Deadly Waters (7 page)

“No!” exhaled Taylor, panting hard from the climb. “Get me out of here! Do you know how many people will die? No, I don’t want to discuss it. This has to be a joke. Tell me this is a joke.”

Mondragon drove them off the slope and back to the highway. As they approached the ragged outer reaches of Grand Junction, Taylor’s outbursts fell to a lower volume, not because he was less outraged but because his anger had exhausted him. “I should go straight to the police,” he said.

“You do what you have to do,” said Erin. “I should tell you now, they won’t believe you.”

“How could you get involved in anything like this, Erin?”

“Revenge,” said Mondragon.

“For what?”

“For everything they did to me, to Al Harris, to you, to everybody that has been ground under or left out,” said Mondragon. “Look, Jack, when the Darrin Bentons are running the world, what could we do that would be morally wrong? Have you read a newspaper lately? Kids are killing kids. The adults running this country are better armed and no less wrongheaded.”

“By modern standards, maybe you’re right to be so angry at this county,” said Taylor. “Not by what I have in my heart. My dad fought for this country, for Christ sake. My uncle Pat is buried over in France. Why do you think I want to destroy America?”

“If that’s the way you feel,” said Mondragon, “then I’m sorry I breached the subject with you.”

They merged with the four lanes of traffic as they entered the outskirts of town. Taylor happened to look out the passenger window at the same time as a beat-up Subaru hatchback pulled even with the SUV. In the driver’s seat of the little car was a young man in dreadlocks who had metal objects hanging from his pierced ears and nostrils. He noticed Taylor staring at him and in response stuck out his tongue at the older man, revealing yet another piece of metal, this one a silver stud that had a five pointed star made of turquoise on its exposed end. A young woman in the driver’s seat laughed at her friend’s actions and gave Taylor a universally recognized gesture with her middle finger as she and her companion sped past Erin’s oversized vehicle.

“Most of those old Japanese beaters have two cycle engines,” said Mondragon. “Add oil every couple thousand miles, and the damn things run forever. That’s why the counterculture types love Subarus from the Seventies--no money needed for maintenance.”

Taylor’s heart, the heart carrying the code that told him right and wrong, sank when he looked at the young couple. Their thoughtless, vulgar response to him had greater effect than the hundreds of words that Mondragon had used to seduce him.

“My son,” whispered Taylor.

“What’s that?” said Mondragon.

“That kid looked like my son,” said Taylor. “Not in his natural features; Jerry is much tall, thinner. I mean to say this one has the same things in his head my boy does. He treats me the same way, too.”

John Taylor paused. He would later reflect that Mondragon had waited for him to speak again, showing that Erin must have been confident of what Taylor would say next.

“Contempt,” he said, letting it hang in air between them. “Contempt,” he repeated a second later, “that’s everything he feels for me, for the company, for my lifetime of work.”

He looked straight ahead at the road while he spoke.

“And my role?” he asked, wishing he were somewhere else and so drunk he could not remember he knew Erin Mondragon, or that he had a son. “I won’t kill anyone; I’ll tell you that at the beginning.”

“No, of course not,” said Mondragon. He nearly patted Taylor on the shoulder. He thought better of it at the last moment and drew back his hand. “The operation will be nothing like that. You’ll see. Everyone will be given ample warning. No one will get hurt. You’ll be doing some Russian acting. Just like in the plays.”

“This Russian I will pretend to be...?” said Taylor.

“Vladimir Petrovski,” said Mondragon. “A very bad fellow. Former spy. He betrayed his own people. Lives in America now, back east somewhere. Not that it matters. This means everything to me, Jack. Having you with us, I mean.”

That evening at dinner Mondragon was in a giddy mood and uncharacteristically drank too much wine. “John’s with us all the way!” he told Ed Harris and Colonel Method and clapped his hands together as though applauding himself. “Everything is falling into place.”

XIII

11/12/06 17:28 EST

The real Vladimir Petrovski was in Camden, New Jersey, speaking on the phone to his literary agent, Stanley Reese. “But Meeester Reeessss,” Mr. Petrovski was exclaiming , “why don’t they want thees book?”

“I’m sorry, Ivan,” said Stanley Reese into his cell phone.

“Vladimir,” Petrovski corrected him.

“Waldomeer,” said Reese, “they loved your first book.
The
Code
of
the
Spies
, wasn’t it? That was the Eighties. The Cold War was big then. Where is it now? Nobody talks about it anymore.”

“The Cold War is over,” said Petrovski, surprised that Reese had not heard the news.

“You see,” said Reese. “My point exactly. Even you admit it. The Cold War is so over, babushka.”

“Did you call me a grandmother?” asked Petrovski, scratching the salt and pepper beard he thought made him look more American, because it made him resemble the late Jerry Garcia.

“Babushka—bashmushka,” said Reese. “I thought it meant ‘friend.’”

“I was on Letterman,” protested Petrovski.

“When did that happen?” asked Reese. “I missed that. Was this in the Eighties, too?”

“Dave said I was vanderfool. I told my Kruschev story. You know the one: Stalin is dying and he has Kruschev visit his bedside. Stalin asks him: ‘Who is buried in Lenin’s tomb?’”

“I’m sure this goes somewhere, Waldo,” interrupted Reese. “Russian stories are always funny. Look at Tim Allen—”

“Tim Allen?” said Petrovski.

“He’s Russian, or maybe French. He’s from Michigan, close to Canada. Lots of Russians up there. My point is, Dave was being kind. You’re not as funny as most Russians, Waldo. That’s why the publishers don’t want fiction from you.”

“I’m writing a new book, very nonfictional,” said Vladimir, “about Alger Hiss. I have evidence straight from secret files.”

“That’ll put the readers on pins and needles. What is that? Ancient history? You going to write another book about who really killed Caesar? Wait, is there anything in those files of yours about Princess Di?”

“We did not take surveillance of her and the degenerate crowd of lumpen aristocrats about her,” said Petrovski. “I do haf information on the attempt to kill the Pope.”

“That’ll maybe get some nuns worked up,” said Reese, “and nuns buy Bibles; they don’t buy regular books. You need to do something more contemporary. Make it domestic; that means in the US.”

“Did you read my book?” asked Petrovski.

“Saw the movie and bought the t-shirt.”

“I vas headlines in New York Times twenty-six years ago upon my defection,” said Petrovski. “I was on cover of
Time
. My book is bestseller for twenty-four weeks. Today, Vladimir Petrovski, former European director of KGB, is living in cold vater flat in New Jersey. He is seventy-eight years old and has no pension.”

“Couldn’t your old country pay you a pension?”

Petrovski held the phone at arm’s length and wondered if Reese could have said that.

“My country no longer exeests,” he informed Reese.

“Sorry to hear that,” said Reese. “I’d love to help you, Waldo, but you’ve got to give me product. I can move product. No product; I can’t move it.”

“Product?” repeated Vladimir.

“Make something up,” suggested Reese. “You know why the Nazis have had legs and you guys don’t?”

“Hitler vas more outrageous character?”

“No,” answered Reese, “because writers have been able to put Nazis in the modern world. I mean:
The
Boys
from
Brazil
,,
The
Man
in
the
High
Tower
,
Fatherland
, all those Len Deighton novels Michael Caine made into movies. People don't believe the Nazis ever went away. You need to give the Commies the same treatment. Make up some conspiracies, things that the last Commie hangers-on have got planned for America.”

“That would be... lying,” said Vladimir.

“Who’s going to fact check this?” asked Reese. “Your country doesn’t exist anymore. You said so yourself. Let your imagination run wild. Gotta go now, ciao.”

“Ciao?” said Vladimir, putting down his phone.

He looked about his two-room apartment, at the dingy sofa in his living room/kitchen, at the newspapers scattered across the floor, at the sink full of dirty dishes and the torn curtains over the sink, and he wondered why he had ever left his cozy dacha in the Sparrow Mountains.

“Oh yes,” he remembered, “they were going to shoot me.”

XIV

1/3/07 08:20 EST

Margaret Smythe of the DoD and Ronald Goodman--both recently moved to the posts of consultants inside the NSA--were having a hard time being in front of Senator Hasket’s committee. Congress was not in session that soon after the New Year, and only the Senator himself and a couple of his senior aides were present at the hearing, and they sincerely wished they were somewhere else. Senator Hasket was not merely his usual cranky self that morning; he, out of perhaps the entire galaxy of committee chairmen, read nearly everything presented to him, including the fantastic report on possible domestic terrorist acts Smythe and Goodman had prepared.

“It says here on page 192,” said the senator, reading directly from the 854 typed pages Margaret and Ronald had pasted together from other peoples’ work, “that possibly within five and certainly within ten years there will be a terrorist attack on a major United States city involving either chemical or biological weapons. Do I read that correctly, Miss Smythe?”

He pronounced “United” yew-nigh-ted and “biological” by-oo-logde-ee-cal, which showed, thought Margaret, what sort of college--if any--the senator had attended. He looked almost presentable at the moment in his oversized and out-of-date wool suit, but Margaret wagered that earlier in Hasket’s life there had been dirt under his fingernails and chewing tobacco in his rubbery, hillbilly mouth. It was nearly unbearable that he was allowed to upbraid her, a magna cum laude graduate and the smartest person in the room, no matter what room she entered.

“Yes, senator,” she said and smiled.

“Miss Smythe,” said Senator Hasket, “is not that prediction the same one Colonel McClain of the preparedness task force make last October?”

She became more uncomfortable in her wooden chair. Ronald sat passively beside her, fingering his class ring and going through the motions of looking for an indefinite something in his copy of the report.

Thank you for all the help, you jackass! thought Margaret. “We depended on other reliable sources when doing this report,” she said. “We cannot be the primary source on everything.”

The senator put his reading glasses on his nose and peered closely at some other documents on his table. “You,” he said, “you were an art history major in college, Miss Smythe?”

“As an undergraduate,” she said. “At Harvard. Then I attended the Kennedy School of Government.” No one was counting, however, this was the third time in the morning’s session that Margaret had managed to name her alma mater.

“You then went to work for the Secretary of State,” noted Senator Hasket. “You were a Deputy Secretary of State at age twenty-three?”

“I learn quickly,” said Margaret, and told herself to quit fidgeting in her chair.

“You, Mr. Goodman,” said the senator.

“Yes,” said Ronald, startled to be brought back into the discussion

“Your uncle was my old, dear college friend, Senator Norman Tate?” asked Senator Hasket, who in reality had danced a jig the night Senator Tate--a man Hasket had in private described as a thief, a liar and a fool--was defeated in his last bid for re-election “Many were the nights he and I shared a glass of lemonade in the senate cloakroom. I must say, you strongly favor him, young sir.”

The senator pronounced “sir” see-rah, which infuriated Margaret as much as the blather he was lavishing upon Ronald.

“Thank you, senator,” said Ronald. “Uncle Norman was my mother’s favorite brother.”

You are such an asshole! thought Margaret.

“Now then, Mr. Goodman and Miss Smythe,” said the senator, “is there something in your report that is actually new?”

“The possibility of Serbian terrorists setting fires in our national forests in Section 12 A…” began Margaret.

“Please, Miss Smythe,” said the senator, “That is so twentieth century, as you young people say. That stuff is so old hat, it’s been in the newspaper.
The
Post
ran with this back in ‘98.”

“What about militia fanatics armed with the anthrax virus?” suggested Margaret.

“That’s been a TV movie, a bad one with no fewer than two Baldwin brothers in it,” said Senator Hasket.

Ronald cleared his throat, for he saw his chance to pounce. “What about the possibility of a terrorist organization blowing up large dams?” he asked. “The successful destruction of a large upstream dam, such as Grand Coulee or, you know, Hoover, would result in the loss of billions of dollars of property and a major disruption in the regional electrical grid. I detailed all this in Section 14 C.”

The senator took off his spectacles and sucked on one of the ear stems for a pensive ten seconds. “I like this, son,” he said. “This is new. This is sexy.” (The senator’s staff was advising him to use modern slang.) “We could spend some serious money on this.”

That was my idea! thought Margaret, although she and Ronald had concocted this fantasy scenario together.

“I think,” said Ronald, “we should start a separate department within the DoD, a task force to prepare for the possibility of hydro-electric destruction.”

“Whose department gets it?” asked the senator, whose curiosity obviously was piqued when he heard the young man suggest the Department of Defense be in charge, rather than Ronald’s own NSA.

“The DoD has the technical experts in the Corps of Engineers,” said Ronald Goodman. “I expect someone from the NSA would be placed in a supervisory position to co-ordinate the program.”

Both Margaret and Senator Hasket, as much as they disliked each other on that morning, had the same thought. “Very good, sir,” said Senator Hasket. “I’m sure you’ll have some recommendations as to who that administrator might me.”

Both of them smiled at Ronald as they contemplated how much they loathed him.

As the senator predicted, the government did spend some money on the task force. By the end of the fiscal year 2007, the project had a budget of two million dollars, and Ronald and Margaret were appointed to manage it. Ronald and Margaret were, in fact, the entire department, a separate kingdom within the many small kingdoms that make up the national government. This kingdom of two was a fertile one and created thousands of copies of the reports it generated every three months. These unread reports floated everywhere through the security and military communities. Somewhere in the government’s computer files, if not in the minds of the nation’s leaders, Ronald and Margaret became America’s authorities on the subject of possible terrorist attacks on large dams.