Wednesday night about half past eight, as I relaxed with a literary magazine on the living room couch, my cat Twinkle, who had been performing her duty decorating a nearby antique chair, suddenly perked up her ears, looked at me with an unusually serious mien, and hissed. “Rosie,” Twinkle proclaimed, in her heavy feline accent, and then ran upstairs without further comment. Twinkle never did like Rosie, and never made a secret of it, either. Cats can tell about people.
A few seconds later, the door bell rang. I answered it, and as my cat had promised, there Rosie stood, her eyes red rimmed from a recent crying jag.
“Tom!” Rosie whined with an edge on her voice that would put rafter nails on a chalkboard to shame, “I’ve been raped!”
“What, you mean literally?” This was a valid question, since, when the good Lord Almighty made Rosie, He apparently perched her right at the top of the Ugly Tree – subsequently pushing her off – and you don’t need to be Richard Avedon to figure out that she hit every stick on the way down.
“What difference does that make?” Rosie shot back, pushing past the threshold, walking into my living room and taking a seat on the chair Twinkle had so recently vacated with such spleen. “This chair is still warm,” Rosie remarked a moment after sitting down. “Is there someone else here?”
“Not exactly,” I said as I resumed my place on the couch. “My cat was sitting on that chair.”
“A cat?” Rosie leapt out of the seat, furiously bushing her derriere, “Tom,” she bitterly complained, “you know I’m allergic!”
“Sorry,” I apologized, gesturing to the remaining furniture, “please, sit somewhere else if you like, but to be truthful about it, the cat has the run of the house and perches anywhere she feels like, except the furniture in the kitchen and the dining room.”
“You expect me to believe,” Rosie demanded as she scurried into the dining room, “a cat is smart enough to make those kinds of distinctions?”
“No,” I replied as I followed her, “I would never expect you to believe that. But I’m sure I would expect that, before deciding to drop in on me unannounced,” I reminded Rosie as I took a seat across the dining room table from her, “you would have remembered that I have a cat.”
“I figured,” Rosie sniffed, “you would have gotten rid of that… germ-ridden, parasite-infested predatory beast by now.”
“That cat,” I slowly declaimed, while looking Rosie directly in the eye, “has more common sense than most people in this town.”
“Oh, my God,” Rosie blurted, waving her hands frantically around her head, “what’s that terrible stink in here?”
“Rykiel Pour Homme,” I sighed, exasperated, “the lightest mens’ fragrance on the market. And not even the Eau de Cologne – just the aftershave – which I put on this morning, a good twelve hours ago.”
“You know I’m chemically sensitive,” Rosie complained.
“All too well,” I agreed, “but I did not, however, know that you were coming over to visit me tonight.”
“It’s an emergency,” Rosie said, indicating with another wave of her hands that statement explained and excused everything and anything, as far as she was concerned.
“Sure,” I conceded. “Want some coffee?”
“Don’t you know caffeine causes cancer?”
“Okay, how about some hibiscus blossom tea?”
“Organic? Because I can taste pesticides. And no lemon grass. Lemon grass causes chromosome breakage.”
“Nothing but pure, fair-trade hibiscus flowers, certified organic, hand picked in Sri Lanka by virgin native feminists. Made with glass-bottled, late Pleistocene New Zealand glacier water in a hand-thrown Zuni natural clay herb broth calabash.”
“You’re not going to heat that water in a microwave oven, are you? Microwaves destroy polywater clusters and drinking water like that destroys your kidneys.”
“Oh, no, of course not – natural gas flame and a tea kettle. Copper bottomed stainless steel tea kettle okay?”
“Copper’s a blood toxin, Tom. Didn’t you know that?”
“A one hundred percent stainless steel tea kettle, then?”
“I should say not – iron ions cause heart disease!”
“Pure Pyrex glass stove top water carafe?”
Rosie nodded, so I retired to the kitchen for a few minutes to steep hibiscus flowers while Rosie went around opening all the dining room windows and the French doors, making a big show, cleansing Sonia Rykiel’s idea of what a man should smell like from the room. Taking no chances, I returned bearing Rosie’s hibiscus tea in a Pyrex cup. She regarded it cautiously for a while, then sampled a tiny sip.
“Too strong,” she murmured, putting the cup down quickly. I immediately returned to the kitchen and poured out half of the tea, replacing it with warm water from the carafe.
“Honestly, Tom,” Rosie hectored as she pecked at her tea, “you always make everything you eat and drink so – intense.”
“I’m just an incorrigible sybarite, I suppose. We can’t all be saints like you.”
“No,” Rosie mused, taking another tiny sip, “you certainly can’t.”
“So,” I ventured, having had, truth be told, quite enough of this absurd song and dance, and, in all honesty, wishing to return as soon as possible to my comfy couch, my literary magazine, and my purring cat ensconced once more at her post, improving the visual appeal of my antiques, “how can I help you?”
At that, Rosie slowly put down her cup of hibiscus infusion and began to cry. “Nobody can help me, Tom,” she sobbed, “I told you. I’ve been raped.”
“Pardon me for repeating myself, but – literally?”
“What difference does that make? I’ve been violated, Tom! Absolutely violated.”
“By whom?”
“Some heartless bastard at the White House!”
“And what,” I asked, “did this heartless bastard do?”
“First,” Rosie began in a quaking voice, “he violated my trust.”
“In what way?”
“Well,” Rosie explained, folding her hands and looking down at my dining room table top, “you know that I’m Executive Director of SPORK, of course…”
“Sure,” I replied, “the Secret Protocol Organizations Reporting Knowledgebase. You monitor activities of clandestine groups on the Internet and report them to your clients. Later you post the stuff on your Web site for the whole world to see. You’ve been doing that for what, about six years now? SPORK is some kind of 501(c)(3) non-profit that contracts to the federal government, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Rosie confirmed, “and the White House is one of our clients. This September, SPORK used our proprietary techniques to obtain an advance copy of Osama bin Laden’s latest video tape. We posted a video file of it on a private, password protected Web page and then I sent the URL and password to our contact at the White House, and told him to keep it under wraps until after Al Qaeda released the tape. But instead of doing that, this bastard sent that video to all the major television networks the very same day! Tom,” Rosie choked back tears as she pressed on, “it took us years to develop the techniques and channels we used to get that video! And this idiot, he destroyed all of that completely in three hours! How could he do that to me, Tom? And why would he do that to me?”
“Before I answer those questions, could you tell me why you decided, of all the people inside the Beltway, to pay me a visit to ask them?”
Rosie’s eyes darted left and right. She leaned forward over the table toward me, whispering. “Because you are one of only three people in Washington that I am certain can be trusted in this matter, and the other two are involved in it!”
“Oh, all right,” I conceded, “knowing you, that makes perfect sense. So – first, let’s address the question of how your client could have done such a thing to you. Might as well start with that one; it’s the easiest.”
Rosie’s face froze in a perfect expression of shock. “It is?”
“Sure. You are a federal contractor,” I observed, “and he works for the federal government. Ruining contractors reputations and businesses in order to advance their own careers is second nature to federal employees. They do it all the time, and the smaller the contractor, the more likely they are to do it.”
Rosie scowled at me skeptically. “You can’t be serious,” she objected, quite sincerely.
“Serious as a heart attack – with or without iron ions.”
“Why,” Rosie implored, “would they do that?”
“Why,” I countered, “does the parson’s dog lie in the church driveway on Sunday morning licking himself during the sermon?”
Rosie stared back, utterly dumbfounded. “I… I can’t imagine why,” she peeped, just barely audible.
“Because he can,” I answered.
“Is… is that all?” Rosie was quite pale at the thought.
“Well, okay,” I admitted, “in order to behave in such a manner, a human being would have to possess no more conscience than a dog, no more concept of shame than a dog, no more decency than a dog and no more brains than a dog.”
“In other words…” Rosie’s eyes started rolling back in her head as she began to faint.
“Exactly – they would have to be qualified to work as an employee of the United States federal government.”
It took me about ten minutes to revive her, but when she did come to her senses, Rosie made an inquiry which I had never heard from her before. Strangely enough, as her wits finally returned, her first words were “Got anything stronger than hibiscus tea?” The truth may or may not set one free, but, I have noticed for quite some time now, the truth will often induce an intense desire for things stronger than hibiscus tea. Not that I don’t quaff a bit of the stuff myself occasionally, but not even Gautama Buddha, much less the eccentric and paranoid Rosie, could work projects in this town indefinitely, drinking nothing stronger than hibiscus tea. No, after a while, the truth would demand more than that with which the humble hibiscus can cope, as, in fact, it just had.
So I put three Evian ice cubes in a highball glass, poured in a shot of Chartreuse Vieillissement Exceptionnellement Prolongé and topped it off with chilled Gerolsteiner Sprudel. It’s a mixed drink, named Swamp Water, and if you serve it without a straw, this cocktail’s what they call a creeper – since Chartreuse is so dense, there’s hardly any of it at the top.
“Tastes like root beer,” Rosie opined as she took a sip. This was not just a product of Rosie’s routinely bizarre interpretation of reality, either – due to the dilution of the hundred and sixty three herbs in Chartreuse, Swamp Water does indeed taste like root beer. After a few minutes of silence, during which she developed a nice color from the alcohol and a much mellower disposition from the thujone, Rosie was prepared to continue. “But why,” she finally inquired, “would he do it?”
“That question is quite a bit more difficult to answer,” I warned her, “and none of the possible explanations are very pretty.”
Rosie fortified herself with a respectable pull off her Swamp Water, one which drew her toward the bottom two-thirds of the glass. “Hmm,” she volunteered, “this stuff is pretty good. Is it herbal?”
“It’s Chartreuse VEP,” I informed her. “It has quite a few European alpine herbs in it, they say, but which ones is a closely guarded secret. I’ve found it… useful for certain situations, such as this.”
Rosie delved a bit deeper, stopping about halfway down to the carpet of green strands swirling on the bottom. “Okay,” she announced, “I’m ready. Tell me.”
“The first possibility is that he did it to impress his boss, to get that raise and promotion he’s been sucking up for. The second is that he’s in a power struggle with somebody else in his office, and he did it to intimidate his rival. The third possibility is that he’s looking down the road to 2008, and knows it’s going to be rough for people who work at the Bush White House, so he’s courting a security agency, like the CIA, NSA or DIA to hire him. They’re jealous of your performance and they asked him to destroy your intelligence resources by leaking the tape before Al Qaeda released it; or maybe it was his idea, he suggested it to them and they told him to go ahead with it.”
Rosie upended her drink, chugged the last half of the Swamp Water, and slammed the highball glass on the table. “Door Number Three!” Rosie proclaimed. “I’m absolutely certain of it!”
“What makes you so certain?”
“Because today,” Rosie confessed, “I found out about a whole bunch of weird [expletive]. Can I have another one of these?” Rosie gestured at her empty glass.
“Ah, how about some coffee with a nice shot of Remy XO?” I suggested.
“No, not that,” Rosie mused, a bit woozy, “I like the one that’s shaped like a monk…”
“You mean Frangelico?” I said, making an educated guess. “The one that tastes like hazelnuts?”
“Yeah,” Rosie smiled at me as she nodded, “put that in the coffee.”
So I did – a nice cup of Indonesian palm civet coffee, of course, with a shot of Frangelico, soon sat steaming on the dining room table.
“Yum,” Rosie chortled as she sampled the concoction, “I can taste berries, citrus and bananas – along with the hazelnut. Yeah,” she continued, now additionally fortified by caffeine, “for months, I had been noticing a pattern. Whenever I sent that bastard information about a new terrorist site, the next day, there would be a dozen bozos from US federal government IP addresses trying to access it. I chalked it up to stupidity at first…”
“Considering your clients, that would seem reasonable,” I averred.
“But it was eventually pretty obvious that it was intentional,” Rosie continued, “and the day after the Al Qaeda video fiasco, I checked the logs and found out he’d sent the download link and password to about fifty people at the Pentagon, CIA and FEMA. So secondly, he violated my Web site.”
“Right,” I said, considering the obvious, “looks like he’s shopping for a new position, trying to impress prospective employers.”
“You really think that’s what he’s up to?”
“I think it’s more likely than not. Who at FEMA had to see that video before Al Qaeda released it? I mean, it’s not like Osama was providing any kind of details the people at FEMA could use before it became public.”
“Then, thirdly, he violated our relationship. I had all this evidence, Tom,” she lamented ruefully, “piled up for a month, and then a couple of days ago, when I announced the problem to the press, and presented the evidence, the White House denied everything.”
“What did you expect?” I chided. “They’d stonewall a parking ticket.”
Rosie’s frustration boiled over. “Damn it, Tom, just minutes after he screwed us, we could literally watch those Al Qaeda sites going dark in real time!”
“Well,” I speculated, “if the CIA or some other agency has another window on those sites, getting rid of yours would only increase the value of theirs.”
Rosie shot me a suspicious glance. “Okay – who told you?”
“Told me what?”
“That this bastard at the White House landed a job for himself after the Bush Administration folds – at the CIA – as a reward for helping them sabotage me.”
“Nobody – I was just guessing.”
“That’s an amazingly good guess, Tom,” Rosie breathed out quietly, giving me a peculiar, sidelong stare.
“Sometimes I get lucky. What are you all bent out of shape about?”
“Because that happens to be the very special fact I found out just this morning – the one that ties everything else together – the one that made me decide I had to talk to you,” Rosie whined, “the straw that broke the camel’s back! What,” she sobbed, “is the matter with these people? I spent my whole life learning Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Dari, Malay, Tagalog and five dialects of Berber, Tom – five! I disguised myself as a Moslem woman and infiltrated terrorist organizations the world over. Then I set up the SPORK Web site and provided the United Stated government with the highest quality intelligence – stuff even their best operatives couldn’t get – and this is how they thank me?”
“Thank you?” I asked, skeptically. “I doubt that a bunch of highly funded egotists busy stroking their big swinging Richards and elbowing each other out of the way to the top of their federal government intelligence organization would be terribly grateful to some woman who consistently demonstrates that a single, talented, dedicated person in the private sector can routinely do much better than them while operating on a shoestring budget.”
“So, is that why they hate me, Tom?”
“You embarrassed them. You showed them up. Here’s them, unable to find out anything that’s actually useful about Al Qaeda, and spending millions trying. Here’s you – scooping them left and right, digging up the real dirt on Al Qaeda, and doing it for peanuts. The federal civil service is stuffed chock full of lame nincompoops who simply cannot do what their job descriptions say. The one thing they can never abide is a contractor who comes in and makes it look easy, solving problems they’ve wrestled with for years in a matter of weeks, getting results they’ve failed to produce for months in a matter of days. That was your tragic flaw, like in a Greek play – you are too good at what you do to work as a federal contractor.”
“So you’re saying,” Rosie morosely replied, “that I’m ruined. My situation is hopeless. SPORK is doomed because it does a better job than the federal intelligence agencies and they can’t tolerate me making them look like fools all the time.”
“I don’t believe,” I told her, “that your situation is hopeless by any means.”
“Which is what I was hoping you’d say, Tom,” Rosie smiled wanly back at me, “when I came over to see you. But how can I deal with my clients’ attitude? I mean, it seems to me that I have to keep working for the feds in some capacity or another, because there’s no other market for the kind of information I specialize in obtaining.”
“It’s somewhat surprising,” I asserted, “to hear a person with your background in world wide skulduggery say that.”
“Well, yeah, there are other buyers for the information,” Rosie admitted, “and I bet they’d pay much better and wouldn’t screw me like that bastard at the White House did, either. But how could I do that? What about the security of the American people?”
“Why not let the morons who tried to put you out of business worry about the security of the American people? The security of the American people is their job, isn’t it?,” I pointed out. “Don’t they get paid huge bucks to find out what Al Qaeda is up to? Don’t they get major perks and power so they can do that? Is it your fault that they’re completely incompetent? Is it your fault they feel inadequate? Is it your fault they hate you because you’re good at what you do? Is it your fault they’re hopeless bunglers who fear you? And do you owe them any favors now that they’ve totally destroyed years of your work?”
Rosie finished her hazelnut spiked palm civet coffee, thinking about what I had just said.
“No, I don’t guess I do, Tom.” Rosie glanced at her watch. Just then, her cell phone played the theme from “Mission Impossible.” She answered it.
“Yes? At a friend’s. Talking. What do you mean ‘about what?’ – what do you think? No, I’m fine, I’m perfectly all right. Oh, yeah? As a matter of fact, he’s given me some very useful advice, and I think it was time well spent. You and I need to talk, in person. No, right away – tonight. About some changes to the Web site, that’s what. No, in light of my discussion here, I disagree – there are several things we need to change, immediately. Where it’s hosted, for one thing – look, where are you now? Okay, you stay there and I’ll be right over.” Rosie put her cell phone away and stood up abruptly, curtly telling me “Not a moment to lose!”
With that, Rosie vanished just as quickly as she had appeared, leaving me once again to my literary magazine, which I opened, with no small sensation of relief, as I resumed my place on the living room couch.
“Gone?” Twinkle stood poised, halfway up the stairs, peering through the banister posts at me.
“Rosie gone away, puss-puss. Good puss,” I assured her.
With that, Twinkle sauntered down the stairs and across the living room, stopping at the chair Rosie had chosen. She sniffed it for a moment, then turned her big green eyes to look at me.
“Nuts.”