Deep Cover (24 page)

“Jesus H. Christ. It was Trumble. Congressman Trumble. He called me from Phoenix about one o'clock this morning and he said he couldn't get to the meeting but he had orders to cover it so he had to have a record of it.” Craig gripped the edge of the sink; he looked faint. “I swear that's the truth. That's all he told me.”

“I heard you say that before.”

“I'm not holding out on you.”

“How do you know it was Trumble?”

“You can't mistake that voice. Christ, I know the man. It was him.”

“All right.” Belsky nodded to Hathaway and Hathaway bludgeoned Craig behind the ear. Torrio caught him and held him up against the sink but Craig was unconscious. Belsky said, “Have you got a place to keep him?”

“Alive?” Hathaway showed his surprise.

“Yes. I may need to question him again.”

“You think he was lying?”

Belsky said, “I'm not going to stand in this damned bathroom and argue the point. You understand simple orders, don't you?”

Torrio said, “We'll put him on ice. Don't worry about it.”

“I won't,” Belsky said, and looked at his watch and left.

Chapter Eight

“We've got a war against Communism, gentlemen—pretty soon every man is going to have to stand up and be counted. We've got to keep stopping them every place they try to move in. Fight them on their own ground because if we don't do that now we'll be fighting them in Alaska and Hawaii and then in Chicago and New York. And it's too late when you have to do that.”

Senator Woodrow Guest continued, “Some people among us would like to disarm us and show the world what nice friendly peace-loving pacifists we are. Look, there's nothing in the book that says they can't lick us or won't. We can be defeated. But some of our well-meaning crypto-socialists have blinded themselves because they want to think the Soviets are as peace-loving as they are. The left wing has an
endless capacity for giving the Commies the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to admit the danger of Communist aggression even when the Reds overrun Tibet and Soviet tanks invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This kind of thinking sold us out in Vietnam by caricaturing our military commanders as feebleminded neofascists. This kind of thinking has brainwashed our youth into a wish to believe we've got no need for armaments and national security. This kind of thinking makes no distinction between war and the deterrents of war. My Lord, gentlemen, is there no one left in our halls of government who owns a sense of honest outrage?”

When he paused he smiled a little and lifted the lid of his humidor, selected a cigar and held it like a moustache under his nose. His wise elegant face was averted, but Forrester recognized its expression—the look of a poker player trying to decide whether he has impressed his opponent with the strength of his bluff.

Guest stirred in his chair and broadened his grin. “I won't bore you with the rest of it but it's a pretty good speech, don't you think?”

“If you like saber-rattling. I fail to see how it's relevant to the subject at hand.”

He saw color rise in Guest's cheeks. And Congressman Ross Trumble scowled silently at his dusty shoes.

They were gathered in the study. There were to have been six but when Ramsey Douglass phoned to say he couldn't attend, Guest and Forrester dismissed their own seconds and it was just the three of them now.

The Scottsdale slopes had been bulldozed into a terraced suburb of expensive châteaux inhabited by new merchant princes and young bosses of aggressive corporations. Woody Guest did not fit in with the rest of them but that didn't matter; he lived on the mountain in the splendor of his Moroccan villa because from these heights he could see the city that had made him. The Guest family had owned half the real estate in downtown Phoenix from territorial days forward.

Beyond the landscaped resort hotels Camelback Road was a broad spear with its palm trees converging into the shimmering hover of turbulent heat. In the blinding sunshine a half-million panes of glass shot painful reflections back from the flats and every shadow was black with a sharp edge. The study's glass wall commanded that view; inside, the room was spacious enough to enclose what Guest maintained was the biggest Navajo rug in existence. They sat in deep soft leather chairs, and the oak walls were lined with books and a few masculine paintings and the autographed photographs of seven Presidents.

Forrester had been met at the door by Guest's wife Myra. She was frail and never without a cigarette; she had shown him into the study in her faraway fashion, eyelids drooping—he suspected she had been addicted to some tranquilizing drug for a long time.

He had found Woody Guest taking his ease, clad in weekend slacks and sport shirt. Guest's eyes were set in deep weathered folds and there was authority in the poise of his handsome head. For three hundred years the Guest clan had spread its branches west from Georgia plantations and everywhere a Guest settled, his back porch became headquarters and fountainhead of local political power. When Woody Guest said, “Don't label me a right-wing reactionary just because I believe in the traditional American values,” he believed exactly that. But the values he lived by included a three-hundred-year legacy of back-porch shrewdness, the ingrained understanding of the uses of power. Woody Guest was the complete political chameleon: he could wear a just-folks drawl as effortlessly as he wore the more characteristic aristocratic manner that kept people at a respectful distance.

Ross Trumble had arrived shortly after ten and squeezed his bloated hulk into the room with a disturbing absence of his usual affability. He seemed strangely subdued, his heavily lidded eyes more guarded and secretive than usual. His dewlappy face and oddly prim mouth made him look as if he had intimate knowledge of too many sybaritic vices. He had walked into the room carrying his black attaché case, spoken
his greetings with a smoker's wheeze, accepted a glass of iced tea, and then spent the next five minutes sitting and squinting through the glass at the sunshine.

During that time Woody Guest had trotted out a copy of the speech he intended to deliver before the State Republican Committee.

“It's saber-rattling,” Forrester said again. “You always were a man whose oratory could bring tears to his own eyes.”

Guest laughed comfortably; he was a hard man to rile. “Young friend, I'm only trying to save you grief. No one can look quite so foolish as a man who gets wrapped up in his private crusade. A zealot quickly becomes a bore. I'm only trying to give you the kind of advice your father would have given you if he'd been here. He was one of our great Senators—I learned a fair passel from him and I want to pass a bit of it on to you by way of returning the favor. Your dad would have warned you against the folly of taking a stand on anything just before a reelection campaign—anything, let alone an issue as volatile and complex as this one. Now I'm telling you out of my heartfelt love for you, son, you're going to have to pull in your horns right now and behave yourself or you're going to get dumped on your ear by the party.”

“The first time I ran for office my father said to me, ‘Alan, you want to watch out for old Woody Guest, he talks real good—you could spread it on toast.'”

He heard Ross Trumble's laugh—a long voiceless wheeze—and Guest laughed too, and Forrester said, “I take it you support the same line, Ross?”

“Senator, look at it this way. Man has always lived with elements that could destroy him but we've learned to control them. It may turn out to be the same way with wars—but only as long as we can maintain the balance of power in responsible hands. We invented war and we'll just have to invent some substitute for it, but until we can do that we need deterrents.”

Forrester turned quickly and surprised a look of fascination in Woody Guest's eyes. “Well don't that beat all,” Guest said.

A crimson flush suffused Trumble's big face. “We're not animals,” he said inaccurately. “But we've got to buy time and we can do that only by convincing the other big powers they
can't afford to monkey with us on a nuclear scale. You disarmament advocates just don't take that into account: you just don't see that the idea of massive retaliation is a temporary stopgap, not a permanent solution.”

“A malignant stopgap,” Forrester argued. “The idea's fundamentally unstable. Whether it's permanent or temporary, it can still incinerate the world. Let's use short words: we're building hardware for a war we know will be our doom. To hell with deterrents—the idea's obsolete. Our ten-thousandth Phaeton won't offset their two-thousandth in any real strategic sense.

“You both know I've never disputed that we need enough weapons to defend ourselves. But one-twelfth of the productive output of the
world
goes into military expenses—one-twelfth of the work output of every human being on earth, dedicated to our own mutual slaughter. Half our budget goes into a military stockpile that's already big enough to overkill Russia and China forty times—we're past any legitimate defense requirements, we're just feeding a cancer. Of all people, why should the military be beyond criticism and accountability? Since when is the existence of an insatiable appetite an excuse to feed it? Senator, the more weapons you've got, the easier it is to think about using them, and the more thinkable it becomes the more inevitable that they'll be used.”

Guest showed his teeth around his cigar. “I suppose you've discussed all this with the Soviet Union.”

“I'm not arguing foreign policy. I don't care what the Russians do. We can destroy them regardless, and they know it. But in the meantime we've created a monster with a vested interest in its own perpetuation. To justify its existence we let it come up with estimates of the enemy threat. These estimates are always based on the worst possible threat the enemy could pose. And then on the basis of that imaginary threat we let the researchers develop deadly weapons and deploy the damn things. Naturally the other side panics and starts a crash program to beef up their own systems, and of course that provokes our side into building another new system.… I'm not talking blue sky, Senator. You may recall the Safeguard program was designed to protect our ICBMs
against something like four thousand warheads the Russians were supposed to be capable of deploying. So we built four thousand of our own. It turned out the Russians had built only sixty but in the end they had to expand their own program to keep up with ours. When you overestimate a threat you make it real. Now you want to escalate the whole thing again—it's like winding a watch spring one notch tighter; one day the whole thing snaps and you get pieces of clockwork all over the floor. It's time to break the whole sorry cycle.

“Now I'll grant you've got a product with a lot of sales appeal because you're selling defense of home territory. But the Phaeton can't do us any good and it could well do a great deal of harm. The only tangible benefit will be the contracts the aerospace companies fatten on. Don't think I can't bring that home to the voters.”

Senator Guest removed the cigar from his mouth. “We're talking in circles. Brass tacks now: exactly what do you want, Alan?”

“I want permanent cancellation of the Phaeton Three program.”

“Even at the expense of your own reelection?”

“If that's the choice, yes. I don't believe it is.”

“You realize you could easily get reelected and then start this fight?”

“False. If these hardware systems aren't controlled before they're built they can't be controlled at all.”

Guest went from patient attentiveness to hard anger in the blink of an eye. It was a pose but it usually worked. “You're a gold-plated fool, Alan. You're on the party's shit list and we're offering you an olive branch and you're slapping me across the face with it. Now you've had plenty of time to look at the ramifications and you can't pretend you're ignorant of them. You know the score but I'll mention one or two of them again just so there's no mistake. First we're in an election year and in the Senate we've got fourteen incumbents up and the Democrats have got twenty-one seats up. Twelve of our fourteen are shoo-ins or at least reasonably safe, while the opposition has got maybe eight, maybe ten vulnerable seats. Now if
we can hang on to twelve of our fourteen contested seats and pick up just four out of the ten the Democrats control now, we'll have a majority in the Senate for the first time in twenty-odd years. That's why it's important that the party hang on to your seat, and that's why we're having this little talk today. The party doesn't want to dump you, young friend. We need your seat. But if you force it we'll run Trumble here against you in the primary and believe me we'll wipe up the floor with you, son.”

Forrester felt strangely bored: he had known everything Guest was going to say before he said it. But Ross Trumble's teeth formed a sudden accidental smile and Forrester realized this was the first Trumble had heard of the possibility of his being elevated. But it didn't last long. Trumble lapsed again into brooding indifference; he was attending his own private thoughts and clearly was not listening when Guest resumed: “You may not want to believe this but it's still true that whoever owns the means of production governs our lives. That's true in Communist Russia and it's true here.”