The Icarus Agenda: A Novel

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, it turned out that the Bally shoes had legitimate investments with the mozzarella, and the Pentagon logs showed that he’d been in a procurements conference until almost eleventhirty and, further, he had to catch a plane to Los Angeles at eight in the morning, so the one o’clock was explained.”

  “What about the briefcase?”

  “We couldn’t touch it. Much offense was taken in high dudgeon and lots of national security was thrown around. You see, someone made a phone call.”

  “But not to a lawyer,” said Evan. “Instead, to one Colonel Robert Barrish of the Pentagon.”

  “Bingo. Our noses were shoved in dirt for impugning the motives of a fine, loyal American who was helping to keep the great U.S. of A. strong. The boys were reamed good.”

  “But you think otherwise. You think a lot more than legitimate investments happened in that room.”

  “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s usually a duck. But not the pair of Bally shoes; he wasn’t a duck, he was a slap-tailed weasel whose name was stricken from our list of ducks.”

  “Thanks, Paddy.… All right, Mrs. O’Reilly, what do I say out there?”

  “Whatever I suggest our boy Phil Tobias will probably object to, you should know that. He’s on his way here.”

  “You called off his Monday-morning tennis? That’s courage beyond the call of duty.”

  “He’s sweet and he’s smart, Evan, but I don’t think his advice can help you now; you’re on your own. Remember, those vultures out there are convinced you’ve been grandstanding all last week—running a parlay from the committee hearing to the Foxley show. If you had ciphered out, no one would give a damn, but you didn’t. You took on a heavyweight and made him look like a fast-talking thug and that makes you news. They want to know where you’re going.”

  “Then what do you suggest? You know where I’m going, Annie. What do I say?”

  Ann Mulcahy O’Reilly looked into Kendrick’s eyes. “Whatever you want to, Congressman. Just mean it.”

  “The plaint of the swan? My swan song, Annie?”

  “Only you’ll know that when you get out there.”

  The uproar in the outer office was compounded by the sudden eruption of strobe flashes and the shifting, blinding floodlights of the television crews swinging their lethal mini-cams in the crowd. Questions were shouted and outshouted. Several of the more prominent newspeople were arrogantly demanding their rights for the closest, most prominent positions, so the congressman from Colorado’s Ninth District simply walked to his receptionist’s desk, moved the blotter and the telephone console aside, and sat on top. He smiled gamely, held up both hands several times and refused to speak. Gradually the cacophony subsided, broken now and then by a strident voice answered by the silent stare of mocked surprise on the part of the shocked representative. Finally, it was understood: Congressman Evan Kendrick was not going to open his mouth unless and until he could be heard by everyone. Silence descended.

  “Thanks very much,” said Evan. “I need all the help I can get to figure out what I want to say—before you say what you want to say, which is different because you’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Congressman Kendrick,” shouted an abrasive television journalist, obviously upset with his status in the second row. “Is it true—”

  “Oh, come on, will you?” broke in Evan firmly. “Give me a break, friend. You’re used to this, I’m not.”

  “That’s not the way you came over on television, sir!” replied the erstwhile anchorman.

  “That was one on one, as I see it. This is one against the whole Colosseum wanting a lion’s dinner. Let me say something first, okay?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t you last week, Stan—I think your name is Stan.”

  “It is, Congressman.”

  “You would have had my head along with your brandy.”

  “You’re very kind, sir.”

  “No kidding? It is a compliment, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Congressman, it is. That’s our job.”

  “I respect that. I wish to hell you’d do it more often.”

  “What?”

  “One of the most respected members of my staff,” continued Kendrick quickly, “explained to me that I should make a statement. That’s kind of awesome if you’ve never been asked to make a statement before—”

  “You did run for office, sir,” interrupted another television reporter, very obviously moving her blond hair into her camera’s focus. “Certainly statements were required then.”

  “Not if the incumbent represented our district’s version of Planet of the Apes. Check it out, I’ll stand by that. Now, may I go on or do I simply go out? I’ll be quite honest with you. I really don’t give a damn.”

  “Go on, sir,” said the gentleman often referred to as Stan-the-man, a broad grin on his telegenic face.

  “Okay.… My very valued staff member also mentioned that some of you, if not all of you, might be under the impression that I was grandstanding last week. ‘Grandstanding.’… As I understand the term, it means calling attention to oneself by performing some basically melodramatic act, with or without substance, that rivets the attention of the crowds watching—the grandstands—on the person performing that act. If that definition is accurate, then I must decline the title of grandstander because I’m not looking for anyone’s approval. Again, I really don’t care.”

  The momentary shock was dispelled by the Congressman’s palms pressing the air in front of him. “I’m quite sincere about that, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t expect to be around here very long—”

  “Do you have a health problem, sir?” shouted a young man from the back of the room.

  “Do you want to arm-wrestle?… No, I have no such problem that I’m aware of—”

  “I was a collegiate boxing champion, sir,” added the youthful reporter in the rear, unable to contain himself amid humorous boos from the crowd. “Sorry, sir,” he said, embarrassed.

  “Don’t be, young fella. If I had your talent, I’d probably challenge the head of Pentagon procurements and his counterpart in the Kremlin, and we’d solve everything the old-fashioned way. One challenger from each side and save the battalions. But no, I don’t have your talent and I also have no problems of health.”

  “Then what did you mean?” asked a respected columnist from the New York Times.

  “I’m flattered you’re here,” said Evan, recognizing the man. “I had no idea I was worth your time.”

  “I think you are, and my time’s not that valuable. Where are you coming from, Congressman?”

  “I’m not certain, but to answer your first question, I’m not sure I belong here. As to your second question, since I’m not sure I should be here, I’m in the enviable position of saying what I want to say without regard to the consequences—the political consequences, I guess.”

  “That is news,” said the acerbic Stan-the-man, writing in his notebook. “Your statement, sir.”

  “Thanks. I think I’d like to get it over with. Like a lot of people, I don’t like what I see. I’ve been away from this country for many years, and maybe you have to get away to understand what we’ve got—if only to compare it with what others haven’t got. There’s not supposed to be an oligarchy running this government and yet it seems to me that one has moved in. I can’t put my finger on it, or them, but they’re there, I know it. So do you. They want to escalate, always escalate, always pointing to an adversary who himself has escalated to the top of his economic and technological ladder. Where the hell do we stop? Where do they stop? When do we stop giving our children nightmares because all they hear is the goddamned promise of annihilation? When do their kids stop hearing it?… Or do we just keep going up in this elevator designed in hell until we can’t come down any longer, which won’t make much difference anyway because all the streets outside will be in flames.… Forgive me, I know
it’s not fair, but I suddenly don’t want any more questions. I’m going back to the mountains.” Evan Kendrick got off the desk and walked swiftly through the stunned crowd to his office door. He opened it, quickening his steps, and disappeared into the hallway.

  “He’s not going to the mountains,” whispered Patrick Xavier O’Reilly to his wife. “That lad is staying right here in this town.”

  “Oh, shussh!” cried Annie, tears in her eyes. “He’s just cut himself off from the entire Hill!”

  “Maybe the Hill, lass, but not from us. He’s put his not-too-delicate finger on it. They all make the money and we’re scared shitless. Watch him, Annie, care for him. He’s a voice we want to hear.”

  19

  Kendrick wandered the hot, torpid streets of Washington, his shirt open, his jacket slung over his shoulder, not having any idea where he was going, trying only to clear his head by putting one foot ahead of the other in aimless sequence. More often than he cared to count, he had been stopped by strangers whose comments were pretty equally divided but slightly weighted in his favor, a fact he was not sure he liked.

  “Hell of a job you did on that double-talking prick, Senator!” “I’m not a senator, I’m a congressman. Thank you, I guess.”

  “Who do you think you are, Congressman Whatever-your-name-is? Trying to trip up a fine, loyal American like Colonel Barrish. Goddamned left-wing bachelor-fairy!”

  “Can I sell you some perfume? The colonel bought some.”

  “Disgusting!”

  “Hey, man, I dig your MTV! You move good and you sing in a high register. That mother would send all the brothers back to ’Nam for raw meat!”

  “I don’t think he would, soldier. There’s no discrimination in him. We’re all raw meat.”

  “Because you’re clever doesn’t make you right, sir! And because he was tricked—admittedly by his own words—doesn’t make him wrong. He’s a man committed to the strength of our nation, and you obviously are not!”

  “I think I’m committed to reason, sir. That doesn’t exclude our country’s strength, at least I would hope not.”

  “I saw no evidence of that!”

  “Sorry. It’s there.”

  “Thank you, Congressman, for saying what so many of us are thinking.”

  “Why don’t you say it?”

  “I’m not sure. Everywhere you turn, someone’s shouting at us to stand tough. I was a kid at Bastogne, in the Bulge, and nobody had to tell me to be tough. I was tough—and damned scared, too. It just happened; I wanted to live. But things are different now. It’s not men against men, or even guns and planes. It’s machines flying through the air punching big holes in the earth. You can’t aim at them, you can’t stop them. All you can do is wait.”

  “I wish you’d been at the hearing. You just said it better than I ever could with far more impressive credentials.”

  He really did not want to talk any more; he was talked out and strangers in the streets were not helping him find the solitude he needed. He had to think, sort things out for himself, decide what to do and decide quickly if only to put the decision behind him. He had accepted the Partridge Committee assignment for a specific reason: he wanted a voice in his district’s selection of the man who would succeed him, and his aide, Phil Tobias, had convinced him that accepting Partridge’s summons would guarantee him a voice. But what Evan wondered was did he really give a damn?

  To a degree he had to admit that he did, but not because of any territorial claim. He had walked into a minor political arena an angry man with his eyes open. Could he simply close up shop and take-a-hike because he was irritated over a brief flurry of public exposure? He did not wear a badge of morality on his lapel, but there was something inherently distasteful to him about someone who gave a commitment and walked away from it because of personal inconvenience. On the other hand, in the words of another era, he had thrown out the rascals who had been taking the Colorado’s Ninth District to the cleaners. He had done what he wanted to do. What more could the voters of his constituency want from him? He had awakened them; at least he thought he had and had spared neither words nor money in trying to do so.

  Think. He really had to think. He would probably keep the Colorado property for some future time as yet unconsidered; he was forty-one; in nineteen years he would be sixty. What the hell did that matter?… It did matter. He was heading back to Southwest Asia, to the jobs and the people he knew best how to work with, but, like Manny, he was not going to live out his last years, or with luck a decade or two, in those same surroundings.… Manny. Emmanuel Weingrass, genius, brilliance personified, autocrat, renegade, totally impossible human being—yet the only father he had ever known. He never really knew his own father; that faraway man had died building a bridge in Nepal when he was barely eight years old, leaving a humorously cynical wife who claimed that having married an outrageously young captain in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Second World War, she had fewer episodes of connubial bliss than Catherine of Aragon.

  “Hey!” yelled a rotund man who had just walked out of the small canopied door of a bar on Sixteenth Street. “I just seen you! You were on TV sittin’ on a desk! It was that all-day news program. Boring! I don’t know what the hell you said but some bums clapped and some other bums gave you raspberries. It was you!”

  “You must be mistaken,” said Kendrick, hurrying down the pavement. Good Lord, he thought, the Cable News people had rushed to air the impromptu press conference in short order. He had left his office barely an hour and a half ago; someone was in a hurry. He knew that Cable needed constant fill, but with all the news floating around Washington, why him? In truth, what bothered him was an observation made by young Tobias during Evan’s early days on the Hill. “Cable’s an incubating process, Congressman, and we can capitalize on it. The networks may not consider you important enough to cover, but they scan Cable’s snippets all the time for what’s offbeat, the unusual—their own fill. We can create situations where the C-boys will take the bait, and in my opinion, Mr. Kendrick, your looks and your somewhat oblique observations—”

  “Then let’s never make the mistake, Mr. Tobias, of ever calling the C-boys, okay?” The interruption had deflated the aide, who was only partially mollified by Evan’s promise that the next inhabitant of his office would be far more cooperative. He had meant it; he meant it now, but he worried that it might be too late.

  He headed back to the Madison Hotel, only a block or so away, where he had spent Sunday night—spent it there because he had had the presence of mind to call his house in Virginia to learn if his appearance on the Foxley show had created any interruptions at home.

  “Only if one wishes to make a telephone call, Evan,” Dr. Sabri Hassan had replied in Arabic, the language they both spoke for convenience as well as for other reasons. “It never stops ringing.”

  “Then I’ll stay in town. I don’t know where yet, but I’ll let you know.”

  “Why bother?” Sabri had asked. “You probably won’t be able to get through anyway. I’m surprised that you did now.”

  “Well, in case Manny calls—”

  “Why not call him yourself and tell him where you are so I will not have to lie. The journalists in this city cannot wait for an Arab to lie; they pounce upon us. The Israelis can say that white is black, or sweet is sour, and their lobby convinces Congress it’s for your own good. It is not so with us.”

  “Cut it out, Sabri—”

  “We must leave you, Evan. We’re no good to you, we will be no good to you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Kashi and I watched the program this morning. You were most effective, my friend.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.” He had spent the afternoon watching baseball and drinking whisky. At six-thirty he had turned on the news, one network after another, only to see himself in brief segments from the Foxley show. In disgust, he had switched to an arts channel that showed a film depicting the mating habits o
f whales off the coast of Tierra del Fuego. He was amazed; he fell asleep.

  Today, instinct told him to keep his room key, so he rushed through the Madison’s lobby to the elevators. Once inside the room he removed his clothes down to his shorts and lay on the bed. And whether it was a symptom of a repressed ego or sheer curiosity, he turned on the remote control unit and switched the channel to Cable News. Seven minutes later he saw himself walking out of his office.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen one of the most unusual press conferences this reporter has ever attended. Not only unusual, but unusually one-sided. This first-term representative from Colorado has raised issues of obvious national importance but refuses to be questioned as to his conclusions. He simply walks away. On his behalf it should be said that he denies ‘grandstanding’ because he apparently is not sure he intends to remain in Washington—which we assume means government. Nevertheless, his statements were provocative, to say the least.”

  The videotape suddenly stopped, replaced by the live face of an anchorwoman. “We switch now to the Department of Defense, where we understand that an under secretary in charge of Strategic Deterence has a prepared statement. It’s yours, Steve.”

  Another face, this a dark-haired, blivet-featured reporter with too many teeth who peered into a camera and whispered. “Under Secretary Jasper Hefflefinger, who manages to be hauled out whenever someone attacks the Pentagon, has rushed into the breach opened by Congressman—who?—Henryk, of Wyoming—what?—Colorado! Here is Under Secretary Hefflefinger.”

  Another face. A jowled but handsome man, a strong face with a shock of silver hair that demanded attention. And with a voice that would be envied by the most prominent radio announcers of the late thirties and forties. “I say to the congressman that we welcome his comments. We want the same thing, sir! The avoidance of catastrophe, the pursuit of liberty and freedom—”