A thing of state, p.15
A Thing of State, page 15
For several minutes the guard on the door did not approach the bag, fearful of bombs. Then he noticed the blood seeping from it, exclaimed loudly, and yelled for help. Two of his subordinates rushed out, retrieved the bag, and carried it inside, dripping now a steady flow.
Ambassador Bullock was informed immediately and ran down the stairs from his second-floor office. He engaged in a brief, sharp exchange with his deputy chief of mission, who wanted the bag tested for bombs before anyone touched it again.
“Hell,” Big Bill Bullock snapped, “there aren’t any bombs in there. There’s a body in there. Let’s pray to God it’s still alive.”
But it wasn’t, and when he saw the condition it was in, and with difficulty but with certainty recognized who it had been when alive, Big Bill Bullock, that rough, tough, blunt, pragmatic son of Texas, threw up.
After which, as he told his badly shaken wife in their suite in the compound an hour later, he got on the horn to the White House and began to raise holy hell.
* * *
“But—” the President began with some annoyance, although aware that something must be unusually wrong with the world or he wouldn’t be aroused from a sound sleep at—he glanced quickly at the illuminated clock face on his bedside table—5:11 AM. “Can’t it wait until—”
The ambassador would have none of it.
“God damn it,” he roared, “you listen to me!”—and put it immediately on the basis he thought would do the most to provoke action from this particular chief executive. “That worthless son of a bitch has not only ordered the ghastly murder of one of the finest young men I’ve ever known, he has flat-out defied you. What are you going to do about it?”
“The first thing I’m going to do,” the President said crisply, coming fully awake, “is tell you to calm down and moderate your language. I am aware of the seriousness of this, you don’t have to shout at me. Is that clear?”
“Well, God damn it—” Big Bill Bullock began again.
The President’s tone became cold.
“God damn you,” he said. “You listen to me. I repeat, I am fully aware of the gravity of this. How do you know this was done at Sidi’s direction?”
“How do I know?” the ambassador demanded. “How do I know? I know because any half-ass who knows anything at all about this Godforsaken country knows that you don’t breathe in Greater Lolómé unless Sidi tells you to. And you don’t die here unless he says the word. That’s how I know!”
“If you don’t stop that talk and quiet down right now, Bill,” the President said, “I’m ending this conversation and directing you to address all communication to the Secretary of State, which is what you ought to be doing anyway. Understand me?”
“Well, God damn it!” Bill Bullock cried. “God damn it, do something!”
“I will do what the circumstances warrant,” the President said evenly. “Goodbye, Bill. Ray will get back to you.”
And he hung up.
“God damn it,” the ambassador said bleakly into the silence. “You won’t do any damned thing, I’ll bet!”
But in this, as many had before him, he underestimated the President, who was not where he was for nothing, and who did not minimize his duty or evade it when he saw clearly how to handle it. For the moment he did not. Quite properly he resorted to protocol and roused the Secretary of State. The wheels of the government-in-crisis began to spin, while in Greater Lolómé City, Big Bill Bullock took up the phone again and began the task he always hated however effectively he managed it. First came the parents and then came the fiancée. Everybody cried out in horror (although he told them the absolute minimum—“an accident in this crazy traffic we have over here”). Black rage filled his heart again and he began to consider how he personally might do horrible damage to the man who had done such damage to them. He couldn’t right now but he promised himself that if it ever became possible, he would. That helped, a very little.
* * *
In Washington, in the handsome Washington Harbor apartment, the Secretary of State replaced the receiver after the President’s somber message and stared down reflectively upon the broad sweep of the Potomac, rippling and glistening in the first light of morning as it rolled away south and east toward its ultimate destination in Chesapeake Bay.
Black rage filled his heart, too, but in a long life in the Foreign Service he had learned to accept what came when it couldn’t be changed, and to submerge his feelings and attend matter-of-factly to the business of the day.
There would be plenty on this day.
The first thing to do, as he and the President agreed, was damage control. And the first step in that was to clamp the lid on Bill Bullock and everyone else in the embassy so that no word would get back to Washington until they were ready to handle it.
“Bill has enough sense to do that on his own, I’m sure,” Ray Stanley said, “but I’ll get to him in a minute and reinforce his instincts. Meanwhile, I can’t conceive that this will pass without some open defiance of you. That wouldn’t be Sidi. I think we should prepare some statement and let it, and the news of the death, go out together.”
“But not how the death came about,” the President said.
“Not unless Sidi reveals it,” the Secretary said. “I doubt if he’ll want to, at first. Or maybe he will. We’ve just got to be prepared for whatever.” And he echoed the ambassador’s furious question, because it was the one they all had to have answered: “What are you going to do about it?”
“Well,” the President said slowly. “First of all, you don’t bring the dead back to life. And second, you have to figure out, in this killing game we’re in everywhere in the world right now, how you make use of the dead as astutely as you can to score for your side.” He sighed. “You know, of course, that I am as shocked and saddened as anyone by this horrible crime. I made fun of his name but that was only in jest. Maybe it will fix him in the world’s memory as a symbol of a special kind of horror that I’m sure goes on in Sidi’s part of the world”—he sighed again—“and many others, of course—all the time, nowadays. For the moment,” he said, with a calm acceptance of his own awkward position, “I don’t know what to do. We’re too big to launch a major effort to stamp out every little bug that bites us, and he’s too small, basically, to warrant the kind of effort we would have to make—unless we do use this as an excuse to go after the bombs, in which case the coalition will have to be revived and a major effort launched. Yet he must be brought to book …” His voice trailed away, then repeated strongly, “He must be brought to book.” He uttered a wry little laugh. “You’re my Secretary of State. Give me some ideas.”
Ray Stanley, who had given the matter a lot of rapid thought in the few moments since the President had told him of Creed’s death, found himself, somewhat to his own surprise, recommending actions much stronger than he had originally considered wise.
“Send a couple of aircraft carriers from the Mediterranean,” he suggested. “Don’t explain why, let the world speculate. Let me contact Sidi, demand reparations for Creed’s death, threaten sanctions if he doesn’t comply. Use this as a wedge to demand immediate inspection of his military facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Simultaneously, you talk to the allies, alert the UN, get the Secretary-General into the act, he always likes to throw his weight around and feel important. Sic Penny Sims onto it, he always makes a big deal of his contacts in that part of the world, let him go to work on them. Keep everything off the record as much as possible.” (The President snorted, but the Secretary ignored it.) “Make sure he understands that there are going to be the gravest consequences.”
“Aside from the aircraft carriers,” the President noted, “which would make Arlie McGregor and Bill Rathbun scream like eagles, but that’s all right, you’ve outlined pretty much what we thought about yesterday, haven’t you? You aren’t being very original, Ray.”
“It’s a difficult area of diplomacy to be original in,” the Secretary admitted, “but it’s important that we appear to be decisive. Aside from everything else,” he added, deciding like Bill Bullock that it might be necessary to arouse pride to get action, “this killing is a direct defiance of you personally. You warned him specifically against harming Creed, and he went right ahead and did it. It was cold-blooded, deliberate murder, and it’s cold-blooded, deliberate, sneering defiance of you. Something’s got to be done.”
“Oh, I agree,” the President said. His tone became thoughtful. “I don’t want to make public the nature of his death if I can help it, it would be so hard on his family—”
“And precipitate an immediate major confrontation, which you aren’t ready for at this point,” the Secretary said.
The President uttered a rueful chuckle.
“That’s right. So?”
“For the moment,” Ray Stanley said, “I’d suggest using as many back-channels as possible. Then in due course when the timing seems right, issue a public statement setting forth as much as you want to reveal of the facts, stating the penalties we intend to enforce.”
“Possibly we underestimated old Sidi yesterday,” the President remarked thoughtfully. “But, then again,” he added, sounding more upbeat, “maybe he underestimated us.”
“What we have to do,” the Secretary said, “is get rid of this dangerous assumption that’s growing in the world, that you can jerk the United States around and get away with it. We’ve come dangerously close to letting that impression stand, on a number of occasions in the last two administrations, and we’ve got to stop it or it will be the death of us yet—and there are plenty out there who want our death, in a pretty specific way. We’ve got to stop that before it comes back upon us a hundredfold.”
“If it isn’t too late?” the President inquired in a musing tone; then caught himself up short. “But what the hell am I doing here, sounding like that? I’m the President of the United States, the responsibility is mine, I’ve never been afraid of it and I’m not afraid of it now. We’re letting Sidi spook us. We’ve nothing to fear from him or anybody as long as we’re strong and decisive and know what we’re doing. Why, hell, we’re not some damned banana republic. We’re the United States of America. Which the world is afraid of.”
“As long as we keep it that way,” the Secretary said.
“Exactly so,” the President said.
Silence ensued for what seemed to the Secretary minutes, though possibly only seconds. Finally he said, “Well?” in a tone he hoped would provoke response.
“What?” the President inquired.
“So what shall we do?” Ray Stanley asked. “Shall we proceed along these lines, or—?”
“We’ll have to think about that some more,” the President said in a thoughtful tone. “Better have another NSC meeting this afternoon, I think. Meanwhile,” he added more briskly, “if anyone in the media starts stirring around, we’ll stonewall it. Right?”
“Right,” the Secretary said, wondering: Now what’s holding him up? “The last thing we want is to have them break it before we’re ready.”
But in this, as frequently in Washington, the desire did not delay the deed. In Greater Lolómé City, Big Bill Bullock, riding the wave of horror, repugnance, and furious outrage he had felt when viewing the remains of Creed Moncrief—“like raw hamburger somebody had only half chopped up,” he described them to Arthur Reeves Burton in Lesser Lolómé when they talked later that day—was busy, busy, busy on the satellite. And he was not alone. Results were speedily apparent.
The trouble with a lot of the more famous media types, the ambassador reflected as he waited impatiently for his call to go through, was that they always liked to play hard to get. It was as though they were conferring a favor on you, not the other way around. This was noticeably true in the case of James Van Rensselaer Burden, with his fancy airs and superior ways. Bill Bullock often told his friends down home in Texas that he had known Jimmy Van for what he was the moment he first met him a couple of years ago. Normally he wouldn’t have given him the time of day, but in Washington you took ’em as you found ’em, and the only thing that mattered was what they could do for you and what you could do for them, in the capital’s never-ending balancing act of favor/counterfavor.
Jimmy Van was a good man to know and a good man to use for your own purposes of manipulating the media, which is what Bill Bullock was now setting out to do. He was also, the ambassador admitted to friends, really quite a nice guy and not difficult to talk to, even if he was a damned—but at that point Bill Bullock always stopped with a coy chuckle and admonished himself, “Now, now, we don’t use that word anymore!” Anyway, Jimmy was useful and never more so than at this moment when the call from far-off Greater Lolómé came through to his pleasant oak-lined study in Georgetown.
“Mr. Ambassador!” he responded, sounding surprised and genuinely pleased. “I was just thinking of you. Something’s going on in Greater Lolómé. What is it?”
For a moment the ambassador sounded—or rather, was conspicuous by his lack of sound—quite taken aback. Then he chuckled.
“You’re pretty sharp,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”
“At Dolly Munson’s,” Jimmy Van said. “Last night. From Ray Stanley. He wouldn’t tell us what, though. Have you called to tell me?”
“Yes,” Bill Bullock said grimly, “I have. He was a fine young man and I want you and your colleagues to raise hell.”
“Who was that?” Jimmy asked, sounding puzzled. “I thought it might be something really serious.” His tone became humorous. “I thought you were going to tell me that Sidi has the bomb and is going to drop it on the poor old Mouse.”
“Absolutely,” the ambassador said, his light tone matching Jimmy’s—after all, he wasn’t a fool and had no intention of revealing the real secret until the White House was ready for it. “Except we’re going to bomb him first.”
“That would be the day,” Jimmy Van said with a comfortable laugh. “That would be the day. Not that we don’t want to.”
“I recommend it every day,” the ambassador said. “He’s an annoying son of a bitch.” He’s a monstrous son of a bitch, he added under his breath.
Jimmy Van, diverted, returned to the chase.
“So what about this mysterious fine young man? Anyone I know?”
“I doubt it,” Bill Bullock said, in a tone so dry that Jimmy couldn’t help laughing.
“Now, now,” he said, “Mr. Ambassador. Don’t be mean. I take it this is someone on your staff. What has happened to him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh?” Jimmy Van said, perking up. “When and how?”
“This afternoon, our time.”
“Killed by Sidi’s men?”
“Yes.”
“Tortured?”
“I’m not prepared to go that far at this time,” Bill Bullock said. “Let’s just say he met with a suspicious accident.”
“Leading to suspicions that he might have been.”
“Very definite suspicions that it wasn’t an accident,” Bill Bullock said. “That’s about as far as I want to go right now.”
“Name?” Jimmy Van said, and Bill Bullock obliged with basic details.
“What was he doing there?” Jimmy inquired. “CIA?”
“He was an expert on demographics and was my assistant,” the ambassador said blandly. “He was making a study of the agricultural possibilities if we should ever decide to assist Greater Lolómé in developing some viable crops. Which we aren’t going to do,” he added firmly, “until the Lolómés get rid of Sidi.”
“They show signs of it?” Jimmy inquired dryly.
Bill Bullock said, “No,” in a flat, disgusted tone.
“Are you making a formal protest about Moncrief?”
“I hope we will,” the ambassador said. “You aren’t to use my name, incidentally. Not that I’m afraid of reprisals from the department, I have a hundred thousand acres, five thousand head of cattle, and one hundred and fifty oil wells to go home to; but I don’t want to leave here just yet.”
“What do you want to do, Mr. Ambassador? Why did you call me? Just to raise hell?”
“I want to get things moving over here,” Bill Bullock said. “I don’t want this swept under the rug by the pantywaists in the department. I don’t want Creed forgotten. He was worth more than that.”
“Oh, he won’t be forgotten, Bill,” Jimmy Van said. “I think I can promise you that. I’ll call a few people myself. Any time we can land on Sidi, I’m for it—barring, of course, something just too violent and military that would get us into real trouble.”
“He may not listen to anything else,” the ambassador said.
“Well,” James Van Rensselaer Burden said, “I intend to make very clear in the column I’ll write today on this, that along with the indignation all Americans must feel about this awful criminal act against a fellow American, there must as always be a note of caution maintained. We must not make the mistake of reacting too strongly and thereby endangering the peace of the world.”
“What peace is that?” Bill Bullock inquired. “We can’t see much of it from here.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Jimmy Van said with some impatience. “It’s just an expression. But,” he added firmly, “one that should be supported by all sensible Americans. What’s the President going to do about this?”
“I’ve recommended the strongest possible action,” the ambassador said.
“Recommendation accepted, I’m sure,” Jimmy said dryly; and when the ambassador made no response, added tartly, “He’s such a—such a wishy-wash.”
“I thought you just said in effect that that’s what you want him to be. Nothing violent, nothing military. Right?”
“I didn’t mean crawl into his hole and hide from it,” Jimmy said impatiently. “You know what I mean!”
“Not really, no,” Bill Bullock said. “Anyway, please keep this as completely confidential and treat it with the greatest discretion when you publish it.”
Jimmy Van had the grace to laugh.
