Rules of Betrayal

22

Frank Connor heard the kitchen door slam and a pair of vigorous feet charge up the stairs. The bedroom door opened, and Congressman Joseph Tecumseh Grant bounded into the room. He was wearing athletic shorts and a sweatshirt and he carried a basketball under one arm. Like half the other members of Congress, he was a late-in-life pledge to the fraternity of Phi Slamma Jamma. He saw Connor and drew up.

“Frank… What the-?”

“Why did you lie to me, Joe?”

Grant put down his basketball, then closed the door to the bedroom. The modest row house on the 300 block of C Street Northeast sat within sight of the Capitol and was home away from home for Grant and three other congressmen.

“I’m afraid I have to object to your presence in my home. Just what the heck gives you the right?”

“Sit down and shut up.”

“I know all about you and your crew of ‘operators.’ Trained killers is what they are. Nothing but thugs and assassins.”

“That’s enough, Joe.”

“Are you trying to intimidate me?” Grant advanced toward Connor, his finger raised in righteous indignation. “If you are, it won’t work.”

“I don’t do intimidation, Joe. Otherwise, you’d be lying in an alley somewhere between here and the gym with that basketball shoved up your ass. I do results.”

“You got your results yesterday. I answered all your questions to the fullest of my ability. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave now.”

Connor didn’t move a muscle. He sat in Grant’s swivel chair, as imperturbable as Buddha. “It’s like this, Joe. I know you lied to me. I would have lied myself if I were in your shoes. The problem is that I don’t have time to cut through a load of air force BS. This thing with the cruise missile-it’s happening now. We both know that no one would ever admit to having lost a nuclear weapon unless I personally delivered the device myself to the Pentagon and plopped it on the desk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” protested Grant. “We have never lost a missile. I told you the whole truth and nothing but. Scout’s-”

“Honor,” said Connor, in unison. “I’ve heard that tune before.” Frowning, he removed a manila envelope from his jacket and flipped it onto the coffee table. “Open it.”

Grant stepped forward and picked up the envelope, his eyes widening as he read the name of the world-famous journalist to whom it was addressed. The envelope was not sealed, and its contents slid easily into his hand. He looked at the photographs first, his expression passing from bewilderment to anger to shame. Connor had seen it all before. Then Grant read the transcripts of the cell-phone intercepts and his expression collapsed entirely. He gazed up at Connor, then, seized with a notion, threw the papers down and began pulling books off the shelves, dumping them on the floor. Connor had seen this, too.

“Where is it, you sonofabitch? Where’d you hide it?”

“Don’t bother,” said Connor. “You won’t find the camera. We don’t leave stuff like that around.”

Grant stopped. “Was it her?” he said. “Is she one of yours, too?”

“As I said yesterday, Joe. I’m not that clever. She really is a fourteen-year-old student at Sidwell Friends School.”

Grant dropped to a knee and replaced the papers and photographs in the envelope. “Is this the only copy?”

Connor shook his head. “Of course not.”

“Why?”

“Leverage. I won’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy putting you holier-than-thou blowhards in your place. But really it’s more about efficiency. I need to be able to do my job without you interfering.”

A terrible idea came to Grant, and his face darkened further. “You don’t do this to everyone?”

“God, no,” said Connor. “We don’t have the resources. Besides, everyone isn’t the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees my activities. Ways and Means has nothing to worry about. Neither does the Banking Committee.”

Grant paced the perimeter of his room, every so often looking at Connor and shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you put your finger in it this time.”

“I’m just collecting information, Joe. I think this one is in your court.”

“It was twenty-five years ago.”

“Last I heard, uranium had a half-life a wee bit longer than that.”

“Frank, I just can’t…”

“I’m waiting.”

Grant sat down, as if he had an unbearable weight on his shoulders. “You know what a mirror mission is?” he said finally.

“That’s not my bailiwick.”

“Back in the day when Russia was still the big bad bear, we used to send out our aircraft on long-range runs mirroring the flight profiles we would follow in the event of a nuclear exchange. That’s when it happened. One of our B-52s suffered a catastrophic engine failure and went down, carrying two nuclear-tipped ALCMs. Since the plane’s flight was top-secret, we couldn’t mount a full-fledged retrieval operation. There was also the embarrassment factor. We weren’t going to admit to losing anything until we got them back. It stacked up as a disaster on ten different levels.”

“So you just left them there?”

“Our tracking data showed that one of the devices broke apart on impact and was rendered useless. We figured we only had to worry about the one. We had a decent idea where the plane went down, but remember, this was back in 1984, before we had the kind of GPS system we do now. We were able to narrow down the crash’s location to a one-hundred-square-mile perimeter. The problem was the terrain. Up there, a hundred square miles might as well be a million. For three years we put teams up that mountain. It was a monumental undertaking, more so because it’s impossible to travel around without being noticed. When a place is absolutely deserted, even a single person stands out. It’s not like you can zip in there at night, grab the thing, and zip back out. We’re talking the tallest mountains on earth.”

“What about satellites?”

“To reposition one of our birds in space required an order of Congress. You can’t just flip some switch and move your footprint. At least, you couldn’t back then. No one wanted to spill the beans. We were effectively blind.”

“No one ever found it?”

Grant shook his head. “It was a miracle we were even able to locate the plane. We blew up all the pieces we found. There was sensitive equipment on board, and we wanted to cover our tracks. But we never did find hide nor hair of that last bomb. After a while we just forgot about it. It was no different from losing a bomb at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Hell, if we couldn’t get to it, who could?”

Connor absorbed the information without emotion. He had seen a lot of incompetence during his years. He knew about prevarication and self-deception and all the other white lies bureaucrats tell themselves to paper over their failures. “How big, Joe?”

“I swear we tried,” said Grant. “We did everything we could. You of all people should know that some things have to remain secret.”

“How big a bomb are we talking about?”

“It was Russia we were up against. How big do you think?”

“I’m waiting, Congressman.”

“One-fifty.”

“One-fifty what?”

“One hundred fifty kilotons. The biggest that we could fit on an ALCM.”

“And Hiroshima was how big?”

“Ten.”

Connor kept his liverish gaze on Grant.

“It can’t be found,” Grant pleaded. “It’s above twenty-two thousand feet, two hundred miles from the nearest city. The goddamn thing weighs three thousand pounds. It’s gone, Frank. Do you hear me? It’s at the bottom of some prehistoric crevasse. No one can get to it. It’s impossible.”