Liberty by Stephen Coonts

“Heard a lot about you too, sir,” he muttered, and felt like an idiot.
    â€œTell me about your meeting with Janos Ilin last week. I’ve read the CIA’s summary, but I want to hear it firsthand.”
    Jake covered it all, who Ilin was, explained how he and his wife had met Ilin about a year ago when the Russian
was assigned to the military liaison team for the SuperAegis antiballistic-missile defense system. He mentioned the FBI’s surveillance efforts to ensure Ilin wasn’t followed to the meet in New York, then carefully related the substance of the conversation, the revelation that a Russian general had sold four missile warheads to the Sword of Islam, and the name of the CIA officer that Ilin said was a Russian spy, Richard Doyle.
    â€œFour nuclear warheads with two-hundred-kiloton yields,” the president said softly to himself. He took a deep breath. “Do you think Ilin was lying?”
    â€œWhen he told me about the missing weapons I thought he was telling the truth. It had the right …” Jake rubbed his fingers together as he searched for the proper word “ … the right feel, I suppose you could say. Since then I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, weighing it. For the life of me, I can’t see what the Russians would gain by telling us a lie like that. The story isn’t one I would want told if I were them. It makes them look like incompetents, criminal incompetents who can’t control rogue generals—and if the story is true, that is precisely what they are.
    â€œWas Ilin spilling the beans on his own responsibility or was he playing a role? I don’t know the answer to that one. Ilin always struck me as a man with his own agenda. On the other hand, I doubt that he would have made lieutenant general in the KGB or SVR or whatever they call it this week if his superiors had the slightest doubts about his loyalty or judgment. That said, judging abstract qualities like loyalty or honor is always difficult.”
    â€œRussians have been defecting from positions of trust since the communists took power way back when,” the president observed.
    â€œIn any event,” Jake continued, “it seems to me we must take a hard, careful look at Richard Doyle. I can’t see what Ilin or the Russians would gain by defaming an innocent CIA officer. If it’s a gambit, I don’t see how it helps them. A lie like that would be a dangerous precedent.
On the other hand, if Doyle is indeed spying for the Russians and the weapons story is a lie, giving him to us may be a way to make the lie plausible.”
    â€œYes,” the president said. “I see that.”
    Jake rubbed his head, then said, “The heck of it is that I’m not an intelligence professional. I’m an ex-attack pilot shuffling paper and telephone calls.”
    â€œI’m not an intelligence professional either,” the president said matter-of-factly. “But the buck stops here.”
    â€œSeems to me,” Jake remarked, “that the mistake here would be to overthink this. We should proceed—cautiously of course—on the assumption that Ilin was telling the truth and see where that takes us. If we ever discover that he was lying, then we can reevaluate.”
    â€œI agree.”
    â€œUntil we are absolutely convinced that no weapons left Russia, we should pull out all the stops to find those four. I don’t think we have any choice here, Mr. President.”
    â€œNor do I,” the president said, and looked at his hands. He made a face, then looked out the window at monumental Washington. “The terrorists’ attacks laid bare some of the problems that the American political system has been unable to solve for the last thirty or forty years. Since the end of World War Two we’ve needed a secure place to store all our nuclear waste, and we still don’t have one. No one wants the dump near them, so the stuff is