Deep Cover (18 page)

“And you'd love it.”

“It isn't a question of what I'd love. Let's not forget what we're here for. Celia, have you got any engagements planned for tomorrow and Thursday? If so cancel them—I'll want you
available instantly. The same goes for you, Fred. Maybe you'd better call in sick tomorrow and stay home.”

“I can't. We've got a Senatorial investigation coming on the base Friday morning.”

“Forrester? Yes. Awkward timing, but we'll see what we can do. If worse comes to worst we'll meet without you and Celia will bring you up to date.” Douglass turned away and went toward the door and added over his shoulder, “Let me recommend you prepare yourselves for whatever may be required. It may be time for us to take things out of mothballs and if so we don't want to find any moth holes in them, do we?”

Having given himself the curtain line he walked out.

Winslow watched the red tail lights of Douglass' Volkswagen disappear down the street and then he slammed the door and tramped back through the house. Celia was already outside in the yard. They walked silently down the dusty alley the length of the block and turned right on the gravel sidewalk. There was a chill and he wished he'd brought a sweater.

“He was only trying to throw a scare into us.”

“He wouldn't lie about a thing like that, Fred.”

“I wouldn't put it past him. I wouldn't put anything past him. Thanks for sticking up for me.”

“Did I?”

“When you told him to shut up. I wanted to smash a few of his teeth.”

“That wouldn't have been too bright, would it.”

“‘Whatever may be required,'” he said. “What did he mean by that?”

“I don't think he knows, himself.”

“He knows something we don't know. How can you take it so calmly?”

“What can we do except wait?”

They crossed a street and Winslow said, “Suppose we have to do something that ruins everything we've got here?”

“We've lived with that for years.”

“Is that all there is to it? What about the kids? What do we tell them?”

“We don't tell them a thing, Fred.”

“Sure. It'll be lovely if they have to find out from someone else.”

“Who else is going to tell them?”

“For all we know we'll be in the headlines.”

“For all we know we won't.” She stopped and turned and faced him. “Fred, it's what we are here for.”

“How can they expect us to be the same people we were then? Just because they've banked double pay for us and told us we could come home to early retirement as soon as we're finished here? Do they think that's really what we want after all this time? Go home to what? No friends left over there—God, we'd even have to learn the language all over again. A miniature apartment with a tiny refrigerator and if we're lucky central heating to get through those God damned winters—spend half a day standing in line to buy your clothes, maybe use half our savings to buy an unreliable little excuse for a car so we can go to the country on a few weekends in the summer when it's not snowed in. That's no good for us any more—you know it and they must know it; it's too late for all that. We've changed too much.”

“Fred—”

“Please don't remind me I ought to be glad of a chance to serve my country. It isn't my country any more.”

“I won't. We're a little too mature for all that. I won't even tell you we've been seduced by decadent bourgeois values—leave all that to Rams, he's the only one who still believes in slogans even if he's the one who puts them down. I'm sure we've been seduced by it all but I'm sure they never expected otherwise. They only expected one thing of us—that we never forget who they are, or what they're capable of. We're never out of their reach. Your brothers and sisters and mother, and my parents and nieces and nephews. Even Alec and Barbara.”

“That's what Nicole said. I wonder if she knew about Dangerfield.”

“Nicole?”

“She gave me a peptalk this afternoon.”

“Then she probably knows. Rams would have told her
before he told us. They're two of a kind.” She turned and began walking again. “They've got us on a leash. They wouldn't have sent us if they couldn't be sure of controlling us for our whole lifetimes—they wouldn't have taken the chance of one of us defecting. How many times have we walked up this street and had this conversation before? There aren't any loopholes. All we can do is to be thankful we've had the past twenty years.”

“And Alec and Barbara?”

“Whatever happens they'll survive it or they won't.”

“Do you get any real comfort from that kind of asinine fatalism?”

“Fred, what's the point of agonizing over things that are beyond our power to decide?”

There were clouds over the moon and between street lights it was quite dark; Winslow took his wife's arm. She said, “I was the one who was full of idealism when we volunteered to come over here. Sometimes I thought you came simply to be with me. I couldn't tell if it was what you wanted for yourself or not. But then I told myself I was flattering myself—no woman could force you to do a thing you didn't really want to do.”

He stopped. His grip on her arm turned her and he felt heat in his cheeks; he said in an odd voice, “It could have been a lot worse, after all, couldn't it?”

“We've had twenty-three years together and we didn't end up hating each other. That's a great deal.”

“We're both talking as if it's over.”

A car came into the street preceded by its lights. They turned and began to walk home. Winslow said, “What are they going to want us to do? What are we going to have to do?”

She gripped his hand; it was the only answer she gave.

Chapter Six

Early Wednesday morning Alan Forrester drove down from the ranch and racked the 200SL in a
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
parking slot beside the courthouse. He walked by the open door of a Superior Court room where people were lined up in rows of chairs waiting to be heard—prostitutes with cheap wigs and rickety legs and the absurdly fur-dressed pimps who had come to ransom them.

The Pima County Courthouse had been built in the Moorish style, hollowed out with a square central courtyard and a veranda-covered balcony in lieu of a hallway. The balcony teemed with civil servants in shirtsleeves and cotton dresses, complacent as eunuchs. Forrester, towering and striking, made a center of attention as he progressed. He shook hands and spoke greetings by name and signed a few autographs, and took note of the number of passersby who made a point
of pretending not to see him. The battle lines of public opinion were being drawn up.

He went into his private office by the side door and found Jaime Spode asprawl on the couch. A babble of voices came through the closed door of the outer office and a newspaper lay on the desk,
TORNADOES KILL
17
IN TEXAS PANHANDLE.
There was a small two-column head halfway down the page:

SOVIET DENIES AIM TO SURPASS U.S. IN MIRVS.

Washington,
April 2
(UPI)
—The Soviet press agency Tass issued the first official statement on the growing tempest over the alleged U.S. plan to deploy the Phaeton MIRV system of missile warheads. The Soviet Union asserted it was not seeking to add a further spiral to the arms race by seeking nuclear MIRV superiority over the United States.

The Soviet report seemed clearly a reaction to the disclosures last week by Senator Alan Forrester (R-Ariz) that combined Pentagon-House forces planned to rush official authorization of Phaeton Three through both houses of Congress before the issue could be debated in public. The Phaeton Three multiple-warhead system is (
Cont. on p.
7)

Forrester opened the paper to read the continuation and when he glanced up he caught Spode watching him. “With friends like the Reds, who needs enemies in Congress?”

Forrester grunted.

“Old man Shattuck still avoiding you?”

“Yes.”

“I don't wonder. I checked around and it seems Shattuck Industries gave a hundred-thousand-dollar check to Congressman Webb Breckenyear's campaign fund two years ago.”

“I might have expected that.” Forrester reached for the intercom switch. “Ronnie?”

The speaker crackled. “Yes, Mr. Spode?”

It was a clear enough signal: there was someone in the outer office who wasn't to know Forrester was in.

“Come in when you're free, will you?”

On the speaker behind Ronnie's “Yes, sir,” he heard a woman's harsh acrimony: “Every seven puking seconds another puking mouth to feed with six tons of meat and five tons of wheat and twenty-six million tons of water and God knows what-all—I am going to camp in this puking chair until hell freezes over or I get in to see the puking Senator, whichever comes first. If I don't get his signature we'll all get crowded off the God damn puking planet.”

Ronnie had left the intercom turned up long enough for them to hear what she was up against and it made Spode laugh with a hard bray. “Out to save the puking world all by herself—what'll you bet if I go out there and tell her to fuck off she'll be horrified?”

“I don't mean to seem rude but what are you doing here, Top?”

“Resting my feet.”

“Is that your gentle way of telling me you can't crack Ross Trumble's nut?”

“No, it's my gentle way of telling you my feet are sore because I've been standing in doorways for forty-eight hours keeping a tail on him. Every place he goes he takes that fucking briefcase with him. I think he sleeps with it under his pillow. But I've got a girl down here today from Orozco's agency and maybe she'll be able to pry him loose of it.”

“I need those figures, Top. I postponed the inspection tour of the base as long as I could but we've got to go through with it Friday morning and I've got to have those figures before that. You've got less than forty-eight hours.”

“Yeah, I know.” Spode stretched. “Listen, it's all right this time because I just spent an hour checking this room out, but you really ought to be more careful what you say to me. Breckenyear and Trumble have got FBI buddies and you want to look out for bugs.”

Forrester was impatient with it but it was true enough. The ones who saw Communists under every rock were capable of doing almost anything in the name of national security and that included spying on a United States Senator.

He said, “I haven't time to fool with that woman now, but I need Ronnie in here. You'd better do it—be as gentle as you can.”

“I'll just wave my tommyhawk.” Spode squeezed through the door and disappeared.

Forrester finished reading the newspaper item. There was a quote attributed to Senator Woodrow Guest: “Our liberal brethren seem to be looking for a scapegoat. First it was the draft, then Dow Chemical, then white racists. Now it's the defense industry.” It was easy to hear the tone of biting scorn in Guest's silver voice.

Ronnie came in miming exhaustion. “I thought that woman was going to shout my ears off.”

Spode trailed in and ambled back to the couch. “On her way out she was still talking to herself—heading for the Mayor's puking office.” He sat down and clasped his hands on top of his head, spread-eagling his elbows.

Ronnie had her notebook. “Senator Guest's office phoned. He's flying into Phoenix tonight and he asked if you'll be available for a conference Thursday morning—tomorrow—at ten. Congressman Trumble will be there. And Ramsey Douglass of Matthewson-Ward.”

“Where?”

“Senator Guest's house. Scottsdale.”

Spode said, “If Woody Guest's willing to fly all the way out here to meet you maybe it means he's ready to knuckle under and hold hearings.”

“I think he is,” Forrester said. “He's got quite a few enemies panting around for a crack at his throne and some of them are up for reelection this year. If he refused to hold public hearings it would be an unpopular move and some of the moderate conservatives in the Senate would feel forced to dissociate themselves from him—especially in an election year. No, he'll come out foursquare in favor of open hearings, but when they're held he'll do his best to cloud the issues. So we've still got to whip up public concern and work on the swing voters in the Senate. For openers, that Shattuck Industries contribution to Breckenyear's campaign will do—Shattuck doesn't even have a plant in Breckenyear's state. I
want to make that contribution public. Can you document it?”

“That's what you pay me for.”

“Fine. It'll cast a shadow over Breckenyear and maybe even his redneck supporters will be embarrassed by it. But if I'm going to put pressure on the Senate we're going to need more ammunition like that. I want to know every campaign contribution that came out of the defense industry's checkbook, because when my friends get up to make speeches supporting their good American buddies in the hardware industry I want to show facts and figures that will discredit their motives.”