Politician (27 page)

“Tocsin will be apoplectic,” Spirit remarked, enjoying it.

“I fear I will never live this down,” Thorley muttered, but he didn't seem to be as unhappy as he might have been. He would have an excellent story to write.

Hopie happily waved to the crowd.

In due course we returned to our yacht with a cargo of four frozen Sunshine bodies that included the two Hispanics and the representative. The rest would follow in a Saturn freighter. It would hardly have been possible to transport them all in proper condition in the yacht. We weighed anchor and put out to space with an escort of Saturnine Naval vessels.

Thorley got to work on his dispatches. Not eager to implicate himself in this ultraliberal connivance, he gave me all the discredit for this sally to Saturn. But, by whatever mischance, I had (he concluded) somehow managed to render my planet and president a signal service. It seemed that Thorley himself did not admire Tocsin personally and could not resist that particular needle.

Then the Saturn forces turned us loose for the long drift home. We played cards and board games to wile away the time, and debated the fine points of liberal versus conservative philosophy.

By the time we docked at Hassee I was notorious across the System, as the governor who had braved the Bear's jaws and won. For some reason there was little other than silence from the White Dome.

But politics, even more than life, is a phenomenon of ups and downs. The day I set foot in Ybor after the Saturn excursion, I could perhaps have run for president and won. Six months later it was all I could do to avoid being lynched.

I should provide some background on my abrupt shift of status.

If there was one thing I intended to accomplish it was the elimination of the drug trade. Illicit, mind-modifying, addictive substances were pouring into the planet from the rest of the System and into the north from the south, and the state of Sunshine was perhaps the primary access point. The drugs were illegal, but that seemed only to make the trade more lucrative for the criminal element. In my time in the Navy I had acted to cut off the major middlemen of this trade, the Samoans pirate band, but like a hydra, the drug trade had sprouted new heads and seemed undiminished. Now I had opportunity to strike more directly, for the key to it was the market; cut off the market, and the supply will dwindle. A marketless product is doomed.

The prior efforts of the Sunshine enforcement agency had been sievelike, and it seemed to me that there had to be corruption. I intended to weed it out. I contacted Roulette Phist of the Belt—that is to say, Rue, my lovely onetime wife—and she used her connections to locate a crew of about fifty drug experts who were loaned to us. These were not the kind that pontificants on the physiology and psychology of addiction use as examples; these were men and women and children who could, in some cases, literally smell the drugs and who knew the sinister bypaths of distribution. I did not inquire how these folk had come by their expertise; I interviewed them only to verify that they intended to serve our interest faithfully.

Some few I rejected, but in general Rue's selection was excellent; we quickly formed the most savvy drug-control team extant.

We put them to work first merely to identify the routes, not to close them. That was one reason why I seemed to have accomplished little in my first year in office; we were still in the developmental stage. I did not want another hydra experience; I wanted to kill the entire monster at one blow, when I finally did strike. The agents were instructed to accept any bribes offered and to report them privately, spending the money for themselves in ways that no ordinary enforcement agents would, so as to allay any suspicion.

They enjoyed that part of it. For six months they infiltrated the delivery network of Sunshine, satisfying the professionals that business remained as usual; the new governor would not be any more effective at cutting the pipeline than any other had been.

Then we struck. We went after the personnel, not the drugs, and we got them. The line had been cut, and ninety percent of the drug flow ceased. Overnight.

Meanwhile, we had instituted another program: DeTox. This was intended to wean the clients away from the criminal sources. We had been confiscating illicit drug shipments all along, as we intercepted them; that was standard, but everyone knew that only twenty percent of the total flow was tapped that way, and the drug moguls simply increased the flow to compensate. In fact, news of the drug busts kept the consumers scared and therefore willing to pay higher prices. Thus the busts were actually good for business. The drug movers made more money than they lost, as a result of the busts; this was a fact that the law-enforcement agencies had taken centuries to catch on to. At any rate, we did not destroy the drugs we intercepted; we set up secret laboratories to test and refine them, and built up stores of high-quality stuff. We let it be known that this was available on the gray market; addicts could buy from us cheaper than from the criminal network.

We kept a legal crew operating full-time to cover our legal traces, knowing that others would not understand. Thorley, of course, got wind of it and blew the whistle; there was an immediate fuss that died out after a few days, the net effect of which was to alert any addicts who had not yet gotten the news that this competitive source of supply was available. Thorley hammered away at us periodically, when other news was scarce, asking pointed questions we did not answer—and steadily our business increased. My political enemies, from Tocsin on down, were silent, hoping that all I needed was enough rope to hang myself. In that, perhaps, they were correct.

Then we cut the line, and abruptly there was very little available on the criminal circuit. Prices skyrocketed. Suddenly the addicts came to us in swarms. All a person had to do was identify himself, take his dose at our station, and pay for it. If he had no money we would trade for information. We were rapidly acquiring a comprehensive file of reasonably reliable tips to supplement what our other team was bringing in; we cross-referenced it constantly and cut off those who gave us false leads.

Naturally the hydra's heads sprouted again, but this time we were watching. Our moles traced the new lines as they developed. It was harder for the dealers, because now they had serious competition for clients and could not jack up their prices. Not only were Sunshine prices lower, but quality was higher and reliability much better. The greater part of the market was now ours. In due course we struck again at the illegals and wiped them out—again.

I had become a successful drug mogul, but my heart was pure. I knew it was necessary first to extirpate the criminal connection; then we could deal effectively with the problem of individual drug abuse. The cries of outrage sponsored by Thorley's exposés diminished; increasingly the authorities elsewhere on the planet were watching us. It seemed that we now had the most effective drug-control program on Jupiter.

True, there were serious legal and ethical questions about our operation. But we obtained our merchandise free, by seizing it from the competition, and our operational costs were covered by the fees we charged our clients. Our books were on public record; our program cost the taxpayer nothing. Crime was dropping, partly because we now knew who the criminals were, and partly because they no longer had as much incentive to commit crime. About half of all crime in the state had been related to the drug trade; that was no longer so. Some dealers turned themselves in, plea-bargaining for their drugs; we imprisoned them for their crimes but provided them with their doses in prison. One might have thought that such people would consider that to be no bargain, but it seemed that they considered themselves better off than they had been outside. On the street illicit dealers were now killing each other for increased shares of the diminishing market; we offered safety.

We also did try to detoxify and rehabilitate them, with their consent (which was not forced), by shifting them to related drugs that were less addictive and/or damaging. It was not possible to cure a true addict, but he could be weaned to a milder, cheaper, and safer drug. Price, health, and legitimacy—these were powerful inducements.

All this took time, but in three years we had reduced crime in Sunshine to its lowest rate in the past century, and several other states were instituting similar programs. The legal complications were ameliorating; law does tend to become pragmatic about success. It was evident that we were winning the battle against drugs and crime. Obviously the criminal element had to do something about this or it would be finished. Therein lay our mistake: we underestimated the will and ability of the hydra to strike back.

Spirit and I should have known, for we had been combat officers in the Navy. But we had been seventeen years in civilian life, which was longer than our military tenure, and perhaps we had gotten soft.

We were fighting pirates as savagely as we had in the Navy, but it didn't seem the same. One gets jaded, and reflexes relax. Maybe this was a lesson we needed, savage as it turned out to be.

Their strike was as swift and thorough as one of our drug-line cuts but had an element of subtlety that was a masterstroke. They did not go after the police or the program personnel; they went after me.

It started, for me, when one of our tame addicts blew the whistle—he claimed—on the biggest secret of my administration: a massive payoff by the drug moguls. “I was a courier for the money,” he said. “I took it from the laundry in Ami and brought it to Hassee every week.”

He was interviewed, live, anonymously, by a reporter for Post Times , a major newsfax that did not favor us. “How much money?”

“A lot. Governors don't come cheap. Twenty-five super-gees a week.”

“Twenty-five whats?”

“Super-grands.”

“Oh. So this has nothing to do with gravity, other than being an extremely grave charge.” The interviewer chuckled, but the whistle blower stared at him as if he were an idiot. “And a super-grand is—”

The courier adjusted visibly to the ignorance of the uninitiated. “A grand is a thousand dollars. A super-grand is a grand of grands.”

“A thousand thousands? One million dollars?”

“You got it.”

“A week? ”

“Twenty-five a week,” the courier explained patiently.

“Twenty-five million dollars a week?” The reporter seemed dazed.

“That's what I said.”

“How could you even carry such an amount?”

“Well, it's in gees, mostly. Thousand dollar bills. That's how it comes out of the laundry. Packs of a hundred—two hundred and fifty packs, split between two cases. It's a load, but mostly I just ride the train with it.”

“The laundry?”

“The fence-bank who launders the money, so it can't be traced easy. Got to have a good laundry or the tax boys'd be on it.”

“I see. And where does this... this twenty-five million dollars a week... where does it come from, ultimately?”

“The big boys down south. The drug wholesalers.”

“The big criminal suppliers?”

“Right. They put it in the pipeline to the laundry, and I pick it up in Ami.”

“In two suitcases,” the interviewer said, getting it straight. “And you take it where?”

“To Hassee.”

“The state capital. By regular commuter train?”

“Yeah. So I can keep the bags with me. I don't want to check 'em into no cargo hold.”

“I see your point. And to whom do you deliver them?”

“A guy called Sancho.”

“Sancho!” I exclaimed as I watched. “That can't be!”

“Who is Sancho?” the interviewer asked.

“Some spic who works for the governor's sister. That's all I know. Always wears gloves, has a scarred face. I think he's an illegal. Small guy, talks in a whisper.”

“Sancho works for Spirit Hubris?”

“Yeah. Or maybe for the governor direct. I don't know. He's the one who takes the money, anyway. I don't give it to nobody but him.”

“Does he give you a receipt?”

The courier burst out laughing.

“No receipt for illicit business,” the interviewer said, nettled. “How do your employers know you really deliver it?”

“I'm alive, ain't I?”

“Oh. I presume that if it doesn't arrive complete, there'd be a complaint?”

“There'd be a laser beam in one ear and out the other. I'd never dare cheat; those boys play for keeps.”

“Then why are you talking to me now?”

“I'm out of a job.”

“They fired you? But if you didn't cheat—”

"My face was getting familiar. A courier's shelf life is only a few weeks, then he's got to be replaced.

Before the narcs catch on."

“Then you knew it was a temporary job.”

“Yeah. But I was supposed to get a good settlement. All that money to the governor, and they couldn't spare a measly one s-gee for me.”

“You expected a—a bonus for good performance? Of one super-grand? So you're blowing the whistle?”

“Yeah. It's risky, but it's a matter of principle.”

“I see. What does this Sancho do with the money?”

“Takes it into a warehouse. After that, I don't know. I'd guess the gov's saving it, you know, for retirement.”

“Twenty-five million dollars? Some retirement!”

“Yeah. I'd settle for that.”

“And this is just one week's payment? How long has this been going on?”

“Ever since the big drug-bust program started. I've only been on it the past six weeks, but they've been coming to that warehouse maybe five, six months, and I don't know where else before that.”

“But at twenty-five million dollars a week, for five months, that would be a good half a billion dollars!”

“Yeah. It's one sweet racket.”

I shook my head. There was nothing to this, of course. I was not on the take. But why should someone broadcast such a claim, knowing it would almost immediately be refuted? One thing was certain: Sancho had taken no money from anyone, for anything. I didn't even need to ask Spirit about that; I knew .

But there was a considerable stir about the exposé. The State Senate demanded information, and the courier provided it. He solemnly led a newscrew to the warehouse where he said he had turned over the money.

By this time Spirit was with me. We sat back and watched the vid-cast. Our personnel had instructions to cooperate completely with the investigation; we had nothing to hide, and indeed were curious as to the outcome of this charade.

It was indeed one of our warehouses, used for storing campaign literature. Much of that literature would be useful again when I ran for reelection, so we had saved it, to keep our campaign budget as low as possible. Nothing incriminating there.

They opened the door, entered, and checked around inside. A search warrant was required for this, but I had waived it; I wanted them to search it.

There, hidden under piled campaign posters, was an enormous pile of money. Packs of thousand-dollar bills, hundreds of them, thousands of them!

The police took over the building, confiscating the money as evidence. In a few days the count was official: approximately half a billion dollars in used bills, there in my warehouse, just as the courier had said.

Too late we realized the truth; it was a frame. They had planted the money there, then planted the

“courier,” and suddenly I was in trouble. It was my warehouse, and the money was there.

Meanwhile, other reporters were seeking the other end of the chain, interviewing the drug moguls of the nations to the south. Surprisingly those hidden figures confirmed the payoffs: they claimed that I had put such a squeeze on their operations that they had had to come to terms to stay in business. True, very little of their commodity was sold in Sunshine now, so as to maintain appearances, but the state remained the major pipeline for delivery to other regions of North Jupiter. These deliveries were permitted to continue, as long as the graft was paid. “He's got a choke hold on us,” one mogul admitted. “We've got to pay.”