“Looks that way.”
“So much for our idea about the airliner.”
“I wouldn’t give up on it quite so fast,” Jerald said. “We’re working on a contingency plan.”
“Now would be the time to share,” Larry said as he reached for the box.
Jerald nodded and told the group what he had put into motion. When he was finished, Larry managed a smile – a rarity for him, especially when a situation was running against them – and took another bite of the glazed doughnut he’d selected. “That could work. God knows there are enough missiles floating around there.”
“That’s why I thought of it.”
Larry finished the pastry and wiped his hands on a paper napkin before standing. “All right. I’ve got a meeting this morning with POTUS, to brief him on the latest developments. I’ll give him the sanitized version where everything’s going perfectly.”
The men chuckled and exchanged knowing glances. “Probably best not to bore him with minutiae.”
Larry reached for his coffee cup and nodded. “No. He’s got bigger fish to fry.”
The meeting broke up, and Larry made his way to his office. As the head of the Russian desk, he was also in charge of the surrounding nations and worked with the Department of Defense intelligence service to further their aims. The Ukrainian mess had been harebrained from the start, and he’d said as much, but nobody had wanted to hear it. How anyone with knowledge of the region could believe that Russia would allow nukes there was beyond him, much less following a coup that was right out of the CIA playbook from South and Central America and the Middle East, of late.
A career man who’d been recruited into the agency out of university, Larry had been with the CIA for twenty-nine years and had survived some dark periods. But the latest series of misadventures, the sabre-rattling that ignored that the country was dead broke and twenty trillion in debt to the same nations it was threatening, worried him. There were very practical concerns with an apparatus that had to borrow a trillion a year to pay its bills and had lenders that were now uninterested in buying any more of its debt – and, in fact, were actively selling it. One of the biggest of which was paying the salaries of its military in the event of any significant conflict.
Larry’s secretary wasn’t in yet, and he checked the wall clock as he made his way past her desk into his office. He routinely called his meetings hours before anyone would be on duty, to have quiet time to think. Once phones started ringing and the overnight reports began appearing, he was in reaction mode, and that was of no use in cases like Ukraine.
“Doesn’t help that State overrules anything we tell them these days,” he muttered as he shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on a door hook. He sat heavily in his chair and stared at his monitor before shaking his head and closing his eyes.
He would get through this. More importantly in the politically charged corridors of power, nothing would stick to him if it all blew up. His subordinates would take the blame, be shifted sideways in the organization in reward for their support, and the next crisis of the moment would command everyone’s attention.
Larry checked his inbox and began the mental process of compartmentalizing that would be required for his briefing with the president. The commander in chief only needed to know certain relevant details and nothing more. That way he could claim plausible deniability if anything went seriously wrong, which would inevitably be followed by a congressional hearing that would go nowhere, one largely designed to bore the public until everyone had lost interest with whatever was being investigated.
It was the way the system had worked as long as Larry had been with the agency, and it would most certainly outlive him.
Like Nicholson had said in his most famous movie line, the public wasn’t able to handle the truth.
Which ensured that Larry would have job security for as long as he wanted to show up for work.
Chapter 17
Pristina, Kosovo
Matt walked into the bank with Hannah’s hand in his, her little feet shuffling on the granite floor. He’d circled the block multiple times before parking the scooter two blocks away and reconnoitering on foot with Hannah. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he’d told her to be a little more patient for their lunch and had led her into the imposing building.