Free Running Dog by Don DeLillo Page A

Disarmed you.”
    “I know what you really want to talk about.”
    “Do you?” she said.
    “You don’t want to talk about my family, or my views on world affairs.”
    “Don’t I?”
    “Let me do something to that drink.”
    “No, it’s fine.”
    “You want to talk about the hearings.”
    “Actually, no, you’re wrong.”
    “You want to talk about PAC/ORD.”
    “You’re so wrong, Senator.”
    “Not that I blame you,” he said. “They’ve got mechanisms. Undercover channeling operations. They’ve got offshoots. It’s damn shocking. At this late date, you’d think I’d be impervious to what those people dream up. Not so.”
    “Senator, the truth is I wouldn’t think of asking you to divulge what goes on in closed-door hearings.”
    “What about this boss of yours?”
    “Yes?”
    “Grace Delaney,” he said. “I hear unflattering reports. She’s had dealings with radical groups, among other things.”
    “A woman with a past. Isn’t that what makes us interesting? For men, it’s lack of a recorded past that proves so fascinating. Women, no. It’s the shadows behind us that do the trick.”
    “Your own, for instance, I would dearly love to hear about.”
    “I used to live with Gary Penner. Dial-a-Bomb?”
    “I do recall, yes. The name’s familiar.”
    “It should be, Senator. He blew up half your goddamn state about ten years ago.”
    They shared a laugh over that. Unfolding slowly, Percival’s long body rose from the sofa. He shuffled to the liquor cabinet, bringing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s back to the cocktail table with him.
    “You understand nothing I tell you is to be attributed. It is not only unattributed. It is undocumented, unfounded and unreal. I deny everything in advance. Whoever leaked this stuff to you, whichever committee counsel, is not only breaking the law; he’s totally misrepresenting the facts.”
    “What you’re saying, really, Senator, is that you decided at some point that
Running Dog
is precisely the publication this kind of story cries out for. No one else would touch it since you’ve no intention of providing the slightest clue to its authenticity.”
    “None of it ever happened. I repeat. It’s all lies. I find it utterly inconceivable that such things could find their way into the pages, so on, so on, so on.”
    He told her that PAC/ORD—the Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements—had been set up, on the surface, as the principal unit of budgetary operations for the whole U.S. intelligence community. Dealing strictly in unclassified areas, the agency had been established in response to criticism of soaring intelligence expenditures.
    Covert operations were beyond its scope. Hiring, firing, paying, promoting, budgeting. This was PAC/ORD territory, on the surface, and it did not extend beyond the legal, administrative and clerical areas. Thousands of people in a number of agencies. PAC/ORD was not unlike the personnel department of a large corporation.
    On the surface.
    Beyond that, however, the Senator’s investigating committee had learned that PAC/ORD had a secret arm, the kind of cover setup known as a proprietary. This was Radial Matrix, a legally incorporated firm with headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia. Radial Matrix—the term itself was meaningless—was a systems planning outfit. They advised on, and installed, manufacturing and shipping systems. Their clients included firms across the U.S. and in a number of other countries. In the last three years they’d become a huge success, with several spin-off operations and activities. The only overt connection between PAC/ORD and Radial Matrix was a contract the latter had to install a new computerized wage system on behalf of the former.
    The only overt connection.
    Radial Matrix was in fact a centralized funding mechanism for covert operations directed against foreign governments, against elements within foreign governments, and against political parties trying to