some, but compared to Washington, it isn’t all that bad. I’ve been there. I learned the language there back in the 1980s. The Saudis I’ve met are pretty good people. Their religion is different from mine, but hell, so are the Baptists. The Saudis want this mutt dead more than we do, believe it or not. They’d love to drive him to Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh and take his head off with a sword. To them, he’s spit on their country, and their king, and their religion. Three for three, and that’s pretty bad over there. Doc, the Saudis are not the same as we are, but neither are the Brits, okay? I’ve lived there, too.”
“What do you think we ought to do with him?”
“Above my pay grade, sir. We can always kill him, but better to do that in public—hell, do it at halftime at the Super Bowl with instant replay and color commentary from the network TV crew. I could live with that. But it’s really a bigger question than that. He’s a political figure, and his removal will be a political act also. That always screws things up,” Clark concluded. He had little in the way of political instincts, and didn’t really want any. His world was a simpler one: If you did murder, then you died for it. It wasn’t elegant or very “sensitive,” but it had, actually, worked once. As the legal system had worked a lot better before his country had been overrun with lawyers. But there was no going back, and he could not make it so. Clark had no illusions about ruling the world. His brain just didn’t stretch that far. “Doc, what you just put him through, was it really that bad?”
“Far worse than anything I’ve ever come close to experiencing myself, worse than anything I’ve ever seen in twenty-six years of medical practice, worse than anything you can inflict on a person without killing him all the way dead. My knowledge of this is, really, theoretical, but it’s not something I’d want to go through myself for any reason.”
Clark thought back to a guy named Billy, and his time in Clark’s recompression chamber. He remembered how coldly he’d tortured that little rapist fuck, how it had not touched his conscience one little bit. But that had been personal, not business, and his conscience still didn’t care much about it. He’d left him alive in a farm field in Virginia, later to be driven to a hospital and treated futilely for a week or so before the barotrauma had stolen his worthless rapist life. Part of Clark wondered occasionally if Billy liked it in hell. But not often.
So this was worse than that? Damn.
Pasternak looked down and saw the eyelids flutter. Okay, he was coming all the way back. Good. Sort of.
Clark walked over to Hendley. “Who’s going to interview him?” John asked.
“Jerry Rounds, to start.”
“Want me to backstop him?”
“Probably a good idea if we all stand in here. I mean, it would be best if we had a psychiatrist handy—best of all, an Islamic theologian—but we don’t. We’re always shank’s mare here, aren’t we?”
“Cheer up. Langley would never have had the balls to do what we just did, not without a whole law school handy to kibitz, and a reporter from the Post to take notes and build up his moral outrage. That’s one thing I really like about this place: no leaks.”
“Part of me wants to discuss this with Jack Ryan. He’s not a shrink, but I like his instincts. But I can’t do that. You know why.”
Clark nodded; he did. Jack Ryan also had been known to experience conscience problems. Nobody was perfect.
Hendley walked to a phone and punched in a few digits. Just two minutes later, Jerry Rounds came in. “Well?” Rounds asked.
“Our guest has had a bad morning,” Hendley explained. “Now we need to talk to him. That’s your job, Jerry.”
“Looks unconscious,” Rounds observed.
“He’ll be that way for a couple of minutes,” Pasternak clarified. “But he’ll be okay,” the doctor promised.
“Jesus, do we have enough people in here?” Rounds observed next. More people than the regular board meetings. Then the TV camera came in, set up on a tripod by Dominic, and the tarpaulin curtains they’d duct-taped together the night before were erected around the workbench. At his nod, Dominic hit the camera’s record button, and Hendley took over, announcing off camera the time and date. Gavin Biery would, of course, later digitally alter Hendley’s voice.