“I know a man—it would be perfect—a man, formerly a distinguished university professor…”

“I don’t trust professors. They’re all of them full of shit, a bunch of garbage.”

“This one is totally innocuous. He has some sort of inoffensive project studying acoustics. He could front for us, and he wouldn’t even know he was doing it.”

“He’s stupid?”

“Naïve. Zealously naïve.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“He needs funding. And a place to establish his laboratory.”

“How much would that cost?”

“Nothing, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

The President toyed with his football, tossing it high in a tight spiral, catching it with one hand. Then: “That’s interesting,” he said, “why don’t you sound him out?”

“I’d be honored to.”

“I hope it works,” the President said. “Maybe I’ll drop in on you down there. I always wanted to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight.”

We rode down Connecticut Avenue in silence. At a red light I stared out the window of the stretch. A smattering of pickets filed past some rhetorical monument, carrying anti-nuke placards, shouting slogans strapped to sandwich boards exhorting the administration to get out of Iraq. The light changed. Grady said, “I know what you’re thinking. Lofty thoughts.”

“That friend of yours wants to pin WMDs on the Iraqis. And you’re supplying the blueprint.”

Grady fingered a chrome switch above an armrest and a soundproof window rose snugly, isolating us from the driver.

“What is it you want?” he asked. “How can I help you achieve it?” As if I were holding him up, breaking a contract, as if he were flexible, reasonable, prepared to renegotiate, a little more up front, a more favorable division of the gross, a few more points of the net. As if the subject were money.

“What I want is an end to the war. What I don’t want is to rev it up.”

“Don’t be apocalyptic. That’ll never happen.”

“It’s already started to happen. It’s the only reason the President went along with you.”

“Anything we start we can stop. The ball’s in our court,” Grady went on, using an idiom he might have borrowed from the President. His eyes burned like the arctic sun, flaming and chilling at the same time. “Christ.” With puzzled concern he asked, “Do you think I want to blow up the world?” He shook his head, protesting, astounded by my intractable perversity, and then he grinned, “For one thing it would be bad for business.”

“Then why’d you plant the seed?”

“To get where we’ve got to go,” he said. “What’s good for business is a reactor for the Assamans.”

“To which could be added fortified fuels—a little uranium 235, a sprinkling of plutonium 239—and you got yourself a handy little A-bomb.”

“Abdul’d never do that.”