“About what?” Thayer demanded. “Are we going to find any irregular activity in that bank? Hell, we only took them on at the request of the Republican National Committee.”
“Quite,” Callendar said crisply. “Because your bank has a long and proud tradition of protecting client confidences.”
“We’ll review the file,” Thayer grated. “What are we going to find?”
Callendar shrugged. “The president—really the first lady—had an interest in Little Cheyenne, and a lot of their friends bought in, you know, kinda to be near the Tollivers, the prestige, etc. So she made a couple of bucks.”
Thayer sighed. He had worked hard for Vice President Donahue’s campaign, but not hard enough. Like most other mainline Republicans, he had not taken Rupert Justice Tolliver seriously until much too late, and he and his friends were now struggling to gain some influence over the rube. “How well did they—did the first lady—do?”
“Quite well,” Callendar said coolly, studying his nails. “It was just an investment.”
Thayer shook his head. “The money came in during the campaign.”
“Well, yes, some of it.”
“Most of it, if Hollis can still add and subtract.”
Callendar stood up. He could take just so much of this pompous old man, whatever his influence. “Look, Mr. Thayer, you know this town, better than any of us on the president’s team. You know how any rumor, any hint of impropriety, gets immediately blown out of all proportion.”
Thayer allowed himself a ghost of a smile. “That bad, is it?”
Callendar frowned. “The White House’s concern is simply to keep the private business of the first family private. The White House would like your assurance that that is the concern—the primary concern—of your bank as well.”
Thayer stood, signaling he was through sparring with this puppy. “We’ll do our part, keep our confidences.”
“Thank you.” Callendar extended his hand, which Thayer shook with great reluctance. “We’ll owe you one.”
“You will indeed,” the old man said. “And I won’t forget.” Thayer dropped his hands to his sides and waited silently as the young man left the room.
JULIA AND HOLLIS rode the elevator down to eight. Hollis said nothing, but his face was flushed with rage. When the doors opened, he bolted from the car, nearly colliding with her. She went back to her desk and sat, began putting her personal items away, wondering if it was worth the bother. She still felt quite ill but thought she had better wait the last hour to five o’clock before departing, in case anybody wanted to fire her.
Why had she concealed the Correspondence File and lied about it? She had taken it because there simply wasn’t any more lockable space in her desk. She’d lied because she was scared, but that wasn’t all of it. Julia didn’t scare easily. She’d lied because she felt she had been exposed to terrible secrets, and didn’t want anyone to know what she knew. She wondered who the smooth-looking, cold-eyed man in Thayer’s office who had not been introduced might be. He had the look of law enforcement about him; Julia’s father was a retired captain of the Texas Rangers, once head of the governor’s security detail. Julia knew the look of cops. Could the man be a Secret Service agent? FBI?
Julia tapped her access code into the computer terminal and was instantly rewarded with the same flashing “Code discontinued; access denied” message. She walked over to Hilda’s desk near the window and asked her to bring up Uvalde County Savings and Loan.
“Nothing on record,” Hilda said, puzzled. “You’ve been working on that for weeks.”
Julia shrugged. “I know. I guess maybe the account closed.”
“Come on, Julia. Hollis was prowling around your desk like a caged lion this morning, then Safe and Lock came by and picked the lock and all the files were piled on Old Lady Croft’s trolley and hustled off to the elevator. What were you working on? What did you find?”
“It might be better for your career if you didn’t know,” Julia whispered, catching sight of Hollis pop out of his office, look around like an annoyed squirrel, then head straight for her and Hilda. “Forget I asked you to look it up,” Julia told Hilda.
“Oh, Julia,” Hilda laughed. “Don’t be melodramatic. It’s only a credit file, for goodness sake.”
“Ms. Early,” Hollis rasped from three desks away. “My office, please.” He about-faced and marched back the way he came without waiting for an answer.
Hilda immediately lowered her head to her screen and began typing furiously. Julia followed, wondering whether she would try for another job in Washington or head on back to Texas.
HOLLIS HAD JUST come from the seventeenth floor, his third bollocking of the day, this time from the president of the bank, Max Berlin, whom Thayer let do the real thumping. Asked what he intended to do about a credit trainee who had violated what amounted to the bank’s first commandment—protect the privacy of the client—Reginald had of course volunteered to fire Julia Early. Berlin had called him an idiot; actually, the president had said: “Fucking idiot. Of course you don’t fire her; you have no idea what she really knows.”
“Mr. Berlin, I had no idea what was in that file. I called Dan Coates, the lending officer, and he hadn’t seen it in seven or eight months. It isn’t an active account, they don’t borrow except occasionally in the form of a daylight overdraft on money transfers or foreign exchange—”
“I know that, and you may be sure I’ll know a lot more in a day or so, as will Dan Coates, as will you. You are aware that they were the bank’s highest volume money transfer customer last autumn? Right before the election?”
“I know now,” Hollis gulped.
“And you want to fire the only person who might have figured this out before we can?” Berlin shook his head vehemently. “Hell no, we need her where we can watch her.” Berlin opened Julia’s file, on his desk. “Evaluations are good.”
“She’s done well, until this fuckup,” Hollis said viciously.
Berlin looked up and locked his pale blue eyes on Hollis for a full minute without speaking. “Perhaps she just needs closer supervision.”
Hollis felt light-headed and wished the president would invite him to sit down. He was a vice president with only three more years to retirement, and now, because some stupid bitch—
Berlin closed the file. “We’ll transfer her to security. Frank Simmons is putting together a small group of people to sell security systems to overseas banks. Apparently the girl has exceptional computer skills and presents herself well; be wasted as a junior on the lending platform.”
Hollis took the first breath in half a minute. “Yes, sir. Shall I tell her to report to Frank?”
“Yes, right away. And don’t make it sound like punishment even though those nerds do work below street level down near the vault. We want her sweet.” Berlin gave Hollis a last cold look. “Frank Simmons runs a very tight ship.”
JULIA WAS CALLED to report to Reginald Hollis’s office exactly at five P.M. Bank lore held it that firings were always held at five, usually on Fridays but often on other days. But always a las cinco de la tarde, the hour of the beginning of the bullfight in Spain and Mexico. Julia knew the bullfight from the ring in Monterrey, Mexico, a grubby industrial provincial capital a hundred eighty dusty miles south of Laredo, a favorite weekend run when she was in college.
Julia waited until exactly five, doing nothing, thinking nothing, staring at the screen saver of her computer terminal that had denied her access. She felt weary, sad, and scared as she crossed the bay toward Hollis’s corner office. Her fellow trainees watched her go with hooded eyes. Everybody knew.
Hollis’s door was open so she knocked gently on the jam. He looked up from his work, his face impassive, his anger under tight control. “Please come in,” he said as pleasantly as he could. “Close the door behind you.” Julia did. “And please sit down. I have some reasonably fresh coffee, or ice water?”
“Ice water would be nice,” Julia said, her throat sud
denly dry. She clenched her teeth. She had heard the drill; severance pay was presented and the victim told not to return to her desk but to leave immediately; any personal items would be sent. She wished Hollis would just get on with it.
“Well.” Hollis rose, poured two small glasses of ice water from a thermos, spilling a little. He placed them in front of Julia, sat and seemed to sag. “A long day for us both.”
Julia was suddenly furious. She had done everything she could! The patronizing bastard—
“Julia, mistakes were made, but that is why we have training. And supervision. We all have … supervision.” He looked more pained than angry. “But on the whole, you’ve done well, very well indeed, in Credit Training. You’ve learned to do analysis, you’re very quick and innovative with the computer.” Hollis paused. So I get a decent reference, maybe? Julia flashed between anger and faint hope. “There’s an opening in a new unit, just in formation, that might suit you better than becoming a lending officer. When first we met, you expressed an interest in travel, and there would be travel, a lot of it, and you would be involved in an area of banking the Board thinks of as very important to development of relations with foreign correspondent banks, not to mention that this new area is expected to become a profit center in a very short time.”
Julia was afraid to breathe. Hollis sat and stared at her, puffy, saturnine. “You’re being offered a position in the new unit Frank Simmons has established. I hope you won’t think that, after what happened with the Uvalde County file, this appointment is in any way intended as ironic. In fact, I was instructed some time ago to look for the best people as candidates for the new Bank Electronic Security Services Support unit, and you were at the top of my list. Frank Simmons and I have discussed it, and he would like to have you on Monday morning.”
Julia had no idea what to say. It felt like having a blindfold taken off and watching the firing squad march away, eyes averted. What would it be like? What was Simmons like? Who worked in this new unit?
Shit, who cared? She’d try it. She’d try anything. She hadn’t been fired. “Of course. Monday. Where are they?”
“Basement A, near the mainframes,” Hollis said, sitting up, obviously relieved. “But that’s for Monday; take tomorrow and Friday off; get the taste of this afternoon’s unfortunate unpleasantness off your tongue.”
Julia got up, said a plain thank you, shook hands, and left. She walked home in a daze, not wanting the human press of the bus.
Judith was waiting at the door of their apartment, her face twisted in anger. Hilda sat on the floor, in tears. “Look at this, will you, Julia?”
The apartment had been completely trashed, drawers emptied onto the floor, bookshelves upset, beds overturned, mattresses and upholstered furniture slashed. Julia walked slowly into the room she shared with Hilda and crossed to the closet. All their clothes had been torn off the hangers and tossed onto the floor. Her suitcase, where she had hidden the Correspondence File, was gone.
The phone rang. Judith hastened to answer it. “For you, love,” she said, handing the receiver to Julia.
Julia took the instrument with dread. “Hello?”
“Charles Taylor,” the man said smoothly. “Dinner?”
4
August 1972, Paris
RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER rented a walk-up flat on the Rue Vavin, in the Sixth Arrondissement, near the Luxembourg Gardens. The area was expensive, though the flat was not much above a closet with a single bed, a stained mattress, and a rickety chair and table. The shared bathroom was down the hall. Brother Justice had plenty of money, but wished to live anonymously; Claudia had advised it, especially as she knew he intended to contact students and others opposed to America’s war in Vietnam, a war she hated because it had broken her friend, President Lyndon Johnson.
Claudia had nonetheless been against Brother Justice talking to antiwar types, especially Frenchmen whose country had taken U.S. aid, then cut and run. She gave a grudging consent when Rupert promised that he would do nothing or say anything that would embarrass the president or criticize his decision not to seek reelection. Justice promised, gladly. He thought Johnson was right, and had only come to the knowledge too late.
Justice had become obsessed with the war he had labored so hard to avoid; it needed to be over before he could begin his dream of political power beyond the pulpit. What a little voice in his head insisted was God’s work.
Justice did visit the grand old churches of Paris; Notre Dame of course, Saint Germain des Pres, Saint Sulpice, and the grand if cold Basilica of Sacre Coeur. He made day trips to Versailles and Vincennes. He also visited many smaller churches, incredibly ancient by the standards of a Texan, and was moved by all of them. Their smoky walls and cold stone seemed so steeped in faith that his own, so recently acquired, seemed shallow and, he knew, born of cynicism. He was humbled.
At nights he found the student bars near the universities and on the Montparnasse, and talked of politics with superior French youths who sneered at America and mocked his rudimentary French.
He met Van Trinh, a Vietnamese girl struggling to afford her studies at the Sorbonne on the little money her middle-class family was able to send from Da Lat in the highlands of Vietnam. Justice liked Van, and she him, and they went places together, and ate together and slept together in his flat. She told him things about her tortured country, and he felt better about his refusal to rush to the colors. Van hated the French while studying in their capital, hated the Americans more because she thought they might actually win, then depart as they always did after they won a foreign war, and leave her debilitated country at the mercy of its ancient and eternal enemy, the Chinese.
There was an underground of leftist Vietnamese students in the universities of Paris. One of the right as well, but Justice had no interest in them. Van could find things out, and she was willing to share information with the ugly long-nose, because she was fond of him, found him absurdly naive, and because he always paid.
One of the things she found out was about secret negotiations going on at the Crillon, a luxurious hotel across the Seine and next to the American embassy, between the Americans and the North Vietnamese. She also knew the head of the Vietcong delegation, a minor player but a legend in Vietnam, a woman known only by her nom de guerre, Madame Binh.
Van thought perhaps she could arrange an introduction. Justice suggested she share his modest flat—a palace in comparison to her filthy, noisy, smelly dormitory garret. She would of course contribute her share of the expenses, she insisted.
There would be no need, Justice replied. That evening he bought her a fancy dinner at the famous bistro Deux Magots, and they walked home beneath the chestnut trees. Justice carried all of Van’s worldly goods in her backpack, and she never went back to the dorm.
5
March 2001
PRESIDENT TOLLIVER’S MULTIRACIAL, bi-gender, multicultural cabinet was finally complete. His choice for Treasury—the party’s emphatic choice, given the need for sound money and given as well Justice’s reputation while Governor of Texas of spending rather freely from the public purse—the venerable banker Alfred Thayer, withdrew his name from consideration abruptly and without explanation before his confirmation hearings could begin. His replacement, also at the insistence of the party, was some Jew from Wall Street named Levin whom Justice detested, but his appointment got the cabinet issue out of the way. The president didn’t care; he didn’t plan on listening to his cabinet secretaries anyway.
On the fifteenth of the month Justice instructed Zeke Archer to launch his legislative assault. Justice announced his restructure of government initiative in a rousing speech before both Houses of Congress, then stumped for it around the country like an election campaign. It sounded so good in the president’s speeches, the committees of Congress were cowed into breezing it through hearings, calling hardly a critical witness.
Justice was creating a mandate where none existed. Even Zeke Archer was amazed.
JULIA E
ARLY TOILED on in the basement of Capital National Bank, studying bank computer security and marveling at how primitive and porous it was. She learned more programming skills from the nerds around her, whom, she discovered with amusement, actually knew less about banking and transactions between banks than she did. She had System Manager access to the bank’s computer network, far more than she had had on the eighth floor. It went with the job, and no one on eight or seventeen had thought to restrict her.
In slow times, she began to reconstruct the files she had built on Uvalde County Savings and Loan and Little Cheyenne Development. She decoded and recovered the files Reginald Hollis thought he had deleted. Julia learned it is in fact very difficult to “erase” a file on a modern computer. She also downloaded the worksheet on the payments into and out of the two companies from her home PC, the ones before the election and before inauguration, and added them to her file. As a system manager, Julia had her own files, and knew how to protect them.
Julia knew a little Spanish, as did most south Texans. She named her growing record of money movements through Capital National and Uvalde “Plata Negra.”
Plata Negra meant Black Money in Spanish, a euphemism for corruption.
PRESIDENT TOLLIVER WAS fifteen minutes late for his first meeting with his national security team; far more prompt than usual. The Cabinet Room was crowded with the vice president, Joseph Donahue; the Secretary of Defense, Carolyn White; her chief deputy, Barney Wilson, the former Chairman of Chrysler Corporation; the National Security Advisor, Henry Amos, a rock-ribbed Republican from Connecticut selected as a sop to Donahue’s backers; and the Joint Chiefs, a bunch of ordinary-looking men in uniform led by the somewhat extraordinary-looking Admiral Josephus Austin, barely five feet tall and fit as a twenty-year-old, a Texan chosen by Tolliver from low down on the list; so low that sixty senior admirals and generals had been forced to retire. Austin was a controversial figure, nearly forced to retire himself near the end of the Blythe administration because he had repeatedly called for the reversal of policies that allowed homosexuals to serve in uniform and women to serve in combat. He was a naval aviator, call sign “Cowboy,” and an outspoken advocate of hitting any little dictator the moment he raised his head. Tolliver’s choice of him had been unpopular in the military, ridiculed in the liberal press, and viewed with caution even by the conservative republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee who voted to send his nomination on to the full senate with obvious unease.
Behold a Pale Horse Page 12
