Gary Ponzo - A Touch of Deceit

It was barely daybreak when Nick pulled into the parking lot of the Baltimore field office. A black limousine idled in front of the employee entrance. An American flag hung limp from the antenna. Nick glanced into the open door as he passed by.

“Nick,” a voice came out of the back of the limo. Matt poked his head out and waved him inside.

Crammed into the long bench seating were ten agents from domestic terrorism on their way to a field trip. Nick sidled onto a seat next to Matt.

“We’re going to the White House,” Matt said. “Shit’s going to hit the fan.”

“I’d imagine so.”

Walt Jackson eased into the back of the limo and shut the door. The silence was funereal as he signaled for the driver to go. Walt closed his eyes and rubbed his neck. When he opened them, he realized he was the center of attention. “What are you looking at?” he said. “You’ve never seen a man have a nervous breakdown before.”

It was classic Walt-deflecting the fear and absorbing the blame. It was never anyone else’s fault but his own, and only the most self-conscious agent would feel an ounce of responsibility for anything that went wrong under Jackson’s regime.

A gray sky threatened to conceal the suns affect for the duration of the day. Nick didn’t think the Bureau deserved the sunshine and wondered if he was the only one who felt that way. The silence lingered as the limo rolled towards Pennsylvania Avenue. America was waking to a new world. A world where no one was safe: not the affluent, the privileged, the famous. The prosperous shared vulnerability with their penurious counterparts. For the first time that Nick could remember, America was becoming a community. A very frightened community.

The limo slowed and entered a gated driveway just west of the White House. In the distance Nick could see a podium set up on a grassy area near the front of the building. There were bright, reflective lights hanging from booms and a crowd of journalists huddled in front of the podium waiting for an official response from the president on the bombings.

From the guard station, a uniformed attendant approached the limo and made a thorough examination of its contents. After an exchange with the driver where code words and signals were exchanged, he waved the limo through the opening gates. Once around back, the limo stopped in front of a burgundy awning and a group of secret service officers in suits and headsets ushered the agents into the secured entrance.

Once inside, the pack of terrorist specialists was led into a conference room on the first floor. It was a large room with bare white walls and a long table in the middle. At the head of the table with his arms folded was President Merrick. To his right was CIA Director, Ken Morris, to his left, FBI Director, Louis Dutton. Dutton had an exhausted look on his face as he motioned Walt Jackson to take the seat next to him. The assemblage of agents filled in the remaining seats.

Nick recognized a couple of members of the Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff, the Vice President and Secretary of State, but he didn’t recognize the elderly man who stood next to President Merrick with an expectant look on his face. He wore a suit like everyone else in the room, but his was an older style, as if he’d been forced to dig deep into his closet earlier that morning and came up with that solitary option.

President Merrick stood and placed an arm around the man. “Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he said. He addressed the group around the table. “This is Malik Bandor. He is a retired professor of Middle-Eastern studies from Georgetown University. He has a wealth of knowledge on the plight of Kurds in Turkey. He is also my personal guru on the subject and has been for years, therefore he is privy to information that most civilians are not.” President Merrick swept his hand towards the professor in introductory fashion and sat back down.

“Thank you, Mr. President.” The old man in the old suit smiled. He seemed to assess the gathering of minds assembled before him. “It’s kind of early in the morning to be giving a history lesson, so I’ll present you with only the information that we feel is vital to your mission. And please, feel free to ask any questions as I go along. I’ve always thought that was the best way to distribute intelligence.”

A few older heads nodded, giving Nick the impression that Professor Bandor had orated more than a few White House meetings over the years.

“Since the end of the cold war,” he began, “the United States has no more important ally in NATO than Turkey. This year, Turkey will receive three hundred and twenty million dollars in military loans from the United States. That’s three hundred and twenty million U.S. taxpayer dollars going directly to the Turkish government for the unequivocal purpose of killing their own citizens. Of course these citizens I speak of are Turkish Kurds. There are twenty million Kurds in the region of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, making them the largest ethnic group in the world without a country.

“In the past ten years the U.S. has provided Turkey with no less than six billion dollars worth of military firepower- F-4 fighter jets, M-60 tanks and Cobra helicopters. It’s unfortunate, but every time a Kurd is killed it’s with an American weapon.”

President Merrick had become visibly uncomfortable with this portion of the dissertation and when he made eye contact with Bandor, the old man said, “Of course, these funds were all allocated two administrations ago. However, it doesn’t alleviate us from the dilemma we now face as a consequence of those past decisions. In southeastern Turkey there were an estimated 2,500 Kurdish villages destroyed by the Turkish Security Force, the military muscle of the Turkish government. It stands to reason that the Kurds would feel obligated to fight back and they have-firing at government troops at every opportunity. The numbers of the Kurdish Security Force is much lower than that of the Turkish Security Force, but their atrocities are no less brutal. The KSF was caught retaliating and the world became outraged. And since Turkey is such an important ally, we had no choice but to send our troops over there to try and settle things down.”

“And therein lies the dilemma,” President Merrick added. “Since the Kurds have no country, they have no voice. They have no diplomats or embassies for us to appeal to. We can’t threaten them with anything, because they have nothing for us to threaten. We can’t deny them resources because the Turkish government has already milked them dry.”

President Merrick leaned forward. “Walt, this is our war. We have to fight it here in the states. The Kurds have overreacted and if we’re going to stop them, it’d better be soon. Public outcry has become so loud that our airwaves are flooded with nothing but impeachment and withdrawal discussions. And we all know what happens if we back down from the KSF and withdraw our troops from Turkey. Every two-bit terrorist organization on the planet will be on the next flight to America and threaten to blow up our schools unless we serve free ice cream with every meal at McDonalds. There will be no end to it.”

Jackson asked, “If the KSF has a substantial amount of soldiers here in the U.S., what’s happening over in Kurdistan?”

“That’s a good question,” Professor Bandor said, then pointed to CIA director Ken Morris.

“As you would suspect,” Morris stated. “They’re vulnerable. However, our troops are instructed to prevent violence from both sides and it seems to have tempered the bloodshed.” He turned to Jackson, “Now if we could only find Kharrazi. .”

The President looked at Jackson.

Jackson pushed his chair back and crossed his legs. He nodded, as if he was agreeing with something that someone had said. But nobody spoke.