CHAPTER 31

WASHINGTON, D.C.—SIXTEEN DAYS LATER

General Tom Rutledge wanted to take me to lunch at the Capital Grille, a Pennsylvania Avenue mainstay a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol. Fitting.

The weather outside was gorgeous; for some miraculous reason, the humidity had lifted and the air had a balmy, tropical clarity. A shame to spend the time inside, but then, lunch at the grille never disappointed.

I’d spent six days debriefing. It should have taken six hours. But everyone wanted a piece of the action. They always did when things went well. And things had gone very well.

Big George had been a success. The bombers had knocked out all but one of the Sejil-2 missiles. That one had been attacked and destroyed on the orders of three rogue generals who wanted no part of watching their country get blasted into a radioactive parking lot. Smart thinking.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an undetermined number of mullahs, and half of his high command were in their bunker hideout when a twenty-thousand-pound bunker buster drilled a hundred feet into the ground and incinerated the place. Well, at least that was the hope. The Twelver’s death could not be confirmed. Nor could the mullahs or the members of the high command. A 20,000-pound bunker buster didn’t allow for confirmation; it didn’t allow for much of anything except rubble and complete annihilation, and that bit of uncertainty left me with a queasy feeling in my stomach.

Of course, the Muslim world condemned the American attack, though behind the scenes every government from Istanbul to Rabat scrambled to prop up the alliance formed by the renegade generals and the MEK. Would they be an improvement over the insanity of their predecessors? Well, it would take some real doing to be any worse. And now Iran’s young people were swarming the streets and stepping into the void, and that might just be enough to bring back the engineers and the doctors and all the other professionals who had abandoned the country over the decades.

Truthfully, my concerns were all selfish. I wanted Charlie and Jeri and Leila to have what they’d been striving for going on thirty years: a place they were proud to call home. I wanted to know there wasn’t some self-inflated fanatic holding a gun to my country’s head.

“You feeling any better?” Tom said. Neither of us had bothered to open our menus.

“I’m fine.” I really wasn’t fine. The waterboarding had left some serious scars on my lungs; no telling if they would ever completely heal, one doctor had informed me. In other words, don’t plan on running any marathons in the near future. The three fingers broken on my left hand during interrogation had been rebroken and set with tiny screws that would come out in another four weeks; same prognosis. The good news was that I played tennis with my right hand. The wire they had used on my neck had apparently been rusted, because I’d been given tetanus shots on three occasions; so far, no lockjaw.

“What are you eating?” Tom said. I hadn’t seen the waiter coming.

I had to smile at that. We had been ordering the same damn thing since the day we’d started going to the grille. “How does sliced filet mignon with cippolini onions and wild mushrooms sound, Tom? Something new and different.”

He looked up at the waiter. Held up two fingers. “And two coffees. Black for me. Cream for the wimp.”

“Yes, sir,” the waiter said.

“How’s Richard?” Tom asked. He meant Mr. Elliot. He’d gone into the hospital three days after I returned home. Cancer.

“Not good. Damn cigarettes,” I said. I’d been to visit him every day since my debriefing ended. Funny, he was really the only one I really wanted to brief. He was the only one I’d ever briefed. “Amazed he lived this long.”

“He cleared the DDO’s name. You know that, right?” the three-star general sitting across from me said. “The investigation punked two guys from his staff. Charges pending.”

“Yeah, well, they were still on his staff,” I said. Actually, I was glad Wiseman hadn’t been implicated. That would have been a disaster. A couple of guys going down from his staff was only half a disaster. “What about Landon Fry?”

“He put in his resignation as White House chief of staff,” Tom said as our coffee was served. “He’s running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. And after all the praise the press has been heaping on him, he’s a shoo-in.”

“Terrific.”

“He stayed true to his word, though. He got your intel on the president’s desk.”

I smiled out of the side of my mouth. “He got the intel on the president’s desk, Tom, because only a fool would have ignored it. It was politics from the get-go, and you and I both know it. We sat in that meeting with him at the Old Ebbitt, and he tried to make us believe that he was all in. Behind us all the way. Hell, he might as well have said, Hey, listen, Jake, you bring me back evidence even my mother couldn’t ignore, and I’ll get it in the hands of the president. And then, if the bombers are already in the air, I’ll make sure the president takes your intel seriously.”

“Hope you’re not expecting me to give you an argument.” Tom looked over the rim of his cup at me.

I caught the look in his eyes. “So the bombers were already in the air, weren’t they?” I said.

“Well, more or less.” He held his cup out to me, and I clicked it with mine. He said, “We made heroes of them all, Jake. We made heroes of them all.”