‘Sweetie!’ shouted Ardis Vanvlanderen, walking into the living room from the office she had made for herself from a guest room in San Diego’s Westlake Hotel.
‘What is it, babe?’ asked her husband, sitting in a velour armchair in front of a television set.
‘Your problems are over. Those zillions of millions are safe for the next five years! Keep building your missiles and super-duper sonics until the cows shit uranium… I mean it, lover, your worries are over!’
‘I know that, babe,’ said Andrew Vanvlanderen without moving, his eyes fixed on the screen. ‘I’ll see it and hear it any time now.’
‘What are you talking about?’ She stopped and stood motionless, staring down at her husband.
‘They’ve got to release it soon. They can’t keep it quiet much longer… Jesus, it’s been damn near twenty-four hours.’
‘I have no idea what that muddled mind of yours is conjuring, but I can tell you that Emmanuel Weingrass is on his way out. There was a certain doctor for hire. He’s been injected—’
‘He’s out now. So’s Kendrick.’
‘What?’
‘I couldn’t wait for you, lover—none of us could. There were better ways, more logical ways—expected ways.’
‘What the hell have you done?’
‘Given an aggrieved people the opportunity to avenge themselves on someone who screwed them to hell and back. I found the survivors. I knew where to look.’
‘Andy-boy,’ said Ardis, sitting down opposite her husband, her large green eyes fixed on his distracted face. ‘I repeat,’ she added quietly, ‘what have you done?’
‘Removed an obstacle that would have weakened the military strength of this country to an unacceptable degree—turning the most powerful giant of the free world into a pitiful dwarf. And in doing so cost me personally in the neighbourhood of eight hundred million dollars—and cost our group billions.’
‘Oh, my God… You couldn’t wait—you couldn’t wait. You dealt with the Arabs!’
‘Mr. President, I need these few days,’ pleaded Mitchell Payton, sitting forward on a straight-backed chair in the upstairs living quarters of the White House. It was one fifty-five in the morning. Langford Jennings sat in the corner of the couch dressed in pyjamas and a bathrobe, his legs crossed, a slipper dangling from one foot, his steady, questioning gaze never leaving the CIA director’s face. ‘I realize that by coming directly to you I’ve broken several hundred valid restrictions, but I’m as alarmed as I’ve ever been in my professional life. Years ago a young man said to his commander in chief that there was a cancer growing on the presidency. This is a far older man saying essentially the same thing, except that in this case any knowledge of the disease—if it exists, as I believe it does—has been kept from you.’
‘You’re here, Dr Payton,’ said Jennings, his resonant voice flat, the fear unmistakable. ‘Yes, Dr Payton—I’ve had to learn a few things quickly—because Sam Winters made it clear to me that if you said you were alarmed, most other men would be in shock. From what you’ve told me I understand what he means. I’m in shock.’
‘I’m grateful for an old acquaintance’s intercession. I knew he’d remember me; I wasn’t sure he’d take me seriously.’
‘He took you seriously… You’re sure you’ve told me everything? The whole rotten mess?’
‘Everything I know, sir, everything we’ve pieced together, admitting, of course, that I have no “smoking gun”.’
That’s not the most favourite phrase around these premises.’
‘In all candour, Mr. President, if I thought those words had any application whatsoever to these premises, I wouldn’t be here.’
‘I appreciate your honesty.’ Jennings lowered his head and blinked, then raised it, frowning, and spoke pensively. ‘You’re right, there’s no application, but why are you so sure? My opponents ascribe all manner of deceits to me. Aren’t you infected? Because looking at you and knowing what I know about you, I can’t imagine that you’re an ardent supporter of mine.’
‘I don’t have to agree with everything a man believes to think decently of him.’
‘Which means I’m okay but you wouldn’t vote for me, right?’
‘Again, may I speak in candour, sir? The secret ballot is sacred, after all.’
‘In all candour, sir,’ said the President, a slow smile creasing his lips.
‘No, I wouldn’t vote for you,’ answered Payton, returning the smile.
‘IQ problems?’
‘Good God, no! History shows us that an over-involved mind in the Oval Office can be consumed by an infinity of details. Above a certain level, an immensity of intellect is irrelevant and frequently dangerous. A man whose head is bursting with facts and opposing facts, theories and counter theories, has a tendency to endlessly debate with himself beyond the point where decisions are demanded… No, sir, I have no problem with your IQ, which is far more than sufficient unto the day.’
‘Is it my philosophy then?’
‘Candour?’
‘Candour. You see, I have to know right now whether I’m going to vote for you, and it hasn’t a damn thing to do with quid pro quo.’
‘I think I understand that,’ said Payton, nodding. ‘All right, I suppose your rhetoric does bother me at times. It strikes me that you reduce some very complicated issues to… to—’
‘Simplistics?’ offered Jennings quietly.
‘Today’s world is as complicated and tumultuous as the act of creation itself, however it came about,’ replied Payton. ‘Wrong moves by only a few and we’re back where we started, a lifeless ball of fire racing through the galaxy. There are no easy answers any longer, Mr. President… You asked for candour.’
‘I sure as hell got it.’ Jennings laughed softly as he uncrossed his legs and sat forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘But let me tell you something, Doctor. You try expounding on those complicated, tumultuous problems during an election campaign, you’ll never be in a position to look for the complex solutions. You end up bellyaching from the stands, but you’re not part of the team—you’re not even in the game.’
‘I’d like to believe otherwise, sir.’
‘So would I but I can’t. I’ve seen too many brilliant erudite men go down because they described the world as they knew it to be to electorates who didn’t want to hear it.’
‘I would suggest they were the wrong men, Mr. President. Erudition and political appeal aren’t mutually exclusive. Some day a new breed of politician will face a different electorate, one that will accept the realities, those harsh descriptions you mentioned.’
‘Bravo,’ said Jennings quietly as he leaned back on the couch. ‘You’ve just described the reason for my being who I am—why I do what I do, what I’ve done… All governing, Dr Payton, since the first tribal councils worked out languages over fires in their caves, has been a process of transition, even the Marxists agree with that. There’s no Utopia; in the back of his mind Thomas More knew that, because nothing is as it was—last week, last year, last century. It’s why he used the word Utopia—a place that doesn’t exist… I’m right for my time, my moment in the change of things, and I hope to Christ it’s the change you envisage. If I’m the bridge that brings us alive to that crossing, I’ll go to my grave a damned happy man and my critics can go to hell.’
Silence.
The once and former Professor Mitchell Jarvis Payton observed the most powerful man in the world, his eyes betraying mild astonishment. ‘That’s an extremely scholarly statement,’ he said.
‘Don’t let the word get out, my mandate would disappear and I need those critics… Forget it. You pass, MJ, I’m voting for you.’
‘MJ?’
‘I told you, I had to do some fast gathering and faster reading.’
‘Why do I “pass”, Mr. President? It’s a personal as well as a professional question, if I may ask it.’
‘Because you didn’t flinch.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You haven’t been talking to Lang Jennings, a farmer from Iowa whose family made a few bucks because his daddy happened to buy forty-eight thousand acres in the mountains that developers sold their souls for. You’ve been talking to the head boy of the Western world, the man who could take this planet right back to that ball of fire. If I were you, I’d be frightened confronting that fellow. Frightened and cautious.’
‘I’m trying not to be both, and I didn’t even know about the forty-eight thousand acres.’
‘You think a relatively poor man could ever be president?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Probably never. Power is to the rich, or the damn-near broke who haven’t a thing to lose and a lot of clout and exposure to gain. All the same, Dr Payton, you come here through a back door making an outrageous request, asking me to sanction the covert domestic activities of an agency prohibited by law from operating domestically. Further, and in the process, you want me to permit you to suppress extraordinary information involving a national tragedy, a terrorist massacre meant to kill a man the country owes a great deal to. In essence, you’re asking me to violate any number of rules vital and intrinsic to my oath of office. Am I right so far?’