floated inconspicuously through the layers of Washington bureaucracy, rising to the deputy secretary for homeland security without anyone really noticing. She was a gray insider, a keeper of secrets, trusted by one and all to facilitate decisions made by her superiors, as she had done for the last twenty-seven years. Life was lonely but affordable. She had excellent benefits. Within the tightly enclosed world she inhabited, Tildy was important, but not as important as she deserved to be. No one really understood the clandestine battles she had waged, the quiet victories, the enemies she had left lying in the road behind her. She had a singular talent for being underestimated.
“What is this group that claims credit for the Rome attack?” Tildy asked.
“They call themselves the 313 Brigade,” the agency man said. “They’re the ones who planned the Mumbai attacks in 2008. It’s named after the 313 fighters who joined the Prophet Muhammad in his first military campaign. We took out their leader in 2011, just a month after we got bin Laden. Like all AQ groups they just want to kill as many people as possible. We think they’re dangerous as hell.”
Defense asked if there was any information about future attacks. There was none.
The other deputies nodded, unsurprised. It was a typical agency debriefing. Lots of alarm bells coupled with no actionable intel. They didn’t know the attack was coming, they didn’t know where it was planned, all they knew was that the group was dangerous as hell. The agency was like a fire truck with no driver, racing nowhere in particular, sirens screaming, no water in its hoses.
“There’s something else about the Rome attack,” the agency man said. “There was a group of German tourists who had been at a café near the piazza. They survived the bombing, but two days later, when they returned to Stuttgart, four of them fell ill, and one died. Looks like the others might die, too. The Germans determined that they had been poisoned.”
“What poison?” Tildy asked.
“Botulism. The lab guys tell us that botulism is the most potent poison there is. A single gram can kill a million people. Fortunately for us, the heat of the explosion would have destroyed most of the bacteria.”
State discussed new tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia caused by an Arab separatist group in Ahvaz, in southwest Iran, on the border with Iraq. “Houthi rebels in Yemen have acquired more precise missiles from Tehran, with Riyadh in easy reach,” State reported. “One direct hit could ignite an open war with Iran.”
Tildy turned to Defense. “Do we have sufficient resources in the Gulf?”
“For what?” Defense asked. “If you’re asking can we keep low-level conflict from escalating, probably so. The Islamic civil war is being fought with pawns until now, but the big pieces are on the board. We’ll have to decide how much we want to risk in a region that seems bent on mutual destruction.”
State chimed in: “The Saudis want to dominate the entire Gulf, and then all of Islam. The only way they can do that is by annihilating Iran.”
Tildy asked Energy for an estimate of the time required for Iran to get back to full-scale production of nuclear fuel.
“They’ve built a new plant that can turn out sixty advanced centrifuges a day. We assess that they can produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb every six weeks, if they choose to. Probably they’ve already made that choice.”
We think. We believe. We suspect. Maybe this, probably that.
Tildy had been in government long enough to know that intelligence was almost always vague and imperfect, which was why it was so easy to manipulate. Everybody had a piece of this geopolitical puzzle—or thought they did—but nobody had a clear idea of what was actually happening. Were the Saudis behind the insurgency in Iran? Was the U.S. supporting it? Were the Saudis and the Iranians arming themselves for Armageddon, or were those just rumors? A bluff? Partial facts were summoned to support poorly considered actions in parts of the world where America had few friends and no crucial national interests. That’s how we got into Vietnam, she thought. That’s how we got into Iraq. Libya. You name it. Half-assed intel coupled with ideological bravado. Trillions of dollars wasted. Meantime, government itself was under assault. Everyone in this room, except Defense, represented an agency that was in retreat, all because of misadventures prompted by ill-informed speculation. America didn’t have the money to be America anymore. Or the guts.