Call to Treason

SEVEN

Hood was about to buzz Ron Plummer when his outside line beeped. He glanced at the Caller ID. It was his former wife. He did not feel like talking to her now. The conversations were usually difficult. Sharon was still bitter because he had not been around very much since they moved to Washington. Hood was angry because she had not supported the work he was doing at Op-Center. But none of that mattered. The call could be about the kids.

“Good morning, Sharon,” Hood said when he picked up the phone. He tried to sound pleasant.

“Hi, Paul. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure,” he said. Sharon sounded unusually relaxed.

“I need a favor,” she said. “You met my friend Jim Hunt.”

“The caterer.”

“The home party restaurateur, yes,” she said.

Hunt was someone Sharon had known for years, dating back to when she had her own cooking show. They used to have an occasional lunch together. Now the kids told him they were having frequent dinners together.

“His son Franklin will be studying poli-sci at Georgetown in the fall,” Sharon went on. “The school will give him college credit if he interns in a political institution over the summer. Is there anything he might be able to do at Op-Center? He’s a very sharp young man, Paul.”

Hood’s former wife, who had always resented the hours he spent at Op-Center, was asking him to help the son of her boyfriend get an internship there. And she happened to make her request on a day when Hood had been ordered to lay people off. Bob Herbert once said that CIA stands for Convergent Incongruities Abound. That certainly applied here.

“Does he have any particular interests?” Hood asked. He did not really care, but he needed to think for a moment. Did he really want to do this?

“He is a student of languages and maps,” she said. “He speaks French and is learning Japanese. In fact, he’s been teaching Harleigh basic Japanese grammar. But he would be happy to work anywhere, in any capacity.”

“I’ll ask around,” Hood told her. He would, he decided, though Op-Center rarely used interns, and only then as favors to influential members of Congress. “I just want you to know we had some major cutbacks today. So it may be difficult to place him.”

“He wouldn’t require compensation.”

“I understand,” Hood said. “What I mean is that people are going to be preoccupied.”

“Okay,” Sharon said. By the way she dragged out the second syllable Hood could tell she was not happy with that answer. “Can I have a time frame? If Frankie can’t intern with you, he’ll have to look into other places.”

“Give me a day or two to see how the new landscape looks.”

“A day would be good,” Sharon said. “That will give us time to explore other options. Thanks.”

She did not ask about the layoffs. To her, Op-Center was The Enemy. It had been the rival for her husband’s affection. Now it was like an organ donor, dead except for whatever his former wife needed from it. Sharon had also said “us” not “Jim.” Hood was a little jealous, not because Sharon had found someone but because she was involved in Jim’s life. She was engaged in a way she had never been with Hood’s work, she was simpatico. Even the kids were hitting it off. He should have been glad for them all, but he was not.

They chatted a little about the kids. Sharon said that Harleigh seemed to be doing better and had actually picked up the violin again. Alexander was playing too many computer games, listening to too much rap, and not paying enough attention to his grades. Hood said he would stop by and have a talk with him Tuesday or Wednesday. Sharon said Tuesday would be fine, that she was helping Jim on a catering job that night. Then she hung up.

Hood actually envied Sharon. She had an old friend to go to, someone who had known her even longer than Hood. For all he knew, Jim Hunt may have gotten divorced because he learned that Sharon was free.

Hood sat back and listened to the quiet. A decibel lower, and it would be death. Rodgers probably had not spoken to anyone about what happened, but intelligence people knew when the geometry of a room had changed. That was their job.

Hood wished he had someone to talk to. He had never felt more alone than he did at this moment. And he suspected that there were going to be rough hours ahead, when Lowell Coffey and Darrell McCaskey and especially Bob Herbert found out about the cutbacks. And the loss of Mike Rodgers.

Hood had never been one for self-pity. Adults made choices and lived with the consequences. But he had never been cut off from a support system.

That was how I ended up marrying Sharon, he reminded himself. Nancy Jo had left him, and he married the first woman who made him forget the hurt. Unfortunately, Sharon did not fill the void.

He wanted to talk to someone. Not a professional but a friend.

Hood considered calling Ann Farris. The former Op-Center press liaison had pursued Hood for years. Hood was married while Ann worked there, and after the divorce, there was no danger, no edge to the relationship. There was only Ann’s need. Hood did not care for the divorced young mother enough to be with her, which was why he did not call her now. It would not be fair to Ann.

He thought about calling Daphne Connors. However, several dates with the public relations queen had told him they could never be more than friends. In every restaurant they went to, at the movies, at each bar they visited, Daphne always had one ear on the conversation taking place beside or behind her. She never stopped looking for new accounts or useful intelligence to service existing clients. Hood may be a workaholic, but Op-Center did not come with him when he left the office.

Hood was tempted to call Sergei Orlov, head of the Russian Op-Center in Saint Petersburg. The men had been good friends since working together to thwart the coup against the Kremlin. But Sergei was not the kind of man you talked to over the phone. He was the kind of man you sat down with over a huge bowl of uha — fish soup — and vodka shots taken from twenty-five-gram glasses.

Okay, Hood thought. There’s still a lot of work to do.

Unable to think of anyone he particularly wanted to call, Hood placed the call that had to be made. He asked Ron Plummer to come and see him. Plummer was a team player. He would feel uneasy about Rodgers’s resignation, but he would assume whatever responsibilities Paul Hood asked.

As he punched in Plummer’s extension, Hood found himself suddenly feeling very insecure about his own future. It was in the nature of men to want to build things, not oversee their downsizing. Hood had always envisioned Op-Center as an increasingly vital part of the intelligence and crisis management community. What happened today was not a move in that direction. It was not about making Op-Center more streamlined, about reducing bureaucracy and internal redundancies. The NCMC was being gutted. Hood would still have a great deal of work to do, but how important would that work be? Where would it take Op-Center? Where would it take Paul Hood personally?

“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” he asked himself aloud, to chase away the silence.

Hood asked Plummer to come in. He would deal with the situation one minute at a time. After all, this was what Op-Center was about.

Crisis management.