Operation Damocles Read Free Page A

Not even your own staff could be trusted beyond a certain point, he thought. You certainly didn’t build intimate confidences.
    The work he had trained for and loved all his life—agency business—was suddenly of secondary importance to everyone but him. Petty incidentals were all that mattered. His calendar was filled with important meetings about trivial stuff—protocol alerts concerning visits from minor VIPs and foreign dignitaries, and innumerable state functions with which he had nothing to do—and it seemed that the only thing ever accomplished at those meetings was establishing the time and elate of the next meeting.
    He was learning that, unlike science, nothing in cabinet-level politics was straightforward. Politics, to Patterson, was an elemental thing. It was making people like you. It was an emotional thing that worked best when it was a natural gift, as it was with him. A kind of subliminal cajolery that swayed most people, and if applied over time, eventually got you what you wanted. He knew what he was doing, and when he was doing it; it wasn’t totally unconscious. He picked his targets, people who could give him a leg up on his career ladder, and he knew that he wasn’t quite the sincere and caring man he pretended to be. The inner man wasn’t particularly proud of himself, but he also knew he didn’t belong among the blatant brotherhood of thieves that made up the woof and warp of Washington’s social fabric, Washington was a place of grand buildings and edifices, monuments to great ideals, but these days, it was peopled with all the utterly selfish of the land. Here, the only aspect of government business that mattered was who profited from it. Office politics consisted of getting the dirt on other people, even amplifying on their minor mistakes, while keeping one’s own transgressions safely hidden.
    In a way, he felt ashamed of his ingratitude. The newly installed President Vanderbilt had personally appointed Patterson, lifted him above his equally deserving colleagues and peers in the space sciences community, and set his name down in history. Lately though, the first flush of pride and pleasure in the appointment was waning, and he had begun wondering, why me? He had been director of the Johnson Space Center at Houston, and as such, certainly in line for the position, but somehow it just didn’t feel right. In the past few months, he had come to understand that everything done in Washington was done for a reason other than the one publicly expressed. If someone benefited, a payback of some sort was generally taken for granted. Vanderbilt had shown no reticence in pointing it out.
    Patterson hadn’t “known” anyone in particular. He knew that Vice President Joseph Miller had lobbied for his appointment, but he didn’t know why. He had never met the man. Why had Miller championed him? Why had Vanderbilt acceded? Had he just slipped through the cracks? Was his appointment an accident, a decision made by a man who was tired of thinking about all the minutiae of moving into his office, and who momentarily had no better candidate in mind? If not, if there was a hidden motive, what payback was expected?
    It had begun to haunt him. A niggling doubt that hovered always on the fringe of consciousness, clouded his perspective, pulled his thoughts aside, inhibited the clear, free-flowing logistical thoughts of mission, people, tools and money that he was used to. His dream had begun turning sour.
    And now this! Only six months into his administration, and out of nowhere, Joe Dykes had handed him a political hot potato to top them all. His dream of a long and productive tenure was rapidly becoming a nightmare of being the first NASA chief to be fired in disgrace.
    “God, let it be just another paperwork foul-up,” he prayed. “Just another innocent package that got coded wrong and pulled by mistake.”
    He didn’t believe it, even as he thought it. As Dykes had said, there were too many matching