The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Patrick was not sure that the whole people could make the distinction between a good assassination and a bad one. Even in his own heart Patrick knew that Awad’s murder was nothing but an act of terrorism.

  “It wouldn’t be so worrisome if Awad hadn’t been built up as a holy man,” said Patrick. “Of course he was a charlatan and a madman; I knew him. But appearance is sometimes more than reality.”

  “What’s the truth about Franklin Mallory?” asked the girl. “He’s so sane he’s scary. I mean, all that talk in that cold, cold voice about everybody being rational.”

  Patrick shifted his body; the girl lay with her head on his shoulder and her skull was digging into the soft flesh there.

  “Let me be allegorical,” said Patrick. “Once 1 had a dear friend, an important man at the network, so I won’t name him. He had what used to be called a nervous breakdown and was put into a clinic. After he’d been there for a day or two, a very important executive, the man’s remote superior, came to see him. The visitor had a package with him, a present. Inside was a special clock, with the numbers running from one to twenty-four instead of one to twelve in the usual way. He plugged in the clock and put it on my friend’s bedside table. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘I hear you’re crazy. Years ago I was crazy myself for a while. They put me in this same place. This clock got me out of it. Watch it. Watch it for twenty-four hours every day when nobody is looking. The great thing in a place like this is: Don’t let them see that you’re crazy. If they do, they’ll never let you out. They watch you like a hawk for signs that you’re crazy. Now, anybody can act sane for twenty-four hours at a time. That’s what you’ve got to do. Keep telling yourself, one day at a time, that you won’t let them see that you’re crazy. Believe me, it works. You’ll be out of here and back at the network in no time.’”

  “Did it work?”

  “Of course. And that’s Franklin Mallory’s method. He’s watching the clock until he’s re-elected—being very, very careful not to let anyone see that he’s crazy.”

  Mallory, indeed, was running a strange campaign. He had made no public appearances since the convention in San Francisco. As Lockwood barnstormed the country, Mallory remained in his mansion on Fifth Avenue. He spoke on television every tenth day, gave a news conference every second Tuesday; Susan Grant spoke quietly to favored reporters.

  Mallory was asked again and again about the Awad Affair. “It is a clear case of murder,” he said. “The President says he is consumed by remorse. Perhaps that’s enough for him; we’ll see if it’s enough for the people.” He was pressed to say more. “I don’t have all the facts,” Mallory would say, always using the same words and the same hard emphasis; “nobody but Bedford Forrest Lockwood has all the facts, so far”

  The media, their electrical cables running from throbbing mobile units, clustered outside Mallory’s house, interviewing the advisers who came and went in a steady procession. Each had a self-effacing statement to make; all referred to Mallory as “the President”; gradually the interviewers began to do the same, in order to save themselves the irritation of being corrected by the persons they were interviewing when they called Mallory by his own name. At night, ambassadors and foreign ministers and even a foreign head of state or two came in by the garage entrance. They too were caught in the glare of the portable television lights.

  Then, too, the pictures kept coming back from Ganymede.

  In their factual tones, the scientists aboard Humanity reported the possibility of new sources of mineral wealth. They had taken asteroids in tow on the journey out, proving that the capture of whole freefalling mountains of what had once been called base metals was feasible. Pairs of men in special ships had descended into the outer atmosphere of Jupiter. These most adventurous of ships were called Mallory Explorers.

  Through all these events, Mallory remained calm, fluent, confident. From time to time he let himself be interviewed. Apart from his formula about Ibn Awad, he never said the same thing twice; or at least never spoke in the same words. Lockwood, in the tradition of campaigning politicians, had a set speech; he hammered out the same phrases day after day, in city after city. Of the two candidates, Mallory in his mansion in New York was the more remote, the more presidential. Those men who let themselves be interviewed on the sidewalk by his front door somehow had the king’s odor still on them. The Mallory campaign was a great novelty; the fact that it was being done as it was being done was in itself a fascinating news story.

  Patrick’s girl said so. “The once and future President,” she added.

  Patrick knew a phrase to be feared when he heard it. He put a hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t you ever speak those words outside this bed,” he said.

  The girl, struggling to breathe, for Patrick’s hand was very tight against her face, twisted away. She looked at him with fear. He had shown her a lot of himself in their sexual life, but this was unmasked ferocity.

  “All right, Patrick,” she said. “I hate Mallory as much as you do.”

  Patrick subsided. “It isn’t hatred,” he said, “it’s fear. I’m really afraid for the country.”

  He turned and smiled at her. She was sitting up, cross-legged, at the edge of the bed. The red marks of his fingers were still on her cheeks, as if he had slapped her. Patrick smiled and touched her with a gentler hand.

  “You and I and all our friends would be together anyway,” he said teasingly. “Mallory would send us all to Alaska to chop wood. Barbed wire and snow, that’s what you must see when you close your eyes and think of Mallory.

  “Come here,” he said.

  The fragile dark-haired girl, hardly larger than an Oriental, moved obediently across the bed. Patrick knew why he sought out lovers who looked like this girl; he’d long ago stopped worrying about it. In the end he left a wound on them—he never did women physical harm, but he frightened them, made them remember him. Sometimes, years after the end of an affair, he would chance to meet a girl he had had in some corner of the network building or at a party, and he would see the mingling of fear and desire in her eyes. If they were alone he would sometimes gently caress her breast, or lift her hand and put it on himself, to show that he would never lose the right. He lifted this little body that was so much like Caroline’s and fitted it to his own. The girl opened her eyes wide and stared at him in astonishment. He brought her to a shuddering orgasm, and when she was at its very center, with her hands clutching her own breasts, Patrick, thinking of Caroline, made her speak her husband’s name, over and over.

  The girl left him. Patrick remained in the disordered bed, smoking. He was glad to be alone; he had always been lonely; there had been no one in his family who was anything like him and, like Goethe as a boy, he had imagined that he couldn’t be the son of his lumpish father or the brother of his doughy siblings; some other man—Goethe had wanted his natural father to have been a prince—must have got him on his mother, to pass an hour in a dull town. Certainly his mother had loved him best. “There’s no one like you,” she told him every night, whispering as she kissed him so that his brothers, sprawled on their beds in the same stuffy room that smelled of sports equipment instead of the natural seasons, would not hear.

  There was no one at all like Patrick; there never had been, and sometimes he felt this like a physical pain. Charlotte was with him, she had created a portion of him even, but she was no part of him. No one was. He concealed less of himself from Charlotte than from anyone else; she really did not mind what people were like inside themselves. Was there something to conceal? How natural! She was content to help Patrick build up an appearance, and live by it. She had never pretended to love him. “It only makes trouble between men and women, darling,” she said. Asking her to marry him, Patrick said, “I don’t love you, I just think you’d make me a useful wife.” “I’m so relieved; I accept,” Charlotte replied. She liked the fact that he had chosen a public place, Kettner’s restaurant in Romilly Street with its pink luncheon cloths, to make his pro
posal.

  His words to Charlotte on the day they became engaged were almost the only confession he had ever made to another individual. His mother, dying, had pulled him down into the sour envelope of odors in which her fatal disease had enclosed her and, in a whisper, asked if he loved her. Patrick, believing himself to be lying, said yes. His mother wept, two tears pushing themselves from the colorless ducts at the corners of her deadened eyes, as though it required every bit of strength remaining in her body to give him this sign of her joy. Seeing the tears, Patrick realized that he did love her, that he always had; and alone with her corpse, he did something that even now returned to him in dreams: before calling in the nurses, he had closed his mother’s eyes and her mouth and composed her limbs, and he had combed her hair with his own comb.

  Had that been an act of love? Patrick shuddered, remembering the bloated body with its legs like grotesque sausages in which his existence had begun.

  Patrick picked up a phone and called an art dealer who had been trying to sell him a painting; they agreed on a price. Patrick needed beautiful things outside himself to look at. Charlotte, knowing why, sometimes mocked him. “It’s you!” she’d cry when he carried home a new picture, always more exquisite than the last one he had bought.

  10

  Philindros’s eyes had this peculiarity: pupil and iris were the same deep shade of brown; opaque, unchanging. No signal could be read in them. In the talks room, while he listened to Horace, he stared at the thermos jug, at the watch on Horace’s bony wrist, at the light in the ceiling, as though sibyls might be lurking in these objects, waiting to speak to him. Philindros dealt every day in prophecy, and knew how often it could be correct if based on a cool reading of the obvious.

  “Graham,” he said at last, “seems to be in the grip of conflicting emotions. On the one hand he detests us—and evidently hates your brother; on the other he loves Lockwood.”

  “Or hates and fears Mallory.”

  Philindros put the tips of his fingers together. “Same thing. Why exactly does he hate Julian?”

  “It goes back a long way. You know the story about Caroline. Other things are mixed up in it—class warfare; Patrick imagines that Julian is some sort of Brahmin. And then—Julian has done a lot for him over the years. How many kindnesses can a man be expected to forgive? He may have realized that Julian is the closest thing he has to a real friend in the world. That would be a shattering insight.”

  “Yes. Well, we can’t very well let him proceed. Is it possible to make him see that he’ll take Lockwood down along with us if he decides to attack the FIS? Is there anyone—some disinterested person—who might be able to talk to Graham?”

  Philindros waited for Horace to supply the solution. No more to a subordinate than to a President would he venture a direct suggestion—especially not to a subordinate who was so nearly an equal as Horace. He did not like men who couldn’t see for themselves what action must be taken, once the target had been identified and all the known facts about it laid out on the table.

  “There is a possibility,” Horace said.

  He told Philindros what he had in mind. Philindros was not taken aback. He and Horace knew the same simple fact: only a human being could sway another human being. In the end, whatever the brain might whisper, it was flesh that acted on flesh. Always. Horace had last seen this in the Hagrebi desert, with Prince Talil collapsed at his feet in his splendid robes, cut off at the stem by his grief like some unique orchid by the pruning knife. Both men had used human nature so much to achieve their ends—the ends of their country—that the map of it was in their bloodstream, as the plan of the New York subway system is imprinted on the subconscious of those who grow up in that city. They rode people to their destinations as casually as a commuter took a train, and were as oblivious to what went on inside the rattling car after they got off.

  “I’d have to have the loan of your tape,” Horace said.

  “All right, but your girl must get it back, uncopied, from Graham. Can you trust her to do that?”

  “I think so. After all, she’ll be protecting someone she loves.”

  Philindros took a lozenge from his pocket, unwrapped it, and put it into his mouth. In the muffled atmosphere of the sealed room, the candy clicked audibly against his white teeth.

  “I hope you can move quickly—even tonight—on this Graham business,” Philindros said. “Rose has something new on a related matter.” He paused, sucking on the lozenge to strengthen his voice. “We’ve had a new sighting of Clive Wilmot.”

  Philindros’s eyes shifted to a television monitor. Rose MacKenzie was just coming through the outer security system. She chatted in her animated way with the guards as they verified her voice and hand prints and opened the baffled doors for her one after the other.

  “Wilmot’s been to see Laster again. We picked him up in Riyadh. He’d been in the desert, lost to sight. Then, all of a sudden, he walked into Laster’s office. He wanted to talk.”

  “About what?”

  Philindros shrugged. “We couldn’t manage audio surveillance. Laster took him up in his plane and they talked there, making right turns for an hour over the desert.”

  “I thought we had a man inside Universal Energy.”

  “We do. Your man. But he doesn’t make the chicken sandwiches on Laster’s corporate jet.”

  Laster’s plane served chicken sandwiches, breast of poulet de Bresse on paper-thin wheat bread, with some sort of special dressing that smelled of rosemary and tasted of pepper. The sandwich had a clandestine fame; few had tasted it, but those who did never forgot the privilege.

  “We think there was talk of money. We know a little more than that. Rose will tell you.”

  Philindros while he talked had watched Rose’s progress through the vaults. Now she stood outside the door of the talks room. He worked the combination lock and let her in. She was carrying a delicatessen sandwich in a brown paper bag, and the odor, of pastrami enlivened the sterile atmosphere of the room. Philindros drank a glass of water. He looked at Rose and pointed at Horace.

  “Wilmot, yes,” said Rose. “The computer thinks that Clive has Ibn Awad’s lost atomic bombs.”

  Horace laughed aloud in his admiration of her discipline. He had slept with this woman the night before; she had known then everything she knew now. They had talked all evening about cooking. They had played three games of chess, and Horace had lost badly as he always did; nobody had Rose’s mind for anything with a mathematical base. She had told him nothing until Philindros gave his permission.

  “I should say,” Rose went on, “that the computer thinks O. N. Laster thinks Clive Wilmot has the bombs. Earlier, Hassan Abdallah thought that. I’ve been scanning every data bank in the Near East, and putting the pieces together. Clive’s sister comes into it. I knew she would.” Rose grinned. “Intuition; it exists.”

  Rosalind Wilmot was in a Volkswagen van when she was killed in Baghdad; it was a routine terrorist attack in most ways: cars blocking the target vehicle front and back, gunmen firing, then fleeing on foot through the choked streets.

  “They put two hundred rounds through the front windows,”

  Rose said; “probably all but a very few struck Rosalind. They scooped her up with jelly spoons. But—listen—not one round struck farther back than the front door handle. They didn’t want to start a fire in the gas tank. There was something in the back of the van that they wanted.”

  Tucked away in the police computer in Baghdad, filed under the wrong case, Rose had found a report. Two aluminum suitcases had been taken out of the van by the terrorists; an eyewitness two blocks away saw the gunmen stuffing the suitcases into a waiting car along with their hot weapons, and the car speeding away. The cases seemed to be very heavy: it took two men to boost them into the trunk. They had stood, gasping for breath, for a moment in the dusty street before separating and vanishing like whippets.

  “Three days later,” Rose said, “the Iraqis found the suitcases in a known hid
eout of the Eye of Gaza. Somebody had poured lead into them; that’s what made them heavy.”

  “Shielding?”

  “An amateur might think so. Our data bank says not—that probably no shielding was used. Why would it be? The bombs were going to be exploded by suicide squads. What was a little radiation poisoning to them?”

  “But Awad?”

  “Well, Awad …”

  Rose had other data. Clive Wilmot had been in the Hagrebi desert, he’d gone in over the Iraqi border by Land Rover, a week or more before Ibn Awad had ridden out into the same desert to hide the bombs. Rosalind had been with him. “A jolly old camping trip, brother and sister roasting chestnuts around the fire in the velvet desert night,” Rose said. “We have the report from the Iraqi border patrol of their crossing; they got back unnoticed.”

  “When did Rosalind die, precisely?”

  “A week after Talil. Ostensibly she was going to drive overland in her Volks, back to England. The probabilities are that Clive was using Rosalind as a decoy. How could he know that they’d kill her?”

  “How could he not know?”

  Rose spread her hands. “Well, she was very beautiful. That’s a kind of armor. Perhaps Clive thought they’d just stop her van out on the road and take the cases. Finding them empty, they’d come to him and demand the real items.”

  “They would have taken Rosalind as a hostage, as something to swap.”

  Rose was irritated. All this was obvious. “Yes, yes,” she said. “But what Clive wanted was money, and if he wanted money he couldn’t have thought he was dealing with the Eye of Gaza.”

  “Universal Energy?”

  “I don’t know who else. O. N. Laster, on the day before Rosalind died, had five hundred thousand Swiss francs flown down from Zurich, in hundred-franc notes. You have to remember, Laster was listening in on you and Jack; he certainly realized that if he could get those bombs, then Lockwood had no evidence that he had a good reason to kill Ibn Awad.”