in Caracas, as planned, then drive the rest of the way.”
Shasif Hadi smiled and shrugged. “Then let us all pray for green car.”
The office already had their name tags on the doors, Clark noticed. Both he and Chavez had medium-sized adjoining offices, with desks, swivel chairs, two visitor chairs each, and personal computers, complete with manuals on how to use them and how to access all manner of files.
For his part, Clark was quick to figure out his computer system. Inside of twenty minutes, rather to his amazement, he was surfing through the basement-bedrock-floor level of CIA’s Langley headquarters.
Ten minutes later: “Holy shit,” he breathed.
“Yeah,” Chavez said from the door. “What do you think?”
“This is a director-level compartment I just surfed into. Jesus, this lets me into damned near everything.”
Davis was back. “You’re both fast. The computer system gives you access to a lot of stuff. Not quite everything, just the major compartments. It’s all we need. Same thing with Fort Meade. We have a road into nearly all of their SigInt stuff. You have a lot of reading to catch up on. Keyword EMIR will let you into twenty-three compartments—all we have on that bird, including a damned good profile; at least we think so. It’s labeled AESOP.”
“Yeah, I see it here,” Clark replied.
“A guy named Pizniak, professor of psychiatry at Yale medical school. Read it over and see what you think. Anyway, if you need me, you know where my shop is. Don’t be afraid to come up and ask questions. The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. Oh, by the way, Gerry’s personal secretary is Helen Connolly. She’s been with him for a long time. She is not—repeat not—cleared into what we do here. Gerry does his own drafting of reports and stuff, but mostly we do it verbally at his level of decision-making. By the way, John, he told me about your restructuring idea. Glad you said it; saved me from bringing it up.”
Clark chuckled. “Always happy to be the bad guy.”
Davis left, and they got back to work. Clark went first to the photos they had of the Emir, which weren’t many and were of poor quality. The eyes, he saw, were cold. Almost lifeless, like a shark’s eyes. No expression in them at all. Isn’t that interesting? Clark thought. Many said the Saudis were a humorless people—like Germans but without the sense of humor was the phrase a lot of people used—but that hadn’t been his experience there.
Clark had never met a bad Saudi. There were a few he knew well from his life in the CIA, people from whom he’d learned the language. They’d all been religious, part of the conservative Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam. Not unlike Southern Baptists in the thoroughness of their devotion. That was fine with him. He’d been to a mosque once and watched the exercise of the religion, careful to stay inconspicuously in the back—it had been a language lesson, for the most part, but the sincerity of their religious beliefs was evident. He’d talked religion with his Saudi friends and found nothing the least bit objectionable in it. Saudis were hard to make as close friends, but a true Saudi friend would step in front of the bullet for you. Their religion’s rules on such things as hospitality were admirable indeed. And Islam prohibited racism, something Christianity had unfortunately left out.
Whether the Emir was a devout Muslim or not Clark didn’t know, but the man was no fool, that much AESOP made clear. He was patient by nature but also capable of being decisive in his decision-making. A rare combination, Clark thought, though he’d been that way himself on occasion. Patience was a hard virtue to acquire, all the more so for a true believer in whatever cause he might have chosen as his life mission.
His computer manual had a directory of the Agency’s in-house computer library, and he also had references from the keyword EMIR access point. So Clark started surfing. How much did Langley have on this mutt? What field officers had worked with him? What anecdotes did they write down? Did anyone have the key to this guy’s character?
Clark shook himself out of his reverie and checked his watch. An hour had gone by. “Time flies,” he muttered, and reached for the phone. When the other end picked up, Clark said, “Gerry, John. Got a minute? Tom, too, if he’s handy.”
He was in Hendley’s office two minutes later. Tom Davis,