“No.”
“All right!” Laster snapped his fingers in triumph. “See, Franklin? You don’t even hesitate. Your answer in good old American English is ‘No’—just plain ‘No.’ Why?” Mallory gave him a faint smile. Laster said, “Don’t smirk, Franklin. I want to know your thinking.”
Mallory knew he would have to answer if he wished to be left in peace; Laster had not become chairman and chief executive officer of the most powerful cartel in the world, and extended its operations into the solar system, by taking no for an answer. He was here because he had something to say to Mallory, and his questions were a device to maneuver Mallory into giving him the opportunity of saying it.
“All right,” Mallory said. “I wouldn’t have done it for three reasons. Number one, killing people is wrong. Number two, it’s a good way to get yourself killed in revenge. Number three, killing Ibn Awad was a wasted effort because, assuming these famous suitcase nukes actually existed, he wasn’t going to plant them. All he did, according to the FIS reports, was pay for them. The Eye of Gaza was going to plant them.”
“So what would you have done?”
Mallory, sighing, replied, “Oz, really. What’s the point of playing these games of what-if?”
Laster pressed on. “I have my reasons; bear with me,” he said. “It’s a simple question: If you had been Lockwood, what would you have done?”
“I would have found the bombs and destroyed them, or tried to. Meanwhile I would have let Ibn Awad know that if they were used, the United States would strike every strategic target in his own country with neutron weapons that would kill every living thing but leave all its wealth intact and in our possession.”
“That’s all?”
“What more would have been necessary?”
“You wouldn’t even have cleaned out the Eye of Gaza—is that what you’re saying?”
“Only as a side effect of finding the bombs. What would be the point? Without the bombs they’re just another bunch of armed psychotics plotting mayhem in some Middle Eastern slum.”
As Mallory spoke, Laster vigorously nodded his head—not in agreement, though he certainly held the same opinion as Mallory in this matter, but in encouragement. As soon as the last word was out of Mallory’s mouth, he said, “Good thinking, Franklin. Now you’ve stated the case and removed any personal reason you may have had for not going after this guy with everything you’ve got.”
Amused, Mallory said, “I have?”
“You bet you have. You believe in his fundamental human decency. Fine; I agree. Lockwood isn’t evil. He’s stupid. And that’s why he has to go.”
“He’s going, Oz.”
“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. My information is that Tucker Attenborough and the rest of the boys are trying to rig the process so that the most damning evidence, the frauds in California, will never even come to a vote in the Senate. The strategy of the defense is to throw the Hubbard boys to the wolves on grounds that they done wrong, but that Lockwood never told ‘em to—”
“That’s true enough, but it doesn’t alter the fact that Lockwood wasn’t elected.”
“Think again, buddy. Olmedo is the smartest lawyer in this country. He’ll play the Senate like a Stradivarius and raise enough reasonable doubts to get a verdict of guilty but innocent. He knows all those gutless wonders want is a way out, and he’ll give it to them. Congress will then solemnly certify that Lockwood lost but unfortunately it can’t be proved that you won, at least not beyond the shadow of a doubt. Lockwood will go home to Kentucky to raise racehorses, and Attenborough, a falling-down drunk with a brain like a pickled cactus, will be President of the United States while the Hubbard boys count mouse turds in a jail cell on Sitka. Franklin, I’m telling you the facts.”
Mallory smiled yet again. He liked Laster—admired his single-minded passion, his gift for conviction—but in political matters he did not value his opinion any more than that of any other zealot.
In a softer tone, Laster repeated, “I’m telling you.”
Mallory said, “Just like Horace and Julian told Frosty.”
The comparison hit home. Laster shook his big skull in resentment. Before he could retaliate, his assistant, a willowy young man called Hugo Fugger-Weisskopf, entered the room, pausing just inside the door for permission to speak. Like all of O. N. Laster’s personal staff, Hugo was a German from the eastern provinces; Laster believed that these people, natural followers who had lived under totalitarian systems for almost sixty years, were the only ethnic group that remained capable of blind loyalty.
Harshly, as a means of signaling his indignation to Mallory, Laster said, “What?”
With stout deference, Hugo replied, “The pilot says we should leave, sir. It’s beginning to snow.”
“Tell him to start engines. I’ll be outside in one minute.”
Laster meant one minute. Hugo departed, not bothering to report that Laster’s bags were packed, his rifle cleaned and stowed, his wolves skinned and the pelts packed in refrigerated containers for shipment to the taxidermist. Of course all this had been done. This was what Hugo was paid for—to make life easier for his employer.
To Mallory, with a forgiving smile that was half quizzical, half exasperated, Laster said, “One last question. Will you do what’s necessary?”
Mallory replied, “Oz, one last request. Let me handle this.”
Laster smiled.
Mallory said, “I mean it. I have a plan.”
Laster said, “I know you do. But then, so do Lockwood and the rest of the pinkos.”
He made no assurances. Mallory knew that this man sincerely believed that he, Mallory, and Mallory alone, could save America from the people who hated her and wanted to destroy all that she stood for. But who would save Mallory from his better instincts? This was a question Laster had often asked himself, and asked Mallory.
As they walked toward the door, Laster threw an arm across Mallory’s shoulder and gave him a manly half-hug. “Greater love hath no man,” he said. “I admire you, Franklin. I wish I could be like you. You’re a goddamn Christian.”
5
Lockwood’s letter to Horace Hubbard, written on White House stationery in the big block draftsman’s capitals favored by the President, wasted no words:
YOU WILL ACCOMPANY THE BEARER, MR. J. L. S. MCGRAW, FORTHWITH TO A DESTINATION IN THE UNITED STATES, AND THERE AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM DULY CONSTITUTED AUTHORITY.
B. F. Lockwood
To eliminate any question about its authenticity, the letter was impressed with the presidential seal. McGraw recognized this for what it was, a fussbudget Blackstone touch. He knew as well as Blackstone—or, for that matter, Horace—that Lockwood’s peremptory order had no legal force. Horace was outside U.S. territory and, having quit the FIS, was not subject to the President’s authority. But McGraw was not relying on law; he was relying on the code of conduct by which Horace had always lived.
Once they were inside the Caroline’s cabin, Horace did not argue or even ask a question. “Let me just leave a note for my hosts,” he said. “Then we’ll go ashore.” On the other hand—and this, too, was consistent with the honor system—he did not volunteer any information about his accomplice, the FIS computer expert Rose MacKenzie. However, McGraw had determined, through the professional courtesy of the Ancud customs post, that this individual was also aboard the Caroline.
McGraw said, “I also have a letter for a Rose Elizabeth MacKenzie. Ph.D.”
Horace received this information in the same steady way in which he had read Lockwood’s letter, as something unpleasant but inevitable. “She’s terribly seasick,” he said. “They all are, even some of the crew.”
“Then she should be glad to get off the boat,” McGraw said.
“I suppose you’re right; I’ll call her,” Horace replied after the briefest of hesitations. He looked quizzical—another mannerism, like his haughty way of talking, which McGraw supposed he had been born with, just as he himself came
equipped with a standard-issue Hell’s Kitchen Irish accent and set of gestures. These characteristics, designed to make you fit in, became oddities only when you got separated from the herd.
On the trip between ship and shore, Rose MacKenzie, a good-looking but disheveled woman who was no longer young, and in her present physical and mental misery looked even older than she was, hung over the side of the Caroline’s dinghy, retching convulsively into the offshore swell. She did not speak to McGraw or even look at him, and in return, as a matter of kindness, he ignored her. He knew that not many hours remained of the privacy she had taken for granted all her life; let her enjoy what little was left.
On the northward flight from Santiago to Washington (due north: McGraw had been surprised to relearn from the guidebook that the west coast of South America lay to the east of New York) Rose MacKenzie slept, or pretended to, and he continued to leave her alone. He was not even interested in pumping Horace Hubbard. The economy-class cabin of an airliner was no place to conduct an interrogation, even if McGraw had wanted to do so. He did not; his job was to deliver these witnesses to Olmedo, who would examine them. Nor did Horace ask McGraw any questions. He had spent his life in a profession in which credentials counted for nothing because they were assumed to be forged. Auspices were everything, and McGraw had certainly demonstrated that he had these. Even if Julian had not vouched for him over the telephone, Horace would have accepted him as the genuine article. It was obvious that he could not be anything else.
Nevertheless a certain camaraderie developed between the two men, as often happens between policeman and suspect once an arrest is made. As the plane sped them homeward, they chatted about Antarctic icebergs. Horace had long been interested in them as a possible source of wealth and political influence, and seeing them up close from the deck of the Caroline in the Bellingshausen Sea had reawakened the idea. Or so he said.
“Sheik Ibn Awad, who had banned foreigners from his part of Arabia, let drilling teams into his country twenty years ago because he was told they might find water under the desert,” he told McGraw. “Water is what he prayed for, but ma shā a-Llāh, thanks be to God, they found half a trillion barrels of oil instead.”
With this abrupt mention of Ibn Awad’s name, Horace peered alertly into McGraw’s eyes for some sign of unrevealed knowledge. This was a murderer’s trick. McGraw knew that Horace’s intention was to check out his reaction to hearing the name spoken aloud; he wanted to know what McGraw knew or suspected about the circumstances of the victim’s death. Therefore McGraw registered no response whatsoever. In a normal, next-guy-at-the-bar tone, he said, “Did that piss this sheik off—finding oil instead of water?”
“At first it did somewhat,” Horace replied just as casually. “Then he was put in touch with a man who believed that icebergs could be floated to Near East ports from Antarctica and melted down for irrigation of the desert.”
“The ice wouldn’t melt en route?”
“Some, but not all. Even if you lost half to meltage, there’d be millions of barrels of water left. These bergs are enormous, you know. Some are the size of Manhattan Island, but upside down, so that skyscrapers of ice are submerged. They’re big enough to create their own weather systems; theoretically, you could cause local rainstorms if you anchored enough of them in the Persian Gulf. The beauty of the idea is, they’re composed of the purest water on earth. Icebergs may be the only unpolluted objects left on the planet, in fact. Up close, they smell incredibly clean—like spring water on the morning of creation.”
This poetic turn of phrase surprised McGraw; he had never before met a WASP who talked like an Irishman. But he saw what Horace meant. “That’s what I always thought,” he said.
Now Horace was surprised—not disbelieving, but surprised, and for similar reasons. How could a man like this entertain such an aesthetic thought? “Really?” he said. “You’ve actually thought about how icebergs smell?”
“Yeah, I have—just this morning, in fact, smelling the ocean… . Raspberry or date almond?” McGraw, who had refused the airline food, was offering Horace a choice of granola bars from his zipper bag.
“Raspberry, thank you,” Horace said.
Chewing, McGraw said, “So why didn’t they tow the icebergs to the Persian Gulf?”
“There were a lot of technical problems. It takes a big ship and a lot of power to tow something that large and unwieldy—and of course it would be dangerous in a storm. They thought of making the iceberg self-propelling—installing a nuclear engine, rudder, and screws right in the ice and steering it by satellite. Or towing it with a nuclear submarine. But there was a certain reluctance to sell an Arab with a ninth-century mind nuclear devices, even if he did have billions to spend.”
McGraw nodded and locked eyes with Horace. “And of course,” he said, “the old guy died very suddenly.”
“Yes,” said Horace. He flashed a brief smile, then took a bite of his granola bar. “That certainly was a setback as far as the iceberg project was concerned.”
6
After passing through customs, a speedy affair since none of them had to wait for luggage, McGraw and his witnesses were met at JFK by a hired limousine, which took them directly to Alfonso Olmedo C.’s offices in a Wall Street tower. As they stepped out of the car into the deserted street, the Sunday hush of the financial district was punctuated by the tolling of a steeple bell farther uptown.
“Church bells,” Horace remarked nostalgically. “This really is the most private part of town on weekends. Like a necropolis. Rose lives—lived — just around the corner, you know.”
“Is that so?” said McGraw, who had persuaded Dick Condon, the footsore, liverish ex-cop who was head of security in her building, to admit him to her apartment. Condon, who was even more Irish than McGraw—as a younger man he’d been a Reagan Democrat out of ethnic considerations—had a key because he took care of MacKenzie’s cats. These purring animals, half a dozen lonely, overfriendly Burmese, had rubbed up against McGraw’s shins as he worked his way, sneezing, through the nearly unbelievable clutter of computer printouts, books, recordings, newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, sheet music, and other printed matter that filled the flat. He discovered little of value, though he had come across Rose’s Ph.D. diploma from MIT marking her place in a coffee-table book about cats, and this had put him onto something useful. But of course the FBI, the FIS, and probably others had been there before him, disturbing the scene.
In the elevator, as before, Rose MacKenzie said nothing. She had recovered from her bout of seasickness, and her creamy complexion, slightly sunburnt after her ocean voyage, now glowed with health. Despite the shadow of worry within them, her bright blue eyes shone with intelligence and its usual companion, a sense of humor. Although MacKenzie was Protestant and McGraw was Catholic, and though each could tell that this was so by a hundred small signs, both were pure-blooded Celts, and McGraw had to admit to himself that he liked the look of this female. Too bad she had got mixed up with Horace, who was so obviously descended from Englishmen. But then, the Scots had always let themselves be used by the bastards, from the time of Cromwell and William of Orange. Suddenly she lifted her eyes and stared at him, as if detecting this thought by means of some dormant tribal instinct. She smiled at him, but she still did not utter a word.
In his modestly furnished corner office, Olmedo shook hands and offered them lunch. It was almost impossible to get anything to eat in this neighborhood on weekends. A tray of delicatessen sandwiches and a bowl of fruit stood on the coffee table, along with bottles of seltzer water, crystal tumblers, and a thermos of coffee.
Rose eyed the sandwiches hungrily. “How romantic,” she said to Horace, who smiled fondly in return; she loved delicatessen food, and he had brought her hot pastrami sandwiches on the night they locked themselves into the FIS computer room beneath D. & D. Laux & Co., only a block or two away, and stole the election. Rose, whose digestive track was entirely empty after days of vomiting, seized half
of an enormous corned beef on rye and bolted it. Then, more daintily, she ate an apple. Horace, upper lip twitching in affectionate amusement, ate a plain bagel with cream cheese and drank a cup of coffee.
Olmedo waited for them to finish their food. It was evident without an exchange of words that both Horace and Rose knew exactly who he was; no doubt Rose had called up all the computerized data about him after he was appointed. Olmedo must have made this assumption, because he offered no précis of the situation or description of his own role.
“I thought it would be better for us to meet here rather than in Washington, at least in the first instance,” Olmedo said. “Mr. McGraw assures me that you are here voluntarily. Is that the fact?” Horace replied, “Yes, certainly.” Rose said nothing. A little more emphatically, Olmedo said, “Dr. MacKenzie?” Rose put her apple core on the plate and replied, “You could say that.” This was the first time McGraw had heard her voice; the intonation was, or originally had been, midwestern, and the timbre was surprisingly deep; over the phone, you wouldn’t be sure of her gender.
Olmedo said, “As I assume you know, I represent President Lockwood in his current legal situation. I represent him only as any lawyer would represent any other client. I have no official position, no authority as an officer of the government, and I am not here to collect information for the benefit of anyone except my client. Under the law, I will be obliged to share anything you may tell me that is material to the defense with the lawyers on the other side. Indeed, it will be my purpose to make every relevant fact in this case public, insofar as any such fact might help my client. I hope you will talk to me on the record about what you know about this matter. If you want a lawyer of your own present, that will be fine.”
“That won’t be necessary in my case,” Horace said.
“Nor in mine,” Rose said. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
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