McAlister told him.
“What is it, Pentothal?”
McAlister snapped at him: “Haven't you been listening? It's a new drug. A damned dangerous drug. Handle it like I tell you!”
Unmoving, his hands still at his sides, Rice watched Teffler apply a rubber tourniquet to his thick arm. He watched his own vein rise through the fat, and he sighed when Teffler swabbed his arm with alcohol-soaked gauze.
McAlister forced himself to watch as the needle stabbed deep and the yellow truth serum squeezed out into Rice's system.
The fat man's eyes rolled back into his head, and almost at once he went into convulsions. He pitched out of the chair and to the floor, where he thrashed helplessly.
Going down on his hands and knees, Kirkwood tried to pin Rice's shoulders. It was all he could do, however, to keep from being thrown like a rodeo rider from a wild mount.
McAlister grabbed at the fat man's twisting legs to keep them from being bruised or broken against the furniture. But he took a solid kick in the stomach and was propelled away.
The marine guard ran over from the door, tried to hold Rice's legs, finally sat on them.
“He'll swallow his tongue!” McAlister gasped.
But Teffler was already there, wedging a smooth metal splint between Rice's jaws. With the splint protecting him from a bite, Teffler used his fingers to catch Rice's tongue and hold it flat against the floor of his mouth.
Gradually, the fat man grew quiet.
Shuddering uncontrollably, McAlister went out into Bryson's secretary's office and vomited in the wastebasket there.
Oh God Jesus Christ no Jesus oh shit oh shit no!
Bernie Kirkwood came in and said, “Are you all right?”
Braced against the desk, his head hanging over the basket, McAlister said, “Is he dead?”
“Just unconscious.”
“Coma?”
“The doctor said it's not.”
“I'll be there in a minute.”
Bernie went away.
After about five minutes McAlister got up, pulled a handful of paper tissues from the box on the secretary's desk, and wiped his greasy face. He threw the tissues in the reeking wastebasket. There was a water carafe on the desk and it was half full. The water was flat, but it tasted marvelous. He rinsed out his mouth and spat into the can. After all of this he felt no worse than terminal.
He went back into the room to have a look at Rice.
“At first,” Teffler said, “I thought it was anaphylactic shock, a deadly reaction to the drug. But now I think the dosage was just too large for his system.”
“It was the normal dosage,” McAlister said.
“But as overweight as he is,” Teffler said, “he might not react in any normal fashion.”
McAlister watched the fat man's belly rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.
“What now?” Kirkwood asked.
“How long will he be unconscious?” McAlister asked the doctor.
Sitting on the floor beside Rice, Teffler took the patient's pulse. He peeled back an eyelid. “No less than an hour. No more than two or three.”
“We wait for him to wake up,” McAlister said.
“Then?” Kirkwood said.
“We give him another dose of the serum. Half what we shot into him the first time.”
“I don't know as I like that,” Teffler said sternly.
“Neither do I,” McAlister said. “But that's what we're going to do, all right.”
Rice stirred at eight o'clock, opened his eyes, looked around, closed his eyes.
He was able to sit up at eight-fifteen.
By a quarter of nine he was nearly his old self. Indeed, he was feeling good enough to smile smugly at McAlister.
At nine o'clock Teffler gave him the second, smaller dose of the truth serum — and by two minutes past nine Andrew Rice was spilling all the secrets of The Committee.
But was it too late? McAlister wondered.
PEKING: SUNDAY, 12:10 A.M.
The telephone burred.
Canning woke, rolled over, and lifted the receiver.
“Guess who is waiting for you down in the drawing room,” Ambassador Webster said.
“He's here already?”
“Hasn't poor Mr. Sung suffered enough?”
“I imagine he has,” Canning said. “Tell the general we'll be down in ten minutes.”
THE WHITE HOUSE:
SATURDAY, 11:30 A.M.
The President was shocked at McAlister's bedraggled appearance. He kept saying how shocked he was all the while that McAlister got the tape recorder ready. He stood behind his desk in the Oval Office and clicked his tongue and shook his head and said he felt entirely responsible for the awful way McAlister looked.
For his part, McAlister could not tell if the clicks of the President's tongue were expressions of sympathy — or whether the chief was off on another of his shtik. And not knowing which it was bothered the hell out of him. He said, “It's nothing, sir. I'm fine. It's just about all over now. I've sent an urgent message to Canning. I took the liberty of using your name on it For his eyes only.”
“But from what you've told me — do you think he'll get anything we send to him?”
“Not everyone is involved,” McAlister said. “The communications man at the Peking embassy is trustworthy. He'll see that Canning gets it.” He ran the tape forward at high speed, watching the white numbers roll around and around on the inch-counter. When he found the numbers he wanted, he stopped the tape, checked them against a list of numbers in his note pad. “You'll want to listen to the entire interrogation later,” he told the President. “But right now, I have a few special passages you'll be interested in.”
“By all means.”
McAlister pushed the Start button:
mcalister: But even if the Nationalists manage to seize the mainland eventually, it won't be an easy thing. I mean, the Chinese may not have much, but it is a hell of a lot more than they had under Chiang. He was a real despot. They'll remember that. Even without guidance from Peking, they're going to fight — with guns, clubs, even fists. Do you realize how many people are going to die?
rice: Oh, yes. We've done computer analysis, worked it out in detail.
mcalister: And it doesn't bother you?
rice: No. I look at it like Mr. West does.
mcalister: How does Mr. West look at it?
rice: They aren't people. They're Chinks. Both sides.
mcalister: Have you calculated the Russian reaction?
rice: They'll come in from the west. But they'll never keep the territory they take.
mcalister: Why not?
rice: Because we have something for them too.
mcalister: Something like Dragonfly?
rice: That's right.
mcalister: You have a Dragonfly in Moscow now?
rice: We have a dozen of them, all over Russia. It was much easier to plant those than to plant one man in China. Russia is a more open society than the People's Republic.
The President was stunned at Rice's obvious insanity, stunned that he had been deceived for so long by such a lunatic. His face alternately — and sometimes all at once — registered dismay, surprise, and horror as he fully perceived Rice's lunacy and ruthlessness. But worst of all, in the President's view, was Rice's naïveté, and it was at this that the chief executive winced the hardest. He didn't crack his knuckles once.
McAlister closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He had heard all of this before, of course. And now he could see Rice under interrogation: sweat beading on his white face, sweat glistening in his eyebrows and along his hairline, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, saliva drooling from one corner of his mouth, his massive body twitching continuously and sometimes spasming uncontrollably as the drug savaged his central nervous system… McAlister felt a long snake of self-loathing uncoil slowly within him. He opened his eyes and stared at the whirling reels of tape; and he began to listen to the contents
as well as to the tone of Rice's words. And when he listened closely and heard the evil in the man — the delusions of grandeur, the ruthlessness, the bigotry and jealousy and mindless hatred — he became so enraged that the snake of self-loathing coiled up in him and went back to sleep.
Rice babbled on and thought that he was dispensing gems of military strategy, wisdom for the ages. He talked about the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Neither he nor West nor anyone else in The Committee considered that a major worry. The Committee had Dragonfly's equivalent — with code names like Boris and Ilya — in many Russian missile installations. These Dragonflies carried liquefied nerve gas instead of deadly bacteria. When such a spansule was punctured, the gas would literally explode out of the carrier, expanding at an incredible speed. The personnel of an entire missile installation could be eliminated in seconds by a single Boris planted among them. Even so, some missiles would be launched. Warheads would be exchanged; there was no avoiding it. But Americans should not be frightened of nuclear war, Rice said. They should view it as a potentially necessary and helpful tool. Even a peacemaker like Henry Kissinger had said as much when he had written on the subject years before he became Secretary of State: we can survive a nuclear war. Millions would die, but most likely not tens of millions; and civilization would not pass. There were big risks involved here, Rice admitted. But the only way to destroy Communism before it destroyed us, the only way to insure the dominance of the White Race was to take big risks. Wasn't that true? Wasn't that true? Wasn't it?
McAlister stopped the tape recorder.
The President said, “Jesus H. Christ! Did you get the names of those twelve agents in Moscow?”
“Yes.”
“The Russians will have to be told about them. Can a Dragonfly be — disarmed?”
“Yes,” McAlister said. “If the Russian surgeons know what to look for.”
“We can show them.” He shook his head. “Rice is so damned naïve.”
“And he must be echoing his mentor — A.W. West.”
“How could a man like West, a man who has amassed a billion-dollar fortune, be so simple-minded as to think that private citizens can overthrow foreign governments with impunity? How can he believe that he has any moral right to start a war just because he, personally, thinks it's necessary?”
“Lyndon Johnson greatly increased our involvement in Vietnam largely because he, personally, thought it was necessary. Nixon did the same thing in Cambodia, though on a smaller scale.”
“At least they were Presidents, elected officials!”
McAlister shrugged.
“How can West be so naïve as to think that he has all the answers to the problems of the world?” The President's face was no longer bloodless; it was mottled by rage.
McAlister had worked it out in his mind, all of it, over and over again and he was tired of the subject. He just wanted to go somewhere and lie down and sleep for sixteen hours. From the moment he had entered the Oval Office, however, he had been carefully leading the President in one direction, toward one particular decision; and now that they were halfway to that decision, McAlister couldn't allow his weariness to distract him. “We allowed ITT and a couple of private companies to get away with overthrowing, or helping to overthrow, the Chilean government a few years back. That was a dangerous precedent.”
“But didn't they learn anything from that fiasco? Look what happened to Chile after the coup d'état The military dictatorship was inefficient, inept, incompetent! Chile's inflation rate the first year after the coup was seven hundred percent! Because they interfered with the free market, unemployment eventually rose to fifty percent. There were riots in the streets!”
“I know all of that,” McAlister said. “And I'm sure that Rice and West know it too. But these people are what David Canning likes to call 'masturbating adolescents.' They live partly in a fantasy world. To them, there are never any crossroads in life, just forks in the road, never more than two choices, never more than two ways to see a thing: yes or no, good or bad, stop or go, buy or sell, do or don't, us or them.”
Frowning, the President said, “A lot of very nice people look at life that way.”
“Of course,” McAlister said. “But the difference between the nice people and the men like West and Rice is that the nice people, the decent people, aren't consumed by a lust for power.”
“Masturbating adolescents.”
“That's how Canning sees them. But that doesn't mean that they're harmless. Far from it. You read in the newspapers about wholesome teenage boys who murder their parents in the dead of night. A fool can be amusing — and be a killer at the same time.” He ran the tape ahead for a few seconds, stopped it, checked the numbers in the counter, and punched the Start button:
mcalister: Unless I'm mistaken, the Russian and Chinese operations are only two parts of a three-part plan.
rice: That's correct.
mcalister: The third part is for The Committee to take control of the U.S. government.
rice: That's right. That's the core of it.
mcalister: How would you accomplish that?
rice: Assassinate the President, Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, all within an hour of each other.
mcalister: But how would that give you control of the government?
rice: The President pro tem of the Senate is next in the line of succession. He would move straight into the White House.
mcalister: Let me be sure I understand you. You're saying that the President pro tem of the Senate is a Committeeman?
rice: Yes:
mcalister: That would be Senator Konlick of New York?
rice: Yes. Raymond W. Konlick. (Excited background conversation)
mcalister: But isn't it going to be rather obvious— everyone above Konlick getting killed, and him moving smoothly into power? rice: An attempt will be made on his life too. He'll be wounded. Shot in the shoulder or arm. But the assassination will fail, and he'll take on the duties of the Presidency.
mcalister: When is this to happen?
rice: Between two and four days after we trigger Dragonfly in Peking.
McAlister stopped the tape recorder again.
Unable to speak, the President got up and went to the Georgian window behind his desk. He stared out at Pennsylvania Avenue for a long moment. Then he suddenly jerked involuntarily, as if he had realized what a good target he was making of himself, and he came back to his desk. He sat down, looked at the tape recorder, looked at McAlister. “With what Rice has told you, will you have any real trouble getting hard evidence against A.W. West?”
“If you appointed me special prosecutor and gave me a topnotch team of young lawyers and investigators, no one could stop the truth from coming out. We know where to look now. We could nail West and every other man, big and small, who Rice knows is connected with The Committee.”
The President sighed and slumped down in his chair. “This country is just beginning to calm down after a decade and a half of turmoil… And now we're about to hit it with more sensational news stories, investigations, trials. The rest of my first term's going to be totally wasted. I'll have to spend most of my time defending your investigations against charges of political harassment. I'll be on network television every other week trying to reassure the public. Left-wing extremists are going to get very moralistic and start bombing buildings and killing people in protest of the cruelty of capitalism. And you can be damned sure there won't be a second term for me. Bearers of bad tidings aren't rewarded.”
Letting a moment pass in silence, McAlister then said, “And when the dust finally settles, the problem will still be unsolved.”
The President looked at him quizzically. “Explain that.”
This was the penultimate moment, the point toward which McAlister had been heading ever since he entered the Oval Office. “Well, sir, Rice won't know everyone behind The Committee movement.”
“West will know.”
“Perhaps.
But we'd never get away with using the drug on him that we used on Rice. There will be some men who have extremely tenuous connections with The Committee, men who have protected themselves so damned well that we'll never nail them and might not even suspect them. Once the furor has passed, they'll quietly set about rebuilding The Committee — and this time they'll be much more careful about it.”
Sighing resignedly, the President nodded: Yes, you're right, that's the way it will be.
McAlister leaned forward in his chair. “There have always been madmen like these, I suppose. But our modern technology has given them the means to destroy more things and more people more rapidly than ever before in history. West can wage bacteriological warfare against a foreign power. And once that's known, the SLA will get in the act to wage a little of it here at home. The knowledge is available; they just have to think about using it. When the West case is in all the papers, they'll think about growing some germs.” He paused for effect. Then: “But there's a way to deal with these kind of people.”
“I'd like to hear about it,” the President said.
“There's a way we can defuse The Committee and yet avoid all of the investigations, trials, and public agony. There's a way we can keep the lid on the assassinations and all the rest of it — and still punish the guilty.”
The chief executive's eyes narrowed. “What you're going to suggest is… unorthodox, isn't it?”
“Yes, sir.”
The President looked at the tape recorder for several minutes. He said nothing; he did not move. Then: “Maybe I'm ready for the unorthodox. Let's hear it.”
“I want to play some more of the tape first,” McAlister said. “I want you to be even readier than you are now.” He switched on the machine:
mcalister: Then Chai Po-han is Dragonfly?
rice: Yes.
mcalister: If he was back in China way last March, why haven't you triggered him by now?
rice: In order to cover his absence from his room that night in Washington, we made it look like he'd been out carousing. We put him back to bed, soaked him in cheap whiskey, and put a pair of — a pair of lacy women's — panties in his hands…
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