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“There’s more to this rumor than that,” insisted Ryan. “Alworth has a short list and your name is on it.”
“Whose name isn’t?”
Hart had heard that his name was on the short list of candidates; that it was in fact the first name, the one that Prentice Alworth wanted. He was not interested, and he had said so to everyone who had asked, but that had done nothing to stop the speculation.
Ryan checked his watch. “One thing you can always count on about the chairman – he’s never on time.” He glanced around the committee room. All the other members were there, forced to wait, as usual, for the hearing to start. “You wouldn’t take it, would you?” he asked, turning back to Hart. “If Alworth offered it, you’d say no?”
“You know what I think about Alworth. But it’s not even a question. If my name is on a list, it’s only because they want to keep everyone in suspense. There’s no reason to have me on the ticket. He doesn’t need me to carry California.”
“Clinton didn’t pick Gore to help him carry Tennessee. Bush didn’t pick Cheney to carry Wyoming. Politics aren’t local anymore, they’re national. You’re the senator who led the fight against private companies making money from the war. You could have had the nomination is you’d wanted it. Alworth was a governor. He doesn’t have any experience in foreign policy; he needs someone from the senate.” Ryan searched Hart’s eyes. “You know all this. You know he’s going to ask you. You’re just rehearsing the reasons you’re going to give him when you turn him down.”
“I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to. I’m in the middle of a re-election campaign. I can’t just drop that because I decide I want to be vice-president instead.”
Hart started to turn away, but he remembered something he wanted to tell Ryan, something important he thought he should know.
“Charlie, listen, I heard from someone at the national committee that things in Michigan have tightened up. They tell me that your lead has been cut to a couple of points. Are you in trouble?”
“Not yet, but I could be. Some of my more conservative friends have let me know they aren’t particularly happy with some of the things I’ve done.” A wry grin stretched across his mouth, but the look in his eyes was serious. “When I was a kid, tent revivals would come to town. Some wild-eyed preacher with sweat pouring off his face would tell everyone that the Day of Judgment was just around the corner and that they better repent. It was like a sideshow at the carnival, one of those once-a-year diversions that make a few people feel better and leaves everyone entertained. No one thought that what was said in one of those summertime meetings – people talking in tongues, people screaming hysterically, full of fear and rapture – was the way you ought to run the country. But now everything seems to be at one extreme or the other. It’s what Yeats said: ‘The center does not hold.’” He looked at Hart, a sheepish grin on his face. “I can’t help it. Both my parents were English teachers.”
It was also the reason, Hart believed, that whatever the polls might say, Ryan would almost certainly win: the way he always managed to work into a speech or a conversation a serious thought, quoted in the words of another, and with that boyish embarrassment of his make it appear that he was more surprised than anyone by what he had said.
The door at the side opened. Ryan laughed.
“The chairman, and only twenty minutes late! Probably had to explain to members of the press how we won the Second World War. Only man in America who not only remembers the slogan ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ but every time he repeats it, holds his fingers to his lips to make sure everyone knows what it means.”
Sitting at the witness table, directly in front of the committee, Raymond Caulfield, the deputy director of the CIA, listened without expression to an elaborate, and lengthy, introduction by the chairman who, as he liked to point out, had himself ‘served in some of the nation’s wars and knew the vital importance of intelligence.’
Hunched over the table, the deputy director tightened his mouth into an expression of puzzled concentration. Caulfield was well into his sixties and looked even older than that. His gray eyes were tired, worn out with effort, his voice a dim echo of past enthusiasms. Everything about him suggested fatigue.
Caulfield read from a prepared report about the number of particular types of threats that had been uncovered during the preceding three months, the steps that had been taken to combat them, and what, based on the CIA’s best estimates, the terrorists were likely to try next. It was all analytical, the world and its dangers reduced to mathematics: X number of electronic transmissions; Y number of telephone calls made from certain places overseas. It was like listening to an insurance agent recite mortality tables to determine how much your insurance would cost, without once mentioning that at some point you were certain to die.
The questioning began in order of rank on the committee and followed the usual, predictable routine. For every question that demanded some thought on the part of the witness, at least a dozen others required nothing more than a cursory nod and a few generalized phrases about the crucial importance of the issue the senator had just raised. There were questions asking for clarification on a particular point, and questions that were not questions at all, but invitations to take credit for the important work that was being done.
“Mr. Hart, do you have any questions for the deputy director?”
Hart sat forward on the edge of the chair.
“All of your testimony here today, and nearly all of your responses to the questions you have been asked, have taken the form of a statistical analysis, an assessment of risk, based on, among other things, the volume of communications traffic. You have not told us anything about a single, definable threat and what might be done about it.”
“I was attempting to give the committee an overview of what the electronic surveillance program, authorized by Congress, has allowed us to do.”
“Has it allowed you to infiltrate a single terrorist organization?”
“That is not what the program is designed to do; it is designed -”
“To track electronic communications and try to establish a pattern,” said Hart. His eyes flashed with impatience. “In other words, the answer is no. It has not helped us get inside a single terrorist organization or network; it has not given us any specific intelligence concerning any specific plan to attack the United States or any of our interests abroad.”
Caulfield was courteous and respectful. He had spent too many years testifying before congressional committees to let anything get under his skin.
“No, senator, but it gives us an important tool by which to determine the size, the scope, and the connecting links of the various cells that make up these networks,” he reported methodically. “And with respect to your question about specific threats and what can be done to stop them, we receive information about them every day, dozens, sometimes hundreds of them, from various sources around the world, and we are continuously -”
“How many of these sources are inside Syria or Iran?” asked Hart suddenly and with force. “Let me be even more specific: How many sources do you have inside the intelligence agencies of either country?”
Caulfield moved his eyes in a steady arc from Hart to the chairman.
“I am not at liberty - there is an executive order that specifically prohibits - to disclose operational details of the sort the question asks.”
Hart did not give the chairman the chance to agree.
“Let me ask a different question. There is, is there not, a certain established relationship between the Syrian intelligence agency and the CIA?”
“I’m not sure I know what -”
“A number of prisoners - men the United States has held captive at Guantanamo, and other places, have been turned over to the Syrians for further interrogation - rendition is the term usually applied to this arrangement. Presumably, you haven’t been doing this only to give the Syrians a chance to refine their own, peculiar, methods of extracting information, but to give you intelligence that you did not think you could obtain from your own more - what shall I say - ‘civilized’ methods.”
“What is your question, senator?” asked the chairman, a polite warning in his voice. Hart ignored him
“We turn people over to the Syrians for further interrogation. Is this one of the sources - what you learn from Syrian intelligence - of the various specific threats that you were speaking of?”
“Again, senator, I cannot divulge specific sources of intelligence; I cannot -”
“I’m not asking you to give us their names! I’m asking whether the Syrian intelligence agency - despite all the trouble we have with that government - is cooperating in our effort to discover terrorist threats before they materialize into another attack. Are you going to tell us that you cannot - or will not - answer that either?”
Caulfield began to repeat the reasons why he could not answer. The chairman cut him off.
“The question seems fair enough. You aren’t being asked to name specific individuals. Just tell us what, if any, relationship the CIA has with Syrian intelligence. Anyone who reads the newspapers, Mr. Caulfield, has read the stories about rendition. The question is a logical one to ask. I suggest you answer.”
“As I say, Mr. Chairman, I cannot....”
The chairman stared hard at him a moment and then, his eyes still fixed on the witness, told his “good friend, Senator Hart,” to resume his questioning. “And any question the witness chooses not to answer now, you can ask again when we bring him back under subpoena and put him under oath.”
“Mr. Chairman,” protested Caulfield, “I’m under an executive order not to discuss certain matters; I don’t think that -”
“Senator Hart, if you please.”
The other members of the committee turned to see what Hart would ask next. For an instant he hesitated, worried that he might not get it right. The question had to be simple, straightforward, no chance that it might not be understood.
“Mr. Caulfield, what I want to know is this: Has anyone in Syrian intelligence provided the agency with any information concerning a plot to kill the president?”
Caulfield sat bolt upright. There was a look of stunned disbelief on his face.
“No,” he blurted out before he had time to think about it. “No, we’ve had no intelligence - from any source - about a thing like that.”
“You’ve had no information, from any source?” asked Hart, pressing hard. “Nothing that would even suggest...?”
Caulfield had recovered from the first, initial, shock. He began to consider the broader implications. He fell back into his favored pattern of ambiguity.
“Senator, there are countless threats made all the time; rumors, most of them, about possible plans to kill Americans, both here and abroad. Obviously, that could conceivably include attacks against our political leaders, including even the president himself.”
Hart shook his head in frustration.
“We have a presidential election just a few months away, and the only answer you can give us about the threat we face is a bunch of bureaucratic gibberish that only wastes our time?”
Caulfield started to protest. Hart stopped him in his tracks.
“All of us have heard rumors that something is going on, that someone is planning an assassination before the election. What I want to know - what everyone on this committee wants to know - is what do you know about it and what are you planning to do to prevent it?”
It did not matter that no one had heard this but Hart. Everyone now assumed that everyone else had heard the rumors; no one was about to admit that he was the only one who had not. Everyone leaned forward, eager to hear what Caulfield and the CIA knew, and what they were going to do.
“Mr. Chairman, I believe this is a matter that you should discuss with the director.”
Hart jumped on it.
“I’ll take that to mean that the agency does have some information. Is it, then, in your estimation, more likely to be an attempt on the life of the president, or on the life of some other political leader?”
“I really could not comment on that. All I can say is that, precisely for the reasons you point out – the near proximity of the election, the importance of protecting the integrity of the democratic process, the knowledge of what terrorist groups have talked about in the past - we’re doing all we can to make certain that nothing like this ever happens.”
“And I assume that part of your effort to make certain that no one else is assassinated will be to go back to your sources - in places like Syria and other countries in the Middle East - and find out everything they might have heard. I assume, as part of that effort, that you will let those same sources know that if they hold anything back, if they don’t tell you everything they know, and something happens, they will be held as much accountable as the terrorists who actually do it?”
Caulfield nodded emphatically and said that of course they would certainly make clear how important this kind of information was.
Hart did not have any more questions. He listened inattentively while a Republican member of the committee told the deputy direction something to the effect that ‘thanks to your efforts there hasn’t been another attack since 911,’ and then stopped listening altogether.
When the Intelligence Committee finally adjourned, Hart had to hurry to the Senate chamber for a vote. His administrative assistant, David Allen, walked with him. Short and balding, with small hands and quick moving eyes, Allen wanted to know how things had gone in committee.
“Not too bad,” replied Hart with a weary shrug. “At least everyone now thinks there may be a threat. What do you have for me? I know the bill that’s up. I know how I’m going to vote. That isn’t why you were waiting.”
“It’s Alworth. Jenkins called.”
“Who’s Jenkins?”
“Alworth’s campaign manager – the new ‘genius’ of American politics.”
“And what does the genius want?”
“To tell us that Alworth wants to see you.”
Hart stopped walking. He glanced around to make sure no one was close enough to hear.
“It’s about the vice-presidency, isn’t it? There isn’t any way that….”
“He said Alworth wanted to see you,” said Allen in a way that made it sound like the beginning of a joke.
“And?”
“And nothing. That’s all he said.”
They had worked together so many years they could read whole paragraphs in a single, silent glance.
“And because Alworth is as good as elected president, a word from his man Jenkins and we should all come running.” Hart enjoyed it, the thought of it, Allen sitting all cynical and rumpled in his small office, listening in openmouthed astonishment to the voice at the other end of the line. “How many times did you make him repeat it?”
“Three. Then I asked why.” Allen mimicked a hollow, pompous voice. “‘The governor would like to discuss several matters of great importance.’”
Hart began to walk briskly toward the door to the Senate chamber, less than a hundred feet away.
“I suppose I have to,” he said with an air of resignation. The sergeant-at-arms opened the door but Hart stopped and looked at Allen with cheerful malice. “Unless you want to call the genius back and tell him I’m just too busy.”
The senate session dragged on for hours. There was no time for dinner. Hart gulped down a sandwich and a cup of coffee back in his office where he was in meetings until half past nine. It was nearly ten-thirty when he finally got home to the house in Georgetown where, in his wife’s absence, he lived alone. There was a light on in the kitchen. Someone was waiting for him, and he knew who it was.
“Have you been here long?” he asked as he opened the refrigerator and gathered up two bottles of beer.
“Not long,” said Raymond Caulfield; “not long at all.” He gratefully accepted the bottle that was handed to him, took a drink and then, with a satisfied look, put it down on the table. “You were a little rough on me today,” he said in a quiet, pleasant voice.
Chapter Four
Raymond Caulfield glanced around the kitchen with its gleaming appliances and polished tile floor. He liked the air of peaceful domesticity, a place where everything that happened was private. A lifelong bachelor, he often had, when he visited other homes, a sense of what he might have missed. He removed his eyeglasses and rubbed each lens with a handkerchief. Holding the cold bottle of beer, he stared down at the floor.
“You made me look quite the fool, a faceless bureaucrat who won’t tell Congress one thing more than he absolutely has to. In short,” he continued, raising his eyes, “exactly what I am: a career civil servant about to be pensioned off.”
Hart settled into a chair the other side of the ancient wooden table, something his wife had acquired in a small village somewhere in the south of France. It was curious how easily he had slipped into a public attitude of outraged hostility when Caulfield was a witness for the agency. He actually felt enormous respect, and even affection, for him.
“The last thing anyone would ever think to call you is a fool,” Hart remarked with a gentle, knowing glance. “As for being a ‘faceless bureaucrat,’ that is an act you play to protect the anonymity of one of the last great agents the agency has had. And...are they really forcing you out? Now, after what’s happened?”
“A couple of weeks ago, the director told me that he had just realized - to his great surprise and disappointment, you understand - that I was only half a year from retirement age, and that I was certainly going to be missed. The paperwork has already started.”
“But why? Because you know too much? Because they’re afraid -?”“Because I know too little. For more than a year now, I have been cut out of things, not invited to the most important meetings.” He took a drink. There was a wry look in his aging eyes. “Haven’t you noticed how often I’m sent to testify on Capitol Hill?”
He glanced again around the kitchen, taking a kind of comfort in how neat it was, everything in its proper place. It suggested a certain precision, a settled routine, an absence of self-indulgence. It was not the only reason he liked Bobby Hart, but it was one of them.
