“Fine, but this is not a serious undertaking. It’s an old story, sir. Give us a mission we can do, not one we can’t. Are we serious about this or aren’t we?”
“What do you have in mind?” Ritter asked.
Clark told him. Ritter’s face showed little in the way of emotion at the answer to his question. One of the nice things about Clark, Ritter thought to himself, was that he was the only man in the Agency who could discuss these topics calmly and dispassionately – and really mean it. There were quite a few for whom such talk was an interesting intellectual exercise, unprofessional speculation, really, gotten consciously or subconsciously from reading spy fiction. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we could… It was widely believed in the general public that the Central Intelligence Agency employed a goodly number of expert professionals in this particular field. It didn’t. Even the KGB had gotten away from such things, farming this kind of work out to the Bulgarians – regarded by their own associates as uncouth barbarians – or genuine third-parties like terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East. The political cost of such operations was too high, and despite the mania for secrecy cultivated by every intelligence service in the world, such things always got out eventually. The world had gotten far more civilized since Ritter had graduated from The Farm on the York River, and while he thought that a genuinely good thing, there were times when a return to the good old days beckoned with solutions to problems that hadn’t quite gone away.
“How hard would it be?” Ritter asked, interested.
“With the proper backup and some additional assets – it’s a snap.” Clark explained what special assets were needed. “Everything they’ve done plays into our hands. That’s the one mistake they’ve made. They’re conventional in their defensive outlook. Same old thing, really. It’s a matter of who determines the rules of the game. As things now stand, we both play by the same rules, and those rules, as applied here, give the advantage to the opposition. We never seem to learn that. We always let the other side set the rules. We can annoy them, inconvenience them, take away some of their profit margin, but, hell, given what they already make, it’s a minor business loss. I only see one thing changing that.”
“Which is?”
“How’d you like to live in a house like that one?” Clark asked, handing over one of his photographs.
“Frank Lloyd Wright meets Ludwig the Mad,” Ritter observed with a chuckle.
“The man who commissioned that house is growing quite an ego, sir. They have manipulated whole governments. Everyone says that they are a government for all practical purposes. They said the same thing in Chicago during Prohibition, that Capone really ran the town – just one city, right? Well, these people are on their way to running their own country, and renting out others. So let’s say that they do have the de facto power of a government. Factor ego into that. Sooner or later they’re going to start acting like one. I know we won’t break the rules. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they stepped outside them once or twice, just to see what they might get away with. You see what I mean? They keep expanding their own limits, and they haven’t found the brick wall yet, the one that tells them where to stop.”
“John, you’re turning into a psychologist,” Ritter noted with a thin smile.
“Maybe so. These guys peddle addictive drugs, right? Mostly they do not use the stuff themselves, but I think they’re getting themselves hooked on the most powerful narcotic there is.”
“Power.”
Clark nodded. “Sooner or later, they’re going to OD. At that point, sir, somebody’s going to think seriously about what I just proposed. When you get into the majors, the rules change some. That’s a political decision, of course.”
He was master of all he surveyed. At least that was the phrase that came to mind, and with all such aphorisms it could be both true and false at the same time. The valley into which he looked did not all belong to him; the parcel of land on which he stood was less than a thousand hectares, and his vista included a million. But not one person who lived within his view could continue to live were he to decide otherwise. That was the only sort of power that mattered, and it was a form of power that he had exercised on occasions too numerous to count. A flick of the wrist, a casual remark to an associate, and it was done. It wasn’t that he had ever been casual about it – death was a serious business – but he knew that he could be. It was the sort of power that might make a man mad, he knew. He’d seen it happen among his own business associates, to their sorrow on several occasions. But he was a student of the world, and a student of history. Unusually, for someone in his chosen trade, he was the beneficiary of a good education, something forced on him by his late father, one of the pioneers. One of the greatest regrets of his life was that he’d never expressed his gratitude for it. Because of it he understood economics as well as any university professor. He understood market forces and trends. And he understood the historical forces that brought them about. He was a student of Marxism; though he rejected the Marxist outlook for a multiplicity of reasons, he knew that it contained more than one grain of truth intermixed with all the political gibberish. The rest of his professional education had been what Americans called “on-the-job training.” While his father had helped invent a whole new way of doing business, he had watched and advised, and taken action. He’d explored new markets, under his father’s direction, and formed the reputation of a careful, thorough planner, often sought after but never apprehended. He’d been arrested only once, but after two of the witnesses had died, the others had grown forgetful, ending his direct experience with police and courts.
He deemed himself a carry-over from another age – a classic robber-baron capitalist. A hundred years before, they’d driven railroads across the United States – he was a genuine expert on that country – and crushed anything in their path. Indian tribes – treated like a two-legged version of the plains buffalo and swatted aside. Unions – neutralized with hired thugs. Governments – bribed and subverted. The press – allowed to bray on… until too many people listened. He’d learned from that example. The local press was no longer terribly outspoken, not after learning that its members were mortal. The railroad barons had built themselves palatial homes – winter ones in New York, and summer “cottages” at Newport. Of course, he had problems that they’d not faced, but any historical model broke down if you took it too far. He also chose to ignore the fact that the Goulds and the Harrimans had built something that was useful, not destructive, to their societies. One other lesson he had learned from the previous century was that cutthroat competition was wasteful. He had persuaded his father to seek out his competitors. Even then his powers of persuasion had been impressive. Cleverly, it had been done at a time when danger from outside forces made cooperation attractive. Better to cooperate, the argument had gone, than to waste time, money, energy, and blood – and increase their own personal vulnerabilities. And it had worked.
His name was Ernesto Escobedo. He was one of many within the Cartel, but most of his peers would acknowledge that his was a voice to which all listened. They might not all agree, not all bend to his will, but his ideas were always given the attention they deserved because they had proven to be effective ones. The Cartel had no head as such, since the Cartel was not a single enterprise, but rather a collection of leaders who operated in close confederation – almost a committee, but not quite; almost friends, but not that either. The comparison to the American Mafia suggested itself, but the Cartel was both more civilized and more savage than that. Escobedo would have chosen to say that the Cartel was more effectively organized, and more vigorous, both attributes of a young and vital organization, as opposed to one that was older and feudal.
He knew that the sons of the robber barons had used the wealth accumulated by their antecedents to form a power elite, coming to rule their nation with their “service.” He was unwilling to leave such a legacy to his sons, however. Besides, he himself was technically one of the second generation. Things moved more quickly now. The accumulation of great wealth no longer demanded a lifetime, and, therefore, Ernesto told himself, he didn’t have to leave that to his sons. He could have it all. The first step in accomplishing any goal was deciding that it was possible. He had long since come to that decision.