The Negotiator

“That goddam treaty has got to be stopped,” said Cobb. “Somehow the Senate has got to be persuaded to refuse to ratify it.”

The news of the day had been that the treaty was in the last stages of drafting, would be signed by the respective ambassadors in Washington and Moscow in April, ratified by the Central Committee in Moscow in October after the summer recess, and put before the Senate before year’s end.

“Do you think the Senate will turn it down?” asked Miller carefully. The defense contractor looked gloomily into his fifth glass.

“Nope,” he said. “Fact is, arms cutbacks are always popular among the voters, and despite the odds, Cormack has the charisma and the popularity to push it through by his own personality. I can’t stand the guy, but that’s a fact.”

Miller admired the defeated man’s realism.

“Do you know the terms of the treaty yet?” he asked.

“Enough,” said Cobb. “They’re fixing to slice tens of billions off the defense appropriations. Both sides of the Iron Curtain. There’s talk of forty percent-bilateral, of course.”

“Are there many more who think like you?” asked Miller.

Cobb was too drunk to follow the line of the questioning. “Just about the whole defense industry,” he snarled. “We’re looking at wholesale closings and total personal and corporate losses here.”

“Mmmm. It’s too bad Michael Odell is not our President,” mused Miller. The man from Zodiac, Inc., gave a harsh laugh.

“Oh, what a dream. Yes, he’ll be opposed to cutbacks. But that won’t help us much. He’ll stay Veep and Cormack will stay President.”

“Will he now?” asked Miller quietly.

In the last week of the month, Cobb, Moir, and Salkind met Scanlon and Miller for a private di

“He has to go,” Miller intoned. The others nodded agreement.

“I’ll have no truck with assassination,” said Salkind hurriedly. “In any case, remember Ke

“I agree,” said Miller. “That course of action is inconceivable. But there must be a way of forcing his resignation.”

“Name one,” challenged Moir. “How the hell can anyone bring that about? The man’s fireproof. There are no scandals in back of him. The caucus assured themselves of that before they asked him to step in.”

“There must be something,” said Miller. “Some Achilles’ heel. We have the determination; we have the contacts; we have the financing. We need a pla

“What about your man, the colonel?” asked Scanlon.

Miller shook his head. “He would still regard any U.S. President as his Commander in Chief. No, another man… out there somewhere…”

What he was thinking of, and what he intended to hunt down, was a renegade, subtle, ruthless, intelligent, and loyal only to money.

Chapter 3

Thirty miles west of Oklahoma City lies the federal penitentiary called El Reno, more officially known as a “federal corrections institution.” Less formally, it is one of the toughest prisons in America -in criminal slang, a hard pen. At dawn on a chill morning in the middle of March a small door opened in the frame of its forbidding main gate and a man emerged.

He was of medium height, overweight, prison-pale, broke, and very bitter. He stared about him, saw little (there was little to see), turned toward the city, and began to walk. Above his head, unseen eyes in the guard towers watched him with small interest, then looked away. Other eyes from a parked car watched him far more intently. The stretch limousine was parked a discreet distance from the main gate, far enough for its license plate to be out of vision. The man staring through the rear window of the car put down his binoculars and muttered, “He’s heading this way.”

Ten minutes later the fat man passed the car, glanced at it, and walked on. But he was a pro, and already his alarm ante

“Mr. Moss?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My employer, sir. He wishes to offer you an interview.”

“No name, I suppose,” said the fat man.

The other smiled. “Not yet. But we do have a warm car, a private airplane, and mean you no harm. Let’s face it, Mr. Moss, do you have any place else to go?”

Moss thought. The car and the man did not smell of the Company-the CIA-or of the Bureau-the FBI-his sworn enemies. And no, he had no place else to go. He climbed into the backseat of the car, the young man got in beside him, and the limo headed not toward Oklahoma City but to Wiley Post Airport to the northwest.

In 1966, at the age of twenty-five, Irving Moss had been a junior provincial officer (a GS 12) with the CIA, fresh out of the States and working in Vietnam with the CIA-run Phoenix program. Those were the years when the Special Forces, the Green Berets, had been steadily handing over their hitherto rather successful hearts-and-minds program in the Mekong Delta to the South Vietnamese Army, who proceeded to handle the notion of actually persuading the peasants not to cooperate with the Viet Cong with considerably less skill and humanity. The Phoenix people had to liaise with the ARVN, while the Green Berets switched more and more to search-and-destroy missions, often bringing back Viet Cong prisoners or suspects for interrogation by the ARVN under the aegis of the Phoenix people. That was when Moss discovered both his secret taste and his true talent.

As a youth he had been puzzled and depressed by his own lack of sexuality, and recalled with unappeased bitterness the mockery he had suffered in his teenage years. He had also been bemused-the fifties were an age of relative i

It had been, for him, a beautiful three years, which ended one day in 1969 when a tall, craggy young Green Beret sergeant had unexpectedly walked out of the jungle, his left arm dripping blood, sent back by his officer to get medication. The young warrior had gazed for a few seconds upon Moss’s work, turned without a word, and crashed a haymaker of a right-hand punch onto the bridge of his nose. The medics at Danang had done their best, but the bones of the septum were so shattered that Moss had to go to Japan for treatment. Even then, remedial surgery had left the bridge of his nose broadened and flattened, and the passages were so damaged that he still whistled and snuffled as he breathed, especially when excited.

He never saw the sergeant again, there had been no official report, and he had managed to cover his tracks and stay with the Agency. Until 1983. In that year, much promoted, he had been with the CIA buildup of the contra movement in Honduras, supervising a series of jungle camps along the border with Nicaragua from which the contras, many of them former servants of the ousted and unlovable dictator Somoza, had run sporadic missions across the border into the land they had once ruled. One day such a group had returned with a thirteen-year-old boy, not a Sandinista, just a peasant kid.