The Run Around

Chapter Eleven

Clayton Anderson reckoned he was on stream to reverse a trend and it was about goddamned time, after Watergate and Irangate and every Cabinet member and his brother from all those previous goddamned administrations filling up the cash boxes against their inevitable end-of-term retirement. He guessed those goddamned Ivy League Eastern newspapers had tried hard enough — knew they’d tried hard, from some of their half-assed enquiries — but they hadn’t come within a mile of getting an armlock on Clayton Lucius Anderson. Throughout the first four years of his presidency until now, halfway through the second term, there hadn’t been a whiff of scandal anywhere, everyone who mattered keeping their trouser fly properly zipped and up front in church on Sundays, like they should have been, reassuring all those good folks out there in heartland America that Washington DC was at last in safe, firm hands. He’d achieved a hell of a lot to reassure those good folks out there in heartland America. In the first term he’d sat on inflation tighter than a man on a hog-tied calf and rallied the domestic economy with the right sort of fiscal policy that gave the farmers and domestic industry the protectionist edge they’d been demanding. Only right that domestically the polls should show him the most popular White House incumbent since Truman. So now it was time to go for the big one, the coup that was going to take him from office remembered not just as honest Johnnie Appleseed but as the international statesman who solved an insoluble problem and brought to the Middle East the peace that had defeated every world leader and every government since the creation of Israel. The International Room was already prepared at the memorial library in Austin — bigger and better than Lyndon Johnson’s — and this was going to be its focal point. Which was why there couldn’t be any screw-up.

‘Quite sure?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing’s been overlooked, Mr President.’ James Bell, the Secretary of State, replied respectfully although the two men were old friends from Congress days. Bell’s appointment had been his reward not only for successfully masterminding Anderson’s election the first time but for retaining those Congress links and associations, minimizing over the past six years any conflict between Capitol Hill and the White House.

‘It’s got to be more than just getting them around the same table,’ insisted the President, unnecessarily. ‘There’s got to be some hard, concrete proposal at the end of it. A homeland.’

‘We’ve worked on it for a year, six months before anything leaked publicly,’ reminded Bell. ‘Jordan want it and Syria want it and Egypt want it and Arafat wants it and the very fact that Israel is finally prepared to come face-to-face is proof that they want it, too.’

Anderson, who was a hard-boned, heavy featured, angular man, swung his chair around from the Oval Office desk, so that he could look out over the gardens and the Washington Monument beyond. He said: ‘So what about Moscow?’

‘I personally sounded them out, during the visit in July,’ reported the Secretary of State. ‘There wasn’t any doubt. They want it settled as much as everyone else. It’s gone on too long, like a running sore.’

‘You think we can trust them?’ Anderson had a Texan’s suspicion of anything communist, which had made the international gatherings during his presidency difficult. He didn’t even like the colour red.

‘The Middle East has been draining the Soviets dry for years. Now their reforms mean they’ve got to divert money away from the military and from military aid and into their domestic economy,’ said Bell. He was a shiny cheeked, roly-poly man who didn’t intend returning to his New York law practice when Anderson’s term was over. He was as aware as the President how successful the administration had been and was already receiving approaches from businesses wanting the respect and prestige of his name on their boards. There was also the television approach and that appealed to him. Nothing tacky, of course. The sort of advisory capacity, commenting upon momentous world events, that Kissinger had. And there was the book, of course. And the lecture circuit, like Kissinger again. Bell was calculating $2 million at least, when it all came together. It meant they could go on living in Georgetown and he knew Martha would like that. She enjoyed Washington: the impression of being at the centre of things. He’d already decided to take her to Geneva.

‘I mean this to work, Jim.’

‘So do I, Mr President.’

‘So what’s our security cover?’

‘I’ve given the CIA Director a personal briefing. Every station in every involved country is on maximum alert, for anything that might sound a bell,’ reported the Secretary of State.

‘And Geneva itself?’

‘Quite separate from the normal Secret Service cover the CIA are sending a team of ten,’ said Bell. ‘The supervisor is a man named Giles, Roger Giles. He’s their Middle East expert; served as station chief in Amman and Cairo. Brought back to Langley two years ago to head the desk there. First-class guy.’

It was unfortunate the country didn’t any longer erect monuments to their presidents like that obelisk out there beyond the White House lawn, thought Anderson, swivelling back into the room. He said: ‘You know what’s a pity?’

‘What?’

‘That after all the work I’ve put into this — a whole goddamned year of background pressure and give-and-take diplomacy — that the public signings and agreements are going to be between the Arabs and Israel and the Palestinians,’ complained the President. ‘I should have been there, to be seen as the architect.’

‘You’ll be acknowledged as such,’ assured the Secretary of State.

Would it be possible for him to be nominated for the Nobel Peace prize? wondered Anderson. Kissinger had shared it, at the end of the Vietnam war. But with Le Duc Tho, not Nixon. He’d have to have the archives check the protocol for him: a scroll like that would look damned good as the centrepiece in Austin. Anderson said: ‘This is the milestone one, Jim. This is the big one we’re all going to be remembered by.’

‘That’s how I see it, too, Mr President,’ said the other man. Both of us remembered, he thought.

David Levy left the Foreign Minister’s office inconspicuously through the side door, merging easily into the throng of people in the outside corridors of the Knesset, letting their flow carry him past the Chagall murals towards the exit.

In the forecourt outside, protected against terrorist outrage by the decorative metal fence, he hesitated in the pale sunlight, gazing out over the Jerusalem hills and the valley from which the cross of Christ was supposed to have been cut. How much blood had been shed over this land in the two thousand years since then, he thought. It seemed difficult to imagine that it would ever stop. Or that Geneva could be the way.

Levy was a sabra, a Jew born in Israel without any real way of knowing what the Holocaust had truly been like, but his father had experienced it and told him how it was to exist in the Warsaw sewers, to be hunted like the rats they’d replaced, denied any proper home, any proper life. The old man had come to Palestine a fervent Zionist, one of Begin’s first lieutenants in the Irgun Zvai Lume service that fought against the British in 1947 and from which the Israeli external intelligence service, the Mossad, eventually grew. It had seemed natural that Levy should follow his father: frequently he wished the old man had lived to see how high he had risen in the organization. Levy knew his father would have been very proud. And particularly today, although Levy supposed security would have precluded his telling the old man. Levy had already been notified, of course, that he would be heading the Mossad contingent to the Geneva conference. But he had not expected the Foreign Minister’s appointment that put him in additional command of the group from Shin Bet, Israel’s counter-intelligence organization.

But then, he reflected further, there had been a lot about Mordechai Cohen’s briefing that he had not expected.

‘It’s an intolerable demand!’ protested Harkness. ‘The Foreign Office will be furious.’

‘They are,’ confirmed Wilson, mildly. The Director was conscious of his deputy’s antipathy towards Charlie Muffin and hoped it would not cloud Harkness’s judgement about the man’s professional abilities. Someone had to clear blocked drains and Charlie was good at it.

‘What explanation can we give for demanding, through the Foreign Ministries of seven countries, that the crew of eighteen of their national aircraft are located wherever they are in the world and made specifically available, as soon as possible?’

‘Drugs,’ said Wilson. ‘It was Charlie’s idea. Brilliant, isn’t it? We’re supposedly on the trail of a major international drugs syndicate. Hundreds of millions; all that stuff. Seem to hear about nothing else these days: makes it perfectly acceptable.’

‘And what if it all ends in nothing, after causing so much trouble!’ complained the deputy.

‘Why don’t you try to come up with an idea?’ suggested Wilson, briefly letting his irritation show.

Harkness blinked but said nothing.