Interface

  “Not so fast, Ms. Richmond,” Lady Wilburdon said. “We are going to have a chat.”

  “I would like nothing better, but my schedule—”

  “Arrangements have been made,” Lady Wilburdon said firmly.

  On their way out the front doors they had to jump out of the way of an incoming gurney: the institute’s first patient, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been gutshot with a .357 Magnum.

  Eleanor’s advance person explained it to her in the motorcade. Eleanor’s next two engagements had both been cancelled at the last minute. She had a couple of free hours. Nature abhors a vacuum and Lady Wilburdon had rushed in to plug the gap. They would be having lunch at the Willard.

  It was a small lunch too—just Eleanor, Lady Wilburdon, and her secretary, Miss Chapman. Lady Wilburdon used both force of personality and sheer physical bulk to eject all of Eleanor’s hangers-on from the room. Then they sat at the table together and lunched on tiny sandwiches.

  “I should explain that I knew Bucky,” Lady Wilburdon said.

  “Bucky?”

  “Salvador. The fellow who was shot by the madman across the river and exploded in front of the sushi bar. It is tasteless, I know, but I have become inured.”

  “I didn’t know him myself,” Eleanor said. “All I know is that he ran the company that does media consulting for our campaign. And that Cy Ogle has taken over for him.”

  “Bucky was the very embodiment of low cunning,” Lady Wilburdon said. “Impressive in a superficial way. But flashy.” She said this word with the same intonation she might have used if she were calling him a child molester. “In a way it is surprising that the Network hired him. Normally we have higher standards. But we are in an age when high standards are no longer fashionable.”

  “Network? He worked for one of the television networks?”

  Lady Wilburdon rolled her eyes. “Certainly not. Not even Bucky would do that. You need to know about this, as you will be spending the next eight years—possibly the next sixteen—in a position of great responsibility.”

  “We have to win the election.”

  “You will,” Lady Wilburdon said. “We have solved the problem of elections.”

  It was somewhat later in the afternoon. Lady Wilburdon had dipped into a bottle of sherry and held forth at some length on the subjects of Bucky, Ogle, Cozzano, and the functioning of the PIPER 100. Eleanor listened politely, soaked it all up, and made up her mind that she would not try to figure out until later whether this woman was completely out of her mind or telling the truth.

  It would be easy enough to pass her off as a dingbat. But her words explained a lot. From time to time Eleanor would feel an uncomfortable shock of recognition as Lady Wilburdon’s explanations matched up perfectly with what she herself had noticed. Consciously she kept an open mind. Subconsciously she had long ago decided that everything Lady Wilburdon said was true.

  “If what you’re saying is true,” Eleanor said, “an unbelievable amount of money has been spent.”

  “It’s all relative,” Lady Wilburdon said. “It’s all part of a long-range strategy.”

  “How long-range?”

  “Centuries.”

  “Centuries?”

  “There are only five entities in the world with sufficient wisdom to pursue consistent strategies over periods of several centuries,” Lady Wilburdon said. “These entities are not national or governmental in nature—even the best governments are dangerously unstable and short-lived. Such an entity is self-preserving and self-perpetuating. A world war, or the rise and fall of an empire or an alliance such as the USSR or NATO, is no more serious, to it, than a gust of wind buffeting the sails of a clipper ship.”

  “What are these entities?” Eleanor said.

  “In no particular order, one is the Catholic Church. One is Japan—which is nothing more than a group of zaibatsus, or major industrial combines. The third is a loose network of shtetls. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, they forcibly realized the importance of long-range planning, and in the intervening years have accumulated formidable assets. The fourth one we don’t know much about; it seems to connect many of the recalcitrantly traditional cultures of the Third and Fourth Worlds and to be headquartered somewhere in Central Asia. And the fifth is the Network. It is an alliance of large investors, both individual and institutional, predominantly European and American. You might think of it as the legacy, the residue, of the East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the American railway companies, Standard Oil, and the technological empires of our time. It is the most decentralized of the five entities—really just an effort to pursue investments, and certain other activities, in a coordinated fashion. Before the war its funds were managed by a lovely Scottish gentleman who lived in an old castle near Chichester. Afterward it was moved to the interior of the States and placed in the hands of an American fellow, a mathematical prodigy who attended the Lady Wilburdon School for Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum.”

  “The Network owns Ogle Data Research?”

  “Yes.”

  “And by implication, Cozzano?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re saying that the Network is going to take over the United States?”

  “The Network wouldn’t want it,” Lady Wilburdon said. “Governments, as I mentioned, are dodgy. All the Network wants is to stabilize the return on its investment in the national debt.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying that the Network would put together this incredible conspiracy just to get a couple of extra points on a loan?”

  The idea did not seem troubling to Lady Wilburdon. She seemed a bit surprised that Eleanor didn’t accept it. “My dear lady,” she said, “do you have any idea how much money your government has borrowed?”

  “A lot,” Eleanor said. “Ten trillion dollars.” It was a figure she had to cite regularly during campaign debates.

  “Well, you certainly can’t expect to borrow that much money from someone without incurring certain obligations, can you?” Lady Wilburdon said, as if it were all perfectly obvious. And it was, in fact, perfectly obvious.

  “Of course not,” Eleanor said, “you’re right.”

  “When a business borrows money from a bank, and does so irresponsibly, and is profligate and incompetent, what happens?”

  “It goes bankrupt. And the bank takes it over.”

  “Yes. The bank simply wants what is best for the business. It gets rid of the dead wood, fires the miscreants who drove the business to ruin, cleans it out, and sets everything right, so that the business is once again able to meet its obligations.”

  “And I’m one of the people who is supposed to set everything right.”

  “You and Mr. Cozzano, yes. And I’m sure you’ll do a splendid job of it.”

  “You are? Are you kidding?”

  “Of course not. I’ve been following your career, Ms. Richmond. Everything you’ve been saying in the last year about the failure of American politics is correct,” Lady Wilburdon said. “Without going round and talking to them personally, I daresay that most of the people in the Network consider you something of a folk hero.”

  Eleanor’s mind was whirling, and not just because she had taken two glasses of sherry. She had to see Mary Catherine. And providentially, one of her assistants broke through and signaled it was time to go. Eleanor had been listening with such rapt attention that she had not moved for an hour. One of her legs had gone to sleep, and the sherry also had reduced her coordination. When she stood up, it showed.

  “You need to do some stretching exercises,” Lady Wilburdon said. “Take it from me—I travel even more than a presidential candidate.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Lady Wilburdon. Thank you for an illuminating chat.”

  “It was my pleasure, I assure you,” Lady Wilburdon said, seeing her to the elevators. Eleanor had now been enveloped by her campaign staff.

  “Good-bye,” Lady Wilburdon said, as the elevator arrived, “I should enjoy paying a cal
l on you at the Naval Observatory, if you would have me. I love telescopes.”

  fifty-three

  THE PRINCE of Darkness arrived at Dulles Airport at one P.M. on the ninth of October, in a chartered Learjet with the windows painted black. He was met on the end of the runway by a black limousine that gave the terminal building a wide berth as it swung onto the Dulles Access Road. The limousine made its way into the stream of traffic, headed directly in toward the District of Columbia, trailed by a dark sedan full of men in sunglasses and suits.

  Within half a mile the limousine had changed lanes all the way over to the left edge of the roadway and was traveling in excess of ninety miles per hour. In the back of that limousine, an astonishingly loud, grating voice was egging on the driver, like a hot poker shoving him in the ass. There were only two men in the vehicle, the driver and the passenger, they had been together for less than sixty seconds, and the driver was already fighting a nearly uncontrollable urge to pull onto the shoulder, vault the seat, and wrap his fingers around the Prince of Darkness’s neck.

  They were less than a mile from the airport when the limousine’s brake lights flared and it suddenly veered onto the shoulder. The black sedan grumbled to an emergency stop directly behind it, spraying gravel. The high-speed traffic in the left lane of the roadway veered, screeched, and honked, nearly rear-ending this strange little caravan.

  The door of the limousine had been flung open before the limo had come to a full stop. Jeremiah Freel, the Prince of Darkness, climbed out and jerked the driver’s side door open before the driver even had time to set the parking brake.

  “Out out out out!” he screeched in his terrible, grinding voice. People who had run afoul of the Prince of Darkness vied for ways to describe the sound of his voice: “like a cattle prod in the armpit,” one had said. Like snorting pure Mace from the can. Like putting a single crystal of Drano in the corner of each eye. Having a killer bee stuck in each ear.

  “Get out, you nigger!” Jeremiah Freel screamed at the driver, which was an interesting choice of words since the driver was a white boy.

  He was a white boy with a southern accent. A rural, uneducated southern accent. And as Freel had obviously figured out, simply by listening to this man say, “Good afternoon, sir,” the single most insulting thing you could call him was nigger. So he got out of that driver’s seat in a big hurry and drew himself up face-to-face with Freel, or chest-to-face, actually, since Freel was short enough to sleep comfortably on an ironing board.

  “You—” the driver began, but before he could get anything else out, one of the burly suits from the trailing vehicle had come up behind him, grabbed both of his elbows, and swung him away, shoving and dragging him onto the median strip.

  Which was fine with Jeremiah Freel. With the driver removed from his path, he made a direct line for the steering wheel of the limousine.

  He was blocked by three other men who had jumped out of the dark sedan and who were now standing on tiptoe, as close to him as they could get, spreading their jackets wide open like wings to form a pinstriped curtain that blocked all view of his face from the cars screaming down the roadway. It was imperative that no one recognize the face of Jeremiah Freel, which stared out from so many wanted posters in so many post offices that it had actually been made into a poster, popular in the dorm rooms of cynical college students.

  “Mr. Freel—” one of these men said, moving into position to block the door. The sentence ended there because Freel, taking advantage of the man’s spreadeagled posture, reached up with both hands, gripped the tips of the man’s nipples through his white linen shirt, twisted, and pulled. The man screamed, collapsed in on himself, and fell back against the side of the limousine. Instantly, Freel was sitting in the driver’s seat, the doors all closed and electrically locked. The rear tires of the limousine began to spin wildly in the gravel. One of the other guys in suits lunged forward, grabbed his stunned comrade by the necktie, and jerked him away from the side of the car as it peeled out, fishtailing, onto the road, nearly causing a chain reaction smashup in the three leftmost lanes.

  “Shit!” everyone was saying. Two of them ran back, jumped into the sedan, and took off, stranding the limo driver, the man who was trying to calm him down, and the man who had made the mistake of getting in Jeremiah Freel’s way, who now had a pair of symmetrically placed two-inch bloodstains soaking through his white shirt.

  “So that’s what tertiary syphilis does to a man,” said the driver of the sedan, screaming down the Dulles Access Road at ninety miles per hour in hot pursuit of the limousine. “They said he was an asshole but I had no idea.”

  “Shut up and drive,” said the one in the passenger seat. “You have any idea how badly we screwed this up? Anybody catches sight of his face and we’re finished.”

  They drove very fast, but they had a hard time catching up with Jeremiah Freel in his limousine. In theory the big limo was supposed to be the slower vehicle. The difference between them, though, was this: the Prince of Darkness was not afraid to ram. Not only was he not afraid to ram; he was practiced. Any vehicle in his lane not going as fast as he was got rear-ended and that was that. Lane changes were accomplished by force majeure. They passed at least three vehicles that had veered into the ditch or the median strip. In the end, the only way to catch up with Jeremiah Freel was to pull onto the shoulder and floor it. Which is pretty much what they did, though by the time they actually caught up with him, he was screaming across the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, vectored into the heart of the Capital like a poisoned dum-dum from a sniper’s rifle.

  “You know what he’s doing?” the driver said. “He’s going to the goddamn Watergate!”

  “Head him off,” the passenger said.

  Once they realized where Freel was going, they were able to do a bit of deft curb-hopping, lawn-driving, and zooming down oncoming lanes, and pull their sedan directly across Freel’s path just a few yards short of the entrance to the Watergate. Freel rammed them anyway, caving in the side of the sedan, but both of the occupants saw it coming and dove and rolled out of the other side of the car just before impact.

  The suit who had been sitting in the passenger seat pulled a gun out of his armpit and used the butt of the weapon to smash the driver’s-side window of the limousine. The black glass dissolved into tempered fragments held together by the plastic sheet that had been used to blacken the window. When this debris was pulled out of the way, Jeremiah Freel was exposed, slumped against the steering wheel with a big laceration across his forehead, blood streaming out and dripping off the horn button into his lap. He was barely conscious, mumbling deliriously.

  “Drive much?” he said. “Where’d you get your fucking license? Kmart? Get the fuck out of my way, asshole, I got an equalizer in the glove compartment and more lawyers than you’ve got friends.”

  They shoved Freel across the seat onto the passenger side and then climbed in after him. The driver backed the limousine away from the wrecked sedan. A steady wisp of steam was piping from its radiator but it was still drivable. The passenger wiggled his hands into a pair of latex gloves and then set about tying Jeremiah Freel up with plastic handcuffs. Only when he was finished with that did he begin applying direct pressure to Freel’s forehead.

  Waiting at a stoplight, the two men in suits exchanged looks and rolled their eyes at each other. “Campaign consultants,” the driver said, “gotta love ’em.”

  “Oh, this is a good one,” said the chairman of the Republican National Committee, inspecting a sheet of paper he had just pulled from a file folder marked FREEL. “During a campaign visit to Minot, North Dakota, you ran a school bus off a road, causing thirty-six injuries, ten of them serious. The parents sued you for a hundred million dollars and won.”

  “Fuck you,” Jeremiah Freel said. “Fuck your mother too.” Freel had a nice dark line of stitches across his forehead, tracing a long welt that perfectly matched the curve of the limousine’s steering wheel.

>   “When we add that to the libel and slander judgments from the last three presidential campaigns—let me see, those alone add up to almost another hundred million dollars, which you owe to a dozen and a half different people, including, by the way, myself. You owe me four million.”

  “Eat my shit,” Jeremiah Freel said.

  Several other distinguished-looking and well-dressed men were sitting around the conference table. They were in a suite in a very private hotel a few blocks north of the White House. They had rented a whole floor, covered the windows with black stuff, disabled the elevators, and posted guards with submachine guns by all the stairwells. Jeremiah Freel was sitting in a luxurious padded leather chair in the middle of the table. Standing behind him were two men with a combined weight of six hundred pounds, wearing latex gloves and clear plastic face shields.

  The other men sitting around the table were all glaring coldly at Freel. One by one, they began to raise their hands and speak up.

  “You owe me three million plus legal fees,” said the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

  “One point five,” said another man, holding up his hand.

  “Eight hundred thousand,” barked another man.

  “One point one.”

  “Half a mil and a printed apology in the Miami Herald.”

  “What the hell is this, a fucking star chamber?” Jeremiah Freel said. “Why don’t you just tell me what the hell you’re after?”

  “We’re after Cozzano,” the GOP chairman said.

  “Fine. You got him. He’s a dead man,” Freel said. “By the time I’m finished with that wop son of a bitch, he’ll curse his mother for ever having given birth to him. He won’t be able to cash a check north of the Equator. Children will spit on his knees. His dog will climb onto his bed in the middle of the night and try to tear his face off and he’ll beg for it to happen.”

  There was an awed silence in the room.

  “Don’t you want to hear what we are prepared to offer you in exchange for your services?” the Democratic chairman said uncertainly.