by Len Deighton
WASHINGTON, DC. ‘A trap,’ said the President.
The man’s name was buried in a Spanish Guiana file under the arm of John Curl, the US President’s National Security Adviser. In fact he was not a name. He was just an eight-digit computer number with a CIA prefix.
John Curl was on his way to see the President. He had come from the Old Executive Building a few hundred yards from the West Wing. Under his arm he carried a soft leather case with important papers that he’d just collected from Room 208 (sometimes called the Crisis Management Center). John Curl had no formal powers. His role and duties were not mentioned in the 1947 National Security Act which set up post-war US foreign policy offices. Curl was just one of many assistants to the President. As a go-between for the President and the National Security Council, he had coveted ‘walk-in privileges’ that gave him access to the President. That made him one of the most influential men in the land. Lately he had been permitted to give orders on his own signature – ‘for the President: John Curl’. It made him feel very proud to do that.
After dinner with his family, the President had spent two or three hours reading official papers. Then, at about ten-thirty, he liked to ride the elevator down from the residence to see the latest news. One of the NSA staff was always standing by with up-to-date backup material, such as maps, graphics and satellite photos. Curl was there too: only sickness or duty could keep him away. Often in the evening the President was approachable in a way he wasn’t at the 9.30 am security briefing held in a room filled with people.
The West Wing changed character at night. The fluorescent lighting seemed especially hard when unmixed with daylight. The voices that echoed in the corridors were hushed and respectful. The ceremonial rooms and library, the Press rooms and the barber shop were closed and dark. The night-duty offices were quiet except for the intestinal noises made by the computers, and the sound of laser printers periodically rotating the fuser rollers. The only signs of life were made by the night duty staff at the end of the corridor. A secretary could occasionally be seen there using the coffee machine, or exchanging banalities with a guard.
In the corridor leading to the Lincoln sitting-room, Curl was buttonholed by the Air Force aide who asked, ‘Did you read “Air Bus to Battle”, John?’
Curl stopped, sneaking a quick look at his watch as he did so. The Air Force aide was a man of influence. He controlled the planes of the Presidential Flight. When an extra seat on Air Force One was needed, the general knew how to fix it for the ones he favoured.
Curl said, ‘Halfway through.’ The document he referred to was a 100-page report on a new military transport plane demonstrated the previous week. They both knew that ‘halfway through’ meant Curl had not even glanced at it.
‘I just came from the chief,’ said the general. He said it casually, but minutes with the President were added up proudly, like high school credits. He tapped the Air Force promotion lists to show what the President had signed.
‘Is he alone?’
‘Waiting for the eleven o’clock TV news.’
Curl looked again at his watch. It was 10.58 pm. He was already turning away as he said, ‘Thank you, General. Can I tell you how much we all enjoyed Monday?’
All enjoyed Monday was a far cry from how impressed we all were on Monday. But the general smiled. He liked John Curl. He was not one of those peaceniks who were yelling for more, and still more, military cutbacks every time they saw a newspaper picture of happy smiling Russians.
Right now the Air Force needed every sympathetic voice it could get here in the White House. The poll-watchers were shouting for mega-dollars to be switched to education and fighting crime and drugs. They were saying that it was the only way to avoid the President getting severely clobbered when the mid-term elections came. ‘It was a pleasure, John,’ he called after him. ‘The Air Force is hosting one hundred and fifty Senators and guests for the same demonstration on the twenty-first. If you want tickets for anyone …’
‘Great. I’ll be in touch,’ said Curl, turning to wave. Then he smoothed his wrinkled sleeve. The silk-mixture suit, custom-made shirt and manicured hands were part of Curl’s public image. Even when this handsome man was summoned from bed to an emergency conference in the Crisis Management Center he cut the same dashing and impeccable figure.
Curl had already forgotten the general. His mind was on the newscast that the chief was waiting for. The news he was bringing might be made public and that would change the whole picture. Curl worried that he might need more figures, dates and projections but it was too late now.
Curl stopped and took a silk handkerchief from his top pocket. He carefully wiped his brow. More than once he’d heard the President refer slightingly to aides who arrived ‘hot and sweaty’. Curl nodded to the elderly warrant officer outside the sitting-room door. On the floor at his side rested a metal case. (When the staff photographers were around he kept it on his knees.) It held sealed packets signed by the Joint Chiefs. These were the codes that could order a nuclear strike. And the Doomsday Books that, in comic-strip style, illustrated projections in megadeaths for each of the target towns. The Russians, drowning in a sea of economic disaster, were clutching at the straws of capitalist revival. The East European satellite nations were offering their desolate industrial landscapes to any bidder. But anyone with access to the intelligence pouring in to Room 208, from the Gulf, as well as from Africa and the Far East, knew that America’s enemies had not gone out of business. So ‘the bagman’ followed the President everywhere he went.
Curl knocked at the door softly but waited only a moment before entering. His chief was sitting in his favoured wing armchair, reading from a fat tome and sipping at his favourite evening drink: cognac and ginger.
Curl stood there a moment reflecting upon the baffling way in which this room seemed to change when the President was in it. It was bigger, lighter and more imposing when the chief was here. He’d stood here alone sometimes and marvelled at the difference.
The President made a movement of his hand to acknowledge Curl’s presence. The public saw only the President a make-up team and TV producer created for public display. They would have been shocked to see this wizened little man in his spotted bow tie, baggy slacks, hand-knitted sweater and red velvet slippers. This was the way the President liked to dress when the White House staff photographers were not around, but it was verboten at all other times. The bow tie was ‘arty’, the slippers ‘faggy’, the sweater ‘too homespun’ and US Presidents didn’t drink fancy foreign booze. Most important, US Presidents looked young and fit. They didn’t wear granny glasses and sit hunched over books: they rode and roped and piloted their own choppers. It wasn’t always easy to reconcile this carefully conjured outdoor figure with the emphasis the Administration was now putting upon formal education and the need for scientists and scholars, but votes must always come first.
The President had aged greatly in two years of office, aged by a decade. He continued to read and didn’t look up as Curl entered. ‘Fix yourself a drink, John. The news is coming now.’
Curl didn’t fix himself a drink. He wasn’t fond of alcohol and liked to present a picture of abstemiousness when with the President. Curl stood behind the President looking at the TV but also noticing the small bald patch on the crown of the chief’s head. Curl envied him that: his own baldness was reaching up from his temples to a little promontory of hair that would soon become an island and disappear altogether. From the front the President showed no hair loss at all.
Still thinking about this, Curl seated himself demurely on the sofa with his leather case beside him. He arranged a handful of small pink prompt cards in sequence, shuffling them like a professional gambler with a deck of marked cards. Upon each one a topic of discussion was typed in large orator type. ‘Spanish Guiana – guerrilla contact’ read the topmost card. Curl kept them in his hand, holding them out of sight like a conjuror.
The Pizza Hut ad ended. The President closed his book. This news
caster was a man they both knew, a man to whom they both owed a favour or two. The first item was edited coverage of the protest march in Los Angeles. The subsequent demonstration had continued through the early evening. The tone of the commentary was glum: ‘An LAPD spokesman estimated close on one hundred thousand angry demonstrators packed into MacArthur Park today … Young and old, men and women: protesting the announced cutbacks in the aerospace industry that could make a quarter of a million workers jobless by Christmas.’
There were hand-held TV camera shots of angry demonstrators shouting and struggling with the police at several places on the route. Their big banners were easy to read, and easy to chant: ‘Save your sorrow: Your turn tomorrow’; ‘Cut-backs today will kill L.A.’ One home-made sign, scrawled on a sheet of brown cardboard, said, ‘Where is Joe Stalin now that we need him?’
The time difference between Washington and the West Coast did not prevent the news from airing a few vox-pop interviews with demonstrators as the speeches ended and the people began to disperse. Articulate union leaders, and cautious middle management, agreed that America should not dismantle its defences just because the USSR was adopting a less belligerent posture.
The following news item was about the US Coast Guard’s latest haul of drugs. ‘Five million dollars street value,’ said the commentary. The President pushed the button on his control. The picture went dark. ‘I wish these half-witted TV people would stop glamorizing that poison: “Five million dollars street value.” Holy cow! It’s like a recruiting campaign for pushers.’
Curl stood up and fidgeted with his file cards.
‘MacArthur Park,’ said the President. ‘They would choose skid row! As if the demonstrations aren’t losing me enough votes, I have to have cameras panning across derelict houses and drunken bums.’
Curl said, ‘No real violence, Mr President. We have to be pleased the demonstrators were so disciplined and well-behaved.’
The two men sat looking at the blank screen for a moment. They both knew that this was just the tip of the iceberg. The cuts had started on a small scale. They were to be far more extensive than had yet been made public. Aerospace meant California, and California had become a vital centre of political support. California now had a bigger proportion of the House of Representatives than any state had had since the 1860s. The President’s visit there, and the one thousand dollars per plate dinner, was only a month away. ‘The aerospace boys – the management – are using these demonstrators to shaft us, do you see that?’
‘Management thought it was all over,’ said Curl. ‘We let them think that last year. They thought they had taken the bloodletting. They were breathing a sigh of relief when this hit them.’
‘The opposition will make the most of it,’ said the President dolefully. ‘You can bet every liberal pinko, every half-baked anarchist and every rabble-rouser in the land will schlepp across there to the land of fruits and nuts. They’ll all be there to join in the reception for me when I arrive.’
Curl would not permit such paranoid illusions. He was always ready to step out of line: that’s why he was so valuable. ‘These are all middle-class people, Mr President. Skilled workers, not hippies. That’s why there were no clashes with the cops. They are frightened family men. Frightened family men.’
The President nodded. He hadn’t missed the implication that he too was a frightened family man sometimes. Curl was right. ‘Did you see what the rumours have already done to the stock market?’
‘Yes, I saw that.’
There was a silence. Then: ‘So what do you have, John?’ The President looked up at him, keeping his finger in place in the 500-page unedited draft of the Congressional Joint Economics Committee report. He had reached the page that had sobering projections about what job losses the changes would bring in the coming four years. Now he let go of his place in the report and put it on the floor. He would have his morning call advanced an hour. In the morning he would be able to glean enough from it to be ready for the men from the Government Accounting Office. But already he got up at six. The President closed his eyes as if to sample sleep for a moment. Curl hesitated to continue but, with his eyes still closed, the President said, ‘Shoot, John.’
‘Spanish Guiana. A US prospecting team has struck oil. A lot of oil.’
‘A lot of oil?’
‘It was a personal off-the-record call from Steve Steinbeck – it’s Steve’s company of course – and he wouldn’t talk numbers. Presently it’s on their computer at Houston.’
‘He called you?’
‘He wouldn’t have called unless it was big.’
‘Why you?’ he persisted.
‘We had a kind of line to the prospecting team,’ admitted Curl. ‘I left a message for him to call. Steve guessed what was on my mind.’
The President still hadn’t opened his eyes. ‘I worked in oil when I was young. I’ve seen it all before: a million or more times. These field workers are just telling Steve that they have found the right conditions. Maybe an anticline, a fold in the strata with a sealing formation that would capture oil or gas, if there was any.’
‘They seem pretty certain. I cross-checked with Steve’s head of Latin America exploration.’
‘Some graduate palaeontologist has gathered a basket of fossils, and they’ve fired a few shots, and got a sexy little seismogram for the head office.’
Curl unzipped his leather case. From a pocket inside it, he unclipped a long strip of paper. Six timer lines went the length of it. At each explosion the pen had fluttered wildly according to how far the tremor had reached before bouncing off the reflecting beds deep in the earth. The President took the strip of paper and studied it as if he could make sense of it. It was like an electrocardiogram from an agitated heart. The President stroked the paper and smelled it. ‘This is the real thing, John.’
‘I told Steve you wouldn’t find any kind of photocopy convincing.’
‘Well maybe …’
‘They have seepage, Mr President.’
‘Seepage? Are they sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s different, John.’ He looked at the paper and his mind went back to his youth. A seismogram like this was then the height of his ambition. He’d wanted to be an explorer but his Dad had kept him in that lousy office. ‘Funny to think a piece of paper like this could change the world, John. Seepage! That’s the piece of pork they used to put in the can of beans. That’s what every oil man dreams of: seepage. So Steinbeck got lucky again.’
‘They’ve been renewing licences to prospect down there for ten years or more.’ Discreetly Curl produced a map of South America. He wanted to refresh the President’s memory about exactly where Spanish Guiana was situated. ‘But if it’s really big, Royal Dutch Shell are sure to want a piece of it … and maybe Exxon too.’
‘The word is out?’
‘Not yet. But Steve is screaming for exploratory drilling. When he moves in a lightweight rig, it will raise some eyebrows.’
‘Without drilling there’s no proof it’s anything but a dry hole.’
‘And after the drilling it’s too late,’ said Curl.
‘Too late for what?’
John Curl shrugged.
‘Tell me how you see it, John.’
‘The Benz government has been a good and reliable friend to America. But the real truth is that he’ll only stay in power as long as there is a literacy test for voters.’ He waited for that to sink in.
‘A literacy test for voters,’ said the President. ‘If only we had a literacy test for voters, John.’
John Curl was not to be deflected from his explanation by bad jokes. ‘Remove the literacy qualification and the Indian population would vote Benz into obscurity overnight. The sort of landslide that even a South American election can’t fix. Even as it stands, he sits uneasy on the throne. The guerrilla units in the south are highly organized, well disciplined and well equipped. There are districts of the capital – not half a mile from the Palace
– where police and army can only go in armoured cars.’
It sounds not unlike Washington, DC, the President was about to say, but after seeing the earnest look on Curl’s face said, ‘Conclusion?’
‘Conclusions are your prerogative, Mr President. But Admiral Benz has had a long uphill struggle to bring democratic government to a primitive country that is essentially feudal. Money from oil could give him the chance to build schools and roads and hospitals and make his country into a show-case.’
‘Is this a plea to do nothing?’
‘Steve says the Japanese would do a deal with him … or maybe buy his whole South American outfit. Japan needs energy sources.’
The President thought about that and didn’t like the sound of it. ‘Should this go on the Security Council agenda, John?’
‘Leave it for a few days, Mr President. The fewer who are party to this the better.’
‘And if Steve starts talks with his Japanese buddies?’
‘If Steve talks to his mother we’ll put him into Leavenworth. I told him that, Mr President.’
The President stabbed the TV control and produced fleeting glimpses of an old British war film, ‘The Odd Couple’, a Honda commercial and then a blank screen again. ‘It would be best if Steinbeck held exclusive mineral rights.’
‘Yes,’ said Curl.
‘Let the British in there and they will start building a refinery; they can’t afford to ship crude across the water. We must keep it as crude, brought Stateside for refining. That way if the government there falls, we have a breathing space before anyone can raise the money and get a refinery built.’
Curl nodded.
‘I’m damned if I can remember who we have out there.’
‘Junk-bond Joey.’
‘Junk-bond Joey,’ said the President. The two men looked at each other. They were remembering the flamboyant entrepreneur who had purchased his backwoods embassy for untold millions in campaign funds. This was the man who had almost gone to prison for insider trading, a man who had recently created a minor diplomatic crisis by offering a punch in the head to an Algerian diplomat at a Washington cocktail party.
