Tom Clancy's Op-center Balance of Power - Tom Clancy [3]
"No," Martha said. "They were acting according to a street extortionists' code."
Aideen's eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"
"Those men wouldn't have hurt us," Martha said. "That would have been against the rules. And the rules are that they follow women, pester them, and keep at it until they get a payoff to leave them alone. I was about to give them one when you acted."
"You were?"
Martha nodded. "That's how it's done here. As for the police you would have gone to, many of them collect kickbacks from the street extortionists to look the other way. Get it through your head. Playing the game, however corrupt it seems, is still diplomacy."
"But what if you hadn't known about their 'profession,' their code? I didn't." Aideen lowered her voice. "I was worried about having our backpacks stolen and our covers blown."
"An arrest would have blown our covers a whole lot faster," Martha said. She took Aideen by the arm and pulled her aside. They stood next to a building, away from pedestrian traffic. "The truth is, eventually someone would have told us how to get rid of them. People always do. That's how the game is played, and I believe in obeying the rules of whatever game or whatever country I'm in. When I started out in diplomacy in the early 1970's on the seventh floor of the State Department, I was excited as hell. I was on the seventh floor, where all the real, heavy-duty work is done. But then I found out why I was there. Not because I was so damn talented, though I hoped I was. I was there to deal with the apartheid leaders in South Africa. I was State's 'in-your-face' figure. I was a wagging finger that said, "If you want to deal with the U.S., you'll have to deal with blacks as equals." was Martha scowled. "Do you know what that was like?"
Aideen made a face. She could just imagine.
"It's not like having your fanny patted, I can tell you that," Martha said. "But I did what I was supposed to do because I learned one thing very early. If you infract the rules or bend them to suit your temperament, even a little, it becomes a habit. When it becomes a habit you get sloppy. And a sloppy diplomat is no use to the country-or to me."
Aideen was suddenly disgusted with herself. The thirty-four-year-old foreign service officer would be the first to admit that she wasn't the diplomat her forty-nine-year-old superior was. Few people were. Martha Mackall not only knew her way around European and Asian political circles-partly the result of summers and vacations she'd spent touring the world with her father, popular 1960's soul singer and Civil Rights activist Mack Mackall. She was also a summa cum laude MIT financial wizard who was tight with the world's top bankers and well connected on Capitol Hill. Martha was feared but she was respected. And Aideen had to admit that in this case she was also right.
Martha looked at her watch. "Come on," she said. "We're due at the palace in less than five minutes."
Aideen nodded and walked alongside her boss. The younger woman was no longer angry. She was disgusted with herself and brooded, as she usually did when she screwed up. She hadn't been able to screw up much during her four years in army intelligence at Fort Meade. That was paint-by-numbers courier work, moving cash and top secret information to operatives domestically and abroad. Toward the end of her tenure there she interpreted ELINT-ELECTRONIC intelligence-and passed it on to the Pentagon. Since the satellites and computers did all the heavy lifting there, she took special classes on elite tactics and stakeout techniques-just to get experience in those areas. Aideen didn't have a chance to mess things up either when she left the military and became a junior political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. Most of the time she was using ELINT to help keep track of drug dealers in the Mexican military, though occasionally she was permitted to go out in the field and use some of the undercover skills she'd acquired. One of the most valuable aspects of the three years Aideen had spent