Her former roommate—also CIA—had been living in the place for a year and was holding the lease. “That was here when I moved in,” she said. “I guess it must have been installed for the previous tenants and the Agency never got around to removing it. There are probably phones like that stashed away in apartments all over northern Virginia.”
When Betsy had taken over the lease, she had mentioned the phone to Security, and they’d said they would send someone out to pick it up, but they never had. Every new roommate who passed through the place discovered the phone, picked it up, found that the line was dead, and never touched it again. She and Cassie stacked their hats on it.
Betsy tripped over some towels, stumbled into the closet, swept the hats off the receiver, and picked up the black phone. “Hullo?”
Spector’s strangely distorted voice came over the earpiece. “I’ll meet you down at level three of your parking garage at six forty-five. I’ll be driving a tan Ford Fairlane.” Then he hung up.
Betsy had been maintaining a fragile calm in the face of her upcoming deputies meeting; now even this facade was completely shattered. Something must really be up. Her whole day was off balance. Her twenty-minute routine took thirty-five. She had forgotten to get her clothes ready the night before. The iron was broken, so she couldn’t press her blouse. She broke into her summer clothes to get a lightweight number to wear under her no-nonsense blazer. She finally got herself put together and went to the elevator with her Post in hand.
Parking-level three was the last stop on the elevator ride, and when she arrived, exactly at six forty-five, Spector wasn’t there. The exhaust fans throbbed and hummed, drowning out even her own thoughts, and she waited for five minutes, getting more and more nervous. Finally the government-issue Ford rounded the curve and pulled up beside her.
Spector leaned across, opened the passenger’s-side door, and said casually, “Get in. Have you had any breakfast?”
They drove down to Nineteenth Street and over to McDonald’s. The drive-through was choked with cars, so Spector handed Betsy a ten-dollar bill and said, “Egg McMuffin, orange juice, cinnamon roll, and large black coffee.” The only people she saw at McDonald’s were some cops, and two street people sharing a meal, drinking dozens of artificial creamers, and eating the contents of what appeared to be twenty packets of sugar. Soon she was back in the car.
They drove up the parkway to the first pull-off overlooking the Potomac. They got out, looked down at the rowers in their shells below and the golden sun, already high in the sky, casting a haze over the District.
“Enjoy,” Spector said. “You’re going to have an interesting day.”
“Interesting in the Chinese-curse sense?”
“Absolutely. You are now a target—from at least three places. One, the career bureaucracy. King has spread the word about what a disloyal, insubordinate bitch you are. Two, Department of Agriculture. Glaspie took your words to heart and told the President. He is pissed off—not at you, but at Saddam. The Vice President has been all over the Foreign Assistance Office and Aid for International Development. They have contacted their buddies in Policies and Programs, who are pissed off—not at Saddam, but at you. Three, senior analysts. They were so busy trying to intuit the White House line—Millikan’s line—and fit their analysis to that procrustean bed, that they totally missed all that you noticed. The question is not whether you are or are not right. The problem is that you scooped them. And they are pissed.”
“But what about Millikan—why does he hate me so much?”
“Because Ronald Reagan was a big supporter of Saddam Hussein.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Someone had to get the goods—the weapons, the money, the matériel, the intelligence—into Saddam’s hands. Not as a one-off, you understand—the Iran-Iraq war dragged on forever, and the sheer quantity of stuff we handed over to the Iraqis during those years beggars the imagination. Handing it over was the job given to our friend James Gabor Millikan. Not that he didn’t want the job, of course. He was glad to do it. But it’s safe to say that it turned into a much bigger deal than he was anticipating when it all started—and then he had no choice but to see it through to the bloody end. It’s in the nature of Washington, Betsy, that these things get structured in such a way that there is one, and only one, designated fall guy. One sacrificial lamb who will take full blame if the policy ever goes sour. In the case of our policy of shipping guns and money and highly classified intelligence to Iraq, the fall guy was Millikan. And ever since he’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“And he’s afraid that I’m going to drop it.”
“Bingo.”
“Okay,” Betsy said, “that explains Millikan. In a weird way it almost makes me feel sorry for him. But what about the DCI—where does he stand in all this?”