First Citizen (8 page)

She must have had the same thoughts. Because when we did meet, the following Tuesday, the cadre leader was back in place, wearing her white-seated jeans and her seamless rhetoric.

A few weeks later, I graduated from the Alternative University. There was no formal ceremony, no valediction; you just learned as much as you could absorb and then drifted on. But the subterfuges of the curriculum committee made the credits earned there mostly transferrable. By that time, my head was settled and a mean streak of careerism had surfaced: I believed more than ever that law should be my career.

So I wrote to my father, who wrote to an Old Boy in the Petramin legal section, who wrote on my behalf to an Old Boy in the Harvard admissions office. My Berkeley records were still good and they passed off the semesters at the Commune as a spell of “social conscience,” construing it to my credit.

Boston is much like San Francisco except warmer in the summer. Both of them were old working-class towns which had, in the closing years of the twentieth century, grown self-conscious of their history. They had tried to preserve it through commercial developments that sandblasted the brick faces of their factories, installed modern glass and air conditioning, and rented charming cubbies to bakeshops, brasseries, and boutiques in the hope of depriving tourists of their dollars. But the similarities went deeper.

Both Boston and San Francisco were the hubs of their geographic areas—New England and Northern California, respectively. Both had cashed in early on the Information Society with high-tech colonies near to but not right within the city—Route 128 and Silicon Valley, respectively. Both had long been centers for the ultimate information flow, money—in the form of insurance and banking, respectively. Both prided themselves on regional foods—Maine lobster and Indian pudding, Dungeness crab and sourdough bread, respectively.

It was the similarities, the consciousness of their own sophistication and tradition, that made these regions natural allies in the war twenty-five years later.

A San Franciscan, transplanted to Boston and broad-minded enough to overlook superficial differences like winter snow and the catarrhal speech pattern, would claim native status within six months. I did it in three, but then my childhood on Massachusetts’ North Shore gave me a running start.

For me, coming to Harvard was like coming home. The brickwork and the small-paned windows of the Yard, the winter-barren trees of Cambridge, the smell of old bookbindings and steam heat, the summer boating on the Charles ... after the politics, pot, and saucepan chemistry of the Commune, it was like being reborn in a dream of scholarship. For those three years, I worked like a demon, searching precedents, analyzing cases, drafting and then redrafting briefs, submitting to the
Review
and finally getting published.

The law seemed like
kumite,
the delicate, feather-touch sparring of the Sensei’s karate school. For every attack there was a blocking move and a counter move to the block until your head buzzed with endless permutations of if-he-does-this-then-I-do-that, like a chess master mentally playing out three games in his mind before moving even one piece.

I thought the law was elegant and beautiful, the highest application of human mind to human, social problems of rights, injury, and ownership.

Ironically, the proposed Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Amendments to the United States’ Constitution—the same subjects that had brought me low in Ballenger’s class—were the hot topics during almost my whole time at Harvard Law School. We debated endlessly, and smilingly, the enabling legislation, the text of the amendments, the course of the ratifications, the implications. And, like everyone else, we totally underestimated, by at least a thousand percent, the social and financial impacts if these acts were ever ratified.

When we are young, the political and economic events of the day pass us by too quickly. We have no background of experience to say
this
assassination will be pivotal in the balance of power,
that
law will set the course of all that follows. Because of the course these amendments would set for
me
and
my
fortunes, I should have fixed them with my whole attention.

What I had missed was the trend toward “market forces” that had grown in the United States over the past dozen years. Almost every industry had undergone a course of deregulation: banking, airlines, trucking, energy. They had shown what economic efficiencies—and havoc—could follow when a free market replaced modified central planning.

I had also missed the deficit pressures of the Nicaraguan war. Like Vietnam before it, this war was fought on the margin—financed with promises and with bulges in the national debt and Consumer Price Index, instead of with direct taxation, which would have entailed some kind of popular referendum.

Also, I could not foresee the crash program the Federal government would undertake in the mid-Nineties to build new central station power plants. A decade of high interest rates and optimistically low projections of load growth had all but shut down the private utilities’ building programs. The incidents at the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactors had put a bad odor on the nuclear option—both for the energy companies that would invest in it and for the public that would watch them. The shouting about acid rain in Canada and our own New England States made coal a sour alternative. Oil or gas cost too much and the sun didn’t always shine on solar power. So all the utilities stopped building new plants and assured themselves that, when the crunch came, they could buy excess power from each other.

Within three years, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would be commanding extraordinary powers to begin building single-design, site-licensed nuclear power plants in the 550-megawatt class. A nation that was facing evening brownouts and two Black Days a week would applaud the effort and never ask what it was costing. It would cost plenty.

However, I precede myself.

At the time I was in Harvard Law School, the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Amendments seemed a radical, blue-sky approach to the minor economic problem of the Federal deficit. Just as the Eighteenth Amendment’s ban on making and selling liquor seemed a radical approach to the minor social problem of public drunkenness. The only people who could debate the amendments seriously were the nuts: the Radical Republicans, the Supply-Siders, the “Clean Slaters,” and Deregulationists. Just as the minority Prohibitionists had pushed for the Volstead Act. Their social agendas were so well displayed that the rest of us dismissed them—and those agendas remained effectively hidden.

But we wouldn’t find that out until the amendments were ratified five years later and the great experiment had begun.

One of the best things about Harvard was that Gordon Pollock and the crippling envy he represented were at least three thousand miles away.

In 1994, I graduated seventh in my class. Neither Mother nor Father could attend the ceremonies, but a senior counsel from Petramin’s legal section had come up to take an honorary doctorate of law. He applauded my diploma with the rest of them and then took me to dinner. Within three days, I would report in at the Houston home office, begin studying for the Texas bar, and start earning my way as a
bona fide
attorney. I was a kid with a lot of potential, and I knew it.

Veritas.

Gordon Pollock: On Reflection

Twenty-Five Years Later

He was guilty, guilty, guilty! How many times do I have to say that?

All right, so now he has become a big man: wheels and deals in resources and energy, singlehandedly wins the war in Mexico, welds together the bickering, raggle-taggle TENMAC coalition in the West. Agreed to all of the above.

But he is not that clean and shiny, no sir. Beneath that bright eye and enameled smile is a corruption as sour and deep as a pus-filled abscess. One day he will break and it will all come seeping out. I tell you I saw him sneaking off around the corner from Ballenger’s office. Saw him! He had the exam questions in his hands. It was for a class in economic history, or some such. Ballenger was the professor. They ran him out of Berkeley for cheating.

Of course the record says he quit voluntarily. That was the deal they made, they always make. But he had an expulsion order hot on his heels. I
know
that.

The point is simply this: His record was excellent. His grades were top notch. Wish I had as good. He was liked and respected. So what was the point in cheating on a God-damned
essay
question? Unless he was and is, at heart, a corrupt soul. Unless he is so crooked he will make three left-hand turns where one right will do.

And the further point is: You must not believe his easy explanations on this insurance resolution. He is an attorney, like the rest of us. So why would he cut his own throat and ours and all of his profession’s unless he could take monstrous profit from it?

And still further: He has ambitions. He wants nothing less than to steal this country. After he has done away with you and me, the Constitution, and the fellow behind the tree. He has it all plotted out in his mind. Step by fiendish, fanatical step. We can stop him now, here, or we will have to stop him later. And then it will take a war!

You are still not listening. I tell you, you must not trust the man!

Chapter 5

Granville James Corbin: Rub’ Al Khali

Our helicopter took off from Riyadh with a clatter of rotor blades. Otherwise it was quiet.

The situation had caught me off guard. No, that’s not right. It was my own swelled head. I had come to the pad thinking that the company was treating its newest Harvard acquisition with the proper respect. Two Saudi pilots—though one turned out to be native American—had been detailed to chauffeur me on a private tour of the northern oil fields. And then this incredibly full-bodied Arabian stewardess, sans veil, was coming over to tuck me in.

The price of oil had been inching back up toward thirty dollars a barrel so Petramin was starting to flex its fiscal muscles again. Sending the American brass and top staffers out to the field on orientation trips was part of the company’s good-times consumption pattern. “Visiting the money,” our senior counsel in Houston had called my trip which, he’d hinted, would spotlight me as an important player in the organization.

It’s a wonder my head fit through the helicopter’s sliding door. I was so smug that I forgot to avert my gaze politely when the stewardess lifted one long, nylon-smooth leg over the door’s sill. My eyes took a bite out of her exposed thigh. Then I saw her sawed-off shotgun.

The social dynamic in the cabin changed immediately. She and the American pilot argued briefly about destinations, which I could follow only from the maps I’d seen pinned to the wall in the airfield’s office. The Saudi pilot seemed to be backing her; so the American shrugged and lifted off with a clatter.

And by that time, my moment had passed. If I had been more alert, watching her hands instead of her legs—and if I hadn’t already buckled my lap and shoulder belts—I might have broken her wrist, on the hand holding the scatter gun, with a flying side kick while she was busy climbing aboard. Or taken her with a straight kick to the throat: she wouldn’t have had time to bring her weapon to bear and fire if she were busy strangling.

But the little conference up front ended too quickly and we were fifteen feet in the air before I woke up and remembered all those good karate moves. By then she was settled in and ready, and a single shot from her would have blown out both pilots and the nose of the aircraft. But for the rest of the flight my eyes never stopped measuring distances, angles of fire, the tension in her hands, the focus of her attention. My hand never strayed far from the quick release on the seat harness.

I wasn’t too worried about the Saudi pilot who was displaying a NATO-issue Beretta 9mm automatic pistol. If he tried to get a shot at me moving from between the cockpit seats, he only had about a one-in-ten chance of hitting something vital in my anatomy. Of course, he had about nine-in-ten of drilling the turbine engine, which was aft of the bulkhead behind us. But if that happened, I imagined they could autorotate down to some kind of landing.

Still, the situation was frozen up right then, a bad time to move. So I decided to lie back and enjoy the inevitable.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice on the line between adult casual and kid smartass.

The woman looked at me for, it seemed, the first time. Her eyes were wide-set, deep, a liquid-black that in other circumstances I could stare into for hours. They showed a flash of nameless recognition—that same instant of sexual understanding that sometimes passes between strangers in a waiting room or on a bus. Then the veil of private purposes, other aims, fell across her eyes.

“We are kidnapping you, Mr. Corbin.” Her English was perfect, slight British accent, education and polite society hinted in the tone and syntax.

“Really? What for—money? You’ll find my family doesn’t have all that much and the company will probably care more about getting their helicopter back than saving me. They paid more for it.” I thought I was lying smoothly; later I found out what a helicopter can cost.

“Not money,” she said. No trace of a smile at my humor. Her grip on the scatter gun never varied. “This is an act of terror directed against the fanatical regime that has seized my country and seeks to return it to a state of feudal peonage. They slaughter our youths and squander our national wealth in a futile war against Marxist—”

“What country are you—?”

“Persia.”

“And you seek to restore Queen Farah Diba?” My years among the books of Harvard hadn’t shut out
all
of the current world situation. I could guess that this reverse tide of imperialism had already fired debates, revisionism, and schisms back at the Commune—if it was still in business.

“Of course,” she said. “Our aim is a return to the course of modernism and enlightenment begun by her husband, the late Shah.”