When the first spray of glass and gunfire exploded into the front seat and the blood splattered from the chauffeur’s neck, Ambassador Burdette pitched forward, desperately grabbed the telephone and dove to the rear floor. The terror, the noise almost overwhelming, she squeezed the receiver handle, “We need help. We’re being shot!” Her hand froze tight on the instrument. “This is Ambassador Burdette. We’re being killed!” Her voice had risen to a scream. “We’re in the car; we’re being shot!”
A gloved hand thrust through the window’s jagged hole, flipped the release, yanking open the chauffeur’s door, grabbing his body and shoving it to the wet pavement. The street for a second was quiet. An apartment window opened: A voice called out in unsure complaint. Two figures appeared, hesitated behind the glass of a hotel entrance, then vanished. In this second, Ambassador Burdette, lying face down on the lushly carpeted floor, thought that rescuers had arrived. Her mind stammered in the emptiness following the stunning, ripping shocks of gunfire, the splintering starbursts in the car glass, and the explosion of the front of the limousine collapsing under the assault. The police, she thought, I’m alive! Thank God I’m alive . . . they’re here . . .
The chase, from the chauffeur’s first warning, had lasted less than four minutes. An eternity. Thank God the police have stopped the shooting. Her chest burned. Her throat and mouth were numb. There was blood on her skirt, her legs, her hands. She pushed herself up, still clutching the phone.
“You are Constance Starring Burdette?” The voice was strange, high.
“Yes, yes.” The ambassador forced a smile as she struggled back onto the seat, struggled to thank her rescuers. Her relieved, thankful eyes locked in horror on the insanely zig-zagged ski-masked head, the hands leveling a pistol inches from her face. There was not time to shudder, to protest, to raise her bleeding hands in defense. The machine pistol ripped a lethal path from her forehead to the jeweled flag which laid shattered, its gems still glistening in the growing bloodstain on her lifeless body.
Fifty miles west of Lisbon, the Towerpoint Octagon was steaming on an easy southerly course in the predawn when the radio shack came alive.
“Mr. Starring, sorry to awaken you, sir.” It was the ship’s captain on the telephone. “An urgent message, sir.”
Starring, barefooted, in a deep blue robe trimmed in yellow, met the captain in the passageway at the entrance to the owner’s suite. He rubbed his eyes, his jaw, peered at the black ink of the message printout:
///////FLASH/////FLASH/////
From: OpsCenter TPI
FOR: Thomas Starring, Towerpoint Octagon
BEGIN TEXT
1. Tommie—regret devastating news. Connie murdered, shot dead in Geneva. Killer(s) still at large. Local police, U. S. Mission security set attack at 8:30 p.m.
2. President called personally. He is stunned, grief stricken, hopes you will bring Connie back to Washington for honors, service.
3. President has ordered military special mission aircraft to Lisbon to meet you for flight to Geneva. Special mission aircraft will await your arrival. Please confirm.
4. Join with you in mourning Connie’s passing
Your brother, Adrian.
END TEXT
“Some bastards just killed my sister!” He snapped the message, his eyes flashing. “She had just arrived, new ambassador, Geneva . . . the bastards!” He thrust the message back at the ship’s captain.
“Horrible, horrible, sir; my most sincere condolences. Absolutely horrible. In recent years, Europe . . .”
“Send the following reply, Captain. ‘Confirm travel on president’s special mission flight from Lisbon, deepest appreciation to president . . . my duty to accompany Connie’. . . . Separate message to her family: ‘Robert, children . . . devastated, deepest sympathy . . . we can be forever proud of your mother . . . fell in service to country . . . love . . .’ usual sign-off. Third message to Sullivan: ‘Sullivan, meet me on arrival Washington.’”
“Sir, I will pass the details to Geneva. Is there anything else?”
“The stewards should not wake up Mrs. Starring.” He glanced at his watch, “0445. Have my bags aboard the helicopter for 0600 departure.”
The captain saluted, then departed. Starring stepped across the steel coaming onto the weather deck. The damp teak planking was cool, soothing. He stood with his arms folded, facing the wind, his eyes gauging the elevation of the brightest morning star.
Chapter 2
Tommie Starring cut a dashing figure at fifty-eight, trim with a bearing that demanded attention, fine, handsome features beneath a crown of carefully sculpted white hair. Strength flowed from his voice and from his hands, which punctuated his speech with authority. His face was dominated by penetrating gray eyes. A glance could reward or punish; his mind and his soul were concentrated in those eyes.
A descendent of President James Madison, to believe the genealogists, and third-generation heir to his family’s STARCO tramp steamer operations, Starring had walked his first steps on the shipping wharves of Portland, Maine. His life was shipping fueled by profit and dressed in patriotism. As a boy, his greatest joy was passage, unaccompanied, aboard a succession of his father’s coal-burning freighters plying between Atlantic ports from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Havana, Cuba. He knew each ship from stem to stern in minute detail. He observed and absorbed the different patterns of loading, hauling, and discharging of cargoes. School years were endured; shipping was his passion.
Starring’s first marriage was a business venture, bringing the daughter, the riches, and the opportunities of the Endeavor Line into his house, paving the way for merger of the two companies five years later, with Starring the youngest president and chief operating officer of any line in the United States. That marriage was abandoned without children, matter-of-factly, following the intense, adroit maneuvering which brought the reins of power into his hands.
Still in his late twenties, he again outmaneuvered larger competitors, “stealing” the most lucrative contracts of the trans-Atlantic trade, and feeding the profits into the first of a growing network of repair yards and support facilities, launching the dominating era of Towerpoint which continued to climb with a great rocket’s speed toward a zenith never before dreamt of by the entire industry.
Starring took pleasure from the charge that he was boring, one dimensional. His avocation, if it could be described as such, was his responsibility as trustee of the National Creative Performance Arena, a role which had grown from the raw, necessary act of cash endowments to a deep interest in the theater and, in particular, in the strength and drive of its most successful actors and actresses.
Early in the successful years, he had experimented with game hunting. But the exotic, brilliantly mounted heads and full skins bagged from India to the American West were soon removed from his executive offices to be placed in permanent, forgotten storage. His instincts returned him to the only prey with any meaning—competitive builders, rival shipping.
The ledgers of the World Trade Center corporate headquarters carried Towerpoint International assets in the billions. Starring knew the columns of figures, the victories they recorded, the guidance they offered, as well as he knew his ships, his installations, his people. The dynamism of Towerpoint flowed from his energies and, in turn, Towerpoint was the only valid reason for his life.
A pencil beam of light revealed Starring in the darkened first class compartment of the jetliner, midway across the Atlantic on the night run from Washington. He folded back the cover page of the rush congressional transcript, hand-delivered to his secretary minutes before they had departed Dulles. HEARINGS OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS . . . His eyes skimmed the introduction, dropped to the opening remarks.
Chairman Drake: The subcommittee will come to order. The subcommittee continues today its hearings on the posture of our national defense. Voices of grave and legitimate concern are raised across this nation, concern over an increasingly perceived weakness of Am
erica’s Armed Forces in a crucial era of challenge from abroad. It is vital that we identify and remedy such deficiencies and shortcomings as we may have, if we are to survive, if we are to maintain our vitality and strength as a people, if we are to remain the leader, the foremost free society and free people on this earth.
Regretfully, and all too often, such weaknesses are exacerbated by internecine conflicts within our own official family of government over the priorities to be accorded . . . or not accorded . . . in the stewardship of our national defense. These hearings have as their goal the stilling of such conflict and the direction of our energies, our strength and our resources so as to maintain our superiority against those nations who would overturn the United States.
We begin our consideration today, and I speak for all members of the subcommittee, in saying that we are greatly honored to have with us this morning the chairman of the board of Towerpoint International. Mr. Thomas Madison Starring, who has agreed to be with us . . . to appear before this subcommittee . . . on very short notice and under the most tragic of circumstances.
Yesterday, the Congress passed a unanimous resolution honoring the memory of your distinguished sister, Ambassador Constance Starring Burdette, and condemning her heinous murder by terrorists abroad. It was not my privilege to know your sister, sir, but she is immortalized in the ranks of America’s heroines. You have our deepest sympathy, sir. We are greatly honored by your presence at this inquiry. You may proceed.
Mr. Starring: Thank you, Mr. Chairmen. I am honored to appear before this subcommittee of the Congress. I thank you and the members of the subcommittee for your tribute to my sister, Connie. I will be brief. You have other expert witnesses. I have no prepared statement. With your agreement, I will address that aspect of our national defense with which I am most directly involved . . . sea power.
Chairman Drake: Please proceed, sir.
Mr. Starring: Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, as a shipbuilder, fleet operator . . . and as one engaged in expanding the frontiers of undersea technology, I am keenly attentive to America’s status as a sea power. We are, sir, in a state of decline, a state of dangerous decline, and that must be a cause of deep concern for each of us.
I will not mince my words. We have declined as a maritime power. We have declined as a naval power, and there should be no mystery. The Department of the Navy no longer speaks with a clear voice. That voice has been lost for too long in the erroneously conceived Department of Defense. The Navy is underfunded. This is reflected in the fleet, in the air arm, and in vital research and development.
Fix, find, and destroy. It is an old saying, Mr. Chairman, but as relevant now as at the time of John Paul Jones and the Bonhomme Richard. The facts are that in recent years the few ships the Navy has ordered have been undergunned from time of contract. I say that, sir, to include all ships’ weaponry undergunned and with design specifications no better than mediocre.
I submit that you should not ask today’s frigate skipper to put to sea, to prepare for combat, with a single-screw ship, with a single gun mount, with a single missile launcher . . . anymore than your predecessors in the Congress would have asked our frigates of two centuries ago to set forth with a single sail.
Today’s, and tomorrow’s, man-of-war requires the seaman’s common sense and good judgment just as much as it requires advanced technology. At Towerpoint, we have fought faulty contracts as specified by the Navy Department; we have fought proposals for inferior design. But, Mr. Chairman, we have not always won.
We are in a period of naval decadence. Alfred Thayer Mahan used this term—naval decadence—more than a century ago to describe the depths to which this nation had fallen. Mahan also taught that the Navy serves the nation, protecting not only our shores but also our seaborne commerce. In recent decades, Mr. Chairman . . .
Starring returned the subcommittee document its envelope. The words had been transcribed as he had spoken them. The message had to be hammered home whatever the odds against corrective action by the Congress. Ahead of the jetliner, a horizontal thread of orange in the blue-blackness signaled the coming of dawn over Europe. Starring rested. Connie, “immortalized in the ranks of America’s heroines . . .” He savored the words. . . . part of history. Good work, Connie.
The return of the coffin, the ceremony at the Air Force base, the interment at Arlington, every moment precise, dignified. We’re at our best with the dead, not the living, he thought. His head shook as he recalled his sister’s burial, young Evie griefstricken, pressed against her brother. I should have poked him in the nose! Starring detested his brother-in-law, “a lump of academic dough.” He had urged his sister repeatedly over the years to move ahead with her own interests . . . good years when she was running London . . . guts, tenacity . . . the presidential campaign . . . then, Geneva. The president had taken him aside at the cemetery, placed a hand on his shoulder, asked the secretary of state to join them. “I’ve got the best there is on this, Tommie. Interpol, the rest, are cooperating fully. We’re dealing with the animals, but we’ll crack it, crack it fast. Connie was representing me. . . .” He had looked at the casket above the grave as the caisson drew away, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Connie, Connie . . .” He clasped Starring’s hand and departed.
Starring’s reverie was broken by the bustle of the flight attendants. “Sullivan, the stewardess has a hot towel for you. Wake up, have some breakfast. We have some dictating to do.”
Muriel Sullivan, Starring’s secretary, organized herself quickly. Pen and pad emerged from a traveled leather satchel. Starring bent over his linened tray, a napkin at his throat, speaking quickly as he ate. “Have New York wire a full review of the planning for the end of June family session. Remind Hensen this is a formal dress rehearsal for stockholders meeting. London has done some good work, but I want a better analysis of the coming decade in the Irish Sea and the entire Spitzbergen as well as the tote sheet on North Sea construction and production . . . need an honest statement on rig construction decline . . . some highlighting on the shift in tanker charters, shows them we’re anticipating, not asleep.”
“Tell Baltimore the Mexican LNG report, more attention . . . projected employment figures . . . projected regional energy requirements . . . report needs more fight . . . being nibbled to death by small-timers.”
He folded his napkin over the half-finished breakfast. “Make a separate note, Sullivan. Want to see Oats Tooms first thing tomorrow, go over this Mexican business . . . Towerpoint receiving bad press, talk to him in the morning.” The secretary kept pace with these instructions, then flipped back to an earlier page as he resumed work on the June meeting. Starring’s voice snapped through the agenda. He bore in on the improvements to be made to the defense contracts presentation.
“Tell Adrian . . . film is terrible, put the entire crowd to sleep . . . infantile narrative. Scrap it, gives the wrong impression. Each division responsible for sharp, three-dimensional models . . . includes the off-shore division, far more instructive . . .” He was interrupted by the landing announcement. “Fasten your seatbelt, Sullivan. I’ll have two more paragraphs in the airport.”
Muriel Sullivan winced at the intensity of the clerk’s cologne; he was leaning across the glass counter to demonstrate the 35mm camera. Two small boys raced through the concourse, their shoes slapping loudly in the nearly empty terminal. Oblivious to the announcement in French, German, and English of a departing flight, one snared the other by his sweater. They wrestled, pulled apart, and resumed the chase.
“You will appreciate, madame, the professional quality; the very best, madame. The lens is firmly in place with one twist . . . you hear the click . . . the very latest zoom. It will make excellent close-ups.” She looked through the viewfinder, focused on the alert face of a German shepherd guard dog seated beside an airport sentry, automatic rifle, barrel down, hanging from a shoulder strap. Guards; only hours since Mrs. Burdette’s death. The thought made her neck and shoulders ache.
Muriel Sullivan was a petite woman, fair-skinned and red-haired, at Starring’s side professionally for fifteen years, her life given over to the pulsing existence of Towerpoint International. He treated her the way a ship’s captain treats a second in command. He relied on her to be aware of the smallest details inside the Towerpoint structure. Her dedication ran around the clock eleven months each year. September marked her annual pilgrimage to the cottage on the coast near Dun Laoghaire south of Dublin Bay. Her forbearers had come from the east center of Ireland, from Kildare, Wicklow, Dublin. The cottage stayed in the care of a cousin. Starring had first fought unsuccessfully then endured with melancholy this annual disappearance, had said it would be more profitable to put the entire operation in drydock while she was away.
Muriel was as unassuming as she was efficient. There was nothing unusual in Starring’s reliance on her to purchase a camera for his second wife, Tina.
He looked to Muriel to provide a constant burnishing to this outward appearance of attentive husband. It was good for business, good for the image, a mask for hardened emptiness in his heart.
A Death in Geneva Page 2