The Icarus Agenda

by Ludlum, Robert

  'I know.' Yaakov nodded his head slowly. 'I've heard the zealots in the West Bank and the Gaza. I've listened to the Meir Kahanes and they frighten me so—’

  'Frighten you?'

  'Of course. They use the words that were used against us, for, as you say, generations… Yet still, they kill! They killed my two brothers and so many countless others!'

  'It's got to stop sometime. It's all such a terrible waste.'

  'I have to think.'

  'It's a beginning.'

  The men around the dining room table abruptly rose from their chairs. They nodded to one another and, one by one, walked through the living room to the front door and out to their staff cars without acknowledging the presence of anyone else in the house. The host, Hassan, came through the archway and addressed his last guests. At first it was difficult to hear his words, as Emmanuel Weingrass was doubled up with a coughing seizure in the dining room. Evan started to rise. Yaakov, shaking his head, gripped Kendrick's arm. Evan understood; he nodded and sat back.

  'The American Embassy in Masqat will be relieved in three hours, the terrorists granted safe escort to a ship on the waterfront provided by Sahibe al Farrahkhaliffe.'

  'What happens to him? asked Kendrick angrily.

  'In this room, and only in this room, will that answer be given. I am instructed by the Royal House to inform you that it is to go no further. Is that understood and accepted?'

  All heads nodded.

  'Sahibe al Farrahkhaliffe, known to you as the Mahdi, will be executed without trial or sentence, for his crimes against humanity are so outrageous they do not deserve the dignity of jurisprudence. As the Americans say, we'll do it “our way”.'

  'May I speak?' said Ben-Ami.

  'Of course,' answered Hassan.

  'Arrangements have been made for me and my colleagues to be flown back to Israel. Since none of us has passports or papers, a special plane and procedures have been provided by the Emir. We must be at the airport concourse within the hour. Forgive us for our abrupt departure. Come along, gentlemen.'

  'Forgive us,' said Hassan, nodding. 'For not having the wherewithal to thank you.'

  'Have you got any whisky?' asked code Red.

  'Anything you wish.'

  'Anything you can part with. It's a long, terrible trip back and I hate flying. It frightens me.'

  Evan Kendrick and Emmanuel Weingrass sat next to each other in the armchairs in Hassan's living room. They waited for their instructions from a harried, bewildered American ambassador, who was permitted to make contact only by telephone. It was as though the two old friends had never been apart—the oft-times bewildered student and the strident teacher. Yet the student was the leader, the shaker; and the teacher understood.

  'Ahmat must be up in space with relief,' said Evan, drinking brandy.

  'A couple of things are keeping him grounded.'

  'Oh?'

  'Seems there's a group that wanted to get rid of him, send him back to the States because they thought he was too young and inexperienced to handle things. He called them his arrogant merchant princes. He's bringing them to the palace to straighten them out.'

  'That's one item. What else?'

  'There's another bunch who wanted to take things in their own hands, blow up the embassy if they had to, anything to get their country back. They're machine-gun nuts; they're also the ones who were recruited by Cons Op to get you out of the airport.'

  'What's he going to do about them?'

  'Not a hell of a lot unless you want your name shouted from the minarets. If he calls them in, they'll scream State Department connections and all the crazies in the Middle East will have another cause.'

  'Ahmat knows better. Let them alone.'

  'There's a last item and he's got to do it for himself. He's got to blow that boat out of the water, and kill every one of those filthy bastards.'

  'No, Manny, that's not the way. The killing will just go on and on—’

  'Wrong!' shouted Weingrass. 'You're wrong! Examples must be made over and over again until they all learn the price they have to pay!' Suddenly the old architect was seized by a prolonged, echoing, rattling cough that came from the deepest, rawest cavities of his chest. His face reddened and the veins in his neck and forehead were blue and distended.

  Evan gripped his old friend's shoulder to steady him. 'We'll talk about it later,' he said as the coughing subsided. 'I want you to come back with me, Manny.'

  'Because of this? Weingrass shook his head defensively. 'It's just a chest cold. Lousy weather in France, that's all.'

  'I wasn't thinking of that,' lied Kendrick, he hoped convincingly. 'I need you.'

  '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 I want to completely redesign my house.'

  'I thought you just built it.'

  'I was involved with other things and wasn't paying attention. It'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.'

  'Gross profits 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.'

  Ultra Maximum Secure

  No Existing Intercepts

  Proceed

  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

  Ultra Maximum Secure No Existing Intercepts Proceed

  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.

  The Icarus Agenda

  Chapter 16

  One year later. Sunday, 22 August 8:30 pm

  One by one, like quiet, graceful chariots, the four 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 cars 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 suburban 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 so long as the estates were shipshape for their return from London, Paris or Gstaad. And for those in the professions, there was the occasional stock market tip over a friendly drink at the commercially quaint tavern in the centre 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 pedlars and the scandal sheets twisted everything out of all 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 neighbour, 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 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 townsfolk's logic. It was a small matter for the local police to keep their 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 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 big cars 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 long 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 centre, 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. 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 or opposite 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 moulding above the bookshelves, 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 now, was a console of audio-visual 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 cast-iron 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 whirr 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 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 re-elected 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 man in his seventies 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 towards him personally, for his instincts are decent; he's a decent, 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 it's likely he 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 labelled 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 sil
k dress with a minimum of jewelry. Her cultured voice was laced with those traces of inflection and cadence often described as mid-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.'

  Gideon Logan nodded his large black head in agreement, a smile creasing his lips. 'Oh, they'd stomp around the camp-fires, pulling in all the good-thinking people, and burn the asses off the body politic.' He paused, looking at the woman across the table. 'There are no shortcuts, Margaret. Eric's right about that.'

  'I wasn't talking melodrama,' insisted Lowell. 'No rifle shots in Dallas or deranged kids with hang-ups. I only meant time. Have we the time?'

  'If we use it correctly, we do,' said Jacob Mandel. 'The key factor is the candidate.'

  'Then let's get to him,' interrupted the white-haired Samuel Winters. 'As you all know, our colleague Mr. Varak has completed his search and is convinced he's come up with our man. I won't bore you with his many eliminations except to say that if there's not complete unanimity among us, we'll examine them—every one. He's studied our guidelines—the assets we seek and the liabilities we wish to avoid; in essence, the talents we're convinced must be there. In my judgment he's unearthed a brilliant, if totally unexpected, prospect. I won't talk for our friend—he does that very well for himself—but I'd be remiss if I did not state that in our numerous conferences he's shown the same dedication to us that his uncle, Anton Varak, was said to have given to our predecessors fifteen years ago.'