The Fourth K (15 page)

Now she looked up at him. He noticed how severely her pale blond hair framed her delicate features. Her eyelids were bruised with fatigue, her lips, without makeup, a pale pink.

Theresa said in a flat even voice, “Two of my great-uncles were killed by people like you. My family grew up with death. And my father worried about me when he became President. He warned me that the world had men like you, but I refused to believe him. Now I’m curious. Why do you act like such a villain? Do you think you can frighten the whole world by killing a young girl?”

Yabril thought, Maybe not, but I killed a Pope. She didn’t know that, not yet. For a moment he was tempted to tell her. The whole grand design. The undermining of authority that all men fear, the power of great nations and great churches. And how man’s fear of power could be eroded by solitary acts of terror.

But he reached out a hand to touch her reassuringly. “You will come to no harm from me,” he said. “They will negotiate. Life is negotiation. You and I as we speak, we negotiate. Every terrible act, every word of insult, every word of praise is negotiation. Don’t take what I’ve said too seriously.”

She laughed.

He was pleased she found him witty. She reminded him of Romeo; she had the same instinctive enthusiasm for the little pleasures of life, even just a play on words. Once Yabril had said to Romeo, “God is the ultimate terrorist,” and Romeo had clapped his hands in delight.

And now Yabril’s heart sickened, he felt a wave of dizziness. He was ashamed of wanting to charm Theresa Kennedy. He had believed he had come to a time in his life when he was beyond such weakness. If only he could persuade her to make the videotape, he would not have to kill her.

On the Tuesday morning after the Easter Sunday hijacking and the murder of the Pope, President Francis Kennedy entered the White House screening room to watch a CIA film smuggled from Sherhaben.

The White House screening room was a disgraceful affair, with dingy green armchairs for the favored few and metal folding chairs for anyone under Cabinet level. The audience was composed of CIA personnel, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, their respective staffs, and the members of the White House senior staff.

All rose when the President entered. Kennedy took a green armchair; the CIA director, Theodore Tappey, stood alongside the screen to provide commentary.

The film started. It showed a truck pulling up to the back of the hijacked plane. The workers unloading supplies wore brimmed hats against the sun; they were clad in brown twill
trousers and short-sleeved brown cotton shirts. The film showed the workers leaving the plane and then froze on one of them. Under the floppy hat the features of Yabril could be seen, the dark angled face with brilliant eyes, the slight smile on his lips. Yabril got into the supply truck with the other workers.

The film stopped and Tappey spoke. “That truck went to the compound of the Sultan of Sherhaben. Our information is that they had an elaborate banquet complete with dancing girls. Afterward Yabril returned to the plane in the same fashion. Certainly the Sultan of Sherhaben is a fellow conspirator in these acts of terrorism.”

The voice of the Secretary of State boomed in the darkness. “Certain only to us. Secret intelligence is always suspect. And even if we could prove it, we couldn’t make it public. It would upset all political balances in the Persian Gulf. We would be forced to take retaliatory action, and that would be against our best interest.”

Otto Gray muttered, “Jesus Christ.”

Christian Klee laughed outright.

Eugene Dazzy, who could write in the dark—a sure mark of administrative genius, he always told everyone—made notes on a pad.

The CIA chief continued, “Our information boils down to this. You’ll get the memos in detail later. This seems to be an operation cadre financed by the international terrorist group called the First Hundred, or sometimes the Christs of Violence. It seems to be a liaison between Marxist-oriented revolutionary groups from elite universities in different countries, supplying safe houses and material. And it is limited mostly to Germany, Italy, France and Japan, and exists very vaguely in Ireland and England. But according to our information even the Hundred never really knew what was
going on here. They thought the operation ended with the killing of the Pope. So what we come down to is that only this man, Yabril, with the Sultan of Sherhaben, controls this conspiracy.”

The film started to roll again. It showed the airplane isolated on the tarmac and the ring of soldiers and antiaircraft guns that protected the approaches to the plane. It showed the crowds that were kept over a hundred yards away.

The CIA director’s voice sounded over the film. “This film and other sources indicate there can be no rescue mission. Unless we decide to simply overpower the whole state of Sherhaben. And of course Russia will never allow that, nor perhaps will the other Arab states. Also, over fifty billion dollars of American money has gone to build up their city of Dak, which is another sort of hostage they hold. We are not going to blow away fifty billion dollars of our citizen-invested money. Plus the fact that the missile sites are manned mostly by American mercenaries, but at this point we come to something much more curious.”

On the screen appeared a wobbly shot of the hijacked plane’s interior. The camera was obviously hand-held and moved down the aisle of the tourist section to show the mass of frightened passengers strapped into their seats. Then the camera moved back up into the first-class cabin and held on a passenger sitting there. Then Yabril moved into the picture. He wore cotton slacks of a light brown and a tan short-sleeved shirt the color of the desert outside the plane. The film cut to Yabril sitting next to that lone passenger, revealed now as Theresa Kennedy. Yabril and Theresa seemed to be talking in an animated and friendly way.

Theresa Kennedy had a small, amused smile on her face, and this made her father, watching the screen, almost turn his head away. It was a smile he remembered from his own
childhood, the smile of people entrenched in the central halls of power, who never dream they can be touched by the malicious evil of their fellowmen. Francis Kennedy had seen that smile often on the faces of his uncles.

Kennedy asked the CIA director, “How recent is that film and how did you get it?”

Tappey replied, “It’s twelve hours old. We bought it at great cost, obviously from someone close to the terrorists. I can give you the details in private after this meeting, Mr. President.”

Kennedy made a dismissive motion. He was not interested in details.

Tappey went on: “Further information. None of the passengers have been mistreated. Also, curiously enough, the female members of the hijacking cadre have been replaced, certainly with the connivance of the Sultan. I regard this development as a little sinister.”

“In what way?” Kennedy asked sharply.

Tappey said, “The terrorists on the plane are male. There are more of them, at least ten. They are heavily armed. It may be they are determined to kill their hostages if an attack is made. They may think that female guards would not be able to carry through such a slaughter. Our latest intelligence evaluation forbids a rescue operation by force.”

Klee said sharply, “They may be using different personnel simply because this is a different phase of the operation. Or Yabril might just feel more comfortable with men—he’s an Arab, after all.”

Tappey smiled at him. He said, “Chris, you know as well as I do that this replacement is an aberration. I think it’s happened only once before. From your own experience in clandestine operations you know damn well this rules out a direct attack to rescue the hostages.”

Kennedy remained silent.

They watched the little bit of film remaining. Yabril and Theresa talking animatedly, seeming to grow more and more friendly. Then finally Yabril was actually patting her shoulder. It was obvious that he was reassuring her, giving her some good news, because Theresa laughed delightedly. Then Yabril made her an almost courtly bow, a gesture that she was under his protection and that she would come to no harm.

Klee said, “I’m afraid of that guy. Let’s get Theresa out of there.”

Eugene Dazzy sat in his office going over all his options to help President Kennedy. First he called his mistress to tell her he would not be able to see her until the crisis was over. Then he called his wife to check their social schedule and cancel everything. After much thought he called Bert Audick, who over the last three years had been one of the most bitter enemies of the Kennedy administration.

“You’ve got to help us, Bert,” he said. “I’ll owe you a big one.”

Audick said, “Listen, Eugene, in this we are all Americans together.”

Bert Audick had already swallowed two of the giant American oil companies, gulping them like a frog swallowing flies, so his enemies said. Actually, he did look like a frog, the wide mouth in a great jowly face, eyes slightly popping. And yet he was an impressive man, tall and bulky, with a massive head and a jaw as boxy as his oil rigs. He had always been an oil man. Conceived in oil, raised in oil, matured in oil. Born wealthy, he had increased that wealth a hundredfold. His privately held company was worth twenty billion dollars
and he owned 51 percent of it. Now at seventy he knew more about oil than any man in America. Said he knew every spot on the globe where it was buried beneath the earth.

In his Houston corporate headquarters, computer screens made a huge map of the world that showed every one of the countless tankers at sea, its port of origin and destinations. Who owned it, what price it had been bought for, how many tons it carried. He could slip any country a billion barrels of oil as easily as a man-about-town slips a fifty-dollar bill to a maître d’.

He had made part of his great fortune in the oil scare of the 1970s, when the OPEC cartel seemed to have the world by the throat. But it was Bert Audick who applied the squeeze. He had made billions of dollars out of a shortage he knew was just a sham.

But he had not done so out of pure greed. He loved oil and was outraged that this life-giving force could be bought so cheaply. He helped rig the price of oil with the romantic ardor of a youth rioting against the injustices of society. And then he had given a great part of his booty away to worthy charities.

He had built nonprofit hospitals, free nursing homes for the elderly, art museums. He had established thousands of college scholarships for the underprivileged without regard to race or creed. He had, of course, taken care of his relatives and friends, made distant cousins rich. He loved his country and his fellow Americans, and never contributed money for anything outside the United States. Except, of course, for the necessary bribes to foreign officials.

He did not love the political rulers of his country or its crushing machinery of government. They were too often his enemies with their regulatory laws, their antitrust suits, their interference in his private affairs. Bert Audick was fiercely
loyal to his country, but it was his business, his democratic right, to squeeze his fellow citizens, make them pay for the oil he worshiped.

Audick believed in holding his oil in the ground as long as possible. He often thought lovingly of those billions and billions of dollars that lay in great puddles beneath the desert sands of Sherhaben and other places on earth, safe as they could be. He would keep that vast golden lake as long as possible. He would buy other people’s oil, buy other oil companies. He would drill the oceans, buy into England’s North Sea, get a piece of Venezuela. And then there was Alaska. Only he knew the size of the great fortune that lay beneath the ice.

He was as nimble as a ballet dancer in his business dealings. He had a sophisticated intelligence apparatus that gave him a far more accurate estimate of the oil reserves of the Soviet Union than the CIA. Such information he did not share with the United States Government, as why should he, since he paid an enormous amount of cash to get it, and its value to him was its exclusivity.

And he truly believed, as did many Americans—indeed he proclaimed it a linchpin of a democratic society—that a free citizen in a free country has the right to put his personal interests ahead of the aims of elected government officials. For if every citizen promoted his own welfare, how could the country not prosper?

On Dazzy’s recommendation, Kennedy agreed to see this man. To the public, Audick was a shadowy figure presented in the newspapers and
Fortune
magazine as a cartoonish Czar of Oil. But he had enormous influence with the elected representatives in the Congress and the House. He also had many friends and associates among the few thousand men who controlled the most important industries of the United
States and belonged to the Socrates Club. The men in this club controlled the print media and the TV media, ran companies that controlled the buying and shipping of grain; they were the Wall Street giants, the colossi of electronics and automobiles, the Templars of Money who ran the banks. And most important, Audick was a personal friend of the Sultan of Sherhaben.

Bert Audick was escorted into the Cabinet Room, where Francis Kennedy was meeting with his staff and the appropriate Cabinet members. Everybody understood that he had come not only to help the President but to caution him. It was Audick’s oil company that had fifty billion dollars invested in the oil fields of Sherhaben and the principal city of Dak. He had a magical voice, friendly, persuasive and so sure of what it was saying that it seemed as if a cathedral bell tolled at the end of every sentence. He could have been a superb politician had it not been for the fact that in all his life he had never been able to lie to the people of his country on political issues, and his beliefs were so far right that he could not be elected in the most conservative districts of the country.

He started off by expressing his deepest sympathy for Kennedy with such sincerity that there could be no doubt that the rescuing of Theresa Kennedy was the main reason he had offered his services.