Atropos

by William L. DeAndrea

  Hank sat and drank Gibsons and tried to decide how many times his library in the town house would fit in this room. A voice over his shoulder broke into his thoughts.

  “Senator Van Horn!”

  Hank spun around to see the Russian general bearing down on him. He looked a lot less friendly than he had at the party Hank had thrown for him.

  Hank was no fool; after a slight start (and anybody would be startled to hear that voice suddenly barking behind him) he realized what was going on. Dudakov was one of the Russians who had something to do with his situation. And obviously, Gus Pickett worked for him. That was kind of funny, but Hank didn’t laugh. There had been rumors about Gus for years—he was so chummy with the Russians, he must be on their string somehow, was the way the thinking usually went—but he had so much money, only a handful of fanatics really believed anything could be going on. Chalk one up for the fanatics.

  And now Dudakov was throwing threats around about Mark.

  Hank was thinking hard; when he did that, habits took over. The habit of a politician is to be affable.

  “General,” he began heartily.

  “I said listen,” Dudakov snapped.

  Hank blinked as his brain jumped out of its groove. “What have you done with my son?” he demanded.

  “Your son is safe.”

  “Why did you kill the girl?”

  “Your son may not always be safe. Now be quiet.”

  Hank closed his mouth. When the general told him to sit, he sat.

  Dudakov was calmer, now, but the menace in him was still obvious. “That’s better, Senator. Relax.”

  Hank tried and failed.

  “Look around you.”

  Hank looked around. There was nothing to see but Gus Pickett’s enormous room.

  “We are alone,” the General said. He began to cough, and it took him a long time to catch his breath. He’d done this, Hank remembered, at the party. This wasn’t quite as bad. Hank began to rise to help him, but Dudakov raised a hand for him to stop. The old man made his own way to an ornate love seat striped in gold and purple and plopped down on it. He wasn’t a good match for it—you might as well put a frog on a velvet cushion, Hank thought—but sitting down seemed to help him. Borzov took a couple of deep breaths and began again.

  “We are alone. I am not going to have you beaten or shot. Besides—”

  “You have my son.”

  The General smiled. “I have your son. We must talk about what you have done and what you are going to do.”

  Hank clasped his hands together in front of him, realized that was weak body language, and let them go. He wished uselessly that Ainley were here. Still, he wasn’t as worried as he might have been. As long as they were still talking, he knew everything would be all right.

  Borzov looked at the Senator with disdain. It was an unfortunate fact of his calling that while the weak were the easiest tools to obtain, they were the most difficult to work with. With a whole man, a man with a mind and a soul and convictions (the General’s Presidential candidate, for instance), no task was too great. The Senator’s mind, if he had one, had been buried under a life of ease and unearned power. His soul contained only arrogance and lust. His only conviction was that the arrogance and lust should not be left unsatisfied.

  Even the Senator’s concern for his son, the General could see, was a vestigial thing at best. Oh, he was willing to believe that the Senator would prefer that the boy live. But, Borzov believed, the Senator showed outrage because The Public would expect him to show outrage, and fear because it would expect him to show fear.

  In truth, it was Borzov who was afraid. He was a dying man in a wearing business. His mind and soul and convictions had been devoted to the service of his country, and that service was incomplete. Its completion depended in large part on the Senator. The Senator had been saved for just this occasion. And now, on the eve of fruition, Van Horn had done something unexpected. Worse, hostile. To be sure, weak tools often twisted in the hands of the craftsman, but Borzov was the Guild Master of this art. He should not be taken by surprise by such a one as Senator Van Horn.

  Borzov had to find out what was wrong, and fix it without ruining his plan. It would take handling, handling made no easier by the bumbling fools who had so needlessly killed the girl when she’d walked in on the kidnapping. That had been foolish—they could simply have taken her along. They had compounded their stupidity by leaving the body there—something that could only send a message of terror to the Senator, and bring a more concerted effort to find the perpetrators.

  Borzov shook his head. If this had been done properly, the American authorities need never have known of it.

  Enough, he told himself. Time advances.

  “Tell me, Senator,” he said, “do you not realize the nature of the tape that has been in our possession these many years? Did we not send you a copy of it?”

  Van Horn nodded. He had decided to be “reasonable.” “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you did.”

  “At any time, we could have destroyed you. We could have changed what is a mere suspicion in the minds of some Americans into a certainty in all of them. But we have not done that, have we?”

  “No,” Senator Van Horn said.

  “And our ... agreement. You haven’t found it particularly onerous, have you? Our requests for your assistance have not been excessive?”

  “Not at all,” the Senator said.

  And well he might, Borzov thought. Except for some minor things during the early days—names of people to recommend for appointments, a few projects to mention in his speeches—they had asked him to do nothing at all. And even those early requests were more tests of the Senator’s commitment to the “agreement” than anything important in the way of operations. The Senator was too important a piece to be wasted in the daily play of the game of put-and-take that was international politics.

  “Are you so stupid, then, as to think that I possess the only copy of the tape? That if I were to die, my organization and my nation would somehow be powerless to enforce the agreement that has allowed you to live in luxury and power for over a dozen years?”

  The Senator scowled. “I—I—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, General.”

  “You deny you sent a bomb to me at the embassy?”

  “A what?”

  Borzov looked at him closely. He knew that for all his faults, Senator Henry Van Horn was a man with years of experience in American electoral politics, and therefore, an expert liar. But Borzov considered himself to be an expert at detecting liars, and the Senator did not seem to him to be lying.

  “I don’t even know how to make a bomb!” Van Horn protested.

  This device was the work of a clumsy amateur. It was exactly the sort of thing a man who did not know how to make a bomb might attempt to send me.”

  “Anyway, how do I even know there was a bomb? I didn’t hear anything about an explosion at the embassy.”

  “There was no explosion. It was easily detected. That is not the point. The point is the attempt.”

  “Why pick on me?” The Senator was petulant. “There are lots of nuts running around who hate Russians.”

  “That is true. You, however, are a man who may have decided he has a reason to want me dead. And you are known to be a man who panics and resorts to violence under pressure.”

  It was obvious from Van Horn’s face that he didn’t like that, but he let it go. Instead he said, “Besides, I’m not a total idiot. My grandfather was ambassador to Germany, you know. I know how embassies work. You don’t open your own mail. Don’t you think I know that?”

  Borzov took a deep breath, which for once did not cause a coughing fit. “Yes, Senator. I am aware you know that. But I am also aware that you depend on your staff for assistance in most of your endeavors.”

  Now the fool’s feelings were hurt. “Every Senator does,” he said. “We couldn’t function efficiently otherwise.” />
  “Of course, Senator. It was not a criticism. I, too, have a staff. My point is, that the nature of our agreement cuts you off from their counsel and assistance. You might have recruited some other help, someone, say, willing to act on vague instructions to ‘take care’ of me in some way.”

  “And saddle myself for life with a blackmailer. Come on, General.”

  “Very well. I accept that. It was something that had to be checked.”

  “It had to be checked,” Van Horn echoed. “You kidnapped my son and killed that girl because it had to be checked.”

  “We are working for the good of the world. Over five billion lives, Senator. Almost everyone who was alive yesterday is alive today and will be alive tomorrow. Yet someday, each of us will die. One day, we will be here, the next, gone. One day Helen Fraser was here, the next gone. One day, Josephine Girolamo was here ...”

  “When can I have my son back?”

  “He will be released immediately. The word will reach you here, and you will be helicoptered back.”

  “The sooner the better. I don’t think this was one of your better ideas, General.”

  “The matter is by no means over, Senator. In the coming weeks, you will be watched.”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Don’t get up, Senator.” Borzov took a small plastic box from his pocket and pressed a light-blue button on it. One of Augustus Pickett’s mountainous bodyguards entered the room, gun drawn.

  “The gun will not be necessary,” Borzov said. “Please tell your chief that the bird may fly.”

  The security man nodded and left. Borzov turned to Van Horn. “Now. We have more to talk about, Senator.”

  “Now what?”

  “The fascinating topic of American Presidential politics. We are going to discuss whom you are going to endorse for your party’s nomination, and when and how you are to do it.

  “You will notice, Senator, that your son is being released as a gesture of good faith. He will be at your side, if you wish it, all the while you are carrying out your final instructions.”

  Part Three

  Atropos

  She who cuts the thread of life ...

  Chapter One

  June—State Capital

  THE BELLBOY SHOWED GUS Pickett around his hotel suite. “Sitting room here, shower here, television’s in the cabinet, the remote control for it is in the—”

  “I’ll find it, thanks,” Pickett said. He tried to decide if he sounded gruff. Magazine articles about him never failed to include the phrase “the gruff-voiced octogenarian,” but Gus never thought he sounded gruff. Gus thought he sounded just fine.

  With a skill born of a million stays in a million hotel rooms, Gus had the kid tipped and out of there before he started to lose his patience. He’d been a hard-working man for seventy-two years, now, and he didn’t plan to waste what time he had left in small talk with bellboys.

  “In town for the primary?” the kid had asked.

  “Got business,” Gus had replied. “All my trips are business.” Then he’d tipped the kid five dollars, or fifty times what the job was worth—okay, at least five times, allowing for inflation—and told him to scoot.

  Of course, his business here was the primary, but that was nobody’s concern. Anybody who wanted to waste his time checking up on old Gus would find that the purpose of this trip to the middle of the Great Plains had been to sell a bunch of wheat that had been sitting out in a bunch of grain elevators not far from here. Gus had been in the wheat business since the fifties. He’d gone into it to make money, of course—Gus was always interested in making money. But he’d also done it because his pal Borzov had foreseen the day when Russia might need more grain than they could grow. It would help to have a friend at the source if a clandestine wheat line had to be established at some point or other.

  Then when the time came, the United States just up and sold Russia the wheat as if they were best friends. By the time anybody got the idea to cut off the wheat as a slap on the wrist for the invasion of Afghanistan or some other offense to American sensibilities, America’s beloved allies had gotten the idea. They gladly fronted for the Soviets in huge grain purchases. The U.S. Government was perfectly aware of it, of course, but what the hell could they do? If they really clamped down, they’d have the farmers on their throats. So they winked at it, and undercut their own policy. It was things like this that made Gus Pickett sure he had made the right choice all those years ago.

  Because the Russians were going to win. Lenin said the capitalists would sell the rope Communists would hang them with. Gus Pickett had never met Lenin; he wished he had. He’d met Stalin, though. Back in the thirties. Gus’s father had just died, leaving his son with a Depression-idled mine and foundry. There was little demand at home for what Gus had to sell.

  But Europe would be going to war, soon. That was obvious to anyone who could read a newspaper—at least to anyone who didn’t have a big, sentimental thing about peace. Gus Pickett was not sentimental about anything. And it took a lot of metal to wage a war.

  So he’d scraped together some money and headed overseas. He didn’t waste any time with England or France—those idiots were still pretending war was avoidable. Germany didn’t need him—Hitler already had the Krupps and the rest of German industry tamed and eating out of his hand.

  But the Russians were different. Stalin’s five-year plans had gotten a few factories built, but nowhere near what was going to be needed with a war coming up. So they were willing to talk. And while the talking was going on, Gus kept his eyes open. He saw the way the population had been cowed into submission. He heard whispers of the purges; he himself had once seen a man dragged screaming from the lobby of his hotel by three big guys in bad suits and heavy shoes.

  And Gus himself had been picked up and interrogated. They didn’t rough him up, but they made him plenty uncomfortable—salty food, and no water. Bright lights in the eyes. No sleep. Crude, but effective.

  A captain named Borzov was the chief inquisitor. “We know you are spying for the British,” he would begin, and Gus would tell him to come off it. After about two and a half days, they’d satisfied themselves that Gus was what he pretended to be, apologized, and invited him to talk business.

  Gus had been delighted to. More than delighted, ecstatic. He felt as if he’d come home. Because this was the place that had caught on, this was the system that understood what Gus knew to be the true secret of life.

  Power is everything.

  Because mankind was just a bunch of animals clawing after the same piece of meat, and it was the nature of man to want the best. The best food. The most comfortable life. The most beautiful women. It didn’t matter. The key to happiness was getting exactly what you wanted as soon as you decided you wanted it. And the secret to that was power.

  But it was more than that. Capitalists were always being quoted as saying that they did what they did because it was a challenge to them, a game, and the money was just a way to keep score.

  That might be true for capitalists. Gus was not a capitalist. He was a survivalist. Not one of these clowns who go off to live in the woods with six rifles and a book of raccoon recipes. A real survivalist. Someone who knows that the real score is kept in human lives. Do you need to negotiate, or can you crush instead? How many men could you safely have killed? How many families can you reduce to poverty if the whim takes you? In short, how many people owe their lives and livelihoods to the simple fact that they have yet to get on your nerves?

  For Stalin, and to a lesser extent for Borzov, the answer to that final question was—and, more important, rightly should be—everybody.

  A nation run that way has to prevail. So Gus went with a winner.

  It didn’t happen all at once. There was a long period of feeling each other out, and the war offered a certain amount of distraction. But by the late forties, Gus and his war-bloated fortune were at the service of the “Communists.” Gus wanted to laugh. As if ideology had anything
to do with it, right? Communism was just a convenient label Lenin had seized on (damn, but Gus wished he’d met that guy—they really could have hit it off) to sell the sheep on the idea of volunteering to be lamb chops. At other times, in other places, it had been Fascism or Nationalism or God’s will. What it all was was grease on the wheels of the juggernaut that carried those with brains and guts enough to the seats of power.

  Gus had known all along that he might not live to see his work finished, to see America brought under the control of one strong man. But here he was, by damn, on the verge of making it happen.

  Gus had had his doubts about this Project Atropos business—he was never as certain about this thing as Borzov was. Too many things could happen between now and the inauguration. Despite the Party’s overwhelming strength, their candidate could still lose. Stranger things had happened in American politics. Or he could have a heart attack or something. Or the sneaky little double-whammy Borzov had built into this thing could backfire. It was brilliant, and it was tricky, but it was hard to guess what two hundred million people would do in the wake of a shock. They might shrug it off, or they might get disgusted enough to turn off on the whole election. That had come close to happening a few times already.

  Borzov had planned things so as to minimize the risk, however. By springing it before a key primary, he reduced the number of voters he had to affect to swing the nomination the right way. By planning the big event for today—Friday—and the day after, he left the media just two days to shake the animals’ cages before they went to the polls on Tuesday.

  Borzov had been running in luck, too. The race for the nomination had stayed close enough that the last few primaries still made a difference. Now there was only this one and the California primary next week, and as far as anybody could tell, it was still a toss-up between Abweg and Babington. It would take something like a big endorsement to swing things. Something, anyway, to make a splash in the headlines.

  Gus Pickett smiled. They’d give them a splash, all right. They’d give them such a splash that by the time they’d wiped the water out of their eyes, Borzov’s man would be sitting in the White House.