INTERVENTION (66 page)

I dedicate this memoir to all Remillards, living and dead, and most especially to the one who is both.

NEW YORK CITY, EARTH

6
NOVEMBER
1996

K
IERAN O'CONNOR WAS
old enough to remember when presidential candidates made their victory or concession speeches on the day following the election. But here it was, only 11:45 p.m. at the General's campaign headquarters in San Francisco, and the race was decided already. The Republican candidate—Kieran O'Connor's candidate—had been defeated. But Kieran was well content.

The four quadrants of the Sony split screen on the wall of Warren Griffith's Manhattan townhouse switched from varied depictions of network pundits commenting on the 292 electoral votes safely in Democrat hands to a single image of a handsome, silver-haired man. CBS, NBC, ABC, and SNN were opting to telecast Lloyd Baumgartner's concession speech live.

Kieran reached for the remote control. It lay between his stockinged feet on the littered cabriole cocktail table. When Kieran canceled the mute, the measured accents of General Baumgartner filled the room. He delivered his brief announcement in perfect extempore style, his eyes unwavering as he looked directly into the cameras, his manner tranquil in defeat. He thanked the voters who had given him a majority of the popular vote and nearly carried him to an upset victory. He thanked the party that had chosen him as its standard-bearer, thanked his devoted campaign staff, and thanked his gentle-faced wife Nell, who stood at his right shoulder, smiling with tears in her eyes. Baumgartner did not say that he would be back in the running again for the fateful presidential race in the year 2000, but his partisans and political opponents alike took that fact for granted. His rival, Stephen Piccolomini, had won the presidency riding on the coattails of the retiring incumbent, but he had not rolled up the expected landslide; his margin was a precarious twelve electoral votes, and his party retained only a two-seat majority in the Senate.

"Next time," muttered Warren Griffith. "Next time you're in, General. And so are we."

The speech ended to applause and the split screen showed pan shots as the network cameras swept over Baumgartner's campaign workers, who packed the ballroom of the famous old St. Francis Hotel. Some of the people were weeping, but others stomped and cheered as if for a victory, and dozens of hand-lettered signs waved on high, proclaiming:

THE BEST IS YET TO COME!

When the vice-presidential candidate approached the lectern for his turn at the microphone, Kieran flicked the remote's instant-replay pad, programmed it for five minutes, and watched Baumgartner once again declare himself defeated. Then Kieran turned off the Sony and the wall-screen went back to being an excellent counterfeit of Fuseli's
The Nightmare,
1781 version. Griffith, who was the chairman of Roggenfeld Acquisitions and one of Kieran's principal strategists, liked that LCD projection so much that he'd had it on for ne1arly six months. There had been jokes about it when Kieran and Viola Northcutt arrived early in the evening for the election-night vigil.

Now Griffith got up from his chair and said, "We
still
deserve to celebrate!" He padded off into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Pol Roger and three glasses. The two guests pretended to be surprised, just as socially proper telepaths all over the world did under similar circumstances. Griffith said, "Our candidate did not lose. He merely didn't win emphatically enough." Untwisting the wire, he eased out the cork and restrained the overflow with psychokinetic expertise. Then he made a respectful mental gesture to Kieran, calling for a toast.

Kieran O'Connor nodded and his severe features softened as he watched the bubbles rise. Catching an unvoiced hint, Warren Griffith flopped back into the wingback chair he had occupied throughout most of the evening. Viola Northcutt was curled up in the corner of the leather sofa opposite Kieran, unshod feet neatly tucked under her camel's-hair skirt. Somewhere in the townhouse an antique clock chimed three in quavery deadened tones.

I liked the placards that Baumgartner's people made, said Kieran. Let's drink to that: "The best is yet to come."

The others repeated his spoken words. Kieran sipped his champagne, but Griff and Viola tossed theirs down and went for refills.

"I'll hand it to the General," Viola said. "He was strong. A lot better than we ever dared hope."

"That viewing-with-alarm speech fingering the Meta Brain Trust's influence on the Democrats struck just the right note," Griff said. "Shot our boy up a good sixteen percent in the polls. It was a gamble, but we really proved that America's love affair with the operant clique is just about kaput. Before this campaign, I doubt that one voter in a hundred knew what metacoercion was—or redactive probing either."

"Neither did the General," Northcutt put in with a cynical grin. She was a heavyset blond woman in her late forties, one of Kieran's earliest recruits, who had become his best operant head-hunter. Viola had vetted all the presidential campaign personnel, both operant and normal, to make certain that only loyalists would be able to exert influence on Baumgartner. Even so, the General had proved less psychologically malleable than they had hoped.

"Before we lock Baumgartner in as our millennial candidate," Kieran said, "we're going to have to make certain that he has no suspicion that his mind was manipulated during this campaign. We may have pressed too hard when he balked at the anti-Soviet speech in October."

Viola shrugged. "Len and Neville felt it was important that the General express doubt about the Kremlin's commitment to peace. We had the posthypnotic suggestion done prudently. Doc Presteigne handled it when the General had gas for some root-canal work."

"But it didn't work," Kieran said. "You forgot that Baumgartner was a warm chum of the cosmonauts back in the pre-Mars days. He sincerely believes that the Russians have abandoned their expansionist philosophy. You can't depend upon a posthyp to overcome a strong conviction any more than you can coerce over the long term."

"How will we convince him, then?" Viola asked.

Kieran extracted his feet from among the mess of coffee cups, empty beer and seltzer bottles, and snack food that crowded the cocktail table. "When the hard-liners on the Politburo take charge, Baumgartner won't need convincing."

"Hard-liners?" exclaimed Griff. "Take over
when!
"

Kieran poked through a platter of ravaged deli noshes until he found a whole-meal cracker with a hard-boiled egg slice and a shaving of lox. He dabbed it artistically with mustard. "When the present General Secretary dies... and civil war breaks out in Uzbekistan."

Viola and Griff stared at him. He showed them a mental schematic with a number of key elements blanked out.

"Jesus God," whispered Griffith.

"It's nothing you two have to concern yourselves about for a while yet," Kieran said. He popped the tidbit into his mouth and chewed it up, then downed the remainder of the champagne. "What you
will
have to deal with is Baumgartner's immediate future. Griff, I want you to find him a sinecure position on one of our foundations—say the Irons-Conrad. I want him completely divorced from the military-industrial complex and big business in the public mind. Our lad is a political philosopher now, asking questions and providing answers."

"Speaking of which," Viola interposed, "we still have that
matter
of Baumgartner possibly suspecting that he's being manipulated. It's going to be tricky doing a deep-scan without his cooperation, you know. We've never tried it on a person who wasn't being—actively recruited to the inner circle."

"We've got to know," Kieran insisted. "Whatever it takes. It's imperative that Baumgartner have no inkling of our own operancy. He'll only carry conviction in the next phases of our political campaigning if he firmly believes that operants are dangerous—a threat to normal humanity."

Viola was frowning as she thought. "For a proper ream-job, the subject has to be rendered unconscious for something like thirty-six hours. No way to handle that without hospitalizing him. We'll have to come up with something that will satisfy him and the PR people. Nothing psychiatric. We don't want to risk an Eagleton fuck-up."

"Eyes," said Griffith. "I had an uncle, had some kind of eye thing. Terrible headaches, then lost the sight of one eye. The docs fixed him, he was good as new."

"Sounds usable," Viola said. "Presteigne would know what the ailment is and how to simulate the symptoms. Very likely both the headaches and the blindness can be voodooed—by Greta, maybe. Baumgartner won't suspect a thing when we bring in our own eye specialist..."

Kieran nodded. "Work it out as soon as you can. I want to keep him newsworthy. I can see him doing lecture tours and hosting fund-raisers for the by-elections in '98. There are at least four Senate seats that could go Republican in the Bible Belt if we play our cards right and pick up on the antioperant sentiment building there."

"It'll build a lot faster," Viola muttered, "once we get good old Señor Araña on line!"

Griffith said:?

Viola looked guiltily at Kieran, but he lifted a dismissive hand. "I was going to tell Griff about it anyhow."

"A step-up in the antioperant crusade?" Griffith asked.

"
Exactly," said
Kieran. "You know that my overriding concern is to insure that operants not loyal to us are barred from government service or political office. Even more important is to stir up grassroots sentiment against the metapsychic clique. I suppose you noticed the article in the
Times
this weekend about the Swiss banking group's plans to hire telepathic investigators."

"No! God—if they do it, the Japanese'll be next. And next thing you know, the Justice Department or the Treasury'll want their own Metasnooper Corps, and our organization will be up the well-known excremental watercourse!"

"Not if I can help it," said Kieran O'Connor. "Fortunately, we still have a Republican-packed Supreme Court. Next year my people in Chicago will engineer a test case to get a ruling that any form of operant screening of employees by private corporations is an invasion of privacy and unconstitutional. That will lay the groundwork for further action... such as the efforts of Araña. Why don't you tell Griff why we happen to be in New York, Viola?"

She grinned as she fished her suede boots out from under the cocktail table and began to put them on. "Our great and good buddy, The Fabulous Finster, has bagged us a very big fish indeed, and he is arriving tomorrow at Kennedy with this recruit figuratively tucked under his arm. The man's name is Carlos María Araña, and he is an unfrocked Dominican, late of Madrid, where the authorities were only too willing to be rid of him."

"Araña?" Griffith blinked. "Hey—didn't he start that fanatical antioperant movement in Spain? What was its name—Hijos de Putas?"

Viola Northcutt guffawed. "Come on! Hijos de la
Tierra,
Griff. The Sons of Earth. Kier figured it was time for them to open a North American branch." She stood up, stamped her feet the rest of the way into her footgear, and brushed the crumbs from her skirt. "We're going to play off Araña's fanaticism against Baumgartner's reasoned opposition to operant influence. The Spaniard will play dirty and Baumgartner will deplore his intolerance. I mean, we don't really want to burn the confessed operants at the stake, do we? Not yet... Where'd you hide our coats, Griff? Kieran and I have to get back to our platonic little nest at the Plaza and get some sleep. Our cucaracha is coming in on Iberia's early flight tomorrow and poor Finster's going to need all the help he can get."

Kieran stood up, yawned, and laughed. "Don't you worry about a thing, Vi. Fabby's tamed Señor Araña very thoroughly. It was a tough assignment—perhaps the toughest he's ever had to handle. But he's delivered the goods."

"They don't call him Fabulous for nothing, eh?" Warren Griffith helped Viola on with her coat, then assisted Kieran. "I wouldn't mind meeting this Finster, Kier. If it wouldn't compromise your security arrangements, of course."

Kieran smiled. His mind touched that of his associate, giving both reassurance and warning. "Maybe another time, Griff. Fabby will be dead beat, and I have other matters to discuss with him before he leaves for Moscow on Friday."

Moscow!
Kier don't tell me
that's
the way—

"I wouldn't dream of telling you, Griff. You're a man who thinks for himself. That's why you're part of my organization. I'll be getting in touch with you soon on the Petro-Pascua acquisition."

But Kier the man's a
moderate
the first reasonable Russian leader we've ever dealt with you can't—

I can. Make no mistake about it Griff if it suits my purposes and it does
I can.
"Thanks a lot for playing host. Don't bother to see us out. Vi and I can find our own way."

ALMA-ATA, KAZAKH SSR, EARTH

15
SEPTEMBER
1997

A
CHILL SETTLED
quickly over the plaza in front of the Lenin Palace of Culture once the sun dropped behind the parched hills. Yellow leaves, prematurely fallen in the great drought that had plagued Central Asia that year, were swirled by the sharp breeze around the dusty shoes of Colonel Sergei Arkhipov, who sat on a bench near the Abai monument, waiting.

From time to time as his ulcer gnawed, Sergei would slip an antacid tablet into his mouth. What he really needed was food; but he could not leave his post until the first afternoon session of the Sixth Congress on Metapsychology ended, and Donish furnished a report upon his fellow delegates' state of mind.

Finally, people began to emerge, hurrying down the palace steps as if eager for their own suppers. Most of the longbrains went off into the park on the left, on their way to the Kazakhstan Hotel where the foreigners were being lodged. Numbers of locals, heading for the buses, came straight down Abaya Prospekt and passed directly in front of Sergei's bench. One of these was a compact young man in a green windbreaker who carried a canvas briefcase. His hair and complexion were dark and he wore a squarish black skullcap with white embroidered designs on the sides.