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Chapter 53

The director of the Homeland Investigation Authority stared out of the window. At a distance, he could see a little stretch of the Potomac River.

The sight of the river was soothing. A little reminder, if he needed it, that politicians and bureaucrats came and went—not exempting himself, even if his tenure had been much longer than usual—but the nation remained.

Throughout, half his mind—but no more than that—remained attentive to the continuing prattle coming from the National Security Adviser. The rest of his mind was busy recalling every NSA who'd passed through Washington in the years that Hughes had sat in the director's office. Had any of them been quite the unmitigated ass that Jensen was?

The answer kept coming up: no. Close, in one or two cases, but no cigar.

"—charges of treason not out of the question, I tell you!"

Enough was enough. He'd listened politely, now, for well over fifteen minutes.

"That is perhaps the silliest statement I've ever heard in this office, George—and I've heard quite a few."

He swiveled his chair to look at the NSA sitting on the couch some distance away. Jensen had insisted on the couch, as usual. This time, though, Hughes had insisted on remaining at his desk.

"The charge of treason is a very specific one, whose parameters are clearly spelled out in the Constitution. You couldn't find a shyster anywhere—not even in this town, not even in the Justice Department—who'd agree to bring that charge against Madeline

Fathom. They'd be afraid of being disbarred for incompetence."

A pity we can't do the same for NSAs. But he left that unsaid.

"George," he continued, "if you do so much as try to charge her with violating this or that security law—oh, you could certainly find something, we've got so many of them—you'd still come out of it on the short end of the stick. 'Short end' as in—"

He held up his pudgy hand, with only a millimeter or two separating the tips of his thumb and forefinger. "—you'll be clutching the itty-bit tip fighting desperately for your political survival, while Fathom uses the great big meaty part of it to club you silly. Well . . . not her, personally. She'd stay out of it, directly. If I know Madeline—and I do—she won't even make any statements to the press. Doesn't matter. The media will beat you to death."

He leaned forward, plucked a small stack of magazines from the top of his desk, and flicked them over to the coffee table.

Hughes had been a pretty good basketball player in his youth, until the certain knowledge that he'd never be taller than five and a half feet put paid to that ambition. All but one of the magazines landed squarely on the table. Even that one landed face up on the carpet.

Madeline Fathom's face up, to be precise. That was Celebrities Today, which, as usual, had gone for a full-face glamor shot. Most of the other magazines, being news magazines, had run a different picture—the image taken by A.J. Baker's recorders as he'd first found Madeline in the collapse of the ice tunnel.

"She was on the cover of half the magazines in America, that week. With 'America's Supergirl' as the banner in most of them. She's better known to the public than you are these days, George, and—I guarantee you this much—one hell of a lot more popular."

He chuckled heavily and added, in an exaggerated Southern drawl, "A popular security agent, if that don't beat all! Created one heck of a problem for us, o' course. The HIA's been flooded with applications since, at least half of them girls about to graduate from high school. Betcha that a few months from now, 'Madeline' will be the most popular name for newborn girl babies. Give you ten-to-one odds."

Jensen was staring at the magazines as he might stare at so many venomous snakes set loose from a cage.

"Face facts," Hughes said coldly. "Start with the fact that she's way smarter than you think. There was not a single military secret in that entire transmission. Not one. That was her assignment. Defined in precise and narrow terms, I admit, but that's exactly how a hostile press will define it—and what are you going to say? Much less charge her with? 'She failed to read our minds properly'?"

"Who cares, Andy?" Jensen exploded, half-rising from the couch. He was so agitated he lapsed into profanity, something he normally avoided. "The whole fucking transmission's a violation of national security! She told the whole world everything, God damn it!"

Now, he did rise fully to his feet, and dramatically started counting off on his fingers.

"Start with item one. The whole world now knows that such a thing as a reactionless drive is possible. Which means that every relevant university lab and research institute in the world—not just ours—will be kicking into high gear to figure out how to make one.

"Item two. The whole world now knows that we've found the key to translating the Bemmie language."

Almost—not quite—he sneered at Hughes. "So big deal if it'll take years to decipher that key, assuming the linguists are right—and who's to say they haven't been compromised? One of them is a foreign national, you know."

"'Compromised,'" Hughes drawled, again exaggerating his accent, as if he couldn't help do so while savoring the word. In the dialect of Washingtonese favored by Jensen and his type, that translated as: can't be certain to get with the program in every jot and particular.

He sat up straighter and went back to his usual manner of speech, which had only a trace left of his Mississippi rural origins. "Yes, one of the linguists is a foreigner, indeed. A citizen of our well-known archenemy, Great Britain. The only country, let me remind you, to ever invade the United States—and who's to say their conduct for the past two centuries hasn't just been a ploy to get us to lower our guard so they can do it again?"

"This is no time for jokes, Andy!"

"Who's joking?" He twisted his head slightly, gesturing in the direction of the Pentagon. "You and I both know perfectly well that somewhere buried over there are plans for repelling a British invasion— and invading them, for that matter. They're called 'contingency plans' and we've got them for just about everything. A surgical strike at Antarctica's penguins, I imagine, if that's ever needed. And so what? Nobody in their right mind really expects them to be used— just like nobody in their right mind really thinks Ms. Jane Mayhew is Mata Hari. Including you, so don't give me lectures about telling jokes. And will you please sit down? As short as I am and as tall as you are, you're giving my neck a crick having to look up at you."

After a moment, Jensen did so, his long and angular body folding up on the couch like a collapsing pile of sticks.

"What a nightmare," he hissed, closing his eyes and rubbing them. "It's the combination that makes it such a mess. A reactionless drive in the abstract would be one thing. Such a drive and the possibility we might someday be able to interpret what might be blueprints for building it has every nation in the world hollering bloody murder. All of them are now insisting that the United States has to open up the space program and give everyone equal access to Melas Chasma. The Central African Republic, Mongolia, Paraguay, you name it."

He lowered his hand and stared gloomily at the opposite wall. "Those we can brush off, of course. But the Chinese and even the Europeans are every bit as adamant, and . . ."

"Those we can't. Or, if we did, wouldn't do any good. I've seen the intelligence. If they really put their money where their mouth is, the Europeans can build a Nike or its equivalent inside of three years. It'd take the Chinese longer, but not that much. The Indians could eventually manage it, too—possibly even the Brazilians—although that would take a couple of decades or so."

He swiveled his head to look out of the window again. The Potomac settled him down, as always. That very same river had flowed there, after all, more than two centuries earlier when the British burned the capital. Hughes' long career, if nothing else, had convinced him that most political uproars were a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing once a few years went by.

"And then what?" he mused. "Do we instruct our people on Mars and Phobos—that mighty military host—to fend them off with . . . I'm not sure what. I believe Captain Hathaway has a few pistols stashed away somewhere, in the event he ever had to suppress a mutiny."

"The President—just this morning—sent down orders to start building three more Nike-class ships," Jensen growled. "We can get them functional before anyone else can assemble even one equivalent ship up there, and I can assure you—"

"Yes, yes, they'll be armed to the teeth. And—again—so what? Do you really propose to start a new world war over this?"

He turned his head back to look at Jensen. "Well. Do you?"

"Don't be absurd!"

"I'm not being absurd. 'Absurd' is a word you apply to a threat that everyone knows is empty. Which that threat is—and the Europeans and the Chinese will say so openly. The Europeans will probably be polite about it. Formally speaking, at least."

His hand started moving through the pile of papers on his desk, looking for one of them. "It's a done deal, George. My own recommendation—yes, I know it's out of my area—is that you recommend to the President that we be Mr. Nice Guy about the whole thing. Offer to set up a joint space program. In the real world, once their feathers get unruffled, the Europeans and Chinese will let us basically manage it. If for no other reason, because they won't want to sink the money into creating their own full-scale alternative. So we wind up with a messy compromise but still one that isn't out of control."

He found the paper he was looking for and took it in his hand. Then, waited.

Jensen gave the innocent wall the benefit of his glare for another minute or so. "Very well. But whatever else—I want that woman fired. Fired, do you hear?"

The Jensens of the world were so predictable. Hughes grunted, a bit amused, and held up the paper in his hand.

"Don't need to fire her. This is her offer of resignation. She sent that as a coda to the main transmission."

Jensen stared at him. "She resigned?"

"I didn't say that. I said she offered to resign." He glanced down at the paper. "To quote her exact words: . . . in the event that would prove helpful to either you or the administration. I would, of course, respect the terms of my confidentiality agreement.'"

Jensen's narrow face looked almost like a blade. "She knew. How else explain that offer? This was no innocent girl fumbling a job too big for her."

"Of course, she knew. I told you she was one of my three top agents. I don't pick 'em—sure as hell don't promote 'em as fast as I promoted her—unless they're smart as a whip. And Fathom is something of a real genius at this work."

"'Genius.'" Jensen's lip curled. "You have a strange definition of the term, Andy."

He unfolded his body and rose to his feet. "Very well. Tell her the resignation is accepted—make sure you stress the penalties attached to violating the confidentiality agreement—and we'll let it go at that. I'll so recommend to the President. In the meantime, we'll want you—"

He broke off, seeing Hughes shaking his head.

"Not 'me,' George. Whatever it is you want, you'll need to discuss it with my successor."

The Director of the HIA leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands over his belly. "You can inform the President he'll have my resignation on his desk tomorrow as well."

Jensen stared at him. As the seconds passed, his eyes grew wider and wider. So did his mouth.

"I will, of course, respect my confidentiality agreement also. But I do remind you—sorry, George, but it's the law—that any such agreement is superceded in the event Congress launches an investigation. Which"—he smiled, very thinly—"I imagine they probably will."

Jensen shook his head abruptly, as if to clear it of fuzziness. "Andy . . . nobody is asking you—"

"Be quiet," Hughes said. All the simmering anger he'd felt at the current administration since it came into office finally surfaced, although his tone of voice remained soft-spoken. "I am sick and tired of people who think the phrase 'national security' is just another way of saying 'what suits us, because it's politically convenient at the moment.' I didn't survive more than twenty years in this office because I let whoever the current occupant of the White House was dictate to me my responsibilities. That's the reason Congress and the public have put up with me for so long. I'm the anti-J. Edgar Hoover, if you will, in that respect. Everybody makes jokes about the President's legal plumbers and the buck vanishing here, but nobody takes it all that seriously—because they trust me, enough at least, not to allow the HIA to get pulled into those games. I've proved it before, in a crunch, and I'm quite willing to prove it again."

He unfolded his hands and pointed a forefinger at the Security Advisor. It was a very short, stubby finger, to be sure. But it still bore an uncanny resemblance to a cannon.

"The real problem here isn't Fathom. It's that—as usual—you people insisted on having your cake and eating it too. If you wanted Fathom to clamp down full and tight security, you only had to instruct her to do so. Of course, that would have produced a political firestorm, once the word got out publicly. Even here at home, much less abroad. So, instead, you relied on her to interpret your inner desires properly. So that if something went wrong, you could—as usual—blame the flunky in the field for whatever mess you found in your lap."

He returned his hand to its comfortable clasp over his belly. "Clean up your own messes. I do not and have never allowed one of my agents to serve as a sacrificial lamb or a scapegoat for an administration's convenience. You fucked it up, you fix it."

Hughes used profanity even more rarely than Jensen did. And Jensen knew that, since he wasn't actually stupid.

"What . . ."

"I suggest you recommend to the President that he take Fathom's fait accompli as established and preexisting policy—the thought of doing otherwise never occurred to him once and you can practically see the butter not melting in his mouth—and we go from there. I'll send her a private message making clear that she stretched it as far as she could. Coming from me, she'll accept that. Thereafter—"

He shrugged. "It ain't the end of the world, George. Just another complicated situation that we live with from one day to the next. Like we've been doing for a long time now. The world gets a reasonably open space program that they feel part of, and don't feel too threatened by, and we can still buy ourselves a year or two—won't ever be longer than that, don't kid yourself—in the event the people at Melas Chasma ever do turn up any real military secrets. 'C'est la vie,' as our off-and-on French friends say."

Jensen was trying to glare at Hughes, but . . . was obviously finding the task difficult. As several of his predecessors had discovered over the years, the country boy from Mississippi was impervious to such efforts. Mississippi was ancient history. Hughes had been in Washington and survived its feuds longer than just about anyone. One of the other common jokes in the capital was his nickname. Devil Anse Hughes.

"All right, then, keep her if you insist. But send out a replacement as soon as—what? You won't even give me that much?"

Hughes stopped shaking his head. "George, for Pete's sake. Think. Or if you won't, then trust my assessment of the situation. Now that Fathom's gotten what she wanted—"

"Which was what? What did that bitch—" he broke off, seeing the Director's glare. Andy Hughes glared even less often than he used cuss words.

"Not in this room, George. Not ever. Way I was brought up, we don't call a lady a bitch. Sure as hell not a lady like Madeline Fathom. She's been places and done things that would have—"

He broke off himself. Pearls before swine, and all that.

He leaned forward, putting his hands on the desk. "What did she want? Exactly what she's going to get. You still don't understand, do you?"

Then, wearily: "Ah, never mind. My recommendation to the President is that we leave the existing agent in place. Seeing as how— this is not rocket science—one of the other side effects of her transmission is that she'll now have all those cantankerous scientists out there eating out of her hand. Thirty percent of whom, I remind you, are foreign nationals—and one hundred percent of whom are among the top scientists in the world and will be about as easy to keep squelched as herding cats. Genius-grade cats, to make things worse. If there's anyone who can do it—well enough, anyway—it'll be Madeline Fathom."

"Oh."

"Yeah. 'Oh.' Live with it, George. Just live with it." He looked at his watch. "You'd best get back, since you'll be having a new crisis coming down the pike."

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, I figure right around . . ." He glanced at the watch again. "Now, I'd say, it will finally be registering on every CEO of every major aerospace, oil and auto company—probably the railroads, too—that a reactionless drive might upset their applecarts. They'll be flooding the President with calls demanding to know what he intends to do about that dire threat to national security."

He managed to say it without a trace of sarcasm. A waste of effort, really, since by the time he was finished the National Security Advisor was already out the door.

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