Treaty of War: A Thriller by Jay Bradford

Author:Jay Bradford [Bradford, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peacemaker Press
Published: 2022-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 35

Jackson went straight to the locked file cabinet in his State Department office. He began spinning the knob of the lock. These old contraptions were a running joke. The rusted combination locks might deter people with a fear of tetanus, but they weren’t keeping out many burglars, much less determined foreign agents.

Jackson spun it right three times—32. Left two times—14. Right one time—27. Left to 0.

He pulled on it. Stuck.

He jerked harder, making the whole cabinet rattle like a bag of metal beams. He peeked outside his office. No one was paying attention. Quit being paranoid, he told himself. Only the CIA is watching. He knew there were no cameras in his office, but he scanned the ceiling anyway. The speckled particleboard and fluorescent lights showed no sign of intelligent life.

He spun the combination again, going slower this time.

He finished, landing on 0, and tugged. This time the lock opened, and he lifted the bar that kept the cabinets shut. He bent down to open the bottom one. The backup copy of the picture had to still be here.

Crouching, he flipped through the hanging files until he reached the one labeled Caracas, Venezuela. Every document in there was a decade old and about the struggling South American country. It was the last place anyone would look, unless they knew. Jackson found the cable about an economic deal with Venezuela in the 1990s. He pulled out the picture from the folder, with Ambassador Blair staring straight at him. He was thinking about showing Lily. He stuffed it into his briefcase and locked up the cabinet.

As he sat down at the desk, Jackson checked the clock. He still had a couple hours before he would join Blair for a mid-morning briefing with the Secretary of State. He started catching up on a backlog of emails and briefings. He cleared a few packages for the senior officials, attended a staff meeting, and approved the hire of two new lawyers. Having one of his people get killed would not help their hiring pool.

He had cleared most of his pressing emails when he came across an ethics package. It was for a new ambassador to Peru. The woman was filthy rich, like most ambassadors, and she had to sell a fortune in Coca-Cola stock before she could take the job, due to the company’s lobbying about a plant in the country. Rich ambassadors loved this process because any assets sold due to ethical obligations meant avoiding capital gains taxes. It could save them millions. The rich get richer.

It made Jackson think of something. Ambassador Blair would have done a form like this. They made any senior official’s assets publicly available, except for the assets that an ambassador sold. Had Blair sold anything?

Jackson pulled up the memo recording Blair’s divestments. He had sold holdings in at least twenty companies, most of them Chinese. Three of them were major gaming conglomerates. One was a construction company specializing in tunnels. Jackson knew Blair had made a fortune investing in China, but it seemed odd that he would sell all this to take his position in Japan.

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