On 10 August the second file arrived in Kiev to join the first. Premier Evgeniy Luchenko’s chief of staff compared them and reported to his boss. “No doubt about it, sir: Ripley Forte is dead.”
“Excellent!”
“Now that Forte’s death is confirmed, what shall we do about the fires, sir?”
Luchenko laughed.
22. TESTAMENT
1 AUGUST 2009
The truck on the rack was no stranger. Gordielo Lopez had serviced it at least half a dozen times during the three years he worked at the Amoco station in El Centro, for the owner complied strictly with the manufacturer’s recommendation that the vehicle be lubricated and have its oil changed every three months. In fact, he had serviced it the previous time, and he knew damned well that there hadn’t been anything taped to the new oil filter when he installed it. He unscrewed the filter and inspected it under the workbench light.
Wrapped around the filter was a piece of clear plastic, and underneath it what appeared to be a $100 bill. Lopez glanced around the shop to make sure he wasn’t observed, slit the plastic cover, and removed the bill. As he shoved it in the pocket of his overalls, he noted the yellow sticker fastened to the white envelope underneath. “urgent,” it said. And “Please mail at once.”
For a moment Lopez thought about opening the envelope. But he decided that if he did, he might be involved in something he didn’t understand, and anything he didn’t understand was dangerous. It might lead to questions, and the matter of the $100 bill might come up. The best way to deal with the matter was to keep the money and throw the envelope away, or destroy it. But then, reading the address, his suspicions were aroused. What if it were a trick? What if the money were put there expressly to trap him? What if he took the money and didn’t mail the letter, and the police were waiting to pounce on him, or send him back to San Luis Potosi? He agonized, changed his mind several times, spent the morning looking over his shoulder to see whether he was being watched, and finally, at lunchtime, bought a stamp and dropped the letter in the mailbox.
Thus, five days later, the letter arrived at the office of the secretary to the President of the Republic of Texas, in Austin, Texas.
The secretary read the letter hurriedly and was about to put it aside as a crank letter when he noticed the signature. The name was that of a University of Texas scientist who had disappeared without a trace way back in February, Livia dos Santos. He took the letter immediately into the office of President Traynor.
“I think you’ll want to read this, sir.”
“Later,” said President Cherokee Tom Traynor, annoyed at the interruption. He had been considering emergency measures to ensure domestic tranquillity among his constituents, made fearful and restive by the deepening pall of smoke that was descending from the Plains states and had already cut off the sun from the northern two-thirds of Texas. According to the meteorologists, within a week the black cloud would reach the Gulf of Mexico, putting Texas, along with all the forty-nine states, in a state of perpetual twilight. Already the fallout from the roiling smoke had ruined much of the maturing wheat crop in the northern states, a catastrophe Texas had been spared because its June harvest was already complete. Even so, the poisoning of its rivers and ground water supplies, the corrosive effects of the acid rain on clothing and buildings, and the plummeting morale of Texans who could find no effective way to fight back was making his fellow countrymen increasingly desperate, and Traynor had to find some means of arresting the slide toward disorder.
“It’s from Livia dos Santos,” his secretary persisted.
“Who?”
“The young woman from UT who disappeared early this year.”
President Traynor snatched the letter. It was dated 26 May 2009.
My dear President Traynor:
You don’t know me, but I suspect by now I am listed by the Austin police as a missing person, having left my studies at UT in February to accept a research assignment at a fee too handsome for a person in my circumstances to pass by.
I was prevailed upon by one Dr. Oswaldo Edwards to engage in a three-month research assignment for what, to me, is a magnificent sum: $125,000. As it was highly secret (United States) government research, I agreed to hold myself incommunicado from the beginning of the project until its end.
Under the circumstances, I was not surprised to learn that I was part of a group of seventeen bright young research scientists from Texas, the United States, and our free-world allies. What did surprise me, at first, was our assignment: to brainstorm the options available to the Soviet Union in its quest for world hegemony now that its military and intellectual bases had been seriously impaired as a result of the nuclear explosion that wiped out Moscow and its environs on 22 July of last year. The assignment seemed to me bizarre in the extreme, until Dr. Edwards explained that, at the moment, the Soviet Union would be convening its scientists for this identical purpose. Were we to rehearse its deliberations, the United States would then be in the position of being able to counter each Russian technological-as opposed to military-offensive as it developed, for our mission was to elaborate defenses for each Russian option proposed. And we seventeen were but one team- the Young Turks, he called us-working on the project, whose results would be compared at the termination of our research.
Dr. Edwards’ logic was unexceptionable. Still, one day while we were daydreaming exotic offensive fancies, it occurred to my friend Raoul von Williams that, for all practical purposes, we could just as easily be confined in a gulag-he called it a sharashka-in the Soviet Union as in El Centra, where our research was taking place. We were confined. We were incommunicado. We were totally under the control of Dr. Oswaldo Edwards. We were doing work that would be invaluable to the Soviet Union, if they could somehow discover it. What if the papers we were presenting to Dr. Edwards somehow leaked? Worse, what if Dr. Oswaldo Edwards were actually an agent of the Soviet Union?
Chilling though the thought was, we realized its absurdity. After all, we were ensconced in an installation of Raynes Oceanic Resources, and we knew that Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud is a woman of proven patriotism and too astute a businesswoman to allow herself to be misled by even the cleverest Soviet agent. Still, the two of us decided it would not be a bad idea to take out a little insurance.
Each day we summarized the discussions of the group in minutes that each of us wrote independently. We made copies of the reports we submitted to Dr. Edwards at our weekly meetings. And we buried the resulting documents, which filled a shoebox, night before last on the grounds of the El Centro base, since Dr. Edwards said he was satisfied that the work we had done was more than sufficient.
The box is buried under the northeast corner of Building E, in which we both had apartments.
Of course, you will realize when you read this that all seventeen of us are either in captivity or dead.
Since we had no means of communication with the outside, we devised the following stratagem: we noted from the Amoco stickers on the inside of the door of the caterer’s truck that the truck received an oil change and lubrication at three-month intervals. We expected that, if we were allowed to return to our normal pursuits, we would merely reclaim this letter before the truck went into the garage, and the documents would remain buried until mold and insects destroyed them. If we were not released, however, the mechanic who serviced the truck would discover the $100 bill von Williams taped to the oil filter with this letter one evening, and-we hoped-mail the letter, as indeed he apparently did.
Since we have been duped-taken for suckers is really more like it-we are eager that you reclaim the minutes and reports we buried at El Centro and thwart the plans the Russians have induced us to make for the free world’s destruction. We regret that the scientist’s traditional arrogance coupled with childlike trust led us to our destruction, but at least, if you act with haste, the free world will not share our fate.
Sincerely,
/s/ Livia dos Santos
and Raoul von Williams
President Tom Traynor decided that the contents of the letter were too important to entrust even to the scrambler, and enplaned that afternoon for Washington, where he went into immediate conference with President Horatio Francis Turnbull.
Within hours a special FBI team was on its way to California. The Raynes Oceanic Resources installation at El Centro was cordoned off, and a thorough search made of the premises. No documents were found at the northeast corner of Building E, or indeed anywhere else on the base. It was evident, however, that earth had been excavated at the site within the past few months, according to FBI experts.