“IF YOU WANT YOUR son back,” General Dudakov said severely, “you will listen carefully.”
Hank Van Horn took a long pull at his Gibson. He was still trying to figure out what the hell the General was doing here.
Things had been happening fast since the helicopter landed. Gus Pickett, all smiles and heartiness, had risked getting his silk smoking jacket drizzled on in order to meet Hank at the landing pad. Gus had put his arm around the Senator and led him inside the house, a big stone palace of a place some tobacco baron had built around the time Gus Pickett had been born.
Gus brought him to the drawing room, showed him to a seat, and asked Hank what he wanted to drink. Then the multibillionaire fixed a pitcher of Gibsons with his own hands and placed it, along with a crystal glass full of pearl onions, on a table at Hank’s elbow.
Still smiling, Gus had said, “See you in a minute,” and disappeared.
Hank sat and drank Gibsons and tried to decide how many times his library in the town house would fit in this room. A voice over his shoulder broke into his thoughts.
“Senator Van Horn!”
Hank spun around to see the Russian general bearing down on him. He looked a lot less friendly than he had at the party Hank had thrown for him.
Hank was no fool; after a slight start (and anybody would be startled to hear that voice suddenly barking behind him) he realized what was going on. Dudakov was one of the Russians who had something to do with his situation. And obviously, Gus Pickett worked for him. That was kind of funny, but Hank didn’t laugh. There had been rumors about Gus for years—he was so chummy with the Russians, he must be on their string somehow, was the way the thinking usually went—but he had so much money, only a handful of fanatics really believed anything could be going on. Chalk one up for the fanatics.
And now Dudakov was throwing threats around about Mark.
Hank was thinking hard; when he did that, habits took over. The habit of a politician is to be affable.
“General,” he began heartily.
“I said listen,” Dudakov snapped.
Hank blinked as his brain jumped out of its groove. “What have you done with my son?” he demanded.
“Your son is safe.”
“Why did you kill the girl?”
“Your son may not always be safe. Now be quiet.”
Hank closed his mouth. When the general told him to sit, he sat.
Dudakov was calmer, now, but the menace in him was still obvious. “That’s better, Senator. Relax.”
Hank tried and failed.
“Look around you.”
Hank looked around. There was nothing to see but Gus Pickett’s enormous room.
“We are alone,” the General said. He began to cough, and it took him a long time to catch his breath. He’d done this, Hank remembered, at the party. This wasn’t quite as bad. Hank began to rise to help him, but Dudakov raised a hand for him to stop. The old man made his own way to an ornate love seat striped in gold and purple and plopped down on it. He wasn’t a good match for it—you might as well put a frog on a velvet cushion, Hank thought—but sitting down seemed to help him. Borzov took a couple of deep breaths and began again.
“We are alone. I am not going to have you beaten or shot. Besides—”
“You have my son.”
The General smiled. “I have your son. We must talk about what you have done and what you are going to do.”
Hank clasped his hands together in front of him, realized that was weak body language, and let them go. He wished uselessly that Ainley were here. Still, he wasn’t as worried as he might have been. As long as they were still talking, he knew everything would be all right.
Borzov looked at the Senator with disdain. It was an unfortunate fact of his calling that while the weak were the easiest tools to obtain, they were the most difficult to work with. With a whole man, a man with a mind and a soul and convictions (the General’s Presidential candidate, for instance), no task was too great. The Senator’s mind, if he had one, had been buried under a life of ease and unearned power. His soul contained only arrogance and lust. His only conviction was that the arrogance and lust should not be left unsatisfied.
Even the Senator’s concern for his son, the General could see, was a vestigial thing at best. Oh, he was willing to believe that the Senator would prefer that the boy live. But, Borzov believed, the Senator showed outrage because The Public would expect him to show outrage, and fear because it would expect him to show fear.
In truth, it was Borzov who was afraid. He was a dying man in a wearing business. His mind and soul and convictions had been devoted to the service of his country, and that service was incomplete. Its completion depended in large part on the Senator. The Senator had been saved for just this occasion. And now, on the eve of fruition, Van Horn had done something unexpected. Worse, hostile. To be sure, weak tools often twisted in the hands of the craftsman, but Borzov was the Guild Master of this art. He should not be taken by surprise by such a one as Senator Van Horn.
Borzov had to find out what was wrong, and fix it without ruining his plan. It would take handling, handling made no easier by the bumbling fools who had so needlessly killed the girl when she’d walked in on the kidnapping. That had been foolish—they could simply have taken her along. They had compounded their stupidity by leaving the body there—something that could only send a message of terror to the Senator, and bring a more concerted effort to find the perpetrators.
Borzov shook his head. If this had been done properly, the American authorities need never have known of it.
Enough, he told himself. Time advances.
“Tell me, Senator,” he said, “do you not realize the nature of the tape that has been in our possession these many years? Did we not send you a copy of it?”
Van Horn nodded. He had decided to be “reasonable.” “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you did.”
“At any time, we could have destroyed you. We could have changed what is a mere suspicion in the minds of some Americans into a certainty in all of them. But we have not done that, have we?”
“No,” Senator Van Horn said.
“And our ... agreement. You haven’t found it particularly onerous, have you? Our requests for your assistance have not been excessive?”
“Not at all,” the Senator said.
And well he might, Borzov thought. Except for some minor things during the early days—names of people to recommend for appointments, a few projects to mention in his speeches—they had asked him to do nothing at all. And even those early requests were more tests of the Senator’s commitment to the “agreement” than anything important in the way of operations. The Senator was too important a piece to be wasted in the daily play of the game of put-and-take that was international politics.
“Are you so stupid, then, as to think that I possess the only copy of the tape? That if I were to die, my organization and my nation would somehow be powerless to enforce the agreement that has allowed you to live in luxury and power for over a dozen years?”
The Senator scowled. “I—I—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, General.”
“You deny you sent a bomb to me at the embassy?”
“A what?”
Borzov looked at him closely. He knew that for all his faults, Senator Henry Van Horn was a man with years of experience in American electoral politics, and therefore, an expert liar. But Borzov considered himself to be an expert at detecting liars, and the Senator did not seem to him to be lying.
“I don’t even know how to make a bomb!” Van Horn protested.
This device was the work of a clumsy amateur. It was exactly the sort of thing a man who did not know how to make a bomb might attempt to send me.”
“Anyway, how do I even know there was a bomb? I didn’t hear anything about an explosion at the embassy.”
“There was no explosion. It was easily detected. That is not the point. The point is the attempt.”
“Why pick on me?” The Senator was petulant. “There are lots of nuts running around who hate Russians.”
“That is true. You, however, are a man who may have decided he has a reason to want me dead. And you are known to be a man who panics and resorts to violence under pressure.”
It was obvious from Van Horn’s face that he didn’t like that, but he let it go. Instead he said, “Besides, I’m not a total idiot. My grandfather was ambassador to Germany, you know. I know how embassies work. You don’t open your own mail. Don’t you think I know that?”
Borzov took a deep breath, which for once did not cause a coughing fit. “Yes, Senator. I am aware you know that. But I am also aware that you depend on your staff for assistance in most of your endeavors.”
Now the fool’s feelings were hurt. “Every Senator does,” he said. “We couldn’t function efficiently otherwise.”
“Of course, Senator. It was not a criticism. I, too, have a staff. My point is, that the nature of our agreement cuts you off from their counsel and assistance. You might have recruited some other help, someone, say, willing to act on vague instructions to ‘take care’ of me in some way.”
“And saddle myself for life with a blackmailer. Come on, General.”
“Very well. I accept that. It was something that had to be checked.”
“It had to be checked,” Van Horn echoed. “You kidnapped my son and killed that girl because it had to be checked.”
“We are working for the good of the world. Over five billion lives, Senator. Almost everyone who was alive yesterday is alive today and will be alive tomorrow. Yet someday, each of us will die. One day, we will be here, the next, gone. One day Helen Fraser was here, the next gone. One day, Josephine Girolamo was here ...”
“When can I have my son back?”
“He will be released immediately. The word will reach you here, and you will be helicoptered back.”
“The sooner the better. I don’t think this was one of your better ideas, General.”
“The matter is by no means over, Senator. In the coming weeks, you will be watched.”
“Help yourself.”
“Don’t get up, Senator.” Borzov took a small plastic box from his pocket and pressed a light-blue button on it. One of Augustus Pickett’s mountainous bodyguards entered the room, gun drawn.
“The gun will not be necessary,” Borzov said. “Please tell your chief that the bird may fly.”
The security man nodded and left. Borzov turned to Van Horn. “Now. We have more to talk about, Senator.”
“Now what?”
“The fascinating topic of American Presidential politics. We are going to discuss whom you are going to endorse for your party’s nomination, and when and how you are to do it.
“You will notice, Senator, that your son is being released as a gesture of good faith. He will be at your side, if you wish it, all the while you are carrying out your final instructions.”