Divide and Conquer

ELEVEN

The cell phone rang in the office of the red-haired man. He shooed out two young assistants who closed the door behind them. Then he swiveled his chair so the high leather back was facing the door. He looked out the window, drew the cell phone from his inside jacket pocket, and answered on the fifth ring. If the phone had been stolen or lost and someone answered before that, the caller had been instructed to hang up.

“Yes?” the red-haired man said softly.

“He’s completed phase one,” said the caller. “Everything is exactly on schedule.”

“Thank you,” said the red-haired man and clicked off. He immediately punched in a new number. The phone was answered on the fifth ring.

“Hello?” said a gravelly voice.

“We’re on track,” said the red-haired man.

“Very good,” said the other.

“Anything from Benn?” asked the red-haired man.

“Nothing yet,” said the other. “It will come.”

The men hung up.

The red-haired man put the phone back in his jacket pocket. He looked out across his desk and the office beyond. The photographs with the president and foreign heads of state. The commendations. A seven-by-ten-inch American flag that had been given to him by his mother. The red-haired man had carried it, folded, in his back pocket during his tour of duty in Vietnam. It was framed on the wall, still creased and soiled with sweat and mud, the lubricants of combat.

As the red-haired man called his two aides back to the office, the ordinary nature of that act, the return of routine, underscored the extreme and complex nature of what he and his partners were undertaking. To remake the international political and economic map was one thing. But to do it quickly, in a stroke such as this, was unprecedented.

The work was daunting, and it was exciting. If the operation ever were to become publicly known, it would be considered monstrous by some. But to many, so were the American Revolution and the Civil War in their day. So was the involvement of the United States in World War II, before Pearl Harbor. The red-haired man only hoped that if their actions were ever revealed, people would understand why they had been necessary. That the world in which the United States existed was radically different from the world into which the United States had been born. That in order to grow it was sometimes necessary to destroy. Sometimes rules, sometimes lives.

Sometimes both.