Читать книгу Jackknife - William W. Johnstone - Страница 10

The President said, “Those goddamn camel-jockeys never had any intention of holding up their part of the bargain.”

“Don’t let the press hear you using an ethnic slur like that,” her husband said with a grin. “After all, you represent the party of tolerance and diversity.”

She fixed him with the familiar steely-eyed glare he had seen so many times during their thirty-plus years of marriage. At first, he’d been scared shitless whenever she looked at him like that, because it was in those moments that he had been able to look into her and see her for what she really was.

Over the years, though, he had come to realize that maintaining the façade of a happy marriage was too important to her plans for her to ever direct the full force of her rage at him. All he had to do to remain safe was to exercise just the least bit of restraint and discretion. She had skated by on the edge of enough scandals, both personal and political, that she couldn’t afford to let any sort of “accident” befall him, as had happened to others who had gotten in her way.

Besides, he truly did love her, despite knowing that to her, he was mostly just a useful prop. So when they were alone like this, in the upstairs quarters of the White House, he made it a habit to speak as plainly with her as he could. He wanted to help.

“You’re right,” he went on. “They were lyin’ to you from the get-go, just stringin’ you along with empty promises so you’d keep the Israelis off their back for a while longer.”

She nodded. “Yes, but I believed them at first. I mean, why wouldn’t I? They had no reason to fear U.N. inspections. Pulling the wool over the eyes of the United Nations is no great trick. Even a cheap thug like Saddam Hussein was able to do it for years. They never did figure out what he was up to.”

“Don’t let anybody hear you say that either,” her husband advised, and he wasn’t smiling now. “Everybody knows that Bush lied and Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction. You don’t want to go lettin’ people think that the conventional wisdom might not be true.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “All they had to do was hide the real stuff and put on a dog-and-pony show for the inspectors. Then we would have had a good excuse for going along with whatever the U.N. said, and without our backing the Israelis would have had to accept it, too.”

“Maybe you don’t know the Israelis quite as well as you think you do.”

“What do you mean by that?” she snapped.

“I mean that when those folks feel like they’ve been backed into a corner, they’re liable to do almost anything.”

The President shook her head. “They won’t attack Iran. My God, they’re already surrounded by enemies who want them dead as it is.”

“Then they don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, now do they?” her husband said softly.

That shook her for a second; he could tell by the way she looked. She truly believed that every setback was only temporary, that in the end everything would work out the way she wanted it to because she was smarter than everybody else. Smarter, and more decent and moral, and anyone who disagreed with her was evil or stupid or both, and therefore destined to lose. Maybe she was right—he hoped she was—but he feared that the rest of the world might not cooperate.

She resumed the pacing that had sent her back and forth across the luxuriously appointed bedroom a dozen times so far during their conversation. “Why now?” she asked. “Everything was looking good. All the Iranians had to do was play along for a while. The whole situation would have cooled down, so that next year would be nice and peaceful leading up to the election. Why throw a wrench in the works right now?”

“Maybe they were just stalling for time. Maybe they don’t need to anymore.”

She stopped and swung around toward him. “You mean you think they’re ready to…to do something?”

“I don’t know,” her husband replied honestly. “But I got a feelin’ there’s a shitstorm comin’…and we won’t be able to deny our way outta this one.”