He felt the President’s arm around his shoulder. He could feel it coming–the Judas kiss. The old bastard was going to thank him on behalf of the nation and laud his true bipartisan spirit, or some such guff. He smiled through gritted teeth and swore he would somehow, someday make the old man pay.
“I am sure everyone will agree,” the President was saying, “that there can be only one leader for this monumental project: the Honorable David D. Castle, Congressman from California.”
9. JENNIFER RED CLOUD
24 FEBRUARY 2005
AS FAR AS THE EX-MARINE SECURITY GUARD IN THE SENtry tower could discern through his ten-power binoculars, Jennifer Red Cloud was without blemish. As she lay naked in the sun, her copper-hued skin seemed as soft as the feathery breeze that floated in off Montego Bay, her contours as smooth as the undulating hills beyond his eyrie, her hair sleek and lustrous, like that of a black panther at midnight.
He adjusted the focus and wondered what a woman like Jennifer Red Cloud would be thinking about. With a body like that, it could only be sex.
Jennifer Red Cloud was thinking about ocean thermal energy conversion. The theory was simple enough even for someone of her limited scientific training. The difference in temperature between warm surface waters of the ocean and cold waters of the depths was harnessed to drive a closed evaporation-condensation cycle and so generate electricity, like a refrigerator working in reverse. The warm surface waters contained enough heat to vaporize a compound such as ammonia. Then cold bottom waters would be pumped up to condense the vapor, to be cycled through evaporators using the warm waters to drive turbines linked to banks of generators.
Or something. She was a bit hazy about the details, but then, that was what engineers were for. More immediately important were the questions of scale and geography. Where ocean warm-surface-cold-bottom conditions prevailed, as in the midocean tropics, there were obviously no customers for electricity, or anything else. In coastal climes markets were abundant, but the water-temperature differentials were too small unless the OTEC facilities were huge, which made them noncompetitive with nuclearor fossil-fuel-generated electricity.
With this in mind, her board of directors had strongly advised against the purchase of Sea Exploration and Development’s OTEC patents and factories. Jennifer Red Cloud’s instincts told her to ignore the counsel. She seldom argued with her instincts, for they were correct more often than her advisers. She had just resolved that if she could beat down SEAD’s price another $5 million or so, she would buy, when a voice intruded on her reflections.
“Madame Red Cloud?”
“What do you want?” she said testily, holding up her hand to shade her eyes from the sun. The staff had strict instructions not to intrude unless it was a matter of life or death–hers.
“Mr. Dan Adamus is on the telephone, madame,” replied Luis, her Filipino steward.
Mr. Adamus was Raynes Oceanic Resources vice president for governmental relations. Vice presidents for governmental relations were a dime a dozen, but a good suntan was hard to come by.
“Tell him he’s fired.”
“Yes, madame.”
Luis trudged up the beach toward the house. It was bigger than it looked, consisting of a twelve-room main building with wings concealed behind rows of palms housing her staff, her offices, and her stables. The lawns on all sides were of a deep green as uniform as artificial turf, and the beds of tropical plants were awash with primary colors, blooming strictly according to Mrs. Red Cloud’s schedule–or else. Around the periphery of the fourhundred-acre estate ran a high electric fence.
Five minutes after Luis’s departure, he was back. Mrs. Red Cloud was now lying on her back, but otherwise her attitude was unchanged.
“Listen, you goddamn Hukbalahap,” she hissed, “if I see your face once more today, I’m going to ship you back to Mindinao. Understand?”
“It’s Leyte, actually, madame.” The steward had been through it all before. “However,” Luis went on, “it is not Mr. Adamus who is now on the telephone, madame, but Mr. Gustafson. He is very insistent that he speak with madame.”
Jennifer Red Cloud sighed and rose, cursing subordinates who had the bad judgment to incite her to dismiss them. Still, it just might be something important. Randy Gustafson liked that $850,000-a-year salary as president of Raynes Ocean Resources too much to jeopardize it by bothering her with trifles. She strode up the beach, past the tennis courts and the saltwater swimming pool, across the broad veranda with its red-striped awning, into her study. There her secretary, Terence, was holding a white telephone. He pretended to avert his eyes from her stillnude body but failed to impress her: She was well aware he preferred male privates, preferably out of uniform, to female captains of industry.
“This had better be good,” she said into the telephone.
“It is. The chance of a lifetime, if you move fast.”
“Get to the point, Randy.”
“You must come to Washington right away.”
“You’re not paid to tell me what I must do, Randy,” she said frostily. “You may, however, tell me why I should come to Washington.”
“I can’t. A lot of big ears are probably tuned in to this conversation.”
“That’s true. Very well, if it’s really important, I’ll come.”
“When?”
Washington, nearly two thousand kilometers distant, was two hours away in the Raynes corporate jet. “Meet me at Dulles in three hours.”
“Sooner would be better,” said Gustafson.
“Very well, make it two hours and a half.”
It meant she’d have to ride shotgun in the converted F-15 courier plane. She hated the cramped rear seat. Worse, the oxygen mask mussed her lipstick.
10. MR. SECRETARY CASTLE
24 FEBRUARY 2005
THE CONVERTED F-15 TOUCHED DOWN WITH A SHRIEK OF burning rubber at Dulles International Airport at five past eleven, and taxied to the far end of the strip. There a helicopter, its rotors turning lazily, waited. ROR President Randy Gustafson, a hard-bellied man of middle age with chalk-white hair, hooked the aluminum ladder to the side of the plane as the Plexiglas canopy lifted up and back.
Jennifer Red Cloud punched the release button of the shoulder harness and pulled off her helmet. She stood, hiked up her skirt so she could extend a sculptured leg over the side of the cockpit, and climbed down.
She disregarded Gustafson’s proffered hand and flounced across the tarmac to the Sea Drift helicopter, heels clicking on the pavement, white sharkskin dress molded against her body by the propwash, long black hair streaming in the wind. She climbed up the five steps, and moments later they were airborne for downtown Washington.
“I’m listening,” said Mrs. Red Cloud, taking her seat before a bank of mirrors and a cabinet containing a complete array of the made-to-her-order powders, creams, ointments, lip rouge, unguents, blushes, and other magic substances waiting at her every port of call, in a futile
attempt, in Gustafson’s view, to improve on nature.
As her Filipino makeup artist Ernesto went about repairing the ravages of the trip, Gustafson told her apologetically that he had waited all the previous day for her telephone call, and only when none had come had he instructed Adamus to get in contact with her.
“Just tell me why I’m here.”
“President Turnbull created a new Department of Water Resources Tuesday night and named David D. Castle as secretary.”
Mrs. Red Cloud regarded Gustafson coldly in the mirror.
“Why wasn’t I informed immediately?”
“Your phones are disconnected between 5 P.M. and 9 A.M.–company policy,” he reminded her. “Yesterday, I figured you had must have already got–”
“You could have flown down.”
“Your personal orders are–”
“I know my personal orders, Mr. Gustafson. You must learn when to disobey.”
“I’ll have to tell Dan Adamus that–if I ever see him again,” said Gustafson wryly.
“Never mind Adamus. Did you make an appointment for me with Castle?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s for eleven-thirty.”
“Well, at least you’re not completely useless, Randy.”
Randy Gustafson sighed. When she wanted to murder him, it was Mr. Gustafson. When she loved him, it was Randy. On the other hand, when he thought about her, he was Randy all the time.
“I did the best I could, Mrs. Red Cloud, but I’m afraid somebody got there before us. Brill tells me Ripley Forte has been in conference with Castle since ten-thirty.”
At the mention of Forte’s name, her head jerked as if she had been stabbed in the small of the back. The lipstick Ernesto was applying made an ugly smear across her cheek.
“Terribly sorry, ma’am,” said the Filipino, wiping off the lipstick with a tissue. Under his fingertips he could feel her jaw muscle tighten.
“Is this as fast at this goddamn machine will go?” she demanded.
Ernesto noticed that her eyes were a little crazy. It was the kind of thing, as good as he was, no makeup could cover.
Mrs. Red Cloud was six minutes late, but it didn’t matter, said Miss Brill, Castle’s wan, middle-aged secretary. He was still tied up with his ten-thirty appointment, and would they please have a seat? On the wall behind Miss Brill a life-size portrait of President Horatio Francis Turnbull in a stainless-steel frame gazed down like Big Brother.