Desperate Measures

19

The sundeck was disturbingly unilluminated. Pittman didn’t understand. Crouching in the darkness on top, he wondered why the other parts of the building had outside lights, while the sundeck did not.

The room beyond the two sets of French doors was well lit, however. Past substantial ornate metal furniture upon which cocktails and lunches would be served when the weather got warm, Pittman saw bright lamps in a wide room that had a cocktail bar along the left wall in addition to a big-screen television built into the middle of the right wall.

At the moment, though, the room was being used for something quite different from entertainment. Leather furniture had been shifted toward the television, leaving the center of the room available for a bed with safety railings on each side. A long table beyond it supported electronic instruments that Pittman recognized vividly from the week when Jeremy had been in intensive care: monitors that analyzed heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration rate, and blood-oxygen content. Two pumps controlled the speed with which liquid flowed from bottles on an IV stand into the right and left arm of a frail old man who lay covered with sheets on the bed. The two male attendants whom Pittman had seen at the hospital were making adjustments to the monitors. The female nurse was taking care that there weren’t any kinks in the oxygen tube that led to prongs inserted in the old man’s nostrils.

The oxygen mask that had obscured the old man’s face when he was taken from the hospital now lay on top of a monitor on the table beyond the bed. Pittman couldn’t be totally sure from outside in the darkness, but what he had suspected at the hospital insisted more strongly: The old man bore a resemblance to Jonathan Millgate.

The intense young man who had been in charge of getting the old man out of the hospital had a stethoscope around his neck and was listening to the old man’s chest. The somber men who had acted as bodyguards were standing in the far-left corner.

But other people were in the large room, as well. Pittman hadn’t seen them at the hospital, although he definitely had seen them before-in old photographs and in television documentaries about the politics of the Vietnam War. Four men. Distinguished-looking. Dressed in conservative custom-made dark three-piece suits. Old but bearing a resemblance to images of their younger selves.

Three wore spectacles. One had a white mustache. Two were bald, while the other two had wispy white hair. All had stern, pinched, wrinkled faces and drooping skin on their necks. Their expressions severe, they stood in a row, as if they were on a dais or part of a diplomatic receiving line. Their combined former titles included ambassador to the USSR, ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to Great Britain, ambassador to Saudi Arabia, ambassador to West Germany, ambassador to NATO, secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser. Indeed, several of these positions had been held by all of these men at various times, just as they had all at various times belonged to the National Security Council. They had never been elected to public office, and yet in their appointed roles they had exerted more influence than any but the most highly placed politicians. Their names were Eustace Gable, Anthony Lloyd, Victor Standish, and Winston Sloane. They were the legendary diplomats upon whom Presidents from Truman to Clinton, Republican and Democrat, had frequently relied for advice, their shrewdness having earned them the nickname “the grand counselors.” Four of them. Which suggested that the old man in the bed was, in fact, the fifth grand counselor: Jonathan Millgate.