Her voice, as sharp-edged as a scalpel, cut into his reflections. “A little more meat on those bones and you’d be fit game for a real woman like me,” she greeted him.
He sat up with a start and opened his eyes. At first he saw only a silhouette, as she was between him and the sun. That was a mercy, for as she sank to her knees by his side, he had a full view of her bosom slopping around the sides of a too-tight white bathing suit, skin corpse-gray where it wasn’t mottled, her blizzard-blown hair, thick glasses the size of a scuba-diver’s goggles, and tobacco tar-stained teeth behind a hideous grin that was meant to be coy. “What-what-?”
“To what, I guess you mean.”
“To what?” said the stunned Castle, fearing that at any moment she might rise, favoring him with an unobstructed view of her gnarled, lumpy, thick-ankled legs.
“‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’ you were about to say.”
“Oh, yes.”
“To our leaders, God bless ’em. They told me to track you down and brief you immediately. I think ‘brief was the word they used.” She let her eyes slide down his body suggestively.
Castle felt his skin crawling. He wished he could join it. “Brief me on what?” he said quickly, before her innuendo got out of hand and onto his thigh.
“New policy,” she said, dragging her eyes away with visible reluctance. “They want the United States to redouble its efforts to apprehend-really apprehend this time-Ripley Forte.”
“Why the sudden interest in Forte?”
“Because our people in the Kremlin are convinced that Forte is behind the runaway nuclear reactors in the Benipic nations.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. If anything, I’d think the Russians would want to give him a medal. After all, if Forte is behind all that hot water being dumped into the oceans, he’ll only be doing what the Soviet Union itself has been doing for months-heating up the atmosphere. Why the sudden concern?”
Ilse Freemann didn’t know, but she wasn’t the sort to parade her ignorance. “It ought to be obvious to you, but since it isn’t, there’s no use in my spreading the Kremlin’s secrets around. All you really need to know is that you have orders directly from Premier Luchenko, through me. You’re to get your sweet little tail back to Washington at once, and while you’re on your way, think of some good reasons why Forte must persuade-it’s obvious that the United States itself has been unable to do so-the competent authorities to stop these hot-water emissions. I have been instructed to tell you, furthermore, that this mission is of the highest priority you’ll ever receive. If you succeed, you will receive the Order of Lenin.”
“And if I fail? Remember, I’m only vice-president. If the president himself and all his cabinet, plus the President of Texas, can’t find and turn Ripley Forte around, how the hell can I be expected to? The order is unreasonable.”
“Unreasonable or not, those are your orders. You must do your very best on this one.”
David D. Castle grimaced, shrugged, and started to get up.
Ilse Freemann put a thick-fingered hand on his chest and playfully pushed him back. “I don’t suppose half an hour’s delay will mean the end of the world.”
But it would mean the end of me, Castle thought desperately as he parried her thrust and struggled to his feet. She rose with him, stepped in hard against him, grabbed his wrist and pressed his hand against her steatopygic bottom. He removed it. “Orders are orders,” he said sternly.
In a guard kiosk overlooking the beach from the fringe of palms in the distance, Lieutenant Colonel South turned to the gunnery sergeant who was tracking the couple walking up the beach with a parabolic dish mounted on a heavy metal tripod. “Still coming in okay?”
The gunny lifted one earphone, made a thumb-and-index-finger sign, and grinned. “Clear as a bell, Colonel. How about the video?”
“With this baby,” he replied, patting the black 2000-mm lens approximately the size of a drain pipe attached to his videorecorder, “I guess I could pick up the warts on the old biddy’s ass. We’ll track them to the house, and after that the inside team will take over. But I don’t suppose they’ll have much to say to each other when they know the servants might be listening….”
30. EXCURSIONS
1 NOVEMBER 2009
The visit was unprecedented. For the first time in American diplomatic history, a foreign chief of state arrived uninvited, unheralded, and unwanted. Also unreceived, for President Horatio Francis Turnbull was closeted at his Camp David retreat with his advisers grappling with the sudden crisis of hot-water emissions from 1023 nuclear generating facilities in the world’s poor nations.
“What the hell’s he doing here?” growled Turnbull when his aide arrived with a message from the secretary of state announcing Premier Evgeniy Luchenko’s unexpected excursion to Washington.
General Noonie had a pretty good idea. Ripley Forte had gone over to the enemy, presumably in furtherance of the grand Soviet strategy laid down by the seventeen American scientists. Noonie could only speculate on the inducements the Soviets must have offered the second richest man in the world and Russian-hater, Forte, to turn his coat, but they must have been spectacular. As for the strategy itself, it was simple enough: the Russians started the fires in Siberia, waited until the United States realized that it would be ruined if they continued to burn, then offered to extinguish them-for a price. Having done so, traitor Ripley Forte, presumably a loose gun, then contrived the dumping of uncounted billions of tons of hot water into the seas, accelerating the ice-cap melt. The Russians would, of course, disclaim all responsibility, for if they admitted it the desperate Americans might drop The Bomb. Nevertheless, the premier had come to let the Americans know that the Soviet Union, and only the Soviet Union, could stop Forte, but of course there would be a small charge….
“It seems that’s my fate: to get a charge out of the Russians,” Turnbull said when he had urged General Noonie to tell him the worst.
“We can, at least, stall,” said the other. “After all, we had no official-not even unofficial-notification of Luchenko’s visit. It’s against all protocol. We can say you had an urgent meeting scheduled-which is the simple truth. We can let him cool his heels-”
“While he warms our coasts. No, Noonie, we’ve got to get this issue resolved, and resolved fast. The fair-and-warmer boys tell me that the ambient temperature is ascending at the rate of nearly a tenth of a degree every day. They can’t predict precisely when it will happen, but they do know that at a certain point whole damned chunks of the Antarctic continent will suddenly slip into the sea, raising the sea level by up to ten meters at a crack. We can’t let that happen. We’ve got to talk to the Russians right away-tomorrow at the latest.”
But he didn’t. The strain of the crisis had sapped the chief executive’s vitality, and he was caught by a sudden autumn shower during his postprandial walk around the grounds. That afternoon President Turnbull began to suffer from a scratchy throat, and his temperature shot up to 101 degrees. By nightfall his voice was gone. His medical adviser filled him full of antibiotics, administered a brimming hot rum toddy, and told him to get a good night’s sleep.
He got three.
By noon on the fourth, Premier Luchenko was pacing the floor at the Soviet Embassy on 16th Street like an old con in solitary. “It’s an affront!” he shouted, crimson-necked, to Ambassador Mish-mish Pasha. “It’s an insult, an outrage! I am not some piddling ambassador he can push around. I am the Premier of the Soviet Union, and I will not be treated like a lackey. Do something!”
“What do you suggest, sir?” replied Mish-mish mildly. “I have a Ph.D. in political science, not an M.D. in internal medicine. The State Department and the Executive Office both claim he is in bed with a bad cold.”
“Lies-all lies! It’s a diplomatic illness if I ever saw one. He’s got to see us, I tell you.” His voice was almost plaintive. “Every passing day increases the danger.”
Mish-mish didn’t know what Luchenko was talking about, but he hadn’t achieved ambassadorial rank by asking leading questions of his superiors. Like Major General Habib T. Noonie, he had assumed that Luchenko had come here to strike while the water was hot, perhaps demanding that the Americans demobilize their armed forces entirely as the price for his ordering the spigots shut. But Luchenko’s agitation belied such a theory. The premier would have been confident. He would have gloated at the delay, knowing that each passing day would increase the Americans’ discomfiture, allowing him to raise the ante commensurately when payday finally came. But no, Luchenko was acting like the American president should have been. Mish-mish was at a loss to explain this strange role reversal, thank God an ambassador wasn’t required to do so. The job of messenger boy had its merits. “They’re bluffing,” Mish-mish said, falling back on a cliche that, applied to the Americans, had never failed him yet.