The Kingmaker by Brian Haig Read Free Book Online

there as I fled out his door. Score: Clarence one, Drummond zero.
    Back in the car, Katrina said, “Gee, you handled that well.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I wasn’t serious.”
    “I know.”
    “Am I missing something here? What was that about his wife?”
    “Mary Morrison was the CIA station chief in Moscow. You know those Washington power couples you always read about? Bill and Hillary. Dole and Dole. The Morrisons were all that in the world of supersecret agencies. Oh, and incidentally, I had a fling with his wife in college.”
    Sometimes, say things quickly enough and it doesn’t register. She frowned, however, and remarked, “A fling, huh? She wasn’t the one who talked you into defending her husband? Tell me this isn’t so.”
    “The relevant point is that he asked for me,” I said, partially answering her question, and partially not.
    “Then you and he are acquainted also?”
    I nodded, and she asked, “How well acquainted?”
    “More than I want to be.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “He’s a jerk.”
    “He’s a jerk?”
    “You’re right. Let me amend that. A social-climbing, ass-covering, arrogant, self-serving, mealy-mouthed jerk.”
    “Are we having objectivity issues?”
    “What’s not objective? The subject’s a jerk and all else flows from there.”
    Wisely, she decided on a different tack. “I was under the impression you guys promoted capable people to such high ranks. Don’t tell me Hollywood had it right all along?”
    “I never said Morrison isn’t capable. I worked with him once, back when I was in the infantry. Back before he met Mary, even.”
    She leaned against the door and said, “Tell me about that.”
    “I was a team leader of a unit that was ordered to take out a terrorist cell that was planning to murder some American diplomats in Israel. Only our intelligence agencies intercepted a few of their messages and somebody decided to preempt it. Morrison was the liaison officer from the intelligence community. I had no complaints there. He knows his job.”
    “What part did you have complaints about?”
    “Him. He was bossy and abusive to my people. He started telling us how to prepare for the mission, how to plan it, how to cut eggs. I told him to back off, and he rudely reminded me he was a lieutenant colonel and I was a lieutenant. He started angling to come along. I said no, he wasn’t part of the team, wasn’t screened, wasn’t trained. It was dangerous for him, and dangerous for us.”
    It wasn’t hard to guess where this was going. “But he went anyway?”
    “Some general who was a buddy of his pulled strings. He ended up on the plane.”
    “And did it cause a problem?”
    “I suppose that depends whose side of the story you listen to.”
    “I believe I’m stuck with your side.”
    “We landed on the coast twenty miles north of Beirut, then worked our way by foot down to the Shiite quarter of the city. We were all dressed up like Arabs, our hair and mustaches dyed black, our skin tinted. Morrison kept bossing my team around.We exchanged words a few times, and he got testy, so I got testy back. I couldn’t figure out what his game was. I assumed he was just a guy who wanted to have a war story to tell his grandkids. I underestimated him.”
    “How so?”
    “The target turned out to be different. Wasn’t anybody’s fault, it just was. We used our night-vision goggles to stake it out and saw nearly twenty guys, instead of the six we’d been told to expect. The whole mission had been rehearsed down to the minutest detail, and I had only eight men. Morrison insisted we had to call it off. I said we’d just replan it on the fly. The terrorist attack was scheduled for four days away, so it was then or never. He kept insisting, and that’s when I figured out his game. He was a plant. The intell folks were scared about what would happen if their information turned out to be wrong and the mission got bollixed. He was their bureaucratic stopgap.”
    She nodded like