He watched the children cavort on the playground. It seemed to be covered with wood chips. How natural it all was, the little ones cocooned in bulky winter clothes—the temperature was eleven or twelve, he estimated—and running about, some on the monkey bars, others on swings, still more playing in what dirt they could find. The manner of dress told him that these children were well looked-after, and they were, after all, children. Except for one. Which one he couldn’t tell from this distance—they’d need photos for that, when the time came—but that one wasn’t a child at all. That one was a political statement for someone to make. Who would make the statement, and exactly why the statement would be made didn’t concern Movie Star. He’d remain in his perch for several hours, not thinking at all about what might result from his activities. Or might not. He didn’t care. He’d write up his memorized notes, draw his detailed maps and diagrams, and forget about it. “Kolb” was years past caring about it all. What had begun with religious fervor for the liberating Holy War of his people had, with the passage of time, become work for which he was paid. If, in the end, something happened which he found politically beneficial, so much the better, but somehow that had never taken place, despite all the hopes and dreams and fiery rhetoric, and what sustained him was the work and his skill at it. How strange, Movie Star thought, that it should have become so, but the passionate ones were mainly dead, victims of their own dedication. His face grimaced at the irony of it. The true believers done in by their own passion, and those who sustained the hope of his people were those who ... didn’t care anymore? Was that true?
“MANY PEOPLE WILL object to the nature of your proposed tax plan. A really fair plan is progressive,” the senator went on. Predictably, he was one of the survivors, not one of the new arrivals. He had the mantra down. “Doesn’t this place rather a high burden on working Americans?”
“Senator, I understand what you’re saying,” Winston replied after taking a sip from his water glass. “But what do you mean when you say ‘working’ Americans? I work. I built my business from the ground up and, believe me, that’s work. The First Lady, Cathy Ryan, makes something like four hundred thousand dollars per year—much more than her husband, I might add. Does that mean she doesn’t work? I think she does. She’s a surgeon. I have a brother who’s a physician, and I know the hours he works. True, those two people make more than the average American does, but the marketplace has long since decided that the work they do is more valuable than what some other people do. If you’re going blind, a union auto worker can’t help you; neither can a lawyer. A physician can. That doesn’t mean that the physician doesn’t work, Senator. It means that the work requires higher qualifications and much longer training, and that as a result the work is more highly compensated. What about a baseball player? That’s another category of skilled work, and nobody in this room objects to the salary paid Ken Griffey, Jr., for example. Why? Because he’s superb at what he does, one of the—what?—four or five best in the entire world, and he is lavishly compensated for it. Again, that’s the marketplace at work.
“In a broader sense, speaking in my capacity as a mere citizen instead of a Secretary-designate, I object strongly to the artificial and mainly false dichotomy that some people in the political arena place between blue-collar and white-collar workers. There is no way to earn an honest living in this country except by providing a product or a service to the public and, generally speaking, the harder and smarter you work, the more money you make. It’s just that some people have greater abilities than others. If there is an idle-rich class in America, I think the only place you find them is in the movies. Who in this room, if you had the choice, would not instantly trade places with Ken Griffey or Jack Nicklaus? Don’t all of us dream about being that good at something? I do,” Winston admitted. “But I can’t swing a bat that hard.
“Okay, what about a really talented software engineer? I can’t do that, either. What about an inventor? What about an executive who transforms a company from a loser to a profit-maker—remember what Samuel Gompers said? The worst failure of a captain of industry is to fail to show a profit. Why? Because a profitable company is one that does its job well, and only those companies can compensate their workers properly, and at the same time return money to their shareholders—and those are the people who invest their money in the company which generated jobs for its workers.
“Senator, the thing we forget is why we’re here and what we’re trying to do. The government doesn’t provide productive jobs. That’s not what we’re supposed to do. General Motors and Boeing and Microsoft are the ones who employ workers to turn out products the people need. The job of government is to protect the people, to enforce the law, and to make sure people play by the rules, like the umpires on a ball field. It’s not supposed to be our job, I think, to punish people for playing the game well.
“We collect taxes so that the government can perform its functions. But we’ve gotten away from that. We should collect those taxes in such a way as to do minimum harm to the economy as a whole. Taxes are by their very nature a negative influence, and we can’t get away from that, but what we can do is at least structure the tax system in such a way that it does minimum harm, and maybe even encourages people to use their money in such a way as to encourage the overall system to work.”
“I know where you’re going. You’re going to talk about cutting capital-gains taxes, but that benefits only the few, at the cost of—”
“Senator, excuse me for interrupting, but that simply is not true, and you know it’s not true,” Winston chided brusquely. “Reducing the rate of tax on capital gains means the following: it encourages people to invest their money—no, let me back up a little.
“Let’s say I make a thousand dollars. I pay taxes on that money, pay my mortgage, pay for food, pay for the car, and what I have left I invest in, oh, XYZ Computer Company. XYZ takes my money and hires somebody. That person works at his job like I work at mine, and from what work he does—he’s making a product which the public likes and buys, right?—the company generates a profit, which the company shares with me. That money is taxed as regular income. Then I sell the stock and buy into another company, so that it can hire somebody else. The money realized from selling the stock issue is capital gains. People don’t put their money under the mattress anymore,” he reminded them, “and we don’t want them to. We want them to invest in America, in their fellow citizens.
“Now, I’ve already paid tax on the money which I invested, right? Okay, then I help give some fellow citizen a job. That job makes something for the public. And for helping give a worker a job, and for helping that worker make something for the public, I get a modest return. That’s good for that worker I helped to hire, and good for the public. Then I move on to do the same thing somewhere else. Why punish me for that? Doesn’t it make more sense to encourage people to do that? And, remember, we’ve already taxed that investment money once anyway—in actual practice, more than once.
“That isn’t good for the country. It’s bad enough that we take so much, but the manner in which we take it is egrcgiously counterproductive. Why are we here, Senator? We’re supposed to be helping things along, not hurting. And the net result, remember, is a tax system so complicated that we need to collect billions to administer it—and that money is totally wasted. Toss in all the accountants and tax lawyers who make their living off something the public can’t understand,” SecTreas concluded.
“America isn’t about envy. America isn’t about class rivalry. We don’t have a class system in America. Nobody tells an American citizen what they can do. Birth doesn’t count for much. Look at the committee members. Son of a farmer, son of a teacher, son of a truck driver, son of a lawyer, you, Senator Nikolides, son of an immigrant. If America was a class-defined society, then how the heck did you people get here?” he demanded. His current questioner was a professional politician, son of another, not to mention an arrogant son of a bitch, Winston thought, and didn’t get classi
fied. Everyone he’d just pointed to kvelled a little at being singled out for the cameras. “Gentlemen, let’s try and make it easier for people to do what we’ve all done. If we have to skew the system, then let’s do it in such a way that it encourages our fellow citizens to help one another. If America has a structural economic problem, it’s that we don’t generate as many opportunities as we should and can do. The system isn’t perfect. Fine, let’s try to fix it some. That’s why we’re all here.”
“But the system must demand that everyone pay their fair share,” the senator said, trying to take the floor back.
“What does ‘fair’ mean? In the dictionary, it means that everyone has to do about the same. Ten percent of a million dollars is still ten times more than ten percent of a hundred thousand dollars, and twenty times more than ten percent of fifty thousand. But ‘fairness’ in the tax code has come to mean that we take all the money we can from successful people and dole it back—and, oh, by the way, those rich people hire lawyers and lobbyists who talk to people in the political arena and get a million special exceptions written into the system so that they don’t get totally fleeced—and they don‘t, and we all know that—and what do we end up with?” Winston waved his hand at the pile of books on the floor of the committee room. “We end up with a jobs program for bureaucrats, and accountants, and lawyers, and lobbyists, and somewhere along the way the taxpaying citizens are just plain forgotten. We don’t care that they can’t make sense of the system that’s supposed to serve them. It’s not supposed to be that way.” Winston leaned into the microphone. “I’ll tell you what I think ‘fair’ means. I think it means that we all bear the same burden in the same proportion. I think it means that the system not only allows but encourages us to participate in the economy. I think it means that we promulgate simple and comprehensible laws so that people know where they stand. I think ‘fair’ means that it’s a level playing field, and everybody gets the same breaks, and that we don’t punish Ken Griffey for hitting home runs. We admire him. We try to emulate him. We try to make more like him. And we keep out of his way.”
“Let ’em eat cake?” the chief of staff said.
“We can’t say hot dogs, can we?” Kealty asked. Then he smiled broadly. “Finally.”
“Finally,” another aide agreed.
THE RESULTS WERE all equivocal. The FBI polygrapher had been working all morning, and every single set of tracings on the fan-fold paper was iffy. It couldn’t be helped. An all-night session, they’d all told him, looking into something important which he wasn’t cleared for. That made it the Iran/Iraq situation, of course. He could watch CNN as well as anyone. The men he’d put on the box were all tired and irritable, and some had fluttered badly on telling him their proper names and job descriptions, and the whole exercise had been useless. Probably.
“Did I pass?” Rutledge asked, when he took off the pressurized armband in the manner of someone who’d done this all before.
“Well, I’m sure you’ve been told before—”
“It’s not a pass-or-fail examination process,” the Under Secretary of State said tiredly. “Yeah, tell that to somebody who lost his clearance because of a session on the box. I hate the damned things, always have.”
It was right up—or down—there with being a dentist, the FBI agent thought, and though he was one of the best around at this particular black art, he’d learned nothing this day that would help the investigation.
“The session you had last night—”
Rutledge cut him off cold. “Can’t discuss it, sorry.”
“No, I mean, this sort of thing normal here?”
“It will be for a while, probably. Look, you know what it’s about, probably.” The agent nodded, and the Under Secretary did the same. “Fine. Then you know it’s a big deal, and we’re going to be burning a lot of midnight oil over it, especially my people. So, lots of coffee and long hours and short tempers.” He checked his watch. “My working group gets together in ten minutes. Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Thanks for a fun ninety minutes,” Rutledge said, heading for the door. It was so easy. You just had to know how the things worked. They wanted relaxed and peaceful subjects to get proper results—the polygraph essentially measured tension induced by awkward questions. So make everybody tense. That was simple enough. And really the Iranians were doing the work. All he had to do was stoke the fires a little. That was good for a smile as he entered the executive washroom.
THERE. MOVIE STAR checked his watch and made a further mental note. Two men walked out of the private dwelling. One of them turned to say something as he closed the door. They walked to the parking lot of Giant Steps, eyes scanning around in a way that identified them as positively as uniforms and rifles. The Chevy Suburban emerged from the private garage. A good hiding place, but a little too obvious to the skilled observer. Two children came out together, one led by a woman, the other by a man ... yes, the one who’d been in the shadowed doorway when they’d gone out for their afternoon playtime. Large man, formidable one. Two women, one in front, one behind. All the heads turning and scanning. They took the child to a plain car. The Suburban halted in front of the driveway, and the other cars followed it down the highway, with a police car, he saw, fifteen seconds behind.
It would be a difficult task, but not an impossible one, and the mission had several different outcomes, all acceptable to his patrons. Just as well that he didn’t get sentimental about children. He’d been involved in such missions before, and you simply couldn’t look at them as children at all. The one who’d been led by the large hand of her bodyguard was what he’d decided before, a political statement to be made by someone else. Allah would not have approved. Movie Star knew that. There was not a religion in the world that sanctioned harm to a child, but religions were not instruments of statecraft, regardless of what Badrayn’s current superior might believe. Religions were something for an ideal world, and the world wasn’t ideal. And so one might use unusual means to serve religious goals, and that meant ... something he simply didn’t think about. It was business, his business, to see what could be done, rules or not, and Movie Star wasn’t the least bit sanctimonious about it, which, he thought, was probably why he was still alive while others were not—and, if he read this properly, still others would not be.
28
... BUT A WHIMPER
POLITICIANS RARELY LIKE surprises. Much as they enjoy dropping them on others—mainly other politicians, usually in public, and invariably delivered with all the care and planning of a jungle ambush—they reciprocally detest being on the receiving end. And that was just the political sort, in countries where politics was a fairly civilized business.
In Turkmenistan, things had not gotten that far yet. The Premier—he had a wide variety of titles to choose from, and he liked this one better than “president”—enjoyed everything about his life and his office. As a chieftain of the semi-departed Communist Party, he would have lived under greater personal restrictions than were now the case, and would always be at the end of a telephone line to Moscow, like a brook fish at the end of a long leader. But not now. Moscow no longer had the reach, and he had become too large a fish. He was a vigorous man in his late fifties and, as he liked to joke, a man of the people. The “people” in this case had been an attractive clerk of twenty years who, after an evening of fine dining and a little ethnic dancing (at which he excelled), had entertained him as only a young woman could, and now he was driving back to his official residence under a clear, starry sky, sitting in the right-front seat of his black Mercedes with the sated smile of a man who’d just proven that that’s what he was, in the best possible way. Perhaps he’d wangle a promotion for the girl ... in a few weeks. His was the exercise of, if not absolute power, then surely enough for any man, and with that came near-utter contentment. Popular with his people as an earthy, common-folk sort of leader, he knew how to act, how to sit with the people, how to grasp a hand or a shoulder, always
in front of TV cameras to show that he was one of them. “Cult of personality” was what the former regime had called it, and that’s what it was, and that, he knew for sure, was what all politics had to be. His was a great responsibility, and he met that duty, and in return he was owed some things. One of them was this fine German automobile—smuggling that into the country had been an exercise in panache rather than corruption—and another was now returning to her bed with a smile and a sigh. And life was good. He didn’t know he had less than sixty seconds of it left.
He didn’t bother with a police escort. His people loved him. He was sure of that, too, and besides it was late. But there was a police car, he saw, at an intersection, its light turning and flashing, blocking the way, just beyond the cross street. A dismounted policeman raised his hand while talking into his radio, hardly even looking at them. The Premier wondered what the problem was. His driver/ bodyguard slowed the Mercedes with an annoyed snort, stopping it right in the intersection and making sure his pistol was readily accessible. Barely had the official car stopped when both of them heard a noise to their right. The Premier turned that way, and scarcely had time for his eyes to go wide before the Zil-157 truck hit him at forty kilometers per hour. The high military-style bumper hit just at the bottom of the door glass, and the official car was thrown ten meters to the left, stopping when it hit the stone walls of an office building. Then it was time for the policeman to walk over, assisted by two others who had appeared from the shadows. The driver was dead from a broken neck. The policemen could see that from the angle of his head, and one of them reached through the shattered windshield to shake it around, just to make sure. But the Premier, to everyone’s astonishment, was still moaning, despite his injuries. Due to all the drink, they thought, his body limp and limber. Well, that was easily fixed. The senior cop walked to the truck, flipped open the tool box, took a tire iron, returned, and smashed it against the side of his Premier’s head just forward of the ear. That task completed, he tossed the tool back to the truck driver, and the premier of Turkmenistan was dead as the result of an auto accident. Well, then, their country would have to have elections, wouldn’t it? That would be something of a first, and it would call for a leader whom the people knew and respected.
Executive Orders (1996) Page 63
