The Icarus Agenda (43 page)

“Let’s see. My son was married in Paris when I broke my leg and couldn’t attend, and my daughter eloped with that charming helium-head who makes far more money than he deserves writing those films I don’t understand—so it must have been in ’45 when I got back from the war. St. John the Divine, of course.
She
made me go when all I wanted to do was get her undressed.”

“Oh, you’re outrageous! I don’t believe you for a minute.”

“You’d be wrong.”

“He could be dangerous,” said Mandel, suddenly changing the subject and reverting to Evan Kendrick. Winters understood; his old friend had been talking but he had also been thinking.

“In what way? Everything we’ve learned about him—and I doubt there’s much more to know—would seem to negate any obsession for power. Without that, where’s the danger?”

“He’s fiercely independent.”

“All to the good. He might even make a fine President. No ties to the tub-thumpers, the yea-sayers and the sycophants. We’ve both seen him blow the first category away; the rest are easier.”

“Then I’m not being clear,” said Mandel. “Because it’s not yet clear to me.”

“Or I’m being stupid, Jacob. What are you trying to say?”

“Suppose he found out about us? Suppose he learned he was code name Icarus, the product of Inver Brass?”

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s not the question. Leap over the impossibility. Intellectually—and the young man has an intellect—what would be his response? Remember now, he’s fiercely independent.”

Samuel Winters brought his hand to his chin and stared out the window overlooking the street. And then his gaze shifted to the portrait of his wife. “I see,” he said, uncertain images coming into focus from his own past. “He’d be furious. He’d consider himself part of a larger corruption, irrevocably tied to it because he was manipulated. He’d be in a rage.”

“And in that rage,” pressed Mandel, “what do you think he would do? Incidentally, exposing us in the long run is irrelevant. It would be like the rumors of the Trilateral Commission promoting Jimmy Carter because Henry Luce put an obscure governor of Georgia on the cover of
Time
. There was more truth than
not in those rumors, but nobody cared.… What
would
Kendrick do?”

Winters looked at his old friend, his eyes widening. “My God,” he said quietly. “He’d run in disgust.”

“Does that sound familiar, Samuel?”

“It was so many years ago … things were different—”

“I don’t think they were that different. Far better than now, actually, not different.”

“I wasn’t in office.”

“It was yours for the taking. The brilliant, immensely wealthy dean from Columbia University whose advice was sought by succeeding presidents and whose appearances before the House and Senate committees altered national policies.… You were tapped for the governorship of New York, literally being swept into Albany, when you learned only weeks before the convention that a political organization unknown to you had orchestrated your nomination and your inevitable election.”

“It was a total shock. I’d never heard of it or them.”

“Yet you presumed—rightly or wrongly—that this silent machine expected you to do its bidding and you fled, denouncing the whole charade.”

“In disgust. It was against every precept of an open political process I’d ever advocated.”

“Fiercely independent,” added the stockbroker. “And what followed was a power vacuum; there was political chaos, the party in disarray. The opportunists moved in and took over, and there were six years of draconian laws and corrupt administrations from the lower to the upper Hudson.”

“Are you blaming me for all that, Jacob?”

“It’s related, Samuel. Thrice Caesar refused the crown and all hell broke loose.”

“Are you saying that Kendrick might refuse to assume the office presented to him?”

“You did. You walked away in outrage.”

“Because people unknown to me were committing enormous sums of money, propelling me into office. Why? If they were genuinely interested in better government and not private interest, why didn’t they come forward?”

“Why don’t we, Samuel?”

Winters looked hard at Mandel, his eyes sad. “Because we’re playing God, Jacob. We must, for we know what others don’t know. We know what will happen if we don’t proceed our way. Suddenly the people of a great republic don’t have a president
but a king, the emperor of all the states of the union. What they don’t understand is what’s behind the king. Those jackals in the background can only be ripped out by replacing him. No other way.”

“I understand. I’m cautious because I’m afraid.”

“Then we must be extraordinarily careful and make certain Evan Kendrick never learns about us. It’s as simple as that.”

“Nothing’s simple,” objected Mandel. “He’s no fool. He’s going to wonder why all the attention is raining down on him. Varak will have to be a master scenarist—each sequence logically, unalterably leading to the next.”

“I wondered, too,” admitted Winters softly, once again glancing at the portrait of his late wife. “Jennie used to say to me, ‘It’s too easy, Sam. Everyone else is out there busting his britches to get a few lines in the newspapers and you get whole editorials praising you for things we’re not even sure you did.’ It’s why I started asking questions, how I found out what had happened, not who but
how
.”

“And then you walked away.”

“Of course.”

“Why? I mean really,
why
?”

“You just answered that, Jacob. I was outraged.”

“Despite everything you might have contributed?”

“Well, obviously.”

“Is it fair, Samuel, to say you were not gripped by the fever to
win
that office?”

“Again, obviously. Whether admirable or not, I’ve never had to win
anything
. As Averell once said, ‘Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve not had to depend on my current job to eat.’ That sums it up, I guess.”

“The fever, Samuel. The fever you never felt, the hunger you never had must somehow grip Kendrick. In the final analysis, he has to want to win, desperately
need
to win.”

“The fire in the belly,” said the historian. “We all should have thought of it first, but the rest of us simply assumed he’d leap at the opportunity. God, we were
fools
!”

“Not ‘the rest of us,’ ” protested the stockbroker, holding up the palms of his hands. “I didn’t think about it until I walked into this room an hour ago. Suddenly the memories came back, memories of you and your—fierce independence. From being the bright hope, an extraordinary asset, you became a morally outraged liability who walked away and made room for all the sleazeballs in and out of town.”

“You’re hitting home, Jacob.… I should have stayed, I’ve known it for years. My wife in a fit of anger once called me a ‘spoiled Goody Two-Shoes.’ She claimed, like you, I think, that I could have prevented so much, if I accomplished nothing else.”

“Yes, you could have, Samuel. Harry Truman was right, it’s the leaders who shape history. There would have been no United States without Thomas Jefferson, no Third Reich without Adolf Hitler. But no man or woman becomes a leader unless he or she wants to. They’ve got to have a burning need to get there.”

“And you think our Kendrick lacks it?”

“I suspect he does. What I saw on that television screen, and what I saw five days ago during the committee hearing, was an incautious man who didn’t give a damn whose bones he rattled because he was morally outraged. Brains, yes; courage, certainly; even wit and appeal—all of which we agreed had to be part of the ideal composite we sought. But I also saw a streak of my friend Samuel Winters, a man who could walk away from the system because he didn’t have the fever in him to go after the prize.”

“Is that so bad, Jacob? Not with regard to me—I was never that important, really—but is it so healthy for all officeseekers to be on fire?”

“You don’t turn over the store to part-time management, not if it’s your major investment. The people rightly expect a fulltime landlord, and they sense it when the call isn’t basically there, aggressively there. They want their money’s worth.”

“Well,” said Winters, his tone mildly defensive. “I believe the people were not totally unimpressed with me, and I wasn’t burning up with fever. On the other hand, I didn’t make too many gaffes.”

“Good Lord, you never had the chance to. Your campaign was a television blitzkrieg with some of the best photography I’ve ever seen, your handsome countenance a decided asset, of course.”

“I had three or four debates, you know.… Three actually.…”

“With warthogs, Samuel. They were buried by congenial class—the people love that. They never stop searching the heavens, now the television screens, for that king or that prince to come along and show them the way with comforting words.”

“It’s a goddamned shame. Abraham Lincoln would have been considered an awkward hick and stayed in Illinois.”

“Or worse,” said Jacob Mandel, chuckling. “Abraham the Jew in league with the anti-Christs, sacrificing Gentile infants.”

“And when he grew the beard, absolute confirmation,” agreed Winters, smiling and getting out of his chair. “A drink?” he asked, knowing his friend’s answer and heading for the bar beneath a French tapestry on the right wall.

“Thank you. The usual, please.”

“Of course.” The historian poured two drinks in silence, one bourbon, one Canadian, both with ice only. He returned to their chairs and handed the bourbon to Mandel. “All right, Jacob. I think I’ve put it all together.”

“I knew you could pour and think at the same time,” said Mandel, smiling and raising his glass. “Your health, sir.”

“
L’chaim
,” replied the historian.

“So?”

“Somehow, some way, this fever you speak of, this need to win the prize, must be instilled in Evan Kendrick. Without it he’s not credible and without
him
Gideon’s mongrels—the opportunists and the fanatics—move in.”

“I believe that, yes.”

Winters sipped his drink, his eyes straying to a Gobelin tapestry. “Philip and the knights at Crécy weren’t defeated by the English bowmen and the Welsh long knives alone. They had to contend with what Saint-Simon described three hundred years later as a court bled by the ‘vile bourgeois corrupters.’ ”

“Your erudition is beyond me, Samuel.”

“How do we
instill
this fever in Evan Kendrick? It’s so terribly important that we do. I see it so clearly now.”

“I think we start with Milos Varak.”

Annie Mulcahy O’Reilly was beside herself. The standard four telephone lines in the congressional office were usually used for outgoing calls; this particular congressman did not normally receive many incoming ones. Today, however, was not only different, it was
crazy
. In the space of twenty-four hours, the smallest, most underworked staff on the Hill became the most frenzied. Annie had to call her two file clerks, who
never
came in on Monday (“Come on, Annie, it ruins a decent weekend”), to get their bouffant heads down to the office. She then reached Phillip Tobias, the bright if frustrated chief aide, and told him to forget his tennis game and drag his promotional ass downtown or she’d kill him. (“What the hell happened?” “You didn’t see the Foxley show yesterday?” “No, I was sailing. Why should I have?” “
He
was on it!” “
What?
That can’t
happen
without my
approval
!” “They must have called him at home.” “The son of
a bitch never
told
me!” “He didn’t tell me, either, but I saw his name in the
Post
’s late listings.” “
Jesus!
Get me a tape, Annie!
Please!
” “Only if you come down and help us man the phones, dearie.” “
Shit!
” “I’m a lady, you prick. Don’t talk to me that way.” “I’m sorry, I’m
sorry
, Annie!
Please
. The
tape
!”)

Finally, and only because she was desperate, and only because her husband, Patrick Xavier O’Reilly, had Mondays off because he worked the high-crime shift on Saturdays, she called the two-toilet Irish detective and told him that if he did not come down to help out she’d file a complaint against him for rape—which was only wishful thinking, she added. The only person she was unable to reach was the congressman from Colorado’s Ninth District.

“I am so very, very sorry, Mrs. O’Reilly,” said the Arab husband of the couple who took care of Kendrick’s house, and who Annie suspected was probably an unemployed surgeon or an ex-university president. “The Congressman said he would be away for a few days. I have no idea where he is.”

“That’s a lot of
crap
, Mr.
Sahara
—”

“You flatter me with dimensions, madame.”

“That,
too
! You reach that horned-toad servant of the public and tell him we’re going
ape-shit
down here! And it’s all because of his appearance on the Foxley show!”

“He was remarkably effective, was he not?”

“
You
know about it?”

“I saw his name in the
Washington Post
’s late listings, madame. Also in the
Times
of New York and Los Angeles, and the
Chicago Tribune
.”

“
He
gets all those papers?”

“No, madame, I do. But he’s perfectly welcome to read them.”

“Glory be to God!”

The pandemonium in the outside office had become intolerable. Annie slammed down the phone and ran to her door; she opened it, astonished to see Evan Kendrick and her husband shoving their way through a crowd of reporters, congressional aides and various other people she did not know. “Come in
here
!” she yelled.

Once inside the secretarial office and with the door closed, Mr. O’Reilly spoke. “I’m her Paddy,” he said, out of breath. “Nice to meet you, Congressman.”

“You’re my blocking back, pal,” replied Kendrick, shaking hands and quickly studying the large broad-shouldered, redhaired
man with a paunch four inches larger than his considerable height should permit, and a vaguely florid face that held a pair of knowing, intelligent green eyes. “I’m grateful we got here at the same time.”