The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,70

was leaving. Hoffman ordered more coffee and, once again, a donut. He hadn’t touched the bun in front of him. The waiter shuddered. Hoffman put his cigar back in his mouth and the waiter retreated.

“What should I do?” asked Harry. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. The White House is trying to roll us. I don’t trust anyone at the agency enough to tell them what I just told you. But I am stumped. I don’t know what’s right.”

Hoffman looked out the window to the parking lot. BMWs, Mercedes, Lexuses. Maseratis. There wasn’t an American car in the lot.

“Don’t let them do it,” he said. “Don’t let them take the country to war again without real evidence.”

“But I can’t disobey orders. Can I?”

“No. I suppose not. Not technically. But drag your feet. Work with your British friends. Find some way to debrief this Iranian. Make sure you understand what the intelligence means before you let them make it public.”

“Should I tell the director?”

“Would he make you stop?”

“Probably, if I was honest with him.”

“Then don’t tell him. Just do it.”

Harry nodded. He knew that there were situations that didn’t fit the usual categories, but he was uncomfortable with what his former boss was telling him. It amounted to insubordination. Something worse than that, perhaps.

“Do what’s right, my friend,” said Hoffman. “You’re the one who has to decide what that is.” He opened his wallet and dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and then, in what he seemed to regard as a gesture of contempt for the waiter, another ten. He turned back toward Harry.

“This conversation never happened. If anyone ever asks me about it, I’ll tell them I don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.”

“That means I’m on my own,” said Harry.

“Yeah. Pretty much. But that was true anyway.” Hoffman put his cigar in his mouth, walked out the door, and when he reached the open air, lit it and took a deep breath of the pleasing, noxious smoke.

WASHINGTON

Harry asked his wife Andrea to have dinner with him Friday night at the Inn at Little Washington, a fancy restaurant about an hour south of their home in Reston. She thought something must be wrong. They used to come there on anniversaries and other special occasions, before Alex died and their easy pleasures ended. She suggested someplace cheaper and nearer to home but he said no, he really needed to talk, and he wanted to be somewhere private and far away. That made her more nervous. What was it that had kept him up all night, that had taken him out of their big old bed?

Andrea went to the beauty parlor and had her hair done, and then went to the little Vietnamese place on Route 7 and had a pedicure. She wanted to look good for him, whatever was coming.

Andrea had been Harry’s dream girl, a lightning bolt, as the French say, from the moment they met in the 1970s. She was tough and smart, but she was also feminine in a way that most women had given up trying to be back then. At teachers college in Waltham, she was pursued by law students and medical students, and even the interns at Mass General. They were all multimillionaires now, those boys who had looked longingly at her short skirts and tight blouses, and it wasn’t that she had disliked the idea of being a lawyer’s or doctor’s wife. But then she met Harry.

Their parents knew each other; that was how they were introduced. Harry was already in the army, graduated from Ranger school and about to make captain. He had been off on missions overseas that he couldn’t talk about, so there was a mystery about him. And he was intelligent—not book-smart like the medical students, but smarter. He knew what ordinary people knew, and he didn’t seem to realize that he was quite extraordinary himself. That lack of pretense was part of what attracted Andrea. He was big and reassuring; when she was in Harry’s arms at the end of their second date, she didn’t want to be anywhere else. And he was a funny man, ready with a wisecrack that punctured the self-importance of the Massachusetts people with whom they had both grown up. He made her laugh, back in those days when things still seemed funny, and they didn’t know what loss was.

Harry ordered cocktails, and then a bottle of wine. He was so deliberate about it, knocking back big sips of his