The blue sky turned to black as consciousness left him, and slowly Pitt drifted under the lifeboat and sank out of sight.
59
The President’s wife entered his second-floor study, kissed him good night and went off to bed. He sat in a soft high-back embroidered chair and studied a pile of statistics on the latest economic forecasts. Using a large yellow legal pad, he scribbled a prodigious amount of notes. Some he saved, some he tore up and discarded before they were completed. After nearly three hours, he removed his glasses and closed his tired eyes for a few moments.
When he opened them again, he was no longer in his White House study, but in a small gray room with a high ceiling and no windows.
He rubbed his eyes and looked once more, blinking in the monotone light.
He was still in the gray room, only now he found himself seated in a hard wooden chair, his ankles strapped to square carved legs and his hands to the armrests.
A violent fear coursed through him, and he cried for his wife and the Secret Service guards, but the voice was not his. It had a different tonal quality, deeper, more coarse.
Soon a door that was recessed into one wall swung inward and a small man with a thin, intelligent face entered. His eyes had a dark, bemused look, and he carried a syringe in one hand.
“How are we today, Mr. President?” he asked politely.
Strangely, the words were foreign, but the President understood them perfectly. Then he heard himself shouting repeatedly, “I am Oskar Belkaya, I am not the President of the United States, I am Oskar—” He broke off as the intruder plunged the needle into his arm.
The bemused expression never left the little man’s face; it might have been glued there. He nodded toward the doorway and another man wearing a drab prison uniform came in and set a cassette recorder on a Spartan metal table that was bolted to the floor. He wired the recorder to four small eyelets on the table’s surface and left.
“So you won’t knock your new lesson on the floor, Mr. President,” said the thin man. “I hope you find it interesting.” Then he switched on the recorder and left the room.
The President struggled to shake off the bewildering terror of the nightmare. Yet it all seemed too real to be dream fantasy. He could smell his own sweat, feel the hurt as the straps chafed his skin, hear the walls echo with his cries of frustration. His head sagged to his chest and he began to sob uncontrollably as the recorded message droned over and over. When at last he sufficiently recovered, he raised his head as if lifting a ponderous weight and looked around.
He was seated in his White House study.
Secretary Oates took Dan Fawcett’s call on his private line. “What’s the situation over there?” he asked without wasting words.
“Critical,” Fawcett replied. “Armed guards everywhere. I haven’t seen this many troops since I was with the Fifth Marine Regiment in Korea.”
“And the President?”
“Spitting out directives like a Gatling gun. He won’t listen to advice from his aides any longer, myself included. He’s getting increasingly harder to reach. Two weeks ago, he’d give full attention to opposing viewpoints or objective comments. No more. You agree with him or you’re out the door. Megan Blair and I are the only ones still with access to his office, and my days are numbered. I’m bailing out before the roof caves in.”
“Stay put,” said Oates. “It’s best for all concerned if you and Oscar Lucas remain close to the President. You’re the only open line of communications any of us have into the White House.”
“Won’t work.”
“Why?”
“I told you, even if I stick around, I’ll be closed out. My name is rapidly climbing to the top of the President’s shit list.”
“Then get back in his good graces,” Oates ordered. “Crawl up his butt and support whatever he says. Play yes-man and relay up-to-the-minute reports on every course of action he takes.”
There was a long pause. “Okay, I’ll do my best to keep you informed.”
“And alert Oscar Lucas to stand by. We’re going to need him.”
“Can I ask what’s going on?”
“Not yet,” Oates replied tersely.
Fawcett didn’t press him. He switched tack. “You want to hear the President’s latest brainstorm?”
“Bad?”
“Very bad,” admitted Fawcett. “He’s talking about withdrawing our military forces from the NATO alliance.”
Oates clutched the phone until his knuckles turned ivory. “He’s got to be stopped,” he said grimly.
Fawcett’s voice sounded far away. “The President and I go back a long way together, but in the best interests of the country, I must agree.”
“Stay in touch.”
Oates put down the phone, turned in his desk chair and gazed out the window, lost in thought. The afternoon sky had turned an ominous gray, and a light rain began to fall on Washington’s streets, their slickened surfaces reflecting the federal buildings in eerie distortions.
In the end he would have to take over the reins of government, Oates thought bitterly. He was well aware that every President in the last thirty years had been vilified and debased by events beyond his control. Eisenhower was the last chief executive who left the White House as venerated as when he came in. No matter how saintly or intellectually brilliant the next President, he would be stoned by an unmovable bureaucracy and increasingly hostile news media; and Oates harbored no desire to be a target of the rock throwers.
He was pulled out of his reverie by the muted buzz of his intercom. “Mr. Brogan and another gentleman to see you.”
“Send them in,” Oates directed. He rose and came around his desk as Brogan entered. They shook hands briefly and Brogan introduced the man standing beside him as Dr. Raymond Edgely.
Oates correctly pegged Edgely as an academician. The old-fashioned crew cut and bow tie suggested someone who seldom strayed from a university campus. Edgely was slender, wore a scraggly barbed-wire beard, and his bristly dark eyebrows were untrimmed and brushed upward in a Mephistopheles set and blow.
“Dr. Edgely is the director of Fathom,” Brogan explained, “the Agency’s special study into mind-control techniques at Greeley University in Colorado.”
Oates gestured for them to sit on a sofa and took a chair across a marble coffee table. “I’ve just received a call from Dan Fawcett. The President intends to withdraw our troops from NATO.”
“Another piece of evidence to bolster our case,” said Brogan. “Only the Russians would profit from such a move.”
Oates turned to Edgely. “Has Martin explained our suspicions regarding the President’s behavior to you?”
“Yes, Mr. Brogan has filled me in.”
“And how does the situation strike you? Can the President be mentally forced to become an involuntary traitor?”
“I grant the President’s actions demonstrate a dramatic personality change, but unless we can put him through a series of tests, there is no way of being certain of brain alteration or exterior domination.”
“He will never consent to an examination,” said Brogan.
“That presents a problem,” Edgely said.
“Suppose you tell us, Doctor,” Oates asked, “how the President’s mind transfer was performed?”
“If that is indeed what we are faced with,” replied Edgely, “the first step is to isolate the subject in a womblike chamber for a given length of time, removed from all sensorial influences. During this sequence his brain patterns are studied, analyzed and deciphered into a language that can be programmed and translated by computer. The next step is to design an implant, in this instance a microchip, with the desired data and then insert it by psychosurgery into the subject’s brain.”
“You make it sound as elementary as a tonsillectomy,” said Oates.
Edgely laughed. “I’ve condensed and oversimplified, of course, but in reality the procedures are incredibly delicate and involved.”
“After the mic
rochip is imbedded into the brain, what then?”
“I should have mentioned that a section of the implant is a tiny transmitter/receiver which operates off the electrical impulses of the brain and is capable of sending thought patterns and other bodily functions to a central computer and monitoring post located as far away as Hong Kong.”
“Or Moscow,” added Brogan.
“And not the Soviet embassy here in Washington, as you suggested earlier?” Oates asked, looking at Brogan.
“I think I can answer that,” Edgely volunteered. “The communication technology is certainly available to relay data from a subject via satellite to Russia, but if I were in Dr. Lugovoy’s shoes, I’d set up my monitoring station nearby so I could observe the results of the President’s actions at firsthand. This would also allow me a faster response time to redirect my command signals to his mind during unexpected political events.”
“Can Lugovoy lose control over the President?” asked Brogan.
“If the President ceases to think and act for himself, he breaks the ties to his normal world. Then he may tend to stray from Lugovoy’s instructions and carry them to extremes.”
“Is this why he’s instigated so many radical programs in such haste?”
“I can’t say,” Edgely answered. “For all I know he is responding precisely to Lugovoy’s commands. I do suspect, however, that it goes far deeper.”
“In what manner?”
“The reports supplied by Mr. Brogan’s operatives in Russia show that Lugovoy has attempted experiments with political prisoners, transferring the fluid from their hippocampuses — a structure in the brain’s limbic system that holds our memories — to those of other subjects.”
“A memory injection,” Oates murmured wonderingly. “So there really is a Dr. Frankenstein.”
“Memory transfer is a tricky business,” Edgely continued. “There is no predicting with any certainty the end results.”
“Do you think Lugovoy performed this experiment on the President?”
“I hate to say yes, but if he runs true to form, he might very well have programmed some poor Russian prisoner for months, even years, with thoughts promoting Soviet policy, and then transplanted the hippocampal fluid into the President’s brain as a backup to the implant.”
“Under the proper care,” Oates asked, “could the President return to normal?”
“You mean put his mind back as it was before?”
“Something like that.”
Edgely shook his head. “Any known treatment will not reverse the damage. The President will always be haunted by the memory of someone else.”
“Couldn’t you extract his hippocampal fluid as well?”
“I catch your meaning, but by removing the foreign thought patterns, we’d be erasing the President’s own memories.” Edgely paused. “No, I’m sorry to say, the President’s behavior patterns have been irrevocably altered.”
“Then he should be removed from office… permanently.”
“That would be my recommendation,” answered Edgely without hesitation.
Oates sat back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Thank you, Doctor. You’ve reinforced our resolve.”
“From what I’ve heard, no one gets through the White House gates.”
“If the Russians could abduct him,” said Brogan, “I see no reason why we can’t do the same. But first we have to disconnect him from Lugovoy.”
“May I make a suggestion?”
“Please.”
“There is an excellent opportunity to turn this situation around to our advantage.”
“How?”
“Rather than cut off his brain signals, why not tune in on the frequency?”
“For what purpose?”
‘‘So my staff and I can feed the transmissions into our own monitoring equipment. If our computers can receive enough data, say within a forty-eight-hour period, we can take the place of the President’s brain.”
“A substitution to feed the Russians false information,” said Brogan, rising to Edgely’s inspiration.
“Exactly!” Edgely exclaimed. “Because they have every reason to believe the validity of the data they receive from the President, Soviet intelligence can be led down whichever garden path you choose.”
“I like the idea,” said Oates. “But the stickler is whether we can afford the forty-eight hours. There’s no telling what the President might attempt within that time frame.”
“The risk is worth it,” Brogan stated flatly.
There was a knock on the door and Oates’s secretary leaned her head into the room. “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Secretary, but Mr. Brogan has an urgent call.”
Brogan got up quickly, lifted the phone on Oates’s desk and pressed the winking button. “Brogan.”
He stood there listening for close to a full minute without speaking. Then he hung up and faced Oates.
“Speaker of the House Alan Moran just turned up alive at our Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba,” he said slowly.
“Margolin?”
“No report.”
“Larimer?”
“Senator Larimer is dead.”
“Oh, good God!” Oates moaned. “That means Moran could be our next President. I can’t think of a more unscrupulous or ill-equipped man for the job!”
“A Fagin poised at the White House gate,” commented Brogan. “Not a pleasant thought.”
60
Pitt was certain he was dead. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be dead. And yet he saw no blinding light at the end of a tunnel, no faces of friends and relatives who died before him. He felt as though he were dozing in his own bed at home. And Loren was there, her hair cascading on the pillow, her body pressed against his, her arms encircling his neck, holding tightly, refusing to let him drift away. Her face seemed to glow, and her violet eyes looked straight into his. He wondered if she was dead too.
Suddenly she released her hold and began to blur, moving away, diminishing ever smaller until she vanished altogether. A dim light filtered through his closed eyelids and he heard voices in the distance. Slowly, with an effort as great as lifting a pair of hundred-pound weights, he opened his eyes. At first he thought he was gazing at a flat white surface. Then as his mind crept past the veil of unconsciousness he realized he really was gazing at a flat white surface.
It was a ceiling.
A strange sound said, “He’s coming around.”
“Takes more than three cracked ribs, a brain concussion and a gallon of seawater to do this character in.” There was no mistaking the laconic voice.
“My worst fears,” Pitt managed to mutter. “I’ve gone to hell and met the devil.”
“See how he talks about his best and only friend,” said Al Giordino to the doctor in naval uniform.
“He’s in good physical shape,” said the doctor. “He should mend pretty quickly.”
“Pardon the mundane question,” said Pitt, “but where am I?”
“Welcome to the U.S. Naval Hospital at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the doctor answered. “You and Mr. Giordino were fished out of the water by one of our recovery craft.”
Pitt focused his eyes on Giordino. “Are you all right?”
“He has a bruise the size of a cantaloupe on his abdomen, but he’ll survive,” the doctor said, smiling. “By the way, I understand he saved your life.”
Pitt cleared the mist from his mind and tried to recall. “The steward from the Leonid Andreyev was playing baseball with my head.”
“Pounded you under the boat with an oar,” Giordino explained. “I slipped over the side, swam underwater until I grabbed your arm, dragged you to the surface. The steward would have beat on me too except for the timely arrival of a Navy helicopter whose paramedics jumped into the water and helped sling us on board.”
“And Loren?”
Giordino averted his gaze. “She’s listed as missing.”
“Missing, hell!” Pitt snarled. He grimaced from the sudd
en pain in his chest as he rose to his elbows. “We both know she was alive and sitting in the lifeboat.”
A solemn look clouded Giordino’s face. “Her name didn’t appear on a list of survivors given out by the ship’s captain.”
“A Bougainville ship!” Pitt blurted as his memory came flooding back. “The Oriental steward who tried to brain us pointed toward the—”
“Chalmette,” Giordino prompted.
“Yes, the Chalmette, and said it belonged to him. He also spoke my name.”
“Stewards are supposed to remember passengers’ names. He knew you as Charlie Gruber in cabin thirty-four.”
“No, he rightly accused me of meddling in Bougainville affairs, and his last words were ‘Bon voyage, Dirk Pitt.’ “
Giordino gave a puzzled shrug. “Beats hell out of me how he knew you. But why would a Bougainville man work as a steward on a Russian cruise ship?”
“I can’t begin to guess.”
“And lie about Loren’s rescue?”
Pitt merely gave an imperceptible shake of his head.
“Then she’s being held prisoner by the Bougainvilles,” said Giordino as if suddenly enlightened. “But for what reason?”
“You keep asking questions I can’t answer,” Pitt said irritably. “Where is the Chalmette now?”
“Headed toward Miami to land the survivors.”
“How long have I been unconscious?”
“About thirty-two hours,” replied the doctor.
“Still time,” said Pitt. “The Chalmette won’t reach the Florida coast for several hours yet.”
He raised himself to a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The room began to seesaw back and forth.
The doctor moved forward and steadied him by both arms. “I hope you don’t think you’re rushing off somewhere.”
“I intend to be standing on the dock when the Chalmette arrives in Miami,” Pitt said implacably.
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