Rainbow Six

CHAPTER 11

The lawyer made the call, and unsurprisingly found that it developed into a luncheon in a restaurant where a man of forty or so asked a few simple questions, then left before the dessert cart was wheeled up to the table. That ended his involvement with whatever would happen. He paid the check with cash and walked back to his office haunted by the question-what had he done, what might he have started? The answer for both, he told himself forcefully, was that he didn't know. It was the intellectual equivalent of a shower after a sweaty day's work, and though ultimately not as satisfying, he was a lawyer, and accustomed to the vicissitudes of life.

His interlocutor left the restaurant and caught the Metro, changing trains three times before settling on the one that ran near his home, close to a park known for the prostitutes who stood about, peddling their multivalued wares for passersby in automobiles. If there were anywhere an indictment of the capitalist system, it was here, he thought, though the tradition went further back than the onset of the current economic system. The women had all the gaiety of serial killers, as they stood there in their abbreviated clothing made to be removed as rapidly as possible, so as to save time. He turned away, and headed to his flat, where, with luck, others would be waiting for him. And luck, it turned out, was with him. One of his guests had even made coffee.

"This is where it has to stop," Carol Brightling said, even though she knew it wouldn't.

"Sure, doc," her guest said, sipping OEOB coffee. "But how the hell do you sell it to him?"

The map was spread on her coffee table: East of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay was a piece of tundra, over a thousand square miles of it, and geologists for British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield - the two companies that had largely exploited the Alaskan North Slope, built the pipeline, and therefore helped cause the Exxon Valdez disaster-had made their public pronouncement. This oilfield, called AARM, was at least double the size of the North Slope. The report, still semi classified in the industrial sense, had come to the White House a week earlier, with confirming data from the United States Geological Survey, a federal agency tasked to the same sort of work, along with the opinion of the geologists that the field extended farther east, across the Canadian border-and exactly how far it extended they could only guess, because the Canadians had not yet begun their survey. The conclusion of the executive summary posited the possibility that the entire field could rival the one in Saudi Arabia, although it was far harder to transport oil from it-except for the fact, the report went on, that the Trans-Alaska pipeline had already been built, and the new fields would only need a few hundred miles of extension on the existing pipeline, which, the summary concluded arrogantly, had produced a negligible environmental impact.

"Except for that damned tanker incident," Dr. Brightling observed into her morning coffee. Which had killed thousands of innocent wild birds and hundreds of sea otters, and had sullied several hundred square miles of pristine seacoast.

"This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can't allow the oil companies to go in there!"

"I know, Kevin," the President's Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod

"The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost-there's nothing more delicate on the face of the planet," the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. "We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children-we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don't care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place."

"Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn't force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally. "

"That's horseshit, and you know it, Carol." Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn't want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn't reflect on the fact that he'd flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn't know and didn't care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President's Science Advisor did understand, and that she did workin the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.

"Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done."

"Kevin, it's not that easy."

"Why the hell not? He's not that much of a dunce, is he?"

"He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal," she said, tapping the report on the table. "They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion dollar bond in case something goes wrong for God's sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!"

"And be outnumbered there by their own cronies! Be damned if they'll co-opt us that way!" Mayflower snarled. "I won't let anyone from my office be a part of this rape, and that's final!"

"And if you say that out loud, the oil companies will call you an extremist, and marginalize the whole environmental movement-and you can't afford to let that happen, Kevin!"

"The hell I can't. You have to stand and fight for something, Carol. Here is where we stand and fight. We let those polluting bastards drill oil in Prudhoe Bay, but that's it!"

"What will the rest of your board say about this?" Dr. Brightling asked.

"They'll goddamned well say what I goddamned tell them to say!"

"No, Kevin, they won't." Carol leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She'd read the entire report the previous night, and the sad truth was that the oil companies had gotten pretty damned smart about dealing with environmental issues. It was plain business sense. The Exxon Valdez had cost them a ton of money, in addition to the bad public relations. Three pages had been devoted to the changes in tanker safety procedures. Now, ships leaving the huge oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, were escorted by tugs all the way to the open sea. A total of twenty pollution-control vessels were on constant standby, with a further number in reserve. The navigation systems on every tanker had been upgraded to beyond what nuclear submarines carried; the navigation officers were compelled to test their skills on simulators every six months. It was all hugely expensive, but far less so than another serious spill. A series of commercials proclaimed all of these facts on television-worst of all, the high-end intellectual cable/satellite channels, History, Learning, Discovery, and A amp;E, for whom the oil companies were also sponsoring new shows on wildlife in the Arctic, never touched upon what the companies did, but there were plenty of pictures of caribou and other animals traversing under the elevated portions of the pipeline. They were getting their message out very skillfully indeed, even to members of the Sierra Club's board, Brightling thought.

What they didn't say, and what both she and Mayflower knew, was that once the oil was safely out of the ground, safely transported through the monster pipeline, safely conveyed over the sea by the newly double hulled supertankers, then it just became more air pollution, out the tailpipes of cars and trucks and the smokestacks of electric power stations. So it really was all a joke, and that joke included Kevin's bitching about hurting the permafrost. At most, what would be seriously damaged? Ten or twenty acres, probably, and the oil companies would make more commercials about how they cleaned that up, as though the polluting end-use of the oil was not an issue at all!

Because to the ignorant Joe Six-pack, sitting there in front of his TV, watching football games, it wasn't an issue, was it? There were a hundred or so million motor vehicles in the United States, and a larger number across the world, and they all polluted the air, and that was the real issue. How did one stop that from poisoning the planet?

Well, there were ways, weren't there? she reflected.

"Kevin, I'll do my best," she promised. "I will advise the President not to support this bill."

The bill was S-1768, submitted and sponsored by both Alaskan senators, whom the oil companies had bought long before, which would authorize the Department of the Interior to auction off the drilling rights into the AAMP area. The money involved would be huge, both for the federal government and for the state of Alaska. Even the Native American tribes up there would look the other way.

The money they got from the oil would buy them lots of snowmobiles with which to chase and shoot the caribou, and motorboats to fish and kill the odd whale, which was part of their racial and cultural heritage. Snowmobiles weren't needed in the modern age of plastic-wrapped USDA Choice Iowa beef, but the Native Americans clung to the end-result of their traditions, if not the traditional methods. It was a depressing truth that even these people had set aside their history and their very gods in homage to a new age of mechanistic worship to oil and its products. Both the Alaskan senators would bring down tribal elders to testify in favor of S-1768, and they would be listened to, since who more than Native Americans knew what it was like to live in harmony with nature? Only today they did it with Ski-Do snowmobiles, Johnson outboard motors, and Winchester hunting rifles… She sighed at the madness of it all.

"Will he listen?" Mayflower asked, getting back to business. Even environmentalists had to live in the real world of politics.

"Honest answer? Probably not," Carol Brightling admitted quietly.

"You know," Kevin observed in a low voice. "There are times when I understand John Wilkes Booth."

"Kevin, I didn't hear that, and you didn't say it. Not here. Not in this building."

"Damn it, Carol, you know how I feel. And you know I'm right. How the hell are we supposed to protect the planet if the idiots who run the world don't give a fuck about the world we live on?"

"What are you going to say? That Homo sapiens is a parasitic species that hurts the earth and the ecosystem'' That we don't belong here?"

"A lot of us don't, and that's a fact."

"Maybe so, but what do you do about it?"

"I don't know," Mayflower had to admit.

Some of us know, Carol Brightling thought, looking up into his sad eyes. But are you ready for that one, Kevin? She thought he was, but recruitment was always a troublesome step, even for true believers like Kevin Mayflower…

Construction was about ninety percent complete. There were twenty whole sections around the site, twenty one-square-mile blocks of land, mainly flat, a slight roll to it, with a four-lane paved road leading north to Interstate 70, which was still covered with trucks heading in and out. The last two miles of the highway were set up without a median strip, the rebarred concrete paving a full thirty inches deep, as though it had been built to land airplanes on, the construction superintendent had observed, big ones, even. The road led into an equally sturdy and massively wide parking lot. He didn't care enough about it, though, to mention it at his country club in Salina.

The buildings were fairly pedestrian, except for their environmental-control systems, which were so state-of-the-art that the Navy could have used them on nuclear submarines. It was all part of the company's leading-edge posture on its systems, the chairman had told him on his last visit. They had a tradition of doing everything ahead of everyone else, and besides, the nature of their work required careful attention to every little squiggly detail. You didn't make vaccines in the open. But even the worker housing and offices had the same systems, the super thought, and that was odd, to say the least. Every building had a basement-it was a sensible thing to build here in tornado country, but few ever bothered with it, partly out of sloth, and partly from the fact that the ground was not all that easy to dig here, the famous Kansas hardpan whose top was scratched to grow wheat. That was the other interesting part. They'd continue to farm most of the area. The winter wheat was already in, and two miles away was the farm-operations center, down its own over-wide two-lane road, outfitted with the newest and best farm equipment he'd ever seen, even in an area where growing wheat was essentially an art form.

Three hundred million dollars, total, was going into this project. The buildings were huge-you could convert them to living space for five or six thousand people, the super thought. The office building had classrooms for continuing education. The site had its own power plant, along with a huge fuel-tank farm, whose tanks were semi buried in deference to local weather conditions, and connected by their own pipeline to a filling point just off 1-70 at Kanopolis. Despite the local lake, there were no fewer than ten twelve-inch artesian wells drilled well down into-and past-the Cherokee Aquifer that local farmers used to water their fields. Hell, that was enough water to supply a small city. But the company was footing the bill, and he was getting his usual percentage of the total job cost to bring it in on time, with a substantial bonus for coming in early, which he was determined to earn. It had been twenty-five months to this point, with two more to go. And he'd make it, the super thought, and he'd get that bonus, after which he'd take the family to Disney World for two weeks of Mickey and golf on the wonderful courses there, which he needed in order to get his game back in shape after two years of seven-day weeks.

But the bonus meant he wouldn't need to work again for a couple of years. He specialized in large jobs. He'd done two skyscrapers in New York, an oil refinery in Delaware, an amusement park in Ohio, and two huge housing projects elsewhere, earning a reputation for bringing things in early and under budget not a bad rep for someone in his business. He parked his Jeep Cherokee, and checked notes for the things remaining this afternoon. Yeah, the window-seal tests in Building One. He used his cell phone to call ahead, and headed off, across the landing strip, as he called it, where the access roads came together. He remembered his time as an engineer in the Air Force. Two miles long, and almost a yard thick, yeah, you could land a 747 on this road if you wanted. Well, the company had a fleet of its own Gulfstream business jets, and why not land them here instead of the dinky little airfield at Ellsworth? And if they ever bought a jumbo, he chuckled, they could do that here, too. Three minutes later, he was parked just outside of One. This building was complete, three weeks early, and the last thing to be done was the environmental checks. Fine. He walked in through the revolving door-an unusually heavy, robust one, which was immediately locked upon his entry.

"Okay, we ready, Gil?"

"We are now, Mr. Hollister."

"Run her up, then," Charlie Hollister ordered.

Gil Trains was the supervisor of all the environmental systems at the project. Ex-Navy, and something of a control freak, he punched the wall-mounted controls himself. There was no noise associated with the pressurization the systems were too far away for that-but the effect was almost immediate. On the walk over to Gil, Hollister felt it in his ears, like driving down a mountain road, your ears clicked, and you had to work your jaw around to equalize the pressure, which was announced by another click.

"How's it holding?"

"So far, so good," Trains replied. "Zero point-seven-five PSI overpressure, holding steady." His eyes were on the gauges mounted in this control station. "You know what this is like, Charlie?"

"Nope," the superintendent admitted.

"Testing watertight integrity on a submarine. Same method, we overpressure a compartment."

"Really? It's all reminded me of stuff I did in Europe at fighter bases."

"What's that?" Gil asked.

"Overpressurizing pilots' quarters to keep gas out."

"Oh yeah? Well, I guess it works both ways. Pressure is holding nicely."

Damned well ought to, Hollister thought, with all the hell ire went through to make sure every fucking window was scaled with vinyl gaskets. Not that there were all that many windows. That had struck him as pretty odd. The views here were pretty nice. Why shut them out?

The building was spec'd for a full 1.3 pounds of overpressure. They'd told him it was tornado protection, and that sorta-kinda made sense, along with the increased efficiency of the HVAC systems that came along with the seals. But it could also make for sick-building syndrome. Buildings with overly good environmental isolation kept flu germs in, and helped colds spread like a goddamned prairie fire. Well, that had to be part of the idea, too. The company worked on drugs and vaccines and stuff, and that meant that this place was like a germ-warfare factory, didn't it? So, it made sense to keep stuff in - and keep stuff out, right? Ten minutes later they were sure. Instruments all over the building confirmed that the overpressurization systems worked-on the first trial. The guys who'd done the windows and doors had earned all that extra pay for getting it right.

"Looks pretty good. Gil, I have to run over to the uplink center." The complex also had a lavish collection of satellite communications systems.

"Use the air lock." Trains pointed.

"See you later," the super said on his way out.

"Sure thing, Charlie."

It wasn't pleasant. They now had eleven people, healthy ones, eight women and three men-segregated by gender, of course-and eleven was actually one more than they'd planned, but after kidnapping them you couldn't very well give them back. Their clothing had been taken away in some cases it had been removed while they'd been unconscious-and replaced with tops and bottoms that were rather like prison garb, if made of somewhat better material. No undergarments were permitted-imprisoned women had actually used bras to hang themselves on occasion, and that couldn't be allowed here. Slippers for shoes, and the food was heavily laced with Valium, which helped to calm people down somewhat, but not completely. It wouldn't have been very smart to drug them that much, since the depression of all their bodily systems might skew the test, and they couldn't allow that either.

"What is all this?" the woman demanded of Dr. Archer.

"It's a medical test," Barbara replied, filling out the form. "You volunteered for it, remember? We're paying you for this, and after it's over you can go back home."

"When did I do that?"

"Last week," Dr. Archer told her.

"I don't remember."

"Well, you did. We have your signature on the consent form. And we're taking good care of you, aren't we?"

"I feel dopey all the time."

"That's normal," Dr. Archer assured her. "It's nothing to worry about."

She-Subject F4-was a legal secretary. Three of the women subjects were that, which was mildly troubling to Dr. Archer. What if the lawyers they worked for called the police? Letters of resignation had been sent, with the signatures expertly forged, and plausible explanations for the supposed event included in the text of the letters. Maybe it would hold up. In any case, the kidnappings had been expertly done, and nobody here would talk to anybody about it, would they?

Subject F4 was nude, and sitting in a comfortable cloth-covered chair. Fairly attractive, though she needed to lose about ten pounds, Archer thought. The physical examination had revealed nothing unusual. Blood pressure was normal. Blood chemistry showed slightly elevated cholesterol, but nothing to worry about. She appeared to be a normal, healthy, twenty-six-year-old female. The interview for her medical history was similarly unremarkable. She was not a virgin, of course, having had twelve lovers over the nine years of her sexual activity. One abortion carried out at age twenty by her gynecologist, after which she'd practiced safe sex. She had a current love interest, but he was out of town for a few weeks on business, and she suspected that he had another woman in his life anyway.

"Okay, that about does it, Mary." Archer stood and smiled. "Thank you for your cooperation."

"Can I get dressed now?"

"First there's something we want you to do. Please walk through the green door. There's a fogging system in there. You'll find it feels nice and cool. Your clothes will be on the other side. You can get dressed there."

"Okay." Subject F4 rose and did as she was told. Inside the sealed room was - nothing, really. She stood there in drugged puzzlement for a few seconds, noting that it was hot in there, over ninety degrees, but then invisible spray ports in the wall sent out a mist… fog, something like that, which cooled her down instantly and comfortably for about ten seconds. Then the fog stopped, and the far door clicked open. As promised, there was a dressing room there, and she donned her green jamms, then walked out into the corridor, where a security guard waved her to the door at the far end - he never got closer than ten feet - back to the dormitory, where lunch was waiting. Meals were pretty good here, and after meals she always felt like a nap.

"Feeling bad, Pete?" Dr. Killgore asked in a different part of the building.

"Must be the flu or something. I feel beat-up all over, and I can't keep anything down." Even the booze, he didn't say, though that was especially disconcerting for the alcoholic. Booze was the one thing he could always keep down.

"Okay, let's give it a look, then." Killgore stood, donning a mask and putting on latex gloves for his examination. "Gotta take a blood sample, okay?"

"Sure, doc."

Killgore did that very carefully indeed, giving him the usual stick inside the elbow, and filling four five-cc test tubes. Next he checked Pete's eyes, mouth, and did the normal prodding, which drew a reaction over the subject's liver

"Ouch! That hurts, doc."

"Oh? Doesn't feel very different from before, Pete. How's it hurt?" he asked, feeling the liver, which, as in most alcoholics, felt like a soft brick. "Like you just stabbed me with a knife, doc. Real sore there."

"Sorry, Pete. How about here?" the physician asked, probing lower with both hands.

"Not as sharp, but it hurts a little. Somethin' I ate, maybe?"

"Could be. I wouldn't worry too much about it," Killgore replied. Okay, this one was symptomatic, a few days earlier than expected, but small irregularities were to be expected. Pete was one of the healthier subjects, but alcoholics were never really what one could call healthy. So, Pete would be Number 2. Bad luck, Pete, Killgore thought. "Let me give you something to take the edge off."

The doctor turned and pulled open a drawer on the wall cabinet. Five milligrams, he thought, filling the plastic syringe to the right line, then turning and sticking the vein on the back of the hand.

"Oooh!" Pete said a few seconds later. "Oooh… that feels okay. Lot better, doc. Thanks." The rheumy eyes went wide, then relaxed.

Heroin was a superb analgesic, and best of all, it gave its recipient a dazzling rush in the first few seconds, then reduced him to a comfortable stupor for the next few hours. So, Pete would feel just fine for a while. Killgore helped him stand, then sent him back. Next he took the blood samples off for testing. In thirty minutes, he was sure. The antibody tests still showed positive, and microscopic examination showed what the antibodies were fighting against… and losing to.

Only two years earlier, people had tried to infect America with the natural version of this bug, this "shepherd's crook," some called it. It had been somewhat modified in the genetic-engineering lab with the addition of cancer DNA to make this negative-strand RNA virus more robust, but that was really like putting a raincoat on the bug. The best news of all was that the genetic engineering had more than tripled the latency period. Once thought to be four to ten days, now it was almost a month. Maggie really knew her stuff, and she'd even picked the right name for it. Shiva was one nasty little son of a bitch. It had killed Chester-well, the potassium had done that, but Chester had been doomed-and it was now starting to kill Pete. There would be no merciful help for this one. Pete would be allowed to live until the disease took his life. His physical condition was close enough to normal that they'd work to see what good supportive care could do to fight off the effects of the Ebola-Shiva. Probably nothing, but they had to establish that. Nine remaining primary test subjects, and then eleven more on the other side of the building-they would be the real test. They were all healthy, or so the company thought. They'd be testing both the method of primary transmission and the viability of Shiva as a plague agent, plus the utility of the vaccines Steve Berg had isolated the previous week.

That concluded Killgore's work for the day. He made his way outside. The evening air was chilly and clean and pure - well, as pure as it could be in this part of the world. There were a hundred million cars in the country, all spewing their complex hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Killgore wondered if he'd be able to tell the difference in two or three years, when all that stopped. In the glow of the building lights, he saw the flapping of bats. Cool, he thought, one rarely saw bats. They must be chasing insects, and he wished his ears could hear the ultrasonic sounds they projected like radar to locate the bugs and intercept them. There would be birds up there, too. Owls especially, magnificent raptors of the night, flying with soft, quiet feathers, finding their way into barns, where they'd catch mice, eat and digest them, and then regurgitate the bones of their prey in compact little capsules. Killgore felt far more kinship for the wild predators than he did for the prey animals. But that was to be expected, wasn't it? He did have kinship with the predators, those wild, magnificent things that killed without conscience, because Mother Nature had no conscience at all. It gave life with one hand, and took it back with the other. The ageless process of life, that had made the earth what it was. Men had tried so hard and so long to change it, but other men now would change it back, quickly and dramatically, and he'd be there to see it. He wouldn't see all the scars fade from the land, and that was too bad, but, he judged, he'd live long enough to see the important things change. Pollution would stop almost completely. The animals would no longer be fettered and poisoned. The sky would clear, and the land would soon be covered with life, as Nature intended, with him and his colleagues to see the magnificence of the transformation. And if the price was high, then the prize it earned was worth it. The earth belonged to those who appreciated and understood her. He was even using one of Nature's methods to take possession albeit with a little human help. If humans could use their science and arts to harm the world, then other humans could use them to fix it. Chester and Pete would not have understood, but then, they'd never understood much of anything, had they?

"There will be thousands of Frenchmen there," Juan said. "And half of them will be children. If we wish to liberate our colleagues, the impact must be a strong one. This should be strong enough."

"Where will we go afterwards?" Rene asked.

"The Bekaa Valley is still available, and from there, wherever we wish. I have good contacts in Syria, still, and there are always options."

"It's a four-hour flight, and there is always an American aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean."

"They will not attack an aircraft filled with children," Esteban pointed out. "They might even give us an escort," he added with a smile.

"It is only twelve kilometers to the airport," Andre reminded them, "a fine multilane highway."

"So, then, we must plan the mission in every detail. Esteban, you will get yourself a job there. You, too, Andre. We must pick our places, then select the time and the day.

"We'll need more men. At least ten more."

"That is a problem. Where can we get ten reliable men?" Juan asked.

"Sicarios can be hired. We need only promise them the right amount of money," Esteban pointed out.

"They must be faithful men," Rene told them forcefully.

"They will be faithful enough," the Basque told them. "I know where to go for them."

They were all bearded. It was the easiest disguise to adopt, and though the national police in their countries had pictures of them, the pictures were all of young, shaven men. A passerby might have thought them to be artists, the way they looked, and the way they all leaned inward on the table to speak with intense whispers. They were all dressed moderately well, though not expensively so. Perhaps they were arguing over some political issue, the waiter thought from his station ten meters away, or some confidential business matter. He couldn't know that he was right on both counts. A few minutes later, he watched them shake hands and depart in different directions, having left cash to pay the bill, and, the waiter discovered, a niggardly tip. Artists, he thought. They were notoriously cheap bastards.

"But this is an environmental disaster waiting to happen!" Carol Brightling insisted.

"Carol," the chief of staff replied. "It's about our balance of payments. It will save America something like fifty billion dollars, and we need that. On the environmental side, I know what your concerns are, but the president of Atlantic Richfield has promised me personally that this will be a clean operation. They've learned a lot in the past twenty years, on the engineering side and the public relations side, about cleaning up their act, haven't they?"

"Have you ever been there?" the President's science advisor asked.

"Nope." He shook his head. "I've flown over Alaska, but that's it."

"You would think differently if you'd ever seen the place, trust me."

"They strip-mine coal in Ohio. I've seen that. And I've seen them cover it back up and plant grass and trees. Hell, one of those strip mines-in two years they're going to have the PGA championship on the golf course that they built there! It's cleaned up, Carol. They know how now, and they know it makes good sense to do it, economically and politically. So, no, Carol, the President will not withdraw his support for this drilling project. It makes economic sense for the country." And who really cares a rat's ass for land that only a few hundred people have ever seen? he didn't add.

"I have to talk to him personally about it," the science advisor insisted.

"No." The chief of staff shook his head emphatically. "That's not going to happen. Not on this issue. All you'd accomplish is to undercut your position, and that isn't smart, Carol."

"But I promised."

"Promised whom?"

"The Sierra Club."

"Carol, the Sierra Club isn't part of this administration. And we get their letters. I've read them. They're turning into an extremist organization on issues like this. Anybody can say 'do nothing,' and that's about all they're saying since this Mayflower guy took it over."

"Kevin is a good man and a very smart one."

"You couldn't prove that by me, Carol," the chief of staff snorted. "He's a Luddite."

"Goddamnit, Arnie, not everyone who disagrees with you is an extremist, okay?"

"That one is. The Sierra Club's going to self-destruct if they keep him on top of the masthead. Anyway." The chief of staff checked his schedule. "I have work to do. Your position on this issue, Dr. Brightling, is to support the Administration. That means you personally support the drilling bill for AAMP. There is only one position in this building, and that position is what the President says it is. That's the price you pay for working as an advisor to the President, Carol. You get to influence policy, but once that policy is promulgated, you support it, whether you believe it or not. You will say publicly that you think that drilling that oil is a good thing for America and for the environment. Do you understand that?"

"No, Arnie, I won't!" Brightling insisted.

"Carol, you will. And you will do it convincingly, in such a way as to make the more moderate environmental groups see the logic of the situation. If, that is, you like working here."

"Are you threatening me?"

"No, Carol, I am not threatening you. I am explaining to you how the rules work here. Because you have to play by the rules, just like I do, and just like everyone else does. If you work here you must be loyal to the President. If you are not loyal, then you cannot work here. You knew those rules when you came onboard, and you knew you had to live by them. Okay, now it's time for a gut check. Carol, will you live by the rules or won't you?"

Her face was red under the makeup. She hadn't learned to conceal her anger. the chief of staff saw, and that was too bad. You couldn't afford to get angry over minor bullshit items, not at this level of government. And this was a minor bullshit item. When you found something as valuable as several billion barrels of oil in a place that belonged to you, you drilled into the ground to get it out. It was as simple as that - and it was simpler still if the oil companies promised not to hurt anything as a result. It would remain that simple as long as the voters drove automobiles. "Well, Carol?" he asked.

"Yes, Arnie, I know the rules, and I will live by the rules," she confirmed at last.

"Good. I want you to prepare a statement this afternoon for release next week. I want to see it today. The usual stuff, the science of it, the safety of the engineering measures, that sort of thing. Thanks for coming over, Carol," he said in dismissal.

Dr. Brightling stood and moved to the door. She hesitated there, wanting to turn and tell Arnie what he could do with his statement… but she kept moving into the corridor in the West Wing, turned north, and went down the stairs for the street level. Two Secret Service agents noted the look on her face and wondered what had rained on her parade that morning - or maybe had turned a hailstorm loose on it. She walked across the street with an unusually stiff gait, then up the steps into the OEOB. In her office, she turned on her Gateway computer and called up her word-processing program, wanting to put her fist through the glass screen rather than type on the keyboard. To be ordered around by that man! Who didn't know anything about science, and didn't care about environmental policy. All Arnie cared about was politics, and politics was the most artificial damned thing in the world!

But then, finally, she calmed down, took a deep breath, and began drafting her defense of something that, after all, would never happen, would it?

No, she told herself. It would never happen.