“What a girl does to make a living these days.”
“Mustn’t grumble, Miss Pace, and I doubt that you will want to when you see the size of the bonus that’s waiting for you in the little white envelope. Now, if you’ll just go up to the house, shower and dress, my men will see you get back to the mainland in good order.”
“No warnings about not talking?” said the young woman.
“What would you say, and to whom? Besides, if you said it to the wrong people, they might turn out to be baddies. The world’s full of them.”
At lunch Jennifer Red Cloud was glum. “Some judges of character we are. How long do you think he’s been working for the Russians?”
“Who knows? David thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to stay that way for the moment, while we give him some rope to hang himself. Anyway, none of that’s important right now.”
“Oh! And if it isn’t important that the Vice-President of the United States of America is a communist mole, pray tell what is?”
“When you’re going to be reasonable and let me have -see, I mean-my son.”
Jennifer Red Cloud smiled her Gioconda smile. “Have a glass of this lovely 1998 Musar Cabernet Sauvignon,” she said, pouring red wine into his glass. “It’s a vintage year. It’ll help you forget what is beyond your reach.”
19. FIRESTORM
21 JULY 2009
“If it were anybody but you saying that, Rip,” said the President of the United States, “I’d have him hauled away by brawny men in white coats.”
“Nevertheless, sir, it’s a fact-your vice-president is taking orders from the Kremlin.”
Horatio Francis Turnbull shook his head. Unbelievable as it seemed that the man next in line for the presidency of the United States was a covert agent of the Soviet Union, he had to admit that precedents abounded. In England, the Queen’s adviser on art had been a commie, as at various times were the head of and number-two man in MI-5, a brace of MI-6 senior officers, a gaggle of Foreign Office types, communications specialists, and ranking military officers. In the United States, the top-secret Manhattan Project had been riddled with commies homegrown and imported. The United Nations charter had been entrusted for delivery to San Francisco in 1945 to Alger Hiss. And the assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White, was Red. If those traitors had positions of trust among the mighty, why not David D. Castle?
Forte’s evidence was convincing. Utterly damning was the fact that only Castle had been advised of Jennifer Red Cloud’s imminent trip to Jamaica; not even her own staff had been told of her intentions until the moment of departure. Even more conclusive was the bailout of Raynes Oceanic Resources by “the government.” Only the president himself could have authorized such a transfer of funds, and tonight was the first time he had heard of it. It followed from these two bits of evidence that David D. Castle was up to his neck in the disappearance of the seventeen scientists. That they had all defected simultaneously without leaving a trace was preposterous. The only alternative explanation was that they had been forcibly removed to the Soviet Union, or even murdered. Both murder and kidnapping were hanging offenses. So any way one looked at it, David D. Castle was going to hang by the neck until dead.
Or was he? He had been tried and convicted in the minds of a jury of three: Ripley Forte, Jennifer Red Cloud, and Horatio Francis Turnbull. The Fifth Amendment required a presentment of a grand jury, while the Sixth guaranteed the right to a speedy and public trial. While such a trial would satisfy the natural thirst of duped Americans for revenge, it would ruin Turnbull, who had picked Castle for his running mate. It would make America an object of the world’s ridicule. Its political damage would exceed the catastrophes of the Tea Pot Dome scandal, Watergate, and the Viet Nam War combined. The president just might escape impeachment, but he could never thereafter captain a ship of state whose sails were filled with gales of laughter.
There was another way, of course. David D. Castle could poison himself one day by ingesting tea accidentally spiked with botulism toxin. Or he might suffer a fatal fall from a high place, or be shot by an assassin, or be crushed under a runaway tractor on his Virginia farm. The possibilities were legion, and the men Turnbull could rely on to carry out such a patriotic project only slightly less numerous.
“But would that be wise?” he mused, half aloud.
“What’s that, Mr. President?” said Ripley Forte, whom President Turnbull had completely forgotten about while concentrating on the many attractive possibilities for bringing David D. Castle’s career to a prompt and vigorous close.
“I was wondering whether we should confront him with evidence of his treason,” said the president glibly. “Give him a chance to take the gentleman’s way out.”
Forte snorted. “Fall on his sword? More likely he’d need a hearty push.”
President Turnbull was aghast. “I hope you aren’t suggesting anything illegal, Rip. While I quite sympathize with your indignation-and share it-I cannot permit such a line of thought. No, we’ll have to do something else.”
Forte waited.
“Yes,” the president went on, “we’ll have to handle it in another way, without either jeopardizing the effectiveness of the remainder of my term by a public disclosure of Castle’s treason or committing upon him the mayhem he so richly deserves.”
“There’s another way?”
“Certainly. We’ll proceed as if nothing had happened -providing you can persuade Mrs. Red Cloud to stay out of sight for the time being. Thus our vice-president and his employers will be convinced their operative has killed Mrs. Red Cloud and that his secret is safe. And then we will be able to plant whatever disinformation we wish with Castle, knowing it will be immediately relayed to the Russians. An agent, once uncovered, can be a very useful weapon in our battle with the forces of darkness.”
Spoken like a true politician, thought Forte. “One thing: what happens if-may the evil be far distant from you-you should die while in office? We’d have a Russian mole surfacing in the Oval Office. What then?”
“Then I’d expect you, my dear Ripley, to take appropriate measures.”
“Speaking of which, what do you intend to do about the Russians?”
“Do?”
“Sure. They’re about to convert the population of the United States into a nation of lotus eaters. You are going to act, I hope?”
President Turnbull shook his head. “Anything I did to prevent the Russians from unleashing an offensive that, so far as I know officially, exists only in the mind of a single citizen of a foreign country-you-would constitute an act of war. The world would become embroiled in immediate hostilities, leading to a nuclear exchange punctuated at last only by our mutual extinction.”
Forte regarded the president sourly. “Double-talk for doing nothing, is that it?”
“That’s right.” Turnbull nodded, rising behind his desk. “Nothing. On the other hand, Rip, you being a citizen of the Republic of Texas and all-I have no control over what you might do as an outraged individual acting in your own interest. From what I’ve heard, you Texans don’t get mad-you get even.”
That bit about the “outraged individual” was right on the mark, Forte decided as he left by the West Wing tunnel that took him directly to the White House helipad, its lights extinguished to conceal the identity of the midnight visitor. He didn’t know whether he was more outraged by Castle’s treason, or the Soviet scheme to make zombies of Americans, or the president’s decision to let Forte do the job the American people elected him president to discharge. Forte was a businessman, not a statesman. His function was to make money, not war. But if making war was the only way he could continue to pursue his business of selling water and electricity and growing wheat, then so be it.
On the flight from Dulles International Airport back to Houston that night, Forte considered the interrelated problems of preventing the poisoning of the water and atmosphere by beta-3 and teaching the Russians that getting Gwillam Forte’s boy Ripley riled was bad politics. It would have been in the realm of the possible had he commanded half a million battle-hardened Marines, in the purlieu of the probable with 1,000 intercontinental bombers or an arsenal of missiles. On the other hand, he had what might prove far more useful: a vast organization peopled by men and women with brains and imagination.
“The problem is this,” said Ripley Forte the next day to his top computer scientist in the SD-1 research laboratories under Houston. “I want to bust into the Strategic Defense Initiative control system.”
Dr. Victor Reston, a wiry, well-preserved man who once had been Golden Gloves boxing champion of Texas, returned a thoughtful look. “Well, Rip, I foresee no great difficulty. That little chore should be simple enough after we’ve laid some preliminary scientific groundwork-like determining the extent of the universe, reversing the aging process, figuring out why teenagers hate their parents, and discovering how a man smart enough to accumulate an estimated twelve billion dollars can be dumb enough to think he can bust into SDL”