Permanent Interests (16 page)

A week later, the voucher office called Innes to inform him that a "routine" review of his travel vouchers over the past seven years showed that he owed Uncle Sam at least $4,000, that he should pay this initial amount within 30

days or face having it docked from his salary.

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His career development officer, "CDO," in human resources called.

"Bob, I don't know how to say this, so I'll just give it to you in one shot. The system has 'identified' you for a twelve-month stint in Somalia. You'll be humanitarian affairs officer."

Somalia was a desolate country racked by years of civil strife and run by warlords with a reputation for going after U.S. government personnel with literally murderous tenacity. "Humanitarian affairs officer" was a grab-bag appellation for one who monitored starving refugees, human rights violations and mine-clearing operations.

"There'll be a lot of travel in-country, so you won't be stuck in the office all the time," the CDO continued. "Oh, but your family can't go. They'll have to stay back here.

But you'll get separate maintenance allowance to cover some of their expenses."

"What the hell is going on, Dan? One day, I'm on the Secretary's staff, handling the sexiest issues out there. Next day, the 'System' slam-dunks me in a putrid cesspool like Somalia!"

"Fair share, buddy. Remember?"

Theoretically, all U.S. diplomats were required to take turns serving tours in hardship posts, hence "fair share."

"We all know that 'fair share' is a joke. How many hardship tours have you served?"

"This isn't about me, Bob. Look, I've got instructions.

I'm passing them on. You don't like the assignment, you have the option of quitting."

"This isn't an assignment. It's a death sentence."

"Your

call,

buddy."

"Somebody wants me out -- whether dead or alive."

The CDO hung up.

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137

Innes got no satisfaction from the quasi-union nominally defending the labor interests of Foreign Service employees.

Its vice president wanly advised Innes not to fight an assignment, citing "the needs of the Service." As for the voucher matter, he said that it was a "private matter."

Carolyn called to say the IRS had sent a certified letter informing him that he was to be audited. The auditors requested a ton of information on Innes's claimed deductions going back, yes, seven years.

Innes's reduced assignment in the prestigious Ops Center ended abruptly. He found out one morning when he showed up for work and encountered a young woman sitting at his desk. She was as embarrassed as he was surprised. Straight from junior officer training, she had been assigned to his job. She timidly handed him an envelope marked "Diplomatic Security." It contained a pink slip of paper signed by "Agent D.S. Warren" curtly informing Innes that his top secret security clearance had been suspended pending "further investigation," offering no further explanation. Innes's torpid CDO sympathized, then promptly let him know that, until the security problem was cleared up, Innes was assigned to processing Freedom of Information requests -- the unclassified aspects, effective immediately.

Innes's world was falling apart. "When it rains, it pours," which is what the union guy told him, just didn't cut it. Why now? And why in spades?

Family life fared no better. His relations with Carolyn went from cold to hot war. The shouting made the kids cry which, in turn, made Carolyn cry, which made Innes that much more irritable. He increasingly sought refuge at Colleen's, then stayed, returning to his own house only to see the kids. Colleen fretted over him. She tried desperately to console him, but he kept sinking deeper and 138 JAMES

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deeper into despair. He would lay his cheek on her breast and weep. As she stroked his hair, she wept with him.

Innes came from a long line of stubborn yeoman farmers. He recalled when, as a boy, his family dairy farm in Ontario County, in upstate New York, was to be seized and auctioned off by the bank because his father couldn't make the mortgage payments on time after two years of drought. The elder Innes's neighbors and many friends in the surrounding communities chipped in to pay the bank off. Just in time for the rains to resume. Inneses could always rely on friends in times of trouble.

He called Speedy.

The special at the Okura was red roe
sashimi
. Speedy, always game for interesting food, wasn't so sure about this, or Japanese cuisine in general, being mainly a ribs-and-chops, burrito-and-beans, pizza-and-burgers type of guy.

But Innes's arm-twisting got him to relent. Innes ordered for both of them.

Speedy regarded the tuna
sushi
with deep suspicion.

"Looks to me like fish bait." He sniffed at it and grimaced.

Innes told him how to eat it, lifting a piece with his chopsticks. "Look, you dunk it into this soy sauce and just eat it." He did so, washing it down with a small cup of warm
sake
.

Speedy bravely followed suit. He immediately went into a coughing fit which sent several pints of extra blood coursing to his face. His head looked like it was about to burst. He grabbed his cup of green tea and gulped it, then involuntarily sprayed it all over the table. This aroused the attention of the other diners.

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Catching his breath, he gasped, "What was that little piece of green shit?"

"Oh,

just

wasabi
– Japanese
horse radish. You should've just mixed a little in the soy sauce, not swallowed the thing whole. I should've told you. Sorry."

When the sushi arrived, Speedy asked to see the menu, and ordered chicken teriyaki.

Innes explained the cascade of problems suddenly confronting him. "They're after me big time. It's obvious,"

he said.

"It sure looks that way," Speedy said, deep in thought.

"But can you prove it? Henry Kissinger once said that" --

he lowered his voice and affected a German accent --

"'These people play for keeps.'"

"He's

right."

"You bet he's right. But Washington types are also as stupid as they are clever. Despite Watergate, despite Irangate, despite all the cases of big shots trying to do in whistleblowers, they never learn and they do the same stupid things over and over again."

"So? What should I be doing?"

"At this point? Hang in there, but also be prepared to press your case outside of channels."

"Hmm." Innes played with his food. "Anything new on Mortimer?"

Speedy sank his teeth into a teriyakied chicken breast.

"Afraid not. But Dom Berlucci has taken direct control over the investigation. This is good. State and CIA are flubbing up. But more than that, now that it's front page news, the Director wants us to pull out all the stops, whether the White House likes it or not."

Innes nodded, mulled it over in his head.

"Berlucci wants to talk with you. Your memo knocked his socks off," Speedy said.

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Innes dropped his head. "The Ontario County DMV

must have it by now."

"He told me to tell you that nobody needs to know about it. All he wants is to pick your brain. That's all. You'll be protected."

Innes pondered a moment. With his chopsticks he slowly demolished the block of tofu in his
miso
soup. "I don't know, Speedy. I'm trying to cool it."

"You can't let go and you know it. Besides, what have you got left to lose? They can't fire you. And they can't fire at you." Speedy chuckled at his own sick pun.

Innes looked up, and slowly nodded.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

The lovemaking was never tender. But it was, mercifully, always brief. Eastern European males tended to be that way, in Lydia's experience. When they came to America, they changed their outlooks in many ways, these phallocentric men from the Old World. They learned to be more superficially outgoing, a must in the American business milieu. They chilled out, especially those that emigrated to California. They dressed down, studiously acquiring the subtle habits and nuanced gestures of American informality. They burnished their accents to fit in better. "Hey, John! What's happenin'?" replaced "Good day Mr. Smith. Are you well?" in their new American-English lexicon. Yet in the bedroom, they reverted to Ivan the Terrible, or Vlad the Impaler. In the bedroom, females were to be conquered. Outside, they were to stand demurely behind their man.

As was customary, he turned on his side and fell fast asleep, snoring deeply. In an hour or two he would awaken, hurriedly wash up, dress and scurry out the door.

And he would be back, within a week's time. They would dine clandestinely at a handful of upscale establishments where the maitres d' knew him and would provide a private 142 JAMES

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room, away from the glare of publicity, the earshot of Washington gossipmongers, the prying of the malevolently ambitious. Discretion was an essential hallmark of the President's National Security Adviser. The public and private personae may not square, but God help him if the latter overwhelmed the former to its detriment.

So, it was not all wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. Like most vain men, particularly of Horvath's social origins and oversized ego, the President's right-hand man liked to talk, mostly about himself, or his role in saving the American civilization. And dutifully, she listened, commenting only in support of him.

As with most men, he talked a lot about his boss.

"He's surrounded by all these kids. Whiz kids from nowhere who happened to be backing the right candidate at the right time. They're not idealists nor ideological.

They're like all the other cynical yuppies who came of age in the '80s and '90s. They're out for themselves and they don't want to put in the time necessary to gain the experience to function effectively." As a creature of Old World culture, Horvath was acutely hierarchical and dismissive of youth, especially in the realm of politics.

"Foreign policy. Humphh! What foreign policy? The man is totally impervious to grand strategy. Tells me it's

'un-American.' Can you believe that? There are plenty of wolves out there just waiting to eat us alive. He really never has read any of my books. He took me because he wanted a Harvard professor to lend respectability to an administration populated with backward nincompoops. I've tried repeatedly to sell him -- to explain to him -- my theory on controlled inevitability, the central thesis of which …”

At such points in the monopologue, Lydia would tune out and let the tape recorder do its job. Yakov saw to it that PERMANENT INTERESTS

143

the latest state-of-the-art listening and photographic gear for clandestine recording was installed in the classic Georgetown townhouse he set her up in.

"Russia. Putin's days are numbered. We all know that.

He's pissing off too many players over there. The cookie-pushers at State want to give him the farm. The Pentagon, however, wants to prepare for the next cold war. I have prepared a list of seven options. If Corgan bothers to study them between his preoccupations with tax reform and immigration and covering his big ass with Congress…"

Lydia day-dreamed of Rome, the fine living, the exuberance of the people. She thought back further to grimy Rostov, to her mother and father and her old friends.

She had gone back for a visit a few months earlier. Girls she went to school with, girls who were beautiful, with clean complexions, bright eyes and velvety voices punctuated by spasms of giggles, were now married, or divorced, with kids, lazy husbands and lives that ground them down, wrecked their beauty and their souls, as only Russia could do. Their every waking hour was devoted to survival. Their faces drained of loveliness, their spirits devoid of spontaneity, their hearts sapped of hope, they merely carried on, certain only that the next day would be like the previous. Lydia shuddered. There but for the grace of God …

"As far as I'm concerned, people deserve the leadership they get. So it is with you Russians. And we have to deal with it." There was an edge to his voice. Horvath, a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian revolution against communism and the Soviets, retained a visceral dislike of Russians. Lydia concluded that he got a vicarious pleasure out of screwing them. This, plus his affinity for European, particularly Slavic, women, made for very complicated emotions in an overeducated, insecure man who thought 144 JAMES

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very highly of himself. She further concluded that he felt the rules did not apply to him -- including those which forbade U.S. officials sleeping with nationals of states with

“hostile intelligence services."

"And so, my little Russian
tsvetok
, who are you seeing besides myself?" Horvath stood looking out the bedroom window onto the brick sidewalks and elms of 31st street.

He was naked and held his hands together in front of his groin.

Lydia tensed. She lay on the bed still, carefully modulating her breathing. While she had been getting accustomed to his mood swings, Lydia still had not found a way of dealing with Horvath's unpredictable temper.

"I've told you already. I see only you."

He remained unmoving before the window. Lydia could nonetheless hear his breathing pick up.

"And what are you telling other men about me?" He slowly turned around, keeping his hands in place.

Lydia would not look away. She held her gaze onto his, refusing to show any sign of weakness or fear.

"Nicky, I see only you."

"Many people have underestimated me over the years.

They think I am a fool who can be easily manipulated. But I have showed them who is smarter, braver."

"You are very smart. And very brave, Nicky. But you also must be more trusting."

"Trusting?" He slowly approached the bed. "Trust is a luxury of fools. Trusting fools become slaves. Or they die!"

"Nicky, I don't like when you get like this. Please lower your voice." She especially didn't like the idea of this kind of scene being recorded.