The Fourth Perimeter Page 9

  CHAPTER 10

  In the Oval Office of the White House, the president of the United States, Calvin Parkes, sat behind his desk facing the high-living, obese secretary of state and the ramrod-straight chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Behind them, by the door, Mack Taylor stood impassively as he always did, less obtrusive than a floor lamp to those who spent any time at all around the president. The president measured his words carefully before he spoke.

  “Let’s try to talk to the Iranians,” he said. He was a large man, and although his shoulders were rounded he liked to keep them pulled back straight. His blustery red face, thick white hair, and deep, sonorous voice made him an imposing figure.

  What he wanted to say was: “Let’s launch some missiles.” But that wouldn’t do. It was one of the most painful things to him about being president. Calvin Parkes had grown up accustomed to saying anything he thought. As a boy in Pittsburgh, he was the son of Jonathan Parkes, the third-generation owner of the Pennsylvania and Ohio Railroad. From an early age, the president had grown used to flinging his opinion carelessly about, whether it was asked for or not. Now, with the entire world hanging on his every inclination, he had learned to bury his more caustic sentiments beneath the guarded mumbo-jumbo that he’d come to acquire in public life.

  He hadn’t chosen politics out of need but desire. It was a desire, however, born from a vanity that superseded most men’s needs. His father had successfully sold the family railroad in the seventies and just as successfully invested the proceeds in the stock market. So people thought things came easy to the Parkeses.

  While being the scion of a long line of millionaires had its advantages, it also incited jealousy, and only among the vulgar did it garner real admiration. Men of accomplishment tended to view a young man who came from old money with skepticism, linking every achievement back to his inheritance. Calvin Parkes had wanted to be admired for himself by people who counted, not pandered to because of his wealth. The difficulty was that any success he ever had in business would be inexorably linked to his family money and connections. What he had wanted was a medium in which he could excel that transcended his birth.

  The answer came to him at a political fund-raiser that his father hosted for the governor of Pennsylvania at the Duquesne Club one late spring evening. Calvin was just home from college. It was a chilly evening and a steady rain had spoiled all the joy of the coming summer. Calvin came in from the raw weather stamping his feet and tapping the rain from his umbrella on the oriental rug covering the entry floor. He was straightening his black tie as he entered the main room with its heavy and intricately carved wood when he was struck by an image that he could recall to this day by simply closing his eyes. It was his father, white-haired and red-faced, with his imposing walrus mustache, his tall frame bent over, actually stooping to the floor to pick up a cuff link that had popped loose from the governor’s sleeve.

  Calvin had never seen his father stoop for anyone or anything. He watched with fascination as the others, prominent men of his father’s station, also fawned over the one man who appeared so much less substantial than the rest. The governor at that time was a sickly looking fellow with pink, watery eyes. His skin was pale, his teeth gray, and he spoke in the lilting voice of a clothier. Calvin had expected much more from the man who held the state’s highest office and who people claimed had real potential for a run at the White House.

  It was that moment, and the courage he gained from comparing himself to the then governor of Pennsylvania, that had led him to his calling. The governor had grown up on a farm and studied law. The battlefield of politics didn’t belong exclusively to the rich. If Calvin Parkes succeeded in that arena, no one would doubt his own personal prowess.

  Calvin quickly discovered that he was a born politician. He was able to honestly assess his own strengths and use them with a ruthlessness that impressed even the patriarchs of the party. He took advantage of his money and family connections without a hint of shame.

  He broke into the game as a congressional representative. Then, after a four-year hiatus from the legislature at a high-level job within the Reagan administration, he ran for U.S. Senate and won. After two terms of doling out pork on the Ways and Means Committee, Calvin was ready for his run at the White House. It was an upset victory, really. He had been a dark horse in the primaries, but it came down to the thing his opponents reviled him for most: that old money. He outspent them all at a staggering rate, using the media with a deft ruthlessness that set a new standard in American politics.

  But being president, he learned in his first three and a half years in office, wasn’t as liberating as he thought. The zenith of any American politician’s career was as much a burden as it was a reward, and it seemed to him now that the most important thing he could do was to leave a legacy. He wanted to do something that people would look back on and say, “It all began under the Parkes administration.”

  While the temptation to launch some kind of military action against another nation was great, it no longer held the same allure it had in days gone by. The luster had faded from military engagements. It was true that the Gulf War had been a dynamic national experience that resulted in great admiration. But it had faded as quickly as a peculiar fashion in women’s clothes. Military aggression was no longer a fertile prospect for presidential exaltation.

  Still, that primal tug like a boy feels when he regards his father’s gleaming gun mounted above the fireplace left Parkes feeling slightly remorseful at the sound of the carefully chosen words that dropped from his lips. But whimsical statements belonged to Calvin Parkes’s past. As president, everything he said or did was heard. Most of it was scrutinized. He was almost a prisoner of his own power. The Secret Service, the men who had sworn to give their lives to protect him, couldn’t do their job if they weren’t with him always. When he broke wind in his sleep, they heard it. The things he said in his office were preserved on tape, all of them. So he knew better than to suggest they bomb the Iranians, even though he could hear the words in his own mind ringing out clearly.

  Of course, there were times when the Secret Service men and the recording machines weren’t around. It was during those times that the president did his best work. Sitting around as he was now and pontificating with advisers was all well and good. He had to do it. It was expected and it was necessary. But the really important things, the things that kept him in a position of power—those things were done when there weren’t any microphones, or cameras, or even agents around to hear or see.

  His thoughts returned to the mark he planned to leave, and that led his mind to wander. He stared at the lamp on a side table that was his own personal mark on this office. Would it stay? There above it hung a painting from the Lincoln administration. The table itself was Andrew Jackson’s. But evidence of many of the men who had held this office had been removed over time. The chattel that remained in the Oval Office from administration to administration was the measure of a president’s true greatness. Calvin Parkes wanted his lamp to still be there right on top of Andrew Jackson’s table two hundred, even four hundred years hence. And what, he wondered, about a coin?

  He remained impervious to the incessant droning of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and thought about the Internet. If they could spin it right, he just might sell the world on the notion that his tax would serve to preserve the world’s greatest experiment, its most powerful democracy. The bill he planned to sign into law that taxed the Internet—that would be his legacy. It would revolutionize the entire system of taxation and absolutely guarantee the preservation of the United States federal government. In the future, all commerce would be electronically transacted. By taxing each individual transaction, the new law would equitably spread the tax burden among people and businesses and would lock down the government’s revenues forever.

  It was a controversial bill, one that had been spawned outside his own administration. But he saw the powerful brilliance of the idea and took it for his o
wn. Despite a virulent opposition, he had been able, with the same kind of behind-the-scenes bullying that got him into the Oval Office, to rally the votes it needed to get through Congress. Soon he would turn it into law. It was a use tax, really. Ultimately, it would result in less tax on the individual and more on the corporate entities who currently avoided much of their tax obligation through loopholes. High-tech companies were dead against it. But they were the robber barons of the twenty-first century and they were fighting hard to go on squeezing American society without restraint. His own family fortune had come in a similar manner, but he felt the loathing old money always had for new.

  Special interests of all kinds were lined up against him. But if he played things right, he could keep them guessing just long enough to win the next election, and then it would be too late. He would sign the bill and crush their efforts without having to worry about the repercussions. He could only serve one more term and he would be remembered as the president who had made a bold move when necessity demanded it. Historians would say that he, Calvin Parkes, not only strengthened but saved the nation. One day, he suspected, his face would adorn some form of American currency. He would be remembered forever, and that was what he really wanted.

  “So talk to them, Lonnie,” he said impatiently after picking up on the tail end of the discussion that had erupted between the two men, “and if you need me to make a call, let me know. Other than that, I’ve got a campaign meeting and then a speech to give at that Girl Scouts’ convention at the Hilton . . .”

  In response to the sour look on the face of his secretary of state he said sharply, “Give me a break, goddamn it, will you, Lonnie? Does it really bother you that much when I do something that wasn’t your idea?

  “We both know what’s going to happen anyway,” he added impetuously. “Sam will get the navy to move some ships around, the army shuffles some troops to get their attention, and it all works out before the weekend.”

  With that, the president rose to his feet, signaling an end to the meeting. The two men left and as they did five more scurried in and surrounded Parkes as he sauntered out the side door and into the Rose Garden where there weren’t any tape recorders.

  “Where are we at, Marty?” he said impatiently. He had taken a chocolate mint from a jar on his desk and now he popped it into his mouth as he glared up at the sky.

  Marty Mulligan was his campaign chairman, a gaunt, chain-smoking Irishman from Yonkers with dark eyes and a shadowy face. He skulked along beside the president like a willful cur.

  “We’re about ten million dollars short of where I want to be,” he said in the raspy voice of a man who looked down on the rest of the world.

  “So give me the bad news,” the president said with a deadpan face before breaking into a snarl. “Dammit! I’m so tired of people wanting me to use my own money for all this. Bush never used his own money! Clinton didn’t!”

  “Clinton didn’t have any,” Mulligan’s assistant innocently pointed out from the fringe of the group.

  Calvin Parkes stopped and glared. “What’s Reynolds doing?” he railed. “Why isn’t the party more worried about raising the money? I’ll tell you why! They want me to use my own! Damn, I’m sick of it!”

  “We need ten million more,” Mulligan said, apparently oblivious to the president’s moods. “I’m not saying we need it right away, but we need it. I want to up the advertising budget for later this summer when we go into New England and New York.”

  “Yeah, I want to talk about that New York trip,” the president said as he rolled the green foil from the mint into a little ball with his fingers. “People can’t even say this Skinny-annie-whatever-it-is. Where the hell are you sending me, Marty? People are asking me and I don’t like not knowing why.”

  Mulligan worked his fingers in anticipation of the cigarette he’d have the moment he walked away from this meeting. He replied in an indignant tone, “We talked about this three times, Cal.”

  Mulligan was the only man anyone knew who could speak to the president in such a way. To everyone else, Calvin Parkes was “Mr. President.” Even though they all knew it was Mulligan’s strategizing that had gotten the president to where he was, and that he would be integral in keeping him there, his casual manner still made them uncomfortable. Part of the reason for other people’s discomfort may have been that whenever Mulligan did call him Cal, the president glared around the group as if in silent warning to the rest of them.

  The other men shifted awkwardly. Their eyes couldn’t help roving to Mack Taylor’s chiseled, soulless face. The SAIC stood behind the president staring straight ahead, his pale gray eyes as lifeless as those of an obedient attack dog. Despite the agent’s sharply tailored dark suit and his short, clean-cut gray hair, each of the president’s aides was acutely conscious of the primal threat emanating from him like an odor.

  He was the usual sort, a thick-necked former special ops officer who had joined the Secret Service after Vietnam. During a combat tour, Taylor was rumored to have specialized in field interrogations. The only one Taylor didn’t faze was Mulligan. In a strange way, they seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Each was the kind of man you never wanted to turn your back on.

  “You’ll be staying with Max Shapiro, the federal judge,” Mulligan continued, “which is important in and of itself. We’ll hit the State Fair, where you can press some flesh and get some good photo ops with a bunch of babies, and the press corps will love this. This place is beautiful. The water looks like the Caribbean or something. It’s an old New England–type town with brick sidewalks and cast-iron lampposts. It’s a place where you can look like you’re relaxing, like you’re a normal American taking his summer vacation enjoying this country’s beautiful natural resources. And we’ll unveil our plans for more stringent EPA water standards on one of the cleanest lakes in the world. The greens will love it. We’ll have you drinking some water right out of the lake and saying it should be every American’s right to have clean water or something.”

  “What about their businesspeople,” the president complained, throwing his hands in the air and beginning to stroll again. “They’re already all over me for not vetoing that emissions legislation. You’re sounding more and more like a Democrat, Marty.”

  “We have to win New York, period,” Mulligan said. “Hey, can I get a coffee or something?”

  The campaign chairman’s assistant tore away from the group and made for the Oval Office, whispering to someone inside that Mr. Mulligan needed a coffee with milk, no cream.

  “So,” Mulligan continued, “you want the election, you gotta get New York. You want New York, you gotta sound a little green. Don’t worry, it’s just talk.”

  Mulligan looked at the president with his unblinking reptilian eyes. The president looked back. Both knew the other well. They were men who did what they had to do to get where they wanted to go. Anyone who had closely followed their actions knew that it didn’t bother either of them to circumvent scruples. Scruples were for fools.

  “Good,” said the president, as if the idea were his all along. “We’ll go to Skinny-whatever and drink clean water and hopefully somewhere along the line we can get in a round of golf and pick up an extra ten million.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Rain fell in sheets on the lake. Kurt felt his way across the water’s fractured surface in a small skiff whose engine couldn’t be heard above the teeming downpour. It was two-thirty in the morning on Tuesday. He was alert, and would look down at the compass on his GPS from time to time, but the steady sound of rain and the dull vibration of the engine under his grip on the throttle lulled him into contemplation.

  He had spent the day holed up in his library, breaking only for a subdued dinner with Jill and Gracie on the veranda overlooking the lake. Afterward, Jill had suggested that they take a walk. Kurt had declined, saying he still had more to do. He had gotten up from the table and given her a perfunctory kiss and an apologetic smile.

  “You’ve been working
all day,” she had pointed out. “Don’t you think you should take a break?”

  “No,” he’d said. “I can’t do that. You know what I’m up against, Jill.” He had glanced quickly at Gracie, signaling that it wasn’t the time or place for her to start quizzing him.

  Jill had followed him into the library, into the drift of books and papers covering his desk and the reading table.

  “Stay with me, love,” he had pleaded. “Trust me. I have to do this my way, but it will all work out.”

  He knew her nature demanded more—she had the archetypal mind of a scientist, acute and probing. But he also knew he couldn’t give her more. She would have to trust him, to stand by patiently while he sought a resolution for what had happened and a plan for moving on. He had kissed her again, warmly and deeply this time, then told her good night. With one last longing look at his work, she had forced a smile and left for their bed.

  That’s where he had found her sometime well past midnight, sleeping soundly. Her wild hair radiated from her face, its golden streaks shining like beams of sunlight even in the dim yellow glow of the reading lamp next to the bed. He had slipped into his closet and pulled on some dark clothes and a black baseball cap. On his way out, he had checked his instinct to gently lay his hand along the pretty curve of her cheek.

  In the blind darkness of the wet night, Kurt was jarred from his reverie. The aluminum skiff had bumped suddenly and loudly against the judge’s pier. He strained his eyes as he lashed his boat to a metal cleat, but nothing stirred. The house sat amid a cluster of towering oaks, and only a handful of the high old windows were lit from within at random spots throughout the large mansion. Still, they cast enough of a glow for him to vaguely make out the shape of the building if he looked indirectly at it, using his peripheral vision.