The Network - Jason Elliot [73]
‘I only have three weeks with the girls this summer. It’s my only chance to have a proper holiday with them. I can’t fly them to England for just a week. I don’t think it’s a good idea.’
There’s a tightening of her jaw and a renewed look of contempt.
‘Fine. If that’s how selfish you want to be. I shouldn’t have expected anything different from you. We can make things difficult too.’
I have no reply to this, so I kiss the girls goodbye, and they step beyond the threshold under their mother’s arm and disappear. Then, as I’m walking back to the taxi, the door opens again and the two of them race out to me for a final hug.
There is a strategy, I’ve discovered, to manage the feeling of devastation I experience when I leave my kids. I put my mind on something different and force it to stay there until the feeling subsides. There’s a radiating sensation of grief in my chest which I know will pass if I let it run its course. I need in the meantime to get back to another world where my feelings cannot be allowed to run riot. As the taxi rolls back to the hotel past the manicured lawns of the perfect homes of Chevy Chase, I force myself to the meeting I’ll be having later with Grace. I wonder what level of clearance she’s been authorised to read me onto. I’ve had top secret clearance since Seethrough reinstated me with the Firm, but it doesn’t mean I’m automatically cleared for what the Americans call an SCI or sensitive compartmented information, or for SAPs – special access programmes, like the Predator missions, the very existence of which is classified.
As a British citizen I can’t get top secret clearance in the US, but can be granted a limited access authorization if it can be shown, which it obviously has been, that a clearable US citizen isn’t available for the same job. This allows me to be read onto the relevant SCIs. The rest is NTK or need to know, which limits access to whatever is necessary for carrying out the task involved. Seethrough has smoothed the process through with his counterparts at Langley, and as Grace has reminded me, somebody loves me on the seventh floor. Clearance isn’t in itself secret, and may even lapse after a given period. But one’s accountability to it is for life. It’s a disturbing thought. I’m comforted by the paradoxical knowledge that at the highest levels of all, as exemplified by the Baroness’s dealings, there’s no such thing as clearance at all, nor any paperwork to support it. Or to deny it. Just conversations in quiet rooms, on benches in public parks, and words exchanged in chance meetings that quite probably never happened.
I have good intentions to go for a swim in the hotel pool, but instead collapse on the bed and sleep fitfully for an hour before waking with a sense of panic at not knowing where I am. When I come down to the lobby, Grace is already there, reading a copy of the Washington Post. I see her in daylight now and realise how blue her eyes are. There’s the same mixture of hardness in her gait, voice and manner, and softness when she smiles or laughs.
Grace lives alone in a neighbourhood called Adams Morgan, jokingly called Madam’s Organ by its inhabitants. An inordinate number of different locks on her front door protect a narrow house on four floors, small by American standards but huge by all others. There are Persian and Turkish carpets on the floors and Georgia O’Keefe prints on the walls. Above an elaborately hand-tooled saddle on a wooden stand in a corner of the living room hang several rodeo trophies. Among a collection of family photographs, there’s one of Grace shaking hands with the president and a second woman, another with the former president, another with the CIA’s director George Tenet, his Levantine features offset by a pink tie, and another with the former DCI, John Deutch. A miniature flag of the state of Colorado pokes up between them. I ask who the other woman is in the photograph.
‘Secretary of state,’ she answers, coming over to peer at the picture. ‘Stuck-up bitch. Know what she said to me?