blanks.”
“And yet you’ve all known the answer from the start, haven’t you?” I asked. “From before I received orders to assassinate John Paul?”
Nobody said a word.
I didn’t move. My eyes were fixed on the men and women around the table.
The sea of faces also remained motionless, except for almost imperceptible twitches. Who could be used as the scapegoat? None of them wanted to be the first to speak in response to my question, lest a wrong answer cost them their job. Such were the dynamics of Washington.
Eventually a woman in a navy blue suit broke the abstruse Washingtonian silence. “That’s right. We attempted to capture John Paul a number of times prior to issuing the assassination order.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Williams asked bluntly, pointing a finger at the woman’s face. The woman was visibly taken aback by his bluntness and lack of respect but said nothing to object—neither did Boss or the undersecretary of defense.
“CIA. Overseas is our territory after all,” the woman in the blue suit replied.
“No it’s not. It’s not your ‘territory.’ The world is what it is, a giant mess of a place full of confusion and chaos. Thinking that it’s somehow ‘your territory’ is what’s caused this whole clusterfuck in the first place.”
Despite the extraordinary words that were coming from his mouth, Williams was absolutely calm. He wasn’t riled up or trying to pick a fight, particularly. He just had no time for amateurs.
Colonel Rockwell had to rein him in. “Watch your tongue, Captain.”
“Apologies, sir. I take my words back fully, although not the sentiment behind them. If there’s anyone who’s being rude here, it’s the lady over there. Calling the world her territory is disrespectful to the rest of the world and disrespectful to us.” Williams seemed to accept his reprimand but showed no remorse for his outspokenness. We were the ones who had been fighting for the US abroad after all, unlike the CIA, who basically played teddy bears’ picnic with their “paramilitary” activities. What right did they have to call the world their territory? I could figure what Williams was thinking.
The USD urged the CIA woman to continue, and she did so without changing her blank expression.
“As you say, we did indeed fail on a number of occasions to capture John Paul. In our defense, it hadn’t yet been established at that stage that he was instrumental in fanning the flames of conflict around the world. There was a correlation, but there were numerous factors involved at that stage, and all we could say for sure was that he seemed to be cropping up in the shadows quite a lot whenever there was some sort of atrocity. It was only when the level of the atrocities started intensifying exponentially that we started receiving reliable intel confirming that John Paul was at the heart of all this.”
I wondered how many innocent people had been murdered in John Paul’s wars and atrocities in the time it had taken the CIA lady to explain this to us with her arms folded in front of her.
Just one single man, traveling around the world, leaving a bloodbath in his wake. He seemed to find his way to the heart of power—government or insurgency forces, it didn’t seem to matter to him, so long as he could whisper his seductive spell into the ears of those who had the power; and then, as if by magic, piles of dead bodies would start appearing.
Was that a credible explanation of events?
I thought back. Two years ago, when I had killed the ex-brigadier general. Why? Why? Why has my country ended up like this? The former brigadier general hadn’t been asking a hypothetical question born of regret, he’d been genuinely trying to work out what had happened. I remembered his expression when I confronted him; even though he knew what his motives were, what he was trying to achieve by causing those atrocious scenes of mass murder, he didn’t know why .
I remembered that expression and I
“And yet you’ve all known the answer from the start, haven’t you?” I asked. “From before I received orders to assassinate John Paul?”
Nobody said a word.
I didn’t move. My eyes were fixed on the men and women around the table.
The sea of faces also remained motionless, except for almost imperceptible twitches. Who could be used as the scapegoat? None of them wanted to be the first to speak in response to my question, lest a wrong answer cost them their job. Such were the dynamics of Washington.
Eventually a woman in a navy blue suit broke the abstruse Washingtonian silence. “That’s right. We attempted to capture John Paul a number of times prior to issuing the assassination order.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Williams asked bluntly, pointing a finger at the woman’s face. The woman was visibly taken aback by his bluntness and lack of respect but said nothing to object—neither did Boss or the undersecretary of defense.
“CIA. Overseas is our territory after all,” the woman in the blue suit replied.
“No it’s not. It’s not your ‘territory.’ The world is what it is, a giant mess of a place full of confusion and chaos. Thinking that it’s somehow ‘your territory’ is what’s caused this whole clusterfuck in the first place.”
Despite the extraordinary words that were coming from his mouth, Williams was absolutely calm. He wasn’t riled up or trying to pick a fight, particularly. He just had no time for amateurs.
Colonel Rockwell had to rein him in. “Watch your tongue, Captain.”
“Apologies, sir. I take my words back fully, although not the sentiment behind them. If there’s anyone who’s being rude here, it’s the lady over there. Calling the world her territory is disrespectful to the rest of the world and disrespectful to us.” Williams seemed to accept his reprimand but showed no remorse for his outspokenness. We were the ones who had been fighting for the US abroad after all, unlike the CIA, who basically played teddy bears’ picnic with their “paramilitary” activities. What right did they have to call the world their territory? I could figure what Williams was thinking.
The USD urged the CIA woman to continue, and she did so without changing her blank expression.
“As you say, we did indeed fail on a number of occasions to capture John Paul. In our defense, it hadn’t yet been established at that stage that he was instrumental in fanning the flames of conflict around the world. There was a correlation, but there were numerous factors involved at that stage, and all we could say for sure was that he seemed to be cropping up in the shadows quite a lot whenever there was some sort of atrocity. It was only when the level of the atrocities started intensifying exponentially that we started receiving reliable intel confirming that John Paul was at the heart of all this.”
I wondered how many innocent people had been murdered in John Paul’s wars and atrocities in the time it had taken the CIA lady to explain this to us with her arms folded in front of her.
Just one single man, traveling around the world, leaving a bloodbath in his wake. He seemed to find his way to the heart of power—government or insurgency forces, it didn’t seem to matter to him, so long as he could whisper his seductive spell into the ears of those who had the power; and then, as if by magic, piles of dead bodies would start appearing.
Was that a credible explanation of events?
I thought back. Two years ago, when I had killed the ex-brigadier general. Why? Why? Why has my country ended up like this? The former brigadier general hadn’t been asking a hypothetical question born of regret, he’d been genuinely trying to work out what had happened. I remembered his expression when I confronted him; even though he knew what his motives were, what he was trying to achieve by causing those atrocious scenes of mass murder, he didn’t know why .
I remembered that expression and I
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