THERE. MOVIE STAR checked his watch and made a further mental note. Two men walked out of the private dwelling. One of them turned to say something as he closed the door. They walked to the parking lot of Giant Steps, eyes scanning around in a way that identified them as positively as uniforms and rifles. The Chevy Suburban emerged from the private garage. A good hiding place, but a little too obvious to the skilled observer. Two children came out together, one led by a woman, the other by a man . . . yes, the one who’d been in the shadowed doorway when they’d gone out for their afternoon playtime. Large man, formidable one. Two women, one in front, one behind. All the heads turning and scanning. They took the child to a plain car. The Suburban halted in front of the driveway, and the other cars followed it down the highway, with a police car, he saw, fifteen seconds behind.
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It would be a difficult task, but not an impossible one, and the mission had several different outcomes, all acceptable to his patrons. Just as well that he didn’t get sentimental about children. He’d been involved in such missions before, and you simply couldn’t look at them as children at all. The one who’d been led by the large hand of her bodyguard was what he’d decided before, a political statement to be made by someone else. Allah would not have approved. Movie Star knew that. There was not a religion in the world that sanctioned harm to a child, but religions were not instruments of statecraft, regardless of what Badrayn’s current superior might believe. Religions were something for an ideal world, and the world wasn’t ideal. And so one might use unusual means to serve religious goals, and that meant… something he simply didn’t think about. It was business, his business, to see what could be done, rules or not, and Movie Star wasn’t the least bit sanctimonious about it, which, he thought, was probably why he was still alive while others were not– and, if he read this properly, still others would not be.
28
BUT A WHIMPER
POLIT1CIANS RARELY LIKE
surprises. Much as they enjoy dropping them on others– mainly other politicians, usually in public, and invariably delivered with all the care and planning of a jungle ambush–they reciprocally detest being on the receiving end. And that was just the political sort, in countries where politics was a fairly civilized business.
In Turkmenistan, things had not gotten that far yet. The Premier–he had a wide variety of titles to choose from, and he liked this one better than “president”–enjoyed everything about his life and his office. As a chieftain of the semi-departed Communist Party, he would have lived under greater personal restrictions than were now the case, and would always be at the end of a telephone line to Moscow, like a brook fish at the end of a long leader. But not now. Moscow no longer had the reach, and he had become too large a fish. He was a vigorous man in his late fifties and, as he liked to joke, a man of the people. The “people” in this case had been an attractive clerk of twenty years who, after an evening of fine dining and a little ethnic dancing (at which he excelled), had entertained him as only a young woman could, and now he was driving back to his official residence under a clear, starry sky, sitting in the right-front seat of his black Mercedes with the sated smile of a man who’d just proven that that’s what he was, in the best possible way. Perhaps he’d wangle a promotion for the girl … in a few weeks. His was the exercise of, if not absolute power, then surely enough for any man, and with that came near-utter contentment. Popular with his people as an earthy, common-folk sort of leader, he knew how to act, how to sit with the people, how to grasp a hand or a shoulder, always in front of TV cameras to show that he was one of them. “Cult of personality” was what the former regime had called it, and that’s what it was, and that, he knew for sure, was
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what all politics had to be. His was a great responsibility, and he met that duty, and in return he was owed some things. One of them was this fine German automobile– smuggling that into the country had been an exercise in panache rather than corruption–and another was now returning to her bed with a smile and a sigh. And life was good. He didn’t know he had less than sixty seconds of it left.
He didn’t bother with a police escort. His people loved him. He was sure of that, too, and besides it was late. But there was a police car, he saw, at an intersection, its light turning and flashing, blocking the way, just beyond the cross street. A dismounted policeman raised his hand while talking into his radio, hardly even looking at them. The Premier wondered what the problem was. His driver/ bodyguard slowed the Mercedes with an annoyed snort, stopping it right in the intersection and making sure his pistol was readily accessible. Barely had the official car stopped when both of them heard a noise to their right. The Premier turned that way, and scarcely had time for his eyes to go wide before the Zil-157 truck hit him at forty kilometers per hour. The high military-style bumper hit just at the bottom of the door glass, and the official car was thrown ten meters to the left, stopping when it hit the stone walls of an office building. Then it was time for the policeman to walk over, assisted by two others who had appeared from the shadows. The driver was dead from a broken neck. The policemen could see that from the angle of his head, and one of them reached through the shattered windshield to shake it around, just to make sure. But the Premier, to everyone’s astonishment, was still moaning, despite his injuries. Due to all the drink, they thought, his body limp and limber. Well, that was easily fixed. The senior cop walked to the truck, flipped open the tool box, took a tire iron, returned, and smashed it against the side of his Premier’s head just forward of the ear. That task completed, he tossed the tool back to the truck driver, and the premier of Turkmenistan was dead as the result of an auto accident. Well, then, their country would have to have elections, wouldn’t it? That would be something of
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a first, and it would call for a leader whom the people knew and respected.
“SENATOR, IT’S BEEN a long day,” Tony Bretano agreed. “And it’s been rather a long couple of weeks for me, learning the ropes and meeting the people, but, you know, management is management, and the Department of Defense has been without it for quite some time. I am especially concerned with the procurement system. It takes too long and costs too much. The problem isn’t so much corruption as an attempt to impose a standard of fairness so exacting that–well, as a pedestrian example, if you bought food the way DOD is forced to buy weapons, you’d starve to death in the supermarket while trying to decide between Libby and DelMonte pears. TRW is an engineering company, and to my way of thinking, a very good one. There’s no way I could run my company like this. My stockholders would lynch me. We can do better, and I intend to see that we do.”
“Mr. Secretary-designate,” the senator asked, “how much longer does this have to go on? We just won a war and–”
“Senator, America has the best medical care in the world, but people still die from cancer and heart disease. The best isn’t always good enough, is it? But more than that, and more to the point, we can do better for less money. I am not going to come to you with a request for increased overall funding. Acquisition funding will have to be higher, yes. Training and readiness will be higher also. But the real money in defense goes out in personnel costs, and that is where we can make a difference. The whole department is overmanned in the wrong places. That wastes the taxpayers’ money. I know. I pay a lot of taxes. We do not utilize our people effectively, and nothing, Senator, is more wasteful than that. I think I can promise you a net reduction of two or three percent. Maybe more if I can get a handle on the acquisition system. For the latter, I need statutory assistance. There’s no reason why we have to wait eight to twelve years to field
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a new airplane. We study things to death. That was once meant to save money, and maybe once it was a good idea, but now we spend more money on studies than we do on real R and D. It’s time to stop inventing the wheel every two years. Our citizens work for the money we spend, and we owe it to them to spend it intelligently.