Windmills of the Gods (2 page)

Paul Ellison said, “I’m going to need a lot of help from you, old friend.”

“You’ll get it,” Stanton Rogers replied quietly.

They were seated in the Oval Office, the President at his desk with the American flag behind him. It was their first meeting together in this office, and President Ellison was uncomfortable.

If Stanton hadn’t made that one mistake,
Paul Ellison thought,
he would be sitting at this desk instead of me.

As though reading his mind, Stanton Rogers said, “I have a confession to make. The day you were nominated for the presidency, I was as jealous as hell, Paul. It was
my
dream, and you were living it. But do you know something? I finally came to realize that if I couldn’t sit in that chair, there was no one else in the world I would want to sit there but you. That chair suits you.”

Paul Ellison smiled at his friend and said, “To tell you the truth, Stan, this room scares the hell out of me. I feel the
ghosts of Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson.”

“We’ve also had Presidents who—”

“I know. But it’s the great ones we have to try to live up to.”

He pressed the button on his desk, and seconds later a white-jacketed steward came into the room.

“Yes, Mr. President?”

Paul Ellison turned to Rogers. “Coffee?”

“Sounds good.”

“Want anything with it?”

“No, thanks. Barbara wants me to watch my waistline.”

The President nodded to Henry, the steward, and he quietly left the room.

Barbara.
She had surprised everyone. The gossip around Washington was that the marriage would not last out the first year. But it had been almost fifteen years now, and it was a success. Stanton Rogers had built up a prestigious law practice in Washington, and Barbara had earned the reputation of being a gracious hostess.

Paul Ellison rose and began to pace. “My people-to-people speech seems to have caused quite an uproar. I suppose you’ve seen all the newspapers.”

Stanton Rogers shrugged. “You know how they are. They love to build up heroes so they can knock them down.”

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn what the papers say. I’m interested in what
people
are saying.”

“Quite candidly, you’re scaring the hell out of a lot of people, Paul. The armed forces are against your plan, and some powerful movers and shakers would like to see it fail.”

“It’s not going to fail.” He leaned back in his chair. “Do you know the biggest problem with the world today? There are no more statesmen. Countries are being run by politicians. There was a time not too long ago when this earth was peopled with giants. Some were good, and some were evil—but, by God, they were giants. Roosevelt and Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle and Joseph Stalin. Why
did they all live at that one particular time? Why aren’t there any statesmen today?”

“It’s pretty hard to be a world giant on a twenty-one-inch screen.”

The steward appeared, bearing a silver tray with a pot of coffee and two cups, each imprinted with the presidential seal. He skillfully poured the coffee. “Can I get you something else, Mr. President?”

“No. That’s it, Henry. Thank you.”

The President waited until the steward had gone. “I want to talk to you about finding the right ambassador to Romania.”

“Right.”

“I don’t have to tell you how important this is. I want you to move on it as quickly as possible.”

Stanton Rogers took a sip of his coffee and rose to his feet. “I’ll get State on it right away.”

In the little suburb of Neuilly, it was two
A.M.
Marin Groza’s villa lay in ebon darkness, the moon nested in a thick layer of storm clouds. The streets were hushed at this hour, with only the sound of an occasional passerby rippling the silence. A black-clad figure moved noiselessly through the trees toward the brick wall that surrounded the villa. Over one shoulder he carried a rope and a blanket, and in his arms was cradled an Uzi with a silencer and a dart gun. When he reached the wall, he stopped and listened. He waited, motionless, for five minutes. Finally, satisfied, he uncoiled the nylon rope and tossed the scaling hook attached to the end of it upward until it caught on the far edge of the wall. Swiftly, the man began to climb. When he reached the top of the wall, he flung the blanket across it to protect himself against the poison-tipped metal spikes embedded on top. He stopped again to listen. He reversed the hook, shifting the rope to the inside of the wall, and slid down onto the grounds. He checked the balisong at his waist, the deadly Filipino folding
knife that could be flicked open or closed with one hand.

The attack dogs would be next. The intruder crouched there, waiting for them to pick up his scent. There were three Dobermans, trained to kill. But they were only the first obstacle. The grounds and the villa were filled with electronic devices, and continuously monitored by television cameras. All mail and packages were received at the gatehouse and opened there by the guards. The doors of the villa were bombproof. The villa had its own water supply, and Marin Groza had a food taster. The villa was impregnable. Supposedly. The figure in black was here this night to prove that it was not.

He heard the sounds of the dogs rushing at him before he saw them. They came flying out of the darkness, charging at his throat. There were two of them. He aimed the dart gun and shot the nearest one on his left first, and then the one on his right, dodging out of the way of their hurtling bodies. He spun around, alert for the third dog, and when it came, he fired again, and then there was only stillness.

The intruder knew where the sonic traps were buried in the ground, and he skirted them. He silently glided through the areas of the grounds that the television cameras did not cover, and in less than two minutes after he had gone over the wall, he was at the back door of the villa.

As he reached for the handle of the door, he was caught in the sudden glare of floodlights. A voice called out, “Freeze! Drop your gun and raise your hands.”

The figure in black carefully dropped his gun and looked up. There were half a dozen men spread out on the roof, with a variety of weapons pointed at him.

The man in black growled, “What the fuck took you so long? I never should have gotten this far.”

“You didn’t,” the head guard informed him. “We started tracking you before you got over the wall.”

Lev Pasternak was not mollified. “Then you should have stopped me sooner. I could have been on a suicide mission with a load of grenades or a goddamn mortar. I want a meeting
of the entire staff tomorrow morning, eight o’clock sharp. The dogs have been stunned. Have someone keep an eye on them until they wake up.”

Lev Pasternak prided himself on being the best security guard in the world. He had been a pilot in the Israeli Six-Day War, and after the war had become a top agent in Mossad, one of Israel’s five secret services.

He would never forget the morning, two years earlier, when his colonel had called him into his office.

“Lev, someone wants to borrow you for a few weeks.”

“I hope it’s a blonde,” Lev quipped.

“It’s Marin Groza.”

Mossad had a complete file on the Romanian dissident. Groza had been the leader of a popular Romanian movement to depose Alexandros Ionescu and was about to stage a coup when he was betrayed by one of his men. More than two dozen underground fighters had been executed, and Groza had barely escaped the country with his life. France had given him sanctuary. Ionescu denounced Marin Groza as a traitor to his country and put a price on his head. So far half a dozen attempts to assassinate Groza had failed, but he had been wounded in the latest attack.

“What does he want with me?” Pasternak asked. “He has government protection.”

“Not good enough. He needs someone to set up a foolproof security system. He came to us. I recommended you.”

“I’d have to go to France?”

“It will only take you a few weeks.”

“I don’t—”

“Lev, we’re talking about a
mensch.
He’s the guy in the white hat. Our information is that he has enough popular support in his home country to knock over Ionescu. When the timing is right, he’ll make his move. Meanwhile, we have to keep the man alive.”

Lev Pasternak thought about it. “A few weeks, you said?”

“That’s all.”

The colonel had been wrong about the time, but he had been right about Marin Groza. He was a thin, fragile-looking man with an ascetic air about him and a face etched with sorrow. He had an aquiline nose, a firm chin, and a broad forehead, topped by a spray of white hair. He had deep black eyes, and when he spoke, they blazed with passion.

“I don’t give a damn whether I live or die,” he told Lev at their first meeting. “We’re all going to die. It’s the
when
that I’m concerned about. I have to stay alive for another year or two. That’s all the time I need to drive Ionescu out of my country.” He ran his hand absently across a livid scar on his cheek. “No man has the right to enslave a country. We have to free Romania and let the people decide their own fate.”

Lev Pasternak went to work on the security system at the villa in Neuilly. He used some of his own men, and the outsiders he hired were checked out thoroughly. Every single piece of equipment was state of the art.

Pasternak saw the Romanian rebel leader every day, and the more time he spent with him, the more he came to admire him. When Marin Groza asked Pasternak to stay on as his security chief, Pasternak did not hesitate.

“I’ll do it,” he said, “until you’re ready to make your move. Then I will return to Israel.”

They struck a deal.

At irregular intervals, Pasternak staged surprise attacks on the villa, testing its security. Now, he thought:
Some of the guards are getting careless. I’ll have to replace them.

He walked through the hallways, carefully checking the heat sensors, the electronic warning systems, and the infrared beams at the sill of each door. As he reached Marin Groza’s bedroom, he heard a loud crash, and a moment later Groza began screaming out in agony.

Lev Pasternak passed Groza’s room and kept walking.

Headquarters for the Central Intelligence Agency is located across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia, seven miles northwest of Washington, D.C. At the approach road to the agency is a flashing red beacon on top of a gate. The gatehouse is guarded twenty-four hours a day, and authorized visitors are issued colored badges giving them access only to the particular department with which they have business. Outside the gray seven-level headquarters building, whimsically called the Toy Factory, is a large statue of Nathan Hale. Inside, on the ground floor, a glass corridor wall faces an inner courtyard with a landscaped garden dotted with magnolia trees. Above the reception desk a verse is carved in marble:

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free.

The public is never admitted inside the building, and there are no facilities for visitors. For those who wish to enter the
compound “black”—unseen—there is a tunnel that emerges onto a foyer facing a mahogany elevator door, watched around the clock by a squad of gray-flanneled sentries.

In the seventh-floor conference room, guarded by security aides armed with snub-nosed thirty-eight revolvers under their business suits, the Monday morning executive staff meeting was under way. Seated around the large oak table were Ned Tillingast, director of the CIA; General Oliver Brooks, Army Chief of Staff; Secretary of State Floyd Baker; Pete Connors, chief of counterintelligence; and Stanton Rogers.

Ned Tillingast, the CIA director, was in his sixties, a cold, taciturn man, burdened with maleficent secrets. There is a light branch and a dark branch of the CIA. The dark branch handles clandestine operations, and for the past seven years, Tillingast had been in charge of the forty-five hundred employees working in that section.

General Oliver Brooks was a West Point soldier who conducted his personal and professional life by the book. He was a company man, and the company he worked for was the United States Army.

Floyd Baker, the secretary of state, was an anachronism, a throwback to an earlier era. He was of Southern vintage, tall, silver-haired, and distinguished-looking, with an old-fashioned gallantry. He was a man who wore mental spats. He owned a chain of influential newspapers around the country, and was reputed to be enormously wealthy. There was no one in Washington with a keener political sense, and Baker’s antennae were constantly tuned to the changing signals around the halls of Congress.

Pete Connors was black-Irish, a stubborn bulldog of a man, hard-drinking and fearless. This was his last year with the CIA. He faced compulsory retirement in June. Connors was chief of the counterintelligence staff, the most secret, highly compartmentalized branch of the CIA. He had worked his way up through the various intelligence divisions, and had
been around in the good old days when CIA agents were the golden boys. Pete Connors had been a golden boy himself. He had taken part in the coup that restored the Shah to the Peacock Throne in Iran, and had been involved in Operation Mongoose, the attempt to topple Castro’s government in 1961.

“After the Bay of Pigs, everything changed,” Pete would mourn from time to time. The length of his diatribe usually depended upon how drunk he was. “The bleeding hearts attacked us on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. They called us a bunch of lying, sneaking clowns who couldn’t get out of our own way. Some anti-CIA bastard published the names of our agents, and Dick Welch, our chief of station in Athens, was murdered.”

Pete Connors had gone through three miserable marriages because of the pressures and secrecy of his work, but as far as he was concerned, no sacrifice was too great to make for his country.

Now, in the middle of the meeting, his face was red with anger. “If we let the President get away with his fucking people-to-people program, he’s going to give the country away. It has to be stopped. We can’t allow—”

Floyd Baker interrupted. “The President has been in office less than a week. We’re all here to carry out his policies and—”

“I’m not here to hand over my country to the damned Commies, mister. The President never even mentioned his plan before his speech. He sprang it on all of us. We didn’t have a chance to get together a rebuttal.”

“Perhaps that’s what he had in mind,” Baker suggested.

Pete Connors stared at him. “By God, you agree with it!”

“He’s my President,” Floyd Baker said firmly. “Just as he’s yours.”

Ned Tillingast turned to Stanton Rogers. “Connors has a point. The President is actually planning to
invite
Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and the other Communist countries to send their spies here posing as cultural attaches and chauffeurs
and secretaries and maids. We’re spending billions of dollars to guard the back door, and the President wants to throw open the front door.”

General Brooks nodded agreement. “I wasn’t consulted, either. In my opinion, the President’s plan could damn well destroy this country.”

Stanton Rogers said, “Gentlemen, some of us may disagree with the President, but let’s not forget that the people voted for Paul Ellison to run this country.” His eyes flicked across the men seated around him. “We’re all part of the President’s team, and we have to follow his lead and support him in every way we can.” His words were followed by a reluctant silence. “All right, then. The President wants an immediate update on the current situation in Romania. Everything you have.”

“Including our covert stuff?” Pete Connors asked.

“Everything. Give it to me straight. What’s the situation in Romania with Alexandras Ionescu?”

“Ionescu’s riding high in the saddle,” Ned Tillingast replied. “Once he got rid of the Ceau§escu family, all of Ceau§escu’s allies were assassinated, jailed, or exiled. Since he seized power, Ionescu’s been bleeding the country dry. The people hate his guts.”

“What about the prospects for a revolution?”

Tillingast said, “Ah. That’s rather interesting. Remember a couple of years back when Marin Groza almost toppled the Ionescu government?”

“Yes. Groza got out of the country by the skin of his butt.”

“With our help. Our information is that there’s a popular ground swell to bring him back. Groza would be good for Romania, and if he got in, it would be good for us. We’re keeping a close watch on the situation.”

Stanton Rogers turned to the secretary of state. “Do you have that list of candidates for the Romanian post?”

Floyd Baker opened a leather attache case, took some papers from it, and handed a copy to Rogers. “These are our
top prospects. They’re all qualified career diplomats. Each one of them has been cleared. No security problems, no financial problems, no embarrassing skeletons in the closet.”

As Stanton Rogers took the list, the secretary of state added, “Naturally, the State Department favors a career diplomat, rather than a political appointee. Someone who’s been trained for this kind of job. In this situation, particularly. Romania is an extremely sensitive post. It has to be handled very carefully.”

“I agree.” Stanton Rogers rose to his feet. “I’ll discuss these names with the President and get back to you. He’s anxious to fill the appointment as quickly as possible.”

As the others got up to leave, Ned Tillingast said, “Stay here, Pete. I want to talk to you.”

When Tillingast and Connors were alone, Tillingast said, “You came on pretty strong, Pete.”

“But I’m right,” Pete Connors said stubbornly. “The President is trying to sell out the country. What are we supposed to do?”

“Keep your mouth shut.”

“Ned, we’re trained to find the enemy and kill him. What if the enemy is behind our lines—sitting in the Oval Office?”

“Be careful. Be very careful.”

Tillingast had been around longer than Pete Connors. He had been a member of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS before it became the CIA. He too hated what the bleeding hearts in Congress were doing to the organization he loved. In fact, there was a deep split within the ranks of the CIA between the hard-liners and those who believed the Russian bear could be tamed into a harmless pet.
We have to fight for every single dollar,
Tillingast thought.
In Moscow, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti—the KGB—trains a thousand agents at a time.

Ned Tillingast had recruited Pete Connors out of college, and Connors had turned out to be one of the best. But in the last few years, Connors had become a cowboy—a little too
independent, a little too quick on the trigger. Dangerous.

“Pete—have you heard anything about an underground organization calling itself Patriots for Freedom?” Tillingast asked.

Connors frowned. “No. Can’t say that I have. Who are they?”

“So far they’re just a rumor. All I have is smoke. See if you can get a lead on them.”

“Will do.”

An hour later, Pete Connors was making a phone call from a public booth at Hains Point.

“I have a message for Odin.”

“This is Odin,” General Oliver Brooks said.

Riding back to the office in his limousine, Stanton Rogers opened the envelope containing the names of the candidates for the ambassadorship and studied them. It was an excellent list. The secretary of state had done his homework. The candidates had all served in Eastern and Western European countries, and a few of them had additional experience in the Far East or Africa.
The President’s going to be pleased,
Stanton thought.

“They’re dinosaurs,” Paul Ellison snapped. He threw the list down on his desk. “Every one of them.”

“Paul,” Stanton protested, “these people are all experienced career diplomats.”

“And hidebound by State Department tradition. You remember how we lost Romania three years ago? Our experienced career diplomat in Bucharest screwed up and we were out in the cold. The pinstriped boys worry me. They’re all out to cover their asses. When I talked about a people-to-people program, I meant every word of it. We need to make a positive impression on a country that at this moment is very wary of us.”

“But if you put an amateur in there—someone with no experience—you’re taking a big risk.”

“Maybe we need someone with a different kind of experience. Romania is going to be a test case, Stan. A pilot run for my whole program, if you will.” He hesitated. “I’m not kidding myself. My credibility is on the line. I know that there are a lot of powerful people who don’t want to see this work. If it fails, I’m going to get cut off at the knees. I’ll have to forget about Bulgaria, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of the iron curtain countries. And I don’t intend for that to happen.”

“I can check out some of our political appointees who—”

President Ellison shook his head. “Same problem. I want someone with a completely fresh point of view. Someone who can thaw the ice. The opposite of the ugly American.”

Stan Rogers was studying the President, puzzled. “Paul—I get the impression that you already have someone in mind. Do you?”

Paul Ellison took a cigar from the humidor on his desk and lit it. “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “I think I may have.”

“Who is he?”

“She. Did you happen to see the article in the current issue of
Foreign Affairs
magazine called ‘Detente Now’?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I thought it was interesting. The author believes that we’re in a position to try to seduce the Communist countries into coming into our camp by offering them economic and—” He broke off. “It was a lot like your inaugural speech.”

“Only it was written six months earlier. She’s published brilliant articles in
Commentary
and
Public Affairs.
Last year I read a book of hers on Eastern European politics, and I must admit, it helped clarify some of my ideas.”

“All right. So she agrees with your theories. That’s no reason to consider her for a post as imp—”

“Stan—she went further than my theory. She outlined a detailed plan that’s brilliant. She wants to take the four major world economic pacts and combine them.”

“How can we—?”

“It would take time, but it could be done. Look. You know that in 1949 the Eastern-bloc countries formed a pact for mutual economic assistance, called COMECON, and in 1958 the other European countries formed the EEC—the Common Market.”

“Right.”

“We have the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes the United States, some Western-bloc countries, and Yugoslavia. And don’t forget that the Third World countries have formed a nonaligned movement that excludes us.” The President’s voice was charged with excitement. “Think of the possibilities. If we could combine all these plans and form one big marketplace—my God, it could be awesome! It would mean
real
world trade. And it could bring peace.”

Stanton Rogers said cautiously, “It’s an interesting idea, but it’s a long way off.”

“You know the old Chinese saying, ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.’ ”

“She’s an amateur, Paul.”

“Some of our finest ambassadors have been amateurs. Anne Armstrong, the former ambassador to Great Britain, was an educator with no political experience. Perle Mesta was appointed to Luxembourg, Clare Boothe Luce was ambassador to Italy. John Gavin, an actor, was the ambassador to Mexico. One third of our current ambassadors are what you call amateurs.”

“But you don’t know anything about this woman.”

“Except that she’s damned bright and that we’re on the same wavelength. I want you to find out everything you can about her.” He picked up a copy of
Foreign Affairs.
“Her name is Mary Ashley.”

Two days later, President Ellison and Stanton Rogers breakfasted together.

“I got the information you asked for.”

Stanton Rogers pulled a paper from his pocket. “Mary Elizabeth Ashley, Twenty-seven Old Milford Road, Junction City, Kansas. Age, almost thirty-five, married to Dr. Edward Ashley—two children, Beth twelve and Tim ten. Chairwoman of the Junction City Chapter of the League of Women Voters. Assistant Professor, East European political science, Kansas State University. Grandfather born in Romania.” He looked up thoughtfully. “I must admit she sounds interesting.”