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Authors: Thomas Fleming

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Dick said nothing. He let Cliff think he agreed with Adrian Van Ness. In a certain sickening sense he did agree with him. Cliff accepted his silence as a final verdict. He poured himself a full water glass of Scotch.
“Okay,” he said. “I'll play your lousy game.”
The hearings resumed that afternoon with Cliff in the witness chair. The Creature began with a right cross. “Mr. Morris,” he said. “According to our records, you paid two hundred and twenty million dollars in bribes to interested parties overseas in the past three years, all carried on your books as extraordinary expenses. Could you explain what that term means?”
“Senator,” Cliff said. “I resent you calling those payments bribes. I see them under a variety of headings—gifts, payments for special services, agents' fees.”
The senators began going through the transactions, one by one, asking Cliff wryly, when he denied the bribe, exactly what he thought the word's
special services
or
agent
meant. The Japanese example was particularly ripe. He had paid millions to a front man for the ruling party, a minor right-wing political zealot, who had a record of virulent anti-Americanism—the last man that an American company would hire as an agent.
The solons wanted to know all about the special services for which Cliff had paid millions in the Mideast. “Were they the world's most expensive hoochy-koochy dancers?” one senator asked.
Cliff was soon begging for mercy. “I'm not an authority on linguistics,” he pleaded.
“But you're a walking encyclopedia on how to bribe people,” the Creature chortled. “You ought to write a book on it.”
The audience roared with glee. Another senator asked Cliff about the various code words used to conceal payments. The word for consultant was
haywire.
“Why did you choose that word?” the Creature asked.
“We let the computer pick it out at random,” Cliff said.
“I'm glad to hear at least your computers have a conscience,” another senator said. He outscored the Creature on the laugh meter with that one.
Cliff laboriously tried to explain that Buchanan only did what other plane makers, oil companies, ITT, did overseas. He blamed it all on the foreigners who expected the payments. A senator from Delaware asked him if he would condone stealing the designs of a competitor's plane because an opponent did it.
“That's against the law of the United States,” Cliff said. “As I've tried to tell you, there is no law prohibiting overseas payments—”
“Do you or don't you steal competitors' designs?” the Creature howled.
“No, sir,” Cliff said, as the galleries exploded with laughter again.
Cliff soon became a target of opportunity. “You've cheated people who trust you!” another senator thundered. “It reminds me of the crook who was asked why he did such a thing and he replied: who else can you cheat?”
Boffo. The audience laughed a full five minutes.
So it went for three gruesome days, while Mike Shannon and Dick Stone occasionally bowed their heads to avoid contemplating the butchery. Each night Cliff retreated to his hotel room and got drunk, rejecting their attempts to talk to him.
Frank Buchanan called Dick to offer his sympathy and support for Cliff. “Can't you stop it?” he said. “Why are you letting Adrian make him the fall guy? If it keeps up I'll fly in and volunteer to tell the whole truth.”
“Tell Frank it's for the good of the company,” Adrian said, when Dick reported the call.
With complete indifference to the careers they were destroying, the senators began reading into the record Cliff's correspondence with prominent politicians in Holland, Japan, Germany, Italy. Adrian decided this was going too far and told Buchanan's Washington attorneys, one of whom was a former secretary of state, to extract an intervention from the State Department that brought Cliff's ordeal to an abrupt halt. No less a personage than the incumbent secretary of state wrote a letter to the attorney general stating that any further disclosure of names would have “grave consequences for the United States.”
The infuriated senators turned on the other aircraft companies. They roasted Lockheed's executives over a slow fire. The treasurer of the company could not handle it and committed suicide rather than face the tormentors. As the other companies went on the coals, an embittered Cliff Morris flew back to California. Adrian invited Dick Stone to Charlottesville for the weekend. They sat on the porch in the twilight, gazing at Monticello in the distance.
“If all goes well, in about three months we'll persuade Cliff to resign,” Adrian said. “He'll go quietly, I hope—and the purification rite will be complete. We can go to the banks here and in London and get the money we need to keep us going until Ronald Reagan is elected. He's given me his solemn promise that he'll build the BX.”
Loathing was all Dick felt for Adrian. He could not disguise it. He did not even try. Adrian's face became florid, his eyes bulged with the intensity of the emotion that seemed to seize him from nowhere.
“You have to see the situation historically, Dick,” he said. “My great-grandfather,
Oakes Ames, was denounced by Congress in 1869—denounced by the same people who took his bribes to build the Union Pacific Railroad—which had a lot to do with winning the Civil War by keeping the West in the Union. Our situation is virtually identical. The same hypocrites who took our campaign contributions and our hospitality are trying to wreck us for five minutes' worth of publicity, without so much as a passing thought for the planes we're building to defend the country.”
It was the final performance of the student of history who had discovered Oakes Ames's fate on a night of anguish in London. But Dick Stone was too disgusted to understand, much less sympathize with Adrian Van Ness. Instead he heard it as one more betrayal of his shining expectations of the American world he had longed to join after World War II.
Dick realized Adrian had revealed more of himself to him than to anyone else in his life. Dick still refused to give him his approval. He did not care if it cost him the CEO's job. Adrian was unquestionably offering it to him. But Dick could not abrogate thirty years of friendship with Cliff, the memories of the
Rainbow Express.
He still sat in judgment on Adrian. He refused to forgive him for anything—selling out Frank and the Talus, destroying Billy McCall—and now, Cliff Morris.
“Cliff's not the greatest human being in the world but he deserves something better than this for a payoff. He evened things for that moment of panic over Schweinfurt with another twenty-four missions. I don't want the CEO's job on these terms, Adrian.”
An almost hysterical trill crept into Adrian's voice. “Cliff'll be well paid in retirement. Isn't that better than letting him wind up in some flophouse in downtown Los Angeles?”
“What if it doesn't work?” Dick said. “What if Reagan—presuming he gets elected—double-crosses us like every other president since Kennedy?”
“He might. But it's still the best gamble in town.”
They were betting the company again. Dick heard Buzz McCall telling Adrian you had to be a man to do that. He felt the lure, the excitement of risk beating in his blood. But he resisted surrendering on Adrian's terms.
“I think we've got to offer the banks, the stockholders, something more than a presidential promise, Adrian,” Dick said. “We've got to offer a vision—the plane of tomorrow. We're the ones who can build it. A hypersonic plane that can fly the Pacific in a couple of hours. That's the kind of plane company I want to run. If you make me CEO, that's what you're going to get.”
“Vision?” Adrian said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “We're playing for time.”
Dick ignored the pleading note in Adrian's voice. “I want seed money for the hypersonic plane as soon as possible. Our best bet is England. You've still got clout there. We can promise Rolls-Royce the engine contract as a quid pro quo.”
“England,” Adrian muttered. “I haven't been to England for a long time.”
“Why not?” Dick said in the same brutal uncaring voice.
“Memories,” Adrian said. “Memories I've never shared with anyone.”
“You'll have to face them for a week or two,” Dick said, utterly indifferent to what these memories might be.
“Could you come with me?” Adrian said. “I'll need a good numbers man.”
Dick Stone ignored the plea to share the English memories. He was in control now. Adrian had lost all his leverage—moral, psychological, financial. “I'll give you the numbers on paper,” Dick said. “I don't intend to let Cliff run the company without me around even for five minutes.”
Loathing.
Dick knew Adrian saw it on his face, heard it in his voice. He would have to live with it. He was living with Amanda's hatred. Dick was surprised when a plea for sympathy shredded Adrian's vaunted self-control.
“Why do I have to do all the dirty work?” he cried.
“I seem to recall you telling me it does a man no good to whine,” Dick Stone said.
Exhausted from a week of nonstop partying and negotiating in London, Adrian Van Ness dozed in the comfortable seat of his Argusair business jet. Instead of dreaming of executive power and glory, he was back on Shakespeare's Cliff at Dover, watching Bleriot fly the English channel. His mother and Goeffrey Tillotson were there, exclaiming in awe and admiration as the fragile plane clattered over their heads. Geoffrey Tillotson pointed at Dover Castle and began predicting that the plane would make forts and every other weapon of war obsolete.
He was interrupted in mid-sentence by a passionate kiss from Clarissa Ames Van Ness. She was announcing there was something more important than forts, armies, ships—and planes. They sank to the green grass, wrapped in each other's arms.
“Stop it!” Adrian cried. “Stop it or I'll jump!”
He teetered on the brink of the white chalk bluff. Below him tiny figures ran along the brown sand. Clarissa and Geoffrey paid no attention to him. They also ignored the stares and titters of the people around them.
“Stop
iiiiiiiit!”
Adrian cried and leaped into space, arms spread wide in a pathetic imitation of flight.
“Wake
up
.”
A hand shook Adrian Van Ness's shoulder. The chairman of the board of the Buchanan Corporation confronted his preternaturally youthful wife. “You were having a bad dream,” Amanda said. Her smile was pleased, even gloating.
The skin was still taut on Amanda's fine-boned high-cheeked face. Her auburn hair still retained its youthful color. No one could explain the phenomenon
to Adrian. Dr. Kirk Willoughby wondered if it had something to do with reduced brain activity. “Maybe it's thinking too much that wears us out,” Buchanan's medical director had said.
As usual Amanda was wearing a dress with a ruffled collar that concealed the scars she had inflicted on herself long ago. The collar combined with her heavy-lidded eyes, her sullen mouth, her slightly pointed chin, to justify the nickname Mike Shannon, the Buchanan Corporation's Washington manager, had given her: the Queen of Spades.
Adrian turned his head to escape his wife's nasty smile. Outside the small octagonal window beside his seat was a blue sky shot through with glaring light. The dulled roar of two Pratt & Whitney jet engines surrounded him. They were cruising at 547 miles an hour nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean. In front of them dozed two of the most powerful politicians in Washington. Adrian had taken them to London to support his plea for British cash to keep Buchanan airborne.
The stratosphere's blue dome arced upward in a slowly deepening hue until it became the velvety black of space. Adrian thought about the men Buchanan had sent up that arc in rocket planes and in jets, probing the boundaries of flight. In memory's glaring light, Billy McCall swaggered out to the needle-nosed rocket plane, White Lightning, his smile disguising his fear—and his rage. Billy had assumed this feat assured him mastery of the other vehicle on which he loved to soar—the American woman. But there he collided with unknowns—and unknown unknowns—he had never encountered in the sky.
Up here in the stratosphere, the upper air that pilots call light country, Adrian found it easy to contemplate the ironies of four and a half decades in the aircraft business. Irony seemed normal in the stratosphere. Below, in the troposphere, where humans lived their daily lives, detachment was not so simple.
Unfortunately, men and women had to live in the troposphere. Outside the Argusair's tilted windows, the stratosphere's temperature was 210 degrees below zero. Winds were tearing along the jet's wings and fuselage with the force of seven hurricanes. A man or woman could survive for only a few convulsive seconds in that icy oxygenless world. Inside the Argusair, thanks to the wizardry of late-twentieth-century technology, Adrian and Amanda and the two politicians sat in seventy-two-degree comfort and safety.
For a moment this physical security was unbearable to Adrian. What if he spun the aluminum wheel that locked the Argusair's pressurized cabin door and sent Amanda and the politicians and himself spewing into the stratosphere? The pilots, sealed in their cockpit, would survive to tell the story. Would Dick Stone—and one or two others—read about it with guilty eyes?
What nonsense.
The ironist at the center of Adrian's soul regained control of his vehicle. He smiled at his antagonistic wife. “I was dreaming we were back in California,” he said. “On the porch of Casa Felicidad. You were kissing me.”
“Why were you saying ‘stop it'?” Amanda asked.
“Frank Buchanan was there, shaking his fist at me.”
“You're lying, as usual,” Amanda said.
Needles of pain shot through Adrian's chest. For another moment the ironist's hands trembled on the controls. In recent years Adrian found it more and more difficult to laugh at the unrelenting hatred underlying Amanda's gibes. Last year he had developed angina pectoris, a convulsive knotting of the heart muscle, not unusual in men his age. Adrian wondered if it was a reaction to Amanda's malevolence. Kirk Willoughby, not a believer in psychosomatic illness, dismissed the idea.
Adrian gulped two pills, nitrogen and some exotic new anticoagulant his heart specialist had prescribed as an alternative to surgery. Lighting a small black Havana cigar against the doctor's orders, he checked to make sure the politicians were asleep and began dictating a letter to Dick Stone:
“I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer and half the bankers in London over the past seven days. At first none of them was inclined to lend us a cent in the aftermath of the bribery hearings. I told them we were about to purge ourselves by offering a public sacrifice for our sins. They instantly understood the charade—which they perform regularly for the electorate—and grew attentive. The senator and the congressman virtually guaranteed some kind of government loan to prevent our demise. With the chancellor, I put on my boldest face and told him if he wanted to get aboard a hypersonic plane, His Majesty's Government had better be prepared to commit a hundred million pounds a year to engine development at their sacred entity, Rolls-Royce. Let me state here my grave doubts about this terrifyingly risky improvisation you've added to my psychodrama. Nonetheless I hope we can raise a glass a year from now and say we're still glad we make planes for a living.”
“Have you ever been truly glad about anything?” Amanda said.
The question returned Adrian to the troposphere at sea level, to the real world of gains and losses, fears and compulsions, love and hate. In his weary mind Amanda again became a being with mysterious powers. Angina gouged his chest. He gulped more pills.
Did he deserve this legacy of stifled rage and morbid bitterness? For the thousandth time Adrian pondered the choices he had made and said no. He regretted many things but he refused to wear sackcloth and ashes for the past. At seventy-nine, he resolutely turned his face to the future and insisted that the past was another country, another time, another life, in which he had done nothing that his household gods disapproved.
Turbulence. Adrian buckled his seat belt. They were descending from light country through gumbo-thick clouds above Washington, D.C. He plugged the dictating machine into the radio telephone on the cabin wall and pressed a button. The letter whizzed to a satellite launched with a Buchanan rocket and down to Buchanan's private communications system. In five minutes typists at Buchanan's headquarters in El Segundo, California, would be transcribing it for Dick Stone's eyes.
The Argusair shivered and shook as she encountered the heavy lower air. In the seat in front of him, the senator from Connecticut awoke with a groan. He had gotten very drunk on their last night in London, after the final meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The exquisite Eurasian Adrian had imported from Singapore for his delectation had demanded double her usual fee.
Across the aisle from the senator, his counterpart on the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, a lean, intense Texan who could hold his liquor and his women, laughed and said: “Don't you throw up on me, you son of a bitch.”
Lately, the senator was drunk most of the time. Only two weeks ago, Adrian had visited him in his office at 9 A.M. and found him incoherent. The senator's wife had recently died and he was miserable without her. Adrian was still amazed by the unpredictable ways the goddess of fate threatened the survival of the Buchanan Corporation—and the United States of America.
Fortuna was the only deity forty years of making and selling planes had taught Adrian to worship. Fortuna and her tormented opposite, Prometheus, whose name meant forethought. From Prometheus had come the gift of fire that had enabled men and women to achieve dominion over the other creatures of the earth—and ultimately to soar above the world and look down on it with exalted or exultant or ironic eyes. In the Argusair's jet engines were raging flames, kindled, caged, controlled, and directed by man's transcendent mind.
Greek, he had become Greek, Adrian told himself, trying to twist his mind away from memories this visit to England had evoked. His British friends had dragged him to the Imperial War Museum, where they had put together a special exhibit to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of World War II. A good part of it was devoted to airpower, naturally. There was an entire room about the Nelson bomber and its accomplishments, with ample credit given to their American friends at Buchanan Aircraft. In one of the final photographs, Beryl Suydam stood beside the bomber she had flown to her doom. Her smile had turned. Adrian's chest into an excruciating knot. He had gulped pills for the rest of the day.
From the Argusair's cockpit came blond, hazel-eyed Elizabeth Hardy, their copilot. “We'll be landing in about five minutes. How is everyone back here?”
“Fine,” Adrian said.
Buchanan had gotten some good publicity (for a change) when they made Ms. Hardy (designer Sam Hardy's daughter) copilot of their number one business jet. But tonight, the sight of this beautiful young woman in her trim blue uniform stirred an enormous echoing regret in Adrian's soul. For a moment he felt hollow, a cave of winds through which meaningless words blew eternally.
Hardy returned to the cockpit. Adrian could hear the pilot, Jerry Quinn, talking to the air traffic controllers at National Airport, reporting altitude, airspeed, confirming their approach pattern. Visibility was low as usual in Washington, D.C. in December. The senator stirred restlessly. He was a nervous flier. Adrian remained calm. The Argusair had the best instrument landing system in the world, made by Buchanan's avionics division. It could land at midnight in
a Heathrow or Gatwick fog—and find the center of the runway every time.
With no warning the plane rolled forty degrees to the left and dove straight for the ground. The senator emitted a belch of terror and the congressman, who had flown bombers over Italy during World War II, yelled “Jesus Christ! Outside the window Adrian glimpsed the silver bulk of a commercial airliner hurtling past them in the murk.
Jerry Quinn pulled the Argusair out of its dive and gasped over the intercom: “That idiot should have been a thousand feet above us.”
Amanda'a smile mocked forethought; it derided his plane's infallible instrument landing system, its computers that made it almost impossible to stall, its aerodynamic grace. Again angina pierced Adrian's chest. He gulped pills and the pain subsided.
The Argusair's landing gear came down with a reassuring whir. They were in their final approach, the engines shrill as the fire scream became more audible at this lower speed.
Thud.
They were on the ground, the engines howling a final protest at their return to this alien element.
The senator and the congressman departed, thanking Adrian for their free ride across the Atlantic and the several thousand dollars' worth of hospitality the Buchanan Corporation had bestowed on them during their week in London. Adrian said he hoped to see them soon in Charlottesville.
Onto the plane bounded Mike Shannon, Buchanan's man in Washington. He kissed Amanda's hand and called her “Your Majesty”—unaware that there was a grisly irony in the title.
“Any
good
news?” Adrian said.
Shannon shook his head. “They're not going to let up on us. I think it's time to drop the guillotine on Cliff.”
Shannon was in on the purification ritual. But he did not like it. He and Dick Stone did not like it—or Adrian Van Ness. They had made that very clear. Adrian was indifferent to Shannon's opinion. But Dick Stone's judgment on him was like a hair shirt. Why couldn't he see how necessity and history exculpated everything?
With a final mock obeisance to Amanda, the Irishman vanished into the dusk. In ten minutes the Argusair was over Charlottesville for another landing, this time without heroics. While Elizabeth Hardy taxied to the terminal, Jerry Quinn emerged from the cabin, apologizing again for the near-miss over Washington, vowing to file a report with the FAA. He was an angular Californian, so brimming with vitality he made Adrian flinch.
“This is one terrific plane,” Quinn said. “She handles better than an F-Sixteen.”

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