The Icarus Agenda (37 page)

“What for?”

“I may be going into several projects and I want your advice.” It was another lie, a weaker one, so he added quickly, “Also my house has to be remodeled completely.”

“I thought you just built it.”

“I was involved with other things and wasn’t paying attention. The design’s terrible; I can’t see half the things I was supposed to see, the mountains and the lakes.”

“You never were any damned good reading exterior schematics.”

“I need you. Please.”

“I have business in Paris. I’ve got to send out money, I gave my word.”

“Send mine.”

“Like a million?”

“Ten, if you like. I’m here and not in some shark’s stomach.… I’m not going to beg you, Manny, but please, I really
do
need you.”

“Well, maybe for a week or two,” said the irascible old man. “They need me in Paris, too, you know.”

“Grosses will drop all over the city, I know
that
,” replied Evan softly, relieved.

“What?”

Fortunately the telephone rang, preventing Kendrick from having to repeat his statement. Their instructions had arrived.

“I’m the man you never met, never spoke to,” said Evan into the pay phone at Andrews Air Force Base in Virginia. “I’m heading out to the white water and the mountains, where I’ve been for the past five days. Is that understood?”

“Understood,” answered Frank Swann, deputy director of the State Department’s Consular Operations. “I won’t even try to thank you.”

“Don’t.”

“I can’t. I don’t even know your name.”

The figure sat hunched over the keyboard, his eyes alive, his mind alert, though his body was racked with exhaustion. He kept breathing deeply as if each breath would keep his brain functioning. He had not slept for nearly forty-eight hours, waiting for developments out of Bahrain. There had been a blackout, a suspension of communications … silence. The small circle of need-to-know personnel at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency may now themselves be breathing deeply, he considered, but not before. Instead, they had been holding their collective breath. Bahrain represented the irreversible, hard edge of finality, the ending unclear. Not any longer. It was over, the subject airborne. He had won. The figure proceeded to type.

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
 

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.

One by one, like quiet, graceful chariots, the five 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 limousines 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 exurban 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 as long as the estates were shipshape for their return from London, Paris or Gstaad. And for those on the upward scale of professions, there was the occasional stock tip over a friendly drink at the commercially quaint tavern in the center 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 peddlers and the scandal sheets twisted everything all out of 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 neighbor, or 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 drives 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 townspeople’s logic. It was a small accommodation for the local police to keep the 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 certain 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 limousines 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 cathedral 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 center, 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 that was part of the setting. 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 them or across from 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 molding above the book-shelves, 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 it was now, was a console of audiovisual 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 Franklin 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 whir 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 could 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 reelected 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 seventy-odd-year-old 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 toward him personally, for his instincts are decent; he’s a decent man, 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 he most likely doesn’t know they exist except as campaign contributors.”

“He doesn’t,” said the fourth member at the table, a rotund middle-aged man with a cherubic face and the impatient eyes of a scholar below a rumpled thatch of red hair; his elbow-patched tweed jacket labeled him an academic. “And I’ll bet ten of my patents that some profound miscalculation will take place before his first term is over.”

“You’d lose,” said the fifth member at the table, an elderly woman with silver hair and dressed elegantly in a black silk dress with a minimum of jewelry. Her cultured voice was laced with those traces of inflection and cadence often described as Middle Atlantic. “Not because you underestimate him, which you do, but because he and those behind him will consolidate their growing consensus until he’s politically invincible. The rhetoric will be slanted, but there won’t be any profound decisions until his opposition is rendered damn near voiceless. In other words, they’re saving their big guns for the second term.”

“Then you agree with Jacob that we have to move quickly,” said the white-haired Samuel Winters, nodding at the gaunt-faced Jacob Mandel on his right.

“Of course I do, Sam,” replied Margaret Lowell, casually smoothing her hair, then suddenly leaning forward, her elbows firmly on the table, her hands clasped. It was an abruptly masculine movement in a very feminine woman, but none at the table noticed. Her mind was the focal point. “Realistically, I’m not sure we can move quickly enough,” she said rapidly, quietly. “We may have to consider a more abrupt approach.”

“
No
, Peg,” broke in Eric Sundstrom, the red-haired scholar
on Lowell’s left. “Everything must be perfectly normal, befitting an upbeat administration that turns liabilities into assets. This
must
be our approach. Any deviation from the principle of natural evolution—nature being unpredictable—would send out intolerable alarms. That ill-informed consensus you mentioned would rally round the cause, inflamed by Gid’s mongrels. We’d have a police state.”