Political Pressure td-135

by Warren Murphy

  Flicker smiled. Kohd saw his boss relax with relief. Flicker had worried that public reaction would not be sympathetic to the party line. Kohd had never worried for a second. After all, they had been following the White Hand Book. The book was always right.

  Kohd put the phone to his ear as it rang again. "Right," he said, then nodded at the first screen. "Sir."

  Flicker snapped BCN into silence and brought up the sound on the first screen, where the two Sams were staring offscreen. "—think you can fire me? You can't fire me! I quit! You can take your old drunkard—"

  The offscreen tirade vanished and was replaced with a commercial featuring a floppy-eared Irish setter bounding overhead. Flicker snapped it into silence, thinking that he might recognize the voice of the producer who had just ruined all his future possibility of getting employment in the network news business. On the third screen another poll was coming up, and he brought the sound. The anchors were talking in sonorous baritones.

  "This is quite unprecedented but it is just as I expected, Karl," said the man with the vast toupee and the heavy eyebrows. "The people are fed up with the corruption."

  "How so, Kent?" asked his partner. "We have had corrupt politicians before."

  "That's an understatement, Karl."

  Both men laughed politely, although the expressions on their faces were cast in stone.

  "Yes, we've certainly had our share of unethical elected officials, Kent, but historically there has always been a sort of break in the public's awareness of unethical behavior. During this lull, the people tend to forget or downplay the scandals of the past."

  Kent nodded somberly.

  "This PLOC, or Perceived Level of Corruption, rises and falls with the media attention paid to political scandals," Karl continued, "but in the recent years these scandals have been unceasing. Therefore the PLOC level has remained high."

  "In other words, there has been no PLOC lull," Kent said in an undertaker's voice.

  "Exactly," Karl agreed expertly. "And without a significant PLOC lull, the public becomes overly sensitive to unethical behavior and more harsh in its judgment."

  Kent and Karl, as wise and incisive as economics professors, considered the dire and meaningful implications of this. "This raises some interesting questions," Kent said leadingly.

  "It certainly does," Karl responded. "If we had experienced a PLOC lull instead of a consistently high PLOC, would the people have been more forgiving of Governor Bryant's alleged corruption?"

  "Absolutely not," Flicker responded to the screen. Kohd, on the phone with another call, nodded in agreement.

  "If there had been any kind of a meaningful PLOC lull at any time in the recent past, would we see such broad-based support for the comments of the Senate candidate? After all, one of the unwritten laws for U.S. politicians has always been to never speak badly of dead opponents. It is seen as disrespectful."

  "Not if their opponents are criminals," Flicker growled.

  "What candidate Lamble has achieved," Karl concluded, "is change the perceptions of the public. The people won't mourn a dead criminal. Lamble has convinced the people—at least some of the people—that Governor Bryant was a criminal and he should not be mourned."

  Flicker's face tightening into a smug grin. "Damn straight," he said.

  Kohd gasped and disconnected his call without saying goodbye, then sat and looked at his boss with amazement. Flicker's confidence was in high gear. "Excuse my language, Mr. Kohd."

  "I should say so, Mr. Flicker," Kohd responded.

  Flicker tried not to roll his eyes. He wanted to tell his assistant to get the hell off his fucking high horse, but if he heard more than a single four-letter word in an hour Kohd would probably cover his ears and ran screaming into the hills. The man was just so damn straight. Flicker considered himself straight, in every sense of the word, but nothing and nobody was more clean-cut, more spit-and-polish, more sinless than Noah Kohd.

  Which, believe it or not, could get on a guy's nerves after a while.

  9

  The White Hand Book had something to say about a grassroots political campaign: it had to look like it was grassroots. If it looked planned or organized or prefabricated, it would have no credibility.

  If the White Hand Book had one golden rule it was this: perception is everything.

  Orville Flicker understood that rule. He had been born understanding it. He had meditated on its meaning for more hours than a philosopher considered the meaning of existence.

  After all, existence was less important than perception. Without perception, existence was meaningless. On the other hand, perceiving something existed was the same as that thing actually existing for as long as the perception continued.

  Flicker understood this when he was a little boy and he believed all the lies told to him by grown-ups, which meant his mother. He was allowed contact with no other grown-ups, or children. He invented his friends, a dragon named Hobbs and a cow named Whom, and spent hours playing with them.

  When Flicker started school it was a small, home- based private class with only five other children. Five other children were more than enough to permanently scar his psyche, and it happened the very first day. Not long after he enthusiastically introduced the children to Hobbs the dragon and Whom the cow, he was ridiculed until he cried. He cried until his mother came and took him away from those awful children.

  That night, Hobbs the dragon unceremoniously tore the meat off Whom the cow and ate her alive, only to get worms from the uncooked meat. Hobbs was dead by morning.

  In his mind, for months, Flicker still saw the rotting dragon carcass and the scattered, moldering bones of the cow, which amazed him, because he was smart enough to know now that he was seeing an illusion created by his own mind.

  He began to wonder how he could make other people believe in what he wanted them to believe, whether it was true or not. This sort of thinking led inevitably to a career in politics.

  Perception was the only thing in politics and advertising. Nothing else mattered. Flicker knew it. Every smart politician knew it. Flicker's uncanny understanding of what perception was, why it was important and how to create it got him far.

  But all it took was one serious lapse in his good judgment to ruin his career in an instant.

  That was in the past and best forgotten. If people didn't forget, then you made them forget. You washed the past out of their minds with illusions of the present and dreams of the future.

  Lucky for him, some memories were too entrenched to be forgotten, such as the reputations of the reigning political parties. In the United States of America there were two choices: bad and worse. The political parties that monopolized elections had been around so long that nobody truly believed there was an alternative. Orville Flicker was about to conjure an alternative out of thin air.

  But it couldn't look conjured. It couldn't look like the product of planning or strategy. It had to be perceived as spontaneous. The people had to believe this new party was their creation, like a mythical bull springing into existence full-grown from the brow of a deity. The new party would appear to come into being in just that way, and all the people who joined it would never know how carefully Orville Flicker had been planning to use them to take over the U.S. government.

  10

  The Master of Sinanju Emeritus sniffed as he approached the automatic doors. When they parted, the air from outside wafted in at full strength and he stopped.

  "Keep moving through the automatic doors," said the young woman on the stool. She had a uniform, a security badge and even a billy club in her belt, but she wasn't really charged with handling airport security. Her responsibilities began and ended with keeping people from stopping between the automatic doors.

  "Come on, Chiun, what're we waiting for?" Remo was balancing a lacquered chest on each shoulder. Each was a unique work of art, the wood hand-hewn, the exquisite designs startling in their beauty. Remo had no idea what was in the chests, but Chiun never went ou
t of town without several of them.

  "Remo, there has been a terrible mistake," Chiun declared. "The pilot of the wobbly winged aircraft has landed us in Mexico."

  "Naw. It's just Denver."

  "Sir, please move out of the way of the automatic doors. They may close unexpectedly," the young woman explained.

  "Smell it if you dare," Chiun said. "It is the oppressive stench of Mexico City."

  "It's just Denver," Remo insisted. "Sometimes the smog gets trapped by the mountains."

  "Sir, the doors might close and cause injury!" said the door-minder urgently.

  "It is the door that will receive injury if it dares to close on me," Chiun snapped. "Tell me, what town this is?"

  Fearfully watching the doors, which quivered in the open position expectantly, she only half heard the question. "It's Denver, of course, what do you think?"

  "Not Mexico?" Chiun demanded.

  "Sir, the doors might close!"

  "What's with the nutty Chink Munchkin?" demanded a business traveler in the gathering line of people waiting to exit.

  "Hoo boy," Remo muttered.

  "Remo! I demand to know the meaning of the word Munchkin!"

  "Well, he's nutty but he's got good hearing," the businessman muttered.

  "That's not all he's got good," Remo replied conversationally.

  "Oh yeah? He a tough guy? What's he gonna do, gum my leg?"

  "Sir," the young door-minder pleaded, "the door could close!"

  Everything happened all at once. The door started to close. The door-minder shrieked, knowing she was about to see the little Asian man crushed. The businessman's chuckling became a gag. Remo became intensely interested in a Pomeranian in a nearby pet carrier.

  "Hi, doggy."

  The Pomeranian's snarl died as it witnessed a surprising flicker of motion.

  "You are correct," Chiun announced. "It is not Mexico City. The stink is slightly cleaner."

  Remo chose not to see the businessman who was now paralyzed, stiff as a plank and jammed in the doors to keep them from closing, although the servomotors were trying their darnedest.

  The door-minder turned to Remo. "The little man! He, he..."

  "I see nothing." Remo stepped over the businessman.

  "We have been to this place before, and it was never so oppressive in its atmosphere," Chiun said.

  "Blame El Nino," Remo said, nodding at a cab, eager to get out before airport security or the sky marshals charged to the scene.

  The driver of the first cab in the queue was staring at them. He'd seen the whole business and he knew trouble when it was about to get into his taxi. He floored it.

  "Hold these for me, would you, Chiun?" Remo asked, tossing him the trunks. There was a shriek from the tiny Korean and a chirp from the cab as Remo used his free hand to grab and lift it by the front end. The clonk and the honk were the driver's head slamming into the steering wheel and hitting the horn.

  "Remo! You cast aside my precious trunks?"

  "I did nothing of the kind. I handed them off to you," Remo growled.

  "You," he said to the driver, who opened his door to flee but had it slammed in his face again. "Stay where you are. I need a ride and you're elected."

  "Off duty!"

  "You did not hand them off! You cast them away like worthless trinkets! They might have been scratched or— or worse! Just imagine if they had crashed to the ground!"

  "You caught them just like I knew you would." Remo busily stowed the blemish-free trunks into the rear of the cab, then he got in back alongside the red-faced Chiun.

  "You are an ungrateful ingrate!"

  "Isn't that redundant?"

  "No!"

  "Look, Chiun, the only way your precious trunks would have gotten dinged is if you fumbled them."

  "I, Chiun, never fumble."

  "So the trunks were never in the slightest danger."

  "Cannot drive! Off duty!" The driver gestured with shaking hands at the Off Duty sign on the fare meter.

  The tiny Korean man weighed half as much as the cabdriver, but the dark-skinned man at the wheel could never in a million years have turned his face the same shade of boiled-lobster red. Other things the cabdriver could never have done included smashing the bullet-resistant Plexiglas safety panel with one bare hand and twist the fare meter out of the dashboard like an old village woman wringing a chicken's neck.

  The fare meter went through the windshield of the cab, raining glass twenty feet in all directions.

  Not only was the fare meter gone, but the radio, the glove box and most of the right half of the dashboard now littered the pavement in the Denver International Airport cab queue.

  "On duty," Remo pointed out. "Can drive."

  The cabbie used his fingertips to leverage the metal shard that had once been the gearshift, pulling into traffic with a longing look at the troops of sky marshals he glimpsed marching through arrivals to the scene of the suspected terrorist activity.

  "Smitty is going to shit a brick," Remo commented. "You know, shutting down airports does not have to be standard operating procedure."

  "I shut down no airport."

  "That's funny, because you just left the airport and ten bucks says they'll shut it down to find the suspected door terrorist."

  "It is you who carries chaos around with you wherever you go."

  "Yeah."

  "It is a potent cloud, it hovers around you, you cannot shake it loose but it still affects everything you come in contact with. It is like, like—"

  "Like cabdriver BO," Remo said helpfully.

  The cabdriver glanced into the rearview mirror, but it was dangling by a single screw and showed him his own flannel shirtfront.

  "News flash, for you, Little Father," Remo said. "You started all the excitement. All I did was talk to an ugly rat-dog in a box."

  "Already your memory of the sequence of events is degrading," Chiun said. "I was angry with you, my son, but now I am only sorry for you."

  "I appreciate your sympathy, Little Father."

  Chiun nodded, his yellowing chin whiskers dancing in the blast of air coming through the windshield. The cabbie managed to bend the rearview mirror back into place and he glared at Remo in the mirror.

  "You I don't need," Remo warned.

  "Kill me if you must, but do not insult my hygiene," the man said in a thick accent.

  Remo snorted. "I have news for you. You got all this circulation and it still smells like an untreated septic tank in here."

  Chiun was shaking his head.

  "What?" Remo demanded. "What?"

  The driver looked crestfallen. "You smell the city, not me."

  Remo considered that.

  He was still considering it as the cabbie dropped them off at a bank in a hotel district. Remo went inside for a minute and came out with an envelope.

  "Listen, I'm sorry I insulted you," he told the cabbie as he extracted Chiun's trunks from the back of the cab. Chiun wandered down the street with his nose held a quarter-inch higher than necessary. "My dad gets me cheesed sometimes."

  "One never grows accustomed to the insults. You are like many Americans who ride my cab," the cabdriver said with an odd mixture of sorrow and fear. Then he glanced at his missing dashboard and added quickly, "In your attitudes about foreigners, I mean."

  "Yeah, you're right," Remo said. "Sorry."

  The cabdriver was sure the tall man with the vicious eyes was being ironic as a prelude to throttling him. But the throttle never came, and the cruel-eyed man handed him the envelope. It was bulging with hundreds. He looked at the bank, sure the cruel-eyed man had just robbed it, but business was going on inside without sign of alarm.

  When he looked again, the cruel-eyed man was jogging down the street with the beautiful chests balanced on his shoulders.

  The cabbie had led a hard life. Tortured by the Baath regime that killed his family, he had escaped Iraq's despot during the opening mayhem of the Shock and Awe bombing campaign. He had
never really believed in the American Dream, but in the past half hour his luck finally turned around.

  He marched directly into the bank and opened a checking account, and the first check he wrote bought him a whole new cab.

  11

  "Holy Toledo, Remo, was that really necessary?"

  "Yeah, Junior." Remo sighed. "Give me Smitty."

  "He's out. You know how much you gave that guy?" Mark Howard demanded on the hotel phone.

  "Of course I do," Remo said, trying to remember how much he gave the cabbie. "Can you stop asking amazed questions, please?"

  "I'm not amazed. I'm aghast."

  "I'm going," Remo said.

  "You know, even I don't make that much in a year."

  Remo sniffed. "Come on, Junior."

  "It's true."

  "Okay, you got me. How much did I give that guy?"

  Mark Howard read off a long number with the words "dollars" at the end.

  "Well," Remo said, thinking fast, "the guy needed a new cab. Chiun destroyed his old one."

  "But it was Remo who destroyed his self-esteem," Chiun called. He was on the floor in front of the thirty- inch television watching a trio of weeping Hispanic women accuse one another of horrific betrayals.

  "What's he mean by that?" Mark Howard asked.

  Remo steered the conversation in a new direction. "Junior, you have to be kidding me. Your salary is less than that?"

  "Yeah. So what?"

  "Annually?"

  "Yeah. But it wasn't exactly a small chunk of change, Remo," Mark Howard said, and now it was his turn to be on the defensive.

  "It was a hell of a tip, yeah, but it's lousy take-home pay for a guy who does everything that you do," Remo insisted.

  "Compared to you, maybe—"