Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [142]
Mary Pat closed the door as instructed and took a seat across from Margolin’s desk. Outside, the operations center hummed with activity.
“They shit-canned our outreach idea,” Margolin said without preamble. “We won’t be using any of the Brits’ assets in Pakistan.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Above my pay grade, Mary Pat. I took it as far as I could, but no go. My best guess: Iraq.”
The same thought had occurred to Mary Pat just before her boss said the word. Up against pressure from its citizens, the UK had been steadily distancing itself, both in policy and in combat resource allocation, from the Iraq War. Rumor was, despite his conciliatory tone in public, President Kealty was furious with the Brits, who had, he felt, left his administration holding the bag. Without the UK’s even nominal support, any plan to withdraw U.S. troops would be slowed, if not jeopardized. Worse still, Britain’s arms-reach attitude had in turn emboldened the Iraqi government, whose calls for a U.S. departure had gone from polite but firm to strident and belligerent, a trend American citizens could not help but notice. First our closest ally, then the very people we’d shed blood to rescue. Having run his campaign on the promise to disentangle the United States from Iraq, Kealty was slipping in the polls, and some of the TV pundits had gone as far as accusing Kealty of stifling the withdrawal to put pressure on Congress, which had itself been wishy-washy on some of their new President’s pet projects.
The fact that their request to enlist the Brits in following the Peshawar-map angle was denied shouldn’t have surprised Mary Pat, a veteran of more intragovernment political squabbles than she could remember, but it did nonetheless. This damned cave was the best lead they’d had on the Emir in years. To see it slip through their fingers over what amounted to a presidential tantrum was infuriating. Of course, it didn’t help that their DCI, Scott Kilborn, was himself a weasel.
Mary Pat shook her head and sighed. “Too bad Driscoll lost his prisoners.”
“A little water inhalation tends to loosen the lips,” Margolin said.
A popular view, Mary Pat thought, but of little use in the real world. She was neither squeamish nor such a Pollyanna that she thought torture did not have its merit, but generally those techniques fell far short on producing reliable and verifiable information. More often than not, it was a waste of time. During and shortly after World War Two, MI6 and the OSS got more information from captured German generals with a game of Ping-Pong or checkers than they did with a pair of pliers or electrodes.
The “ticking bomb” scenario so casually batted about was a near myth. Most plots against the United States since 9/11 had been broken in their infancy, as the bad guys were recruiting, or moving money, or putting logistics into place. The image of a terrorist with his finger hovering over a button somewhere while the good guys tried to squeeze info from his compatriot was beyond rare, a Hollywood concoction, and bore about as much similarity to real-world intelligence work as James Bond did. In fact, there’d been only one instance of the “ticking bomb” during her entire career, and John Clark had settled that in a matter of minutes by breaking a few fingers and asking the right questions.
“Clichés are clichés for a reason,” Ed had told her once. “It’s because they’re usually so true, people overuse them.” As far as Mary Pat was concerned, when it came to interrogation, the cliché “You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar” was dead right. Morality