Our man has done it. My appliances are ecstatic, for although they refused to commit themselves, they indicated that he could succeed. In their inanimate way they saw my vision.
The subject arrived here this morning under deep cover thinking that everything is finished, that his life will return to its abnormal normalcy, but he is wrong. Everything is in place, the record written. The means must be found and they will be found. Lightning will strike and he will be the bolt that changes a nation. For him it is only the beginning.
Book Two
Ultra Maximum Secure No Existing Intercepts Proceed
The means have been found! As in the ancient Vedic scriptures, a god of fire has arrived as a messenger to the people. He has made himself known to me and I to him. The Oman file is now completed. Everything! And I have obtained everything through access and penetration and I have given everything to him. He’s a remarkable man, as I realistically believe I am, and he has a dedication that matches my own.
With the file completed and entered in its entirety, this journal is finished. Another is about to begin.
* * *
Chapter 16
One year later. Sunday, 22 August 8:30 pm
One by one, like quiet, graceful chariots, the four limousines had deposited their owners in front of the marble steps leading to the pillared entrance of the estate on the banks of Chesapeake Bay. The arrivals were erratically spaced so that no sense of urgency was conveyed to suddenly curious onlookers, either on the highway or through the streets of the wealthy village in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was merely another subdued social gathering of the immensely rich, a common sight in this enclave of financial power brokers. A prosperous local banker might glance out of his window and see the glistening cars roll by and wish he were privileged to hear the men talk over their brandy or billiards, but that was the extent of his ruminations.
The immensely rich were generous to their suburban environs and the townspeople were richer for them. Crumbs from their tables provided frequent bonuses: there were the armies of domestic and gardening help whose relatives swelled the payrolls with never a complaint from the owners so long as the estates were shipshape for their return from London, Paris or Gstaad. And for those in the professions, there was the occasional stock market tip over a friendly drink at the commercially quaint tavern in the centre of the town. The bankers, the merchants and the perpetually awed residents were fond of their ‘lairds’; they guarded the privacy of these distinguished men and women with quiet firmness. And if guarding their privacy meant bending a few laws now and then, it was a small price to pay, and in a sense even moral when one considered how the gossip pedlars and the scandal sheets twisted everything out of all proportion to sell their newspapers and magazines. The ordinary man in the street could get roaring drunk or have a bloody fight with his wife or his neighbour, even be in a car accident, and no one took grotesque photographs of him to splatter all over the tabloids. Why were the rich singled out to provide lurid reading for people without an iota of their talents? The rich were different. They provided jobs and gave generously to charity and often made life just a little bit easier for those they came in contact with, so why should they be persecuted?
So went the townsfolk’s logic. It was a small matter for the local police to keep their blotters cleaner than they might be; it made for harmonious relations. It also made for a number of well-kept secrets in this privileged enclave where the estate on Chesapeake Bay was located.
But secrecy is relative. One man’s secret is another’s joke; a government file marked ‘classified’ has more often than not appeared in public print; and a prominent cabinet member’s sexual appetites are confidential fundamentally in terms of his wife finding out, as are hers regarding him. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die’ is a promise made by children of all ages who fail to keep their word, but where extraordinary death is concerned the circle of secrecy must be impenetrable. As it was this night when the five big cars passed through the village of Cynwid Hollow on their way to Chesapeake Bay.
Inside the immense house, in the wing nearest the water, the high-ceilinged library was ornately masculine. Leather and burnished wood predominated, while long windows overlooked the sculptured grounds outside illuminated by floodlights, and seven-foot-high bookshelves formed an imposing wall of knowledge wherever space allowed. Armchairs of soft brown leather, floor lamps at their sides, flanked the windows; a wide cherrywood desk stood at the far right corner of the room, a high-backed swivel chair of black leather behind it. Completing the typical aspects of such a room was a large circular table in the centre, a meeting ground for conferences best held in the security of the countryside.
With these items and this ambience, however, ordinary appearances came to an end and the unusual, if not the strange, became apparent. On the surface of the table, in front of each place, was a brass lamp, its light directed down on a yellow legal pad. It was as if the small, sharp circles of light made it easier for those at the table to rivet their concentration on whatever notes they made without the distraction of fully illuminated faces—and eyes—of those next to or opposite them. For there were no other lights on in the room; faces moved in and out of shadows, expressions discernible but not for lengthy examination. At the west end of the library, attached to the upper wall moulding above the bookshelves, was a long black tube that, when electrically commanded, shot down a silver screen that descended halfway to the parquet floor, as it was now. It was for the benefit of another unusual piece of equipment, unusual because of its permanence.
Built into the east wall beyond and above the table and electronically pushed forward into view, as now, was a console of audio-visual components that included projectors for immediate and taped television, film, photographic slides and voice recordings. Through the technology of a periscoped remote-controlled disk on the roof, the sophisticated unit was capable of picking up satellite and shortwave transmissions from all over the globe. At the moment, a small red light glowed on the fourth lateral; a carousel of slide photographs had been inserted and was ready for operation.
All these accoutrements were certainly unusual for such a library even to the rich, for their inclusion took on another ambience—that of a strategy room far from the White House or the Pentagon or the sterile chambers of the National Security Agency. One pressed button and the world, past and current, was presented for scrutiny, judgments rendered in isolated chiaroscuro.
But at the far right corner of this extraordinary room was a curious anachronism. Standing by itself several feet away from the book-lined wall was an old cast-iron stove, its flue rising to the ceiling. Beside it was a metal pail filled with coal. What was especially odd was that the stove was glowing despite the quiet whirr of the central air conditioning necessitated by the warm, humid night on Chesapeake Bay.
That stove, however, was intrinsic to the conference about to take place on the shores of Cynwid Hollow. Everything written down was to be burned, the notepads as well, for nothing said among these people could be communicated to the world outside. It was a tradition born of international necessity. Governments could collapse, economies rise and fall on their words, wars be precipitated or avoided on their decisions. They were the inheritors of the most powerful silent organization in the free world.
They were five.
And they were human.
‘The President will be re-elected by an overwhelming majority two years from this November,’ said the white-haired man with an aquiline, aristocratic face at the head of the conference table. ‘We hardly needed our projections to determine this. He has the country in the palm of his hand and, short of catastrophic errors, which his more reasonable advisers will prevent, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, ourselves included. Therefore we must prepare for the inevitable and have our man in place.’
‘A strange term, “our man”,’ commented a slender, balding man in his seventies with sunken cheeks and wide, gentle eyes, nodding his head. ‘We’ll have to move quickly. And yet again things could change. The President is such a charming person, so attractive, so wanting to be liked—loved, I imagine.’
‘So shallow,’ broke in a broad-shouldered, middle-aged black, quietly, with no animosity in his voice, his impeccably tailored clothes signifying taste and wealth. ‘I have no ill feeling towards him personally, for his instincts are decent; he’s a decent, perhaps a good man. That’s what the people see and they’re probably right. No, it’s not him. It’s those mongrels behind him—so far behind it’s likely he doesn’t know they exist except as campaign contributors.’