Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [100]
Ellis was looking at Jean-Pierre’s maps. “This was the cleverest thing,” he said. “He knew all the routes because Mohammed always used his maps.” He looked up at her, saw her expression and said hastily: “But let’s not talk about that. What will you do now?”
She sat on the cushion with her back against the wall, her favorite position for nursing. Ellis did not seem embarrassed by her exposed breast, and she began to feel more comfortable. “I have to wait,” she said. “As soon as the route to Pakistan is open and the convoys begin again, I’ll go home. What about you?”
“The same. My work here is over. The agreement will have to be supervised, of course, but the Agency has people in Pakistan who can do that.”
Fara brought the tea. Jane wondered what Ellis’s next job would be: plotting a coup in Nicaragua, or blackmailing a Soviet diplomat in Washington, or perhaps assassinating an African Communist? She had questioned him, when they were lovers, about going to Vietnam, and he had told her that everybody had expected him to dodge the draft, but he was a contrary son of a bitch and so he did the opposite. She was not sure she believed that, but even if it was true it did not explain why he had remained in this violent line of work even after he got out of the army. “So what will you do when you get home?” she asked. “Go back to devising cute ways of killing Castro?”
“The Agency is not supposed to do assassinations,” he said.
“But it does.”
“There’s a lunatic element that gives us a bad name. Unfortunately, presidents can’t resist the temptation to play secret-agent games, and that encourages the nutcase faction.”
“Why don’t you turn your back on them all and join the human race?”
“Look. America is full of people who believe that other countries as well as their own have a right to be free—but they’re the type of people who turn their backs and join the human race. In consequence, the Agency employs too many psychopaths and too few decent, compassionate citizens. Then, when the Agency brings down a foreign government at the whim of a president, they all ask how this kind of thing can possibly happen. The answer is because they let it. My country is a democracy, so there’s nobody to blame but me when things are wrong; and if things are to be put right, I have to do it, because it’s my responsibility.”
Jane was unconvinced. “Would you say that the way to reform the KGB is to join it?”
“No, because the KGB is not ultimately controlled by the people. The Agency is.”
“Control isn’t that simple,” said Jane. “The CIA tells lies to the people. You can’t control them if you have no way of knowing what they’re doing.”
“But in the end it’s our Agency and our responsibility.”
“You could work to abolish it instead of joining it.”
“But we need a central intelligence agency. We live in a hostile world and we need information about our enemies.”
Jane sighed. “But look what it leads to,” she said. “You’re planning to send more and bigger guns to Masud so that he can kill more people faster. And that’s what you people always end up doing.”
“It’s not just so that he can kill more people faster,” Ellis protested. “The Afghans are fighting for their freedom—and they’re fighting against a bunch of murderers—”
“They’re all fighting for their freedom,” Jane interrupted. “The PLO, the Cuban exiles, the Weathermen, the IRA, the white South Africans and the Free Wales Army.”
“Some are right and some aren’t.”
“And the CIA knows the difference?”
“It ought to—”
“But it doesn’t. Whose freedom is Masud fighting for?”
“The freedom of all Afghans.”
“Bullshit,” Jane said fiercely. “He’s a Muslim fundamentalist, and if he ever takes power the first thing he’ll do is clamp down on women. He will never give