2
There had been a faint powdering of snow, but nothing slippery enough to slow the buses down, and the temperature hovered just sufficiently above freezing to take the fear out of walking.
Dr Judith Carriol sat about halfway down the cold and stuffy bus, her furs wrapped about her tightly. Inside them she was too warm, but they were a barricade against the man pressing himself hard along her thigh. Her stop was approaching; she reached a gloved hand up to pull the bell cord, then rose to give the man battle in earnest. Sure enough, he was not about to let her climb across him unmolested, his hand was groping under her sable hem while his eyes stared straight and innocent ahead. The bus was slowing down. Her foot encountered his, and she brought the full force of her thin high heel down on the base of his toes. He had guts, give him that. He didn't scream, only jerked his foot away and withdrew himself from all contact with her. From the aisle she turned to quiz him derisively with brows and eyes, then sidled between the seats to the front of the bus as it came to a final squealing halt.
Oh, for a car! Insulation against the likes of the smarting predator back there in the bus alone. When a man boarded a bus empty save for one woman, and sat himself down next to that woman, she knew exactly what she was in for; an uncomfortable ride, to say the least. And it was no use appealing to the driver for help, he never wanted to know.
Half expecting the man to make a last-minute leap off the bus, she stood militantly on the sidewalk at the stop without moving until the lumbering vehicle
pulled away, unpleating its accordion middle with a groan. His eyes were glaring at her through the grubby window; she raised her hand to him in a mocking salute. Safe.
The Department of the Environment sprawled across the entire acreage of its very big block. Dr Carriol's bus dropped her on North Capitol Street near H Street, but the entrance she used was on K Street, which meant she had to walk right up North Capitol Street, past the main entrance, and turn the far corner into K Street.
A small crowd had gathered about the main entrance and was too involved with whatever lay at its middle to spare her a glance as she strode by, tall and fashionable and elegant though she was. Her sideways glance was cursory, her mind scarcely recording the fact that Security was dealing with another suicide. The grandstand brigade all came to Environment's environment to state their cases in the most forceful way they knew how, convinced within the darkness of the tiny corners into which they had boxed themselves that it was all Environment's fault, and therefore Environment ought to see with its own eyes to what agonized abyss they had come. Dr Carriol felt no urge to check whether this one was throat or wrists, poison or drugs, bullet or something more novel. It was her job — given to her by the President himself — to remove the reason why people needed to come to this squat vast white marble building in order to put paid to existence.
Instead of a uniformed battery of attendants manning a battery of telephones, her entrance door had a combination lock triggered by voice, and the phrase varied day by day to a code gleefully chosen by that arch joker in high places, Harold Magnus himself. Secretary for the Environment. Surely, she thought sourly, the man could find better things to do. But then she was prejudiced against him. Like all permanent career public servants with real seniority, she dismissed the titular head of her department as an incubus around the Departmental neck. A political appointee, he came with a new President, was never a career public servant himself, and went through a predictable sequence from new broom to worn-down stubble — if he lasted in the job. Well, Harold Magnus had lasted, and lasted for the usual reason; he possessed the good sense to let his career people get on with their jobs, and on the whole was secure enough within himself not to be causelessly obstructive.
'Down to a sunless sea,' she said into the speaker buried in the outside wall.
The door clicked and swung open. Crap. Useless shit. No one in the world could have duplicated her voice well enough to fool the electronics analysing it, so why have a changing password? She disliked the sensation it gave her of being a powerless puppet hopping up and down at Harold Magnus's slightest whim; but that of course was why he insisted upon doing it.
The Department of the Environment was an amalgamation of several smaller agencies like Energy that dated back to the preceding century's second half. It was the brainchild of that most remarkable of all chief executives, Augustus Rome, who had dealt with the people and both Houses so deftly they had empowered him to serve four consecutive terms as President of the United States of America. Thus he had guided the country through its most troublous of all times, between Britain's entering the Eurocommune, the series of bloodless popularly acclaimed leftist coups which brought the entire Arab world under the Communist umbrella, the signing of the Delhi Treaty, and the massive internal adjustments which came out of that action. There were those who said he had sold them out, there were those who said only his ability to give ground had preserved and cemented the United States of America's sphere of influence in the much-closer-to-home western hemisphere; certainly the entire western hemisphere from pole clear to pole had swung markedly towards the U.S.A. in the last twenty years, though cynics said that was simply because there was no alternative.
The present Department of the Environment had been built in 2012, replacing the scattered suites of offices it used to occupy all over town; it was the physically biggest of all the federal departments, and it alone among them was housed in a comfortable state of energy conservation. The waste warmth from its computer-filled basement fuelled an air-conditioning unit that was the envy of State, Justice, Defence and the rest, trying to achieve the same end result in structures never designed for the purpose. Environment was white, to obtain maximum illumination from its lighting; low-ceilinged, to save on space and heat; acoustically perfect, to reduce noise neurosis; and utterly soulless, to reassure its inhabitants that it was after all an institution.
Section Four occupied the whole top floor along K Street, and incorporated the offices of the Secretary himself. To reach it Dr Carriol walked easily up seven flights of chill stairs, down many corridors, and through yet another voice-triggered door.
'Down to a sunless sea.'
And open sesame. As usual Section Four was in full swing when she arrived; Dr Carriol preferred to work at night, so she rarely appeared before lunch. Those she encountered were respectful but not familiar in their greetings. As was meet. She was not only extremely senior in Environment, she was also the head of Section Four, and Section Four was the Environment think tank. Therefore Dr Judith Carriol was an enormously powerful woman.
Her private secretary was a man who had to endure the most ludicrous misnomer in the whole Department. John Wayne. Five feet two, eighty pounds, astigmatic myopia and a mild Klinefelter's syndrome that had prevented his attaining full sexual maturity, so that he sported no beard and spoke in a childish falsetto. The days when his name had been a hideous burden to him were long behind him now; he had long ceased to rail against the fate which had decided that the original owner of his name should outlast almost all his movie contemporaries to become something of a modern cult figure.
He lived for his work and he was a fantastic secretary, though of course he rarely did any basic secretarial work; he had his own secretaries for that.
He followed Dr Carriol into her office and stood quietly while she divested herself of the cuddly masses of sable bought at the time of her last promotion and just before she ceased to buy clothes in order to buy a house. Below the furs she was wearing a plain black dress unrelieved by jewellery or other ornamentation, and she looked stunning. Not pretty. Not beautiful. Not attractive in the usual connotation of that word. She exuded sophistication, calm elegance, a touch-me-not-quality too daunting to permit of her name's being on the list of Departmental lovelies. A touch-me-not quality that meant her occasional dates were invariably with men who were extremely successful, extremely worldly and extremely sure of themselves. She wore her faintly wavy black hair li
ke Wallis Warfield Simpson, parted in the middle and drawn softly into a chignon on the nape of her neck. Her eyes were large, heavy-lidded and an unusual muddy green, her mouth was wide, pink, well sculpted, and her skin was densely pallid, too opaque to show the veins beneath and without any bloom of colour anywhere. This interesting paleness against the black hair, brows and lashes endowed her with an alluring distinction she was well aware of, and used. The spatulate fingers of her very long slender white hands were slender also, the nails kept short and unvarnished, and they moved like a spider's legs; but her body, long in the trunk and neither hippy nor busty, moved with a sinuous strength and unexpected celerity that had given her the Departmental nickname of The Snake. Or so people explained defensively when taxed with reasons why.
'Today's the day, John.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'Still at the arranged time?'
'Yes, ma'am. Four, in the executive conference room.'
'Good! I wouldn't have put it past him to change it at the last minute so he could override me and be there.'
'He won't do that, ma'am. This is too important, and his boss is watching things rather carefully.'
She sat down behind her desk, swung the swivel chair sideways and unzipped her black kid boots. The plain but equally high-heeled black kid pumps which replaced them were laid ready neatly side by side in the roomy bottom drawer of her desk; Dr Carriol was obsessively tidy and formidably efficient.
'Coffee?'
'Mmmm! What a terribly good idea! Anything new I ought to know before the meeting?'
'I don't think so. Mr Magnus is anxious to speak to you first, but that's as predicted. You must be very glad the preliminary phase of Operation Search is finally over.'
'Profoundly glad! Not that it hasn't been interesting. Five years of it! When did you join me from State, John?'
'It would be… eighteen months ago.'
'We might have taken less time setting it up if I'd had you from the beginning. Finding you was like tripping over the Welcome Stranger nugget in the middle of the usual State Department minefield.'
He went slightly pink, dipped his head awkwardly, and slid round the door as fast as he could.
Dr Carriol picked up the receiver of a green telephone to one side of the beige multi-lined console on her desk. 'This is Dr Carriol. The Secretary, please, Mrs Taverner.'
The connection was made quickly, without protest, and in scarcely more time than it took to engage the scramble button.
'Dr Carriol, Mr Magnus.'
'I want to come!' He sounded plaintive, petulant even.
'Mr Secretary, my investigative teams and their chiefs are still very much under the impression that Operation Search has been a purely theoretical exercise. I want them to remain under that impression, at least until they can't help but see the results we thrust under their noses, and we're some months off that. If you turn up in person today, they're going to smell a great big rat.' Her breath caught as she made the Freudian slip. Fool, Judith, fool! No one was quicker at words than Harold Magnus.
But his mind was too busy dwelling on his exclusion to notice. 'You're just afraid I might upset your carefully stacked apple cart before you can point out the best apple to me. Because you think I'm going to pick the wrong apple.'
'Nonsense!'
'Tchah! Let's hope phase two will go faster than phase one, anyway. I'd like to be sitting in this chair to see the final result.'
'Sifting the haystack always takes a lot longer than arranging the apple cart, Mr Magnus.'
He muffled a giggle. 'Keep me informed.'
'Of course, Mr Secretary,' she said blandly, and hung up, smiling.
But when John Wayne came in with her coffee she was sitting looking at the green telephone pensively, and chewing her lip.
At four o'clock that afternoon Dr Judith Carriol entered the Section Four executive conference room, with her private secretary in grave attendance. He would take the minutes in old-fashioned shorthand, a decision he and Dr Carriol had taken long before if a meeting was classified top secret. A tape recorder was too vulnerable; even if someone managed to lay hands on his shorthand notes and could read shorthand, that person would also have to contend with the fact that it was modified markedly by his handwriting. From his minutes he would do the typescript himself onto an old-fashioned typewriter minus any kind of memory device and not susceptible to a listening microphone, as was the modern voicewriter. Then he would shred his dictation and his rough draft before personally copying and collating the final draft for distribution in files marked top secret.
It was a small gathering. Including John Wayne, only five people attended. They were seated two down either side of the long, ovoid table, with Dr Carriol in the chair at one end. And she got down to business at once, the fingers of her left hand spread poised to strike across the uppermost of a bundle of files in front of her.
'Dr Abraham, Dr Hemingway, Dr Chasen. Are you ready?'
Each nodded seriously.
'Then let's begin with Dr Abraham. If you please, Sam?'
He needed glasses to read, so he put them on, only the slight tremor in his fingers betraying his high degree of excitement. He adored Dr Carriol, was intensely grateful for the chance to participate in an exercise of this scope, and did not look forward to the day when he must return to more mundane activities.
'My caseload numbered 33,368 when I began, and I have followed the prescribed regimen in whittling them down to my final three choices. My chief researcher selected the same three persons absolutely independently of me. I shall concentrate on each candidate equally in my presentation, but I will discuss them in my order of preference.' He cleared his throat and opened the top file of the three which lay on the table at his right hand.
There was a rustle as the other four people in the room also opened a file and perused its contents while Dr Abraham spoke.
'My number-one choice is Maestro Benjamin Steinfeld. He is a fourth-generation American of Polish Jewish stock on both sides. Aged thirty-eight. Married, one child, a boy now aged fourteen, in school, straight A's. His marital and parental statuses rate ten on the ten-scale. A previous marriage contracted when in his nineteenth year ended in a divorce two years later, the divorce action being brought by his then wife. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, he is currently the director of the Winter Festival in Tucson, Arizona, and he is single-handedly responsible for the series of concerts and allied musical activities which CBS has televised nationwide for the past three years to an ever-increasing audience. On Sundays, as you probably know, he hosts a television forum on CBS devoted to airing current problems, but presented with such tact and restraint that he does not exacerbate people's pain or stir up people's emotions. It is the highest-rated programme in the United States. I am sure you must all have watched it at some time or another, especially given our task in hand, so I do not intend to go into detail about Maestro Steinfeld's personality or ability to speak or possible charisma.'
Dr Carriol had been following this summary from the top file in the stack in front of her; frowning, she held an eight-by-ten matt colour photograph of a man's face to the light, studying it as mercilessly as if she had never seen it before, though it was, as Dr Abraham said, a very familiar face indeed. She noted its striking bone structure, the firm well-cut lips, the large dark shining eyes and the unruly quiff of light-brown hair that fell across the high wide forehead. It was a conductor's face, true enough; why did they always seem to have masses of floppy hair?
'Objections?' she asked, looking towards Dr Chasen and Dr Hemingway.
'The previous marriage, Sam. Did you investigate the reason why Maestro Steinfeld's first wife severed her alliance with him?' asked Dr Hemingway, her intelligent little dog's face looking as if she was enjoying every moment of this long-awaited reporting session.
Dr Abraham looked shocked. 'Naturally! There was no enmity involved, nor does the matter reflect badly on the Maestro in any way. His first wife discover
ed in herself a preference for her own sex. She told Maestro Steinfeld about her feelings, he understood completely, and as a matter of fact he was her staunchest support during a rather troubled first few years in lesbian relationships. He asked for a divorce so he could remarry, but he permitted her to initiate proceedings because at the time she was in a very ticklish work situation.'
'Thank you, Dr Abraham. Any other objections? No? All right, then, please give us your second choice,' said Dr Carriol, clipping the photograph back inside the front cover of Maestro Steinfeld's file, closing it, and laying it neatly to one side before opening the next file.
'Shirley Grossman Schneider. An eighth-generation American of mixed Jewish blood, but mostly German Jewish. Aged thirty-seven. She is married, one child, a boy now aged six, in school, classified very bright. On the scales of ten, she scored perfect as wife and mother. An astronaut still on the active NASA payroll, she was head of the Phoebus series of space missions which built the pilot solar generator in earth orbit. Author of the best-selling book Taming the Sun, and currently NASA's chief spokesman to the American people. She is president of Scientific Women for America. In her college years at MIT she was a much-publicized feminist who was responsible for feminist adoption of the word "man" as generic in any situation where either sex or both sexes are involved. You may remember her still famous quote of the time: "When I chair a meeting I am not going to be palmed off as a chairperson, I intend to be the goddam chairman!" Her public speaking is superlative, eloquent and witty, and emotionally moving. And, unusual in such an outspoken and militant feminist, her popularity is as high among men as it is among women. The lady is loaded with charm as well as personality.'