Free Deadly Waters by Theodore Judson Page B

“Your country doesn’t exist anymore. You said so yourself. Let your imagination run wild. Gotta go now, ciao.”
    “Ciao?” said Vladimir, putting down his phone.
    He looked about his two-room apartment, at the dingy sofa in his living room/kitchen, at the newspapers scattered across the floor, at the sink full of dirty dishes and the torn curtains over the sink, and he wondered why he had ever left his cozy dacha in the Sparrow Mountains.
    “Oh yes,” he remembered, “they were going to shoot me.”

 
    XIV
     
    1/3/07 08:20 EST
     
    Margaret Smythe of the DoD and Ronald Goodman--both recently moved to the posts of consultants inside the NSA--were having a hard time being in front of Senator Hasket’s committee. Congress was not in session that soon after the New Year, and only the Senator himself and a couple of his senior aides were present at the hearing, and they sincerely wished they were somewhere else. Senator Hasket was not merely his usual cranky self that morning; he, out of perhaps the entire galaxy of committee chairmen, read nearly everything presented to him, including the fantastic report on possible domestic terrorist acts Smythe and Goodman had prepared.
    “It says here on page 192,” said the senator, reading directly from the 854 typed pages Margaret and Ronald had pasted together from other peoples’ work, “that possibly within five and certainly within ten years there will be a terrorist attack on a major United States city involving either chemical or biological weapons. Do I read that correctly, Miss Smythe?”
    He pronounced “United” yew-nigh-ted and “biological” by-oo-logde-ee-cal, which showed, thought Margaret, what sort of college--if any--the senator had attended. He looked almost presentable at the moment in his oversized and out-of-date wool suit, but Margaret wagered that earlier in Hasket’s life there had been dirt under his fingernails and chewing tobacco in his rubbery, hillbilly mouth. It was nearly unbearable that he was allowed to upbraid her, a magna cum laude graduate and the smartest person in the room, no matter what room she entered.
    “Yes, senator,” she said and smiled.
    “Miss Smythe,” said Senator Hasket, “is not that prediction the same one Colonel McClain of the preparedness task force make last October?”
    She became more uncomfortable in her wooden chair. Ronald sat passively beside her, fingering his class ring and going through the motions of looking for an indefinite something in his copy of the report.
    Thank you for all the help, you jackass! thought Margaret. “We depended on other reliable sources when doing this report,” she said. “We cannot be the primary source on everything.”
    The senator put his reading glasses on his nose and peered closely at some other documents on his table. “You,” he said, “you were an art history major in college, Miss Smythe?”
    “As an undergraduate,” she said. “At Harvard. Then I attended the Kennedy School of Government.” No one was counting, however, this was the third time in the morning’s session that Margaret had managed to name her alma mater.
    “You then went to work for the Secretary of State,” noted Senator Hasket. “You were a Deputy Secretary of State at age twenty-three?”
    “I learn quickly,” said Margaret, and told herself to quit fidgeting in her chair.
    “You, Mr. Goodman,” said the senator.
    “Yes,” said Ronald, startled to be brought back into the discussion
    “Your uncle was my old, dear college friend, Senator Norman Tate?” asked Senator Hasket, who in reality had danced a jig the night Senator Tate--a man Hasket had in private described as a thief, a liar and a fool--was defeated in his last bid for re-election “Many were the nights he and I shared a glass of lemonade in the senate cloakroom. I must say, you strongly favor him, young sir.”
    The senator pronounced “sir” see-rah, which infuriated Margaret as much as the blather he was