Inside Outt

“No. It wasn’t authorized.”
    “Then who has the real diamonds?”
    Hort’s smile broadened. “I do.”
    Ben shook his head. “What are you… what’s going on here?”
    “I’ll tell you what’s going on. The country is facing a perfect storm of vulnerability. The previous administration turned programs like rendition and torture that had always rightly been run at a retail level into a wholesale operation, an operation that couldn’t be concealed. There’s a public backlash now and the new administration is having trouble containing it. Meanwhile, intel demonstrates what common sense already told us: U.S. torture has been the greatest jihadist recruitment bonanza ever invented. We need new capabilities to address the problems we’ve created. Unfortunately, we’ve lost some of the old ones. For a while, there was an off-the-books operation run by someone named Jim Hilger that had been doing the country a lot of good, but that’s been wiped out.”
    He took a sip of wine. “I and a few others are trying to rebuild. The military is going to have an increasingly influential role in the new order of things. Two active war theaters with no end in sight, the war on terror, military commissions for terror suspects, that’s all bipartisan now. The last administration wanted to use the military in domestic law enforcement, and I expect we’ll see more of that, too. I want you to be part of it all.”
    Ben thought. The management questions, letting him listen in on the conference call with the national security adviser… this is what it was all about. He didn’t know what the hell to think.
    “And Larison?”
    “I want Larison to be part of it, too. A highly capable man and officially dead on top of it. There’s a lot he could do. And a lot you could learn from him.”
    Ben thought about what Larison had told him, and wondered if maybe Hort didn’t know the man the way he thought he did.
    “You see the pattern?” Hort said. “We take the gloves off, it works, so we do more of it. What should be a retail program goes wholesale. You get force drift, mistakes, revelations, commissions, dismantling. Now we’re unprotected, our methods have made things worse, and when we’re attacked again, the public will scream for protection and won’t care how. And we’ll repeat the whole sorry cycle again.”
    Ben shook his head. “I don’t get what you’re trying to do.”
    Hort nodded. “This is all new to you,” he said. “I get that. I want to explain a few things about how America really works. I think then you’ll understand where I’m coming from.”
    “Okay.”
    “Number one, the country is run by corporate interests. I never understand when people get all worked up about socialism. There’s no socialism here. There’s corporatism.”
    “I don’t follow you.”
    “Okay, pop quiz. Why do we give nearly three billion dollars a year to Israel?”
    “So she can defend herself.”
    “Wrong. It’s just a way of funneling a subsidy to U.S. arms manufacturers, which is where Israel, by quiet understanding, turns around and spends the money. But no one would support it if we called it ‘Raytheon aid.’ ‘Foreign aid’ just sounds so much more aboveboard.”
    Ben didn’t answer. Hort said, “Okay, next. Health care reform. Why?”
    “So more people will have insurance.”
    “Wrong. By requiring more people to purchase insurance, the government creates new customers for the insurance companies.”
    Ben nodded, unsure. He still didn’t understand where Hort was trying to lead him.
    “And the AIG bailout was a way of funneling money to Goldman Sachs, which was owed thirteen billion by AIG and would have gone under without it. Hell, the government does this for its own, too. Without bulk mail subsidies, there would be no junk mail, and the post office would have nothing to deliver. And how do you think Halliburton and all the rest have made out from Iraq and Afghanistan? Think that’s just a coincidence? None of this is even new, by the way. The Marshall Plan wasn’t about helping Europe. It was about creating new customers for American corporations.”
    He took a sip of wine. “People don’t realize it, but we have corporate interests so large they have foreign policy concerns. These corporations will pay for intel. And they’ll pay for action. Hilger, for all the good he was doing, was beholden to several of them. With a hundred million in start-up capital, we’ll be