Fatal Conceit 1 Eight days earlier . The fat man in the light blue jogging suit lit a cigar as he sat back behind a desk in the office of his palatial home outside of Washington, D.C. After a few puffs to get the Mancuso going, he turned his attention to the enormous television mounted on the wall across the darkened room. Beyond the heavy drapes pulled across the windows, it was midafternoon on a sunny day in wealthy Loudoun County. But halfway around the world, it was nighttime where a Predator drone circled three thousand feet above the scene displayed in black and white infrared images on the television. Only seconds behind real time, ghostly figures of human beings showed up clearly as they ran across open spaces or ducked behind corners of a dark cluster of buildings and vehicles. Several fires also blazed away in white-hot pixels--one clearly a truck, another on a roof--and bursts of brilliant ellipses he knew were tracer rounds raced back and forth across the screen.
A half hour earlier when he was rudely interrupted during an afternoon quickie with his mistress to watch the events as they unfolded, the firefight between the attackers on the outside and the besieged defenders inside the buildings had been intense. But the defenders were clearly outnumbered and outgunned; without help the outcome had been inevitable. Now almost all of the sporadic shooting was coming from the attackers, including shots apparently fired at figures lying on the ground. Executing the wounded, he guessed. Good, this is FUBAR enough already, we don''t need any witnesses. "How long ago did you say this started?" the fat man asked. A short, neat man in black-rimmed glasses, wearing a three-piece vested suit, standing off to the side of his desk and also watching the screen, looked at his watch. "Almost three hours ago," he replied.
"State Department got an encoded radio transmission about 1300 hours our time, 0300 Sunday there, from the compound stating that they were under attack and requesting help. State called me and scrambled an NSA drone from the airbase in Turkey. I called you after that." "Good," the fat man said as he studied the cigar. "Then what?" The neat man pushed his glasses up his nose and looked over at a very large, hard-looking younger man sitting in a chair in a dark corner of the room watching the television intently, seemingly oblivious to their conversation. "More calls for assistance but those stopped right before I got here. The drone was over the target and could have fired on the hostiles, but I did what you said and told them to stand down." "A necessary evil," the fat man replied with a shrug.
"We aren''t supposed to be there, right? At least not doing whatever it was in the hell you were doing. We don''t know who we would have been shooting at and that''s not our airspace. We need to keep this under wraps if at all possible. What about the Russians?" The neat man shrugged. "Somebody in the compound also sent a general distress call to the Russian army base near Grozny, but . um . there was no response," he replied. "I finally got through to the Russian embassy and told them that our ''trade mission'' in Zandaq had been attacked.
One of their undersecretaries got back to me on my way over here and said that apparently the post''s communication system had been down for repairs, but they were sending a counterterrorism team to ''investigate.'' It''s a pretty good hop to the compound, and they won''t be there for at least another hour and by that time ." He stopped and looked at the television. There were no more signs of resistance from the buildings; some of the attackers were still running about, but others appeared to be just milling around. "It''s over," he concluded simply. The fat man looked at the screen. In some ways he looked like just another overweight limousine liberal; the sort who sat around in coffee shops in Birkenstock sandals over white socks and tie-dyed rock concert T-shirts while talking to their stockbrokers on their smartphones. He wore his hair, which he dyed ash blond, swept back and longish, and his well-scrubbed, hairless face with its round pink cheeks and full lips looked almost boyish.
He was sixty years old and with the toadying press liked coming off as an affable political geek holdover from the late sixties. But he was shrewd, ruthless, and committed to his far left of center politics, and right now, his weak blue eyes glinted with anger behind the round wire-rim glasses he wore. "It may be over in fucking Chechnya," he growled as he stabbed his cigar at the screen, "but it''s not fucking over here. In fact, the shitstorm hasn''t even started here, but it will if we don''t keep a lid on this and know what we''re going to do to distract the voters if anything does get out." He took a long drag and blew the smoke at the ceiling. "So tell me again what the fuck we were doing there?" The neat man, Tucker Lindsey, cleared his throat. He didn''t like the fat man, detested him as a matter of fact. A crude, obese, arrogant asshole from the Midwest, he''d described him to his former colleagues at the State Department.
Certainly not a member of "The Club" that permeated the entourage around the president, as well as his cabinet and appointed posts, particularly at State. Not an Ivy League man, he thought with disdain. In a world that made any sense, there would have been no way that he, a Harvard Law grad and the president''s national security adviser, should have to answer to the boorish tub of goo. But Rod Fauhomme was the president''s re-election campaign manager, probably the best in his dirty business, and with the election only three weeks away, orders from the top were that the corpulent politico was calling the shots on anything that might affect the president''s run at a second term. "Officially, it''s a trade mission," Lindsey said. "A deputy chief of mission from the U.S. consulate in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, reaching out to the locals.
In reality, DCM David Huff and a small security detail drove to Zandaq, a small, out-of-the-way town in southeastern Chechnya, to meet with one of the leaders of the Chechen separatist movement." He nodded at the television screen. "What you''re looking at there is a small gated compound about five miles from town that we lease as part of an agricultural and cultural outreach program run by State." "And why are we meeting with this Chechen separatist?" "To work out a quid pro quo deal," Lindsey said. "He helps us get arms to the rebels in Syria; in exchange he keeps some to get rid of foreign fighters--mostly Islamic extremists--and the Russians; we also agree to support their bid for independence from Russia at the United Nations." "Do we care about their independence?" "To some extent where it meets our foreign policy goals; but it''s a dangerous world out there, a constant juggling act. These Chechen separatists are Muslim but they''re secular and moderate; they''re a better counterbalance to extremist Islamic states than any government we could have created on our own. Plus they hate the Russians with a passion, and anything that distracts the Kremlin can''t be all bad.
" "Why not just give the guns to the Syrian rebels openly? Everybody knows we want Assad out of there; nobody likes the guy." Again, Lindsey shrugged. "The usual walking a tightrope when it comes to the Middle East. We don''t want to be seen as toppling yet another government in a Muslim country. And if the weapons wind up in the wrong hands after Assad''s out--i.e., killing U.S.
soldiers in some other place or bringing down an airliner in Munich--we need to be able to deny it was the administration." "Then why Chechens? Why not just tell the Israelis to do it?" "The Israelis have the same concern about where the arms will eventually wind up and also don''t want them being traced back to them. Imagine how it would go over in Tehran or Cairo if the Arab press got wind of the Israelis'' providing arms to rebels to topple Muslim governments. To be honest, we''re also yanking the Russians'' chain a little bit. They''re not helping us out with Syria, or with the damn Iranians, so we''re stirring the pot in their backyard." Fauhomme shook his head. "Jesus, don''t you spooks ever get tired of ''stirring the pot''? It never seems to pan out, or is Iran-Contra such a distant memory that the lesson has been forgotten?" Stung, Lindsey countered. "No more than you get tired of manipulating voters.
" "Yeah," Fauhomme snorted. "But I get results." "No offense," Lindsey replied tersely, "but you have no idea what has worked and what hasn''t. All you hear about is the occasional foul-up that is bound to happen now and again, but believe it or not, we have reasons for doing what we do that might not be apparent to someone who isn''t in the loop." Lindsey made his last comment pointedly, but Fauhomme just brushed it off with a wave of his cigar. "If I want in the loop, I''ll get in the loop," he replied. "But we have experts, like yourself, to muck it up just fine on your own." The fat man rubbed his face with his pudgy fingers.
He had been in the political game for most of his adult life. The son of an auto worker and avowed communist, he''d joined Students for a Democratic Society when he arrived on a college campus in Illinois in the late sixties. But when the SDS wasn''t radical enough in its plans to topple th.