Chapetr 3 / Page 8

Lisa Borden was as dumb as she was loud. “I don’t care if he’s King David returned from the dead. You don’t send some Bible thumper into Iraq with the possibility of the whole Arab world exploding if he gets caught!”

The NSA closed his eyes. Stillwell watched the hammer drop, and wondered as it fell—what is the agenda? He was sitting in a room with a no name spook, a Spec War Two Star general, a White House hatchet man, the National Security Advisor, and an openly hostile deputy Secretary of State. They were discussing a mission to do what? To capture chemical or nuclear weapons delivered by the Chinese. Perhaps the intention was to lose those weapons. After all, the administration owed its reelection to illegal contributions from the Chinese Government. The politics might dictate certain sensitivities towards Chinese involvement. However, there were other elements equally distressed at the prospect of heavy-duty chemical weapons being made available to Saddam. Evidently, the NSA feared the practical national security issues over a more muddled political agenda.

“Madam Secretary, I am not interested in your proclivities towards or against a person’s religion. As you are well aware, our administration is an inclusive administration. The word of the day is diversity. Now, according to Mister Stillwell here, our focus should be on the containment of what we saw this morning. I believe he would like to stomp on everything. It’s my job to make national security decisions, and it is my job to determine the best tool to implement those decisions. I’ll repeat for the last time: You are here as a courtesy, and we are talking about a very sensitive issue here. Leaks to the press or others will not be permitted. On this point the President has been explicit.” Lisa Borden seemed to shrink back into her chair with each statement. Both knew who would prevail today in this room. It was only a battle, not the war.

“Perhaps we can proceed with Mister Harper’s credentials,” he concluded.

The nameless spook looked up from his report. “I believe some background may be in order. We know Iraq has been able to get its hands on a number of Hewlett Packard (HP) machines. Our best intelligence indicates these machines were diverted from France during a replacement of HP-9000 with IBM RS-6000 systems. The excuse for the replacement is a general market trend towards IBM equipment in Europe. The HPs were supposed to be transshipped back to England. However, the computers returned were about a dozen 386 PC clones and the HP boxes disappeared.