The Threat

Which brought him to now, over the distant blue Atlantic. The president was up front. Then came the senior staff compartment, the medical compartment, and so forth. Dan was in the middle, between the actual VIPs and the media gang aft. Blair was up in the conference room, a Defense prebrief, she said. There were no dining rooms on Air Force One. You got your meals on trays. So he was sitting down to catfish and garlic green beans and whipped garlic potatoes with Telfair Freck in an otherwise empty row of high-backed luxury seats.

Freck was the chairman of the House Military Caucus. Sandy Treherne had come through on her promise to put him in touch with somebody willing to talk about stepping up funding on threat reduction. She’d warned him Freck was no admirer of De Bari’s. He was one of the most conservative members of the House. A perfect voting record as rated by the Christian Coalition. But if Dan wanted to mobilize support for his ideas, he had to talk to as many people as possible, on both sides of the Hill/Executive divide.

Freck was ponderous, grizzled, an athlete long run to fat. Like most everybody else on the plane, he was dressed casually, in his case canvas slip-ons and a lavender velour track suit the size of a small concession tent. He gestured at the seat beside him. “So, you’re the fella from the NSC.”

“Dan Lenson, sir.”

“Navy man. Old flame a’ Sandy’s. Nice to meetcha.”

“Not a flame, sir. Just went to school together.”

They both said how great Sandy was, straight-shooting gal, the usual cautious prelude to a Washington conversation. “I’m really glad you agreed to talk with me,” Dan opened.

“I’m not one of those who thinks everybody over there’s evil personified. Though I’ll say this, between us: I’ve never known Bob De Bari to actually give a hoot about another human being.”

“He knows how to create that impression, though.”

“Course; that’s how he got where he is. An’ I know you folks who work for him probably think even less of him than we do on the Hill, all that woman chasing, the cocaine thing, the organized crime. His wife more than him maybe on that last — but tar rubs off.”

Dan said, “We serve the office, not the man.”

Freck sniffed the fish on the end of his fork, then rammed it home. Said around it, “Knew him back when he was in the governor’s mansion. Exactly the same. Secretaries. Staff girlies. Anything with titties and ass, after it like a dog in heat. And the way he’s failed to support the boys who defend our country, that’s a shame too.”

“Well, sir,” Dan said, “I wanted to talk to you about something along those lines. About helping to make America safer.”

Freck ate with the tolerant air of a man who’d listened to thousands of lobbyists make their cases. When Dan paused he said, “The Cicero Foundation did a study on that. Said State, Bert Sola, I think, really fucked that program up. Wasted millions and got nothing back.”

“Well, they never actually got the funding that was—”

“I been thinking the way to make something happen there might be to set up some kind of private foundation, private outfit. Let folks loose on it who’re used to getting results. Sort of privatize it.”

Dan couldn’t see how such a thing could be done but was willing to give it a hearing. The old man had been in government a lot longer than he had. “You think so?” he said, playing wide-eyed.

Which Freck seemed to respond to; he leaned forward. “Know a bunch of fellows who take on things like that. I forget what the outfit’s called. BSA, PSA something. Forget what it stands for.”

“It’s like a think tank?” Dan said, still trying to figure out how you could do it privately. Did Freck mean with foundation funding? “Like Rand? SAIC? CNA?”

“None of those,” the congressman said. “BSA, that’s it. Major General Froelinghausen. Skip. He retired four-five years back.”

“Well, I will check that out, sir. Now let me try one more thought on you.”

Dan told him about his idea for a close-hold group to try to guess where the country was vulnerable, to envision unconventional means of attack or disruption. “I call it the ‘Threat Cell.’ To try to game out in advance how enemies could hit us in ways we don’t expect.”

Freck sounded encouraging. He wanted to know who would run it, Pentagon, CIA? Dan said to be effective, it had to break the “stovepipes”—the vertical channels through which data went from the field to the respective agencies.

“It’s got to be independent of the military and intel communities. Otherwise it’ll get coopted by whoever’s peddling the next glamour program.” He kept going, pulling ideas out of the air, playing to where he thought the congressman might want to go. Maybe it shouldn’t be part of government. Maybe it should have futurists, screenwriters, people who were more comfortable with using their imagination than retired generals. “You want people who can think outside the box. No offense, but that’s not something that gets rewarded in government work.”