A modest smile. "An old baseball nickname, I'm afraid, General."
More laughter. The Rainmaker dipped into his patience.
"Well then, the rest is merely decoration," he went on with a simple shrug. "The Seals drop in, enter the house and--what? They find one of the men. This unlucky fellow is now our Osama. The Seals terminate him along with all other males -- leaving the children and females, whose account one way or the other will hold no weight in the Muslim world. They pack up the body with a lot of laptops and electronic files and then --"
"Hold on. Just hold it right there. That would never fly," said the CIA man flatly. "That won't work at all. We're going to take down the man who is at the center of al Qaeda? Like f*cking hell we are. We would haul him down to Gitmo and squeeze him like a tube of toothpaste till he coughed up every last detail of his networks. Everybody knows that, and if they don't, the Times is going to remind them the next day."
The Rainmaker could not quite hide his amusement. "Now of course, that's true. But when the president of the United States calls a surprise press conference and announces that we just put a bullet through Osama bin Laden's brain, well, I think good Americans will overlook the loss of intel." He waited for the laughter to subside. "With all respect, sir, you live in Langley, Virginia. The folks who need to hear the narrative live in Memphis and Palo Alto and Dayton."
The CIA man puffed out his cheeks, shrugged, and finally said, "All right, I'll stretch a point -- fine. But then what about the body? You just killed a guy calling him Osama bin Laden. On one hand, you can't leave the guy there for anyone to discover. But on the other, what justification do you have for weighing down a chopper all the way back to Bagram?"
"Yeah, that's right," said the White House guy nervously.
The Rainmaker had an ugly lower-teeth-only smile like a line of gray tenements, which he now displayed. "To check his DNA, of course."
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