Rose remained motionless and mute, her eyes closed. Horace put a hand on her feverish cheek, warning her first that he was going to do so in case she was awake, and then placed his lips close to her ear. “My dear,” he said, “I’m going to have to leave you for a day or two. Mind the doctors. I’ll call as soon as I have news.”
He then drove to the Harbor, packed a bag, loaded it into the car, and went for a walk in the woods. About half a mile from the house, in a grove of maples, he knelt, turned over a rock, reached into a natural chamber in the ledge that lay just below the spongy surface, and extracted what appeared to be another, smaller stone. He put on his reading glasses, examined this object until he found the mark he was looking for, then inserted the blade of a penknife, twisted, and opened it up. He took two tiny Lucite boxes, smaller than ring boxes, out of the compartment within, slipped them into the pocket of his jacket, and then carefully put the fake stone back together and returned it to its hiding place. Then he went down the hill, got into his car, and drove to the bus station in Great Barrington. Taking the express bus to New York, a pleasant ride on country highways, and then changing to the Metroliner, he could be in Washington in time for dinner.
9
On his long bus ride Horace was visited by many thoughts of Rose MacKenzie, and of Emily Hubbard. He did not think that he could bear to stay in the same house with another distraught female, so he checked into a club that had a reciprocal arrangement with his own club in New York. It had a few cheap, penitential rooms on the top floor, just down the hall from the private dining rooms, and as he came out the door after unpacking his bag, he ran into the last man he expected or wanted to see, Baxter T. Busby. Horace stood still in the doorway and kept quiet, thinking Busby might not make out his face as he rushed by, but Horace was unmistakable, even to a man who was too vain to wear glasses.
“Horace!” Busby hissed, placing a palm on Horace’s chest. “Back inside, quick.”
Horace backpedaled into his tiny room and Busby followed him in. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for days,” he said. “But after that fool St. Clair went on the tube I didn’t think it wise.”
“Quite right,” Horace said. “This is not wise, either, Baxter. I’m likely to be the next witness.”
“That may not be necessary,” Busby said in a loud whisper. “Have you been watching the tube?”
“Not religiously,” Horace said.
“You should, for your own sake. Thanks to you, the Year Zed is about to dawn.”
“Thanks to me?” Horace frowned. “ ‘The Year Zed’?” What on earth was that? Owing to his long sojourns abroad and the spymaster’s daily burden of keeping real secrets on which agents’ lives depended, his recollection of Shelleyan code words was shaky. He did not reveal this because he knew that any such lapse was inconceivable to Busby, who had gone on whispering in his breathless way. “It was you who made it possible, first with that dope about the lost bombs—didn’t our man handle that beautifully?” Busby hissed. “And then that incredible stroke of genius about the you-know.”
“About the what?” Horace asked in a normal voice.
“Ssshhh,” Busby said. “The Twentieth Amendment.”
“The Year Zed and the Twentieth Amendment,” Horace said. “You lost me going round the turn, Baxter.”
“Horace, you sly fox, you’re denying everything. I might have known.”
Voices went by in the hallway. “That’s my dinner group,” Busby said. “It’s time to tell a few key people what to expect before I make the final move. But, Horace, that last thing you sent me by hand of messenger really was a stroke of genius.”
“What messenger?” Horace said.
Busby beamed in conspiratorial joy. Suddenly Horace remembered what the Year Zed was. He said, “Baxter, I think you’d better tell me exactly what it is you’re talking about.”
Busby told him, in detail, still in a whisper.
When he was through, Horace said, “You’re going to make Archimedes Hammett President of the United States, and you think I’m the author of the operation?”
“Well, aren’t you?” Busby asked, smiling up at him, an aging version of the nearsighted rich kid who, half a century before, had attached himself to the teenaged Horace at Yale and hung on like a limpet ever since.
“No,” Horace said. “I’m not.”
Busby grinned anew. Horace thought he might give him the elbow. Busby said, “You mean to say you don’t know a thing about the lovely Ms. Slim Eve.”
“I didn’t say that. However—”
“Ah ha! And now I suppose you’re going to say you didn’t know about the diskette she slipped to me at that party or the master plan that was on it? Or that Five-Three didn’t call from China on your behalf and set up the whole delightful encounter?”
“Baxter, listen to me. Whatever you may think, none of this has anything in the world to do with me.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” Busby said. “I never for a moment thought it did. But if you happen not to see Julian, be sure not to tell him that that last ticktock he talked about up at the Harbor is almost upon us.”
Busby squeezed Horace’s arm, looked into the blur that was his face, the noble face of Bucephalus himself, according to brilliant old Booth Conroy, who had taught them “Greeks and Cheeks,” as his required sophomore course in classical literature and art was called. “Got to go,” he said. “Can’t afford to arouse so much as a whisper of suspicion. But go on, be as modest as you want to be. The Poet would be proud of you.”
“He’d be even prouder of you, Baxter,” Horace said. “But please do not go one step further with whatever you’re up to until you hear from me again.”
He looked alarmed; Busby mistook this for pleased embarrassment. “Too late,” he said. “The thing has taken on a life of its own. That’s the beauty of it.”
“You’ve got it wrong, Baxter,” Horace said, looking at Busby in what was the closest thing to horror he had ever felt in a long life filled with treasonous persons and dark deeds. “All this is, God help us, is the law of unintended results.”
He went downstairs to the telephone cabin and called John L. S. McGraw on the number Mcgraw had given him on the way back from Chile. McGraw recognized his voice at once.
“Let’s get together soon,” Horace said.
“Buffalo bridge, nine tonight,” McGraw said.
“Sorry, tied up tonight on a family matter,” Horace said. “Tomorrow morning?”
McGraw did not quibble. “Make it six-thirty A.M. then.”
“Fine.”
Horace hung up. Dumbarton Bridge over Rock Creek Parkway, famous for its guardian bisons with their prominent testicles, was so convenient to Embassy Row, was such a picturesque place for a clandestine meeting, was so hard to bug because of the racket made by the traffic passing beneath it, that it would resemble a spies’ reunion by the dawn’s early light. No matter, thought Horace; not at this stage of the game.
10
When Horace reached Emily on the Georgetown number she told him that Julian had retreated to Camp Panchaea. Horace knew the place well; he had gone there as a boy, when it had been the woodland retreat of a defunct men’s club, the Society of Euhemerus, to which his father and grandfather had belonged. It was named for the mythical island where, according to the Greek poet Euhemerus, the gods had resided before ascending Mount Olympus.
Horace said, “Can you drive me out there, Emily? I don’t have a car.”
“Rent one,” Emily said. Her voice was lifeless and uninterested; a lot was wrong between her and Julian—a lot was wrong between her and Horace, for that matter.
“I’d rather not, really.”
“All right, where are you?”
“I’ll come to you. Kennedy Center garage, Level C elevators, in twenty minutes?”
“That costs ten dollars, even if you only stay a minute,” Emily said.
“I’ll spring for the parking fee,” Horace said, smiling in spite of
the situation. Emily was as tight as paper on the wall, just the girl Julian needed, because he was like their father, with no head for money whatsoever.
She was waiting for him in her battered Fiat beyond the glass doors when he stepped off the escalator and onto the parking apron. Before Horace could find the seat belt and buckle up, she put the car in gear and peeled out of the garage and onto Rock Creek Parkway, scattering oncoming vehicles and fishtailing the rear end with a screech of tires.
She drove across the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and down 1-66 in silence. Horace did not try to make her talk; he had some thinking to do. From time to time he checked their backs. There was no pursuit; as he had anticipated, Emily was of no interest to anyone, the unemployable, uninvitable wife of a has-been in her little old car. After an hour or so she turned off the interstate onto a two-lane blacktop running straight through a swamp that grew nearly to the edge of the pavement. Tree trunks flashed by, and deeper in the underbrush Horace could see moonlight glimmering on stagnant water. A pickup truck hurtled by, lights blinking and horn blaring, then another making the same frantic signals.
“Emily,” Horace said, “the headlights.” Emily had driven all the way from Washington without them. “Whoopsie,” she said, her first word of the trip, and switched them on. The car had a European instrument panel. Now that it was lit, Horace saw that they were moving at 130 kilometers an hour—80 miles an hour. Emily fumbled in her purse and put on a pair of glasses with large round lenses. Horace smiled again: his sister-in-law was almost as myopic as Busby, though infinitely smarter.
After a while Emily screeched to a stop, backed up, and turned into the woods on a logging road that was nothing more than a pair of ruts worn into the slippery clay. Transfixed by the headlights, a deer ran crazily toward the car and grazed it with its antlers. Emily switched off the lights and continued by moonlight. Other antlered animals, moose and elk, moved through patches of fog. Smaller creatures scurried across the track and peered down from the trees. Emily slammed on the brakes and nearly skidded on the slick clay into a large, shaggy beast that blocked the road.
Horace said, “A woodlands bison?”
Emily said, “1 wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
The animal refused to move when Emily sounded the horn and flashed the lights, staring at the machine out of dull rolling eyes, snorting, and finally dropping a huge steaming pancake of dung onto the track. Emily backed up again and drove around, bouncing among the trees. Under the terms of the will of the O.G.’s rich Euhemerian uncle Snowden, Camp Panchaea and the five-thousand-acre private forest that surrounded it had been turned into a wildlife preserve dedicated to rediscovering and restoring original American species. Julian was still chairman of the board of the tax-exempt foundation that ran the place, the last honor and stipend he retained.
Finally the Fiat emerged into a clearing where tumbledown log cabins loomed in the predawn darkness along the near shore of a glassy lake. Inside the largest of these buildings, Julian waited. A log fire burned in a stone fireplace. Hissing gasoline lanterns gave off a poisonous smell. Dust lay over everything. The walls were hung with male souvenirs—paintings and pinups from the Gibson girl to Marilyn Monroe; school and college pennants and antique footballs, basketballs, and baseball bats on which teams had written their names; tarnished silver trophy cups on shelves; group pictures of young American males in athletic and military uniforms; captured flags and insignia cut from the wings of enemy airplanes; spiked helmets, Lugers, samurai swords. These items had been brought here by Euhemerians, long since dead, who used to come here to hunt, fish, and swim naked in the chilly spring-fed lake (“Lake Shrivel,” in club parlance), and in general be boys together again.
Emily handed them jelly glasses filled with red wine. “This is all I could find,” she said. “I’m going upstairs.” She flourished a book at them and vanished.
In undertones Horace and Julian talked about their women for a moment—health and sanity bulletins. “Emily has fallen into a silence,” Julian said.
“I noticed that; Rose has been affected in the opposite way,” Horace said. He told Julian what had happened the night before.
“Will she be all right?” Julian asked.
“She’ll probably get over the pneumonia, but she has a bad case of shame and remorse,” Horace replied.
“Well,” said Julian, “taking the consequences is no great fun. What brings you here?”
“I have two things to discuss with you, actually,” Horace said. “The original thing, which has to do with your friend Hammett’s lady friend, and another thing I found out after I got here.”
Julian looked mildly interested, his lifelong usual expression. He was a stranger to laughter and enthusiasm, Horace’s greatest friends. Horace did not know why. The two brothers, years apart in age, raised by different mothers, living at great distances inside different systems, hardly knew each other.
“All right,” Julian said. “Worst first?”
“Not much to choose between them, I’m afraid,” Horace said. He told Julian what Busby had said to him in the club.
For once Julian’s face showed a great deal of expression as he listened. “And Busby thinks that this was your idea?” he asked.
Horace replied, “That’s what he said, and he’s too simple-minded to make it up. Apparently the call came over the Shelleyan network, but I assure you it wasn’t instigated by me.”
Julian said, “I should hope not.”
Horace said, “Julian, you must tell me the truth about this. Was it you?”
“No,” said Julian, “Certainly not.” He was amazed by the question. “What is Busby thinking of?”
“That’s the first thing,” Horace said. “The second is what I came down here to tell you. That young woman Speaker Attenborough is supposed to have raped or whatever?”
“Slim Eve,” Julian said. “Hammett’s handmaiden. What about her?”
“I saw her on television and recognized her from an operation we ran fifteen years ago to penetrate the Eye of Gaza.”
“She was one of yours?”
“The other side. All of the Eye’s operations were suicide missions, as you know from your experience in the presidential campaign. Before they sent a man out, they’d have him breed his replacement—father a child on a female believer. Not many Arab girls were keen on this arrangement, so the Eye tended to recruit blue-eyed romantics—Germans, Brits, Scandinavians, even the odd American, if you’ll forgive the pun. This woman Slim was one of the brood mares.”
Julian, back nearly to normal, absorbed this without visible reaction. “You’re absolutely certain about this?”
“I’m relying on memory, but yes. She was recruited in college, brought to one of their camps in Libya for terrorist training, then selected as a mother of the jihad. That was the drill: guns and bombs as foreplay, then the idyll in the sands and the planting of the seed of a future terrorist.”
Julian winced, not at the substance of the story but at Horace’s tone of ridicule. “What happened to her kid?”
“The usual thing. She gave it up to the Eye of Gaza as soon as it was born and they put it in storage for future activation. That was the drill. By then, of course, the father had blown himself up for the Cause.”
Julian said, “That was a long time ago, of course. I mean the business with the baby.”
“Yes, she was about twenty-two then,” Horace said, “so by now the kid must be almost ready for detonation himself. But the fact remains that she is a trained terrorist who has an emotional stake in the Eye of Gaza from which she is never likely to recover.” Horace looked into the fire for a moment, then back into his brother’s wary eyes. “Julian, I know you’ve already answered this question, but before I take the steps I think I must take before the sun goes down again, I want to be absolutely sure that none of this thing that Busby is doing has anything whatever to do in any way with anyone who’s related to me.”
“It’s nothing to do with
me, if that’s the question. I can’t speak for our only other living relation.”
“Zarah? I had thoughts about her coming out here this evening.”
“Why?”
“This is where she and her Berber friends trained for Patchen’s last operation.”
“Against whom?”
“The Eye of Gaza,” Horace said. “She walked right in on them with David, afraid of nothing, shades of her old man and her grandmother, and damn near rid the world of them all. Paul himself was in on it, most reluctantly.”
Julian said, “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Zarah was part of the Outfit or FIS?”
“No, never; she went in on this with the O.G. and Patchen for reasons of her own. The team, Paul specifically, captured the head of the Eye, Hassan Abdallah, but the whole operation took place on French territory and there were dead people lying around, so they had to hand him over to the French. They gave him to the Syrians in order to get some of their people out of captivity. Hassan killed Patchen, of course, and Zarah suffered a bit before she got out. More than a bit. They pumped her full of dope, stripped her, chained her to a bed, and queued up on her.”
“She was raped?”
“Ganged, the survivors told the French. The drug they used induces deep amnesia when administered in massive doses, so of course she had no memory of what happened until some genius from the Outfit used hypnosis to debrief her. By then she had turned up pregnant. Miscarried, thank God. Wouldn’t abort it, a Christopher to the marrow.”
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