“They are all legally cleared international students, certified by the Jordanian government and confirmed by our embassy in Amman. They are legally in this country and have the proper visas.”
“Yeah. Sure. Well, I’ve got my own network and my own experience, and I can tell you that most of those people are Iraqis. And you know what? I suspect that deep down under all of this making-the-world-a-better-place crap, you know that they’re Iraqis.”
Kevin’s face reddened, and he clenched his teeth and was shocked to realize that tears had begun to form. This was a little too much like the old days on the potato farm, being tongue-lashed by his father.
Knightly was right. Kevin didn’t know it totally—it wasn’t a conscious realization yet—but he had begun to piece things together in the back of his mind.
Along with the incipient tears his nose had begun to run. He cried too easily, goddamn it. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and blinked back the tears. He thought he’d done a good job of controlling himself without Knightly noticing. But when Knightly resumed his rant, his voice was much gentler, as if he’d noticed it and felt bad. Kevin was indescribably humiliated by this.
“Look, Kevin. Maybe I’m just jealous. I’m in the same game—though at a different level, and I’m legal. But it’s the same game. That’s what this meeting is about.”
Oddly, Kevin felt himself starting to relax. Ever since the magic with his W-2 forms, he’d had questions, but he’d never let himself ask.
Knightly continued. “Let me tell you about the National Association of International Science Students, NAISS—we pronounce it ‘nice.’ Larsen’s PR department must have thought that one up. You’ll see people from virtually every school in the United States and officials from virtually every country in the world. It’s a market. The foreigners—especially the really poor countries—will let us take their smartest people for a few years and use them—kind of like an indenture—but we make money out of it. Then we send them back with some initials after their names, and funny hats that they can’t wear, eternally alienated from their cultures and their identities. We take these talented people and the money they bring with them, we use them to run our labs and teach our classes and do our research for four or five years, and then we send them back to become our satellites. Sort of like the athletic department and their wonderful student-athletes off whom they make millions of dollars, wrecking their bodies in the process, and then ejecting them into the world. Anyway, NAISS is the market in which the bureaucrats and the universities piece together agreements that guarantee the supply of gray matter from Timbuktu.” Knightly shook his head wryly. “And we say we’re doing them a favor. You have any idea what would happen to our system if the flow of these foreign kids stopped?”
They didn’t talk much more as Knightly slammed his ZX across the rolling territory of northern Illinois, through the outskirts of Chicago, and into Midway Airport. Kevin tried to put all this out of his mind by running through his mental checklist for the dozenth time. He’d turned off the air conditioner in his apartment, the oven and burners were off, the iron unplugged. He’d left forwarding addresses and numbers. Larsen’s full-time, in-house travel specialist had reserved him a room at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, right across the Key Bridge from Georgetown where the meeting would take place, and only four blocks from Betsy’s apartment building—and Margaret’s.
Once he had cleared his mental desk of all the reassuring normality, reality came back, and the fear and anxiety with it. For the last several months he had been constantly worrying that the IRS would audit him. The Habibi case, and Clyde Banks’s ongoing interest in the subject, also bothered him. Now to these nagging low-level anxieties was added a much more profound fear of this business with the new Jordanian students. Prior to the arrival of these new people in Wapsipinicon in mid-July, he had been on the phone with his friends at the Jordanian Embassy every day—sometimes several times a day. Since then they hadn’t called him once, and when he called them, they were always in meetings, or out of town.
It had occurred to him that if he ever did find himself in trouble, he could expect very little help from the Rainmaker. Larsen treated Kevin with the same respect as he treated the keyboard of his laptop—something useful, functional, and eminently replaceable. The more authority Larsen gave him—the deeper into this business Kevin got—the more Larsen withdrew from him personally. Kevin’s bowels spasmed and he felt short of breath.