“Try this on for size, Les,” said Forte. “Whatever signs of valuable minerals your men come across during the digging will be recorded for detailed investigation after the tunnel is completed. Forte Ocean Industries will undertake to exploit those minerals when our Houston-to-Kiev subway is in place. A separate company will be established to market the minerals. One-half of the stock in that company will go to FOI for its capital investment, the rest will be distributed among the workers. What do you think?”
Schmida rubbed his hands together like a bookmaker at the approach of a horse player with an infallible system for picking winners.
5. CONTROL
17 OCTOBER 2008
“Miss Ilse Freemann, sir,” announced pease the butler.
“Freemann?” said Vice-President David D. Castle. The name was unfamiliar, and he rarely received strangers, especially during weekends at his country retreat in Middleburg. “Does she have an appointment?”
“No, sir. But she seems confident that you will see her. She claims to be the new diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times.”
That was a different matter. Vice-presidents who intended to run for president in the next election didn’t refuse to receive the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, appointment or no. “Very well,” Castle said languidly. “Have the duty Secret Service Officer confirm her identity and credentials, then show her to my study.”
Castle reluctantly laid down the tweezers with which he was laboriously applying the miniature bricks to a cardboard backing, which would form the facade of a model nineteenth-century small-town railroad station, faithful in every detail. He leaned back in the chair at his workbench and fondly surveyed the model railroad that filled nearly the entire basement.
The system he had constructed cost more thousands of dollars than he cared to think about, but it was worth every penny. One of the finest model railroads in America, it not only comprised exemplars of steam and diesel engines, reefers, gondolas, tank cars, box cars, and other rolling stock from the beginnings of American railroads down to the present, but exact scale models of turntables, water towers, level crossings, tunnels, trestle bridges, gravity switching yards, and other features of the railroading scene. He had painstakingly fashioned the deserts, farmland, range, mountains, and urban backgrounds through which his hundreds of yards of track passed. He had lost count of the time he had spent alone down there, but every hour had been a welcome escape from the cares of office. Only there, among the make-believe relics of a bygone era, did David D. Castle feel completely relaxed.
He took the service elevator to the second floor, stripped off his blue coveralls and engineer’s peaked cap, had a brisk shower, and took his time about dressing. While the goodwill of the press might be indispensable to the politician, letting reporters cool their heels from time to time helped them remember their place.
A man who considered his taste impeccable, he put on gray flannel trousers, argyle socks and loafers, blazer with the Harvard crest on the breast pocket, and foulard. He combed his thinning brown hair straight back, applied a drop of scent to his silk handkerchief, and arranged it with studied carelessness in his blazer pocket. He glanced in the mirror. Glancing back was a patrician gentleman of fifty-four, rather tall, rather lean, with thin bloodless lips and gray eyes. The backs of his hairless hands were lightly mottled with liver spots.
Walking to the window and parting the lace curtain, he observed with complacent pride his eighty rolling acres enclosed by whitewashed wooden fences and his six prize Arabians grazing in the middle distance. He felt the glow of self-satisfaction of a man who had everything-money, health, a first-rate mind, respect, and the second highest office in the land from which, in due course, he would four years hence ascend by the will of the people to the presidency.
Castle took the elevator-he always called it the lift -from the master suite down to the marble-floored foyer, then strode past the library to his study.
The woman who sat in the chair opposite his desk was regarding his favorite seascape with unconcealed disdain. She didn’t rise as Vice-President Castle entered, and he rewarded her impertinence by going directly to his high-backed leather chair, flanked by the American flag and the vice-presidential colors. He sat down, folded his hands on the desk, and examined the Times’ new diplomatic correspondent.
Ms. Ilse Freemann was of indeterminate age between thirty-five and forty-five, short and squat, with disordered graying hair resembling a magpie’s nest after a, hard winter. She wore thick round metal-rimmed glasses, behind which slightly bulbous eyes stared at him, unblinkingly. Her bust was a large, undifferentiated, amorphous bulge, as though she had buttoned her tweed jacket over a loosely packed knapsack. Her nail polish was chipped, her lipstick the wrong color and apparently applied in poor light, and she wore Adidas running shoes. She looked not quite clean, and Castle was happy he had omitted shaking hands. Her nose was too long and her brows too bushy, but her piercing dark eyes indicated a sharp intelligence, and her first words showed she was anything but intimidated by the vice-presidential presence.
“Is it true, Mr. Castle,” she asked in a soft, silky voice that contrasted strongly with her somewhat masculine appearance, “that you are a brigadier general in the KGB?”
Castle was so shocked by the question that the drop or two of blood that seeped sluggishly through the broken capillaries of his nose drained away, giving his face the gray pallor of a cadaver. His throat went dry, and for a moment he masticated air, trying to make words come. When they did, he realized with chagrin that they more befitted an affronted maiden than the Vice-President of the United States. “How dare you!” he gasped. “I have never heard such an odious suggestion in all my years as a public servant.”
“It wasn’t a suggestion, my dear David-it was a question, and you didn’t answer it,” Ms. Freemann purred.
“Then I shall dp so, Ms. Freemann. My answer is that there is not the slightest foundation of fact in your innuendo, and I must strongly protest the intimation that there is. I am most certainly not a brigadier general in the KGB.”
He spoke the whole truth and nothing but. He was a general-major.
His exalted rank was but just recompense for having successfully kept secret his communist affiliation from his undergraduate days at Harvard, through his career as a high-powered Silicon Valley attorney and five-term congressman from California’s Sixth District, right up to the present moment when he was but a heartbeat away from the presidency. He had been a mole buried under such deep cover that only a very few men in the Kremlin-and none at all outside it save his controller-even faintly suspected his connection with the KGB. That circumstance, and his meteoric rise in American public life, made him so valuable that from the beginning of his career as a KGB agent until now he had never been required to pass on a single piece of intelligence. The Kremlin was saving him for the day he would be President of the United States.
“I’d be obliged to know,” said Vice-President Castle, recovering his poise and addressing his visitor with lofty indignation, “where you heard such a ridiculous, outrageous calumny.”
“A little red bird told me. Name of Gideon Sorrow.”
David D. Castle’s heart flirted with fibrillation. “Gideon who?”
“Gideon Sorrow, as in the remorse you must feel for his untimely death, when the Pan American shuttle from Washington augered into the main passenger lounge at Kennedy last Wednesday.”
Castle’s fifty-four years had been such a succession of triumphs and rewards that he had seldom cause to curse his fate. He cursed it now. Ever since the Kremlin and its files had disappeared in a mushroom cloud three months before, Gideon Sorrow had been the sole repository of the secret of his treason. When Sorrow died his fiery death, the shackles that had bound Castle to the Soviet Union had suddenly fallen away. Castle was, for the first time since his sophomore days at Harvard, a free man.
He liked the feeling. It was true that his Kremlin masters had been good to him. They had brainstormed the winning strategy and financed his successful run for Congress and the four reelection campaigns that followed. He didn’t owe the Russians everything, but he owed them a great deal, and human nature has always made debtors restless and resentful of their benefactors.
So it was with David D. Castle. He had felt but conventional grief, and heartfelt relief, when he learned of Gideon Sorrow’s death. Cooperation with Russia, commitment to communism, subterfuge and stealth, obedience to orders-all these unpleasant things were behind him. He had for some years regretted his attachment to Russia and foolish infatuation with communism. The Utopian ideals he had believed in were twisted and perverted by the clique in the Kremlin, and the economic paradise they promised was repudiated by a century of crushing shortages. He had had enough. From now on, he had resolved on that fateful Wednesday when the plane crash was announced, he would devote his considerable energies and abilities to becoming President of the United States, and when he succeeded, he would be an ornament to that office. If it were within his power-it was certainly within his capabilities-he would go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. He could see the history books now: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Jackson, Lincoln, Castle….