The Road to Omaha: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  “How did he ever get through the hearings?” asked the pale-faced New Englander. “I never expected it.”

  “I, for one, have absolutely no desire to know,” replied the President’s prep-school roommate. “However, as to the nomination of the silently accommodating Mr. Mangecavallo, may I remind all of you that it was the result of the President-elect’s search committee, the majority of whom are around this table. I’m sure you felt that he’d never survive the Senate, but he did, and there you have it.… Gentlemen, you yourselves are responsible for placing a Mafia godfather as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “That’s rather crudely put, old man,” observed the escutcheoned Doozie, jutting forth his chin as he fidgeted. “After all, you and I, we did go to the same college together.”

  “God knows it pains me, Bricky, old chum, but surely you understand. I’ve got to protect our boy; it’s my job, honor-bound and duty and all those other things.”

  “He didn’t go to college with us. He wasn’t even pledged to our frat at the other place, the one for the grinds.”

  “Life isn’t fair to most of our crowd, Bricky,” said Froggie, his eyes, however, gazing coldly at the Secretary of State. “But just how could you possibly protect our boy in the Oval Office by alluding to any responsibility on our parts regarding Mangecavallo, which we would promptly and vociferously deny?”

  “Well,” fairly choked the Secretary, his left eye again a steel pinball shooting between two magnets, “as it happens, we have the complete minutes of the search committee’s meetings.”

  “How?” exploded Bricky, the pallid New England banker. “There were no secretaries and no minutes were taken!”

  “You were taped, fellas,” answered the leader of the State Department, whispering.

  “What?”

  “I heard our loyal, fine-familied son of a bitch!” cried the Moose. “He said we were taped!”

  “With what, for God’s sake?” demanded Doozie. “I never saw any machines!”

  “Voice-activated microphones,” said the Secretary, hardly louder than previously. “Underneath the tables—wherever you met.”

  “What was that?… Wherever we met?”

  The faces around the table were frozen in angry astonishment; then one by one, as the realization hit them, the voices followed.

  “My house?”

  “My lodge on the lake?”

  “My estate in Palm Springs!”

  “The offices here in Washington?”

  “Everywhere,” whispered Warren Pease, his face white.

  “How could you possibly do such a thing?” roared the angular Smythington-Fontini, his ascot askew and his cigarette holder a veritable saber.

  “Honor-bound and duty,” replied the blond Froggie. “You unmitigated bastard, don’t you ever expect to play at my club again.”

  “And I suggest you cancel any plans you had for attending our class reunion, you despicable turncoat!” cried Doozie.

  “As of this moment I accept your resignation from the Metropolitan Society!” stated Moose emphatically.

  “I’m honorary chairman!”

  “Not any longer, you’re not. By this evening we’ll have reports of your shocking behavior at State. Say, sexual harassment, female and male. We can’t tolerate that sort of thing! Not in our crowd!”

  “And any thought you entertained about berthing your insignificant cabin cruiser at our yacht club is out of the question,” pronounced Smythie. “Dirty pot sailor.”

  “Moose, Froggie, Doozie—you, too, Smythie! How can you do this to me? You’re talking about my life, all those things I hold dear!”

  “You should have thought of that before—”

  “But I had nothing to do with it. For God’s sake, don’t destroy the messenger because of the message he brings!”

  “That has a familiar ring to it,” said Bricky. “Commie-pinko propaganda, I think.”

  “No, I think it’s Japanese,” explained the green-jacketed Moose, “and that’s worse! They say our refrigerators are too big to sell and our cars too large for their streets. Why can’t they build bigger houses and wider streets, the goddamned protectionist bigots?”

  “It’s none of those things, old fellows,” cried the Secretary of State. “It’s the truth!”

  “What’s the truth?” demanded Froggie.

  “The message and the messenger. He bribed waiters and gardeners to install the equipment!”

  “What the hell are you talking about, you Benedict Arnold?” shouted Petrotoxic’s Doozie.

  “That’s it—that’s him! Arnold!”

  “Arnold who?”

  “Arnold Subagaloo, the President’s Chief of Staff!”

  “Never could get his name straight. Certainly not one of us. What about him?”

  “He’s the one who sent the message—through me! What would I know about voice-activated tapes? Good heavens, I can’t even work my damn VCR.”

  “What did this Subaru do?” repeated the pale-faced New England banker.

  “No, that’s the automobile,” clarified the Secretary. “It’s Subagaloo.”

  “Is that the refrigerator?” asked Moose of Monarch-McDowell. “Sub-Igloo’s a damn fine machine and should be in every lousy little Japanese household.”

  “No, you’re thinking of Subzero. This is Subagaloo, the Chief of Staff.”

  “Oh, that bright fellow from Wall Street?” broke in Smythington-Fontini. “He was very amusing on television a few years back. I thought they might give him his own show.”

  “Sorry, Smythie, he’s gone. That was before, with the other President.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed the yachtsman. “The nice fellow from the cinema with the smile my wife went bonkers over—or was it my mistress, or the little chippie in Milan? Frankly, I never understood a word he said when he wasn’t reading something.”

  “I’m talking about Arnold Subagaloo, this President’s Chief of Staff—”

  “Certainly not one of us, not with that name.”

  “He told me to tell you about the tapings of your meetings. He had them made!”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s against anyone or anything that could be a potential threat to the White House,” observed Froggie. “Therefore, during the transition, he projected all manner of conceivable future problems and took appropriate protective measures—”

  “In a damned ungentlemanly way!” interrupted Bricky.

  “Forcing us to do exactly what we’re doing,” completed the blond cynic, checking his gold Girard-Perregaux wrist-watch. “Eliminate Mangecavallo ourselves, thus removing the problem we, ourselves, created without touching the President.… That Subagaloo is one devious son of a bitch!”

  “Must be a whale of an executive,” concluded the crested Doozie of Petrotoxic. “Probably sits on a dozen boards.”

  “When his term’s over,” added the green-jacketed Moose, “I’d like his résumé. Anyone that devious is heaven-sent.”

  “All right, Mr. Secretary,” said the blond Froggie. “My time is limited, and since Smythie’s solved one vital problem, I suggest you address that other difficulty you mentioned before. I refer, naturally, to that insane and obscene brief to the Supreme Court that would turn Omaha over to the Tacobunnies, whoever the hell they are.”

  “Wopotamis,” corrected the Secretary. “I’m told they’re a branch of the Hudson Mohawks, who disowned them because they wouldn’t get out of their tepees when it snowed.”

  “We don’t give an Indian’s fart who they are or what they did in their filthy igloos—”

  “Tepees.”

  “Are we back to the refrigerators …?”

  “No, he’s the Chief of Staff—”

  “I thought he played for Chicago—”

  “The Japs are buying Chicago …?”

  “Where will they stop? They’ve already got New York and Los Angeles …!”

  “They bought the Dodgers …?
”

  “No, I heard it was the Raiders …!”

  “I thought I owned the Raiders.…”

  “No, Smythie, you own the Rams.…”

  “Will you all shut up?” shouted Froggie. “I have a meeting in Paris in exactly seven hours.… Now, Mr. Secretary, what steps have you taken to kill this ridiculous brief and any public exposure of it? Any public airing would lead to a congressional inquiry and that could take months, every minority-prone freak spewing his intestines across the floors of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The prospect is intolerable! It could cost us billions!”

  “Let me give you the bad news first,” replied the Secretary of State, now crashing the palm of his left hand against his head to control his swinging left eye. “Believing we might buy ourselves guaranteed insurance, we employed the finest patriotic sleazeballs in the business to get something on those fruitcake judges who found some merit in that putrid brief. It all came to nothing. We even began to wonder how they managed to get through law school; no group of lawyers is that clean.”

  “Did you try Goldfarb?” asked Doozie.

  “The first, the first! He gave up.”

  “He never gave up in the Superbowl. Of course, he’s Jewish, so I couldn’t ask him to dinner at the Onion Club, but he was a damn fine linebacker.… He couldn’t find any dirt?”

  “Nothing. Mangecavallo himself told me that Hymie the Hurricane had lost—and I quote—‘most of his marbles.’ He even told Vincent that this Chief Thunder Head was either the Canadian ‘Bigfoot’ or the Himalayan yeti, the Abominable Snowman!”

  “The Golden Goldfarb is history,” said the crested CEO of Petrotoxic sadly. “I’m going to sell my ‘Hurricane’, bubble gum cards as soon as possible. Mummy and Daddy always told me to anticipate the market.”

  “Please!” roared the blond-haired owner of Zenith Worldwide, once more studying his gold wristwatch and glaring at the Secretary of State. “What, if any, is the good news?”

  “Put simply,” answered Pease, his left eye now somewhat in place. “Our soon-to-be deceased director of the CIA has shown us the way. The appellants of the Wopotami brief—namely one Chief Thunder Head and his attorneys—must appear before the Supreme Court for oral interrogation prior to any Court decision.”

  “So?”

  “He’ll never get there—they’ll never get there.”

  “What?”

  “Who?”

  “How?”

  “Vinnie the Bam-Bam used his Mafia connections. We’ll go one better.”

  “What?”

  “Who?”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to unleash certain segments of our Special Forces—a number of whom are still in cages—and program them to terminate this Thunder Head and his associates.… You see, Mangecavallo—the soon-to-be-the-late Mangecavallo—was right. Eliminate the cause, you eliminate the result.”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Good show!”

  “Damn fine scenario!”

  “And we know that son-of-a-bitch Thunder Head and his Commie associates are in Boston. We just have to find him and his rotten, unpatriotic colleagues.”

  “But can you do that?” asked the ice-cold, Paris-bound Froggie. “You haven’t done much else right.”

  “It’s practically done,” replied the Secretary, his left eye completely stable for once. “That dreadful man they arrested in Boston, Caesar the Unpronounceable, is currently in a State Department sterile house clinic in Virginia, being—as they say—‘shot to the moon’ with a truth serum. Before the day is over, we’ll know everything he knows. And Smythie, I think you should go to work immediately.”

  “It … can be arranged.”

  Algernon Smythington-Fontini got out of his limousine at a most unlikely place. It was a run-down gas station on the outskirts of Grasonville, Maryland, a relic of the days when local farmers would fill up their trucks in the early mornings and spend several hours grousing with one another about the weather, the falling market prices, and most of all, the invading agro industries that were their death knell. Smythie nodded at the owner-attendant, who sat in a dilapidated wicker chair by the front door. “Good afternoon,” he said.

  “Hi ya, fancy fella. Go right inside and use the phone.… Leave your money on the counter as usual, and, as usual, I never saw you before in my life.”

  “Diplomatic security, you understand, old man.”

  “Tell your wife, not me, pal.”

  “Impudence doesn’t become your position.”

  “Hey, I got no problem with that—any broad, any position—”

  “Really!” Smythington-Fontini proceeded to go inside the small gas station. He walked to his left, where there was a cracked Formica counter smudged with grease; there was also a decades-old black telephone. He picked it up and dialed. “I trust the time is convenient,” he said.

  “Ah, Signor Fontini!” replied the voice on the other end of the line. “To what do I owe the honor? I trust everything goes well in Milano.”

  “Exceedingly, as in California.”

  “I’m happy we can be of service.”

  “You won’t be happy to learn what has been decreed. Among other ugliness, it’s irrevocable.”

  “Come now, what could be so serious for such words?”

  “Esecuzione.”

  “Che cosa? Chi?”

  “Tu.”

  “Me?… Sons of bitches!” roared Vincent Mangecavallo. “Slimeball tutti-frutti bastards!”

  “We must discuss arrangements. I suggest a boat or a plane, leaving open a return.”

  An apoplectic Vinnie the Bam-Bam furiously punched the buttons on his concealed telephone in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. Twice he drew blood on his knuckles, as he misjudged the sharp wooden edges of the side panels. He barked the number of the hotel room he had to reach.

  “Yeah?” said Little Joey the Shroud sleepily.

  “Get off your fuckin’ butt, Joey, the whole scenario got changed!”

  “What are you talkin’?… Is this you, Bam-Bam?”

  “You can bet the fuckin’ graves of your ancestors in Palermo and Ragusa! The fuckin’ fairies in their silk underwear just ordered my esecuzione! After all we done for ’em!”

  “You gotta be kiddin’! Maybe it’s a mistake. They talk in such polite language you can never tell when they want a shiv in your back or a pair of lips on your—”

  “Basta!” yelled the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “I heard what I heard and it’s gold!”

  “Holy shit! Wadda we do?”

  “Stay cool, Little Joey. I’m gonna disappear for a while, maybe a week, maybe two—we’re working out the particulars—but right now, you got a new assignment. And you gotta do it right, Joey!”

  “On my mother’s grave—”

  “Try someone else. Your momma did too much time.”

  “I got a niece. A nun—”

  “She got thrown out of the convent, remember? She and the fuckin’ plumber!”

  “Awright, awright! My aunt Angelina … she died after eating clams at Umberto’s, and never was there a holier person. On her grave!”

  “She was so fat she took up six plots—”

  “But she was holy, Bam-Bam, really holy! The Rosary every hour of the day.”

  “She didn’t have nothin’ else to do or do it with, but I accept your Aunt Angelina. You ready to swear on that holy grave?”

  “I swear on the threat of demonic possession, which is a big fuckin’ thing with these gibrones in New York.… Sometimes I think those Irish clowns don’t have both oars in the water.”

  “It’s good enough,” pronounced Vincent Francis Assisi Mangecavallo. “I accept your silence on what I am about to tell you.”

  “And I will thank God for your guidance, Bam-Bam. Who do I cause to have his life cut short?”

  “The opposite, Little Joey. You keep them alive!… I want you should set up a conference with this Thunder
Head and his associates. I am suddenly very much a champion of their cause. Such minorities have been trampled upon too much and too often. It’s intolerable.”

  “You gotta be outta your fuckin’ mind!”

  “No, Little Joey, they are.”

  15

  The door of the Ritz-Carlton suite crashed open as Desis One and Two in their white ties and tails lurched into the room, prepared to do battle. Devereaux dropped his martini and Jennifer Redwing spun out of her chair, plummeting to the floor, genetically, perhaps, anticipating the worst from the white man.

  “Well done, adjutants!” roared the buckskinned MacKenzie Hawkins, striding into the suite, followed by a perplexed Aaron Pinkus. “There’s no hostile action in evidence so you may stand to. At ease—casual positions are acceptable.” The Desis First and Second slouched. “Not that casual, Sergeants!” Instantly, D-One and D-Two stood erect. “That’s better,” admonished the Hawk. “Eyes alert! Assault tactics at the ready!”

  “Wad chu mean now?” asked Desi the First.

  “Instant submission is the first sign of counterattack. Forget the tall skinny one; he’s useless, but watch the female! They frequently carry grenades under their skirts.”

  “You antediluvian son of a bitch!” yelled Redwing, getting to her feet and angrily smoothing her hair and her dress. “You barbarian! You bellowing relic from a fifth-rate war movie, who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Guerrilla tactics,” said Mac under his breath to his adjutants. “The second phase after submission is loud verbal abuse—that’s when they distract your concentration and pull the pins.”

  “I’ll pull your pin right out of its hairy recess, you walking junk bond! And how dare you wear those clothes? You look like a refugee from a Shriner’s convention, you horse’s ass!”

  “You see, y’see?” muttered the Hawk, mangling the cigar in his mouth. “She’s trying to distract me now—watch her hands, men. Those knockers she’s got are probably plastic explosives.”

  “I’ll find out, Heneral!” cried Desi the First, his eyes focused properly on the targets as his starched shirt whipped up out of place. “Wad chu think?”