Last Gasp (22 page)

Gelstrom rose lithely and went to the white wooden rail. He was barefoot, even though the tiles were scorching. Exactly six feet tall, he seemed smaller and slighter when the man in white moved to stand alongside him. The two men stood looking out into the distance, not speaking.

It had never been calculated, and would have been difficult to prove, but Joseph Earl Gelstrom possibly had more power and wealth than any other private individual in the United States. He was head of a corporation whose subsidiary and associated companies dealt in chemicals, petroleum refining, plastics, electronics, armaments, aerospace, computers, timber, ranching, transport, the TV and movie industry, as well as substantial holdings in numerous diverse enterprises, from newspapers to motel chains, car hire to fast-food franchises.

His empire had been founded at the age of nineteen, started on the basis of his father’s New Jersey interior-decorating business, which at the time employed nine people. Few people knew about his beginnings. Gelstrom had erected a barrier around his past that was as effective, and deadening, as the lead shielding surrounding a radioactive core. Nothing was known about him publicly prior to his takeover, at the age of twenty-three, of a small run-down chemical company that had a contract for the supply of detergents to the U.S. Army. The contract amounted to a paltry ninety thousand dollars a year until Gelstrom came up with a proposition to rationalize the army’s vehicle-cleaning program, thereby saving them several million dollars annually. What he omitted to mention was that he had costed the new contract on the number of vehicles to be cleaned rather than the quantity of detergent to be supplied. In fact he had achieved the promised saving simply by halving the recommended amount of detergent per vehicle. His only expense was in relabeling the drums to that effect.

From there he went into chemicals for industrial and agricultural use, which led to timber and ranching. Like the Russians he had a series of five-year plans. In each of these periods he concentrated all his attention and efforts on a particular group of industries. Thus timber and ranching occupied him from the ages of twenty-four to twenty-nine. From twenty-nine to thirty-four it was electronics, computers, and plastics. From thirty-four to thirty-nine it was aerospace research and armaments, and in the past five years he had extended the JEG Corporation’s interests into road and rail transport, TV and movie production, and the electronic home leisure and information market. Along the way he had acquired holdings in publishing, car rentals, sports equipment, motels, fast food, and sundry spin-offs.

Although each company was autonomous and able to direct its own day-to-day affairs, Gelstrom retained overall control, keeping a close watch with continual computer updates that enabled him to make instant policy decisions.

Over the years the media had tried repeatedly to penetrate the lead shielding and expose the man to the public gaze. His name was known, of course, but that was just about the sum of it. All his business dealings were conducted through the management of his companies, never face-to-face. If he went to a restaurant, a theater or social function it was never as himself, but undercover as any one of a dozen identities that had been as carefully prepared as a CIA case file.

Only three times had the media come close enough to cause him serious concern. On two of these occasions he had arranged through his grapevine of highly placed and influential contacts to have the story blocked and the reporters warned off. The third attempt, by a young and eager female TV reporter, had unfortunately succeeded— unfortunate, that’s to say, for the reporter, who was hit by a truck while out jogging near her apartment in the Twin Peaks district of San Francisco. At about the same time her car had been stolen, which was later recovered minus a briefcase, tapes and two cans of exposed film.

Two attempts had been made on his life, and both sources identified, though only one satisfactorily resolved. This was the disgruntled exowner of a vending-machine company that the JEG Corporation had taken over, leaving him with little more than the shirt on his back. A Vietnam veteran, he shot Gelstrom at point-blank range with a sawed-off shotgun and blew his head clean off. His aim was excellent, his identification of the target less good, for he happened to have killed an Italian arms dealer with whom Gelstrom was negotiating a deal.

The other source (the one not resolved) was the Mafia. It was the first and only time Gelstrom had heeded a warning and backed off. The deal involved a casino and the location was Las Vegas and Gelstrom had unwisely employed his usual strategy of all-out attack to gain a controlling interest. It wasn’t appreciated, and he should have known better, and soon did when the car he was supposed to be traveling in erupted in a fireball on Interstate 15 en route to Los Angeles. Two of his best people died while he was nine thousand feet above Death Valley on his way to San Francisco. Gelstrom immediately pulled out of the deal, wrote it off as a failure, and counted himself lucky to have failed. Gambling, he decided, was Mafia business, and they were welcome to it.

Unlike this business, which he was going to do something about, though as yet he hadn’t decided what.

Gelstrom gripped the rail, tensing his biceps until the veins stood out. “Having a sick man in the administration doesn’t say a fat lot for the president’s judgment.”

“That’s if he knows.”

“He must know. Lebasse would have to tell him.”

“The media would tear Munro apart,” said the man in white, who was called Sturges. His face beneath the blond crew cut was hard and brutal, the curved strip of smoked plastic making him seem blind and menacing. Gold glinted at his throat and on both hairy wrists.

“It’s Lebasse we have to work on, not the president,” Gelstrom said. “If the secretary of defense approves DEPARTMENT STORE, the president will rubber-stamp it.”

“We can break Lebasse easily enough. Leak it to the media; but Munro will get as much flak.”

“That doesn’t help,” Gelstrom agreed. “We want Lebasse neutralized and somebody we can trust in his place. Who do we have?”

Sturges gazed blindly over the ocean. “What about Zadikov? We’ve supplied him with enough girls.”

“Good old Ralf.” Gelstrom smiled without humor. His dark eyebrows came together above the broad ridge of his nose. “What’s Madden’s pitch on this?”

“He says it’s our move.”

“Has he found a way to block Lucas?”

Sturges nodded. “He made up something Lucas is supposed to have said about Agent Orange years ago. It should be enough—bars Lucas from having access to ASP material.”

“Which just leaves Lebasse,” said Gelstrom thoughtfully. He swung around to face the man under the sunshade whose bald head was bright pink. “We need an opinion, Ivor, old man.”

“I’m—I’m sorry?” Ivor Banting said, craning forward with a tentative smile. He was pretending not to have heard what they were discussing.

Gelstrom spelled it out. “We can’t wait a year for Lebasse to die. We need approval of DEPARTMENT STORE right now. How do we dispose of him?”

At that same moment, though due to the different time zone three hours later by the clock—7:25 eastern time—Thomas Lebasse and Gene Lucas were attending a garden party at the lakeside home of Senator Crawford P. Bright and his wife, Sonia, on the outskirts of Belverdere, a fashionable residential area fifteen minutes drive from Capitol Hill.

Circulating among the 150 or so guests it was easy and natural for the two men to meet without causing comment or arousing suspicion. At this time of year this was only one of countless social events, which was why Lebasse had accepted the invitation and arranged through an intermediary to have the names of Professor Gene Lucas and his wife, Elizabeth, included on the guest list.

As for Lucas, he regarded the invitation, even though he didn’t know Senator Bright personally, as perfectly normal and aboveboard; after all, he was the president’s senior scientific adviser, and he therefore went along with no other intention but to relax and enjoy himself and breathe in the rarefied atmosphere of the Washington socialites, an opportunity that didn’t come his way all that often.

His benign and relaxed disposition lasted up until the moment he found himself strolling with the secretary of defense down by the lake—which at that relatively early hour was molten with the light of the setting sun.

Wildfowl made desultory muted sounds in the reeds as they settled down for the night, and behind the two men a garland of fairy lamps marked the perimeter of the festivities—voices, laughter, the clink-
clink
of glass, a Chopin nocturne—twenty yards away on the darkening velvety lawn.

“Oh, yes, a number of times,” Lucas said in answer to a question. “We’ve served on various presidential committees together since 1990. In those days General Wolfe was, as I recall, a colonel and Madden a lieutenant.”

“Do you know anything about the work they’re engaged upon?”

Lucas exhaled pipe smoke, his mouth small and prim beneath a neatly clipped moustache. He was only an inch or two shorter than Lebasse, which made a change from having to crane his neck in order to converse. “On the military side, you mean? I know they’re both with Advanced Strategic Projects at the Pentagon. But no, not specifically.”

They walked on, Lucas puffing his pipe and watching Lebasse covertly. The man was ill, shrunken, his eyes dull, his movements lethargic. Ulcer? Liver trouble? Something pretty serious, Lucas guessed, and the germ of suspicion entered his mind that this meeting wasn’t as accidental as it appeared.

“Then I take it you know nothing about a project code-named DEPARTMENT STORE?”

Lucas shook his head. “No.”

“Have you heard of it?” Lebasse persisted in a low voice.

“No. Never.” Lucas stood aside to allow the other man to mount the four concrete steps leading up to the short wooden jetty. It was just wide enough for them to walk side by side. They came to the end without speaking, Lebasse’s breath whistling in his chest. Lucas stood and waited, curiously ill at ease. His party mood was fading with the sun’s last rays behind the Blue Ridge of Shenandoah National Park.

“I’m breaking my oath of office by what I’m about to tell you,” said Lebasse, his face ruddily imbued with a fake glow of health by the sunset. “This is for your ears only. DEPARTMENT STORE has special category classification and isn’t to be divulged to anyone without ASP clearance. Now, Gene—okay if I call you that?” and at Lucas’s brief nod, went on, “two reasons I’m telling you this, Gene. One, I need advice. You’re qualified to give it and I trust you. Two, I don’t trust General Wolfe and I trust Madden even less. They both have a vested interest in seeking and gaining approval for this project and will go to any lengths to get it. Are you with me?”

Lucas nodded slowly, pipe clamped between his teeth. This sounded serious and he knew that he was going to hate it. It smelled to high heaven of political and military intrigue, which he abhorred.

“DEPARTMENT STORE is part of a long-term strategy to threaten the USSR with total environmental war,” Lebasse was saying. “According to ASP intelligence the Soviets have a plan of their own to alter the geophysical structure of western Siberia, which will affect the ecological balance of the Arctic Circle and lead to a widespread disruption of our climate here in the United States. They—Wolfe and Madden, that is—maintain that nuclear and bacteriological modes are outdated and ineffective in combating this situation, and therefore we have to be ready with a war plan that will, at the very least, stalemate the Soviet threat and prolong the balance of power. That’s their contention—” He broke off, choking on something, and wiped spittle from the corner of his mouth.

Lucas waited. “I don’t dispute that the Soviets are up to something, Gene, because we have corroborative evidence from other sources. But I’m not a scientist. I have to know whether employing DEPARTMENT STORE as a deterrent is a greater risk than having no deterrent at all. It could pose a bigger threat to our own security—goddammit, the world’s existence is what I’m talking about—than anything the Soviets could do to us. I don’t know, I’m not an expert; but the decision is mine and I have to be right.”

Watching him all the time he was speaking Lucas had noticed how, as the light failed and died behind the ridge, his face assumed a sickly gray pallor, his eyes sunken in their sockets. Lebasse was waging a losing battle. Was this the reason for the secrecy, the urgency? He had to make this one last vital decision before time ran out?

“I need an answer within two weeks.” Lebasse was speaking more quickly now, as if time were indeed running out. “Report to me and only to me, but not through my office. Here’s an unlisted number you can call. Make the call from a public pay phone. I’ll arrange to meet you. In the meantime if you need more information, call me on that number.”

“I’ll need a complete dossier on DEPARTMENT STORE, of course,” Lucas said. “Everything you have relating to the scientific and the military data.”

“You already have it. It’s in the glove compartment of your car.”

“Very well.” Lucas was about to add something, but there didn’t seem much else to say.

Lebasse turned. “Let’s get back before we’re missed.” He took two paces and halted. There was a figure on the jetty. In the deepening twilight it was possible to make out only a white dinner jacket and the glowing tip of a cigar.

“He said there were trout, but I don’t believe it,” Lebasse chortled, moving on. “Crawford spinning a line, the old bastard. Eh?”

“Yeah, guess so,” said Gene Lucas jovially, in what sounded in his own ears to be an incredibly bad piece of ham acting.