She did not waste any time taking advantage of it. Spector had told her that she was asking the right questions, so she followed her nose, sure that there would be no Howard King to get in her way, confident that no hovering snoops would notice an anomalous pattern of requests and blow the whistle on her.
What was Saddam doing with all the money that Ag had sent him for food? The weapons guys had chased down most of that information, tracing the dollars to banks in Cyprus, Austria, Jordan, and, unbelievably, Nepal. The Agency knew where the Chinese-missile money was going, where the German-chemicals dollars were going—including one really clever diversion through Libya. They knew where the North Korean nuclear-research cash was flowing, where the French-computer checks were going, where the American-food bucks flowed. The Iraqis did have the good taste to buy some food from big American suppliers: Soo Empire Grain, Louisiana Rice, and Great Lakes Co-op. But there were still three hundred or so million dollars unaccounted for. That kind of money wouldn’t get Saddam very far in the nuclear department, but chemical and biological weapons were much simpler and cheaper—much more his style. Three hundred million could buy a lot of nerve gas, a lot of anthrax.
She pulled up the tracking documents of the various departments involved: Agriculture, which maintained that all the money not spent on American food products was still in the Baghdad treasury; Commerce, which maintained that Ag was hiding something—that there were funds that should have gone to buy American technology; ACDA, which noted the Chinese weapons flowing in, but said that there was still a lot in the treasury; the Pentagon, which had tracers on all its surplus weapons sprinkled around the world and was watching them converge on Baghdad. She sent a request to a local Collections person and had him ask the Mossad liaison in D.C. if they would care to share their read on the dollars flow; within forty-eight hours the answer came back that four times the amount of money allocated the Iraqis out of the most recent batch had been spent. She called up HUMINT sources in what was left of the contacts the Agency had in the Middle East and got nothing, except one tantalizing hint that a number of Iraq’s best microbiologists were gone, that an entire chunk of the curriculum at Baghdad University was being taught by Pakistani and Palestinian adjunct professors.
At midnight on the fifteenth, the night before she was supposed to appear before the Deputies Committee meeting, she was still thrashing around. She’d accumulated a huge dossier of hints and dead-end leads, but nothing that led to any firm conclusions. Any idiot could plainly see that the Iraqis were up to something. If she’d been an elected official, that would have been enough to go on. But she was just a lowly analyst, she had to be objective and scientific, and she couldn’t get by with hints and suppositions.
She logged off her computer, dragged her weary body over to the elevator just in time to see the next shift come on board at the situation room down the hall. Langley never slept, reflecting Dean Rusk’s observation that when we were asleep, two thirds of the globe was awake and raising hell.
A Red Top cab swung by to pick her up at the front entrance. She stood there by the statue of Nathan Hale, smelling the forsythia and honeysuckle in bloom, trying to figure out what she’d say tomorrow. Figuring out Saddam’s game was the easy part; making the big shots believe her was a different matter.
The cab took her home down the G.W. Parkway. She was so tired that she closed her eyes and fell asleep. In what seemed like hours she was awakened by the Bangladeshi cabbie.
“Madam, pardon me, please wake up. Madam, please wake up. Oh, good, that will be seven-fifty.”
Betsy was embarrassed and gave the cabbie a ten, partially because she felt stupid for having fallen asleep and partially out of gratitude for the driver’s gentlemanly behavior.
As usual Betsy woke up at six the next morning. She felt splendidly rested. As she was climbing out of the shower, she heard a dim mechanical purring noise through the wall. It took her several moments to realize what it was: a phone ringing. Not a modern digital chirp but a throaty “drring, drring, drring,” loud enough to shake plaster off the walls.
But they didn’t have any old-fashioned telephones in the apartment, just cheap boxy Radio Shack models.
Then she remembered. When she’d moved into this place, she’d been poking around in the broom closet,looking for a place to cram her winter clothes, when she’d stumbled across an old black telephone. It sat on top of a flat black box, which was hooked up to a narrow orange cable, which ran out of a hole in the wall.