Partington’s smile remained uncertain at the qualifying tone of Stoddart’s voice. Morgan and Spencer were attentive, too. Careful, thought Amanda.
‘But I see some problems,’ finished Stoddart. And didn’t continue.
‘What sort of problems?’ came in Morgan, to spare the president appearing to get into a question and answer debate.
‘I don’t see how I could take over such a public role at the same time as doing what I am trying to do now.’
‘Easily overcome!’ dismissed Partington, the smile broadening. ‘I announce the American commitment from here at a press conference with you beside me, naming you as the supremo to take over as soon as your current commitments allow, without saying what those commitments are. We go public together with all this other stuff we’ve found out, as well as the influenza – which the WHO will confirm – showing us ahead of the game. It’ll take weeks, months, for a new environmental treaty to be framed and agreed by all the Kyoto signatories. Which you don’t have to be bothered with, not until the very end. Yours – and mine – will be the final approval. Which gives you those weeks and months to go on heading up the Fort Detrick investigation and coming out ahead on that, too.’
The sheer cynicism was breathtaking both in its completeness and simplicity. ‘So my being special executive director is largely symbolic: a recognizable figurehead?’ demanded Stoddart, directly.
‘You’re somebody the public trusts,’ said Spencer, taking his turn to relieve the president.
‘And the job is what you make it,’ added Morgan, falling back on cliche.
Indeed it would be, thought Stoddart. At that moment – and perhaps for some time to come – Partington needed him and his reputation more than he needed Partington. And when his usefulness was over, the man would discard him like the irritant he’d always been. So there was very little to lose. ‘I think it’s important, Mr President, that we agree the situation as it is. As I see it—’
‘… We’re looking at the general picture here, Jack,’ Morgan broke in, hurriedly. ‘The overall game plan … we can fill in the gaps later—’
‘But some details we can flesh out now,’ cut off Stoddart in turn, bothered by the persistent buddy use of his christian name. Intentionally echoing the president’s earlier irritation, Stoddart repeated: ‘As I see it, we’re going responsibly to show ourselves – America – just a tad proactive to a lot of unsettling things brought about by global warming, although still keeping under wraps a horror illness until we can reassure everyone we’ve got the handle on it. Is that how you see it, Mr President?’
There was a stir among the two aides at the wafer thinness keeping the question away from open disrespect. Amanda was glad there was no way she could be associated with the suicidal climatologist.
Slowly – to indicate his displeasure – Partington said: ‘Yes, I suppose that’s how I see it.’ You’re out of your league, little man; enjoy your moment and remember it when I bury you.
‘So when the ageing illness becomes public knowledge – most certainly if we haven’t got a handle on it – we’ve got to stand up to public scrutiny to show that we really were proactive and that the principles we’re going to announce have real, effective meaning. Prove to the critics that we’re genuinely intending to have enacted proper internal legislation to give a lead to the rest of the world.’ Alert to Spencer’s about-to-erupt interjection once more to deflect things from the president, Stoddart said urgently: ‘Believe me, sir, I’m not talking about a bunch of organic-growing shitkickers. The green lobby’s well organized. Clever. Unless you get it right from the beginning – before the beginning – you’ll be accused of catch-up, of empty gestures.’
How, wondered Amanda, had she ever thought of Jack Stoddart as an ineffectual lost cause? She was witnessing political mud-wrestling the like of which she’d heard about but never seen. The bastard was even inferring that he was poacher turned gamekeeper to protect the president!
With teeth-grinding reluctance, Partington said: ‘I understand the point you’re making.’
‘I’m an environmental scientist, not by any means a politician,’ continued Stoddart, actually enjoying himself. ‘And again I ask you to believe me when I say that I am in no way being presumptuous. But as an environmentalist who knows the lobby, I’m urging you as strongly as I can to announce – at the very beginning because there won’t be a second chance – that there’ll be punitive and enforced legislation against any American industry that doesn’t adopt your proposals … And I think the Environment Agency should be given the watchdog role to ensure the legislation is properly observed.’
‘We really are talking details here that we can’t possibly—’ Morgan began to protest.
‘No!’ stopped Partington, relaxed. ‘Jack’s right. We’ll put forward the most stringent environmental and ecologically protective legislation on any statute book, anywhere in the world. Thank you, Jack. Thank you very much indeed.’
‘There’s something else that’s worrying me: worrying me very much,’ persisted Stoddart.
‘What?’ demanded Morgan, apprehensively.
‘As hugely important as it is, global warming is only a part of what we are trying to understand. If, like the influenza and the other effects, the ageing illness …’ He stopped. ‘… If the Shangri-La strain is coming from the sea then there’ll be situations we can’t sit on. It’ll break out – be discovered – in too many different places. We know there’ll be a backlash for our keeping secret the deaths there have already been …’
‘This has already been talked through,’ said Spencer.
Stoddart ignored him. The backlash would be greatly ameliorated if, at the moment of it becoming public knowledge, there existed an Executive Order setting out the special – necessarily generous – compensation that I’ve already been told the families of each American victim were to receive.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Partington. ‘I think that’s another suggestion we could well take on board.’
‘And I’d like to say, Mr President, that I’m honoured by your trust and your offer. Which I’ll very seriously consider …’
‘Consider?’ blurted Morgan.
‘I wouldn’t be treating the position with the seriousness it deserves if I didn’t give myself time to think about it, would I?’ said Stoddart.
It was Amanda who insisted upon the drink and, because it was the most convenient to the White House, they used the Old Ebbitt Grill again. In the lull part of the day they didn’t have to wait for a table. Amanda ordered doubles and after they were delivered said to Stoddart: ‘You’ve virtually held the President of the United States to fucking ransom!’ Amanda was conscious of a surge of sexually wetting excitement, which she couldn’t remember experiencing for a long time. It felt good.
‘No, I haven’t,’ denied Stoddart. ‘Just made a few points that needed to be made.’
‘Where’d you learn that?’
‘From years of being shat on, from a great, hopefully smothering height.’
‘Maybe it’s your time.’
Was she coming on to him, with innuendo? ‘Maybe.’
‘You are going to take the job though, aren’t you?’
How much and how well could he use this woman as she, with equally suspended compunction, would use him if the personal ambitious need or benefit arose? ‘If all the terms and conditions are provably established.’
‘I think Partington spelled those out: direct responsibility to him?’
Stoddart shook his head. ‘That’s meaningless.’
‘What would you want?’
‘Probably twice as much as Partington is prepared to offer,’ he generalized.
‘So where’s that leave you?’
‘Waiting for the proper offer.’
Just over 500 yards away, meandering yet another unrecorded walk in the Rose Garden, Spencer said. ‘That was outrageous!’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ contradicted Partington, pragmatically. ‘W
e’d underestimated him, that’s all. He wants to bargain; imagines he’s tough.’
Morgan was glad he’d waited to gauge the president’s feeling. Calmly he said: ‘How we going to get around restrictive legislation that’ll affect so many of our major industry contributors?’
Yet again Partington smiled. ‘We’ve got the White House but we haven’t got Congress, have we?’
‘No?’ said Morgan, questioningly.
Partington looked to Spencer. ‘And how long before our hostile congressional leaders get here?’
‘An hour,’ said Spencer.
Partington nodded, leading the way back towards the White House. ‘I want the most swinging ideas you can come up with. We don’t have time for details, obviously. What I want to do is give them as much warning as I can that we’re going to propose something really draconian …’ He shook his head at the frowns of the other two men, enjoying out-politicking them. ‘Congress will wreck whatever bill I put forward for Stoddart’s treaty, everyone worried about offending their own financial backers, and when the Shangri-La strain becomes public, following this flu business, we’ll gain so many mid-term senate and representative seats that we’ll get the Hill – and the adulation of the party – for my second term …’ He smiled genuinely for the first time that day. That strikes me as perfect. How’s it strike you?’
‘Perfect,’ echoed Spencer.
‘And our own big industry backers?’ reminded Morgan.
‘I’ve got all the home numbers,’ reminded Partington. ‘I’ll make the reassuring calls personally.’
‘And the Executive Order to compensate the victims?’ asked Morgan.
‘Another brilliant idea,’ said the small man. ‘We’ll hit Congress with the Executive Order while they’re still reeling; they’ll have to agree whatever figure I set. Astonishing how Jack and I thought on the same lines, all along the track. I always knew we’d understand each other perfectly.’
Raisa Orlov had no doubt whatsoever that the separation at Fort Detrick was planned for Stoddart and the woman not just to travel cosily to Washington for some quick hotel-room fuck but to work against her and the inconsequential slob beside her whose shapeless trousers were probably full of farts, because he smelled. She arrived at the Russian embassy tight with impotent fury, which worsened by the minute. She was greeted by a demand – not a request – to meet Gregori Lyalin in an hour. She infuriatingly miscalculated the time difference between Washington and Moscow and Sergei Grenkov, her deputy and the ally with whom she intended establishing a back-channel, had left for the day and wasn’t at home when she redirected the call. When she spoke a second time to her institute department, Anatoli Lisin, the laboratory chief and a man not sufficiently frightened of her, began awkwardly by saying that every experiment they had conducted was included in the material already shipped, at Lyalin’s specific instructions, to America. He had to be angrily pressed into volunteering that there had been no unknown viral protein or any other finding to lead to any understanding of what the illness might be. He didn’t sound sorry.
Intentionally to delay her encounter with her science minister, Raisa remained on the telephone for a further fifteen minutes stipulating the tests and experiments she wanted conducted on the Fort Detrick specimens, even though they were to be accompanied by detailed written instructions, dictating and then correcting which made her a full thirty minutes late. She was initially glad they were meeting in the ambassador’s office, for there to be a witness that even a minister had to respond to her commitments, not she to his.
Raisa didn’t apologize or offer any explanation for her lateness. Lyalin thought she was a sad person although he didn’t feel any pity for her. Having read the transcript of the scientific committee’s midnight discussion, Lyalin said: ‘So there could be a convincing connection with global warming, as there seems to be with the influenza?’
‘And our supposed chairman is the renowned and foremost harbinger of global warming doom!’
Lyalin determined against becoming annoyed, aware of the ambassador looking confusedly between himself and the woman. Lyalin said: ‘What’s the importance of that remark, if it shows us the way to go?’
‘It doesn’t!’ insisted Raisa. ‘At best it suggests – not positively shows – a possible route for an infection that remains viral.’
‘Nothing that’s arrived from Moscow confirms a viral precursor,’ challenged Lyalin.
‘The investigation isn’t completed.’ Why was the sanctimonious bastard so obstructive! There were influential people in Moscow to be told – through Sergei Vasilevich Grenkov – that the Russian science minister had abandoned her in preference to his American hosts.
‘Certainly not with what’s to be exchanged today, from Fort Detrick,’ agreed Lyalin. ‘Do you really consider it necessary to duplicate everything the Americans have done?’
That was a remark that very necessarily had to be heard by a witness, Raisa thought, looking gratefully towards the ambassador. ‘Of course! Didn’t you actually lecture me that scientific progress is achieved by the work of one group being shared and examined by another!’
‘Yes,’ said Lyalin, who’d chosen the ambassador as a witness way ahead of Raisa recognizing her believed benefit. ‘I’m glad you remembered and are observing it. So is Moscow, with whom I’ve very fully discussed everything we’ve talked about and who totally agrees and supports the instructions I’ve already given you.’ How childish it was to have to speak literally like this. Worse, to spy upon the woman, as everyone had spied upon everyone else in the ridiculous era of communism. But he had to protect himself. Which was, Lyalin sadly acknowledged, the justification of that aberrant era.
It wasn’t essential for the gynaecologist to have been a woman – until she’d been shown into the surgery it hadn’t even occurred to Geraldine – but she supposed it had been slightly easier because her English gynaecologist was female, too. Geraldine waited for the inferred medical criticism of a termination, no matter how slight, because she’d detected it in London. But she hadn’t detected it here, even though she knew the strength – the actual terrorism, in fact – of the pro-life movement in America.
The doctor, who’d immediately addressed her as Gerry and told her to call her Rebecca, said: ‘I’ll obviously need to get the test results, but from the scan and the physical examination you’re fine. There’s no evidence at all of any tube damage. You had a simple staph infection that’s been completely zapped by antibiotics. It would be nice to know that every infection could be treated so successfully.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Geraldine heavily. ‘It certainly would.’
Her second, person-to-person encounter with Peter Reynell had been quite different from the first at Fort Detrick. Until then, she’d only been in her minister’s company in group situations, at receptions or conferences or, once, when he’d chaired a London conference on AIDS research. He was, in fact, someone she’d known – or rather been aware of – more through gossip columns and personality magazines recounting the upper-echelon lifestyle of an ascending parliamentarian who had risen first – and determinedly again – from the desperate impoverishment of a once secure and minor landed background into one of the most famous political families in the country.
The comparison between the meetings had been remarkable. At that first, there had been the practised, seemingly intense but actually blank attention with which Geraldine was familiar from members of parliament and politicians allowing just part of their concentration upon her with the rest splintered between a dozen other quite separate things. Today had been different. Sir Alistair Dowding hadn’t been with them and Reynell’s concentration had been total. She’d genuinely believed he’d been grateful for her briefings – particularly the early morning London call she’d been uncertain of making – and there hadn’t been any insincerity in his demanding to go through the transcript of the scientific meeting in point-by-point detail. Because of the intensity of his interest, she’d expected
him to reiterate the demand for them to talk daily (‘it doesn’t matter if you don’t think there’s anything to talk about or that I’m getting a transcript of everything’) but she hadn’t expected the end of the conversation, which surprised her. As well as warned her.
‘You understand, of course, that all your dealings with London have to be through me. Even anything from here, from the embassy. I need to know about them.’
‘You’re not talking of all the samples I’m shipping back and forth?’
‘Not the shipping, of course not. But very definitely any findings that arise from them. Only to me and through me.’
‘Is it likely I will be asked by someone other than yourself?’
‘It’s possible. You’re well enough aware of the sensitivity of what we’re doing. That’s why I’m insisting we do things this way; just you and I – not allowing any other intrusion – guarantees the security.’
‘So what do I say if I get a direct call from London? Or from here, from someone other than yourself?’
‘That you need to check out whatever their question is and that you’ll relay the answer back through me.’
‘What if I’m told to answer directly to whomever it is?’
‘Tell me, before doing so.’
With time to spare before meeting Stoddart, Geraldine decided to walk to the downtown hotel. She didn’t need prompt boards or neon signs to know that she was caught up in some political intrigue and in a virtually hopeless situation. Reynell was her superior, a minister to whom she was answerable and who, in fact, had assigned her the Fort Detrick job. But she was equally answerable to the health minister, without even bringing the prime minister himself into the equation. Where was she if the intrigue was between the two (or three or four) of them and Reynell – 3,500 miles away from any battleground, as she was – lost out? It wasn’t difficult to understand why the British ambassador hadn’t been included in today’s session. Just work, she decided, dismissively. Far more important was what had happened earlier, the virtual assurance that there was no lasting damage from the abortion. How easy – although understandable – it seemed to have been these last few days to wipe any thought of Michael from her mind.
Ice Age Page 24