To the right was the American Embassy, housed in an eighteenth-century prerevolutionary building of magnificently useless elegance. He ignored the main entrance and proceeded to the back, where the Marine guards waved him through, past parked cars to an unmarked but well-guarded entrance that led to a small elevator. He rode it up to the fourth of five floors, where he was greeted by another Marine guard and the CIA duty officer, who were expecting him.
He was where the action was: the secure rooms. Nothing important happened elsewhere. All of the other folderol in the embassy was useless pretension. The duty officer punched him through a vault entrance set incongruously in an elaborate door frame. Through the heavy door he could hear a loud whooshing noise. When the duty officer opened it, the noise drowned out all other sound, like giant garage fans: not so much loud as it was full and all-encompassing.
They were looking at a room within a room: a glass box built on four bimetallic springs that isolated it from the rest of the building.
Millikan walked quickly across the few feet of empty space surrounding the glass room; supposedly it was jammed with electromagnetic radiation that would fry your kidneys, or something, if you lingered there. Then he was inside the glass box. His assistant, Richard Dellinger, was waiting for him as well as a file marked “Eyes Only.” It contained the latest reports from Langley to prepare him for whatever Aziz might be up to. As usual there was nothing there that he didn’t know. They weren’t exactly sure why Aziz had been called back on such short notice, but it could very well be some internal nonsense that had nothing to do with the substance of the actual meeting, and so Millikan decided not to waste effort speculating.
At half-past noon he and Dellinger went downstairs and proceeded to the Hotel Crillon, next door to the embassy. Huge flowing taffeta curtains complemented the darkred carpets and framed the high windows that afforded a view over the Place de la Concorde and across the Seine to the Assemblée Nationale. The dining room was full of rich Japanese tourists and Arabs. The ma?tre d’ rushed up, in a dignified way, to inform Millikan that Aziz had preceded him.
Millikan made a bemused face at Dellinger. “He must be in a hurry.”
They followed the ma?tre d’ to a small private dining room off the corner of the restaurant, containing a single table set with crisp white linen tablecloths, silver settings, and a charming little bouquet of spring flowers in the center. An Arab man with a shock of graying hair, a little mustache, and heavy eyeglasses was rising to his feet to greet them.
Millikan had known Aziz since they had both been students in England, and he counted the man to be his intellectual and diplomatic equal. Even though he represented a single-resource, underdeveloped country led by a madman, Aziz matched Millikan in his ability to articulate the gross and crude impulses of Iraq into a foreign policy toward the rest of the world.
Millikan and Aziz belonged to that most elite club in the world, even more elite than the great intelligence establishments, the financial operations, and the political systems. There were a few, an extremely few, people in the world who by sheer dint of their intelligence and their sensitivities could overcome the limitations of national identity, the normal rewards system of politics, and, most of all, the stupidities of their own bureaucracies to navigate the path to world survival. Politicians, of necessity, were the great captains of the national vessels plying the difficult and anarchic seas of international relations. But they were blind without pilots like Millikan and Aziz, men who could see both the obvious reefs and rocks of disaster and who knew the treacherous sandbars and hidden structures of icebergs. They served their states, because only states had the resources to make use of their intelligence. But for these people of all-penetrating insight, there were no masters. They were a self-proclaimed, self-regulating corps of professionals, the last of the true diplomats, the last generation of a craft that had begun in Italy after the Peace of Lodi in 1454.
Millikan understood that now, in 1990, with the Soviet Union collapsing into itself, the Chinese Communist party making the improbable transition into the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and even South Africa backing away from chaos, the United States had one enemy: Iran, and Iran’s worldwide terrorist network. Aziz knew the same thing, for his country had spent most of the previous decade in a gargantuan struggle with the vastly stronger—in virtually all respects—Iranians. He knew that only a deftly manipulated program of assistance, led both openly and covertly by the Americans, had allowed Iraq to survive. And so the two men, great respecters of each other’s skills, had the added advantage of being allies in all but name.