Goodbye California - Alistair [115]
Mitchell had the grace to part his lips about half an inch. Barrow remained without expression. Clearly he’d been briefed by Dunne: equally clear was the fact that he hadn’t bothered to pass on his information.
‘And what has the CIA achieved? I’ll tell you. It has succeeded in making a laughing-stock of itself in general and its director in particular, not to mention uselessly wasting the taxpayers’ money by sending its agents to pussyfoot around Geneva in search of so-called secret information that has been in the public domain for two years. Apart from that, what? An educated guess would say zero.’
Barrow coughed. ‘You wouldn’t say you are being needlessly intransigent?’ He could have put more reproof into his voice if he’d tried, even a little.
‘Needless intransigence is the only language some people seem to understand.’
Mitchell’s voice surfaced through layers of cracked ice. ‘Your point is taken, Sergeant. You have come to teach us how to do our jobs.’
Ryder wasn’t quite through with being intransigent or letting Mitchell off the hook. ‘I am not a Sergeant. I’m a private citizen and as such beholden to no one. I can’t teach the CIA anything – I wouldn’t know how to go about subverting foreign governments or assassinating their presidents. I can’t teach the FBI anything. All I want is a fair hearing, but it’s really a matter of indifference whether I get it or not.’ His eyes were looking at Mitchell’s. ‘You can shut up and let me say what I’ve been brought here to say, against my better judgement, or not. I’d as soon leave. I find the atmosphere here uncomfortable, not to say hostile, and Major Dunne has all the essentials.’
Mitchell said in a toneless voice: ‘We will hear you out.’
‘I don’t like that expression either.’ Barrow winced. Despite his antipathy towards Mitchell it was not hard to guess that, even although momentarily, he was putting himself in the other’s position. ‘It’s the term used by the chairman of the board when he’s giving a carpeted executive the chance to justify himself before being fired.’
‘Please.’ Barrow turned the palms of his hands upwards. ‘We take the point that you’re a plain speaker. Please take our point that you haven’t been brought here for nothing. We will listen carefully.’
‘Thank you.’ Ryder wasted no time on preamble. ‘You’ve all seen the streets round this block. As we came into your pad on the roof we saw a hundred streets like it. Blocked. Choked. Nothing like it since the retreat from Mons. The people are running scared. I don’t blame them. If I lived here I’d be running scared too. They believe that Morro is going to trigger off this bomb at ten tomorrow morning. So do I. I also believe that he will set off or is quite prepared to set off the other ten nuclear devices he claims to have. What I don’t for a moment believe in is his demand. It’s utter foolishness, he must know it is and we should recognize it for what it is: an empty threat, a meaningless demand that can’t be met.’
‘Perhaps you should know,’ Barrow said. ‘Just before you arrived word came through that protests have been lodged by the Kremlin and Peking, and by their embassies in Washington, crying to high heaven that they are as innocent as the driven snow of this monstrous accusation against them – no one has accused them of anything but one takes their point – and that it’s all part of a warmongering capitalist plot. First time in living memory that they’ve totally agreed with each other on anything.’
‘Not just the