“Not a serious run. So far as we can tell there were no big buys or institutional trading. Presuming our fleet isn’t grounded, we’ll start to come back in ten days or so.”
“What would another crash like that do to you?”
“Don’t even think it,” Kennedy shuddered. “But if it happened within the next year or eighteen months we’d be in for a hell of a bad time. We might not survive even just one more crash.”
“What about two crashes, or even three or more within the next ten days, before you recover from this one? Could you weather it?”
“Not a chance in hell, Mac. Unless Washington bailed us out.” One of the problems was the scaled-back military establishment. Just a few years ago Guerin, McDonnell Douglas, and even Boeing depended heavily on military orders. Now that that market was all but gone the airplane manufacturers were cash poor.
“Along with our accounts payable and federal taxes outstanding, this year’s drawdown on our long-term debt is running at nearly four billion dollars. Match that against our accounts receivable—for all the airplane deals we’ve financed for the airlines—which amounts this year to only three billion, a lot of it slow to come, and you can see we’re in the hole. Al wants to spend one billion on the Moscow facility in addition to what we’ve already spent at Gales Creek, which means our ass is out in the wind.”
“That’s what they’ll do.”
Kennedy looked bleakly at McGarvey for a long second or two. It’s a tough world out there, his father told him years ago. But sitting here now he was sure his father hadn’t a clue just how tough it really was.
“It’s hard to keep a handle on it,” he said. “What do we do? Voluntarily ground the fleet until we can prove Mintori is on the verge of killing a lot of people? We’d go bankrupt. Or continue flying as long as the FAA allows us to, and face the risk that you are right, and that they will bring down more of our airplanes? In which case we’d also go bankrupt. Is that what you’re telling me, McGarvey, that we’ve been placed in a no-win situation?”
“If we can prove the Japanese are behind this before something else happens we’d be able to block their takeover move and save a lot of lives.”
“According to your timetable you’d have less than ten days in which to do it.”
“That’s right.”
Kennedy looked up the aisle toward Socrates and the others—all good people who earnestly believed that designing and building safe and efficient airplanes was more important than working simply for profit. Boeing had taught them that lesson. Make a good airplane and the profits will be there. Safety first, money second. But this assault on them by the Japanese, if it was true, was so monstrous it was nearly impossible to believe. It could not be allowed to succeed. If they gave in now, more than an airplane company would have been lost. He knew that he was being melodramatic, but it was true nevertheless. When one section of the fabric of a country was torn—not altered, not exchanged for something of like value, but torn—then the entire country was diminished.
“Ten days, Mac,” he said. “At the first incident, at so much as a hint that something’s about to happen, I’ll ground the fleet myself.”
“Agreed,” McGarvey said. “But it’s going to get ugly.”
“It couldn’t get worse.”
“Oh yes it could, David. And it will.”
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Aleksandr Semenovich Karyagin was of the new generation of Russian politicians, those who’d not been involved with the Great Patriotic War of 1940-45. At fifty-five he didn’t remember the end of the war, but he clearly remembered the privations afterward, the post-Stalin years in which the gulags continued to flourish. As a result he’d become a Russian patriot as well as a practical man who knew how to bend with the times in order to survive. It was a knowledge that many of his contemporaries had not learned. Some of them were dead or still in exile, while others, like General Polunin, sitting across the desk from him, had risen as high as they would ever get. Every time Polunin came up here he fairly radiated animosity and jealousy, which was fine with Karyagin. It provided the raw energy and zeal so vital to an intelligence-gathering organization. And, in the end, Polunin would serve as a scapegoat should the situation go awry.
“What has Mr. McGarvey provided us as a quid pro quo?” Karyagin asked, looking up from the bound report Polunin had brought him. “No mention is made of it here. In fact did he tell us anything?”
“Nothing substantive, Mr. Director.”
“I see,” Karyagin said. He sat back and stared at his general. Polunin’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“You may recall that McGarvey told us in very certain terms that he would not spy on his country, even if he did have access to the White House, or the seventh floor at Langley. Neither of which he has, so far as I understand the situation.”
“What about his control officer, Colonel Yemlin?” Karyagin asked.
“He’s on his way back to Washington. Should arrive within hours of the Guerin flight.”
“What is his impression, General?”
“A provision of the U.S. State Department’s approval of the loan package is an early settlement of the situation in the Tatar Strait.”
“Were our navy or air force to retaliate, the loan guarantees would be withdrawn. Is that the substance of Colonel Yemlin’s report?”
“That is the substance of his speculation, Mr. Director,” Polunin said, refusing to be drawn into the trap. “I omitted it from my report because Colonel Yemlin told me that Mr. McGarvey never made a direct statement to that effect.”
“Something must have been said to give him the impression.”
“Generalities. Hints. Vague suggestions. Nothing more, Mr. Director.” Polunin was in uniform, as if to distinguish himself from the strictly civilian element of the SUR.
“Why are they suddenly being so coy?” Karyagin asked half to himself. “If our cooperation is so necessary to the loan guarantee, then why hasn’t Washington told us directly?”
“Presumably Guerin’s executives want to make certain that we understand the distance between them and their own government. This is not a Washington-sponsored project, although Guerin’s government must approve of the exchange of technologies.”
“In other words the incident in the Tatar Strait should have nothing to do with our deal with Guerin Airplane Company.”
“That is Yemlin’s thinking.”
Russia was in a difficulty position. Unless some response were made to the Japanese attack on its frigate in Russian waters, what little credibility the eastern fleet had would evaporate, Karyagin thought. But Yeltsin was following the Guerin negotiations with a sharp eye. The deal was very important for a number of reasons, not the least of which were the jobs it would create and the influx of Western currencies it would generate. On another level the deal was important because of the ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine. Kiev was to the former Soviet Union’s aviation industry what Seattle and Portland were to America’s. If Moscow could come out as a rival it would do wonders for Russian prestige, not only at home but around the world as well.
They were walking a very tight line.
“Has Tokyo Station provided us with any further information?”
“Not yet, Mr. Director.”
“I want to review any new material before it is passed to Colonel Yemlin for transmittal to McGarvey.”
“Of course.”
“What of the airplane crash in Washington? Were the Japanese responsible?”
“Tokyo Station has no word on it, but Washington’s official preliminary position is that it was an accident.”
“Does Guerin Airplane Company share that view?”
“No,” Polunin said. “From what was discussed among them here as well as in the air, they suspect that this Japanese zaibatsu may be behind it, and may be planning other accidents within the next ten days.”
“If they are correct, and if they cannot prevent this from happe
ning, their company will be ruined. Am I correct?”
“Yes, Mr. Director.”
“Then I will send a personal message to Tokyo Station to make this problem their number-one priority.”
So close, Karyagin mused, and yet so far. Strange how the world had changed so dramatically in the last seven years.
The timing was incredible. As Edward R. Reid watched the CNN bulletin and then the follow-up reports on the killings and the riot in Yokosuka, he could hardly believe his good fortune.
It had all the earmarks of turning out like the Rodney King incident a few years ago in Los Angeles in which a black man had been severely beaten by a group of cops. The entire country had been affected by what appeared to be a clearcut case of police brutality. When the police officers were brought to trial for use of excessive force they were acquitted, and Los Angeles was hit by the worst riots since Watts. Never mind that Rodney King was a criminal. Never mind that just minutes before the beating he’d apparently gone berserk and according to witnesses was a real threat to the cops. The glaring message Americans focused on was that a group of white cops had beat the living hell out of a lone black man.
The same could be true with this incident in Japan. So far as the early news stories were reporting, a U.S. Navy enlisted man had murdered his Japanese girlfriend, and when the Japanese police attempted to arrest him he disarmed one of them and shot them both to death. The mob of civilians that had gathered went after the American and beat him to death. Probably rightly so, Reid thought, but it wouldn’t play that way.
A lone American serviceman—a boy actually—away from home in a strange, often hostile country, is backed into a corner by an angry, out-of-control mob, armed men in uniforms closing in on him. He does the only thing he can do, the only thing any reasonable red-blooded American boy would do in the same situation—he defends himself the best he can. He’s well trained. The U.S. military is the best-trained military in the world. So he manages to protect himself for a few minutes. It’s all been a misunderstanding, he pleads, but the horde has gone crazy. It was an accident, he pleads. But it is to no avail. They swarm over him, pulling him limb from limb, trampling him into the foreign soil so far from home. All the training in the world could not have protected him from the crazed mob. He was one boy, alone, in a strange land. Now he is dead.
Americans love their melodrama.
Bruno Mueller was upstairs in a bedroom across the corridor from Zerkel’s computer room. The genius and his brother had been tapping into computers all day long—Federal Aviation Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, State Department, Department of Defense, Dulles Flight Traffic Control, any government agency that had anything even remotely to do with the investigation. So far the crash was still being classified as an accident. Although Guerin engineers were questioning that preliminary finding, as was a British design engineer from Rolls-Royce, nothing to this point indicated sabotage.
From where he stood, smoking a cigarette, he could look over his shoulder into the computer room, or straight ahead out the window that faced the airport. The accident site was lit up like a small city. So far as he understood the procedure in this country, accident investigators would remain on site for at least a week, possibly two. They would sort through every single piece of debris, no matter how large or small, catalog it all as to its condition and precise location, and then transport the parts to a hangar where the airplane would be put back together in an effort to understand what happened.
All that would take additional time—weeks, certainly, and probably months. Long before the NTSB had reached any conclusions the next P522s would have already fallen out of the sky.
For the first time in a very long while Mueller actually felt the stirrings of interest. Killing generally meant little or nothing to him. The act of murdering a human being affected him about the same way swatting a mosquito or a fly would affect a normal person, but what Reid wanted was something different. This was murder on a very grand scale. Scores of people would die. Perhaps dozens of airplanes would crash and burn, the passengers’ panic would be agonizing as their airplanes fell out of the sky and they knew they were going to die but couldn’t do a thing about it. It was an interesting idea.
He had been trained to wreak havoc on the capitalists, but his training had gone to waste. His masters were all dead or gone. Even his group of former comrades was no more.
His life had been a waste. Until now.
Reid came up from downstairs. He was drunk again, but Mueller had come to appreciate the man’s capacity for alcohol. No matter how much he drank he seemed to be in control of himself.
“Have you watched the news?” the older man asked.
“No. Has something interesting happened?”
Reid grinned. “You could say that. It’s the Japanese—they’re doing exactly what I want. There was a riot this morning in Yokosuka. A young American serviceman was killed. Pulled apart by an angry mob of civilians. That ass in the White House will have to say something this time.”
“Why was this man killed?” Mueller asked, his voice soft.
“It doesn’t matter. He was trying to defend himself, and the crowd went berserk. It happens. Mob psychology is a strange phenomenon.”
“You say you want this?”
“Yes,” Reid said. “Of course I do. First the incident in the Tatar Strait. Then the airplane crash, which the Japanese will take the blame for. Now this latest atrocity, this violent outbreak of anti-American sentiment. Soon the bastards will go completely over the edge. Something will have to be done, I tell you.”
Mueller could see that Reid almost believed what he was saying. Among other things the man was a consummate actor. Glen Zerkel had told him that their host had once been a rabid anti-communist and for more than thirty years had done everything within his considerable power to keep the Cold War alive and well. “His motto is ‘In conflict there is profit,’” Zerkel had explained.
“The Soviet Union was America’s enemy, but Japan is your ally. It can’t be so easy this time.”
Zerkel had grinned. “Don’t count on it. Mr. R. is what we call a mover and a shaker. If he wants to make Japan our enemy, you’d better believe it’ll happen. I shit you not.”
“But why Japan?” Mueller had asked.
“I don’t know,” Zerkel had shrugged. “I really don’t. But whatever his reasons they’ll be good, and there’ll be more than one of them. He never does anything off the cuff. Before he makes a move he studies it three ways to Sunday. He knows what he’s doing. He’s never been wrong yet.”
“What are you getting out of it?” Mueller had asked. It was early morning and they’d crossed paths outside.
“I get to fight back,” Zerkel had said, and Mueller hadn’t asked him what he meant, because he knew. He felt the same way himself.
“We’ll have to move soon,” Mueller told Reid.
“Louis should be finished by tomorrow, and then we’ll know where we stand.” Reid glanced across the corridor toward the computer room. “The FBI has issued a warrant for his arrest in Jeanne Shepard’s murder.”
“Has he been told?”
“Not yet. It’s going to be difficult moving around the country with him. You’ll have to be careful.”
“It was necessary in case he tried to back out,” Mueller said, but Reid held up a hand.
“I agree one-hundred percent. Nevertheless, we’ll have to take care of him until he gets everything set up.”
Another thought occurred to Mueller. “Do you think he suspects that once he’s finished he becomes expendable?”
“He’s not a stupid man, but if he does suspect I haven’t seen any signs of it.”
“Nor I,” Mueller replied absently. Yet there was something different about Zerkel since the morning of the crash. As if the man were smirking. As if he had a secret.
“Glen will help you,” Reid was saying. “He understands the stakes.”
“Against his own brother?
”
Reid nodded. “Without a moment’s hesitation.”
Mueller had no siblings, but he’d always had the vague notion that brothers, since they were of the same blood, would be staunch allies. Apparently that wasn’t always so. He’d learned something new.
“We’ll talk again in the morning,” Reid said. “I have to go into the city to work on my newsletter.”
“Have you given thought to what will happen afterward?” Mueller asked, watching Reid’s eyes very carefully.
“What do you mean?” the older man asked without blinking.
“I won’t be able to return to Europe for some time to come. Possibly years.”
“Have you thought about what you want?”
“Not specifically.”
“I suggest you do so, Herr Mueller. And when you have decided the course of your future, we will discuss my role as well as my responsibilities in it.”
“Very well,” Mueller said, and Reid left. From the front window he watched the headlights of Reid’s car head down the driveway, the night very dark except toward the airport where the accident investigation continued. He wondered where his life was heading.
It was the easiest headline Reid had ever written. He had been building up to this one for several months, so he did not think many of his readers, including Secretary of State Jonathan Stearnes Carter, would be surprised. Some of them, however, would scream for his blood. Everything he’d written to date was nothing but the solid-gold truth, as he saw it. No one had ever gone wrong, not financially wrong, following his advice. Not even his detractors would deny him his track record. People listened.
He maintained a suite of offices for the Lamplighter at the Grand Hyatt Washington, a half-dozen blocks from the White House. The weekly newsletter was written completely by him, but it was researched by a staff of a dozen people, many of whom had been editors of prison newspapers whose prison releases he had sponsored. His staff was completely loyal to him.
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