“Goddamnit, Arnie, not everyone who disagrees with you is an extremist, okay?”
“That one is. The Sierra Club’s going to self-destruct if they keep him on top of the masthead. Anyway.” The chief of staff checked his schedule. “I have work to do. Your position on this issue, Dr. Brightling, is to support the Administration. That means you personally support the drilling bill for AAMP. There is only one position in this building, and that position is what the President says it is. That’s the price you pay for working as an advisor to the President, Carol. You get to influence policy, but once that policy is promulgated, you support it, whether you believe it or not. You will say publicly that you think that drilling that oil is a good thing for America and for the environment. Do you understand that?”
“No, Arnie, I won’t!” Brightling insisted.
“Carol, you will. And you will do it convincingly, in such a way as to make the more moderate environmental groups see the logic of the situation. If, that is, you like working here.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, Carol, I am not threatening you. I am explaining to you how the rules work here. Because you have to play by the rules, just like I do, and just like everyone else does. If you work here you must be loyal to the President. If you are not loyal, then you cannot work here. You knew those rules when you came onboard, and you knew you had to live by them. Okay, now it’s time for a gut check. Carol, will you live by the rules or won’t you?”
Her face was red under the makeup. She hadn’t learned to conceal her anger. the chief of staff saw, and that was too bad. You couldn’t afford to get angry over minor bullshit items, not at this level of government. And this was a minor bullshit item. When you found something as valuable as several billion barrels of oil in a place that belonged to you, you drilled into the ground to get it out. It was as simple as that – and it was simpler still if the oil companies promised not to hurt anything as a result. It would remain that simple as long as the voters drove automobiles. “Well, Carol?” he asked.
“Yes, Arnie, I know the rules, and I will live by the rules,” she confirmed at last.
“Good. I want you to prepare a statement this afternoon for release next week. I want to see it today. The usual stuff, the science of it, the safety of the engineering measures, that sort of thing. Thanks for coming over, Carol,” he said in dismissal.
Dr. Brightling stood and moved to the door. She hesitated there, wanting to turn and tell Arnie what he could do with his statement . . . but she kept moving into the corridor in the West Wing, turned north, and went down the stairs for the street level. Two Secret Service agents noted the look on her face and wondered what had rained on her parade that morning – or maybe had turned a hailstorm loose on it. She walked across the street with an unusually stiff gait, then up the steps into the OEOB. In her office, she turned on her Gateway computer and called up her word-processing program, wanting to put her fist through the glass screen rather than type on the keyboard. To be ordered around by that man! Who didn’t know anything about science, and didn’t care about environmental policy. All Arnie cared about was politics, and politics was the most artificial damned thing in the world!
But then, finally, she calmed down, took a deep breath, and began drafting her defense of something that, after all, would never happen, would it?
No, she told herself. It would never happen.
CHAPTER 12
WILD CARDS
The theme park had learned well from its more famous model. It had taken care to hire away a dozen senior executives, their lavish salary increases paid for by the park’s Persian Gulf financial backers, who had already exceeded their fiscal expectations and looked forward to recouping their total investment in less than six years instead of the programmed eight and a half.
Those investments had been considerable, since they determined not merely to emulate the American corporation, but to exceed it in every respect. The castle in their park was made of stone, not mere fiberglass. The main street was actually three thoroughfares, each adapted to three separate national themes. The circular railroad was of standard gauge and used two real steam locomotives, and there was talk of extending the line to the international airport, which the Spanish authorities had been so kind as to modernize in order to support the theme park-as well they might: the park provided twenty-eight thousand fulltime and ten thousand more part-time or seasonal jobs. The ride attractions were spectacular, most of them custom designed and built in Switzerland, and some of them adventurous enough to make a fighter pilot go pale. In addition, it had a Science World section, with a moonwalk attraction that had impressed NASA, an underwater walk-through mega-aquarium, and pavilions from every major industry in Europe-the one from Airbus Industrie was particularly impressive, allowing children (and adults) to pilot simulated versions of its aircraft.
There were characters in costumes-gnomes, trolls, and all manner of mythical creatures from European history, plus Roman legionnaires to fight barbarians-and the usual marketing areas where guests could buy replicas of everything the park had to offer.
One of the smartest things the investors had done was to build their theme park in Spain rather than France. The climate here, while hotter, was also sunny and dry most of the year, which made for full-year-round operations. Guests flew in from all over Europe, or took the trains, or came down on bus tours to stay at the large, comfortable hotels, which were designed for three different levels of expense and grandeur, from one that might have been decorated by Cesar Ritz down to several with more basic amenities. Guests at all of them shared the same physical environment, warm and dry, and could take time off to bathe in the many pools surrounded by white-sand beaches, or to play on one of the two existing golf courses-three more were under construction, and one of them would soon be part of the European Professional Tour. There was also a busy casino, something no other theme park had tried. All in all, Worldpark, as it was called, had been an instant and sensational success, and it rarely had fewer than ten thousand guests, and frequently more than fifty thousand.
A thoroughly modern facility, it was controlled by six regional and one master command center, and every attraction, ride, and food outlet was monitored by computers and TV cameras.
Mike Dennis was the operations director. He’d been hired away from Orlando, and while he missed the friendly managerial atmosphere there, the building and then running of Worldpark had been the challenge he’d waited for all his life. A man with three kids, this was his baby, Dennis told himself, looking out the battlements of the tower. His office and command center was in the castle keep, the tall tower in the twelfth-century fortress they’d built. Maybe the Duke of Aquitaine had enjoyed a place like this, but he’d used only swords and spears, not computers and helicopters, and as wealthy as his grace had been back in the twelfth century, he hadn’t handled money in this quantity Worldpark took in ten million dollars in cash alone on a good day, and far more than that from plastic. Every day a cash truck with a heavy police escort left the park for the nearest bank.
Like its model in Florida, Worldpark was a multistory structure. Under the main concourses was a subterranean city where the support services operated, and the cast members changed into costumes and ate their lunches, and where he was able to get people and things from place to place quickly and unseen by the guests in the sunlight. Running it was the equivalent of being mayor of a not-so-small city – harder, actually, since he had to make sure that everything worked all the time, and that the cost of operations was always less than the city’s income. That he did his job well, actually about 2.1 percent better than his own pre-opening projections, meant that he had a sizable salary, and that he’d earned the $1,000,000 bonus that had been delivered to him only five weeks earlier. Now, if only his kids could get used to the local schools. . . .
Even as an object of hatred, it was breathtaking. It was a small city, Andre saw, the construction of which had cost billions. He’d lived through the indoctrination process in the local “Worldpark University,” learned the absurd ethos of the place, learned to smile at everything and everybody. He’d been assigned, fortuitously, to the security department, the notional Worldpark Policia, which meant that he wore a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers with a vertical blue stripe, carried a whistle and a portable radio, and spent most of his time telling people where the restrooms were, because Worldpark needed a police force about as much as a ship needed wheels. He’d gotten this job because he was fluent in three languages, French, Spanish, and English, and thus could be helpful to the majority of the visitors – “guests” – to this new Spanish city, all of whom needed to urinate from time to time, and most of whom, evidently, lacked the wit to notice the hundreds of signs (graphic rather than lettered) that told them where to go when the need became overwhelming. Esteban, Andre saw, was in his usual place, selling his helium filled balloons. Bread and circuses, they both Ought. The vast sums expended to build this place-and or what purpose? To give the children of the poor and working classes a brief few hours of laughter before they returned to their dreary homes? To seduce their parents into spending their money for mere amusement? Really, the purpose of the place was to enrich further the Arab investors who’d been persuaded to spend so much of their oil money here, building this fantasy city. Breathtaking, perhaps, but still an object of contempt, this icon of the unreal, this opiate for the masses of workers who had not the sense to see it for what it was. Well, that was the task of the revolutionary elite.