Rubicon, p.13
Rubicon, page 13
Hart looked up. He thought he understood the doubt.
“I meant the passages Kramer marked. The connection they have to Rubicon is another matter.”
Ryan tapped his finger, gently and without emphasis, on the table. He tried to think.
“Everyone knows the story - at least everyone forced to read Roman history. But even if you didn’t, everyone knows that famous line: ‘Vini, vidi, vici’ - ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Caesar is talking about what he did in Gaul, but it leads up to what he did later when he crossed the Rubicon. The first passage marked: He crosses the Rubicon. Why was that so important? Because he was told not to, because the army was to be kept away from Rome. But why was a Roman army thought to be a threat to Rome itself? That other passage - remember?”
Hart’s gaze drifted back to the text, to the place where Gunther Kramer had carefully and with exact precision drawn brackets. The sense of it seemed plain enough. Hart summarized what it said.
“The early days of the republic, when Rome was smaller, no one commanded an army for more than a few months or a year. But later, as Rome acquired more territory, Rome became an empire and armies had to be sent to places so far away it might take months to get there. The armies became less loyal to Rome than to those, like Caesar, who were their generals. In other words,” added Hart, “the threat to the republic began when Rome became an empire.”
“Yes, but there is something else,” said Ryan. He was not quite certain he could put it into words. “Something about the tone in which it is written. You get the sense that everything that happened was inevitable, that once someone had that much power it was only a matter of time before they were going to do something with it.”
“What about all the notes Kramer made in the margin?”
“I don’t read German, but a friend of mine teaches it at the university. I’ll call him. I wonder what Kramer found so fascinating about it.”
“Maybe the same thing we’re thinking about: what I had never thought about before.”
Ryan gave him a puzzled glance. Hart laughed quietly and with a touch of embarrassment.
“I’m not sure I even knew there was a Roman republic. All I know about Roman history is Shakespeare’s play: Caesar murdered, then a civil war. I thought Caesar crossed the Rubicon to deal with his enemies in Rome.”
“That’s all most people know. What’s your point?”
“My point is that I confused the idea of the Roman Empire with the long list of Roman emperors. I didn’t realize that the empire came before the emperors, and that the empire made the emperors inevitable.”
Ryan nodded in agreement.
“And the lesson from this?”
“That a republic that becomes an empire eventually loses its freedom.”
“Perhaps. But notice the next passage Kramer marked. What was not inevitable was the genius of Julius Caesar. He changed everything and made it seem, at least while he lived, that he had not changed anything. He kept all the old forms of the republic: everything was still done according to the ancient formula: By the will of the Senate and the People of Rome, though nothing happened unless Caesar wanted it.”
“This is all interesting, Charlie, but where does it get us? They came to kill me last night, whoever they are, and all we have is this book.”
Suddenly, he remembered something. He unfolded the thin piece of paper on which Gunther Kramer had written two parallel columns.
“This is in German, too - but Rubicon appears twice: at the top of the column on the left, and at the bottom of the one on the right. Dieter told me that Kramer had worked it all out.”
Ryan stood up and stretched his arms.
“I’ll call that friend of mine. Why don’t you go upstairs and try to get a little sleep.” He looked at Hart with a worried expression. “No one knows you’re here, except David Allen, which means no one else can find you. Every reporter in Washington is probably trying to get hold of you, get your reaction to what happened last night. If you don’t surface sometime soon, they’ll start to report that you’ve gone missing, and you know the kind of speculation that will lead to.”
Hart rose from the table.
“Allen will tell everyone that I’ve gone into seclusion, that the death of Dieter Shoenfeld has been a terrible blow, and that I need a little time to myself. That will buy me a couple of days. I have to get out of the country and no one can know about it. I’ll explain later.”
Hart went upstairs to the guest room while Ryan made his call. He thought he would lie down for a few minutes and rest. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about anything.
“Bobby,” said Ryan quietly, shaking his shoulder. “Wake up. The translation has been done.”
Hart did know what Ryan was talking about. The room where he had fallen asleep was dark. He thought that someone must have closed the curtains. He sat up and looked around.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Six hours, maybe a little more. Come downstairs. Clare is home. We’ll have dinner.”
Clare Ryan was a physician, a heart surgeon on staff at the University of Michigan hospital. Thin as a long-distance runner, with large, candid eyes, she had one of the most sharply analytical minds Hart had encountered. She took things in at a glance that most people never noticed. She had understood Helen right away. It was the first thing she asked about.
“How is she? How is she holding up under all of this?”
Clare put her hand through Hart’s arm and walked with him from the bottom of the long, spiral staircase to the dinning room. The table was set for three people. She gave him a buoyant, yet understated, smile.
“I know you’re a mess, but you can take it. My friend Helen, on the other hand, does not enjoy the protection of the various layers of stupidity by which men like you and Charlie here try to pretend that there is no such thing as danger. They really tried to kill you last night? Good God, what’s this country coming to?”
She kissed him on the side of the cheek and told him that it might be a good idea if he tried to stay alive.
“Charlie tells me that you have to leave the country,” said Clare, shortly after they started dinner. “I have a sister in Toronto, a lawyer who does a lot of immigration work. She might be able to help get a passport, something you can use to fly out of Canada. You can drive across from Detroit to Windsor, and go on to Toronto from there.” There was a slight change in her expression. She had just realized something she ought to have known. “Or had you thought of that already?”
The conversation turned to other things, to what was happening in the presidential race, and to what was happening to Charlie Ryan.
“You told me a couple weeks ago that the money out of Washington had dried up,” said Hart. “I don’t imagine what you did the other night with the vice-president is going to help much with that problem. How much trouble are you in?”
Ryan shrugged it off, or tried to.
“There are people here who want to help. What I don’t know is how what happened in Los Angeles will affect things, or what effect the presidential race will have. It isn’t easy, knowing that Taylor would make a much better president, having to pretend in public that Douglas would not be another disaster.”
Clare threw her napkin down on the table.
“God, Charlie, don’t you think it’s time to stop the fraud? You know that Douglas would be just about the worst thing that could happen. He has not had a thought that has not come out of the White House. Why don’t you just come out and say so, tell people what you really think? Someone has just tried to murder just about the only friend you have in Washington and you’re still going around mouthing the party line? What for - so you don’t lose? What’s the point of winning if you can’t tell the truth?”
The more she talked, the angrier she seemed to become, the broader the smile on Charlie Ryan’s face. He turned to Hart.
“What do you think? Sounds like a hell of a good idea to me.”
Clare did not believe him. She believed he meant it, that it would be a good thing to do, but not that he would actually do it, take the chance, risk everything he had worked for. She understood that there were certain rules of the game; she also knew that there were not many men in politics, or women either, who had been willing to break so many of them as the man to whom she was married.
As soon as dinner was over, Clare had to say goodbye. There were patients to see in the hospital and she would not be home until late.
“Here’s my sister’s address and phone number. I’ll call and tell her to expect you, and what you need. I don’t want to see you go; but I know you have to, and it’s probably better if you cross into Canada at night. I’ll call Helen from my office and tell her we took good care of you. She’ll want to know that, you know,” she said as she gave him one last kiss.
“Thanks, Clare,” he said, moved by how willing she was to help and by how much she cared about Helen. “Thanks for everything.”
“The translation?” asked Hart after Clare had left. “What do all those notes in the margin mean? And the diagram - does it make sense?”
“The translation is done. Does it help explain? I’m not sure.”
They went back into the kitchen and sat in the same places. The book was there, with the diagram beside it, along with two pages of a hand-printed translation.
“Some of the margin notes were just cross-references to other passages. Some of them just a word or two he wanted to be certain of from the Greek.”
Ryan turned the first page of translations so that Hart could see it.
“The long margin note next to the discussion of how the crossing of the Rubicon was the culmination of Roman expansion, the necessary result of empire – it’s a note about Iraq.”
“Iraq?” asked Hart in astonishment. He read the translation out loud. “‘What if war in Iraq was not started because of weapons of mass destruction, or any of the other reasons given. Not talking about oil. Started because it was, they thought….’” Hart looked up. “‘They thought’? Who are ‘they’?”
Ryan told him to keep reading.
“‘Started because it was, they thought, the perfect pretext to establish a client state - the way the Romans established client states - a military presence, a model government - a puppet government - a colony, in the heart of the Middle East. The empire becomes more expansive, the people at home kept satisfied with promises of the spread of democracy and oil cheap and plentiful.’”
“The other page, the diagram Kramer drew,” explained Ryan. “The first column is a list of what happened in Rome after the Rubicon was crossed. The second column is a list of things that could bring an empire - a republican empire - to that same point. It starts with the Second World War, then the military buildup of the Cold War, then the breakup of the Soviet Union and a world in which there is only one superpower left. Then - read what comes at the very end, the few lines just before the word Rubicon.”
Hart read quietly to himself, and then out loud:
“‘Political assassination - the threat of outside enemies - the case for endless war - expansion - more assassination: everything that brings about the necessity, or, rather, the belief in the necessity, that something drastic, fundamental, something without precedent, has to be done.’”
“Gunther Kramer did not think that Rubicon was the code name for a terrorist plot,” said Ryan. “He thought it was a conspiracy to destroy the American republic, but how, and by whom? Something doesn’t fit. What happened in Los Angeles was a terrorist attack. We know who the suicide bomber was, where he came from. We even know his name and why he said he did it. Something is missing, Bobby, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Look at this,” said Hart. He handed Ryan the diagram. “At the bottom.”
“All it says is ‘Rubicon.’”
“No, there’s something more. Just below it.”
Ryan looked again. It was there, a kind of afterthought that, when he first looked at the translation, had not caught his eye.
“‘What Farabi told me.’ What does it mean?”
Hart reached inside his jacket for the notebook he had taken from Dieter Shoenfeld. He turned to the page where he had first seen the name.
“Dieter was supposed to meet Mohammed al Farabi early next week in Rome. I’m going to meet him there instead. He said Farabi might have the missing piece. That was the phrase he used - ‘the missing piece.’”
Chapter Fourteen
Hart could not get the word out of his head. He wrote it on a notepad during the flight from Toronto to Rome; he wrote it in his hotel room after he checked in. What did it mean - Rubicon? It was more than a plot to assassinate a political leader, more than an attempt to sabotage the election. But how much more, and where did it lead? The list that Gunther Kramer had made: assassination, the threat of outside enemies, a case for war, and then more assassinations – all of it to make it appear that something “without precedent” had to be done. What was without precedent, and, whatever it was, how would it lead to Rubicon in a way that ran parallel to what had happened in Rome more than two thousand years ago?
He had two days to wait, two days with nothing to do. He wanted to call home, to tell Helen there was nothing to worry about, that he was all right. It had been nearly a week since the night of the murder, five days since he had last heard her voice, but he had become paranoid, almost certain that someone was intercepting nearly every call. He remembered what Raymond Caulfield had told him about Orwell’s 1984 and the idea of living under the constant surveillance of some all-knowing power. He had spent three days in Toronto and for almost all of it thought he was being watched and followed. Rome seemed safer, and, more importantly, closer to what he hoped would be the end of the chase, when he would find out who was behind Rubicon and what, after Los Angeles, was going to happen next.
The hotel where Hart was staying was the same hotel where Dieter Shoenfeld was supposed to meet Mohammed al Farabi early Monday afternoon. Physically spent and emotionally drained, Hart managed to sleep straight through the night, something he had not been able to do in nearly a week. He had a late breakfast and then decided that he had to get out, that he could not stay all day in his room. He threw on a jacket and a pair of dark glasses, the way any tourist would dress, and walked to the Tiber and took the ancient pedestrian bridge across to the Vatican. The wide avenue that runs from the Castel Sant’Angelo was clogged with Christians waiting to receive the Pope’s blessing at noon.
There were shops and stands all along the route selling various religious objects and pictures and postcards of the Pope. On a sudden whim, Hart bought a postcard which he intended to send to Charlie Ryan.
“The Pope asked about you,” he thought he would write. “Said he would like to hear your confession but, given what you have to confess, was not certain he could spare that much time.”
It gave him a strange sense of the familiar, of being at home. He could almost see the laughter spread across Ryan’s freckled Irish face when he read it. He put the postcard inside his pocket, stepped onto a double-decker tour bus, and left behind the crowd at St. Peter’s.
The Roman sun felt warm and clean against his skin as the bus lumbered along next to the Tiber. For an instant, with the heat of it full on his face, he could feel, or thought he could feel, what it must have been like to be part of a returning Roman army when the empire had conquered most of the known world and a Roman soldier always came home in triumph. He wished he had read more, studied more, known more about the reasons why Rome fell. He realized that he knew hardly anything about it at all.
In slow, halting, but quite precise English, the tour guide described each famous place they passed and paid an occasional brief, but necessary, tribute to the utter futility of Roman traffic.
“Three million people; three million cars. It is impossible to go anywhere, and so of course everyone does.”
Hart looked down the side of the bus and watched the front fender of an Alfa Romeo come within a fraction of an inch of collision before hitting the brakes and pulling back. The bus plowed forward into a bedlam of screaming, high-pitched engines.
“And here, just to your left - that long line of ancient rubble. This is what remains of the marble bleachers that used to seat two hundred fifty thousand people, here, at the Circus Maximus, to watch the chariot races. It was an eighth of a mile across and a half-mile in length.”
An older man, with short gray hair and sharp gray eyes, sitting with his wife in the row just ahead of Hart, gestured toward the long, grass-covered field where all that was left of the race course were a few barely discernible ruts.
“When Rome became corrupt,” he remarked in a steely British voice; “when there was nothing more to do in politics; when the public had lost all its powers and everything was in the hands of the emperors, then the way to control them, to keep their minds off what they had lost, was to keep them well-fed and entertained.” He laughed, a thin, brittle laugh wrapped in irony. “Think what they could have done with television!”
The tour bus made a wide, sweeping turn, doubled back down two winding streets and came out on a wide avenue that led directly to the Colosseum.
“The name Colosseum,” explained the guide on a microphone that emitted a whining metallic sound, “is a misunderstanding. The true name is Flavian Amphitheater. It was the first free standing structure of its type in the world. It was begun by the Emperor Vespasian in the year 64 After Christ. It was finished by his son, the Emperor Titus, in the year 72 After Christ.”
The bus came to a stop. Those who wanted to spend time wandering around the Colosseum got off.
“That was the next stage in Rome’s corruption,” the Britisher explained to his wife. He seldom looked at her when he spoke, but was certain that she listened. “It was not enough to have the distractions of athletic contests. They needed something to give an outlet for all that pent-up aggression. They gave them slaughter. When the place first opened, there were a hundred straight days of it. They say that Roman citizens came from all over the empire - that is what we forget: that they colonized half the globe and gave citizenship to those who earned it through loyal service - to watch the slaughter of more than five thousand beasts, most of them brought over from Africa just for the spectacle. And it never stopped. Almost two hundred years later, on the one thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome, two thousand gladiators fought elephants, tigers, lions, even giraffes and hippopotamuses - just to see the blood flow. And then of course there were the games in which the gladiators killed each other. Do you know, sometimes I really don’t think there’s much hope for the human race.”
