17

Waiting to have his pass and thumbprint verified in the lobby, the Weeder considered the options. It was crystal clear what Wanamaker was up to. (How could he have failed to see it before?) Rods. Hair triggers. Wedges. It wasn’t terrorists who were going to explode a primitive atomic device; it was Wanamaker and his people at Operations Subgroup Charlie. They had smuggled enough uranium into Tehran—probably onto the campus of Tehran University itself—to go critical and set off an uncontrolled chain reaction, otherwise (here the Weeder mimicked in his head the voice of his physicist friend) known as an atomic explosion. Why become a world power if we are afraid to wield that power so that the world functions in a way that is congenial to us? one of Wanamaker’s people had asked. Why indeed? They were going to blow up Tehran University and Tehran, along with the Ayatollah and his army of anti-American fanatics, and make that part of the world congenial. The explosion would be primitive enough so that everyone would assume the Iranians had been trying to put together an Islamic bomb at the Kabir College reactor, which had gone off accidentally. Play with fire, the editorials would say, and you get burned.

My side, the Weeder thought, is going to commit an atrocity. But what could he do to stop it? He couldn’t waltz up to the DDI, or the Director himself, and blow the whistle. Wanamaker was a Company employee, which made Stufftingle a Company operation. He couldn’t take his evidence to The Washington Post or the Intelligence Oversight Committee without ruining the Company and depriving America of its first line of defense; there were many in the press or in Congress who would relish the opportunity to castrate the Company on the basis of Stufftingle. The Weeder wouldn’t—he couldn’t!—give them the chance. He had meant what he said about being a patriot.

Which left Wanamaker. He would send him a last love letter announcing that Stufftingle had been exposed—that if a primitive atomic device devastated Kabir College, the world would learn that Wanamaker was responsible for the explosion. Under these circumstances there would be no question of going ahead with the plot. The Weeder, meanwhile, would pull Stufftingle and Wanamaker from his computer hit list, would hide the printouts that had accumulated and take off for New England to let the dust settle. It wasn’t a perfect plan. But then, as Admiral Toothacher used to say in his guest lectures at the Farm, the perfect was the enemy of the good.

The Weeder’s eyes wandered to the inscription on one wall of the lobby. He had read it a hundred times without giving it a second thought, without weighing the implications of such a phrase being in such a building. “And ye shall know the truth,” the inscription read, “and the truth shall make you free.”

Whose truth? Which truth?