The Increment (17 page)

“I’m not smoking. I’m remembering. Now, go away.” He made a little shooing motion with his hand, as if he were flicking away a bug.

The waiter was going to protest, but something in Hoffman’s manner deterred him. Two ladies who were seated several tables away were looking at the cigar. They whispered to each other and moved to another table across the café. Hoffman turned to Harry.

“What’s up, Harry? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m worried about Iran.”

“You got me out of my garden to tell me that?”

Harry started to apologize, but Hoffman punched him gently on the shoulder.

“Just joking with you, Harry boy. Lighten up. Tell me what’s bothering you. You look like shit.”

“I’m getting squeezed. The White House wants to hit Tehran. They don’t know how yet, but they’re looking at options. They think the Iranians are about to break out. They’re preparing a dossier, just like Iraq. But the intel doesn’t show that. It’s crap. They think we’ve got hard facts, but we don’t. The truth is, I’m not sure what we have. I’m trying to find out, but it takes time, and this crowd is impatient.”

“You think?” said Hoffman sardonically. He had his own scars to show on that account. He put the cigar in his mouth and bit down on it.

“So I don’t know what to do. I’m trying to unravel this ball of string, you know. I’m talking to the Brits, who have a station there. But it makes me nervous. I worry that I’m going to do something wrong. You understand? I worry that I am being disloyal to the White House if I don’t do what they want. But I’m being disloyal to myself if I do. See what I mean?”

“Honestly, Harry, I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You better start at the beginning.”

“Okay, okay.” The waiter brought the coffees and a sad-looking little bun with a crown of spun sugar.

Harry took a breath. Normally he wasn’t nervous, but he found Hoffman intimidating. He started again, lowering his voice.

“Here’s what it’s about, Mr. Hoffman. We have an agent inside the nuclear program. He came in as a VW, and we haven’t met him face-to-face yet. But he has sent us a couple of documents, and they look totally legit to me. The question is figuring out what they mean. The first was a readout on their enrichment program; it says they’re at thirty-five percent, which is close to a bomb, but not there yet. We don’t know how long it will take to get the rest of the way.”

“You need to debrief the agent.”

“Exactly. But that will take some time, and some help from London. And the White House says we don’t have time.”

“Well, tell them to piss off.” Hoffman winked. He knew as well as Harry that defiance was not an option. If you couldn’t do what they told you to do, you were supposed to quit.

“It gets more complicated,” continued Harry. “The Iranian sent us another document. This one was about a triggering mechanism for an actual bomb.”

“No shit! The Holy Grail.”

“Looks like it. The weapons program is back on, for sure. But this second document is hard to read, like the other one. It’s scary stuff when you first look at it, but it’s describing something that hasn’t worked. Maybe that’s the real message our Iranian friend is sending us. Maybe he’s saying, ‘Watch out! We’re trying to build a bomb.’ Or maybe he’s saying, ‘Relax. We’re trying to build a bomb but it isn’t working.’”

“That’s why you need to talk to him.”

Harry nodded.

“Do you know who he is? This Iranian scientist?”

“It took a while, but we finally got a real name and workplace. With help from SIS. The director authorized it, sort of. The White House doesn’t know they’re helping. I think they would shit if they did.”

“Good for the admiral,” said Hoffman. “I wasn’t sure he had the stones. So what are you and your British friends planning to do? Can you run him in place?”

“Well, that’s the question. There’s one more data point. We just got a new message. He says he’s scared. Not in so many words, but it’s obvious that he thinks they’re on to him, and he wants to get out.”

Harry thought of the picture of the Iranian actress, and the brief plaintive message.

“But the White House says no?”

“Correct,” said Harry. “Arthur Fox is telling them this is it. They already have the smoking gun. They don’t need any more intelligence.”

“I hate Fox. I should have fired the prick when I had the chance. So what about your agent? The guy who wants out.”

“They want to leave him in place, but use his information in a public dossier about the Iranian nuclear program.”

“That will get him killed.”

“Yes, sir. But that’s not the real problem.” Harry moved awkwardly in his little chair. He wanted to make sure Hoffman understood him. He wasn’t sentimental about losing an Iranian he’d never met. That wasn’t the point.

“I’m ready to sacrifice an agent if we have to. But in this case, we don’t even understand what he’s trying to tell us. Maybe he’s telling us that the equipment is malfunctioning, but that nobody realizes it. Maybe he’s saying that a sabotage program is working.”

Hoffman looked uncomfortable. He put his cigar down on the table and backed his chair away from Harry.

“What would you know about a sabotage program, Harry?”

“Nothing.” Harry thought of his meeting in London with Kamal Atwan, and his promise to Adrian Winkler that whatever he learned there would belong not to him, but to the British.

Harry noticed the discomfort of his former boss. Hoffman was rarely ill at ease about anything, so he was curious.

“So you don’t know about a sabotage program, Mr. Hoffman?”

Hoffman looked around. The coffee shop was nearly empty. Even so, he lowered his voice.

“I didn’t say that,” he answered quietly. “I said that
you
don’t know anything about such a program. You’re not cleared for it.”

Hoffman had drawn a red line, but Harry decided to step over it.

“Help me out. What would I understand, if I had been cleared?”

Hoffman shook his head. “This subject is out of bounds, my friend. On beyond zebra. I’m deaf and dumb.”

“Don’t play games with me, Mr. Hoffman. My ass is on the line here. These people in the White House want to take the country to war again, and I need to know what the hell is going on. I need a friend right now.”

“Hum, hum, hum.” Hoffman balanced his coffee spoon on his finger, playing for time while he tried to decide what to say. He leaned toward Harry and began to speak again, barely above a whisper.

“We did have a program of the sort you describe. We were running it through Dubai. The folks at Los Alamos put together all kinds of fancy shit. Computers that dropped a stitch. Centrifuge parts that worked for a year but then began to malfunction.”

“What happened?”

“They rumbled us, that’s what happened. They realized that the trader who was supplying all this tainted shit was bad. They tortured him. Very bad scene. He gave up the whole goddamn network.”

“How come I don’t know about this? It’s not in the files.”

“Our biggest successes rarely are, Harry boy. Neither are our biggest fuckups. This one was a combination of both. End of story, unfortunately.”

Harry knew that this was not, in fact, the end of the sabotage story. But he didn’t say that to Jack Hoffman. That information existed in a different space, under a different flag. In his silence, he crossed another line.

The waiter came back
with the check, obviously hoping that this set of customers 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.

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 whiskey and staring at the empty glass until they poured the wine. He acted as if he wanted to get drunk. But he was tongue-tied, for some reason. What was going on? Andrea wondered. She was frightened.

And then her face fell, because it was obvious: he was going to ask her for a divorce. He had been so far away from her the past few months, taking trips he didn’t even bother to explain, why hadn’t she seen it coming? He didn’t know how to be unfaithful, he was so bad at it. But she had let him slip away to wherever he was now, pounding down the drinks in this too-expensive restaurant until he could find the right words. Andrea wondered what she would say, whether she would cry, what she would do if he left her. Men still flirted with her; she could find another husband if it came to that. She didn’t want to stay married to this man if he didn’t love her anymore. She was as proud as he was.

Harry sat across from her, staring at his glass. He was fumbling for words, trying to frame the question he wanted to resolve. He took her hand in his, but she pulled it back.

“I don’t know how to say this, Andrea. It will probably sound crazy. But I’m trying to understand what loyalty means. I need to talk to you about it.”

“So talk, Harry,” she answered. “But don’t play games. Loyalty is simple. It’s about being true to the people you care about.”

Harry took another swig of wine. Her mood was sharper than he expected, but he couldn’t blame her. This was so hard to talk about.

“But what if your loyalty gets tangled up? You get involved with people you’re not supposed to?”

Her hands were trembling, and she put them under the table so that he wouldn’t see.

“You have to be true to yourself, Harry. And to your values. That’s all. If you can’t, well…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“That’s what I think. But I’m trying to decide what it means.”

A tear was rolling down her cheek. She brushed it away. She really didn’t want to cry.

“Oh God, Harry. What’s wrong? Just tell me.”

“I can’t,” he said. He was looking at his wineglass again. He was so absorbed in his own dilemma that he didn’t understand how she was hearing his words, until he looked up and saw the trembling lip and the eyes brimming with tears.

He laughed. He didn’t mean to, but he couldn’t help it. Her eyes flashed, and then softened.

“Oh Jesus, Andrea! This isn’t about you and me.” He took her hand again.

“It’s not?” She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her napkin.

“God, no. It’s about work. Christ, I’m sorry. I must have scared the hell out of you.”

“I thought you wanted a divorce.”

“From you? You’re all I have left.”

She took a deep breath. She looked at her nails. They were a fiery red. “Pour me another drink, Harry. And then let’s talk about your problem at work.”

And so he did.
At least as much as he could explain, without telling her things he should not say. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie. As he drank more, he got a glow on his cheeks, talking with animation in the way he used to when they were dating.

“I’m a loyal person,” Harry said. “I’ve loved the agency every day I worked there. I loved it even when it didn’t love me.”

“I know that, Harry.”

“I did what they asked, even when I knew it was wrong. That year in Baghdad, I saw things that were crazy. I sent cables. When they didn’t listen, I sent more cables. But I did what they asked me to do, always. That was what I signed up for.” He paused and looked away. “But then something broke.”

Her hand reached for his, the red nails folded around his clenched fist.

“When Alex died, I couldn’t be a good soldier anymore. It wasn’t just our son, you know, it was all those other kids. We
knew
it wouldn’t work. We fucking knew it. All of us. But we let it happen. People at the agency cut me slack. They gave me the Iran job, made me a division chief. They thought I was still the good soldier deep down. But I’m not. And I’m not going to do it again.”

“What are you talking about, sweetheart?”

He looked into her eyes. He wasn’t debating it anymore. He had made a decision, and it was suddenly obvious to him that he had to protect her from it.

“I think you know what it is,” he said.

She nodded. “Iran,” she said. She understood him better than he realized.

“There are people who want another war. They want me to help. But I’m not going to do it again.”

She looked toward the other tables. Nobody was listening.

“What are you going to do, then,” she whispered, “if you can’t be a good soldier? Are you going to quit?”

“No. I don’t think so. That would make things worse.”

“Well, what, then?”

“I don’t know.”

A shadow fell over her face. She was putting the pieces together. “You can’t go against them. They’ll destroy you.”

He nodded. This was not something to discuss further, even with her, especially with her. Someday people might ask her questions, if things went bad.

“I won’t do anything that’s wrong, or too stupid. Trust me.”

She rolled her eyes.

They got a room in the hotel and made love that night, something they hadn’t done in many months. The next afternoon, Harry left again for London. He did not tell his colleagues at the agency.