“You buy anything with that card that’s defective, stolen, dropped off a truck by the UPS man, shattered by lightning or any other act of God—they’ll refund you in full. Good talking to you, Clyde,” Terry Stonefield said, and shook Clyde’s hand with his left while reaching out to another supporter with his right.
Clyde got back to Desiree just in time; she was reaching up under her shirt, preparing to whip out a tit in the middle of the room. Clyde plucked Maggie lightly out of her hands, rummaged in the baby bag for a bottle, and carried her up an open stairway to a mezzanine that looked out over the ground floor and the patio. He and Maggie were the only people up there, and Clyde immediately felt calmer to be looking down on the Republicans from a healthy distance.
Maggie went to sleep in his arms; time passed; Desiree came up and agreed that it would be acceptable to leave now. The immense anvil thunderheads to the west loomed high above the rolling hills covered with eight-foot corn, rolling like massive weapons of destruction spewing out lightning in all directions, bearing down relentlessly on the quarter-to half-million-dollar homes lining the golf course.
Chapter Twenty
Policy kept shifting against Saddam, and Betsy’s position was vindicated. That made her happy even though Spector had been at pains to make it clear to her that she would never get credit. She had gone outside of her task, and in the government it was better to follow the lines of authority than to be right. She remained as much an outcast as she had been earlier. And she received no help from any of the branches that could give her the information she needed. But she kept probing, bringing up what sources she could, reading widely to find some sort of confirming link that would tie together the misspent American aid dollars, the wandering academics, the technology of nonconventional warfare, and a few Midwestern universities.
The Iraqis had many of their best people in the States, and she could not understand why. Normally they would send promising youngsters here for training and then bring them back to home soil to do their actual work. But several Iraqi scientists who should have been in the prime of their careers were stationed in the U.S. She could only suppose that here they could get access to equipment or other resources not available at home.
But the implication was that these people were actively developing weapons—or, at least, the underlying science for a weapons program—on U.S. soil.
For a while she traced down the possibilities of a new form of anthrax as a weapon. She had read studies classified as confidential describing how the Iraqis were retroengineering the process of developing weapons-strength uranium—that instead of taking the technology forward, they had actually gone back to 1946-model Oak Ridge technology. Could they be taking a similar tack with biological weapons?
She jumped into the CDC files and dug out all she could on the development of anthrax toxins. She spent three weeks on this line of inquiry but got nowhere. When she would ask Science and Technology for help, they would stonewall her. The DCI refused to disturb the bureaucratic rhythms. The Pentagon would not even consider giving her any help.
One morning at five o’clock, when she was banging on her screen with a foam-rubber sledgehammer that Kevin had given her, Spector walked in. “I was going to ask how things were going. But sometimes nonverbal communication is more effective.”
She looked at him with blood in her eye, got up, walked over to the vault door, and shut it. “Why don’t you people help me?”
“We can’t.”
“Look, I’ll take no credit. I’ll turn everything over to somebody in S and T.”
“They don’t want it. They know you’ve touched it.”
“Can’t we move on any front?”
“No. Millikan has spread the word that you’re to be insulated. Isolated. Ignored.”
“By name?”
“No, that would be gauche. He has done something much more effective: he’s laid out the wiring diagram on investigations into this issue. You’re not on it. Except insofar as it includes your section, as a footnote of sorts—but it’s laid in such a way that anything coming from this vault will have to pass through three layers of review before it actually goes anywhere. You’ve been cobwebbed by the best.”
“What about going to the President?”
Spector blinked in disbelief and did her the favor of not laughing. “Folklore has it that the President, because of his Agency experience, is relatively sympathetic to the plight of the low-level analyst. This has caused many people in your position to harbor unrealistic ideas about going straight to the top. But there are thousands of low-level analysts who dream of doing that.”
“Is there anybody else working on this angle?”
“Not to my knowledge.”