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At the moment, Charlotte Conroy, the ambassador to the United Nations, was with the Adviser. Morgan had arrived at six-fifteen, expecting to be briefed immediately. Camilla Varig had sounded almost excited when she called, not at all usual for Varig. It took something extraordinary to excite Vincent Kellner's longtime assistant. Charlotte Conroy's presence in Kellner's office at this hour reinforced Morgan's guess that something unusual was happening. |
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Vincent Kellner and Charlotte Conroy were both academics in political science from Stanford. Charlotte Conroy had taught at Stanford for eight years before being chosen by Cole Caidin to head the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. Their view of the world was of those who could still remember World War II and its aftermath, forty-five years of the cold war. The two of them were elder statesmen in that sense, although they had both been schoolchildren when the war ended. President Caidin preferred uniformity of opinion from his subordinates for foreign affairs. |
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Morgan wondered what the pending crisis would mean to his request to be returned to active duty in the Marine Corps. He had been ambivalent from the beginning about joining the NSC staff. Nothing else interesting was available at the time of his seconding, and Kellner had assured him he was free to leave any time he found the work irksome. It became irksome almost at once. The NSC office was populated with self-important anonymous bureaucrats doing anonymous things, most of them political, and few of them useful, in Morgan's opinion. I should have trusted my hunches, he thought. After a year and a month in Washington, his inside view of politics made him yearn for the relatively uncomplicated life in the Corps. |
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Camilla Varig glanced across the anteroom at Morgan from behind her desk and said with a thin smile, "I regret the delay, Colonel. But being military, you should be used to hurry up and wait." |
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Varigonly Vincent Kellner called her Camillawas as |
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