Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  From there he went into chemicals for industrial and agricultural use, which led to timber and ranching. Like the Russians he had a series of five-year plans. In each of these periods he concentrated all his attention and efforts on a particular group of industries. Thus timber and ranching occupied him from the ages of twenty-four to twenty-nine. From twenty-nine to thirty-four it was electronics, computers, and plastics. From thirty-four to thirty-nine it was aerospace research and armaments, and in the past five years he had extended the JEG Corporation’s interests into road and rail transport, TV and movie production, and the electronic home leisure and information market. Along the way he had acquired holdings in publishing, car rentals, sports equipment, motels, fast food, and sundry spin-offs.

  Although each company was autonomous and able to direct its own day-to-day affairs, Gelstrom retained overall control, keeping a close watch with continual computer updates that enabled him to make instant policy decisions.

  Over the years the media had tried repeatedly to penetrate the lead shielding and expose the man to the public gaze. His name was known, of course, but that was just about the sum of it. All his business dealings were conducted through the management of his companies, never face-to-face. If he went to a restaurant, a theater or social function it was never as himself, but undercover as any one of a dozen identities that had been as carefully prepared as a CIA case file.

  Only three times had the media come close enough to cause him serious concern. On two of these occasions he had arranged through his grapevine of highly placed and influential contacts to have the story blocked and the reporters warned off. The third attempt, by a young and eager female TV reporter, had unfortunately succeeded— unfortunate, that’s to say, for the reporter, who was hit by a truck while out jogging near her apartment in the Twin Peaks district of San Francisco. At about the same time her car had been stolen, which was later recovered minus a briefcase, tapes and two cans of exposed film.

  Two attempts had been made on his life, and both sources identified, though only one satisfactorily resolved. This was the disgruntled exowner of a vending-machine company that the JEG Corporation had taken over, leaving him with little more than the shirt on his back. A Vietnam veteran, he shot Gelstrom at point-blank range with a sawed-off shotgun and blew his head clean off. His aim was excellent, his identification of the target less good, for he happened to have killed an Italian arms dealer with whom Gelstrom was negotiating a deal.

  The other source (the one not resolved) was the Mafia. It was the first and only time Gelstrom had heeded a warning and backed off. The deal involved a casino and the location was Las Vegas and Gelstrom had unwisely employed his usual strategy of all-out attack to gain a controlling interest. It wasn’t appreciated, and he should have known better, and soon did when the car he was supposed to be traveling in erupted in a fireball on Interstate 15 en route to Los Angeles. Two of his best people died while he was nine thousand feet above Death Valley on his way to San Francisco. Gelstrom immediately pulled out of the deal, wrote it off as a failure, and counted himself lucky to have failed. Gambling, he decided, was Mafia business, and they were welcome to it.

  Unlike this business, which he was going to do something about, though as yet he hadn’t decided what.

  Gelstrom gripped the rail, tensing his biceps until the veins stood out. “Having a sick man in the administration doesn’t say a fat lot for the president’s judgment.”

  “That’s if he knows.”

  “He must know. Lebasse would have to tell him.”

  “The media would tear Munro apart,” said the man in white, who was called Sturges. His face beneath the blond crew cut was hard and brutal, the curved strip of smoked plastic making him seem blind and menacing. Gold glinted at his throat and on both hairy wrists.

  “It’s Lebasse we have to work on, not the president,” Gelstrom said. “If the secretary of defense approves DEPARTMENT STORE, the president will rubber-stamp it.”

  “We can break Lebasse easily enough. Leak it to the media; but Munro will get as much flak.”

  “That doesn’t help,” Gelstrom agreed. “We want Lebasse neutralized and somebody we can trust in his place. Who do we have?”

  Sturges gazed blindly over the ocean. “What about Zadikov? We’ve supplied him with enough girls.”

  “Good old Ralf.” Gelstrom smiled without humor. His dark eyebrows came together above the broad ridge of his nose. “What’s Madden’s pitch on this?”

  “He says it’s our move.”

  “Has he found a way to block Lucas?”

  Sturges nodded. “He made up something Lucas is supposed to have said about Agent Orange years ago. It should be enough—bars Lucas from having access to ASP material.”

  “Which just leaves Lebasse,” said Gelstrom thoughtfully. He swung around to face the man under the sunshade whose bald head was bright pink. “We need an opinion, Ivor, old man.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry?” Ivor Banting said, craning forward with a tentative smile. He was pretending not to have heard what they were discussing.

  Gelstrom spelled it out. “We can’t wait a year for Lebasse to die. We need approval of DEPARTMENT STORE right now. How do we dispose of him?”

  At that same moment, though due to the different time zone three hours later by the clock—7:25 eastern time—Thomas Lebasse and Gene Lucas were attending a garden party at the lakeside home of Senator Crawford P. Bright and his wife, Sonia, on the outskirts of Belverdere, a fashionable residential area fifteen minutes drive from Capitol Hill.

  Circulating among the 150 or so guests it was easy and natural for the two men to meet without causing comment or arousing suspicion. At this time of year this was only one of countless social events, which was why Lebasse had accepted the invitation and arranged through an intermediary to have the names of Professor Gene Lucas and his wife, Elizabeth, included on the guest list.

  As for Lucas, he regarded the invitation, even though he didn’t know Senator Bright personally, as perfectly normal and aboveboard; after all, he was the president’s senior scientific adviser, and he therefore went along with no other intention but to relax and enjoy himself and breathe in the rarefied atmosphere of the Washington socialites, an opportunity that didn’t come his way all that often.

  His benign and relaxed disposition lasted up until the moment he found himself strolling with the secretary of defense down by the lake—which at that relatively early hour was molten with the light of the setting sun.

  Wildfowl made desultory muted sounds in the reeds as they settled down for the night, and behind the two men a garland of fairy lamps marked the perimeter of the festivities—voices, laughter, the clink-clink of glass, a Chopin nocturne—twenty yards away on the darkening velvety lawn.

  “Oh, yes, a number of times,” Lucas said in answer to a question. “We’ve served on various presidential committees together since 1990. In those days General Wolfe was, as I recall, a colonel and Madden a lieutenant.”

  “Do you know anything about the work they’re engaged upon?”

  Lucas exhaled pipe smoke, his mouth small and prim beneath a neatly clipped moustache. He was only an inch or two shorter than Lebasse, which made a change from having to crane his neck in order to converse. “On the military side, you mean? I know they’re both with Advanced Strategic Projects at the Pentagon. But no, not specifically.”

  They walked on, Lucas puffing his pipe and watching Lebasse covertly. The man was ill, shrunken, his eyes dull, his movements lethargic. Ulcer? Liver trouble? Something pretty serious, Lucas guessed, and the germ of suspicion entered his mind that this meeting wasn’t as accidental as it appeared.

  “Then I take it you know nothing about a project code-named DEPARTMENT STORE?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No.”

  “Have you heard of it?” Lebasse persisted in a low voice.

  “No. Never.” Lucas stood aside to allow the other man to mount the four concrete steps leading up to the
short wooden jetty. It was just wide enough for them to walk side by side. They came to the end without speaking, Lebasse’s breath whistling in his chest. Lucas stood and waited, curiously ill at ease. His party mood was fading with the sun’s last rays behind the Blue Ridge of Shenandoah National Park.

  “I’m breaking my oath of office by what I’m about to tell you,” said Lebasse, his face ruddily imbued with a fake glow of health by the sunset. “This is for your ears only. DEPARTMENT STORE has special category classification and isn’t to be divulged to anyone without ASP clearance. Now, Gene—okay if I call you that?” and at Lucas’s brief nod, went on, “two reasons I’m telling you this, Gene. One, I need advice. You’re qualified to give it and I trust you. Two, I don’t trust General Wolfe and I trust Madden even less. They both have a vested interest in seeking and gaining approval for this project and will go to any lengths to get it. Are you with me?”

  Lucas nodded slowly, pipe clamped between his teeth. This sounded serious and he knew that he was going to hate it. It smelled to high heaven of political and military intrigue, which he abhorred.

  “DEPARTMENT STORE is part of a long-term strategy to threaten the USSR with total environmental war,” Lebasse was saying. “According to ASP intelligence the Soviets have a plan of their own to alter the geophysical structure of western Siberia, which will affect the ecological balance of the Arctic Circle and lead to a widespread disruption of our climate here in the United States. They—Wolfe and Madden, that is—maintain that nuclear and bacteriological modes are outdated and ineffective in combating this situation, and therefore we have to be ready with a war plan that will, at the very least, stalemate the Soviet threat and prolong the balance of power. That’s their contention—” He broke off, choking on something, and wiped spittle from the corner of his mouth.

  Lucas waited. “I don’t dispute that the Soviets are up to something, Gene, because we have corroborative evidence from other sources. But I’m not a scientist. I have to know whether employing DEPARTMENT STORE as a deterrent is a greater risk than having no deterrent at all. It could pose a bigger threat to our own security—goddammit, the world’s existence is what I’m talking about—than anything the Soviets could do to us. I don’t know, I’m not an expert; but the decision is mine and I have to be right.”

  Watching him all the time he was speaking Lucas had noticed how, as the light failed and died behind the ridge, his face assumed a sickly gray pallor, his eyes sunken in their sockets. Lebasse was waging a losing battle. Was this the reason for the secrecy, the urgency? He had to make this one last vital decision before time ran out?

  “I need an answer within two weeks.” Lebasse was speaking more quickly now, as if time were indeed running out. “Report to me and only to me, but not through my office. Here’s an unlisted number you can call. Make the call from a public pay phone. I’ll arrange to meet you. In the meantime if you need more information, call me on that number.”

  “I’ll need a complete dossier on DEPARTMENT STORE, of course,” Lucas said. “Everything you have relating to the scientific and the military data.”

  “You already have it. It’s in the glove compartment of your car.”

  “Very well.” Lucas was about to add something, but there didn’t seem much else to say.

  Lebasse turned. “Let’s get back before we’re missed.” He took two paces and halted. There was a figure on the jetty. In the deepening twilight it was possible to make out only a white dinner jacket and the glowing tip of a cigar.

  “He said there were trout, but I don’t believe it,” Lebasse chortled, moving on. “Crawford spinning a line, the old bastard. Eh?”

  “Yeah, guess so,” said Gene Lucas jovially, in what sounded in his own ears to be an incredibly bad piece of ham acting.

  He had walked many thousands of miles, clad in black robes and carrying only his stick and his bowl, and in all that time he had rarely been hungry. The people were poor and had little, but he had nothing, and it was the custom to provide for those less fortunate than oneself. A handful of brown rice. A hunk of maize bread. On good days a small portion of goat’s meat, sometimes with mashed beans. Perhaps even small fishes, cooked underneath flat stones in the glowing embers until the skin was crisp and brittle. Each meal was a feast.

  No, his body had never suffered the pangs of hunger, even though his soul constantly hungered.

  He had sat with priests and wisemen, listening to them while remaining silent himself, struggling to understand. Letting them fill the empty bowl of his mind as the villagers replenished his feeding bowl. The knowledge had been dreadfully slow in coming and painfully acquired. In the early days language was the obstacle. Using signs and gesture and his scant vocabulary he had come to understand the essence of their teaching, yet the greatest obstacle still remained: the rigidity of his mind, its dogmatism and unwillingness to accept.

  Eventually he found himself in the mountainous region of the northeast where the holiest men lived. There he discovered, as if by divine revelation, that the enlightenment he was seeking was in a place he had never suspected—inside himself. And with the knowledge came the awareness that first he had to strip off, layer by layer, the defenses that had been erected and reinforced since birth to protect his vulnerable personality.

  The vast majority of human beings were encased inside this protective shell all their life. The love of self and the desire to impose it on others, on the world at large, made them try to re-create every person and every thing in their own image.

  So the first step, he now came to see, was to let go—to disinherit his bodily needs and accept the world as it is. To accept what is given. From this moment on he discarded his own personality, his own identity, and miraculously found himself beyond the barrier in a world that was completely changed because he himself had undergone a metamorphosis.

  His body erupted in sores, which festered and became succulent feeding places for parasites and flies. He almost died of malaria and lay for days in a burning, shaking stupor, tended by two old women who starved the fever out of him. Twice he was bitten by venomous snakes, which had curled close to share his body heat while he slept. He became thin, almost to the point of emaciation, with stringy arms and lean flanks; yet harder, tougher, and more resilient, able to withstand the heat and cold and the hardships of travel over long distances, always on foot.

  One accident damaged him permanently; he had fallen down a steep rocky ravine and smashed his left knee. The healing took many months, leaving the limb misshapen, and thereafter his walk was lurching and ungainly and caused him much pain.

  His face changed beyond recognition—burned and cracked by the sun and blistered by the wind, the flesh tautened on his cheekbones, leaving deep hollows beneath. His chin became a jutting knob of bone. In this prematurely aged mask his eyes appeared uncommonly large, the whites tinged with blue so that they seemed even whiter, the brown irises clear and brilliant like convex mirrors. His stare was daunting in its naked, uncompromising directness.

  He acquired a new name, too: Bhumi Bhap. Which in the language of his teachers means Earth Father. With this final change the transformation was complete. The inner and outer man had been reborn.

  There were still vestiges of his former life, traces of racial memory, which sometimes surfaced in dreams. He could not erase them completely, even though they had no meaning or relevance in his new philosophy: The past was truly dead.

  Now the time had come for this new being to fulfill the purpose for which it had been created.

  He stayed three weeks in New York while arrangements were made. The ashram was a converted loft in what had been a warehouse on Cleveland Street in the SoHo district. For much of the time he sat and meditated. Whenever approached by any of the young initiates who had heard of his pilgrimage he was amazed to find that they shared his beliefs; he was no longer alone as he had been all those years ago when he set out on his quest.

  In these young people he saw signs of spiritual
malaise, which were symptoms of a national, perhaps worldwide, dissatisfaction: a growing body of youth looking for the way ahead and seeking it in the ancient religious teachings. How, he wondered, could this sickness and dissatisfaction be channeled and used? It was taught that the self and ultimate reality were one and the same, given expression as “Thou are That.” Then how to reconcile this tenet of the faith with his own desire for change? The world must be reborn, just as he had been reborn. But rebirth demanded a death. It was already sliding toward the brink. He could watch it die—more, he would help it toward self-extinction.

  They would follow him, these thousands of young people, if he were prepared to lead. But lead where? He must find the answer.

  From New York he flew to Las Vegas and from there he went north to a small settlement between the townships of Sunnyside and Lund on the banks of the White River, overlooked by Mount Grafton. Even while flying over the Rockies and seeing once again the familiar topography, no stray thought or memory of his previous life impinged upon the serene surface of his mind.

  The past was truly dead and buried.

  There were a few shacks grouped around a clearing in the trees. About fifty members of the faith lived there, young men mostly, with shaved heads and saffron robes. When one of them asked why his own robes were black, Bhumi Bhap replied, “In mourning.”

  In one of the shacks he unpacked his few belongings, including his bowl and wooden spoon, asking to be excused from their company. Alone, he adopted the posture advocated by the Bhagavad-Gita, repeating silently over and over again, Upright body, head and neck, which rest still and move not, with inner gaze that is not restless, master of mind, hoping for nothing, desiring nothing.