"Clancy, Tom - Op-Center 05 - Ballance of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

early. If you infract the rules or bend them
to suit your temperament, even a little, it becomes a
habit. When it becomes a habit you get
sloppy.- And a sloppy diplomat is no use
to the country-or to me."
10 OP-CENTER
Aideen was suddenly disgusted with herself. The
thirty-four-year-old foreign service officer would
be the first to admit that she wasn't the diplomat her
forty-nine-year-old superior was. Few people were.
Martha Mackall not only knew her way around
European and Asian political circles-partly
the result of summers and vacations she'd spent
touring the world with her father, popular 1960's soul
singer and Civil Rights activist Mack
Mackall. She was also a summa cum
laude MIT financial wizard who was tight with the
world's top bankers and well connected on
Capitol Hill. Martha was feared but she was
respected. And Aideen had to admit that in this case
she was also right.
Martha looked at her watch. "Come on," she said.
"We're due at the palace in less than five
minutes."
Aideen nodded and walked alongside her boss. The
younger woman was no longer angry. She was disgusted with
herself and brooded, as she usually did when she
screwed up. She hadn't been able to screw up much
during her four years in army intelligence at Fort
Meade. That was paint-by-numbers courier work,
moving cash and top secret information to operatives
domestically and abroad. Toward the end of her
tenure there she interpreted ELINT'-ELECTRONIC
intelligence- and passed it on to the Pentagon.
Since the satellites and computers did all the
heavy lifting there, she took special classes
on elite tactics and stakeout techniques-just
to get experience in those areas. Aideen didn't have a
chance to mess things up either when she left the military
and became a junior political officer at the
U.s. Embassy in Mexico. Most of the
time
BALANCE OF POWER 11
she was using ELINT to help keep track of drug
dealers in the Mexican military, though occasionally
she was permitted to go out in the field and use some of the
undercover skills she'd acquired. One of the most
valuable aspects of the three years Aideen had
spent in Mexico was learning the ploy that had proved
so effective this afternoon-as well as offensive to Martha