The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [77]
"It works. It keeps the peace."
"Mr. Alien, the peace we have is one continuous crisis. You say we can reduce inventories by half-again, so what? You could cut Soviet inventories by two thirds and still leave them with enough warheads to turn America into a crematorium. The same thing is true of our inventory. As I said coming back from Moscow, the reduction agreement now on the table is cosmetic only. It does not provide any degree of additional safety. It is a symbol-maybe an important one, but only a symbol with very little substance."
"Oh, I don't know," General Parks observed. "If you reduce my target load by half, I wouldn't mind all that much." That earned him a nasty look from Alien.
"If we can find out what the Russians are doing different, where does that leave us?" the President asked.
"If the CIA gives us data that we can use? Major?" Parks turned his head.
"Then we'll have a weapons system that we can demonstrate in three years, and deploy over the five to ten years after that," Gregory said.
"You're sure," the President said.
"As sure as I can be, sir. Like with the Apollo Program, sir, it's not so much a question of inventing a new science as learning how to engineer technology we already have. It's just working out the nuts and bolts."
"You're a very confident young man, Major," Alien said professorially.
"Yes, sir, I am. I think we can do it. Mr. Alien, our objective isn't all that different from yours. You want to get rid of the nukes, and so do we. Maybe we can help you, sir."
Zing! Ryan thought with a hastily concealed smile. A discreet knock came at the door. The President checked his watch.
"I have to cut this one short. I have to go over some antidrug programs over lunch with the Attorney General. Thank you for your time." He took one last look at the Dushanbe photo and stood. Everyone else did the same. They filed out by the side door, the one concealed in the white plaster walls.
"Nice going, kid," Ryan observed quietly to Gregory.
Candi Long caught the car outside her house. It was driven by a friend from Columbia, Dr. Beatrice Taussig, another optical physicist. Their friendship went back to undergraduate days. She was flashier than Candi. Taussig drove a Nissan 300Z sports car, and had the traffic citations to prove it. The car fitted well with her clothes, however, and the Clairoled hairstyle, and the brash personality that turned men off like a light switch.
" 'Morning, Bea." Candi Long slipped into the car and buckled the seat belt before she closed the door. Driving with Bea, you always buckled up-though she never seemed to bother.
"Tough night, Candi?" This morning it was a severe, not quite mannish wool suit, topped by a silk scarf at the neck. Long could never see the point. When you spent your day covered in a cheap white lab coat, who gave a damn what was under it-except Al, of course, but he was interested in what was under what was under, she thought to herself, smiling.
"I sleep better when he's here."
"Where'd he go?" Taussig asked.
"Washington." She yawned. The rising sun cast shadows on the road ahead.
"How come?" Bea downshifted as she accelerated the car up the freeway on-ramp. Candi felt herself pressed sideways against the seat belt. Why did her friend have to drive this way? This wasn't the Grand Prix of Monaco.
"He said that somebody ran a test, and he has to explain it to somebody or other."
"Hmph." Beatrice looked at her mirror and left the car in third as she selected a slot in the rush-hour traffic. She matched velocities expertly and slid into a space only ten feet longer than her Z-car. That earned her an angry beep from the car behind. She just smiled. The nondriving part of her psyche took note of the fact that whatever test Al was explaining hadn't been American. And there weren't too many people doing tests that this particular little geek had to explain. Bea didn't understand what Candi saw in Al Gregory. Love, she told herself, is blind, not to mention deaf and dumb-especially dumb. Poor, plain Candi Long, she could have done so