The Apocalypse Watch (25 page)

As he sat at his desk, ruminating over his past, he tried to coldly objectify, searching areas where his actions might call into question his ethics or morality. In the early days, overworked and vulnerable, he had had several affairs, but they were discreet and only with women who were his peers, as eager as he was to maintain the discretion. He was a tough negotiator in business, always using the tools of advantage by researching, even creating what his adversaries wanted, but his integrity had never been doubted.… What in
hell
was the Bureau doing?

It had begun only minutes ago when his secretary buzzed him. “Yes?”

“A Mr. Roger Brooks from Telluride, Colorado, on the line, sir,” said his secretary.

“Who?”

“A Mr. Brooks. He said he went to high school with you in Cedaredge.”

“My God, Brooksie! I haven’t thought of him in years. I heard he owns a ski resort somewhere.”

“They ski in Telluride, Senator.”

“That was it. Thank you, all-knowing one.”

“Shall I put him through?”

“Sure.… Hello, Roger, how
are
you?”

“Fine, Larry, it’s been a long time.”

“At least thirty years—”

“Well, not quite,” Brooks contradicted gently. “I headed up your campaign here eight years ago. The last election you didn’t really need one.”

“Christ, I’m sorry! Of course, I remember now. Forgive me.”

“No forgiveness required, Larry, you’re a busy guy.”

“How about you?”

“Built four additional runs since then, so you could say I’m surviving pretty well. And the summer backpackers are growing faster than we can cut new trails. ’Course the ones from the East want to know why we don’t have room service in the woods.”

“That’s good, Rog! I’ll use it the next time I’m debating one of my distinguished colleagues from New York. They want room service for everyone on welfare.”

“Larry,” said Roger Brooks, his tone of voice altered, serious. “The reason I’m calling is probably because we went to school together and I ran that campaign down here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either, but I knew I had to call you in spite of the fact that I swore I wouldn’t. Frankly, I didn’t like the son of a bitch; he talked quietly, like he was my best friend and was telling me the secrets of King Tut’s tomb, all the while saying it was for your own good.”

“
Who?
”

“Some guy from the FBI. I made him show me his ID and it was for real. I came damn near throwing him the hell out of here, then I figured I’d better learn what his grief was, if only to let you know.”

“What was it, Roger?”

“Nuts, that’s what it was. You know how some of the press paint you, like they did old Barry G. in Arizona? The nuclear freak who’d blow us to hell, the downtrodder of the downtrodden, all that crazy stuff?”

“Yes, I do. He survived it with honor and so will I. What did the Bureau man want?”

“He wanted to know if I’d ever heard you express sympathy for—get this—‘Fascist causes.’ If maybe at one time or another you might have indicated that you thought Nazi Germany had certain justifications for what they did that led to the war.… I tell you, Larry, by then my blood was boiling hot, but I kept cool and just told him that he was way off base. I brought up the fact that you were decorated in Korea, and you know what the bastard said?”

“No, I don’t, Roger. What did he say?”

“He said, and he said it with kind of a smirk: ‘But that was against the Communists, wasn’t it?’ Shit, Larry, he was trying to build a case without a case!”

“The Communists being an anathema to Nazi Germany, is that what you gathered?”

“Hell, yes. And that kid wasn’t old enough to know where Korea is, but he was smooth—
Jesus
, was he wrapped tight, and spoke like a benevolent angel. All innocence and sweet talk.”

“They’re using their best men,” said Roote softly, staring down at his desk. “How did the conversation end?”

“Oh, upbeat, let me tell you. He made it clear that his confidential information was obviously wrong, very wrong, and the investigation would stop then and there.”

“Which means it’s just begun.” Lawrence Roote picked up a pencil and cracked it with his left hand. “Thanks, Brooksie, thank you more than I can say.”

“What’s going on, Larry?”

“I don’t know, I
really
don’t know. When I find out, I’ll call you.”

Franklyn Wagner, anchorman for MBC News, the most-watched evening news program in the country, sat in his dressing room rewriting much of the copy he would recite in front of the cameras in forty-five minutes. There was a knock on his door and he casually called out, “Come in.”

“Hi there, Mr. Sincere,” said Emmanuel Chernov, chief producer of network news, walking inside and shutting the door; he crossed to a chair and sat down. “You got problems with the words again? I hate to repeat myself, but it’s probably too late to change the TelePrompTers.”

“And to repeat myself, that won’t be necessary. None of this would be necessary if you hired writers who could spell the word
journalism
, or even knew its basic precepts.”

“You print-types, or should I say, you refugees from print who can now afford joints in the Hamptons with swimming pools, always complain.”

“I went to the Hamptons once, Manny,” said the handsome,
silver-haired Wagner while continuing to edit the sheets of copy, “and I’ll tell you why I won’t go there again. Do you want to hear?”

“Sure.”

“The beaches are filled with people of both sexes, either very thin or very fat, who walk up and down the sand carrying galleys to prove that they’re writers. Then at night they gather together in candlelit cafés to extol their unprintable scribblings and exercise their egos at the expense of unwashed publishers.”

“That’s pretty heavy, Frank.”

“It’s pretty damned accurate. I grew up on a farm in Vancouver where, if the Pacific winds brought in sand, it meant the crops wouldn’t grow.”

“That’s kind of a leap, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps, but I can’t stand writers, on television or otherwise, who let the sand pile up between the words.…
There
, I’m finished. If there aren’t any newsbreaks, we’ll have a relatively literate broadcast.”

“Nobody can say you’re humble, Mr. Sincere.”

“I don’t pretend to be. And, speaking of humility, to which you’re uniquely entitled, why are you here, Manny? I thought you delegated all criticisms and network objections to our executive producer.”

“This goes beyond that, Frank,” said Chernov, his eyes heavy-lidded, sad. “I had a visitor today, this afternoon, a fellow from the FBI, who, God knows, I couldn’t ignore, am I right?”

“So far. What did he want?”

“Your head, I think.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re Canadian, right?”

“I am, indeed, and proud of it.”

“When you were in that university, the … the …”

“University of British Columbia.”

“Yeah, that one. Did you protest the Vietnam War?”

“It was a United Nations ‘action,’ and, yes, I opposed it vociferously.”

“You refused to serve?”

“We were not obligated to serve, Manny.”

“But you didn’t go.”

“I wasn’t asked to and if I had been, I wouldn’t have.”

“You were a member of the Universal Peace Movement, is that correct?”

“Yes, I was. Most of us, not all, of course, were.”

“Did you know that Germany was one of the sponsors?”

“The
young
people of Germany, student organizations, certainly not the government. Bonn is prohibited from engaging in armed conflicts or even parliamentary discussions of the issues. Their surrender codified neutrality. Good God, despite your title, don’t you know anything?”

“I know that a lot of Germans were part of the Universal Peace Movement, and you were a member in pretty obvious good standing. ‘Universal Peace’ could have another meaning, like Hitler’s ‘Peace Through Universal Might and Moral Strength.’ ”

“Are you playing paranoid
Hebrew
, Manny? If so, I should remind you that my wife’s mother was Jewish, which is apparently more important than if her father were. Therefore, my children, by extension, are hardly Aryan. Beyond that irrefutable fact, which disqualifies me from being part of the Wehrmacht, the German government had nothing to do with the U.P.M.”

“Still, the German influence was pretty damned apparent.”

“Guilt, Manny, profound guilt was the reason. What the hell are you trying to say?”

“This FBI man, he wanted to know if you had any ties with the new political movements in Germany. After all, Wagner is a German name.”

“I don’t
believe
this!”

Clarence “Clarr” Ogilvie, retired chairman of the board of Global Electronics, drove his restored Duesenberg off the Merritt Parkway at the Greenwich, Connecticut, exit nearest his home, or estate, as the press sarcastically called it. In his family’s wealthier days, before the ’29 crash, three acres of land with a normal-size pool and no tennis court or stables would have hardly constituted an estate.
However, because he had ‘come from money,’ he was somehow an object of scorn, as if he had chosen to be born rich, and his accomplishments were therefore deemed meaningless, merely the products of high-priced public relations which he obviously could afford.

Forgotten, or, to be less charitable, purposefully overlooked, were the years he had spent, twelve to fifteen hours a day, turning an only marginally profitable family company into one of the most successful electronics firms in the country. He had graduated from M.I.T. in the late forties, an advocate of the new technologies, and when he came into the family business, he had instantly recognized that it was a decade behind the times. He let go virtually the entire executive hierarchy, providing all with pensions he hoped he could afford, and replaced them with like-minded, computer-oriented young bulls—and cows—for he hired by talent, not gender.

By the middle fifties the technological advances his teams of long-haired, jean-clad, pot-smoking innovators came up with had caught the attention of the Pentagon—with a shock and a thud. The patience of the sharply pressed “uniforms” was sorely tried by the despised, ill-kempt “beards” and “miniskirts” who casually placed their feet on polished tables or buffed their fingernails during conferences while they patiently explained the new technology. But their products were irresistible and the nation’s armed might was substantially increased; the family business went global.

All that was yesterday, thought Clarr Ogilvie as he threaded through the backcountry roads that led to his house. Today was a day he never in his wildest nightmares had thought could come to pass. He realized that he had never been the most popular player in the so-called military-industrial complex but this was beyond the pale.

In short words, he had been labeled a potential enemy of his country, a closet zealot who supported the aims of a growing Fascist—
Nazi
—movement in Germany!

He had driven into New York to see his attorney and good friend, John Saxe, who said over the phone that it was an emergency.

“Did you supply a German firm called Oberfeld with electronic equipment that involved satellite transmissions?”

“Yes, we did. Cleared by F.T.C., the export boys, and the State Department. No end-user contract was necessary.”

“Did you know who Oberfeld was, Clarr?”

“Only that they paid their bills promptly. I just told you, they were cleared.”

“You never examined their, let’s say, their industrial base, their business objectives?”

“We understood their desire to expand electronically, their specifications. Anything else was up to Washington’s export controls.”

“That’s our out, naturally.”

“What are you talking about, John?”

“They’re Nazis, Clarr, the new generation of Nazis.”

“How the hell would
we
know that if Washington
didn’t
?”

“That’s our defense, of course.”

“Defense against what?”

“Some may claim that you knew what Washington didn’t know. That you willfully, knowingly, supplied a bunch of Nazi revolutionaries with the latest technological communications equipment.”

“That’s
insane
!”

“It may be the case we have to fight.”

“For Christ’s sake,
why
?”

“Because you’re on a list, Clarr, that’s what I’ve been told. Also, you’re not universally loved. Frankly, I’d get rid of that Duesenberg of yours.”

“What? It’s a classic!”

“It’s a German car.”

“The
hell
it is! The Duesenbergs were American, built mostly in Virginia!”

“Well, the name, you understand.”

“No, I don’t understand a goddamned thing!”

Clarence “Clarr” Ogilvie pulled into his driveway, wondering what he could possibly say to his wife.

*   *   *

The elderly man with the shaved head and the thick tortoiseshell glasses that magnified his eyes stood thirty feet from the line of passengers validating their departures on Lufthansa Flight 7000 to Stuttgart, Germany. As each produced his or her passport, along with an airline ticket, the only pause in the procedure came when the clerks checked passports against an unseen computer screen on the left side of the counter. The bald man had been processed, his boarding pass in his pocket. He watched anxiously as a gray-haired woman approached a clerk and presented her credentials. Moments later he sighed audibly in relief; his wife walked away from the counter. They met three minutes later at a newspaper stand, both studying the displays of magazines, but neither acknowledging the other, except in whispers.

“That’s over with,” said the man in German. “We board in twenty minutes. I’ll be among the last, you be there among the first.”

“Aren’t you being overly cautious, Rudi? Our passports and the photographs show two people completely different from our true selves, if, indeed, anybody is remotely interested in us.”

“I prefer excessive caution to indifference in these matters. I’ll be missed in the morning at the laboratory—I may have been missed already if one of my colleagues has tried to reach me. We are approaching breakneck speed refining the fiber optics that will intercept international satellite transmissions regardless of frequencies.”