Dragonfly

For his part, McAlister could not tell if the clicks of the President's tongue were expressions of sympathy — or whether the chief was off on another of his shtik. And not knowing which it was bothered the hell out of him. He said, “It's nothing, sir. I'm fine. It's just about all over now. I've sent an urgent message to Canning. I took the liberty of using your name on it For his eyes only.”

“But from what you've told me — do you think he'll get anything we send to him?”

“Not everyone is involved,” McAlister said. “The communications man at the Peking embassy is trustworthy. He'll see that Canning gets it.” He ran the tape forward at high speed, watching the white numbers roll around and around on the inch-counter. When he found the numbers he wanted, he stopped the tape, checked them against a list of numbers in his note pad. “You'll want to listen to the entire interrogation later,” he told the President. “But right now, I have a few special passages you'll be interested in.”

“By all means.”

McAlister pushed the Start button:

mcalister: But even if the Nationalists manage to seize the mainland eventually, it won't be an easy thing. I mean, the Chinese may not have much, but it is a hell of a lot more than they had under Chiang. He was a real despot. They'll remember that. Even without guidance from Peking, they're going to fight — with guns, clubs, even fists. Do you realize how many people are going to die?

rice: Oh, yes. We've done computer analysis, worked it out in detail.

mcalister: And it doesn't bother you?

rice: No. I look at it like Mr. West does.

mcalister: How does Mr. West look at it?

rice: They aren't people. They're Chinks. Both sides.

mcalister: Have you calculated the Russian reaction?

rice: They'll come in from the west. But they'll never keep the territory they take.

mcalister: Why not?

rice: Because we have something for them too.

mcalister: Something like Dragonfly?

rice: That's right.

mcalister: You have a Dragonfly in Moscow now?

rice: We have a dozen of them, all over Russia. It was much easier to plant those than to plant one man in China. Russia is a more open society than the People's Republic.

The President was stunned at Rice's obvious insanity, stunned that he had been deceived for so long by such a lunatic. His face alternately — and sometimes all at once — registered dismay, surprise, and horror as he fully perceived Rice's lunacy and ruthlessness. But worst of all, in the President's view, was Rice's naivete, and it was at this that the chief executive winced the hardest. He didn't crack his knuckles once.

McAlister closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He had heard all of this before, of course. And now he could see Rice under interrogation: sweat beading on his white face, sweat glistening in his eyebrows and along his hairline, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, saliva drooling from one corner of his mouth, his massive body twitching continuously and sometimes spasming uncontrollably as the drug savaged his central nervous system… McAlister felt a long snake of self-loathing uncoil slowly within him. He opened his eyes and stared at the whirling reels of tape; and he began to listen to the contents as well as to the tone of Rice's words. And when he listened closely and heard the evil in the man — the delusions of grandeur, the ruthlessness, the bigotry and jealousy and mindless hatred — he became so enraged that the snake of self-loathing coiled up in him and went back to sleep.

Rice babbled on and thought that he was dispensing gems of military strategy, wisdom for the ages. He talked about the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Neither he nor West nor anyone else in The Committee considered that a major worry. The Committee had Dragonfly's equivalent — with code names like Boris and Ilya — in many Russian missile installations. These Dragonflies carried liquefied nerve gas instead of deadly bacteria. When such a spansule was punctured, the gas would literally explode out of the carrier, expanding at an incredible speed. The personnel of an entire missile installation could be eliminated in seconds by a single Boris planted among them. Even so, some missiles would be launched. Warheads would be exchanged; there was no avoiding it. But Americans should not be frightened of nuclear war, Rice said. They should view it as a potentially necessary and helpful tool. Even a peacemaker like Henry Kissinger had said as much when he had written on the subject years before he became Secretary of State: we can survive a nuclear war. Millions would die, but most likely not tens of millions; and civilization would not pass. There were big risks involved here, Rice admitted. But the only way to destroy Communism before it destroyed us, the only way to insure the dominance of the White Race was to take big risks. Wasn't that true? Wasn't that true? Wasn't it?

McAlister stopped the tape recorder.

The President said, “Jesus H. Christ! Did you get the names of those twelve agents in Moscow?”

“Yes.”

“The Russians will have to be told about them. Can a Dragonfly be — disarmed?”

“Yes,” McAlister said. “If the Russian surgeons know what to look for.”

“We can show them.” He shook his head. “Rice is so damned naive.”

“And he must be echoing his mentor — A.W. West.”

“How could a man like West, a man who has amassed a billion-dollar fortune, be so simple-minded as to think that private citizens can overthrow foreign governments with impunity? How can he believe that he has any moral right to start a war just because he, personally, thinks it's necessary?”

“Lyndon Johnson greatly increased our involvement in Vietnam largely because he, personally, thought it was necessary. Nixon did the same thing in Cambodia, though on a smaller scale.”

“At least they were Presidents, elected officials!”

McAlister shrugged.

“How can West be so naive as to think that he has all the answers to the problems of the world?” The President's face was no longer bloodless; it was mottled by rage.

McAlister had worked it out in his mind, all of it, over and over again and he was tired of the subject. He just wanted to go somewhere and lie down and sleep for sixteen hours. From the moment he had entered the Oval Office, however, he had been carefully leading the President in one direction, toward one particular decision; and now that they were halfway to that decision, McAlister couldn't allow his weariness to distract him. “We allowed ITT and a couple of private companies to get away with overthrowing, or helping to overthrow, the Chilean government a few years back. That was a dangerous precedent.”

“But didn't they learn anything from that fiasco? Look what happened to Chile after the coup d'etat The military dictatorship was inefficient, inept, incompetent! Chile's inflation rate the first year after the coup was seven hundred percent! Because they interfered with the free market, unemployment eventually rose to fifty percent. There were riots in the streets!”

“I know all of that,” McAlister said. “And I'm sure that Rice and West know it too. But these people are what David Canning likes to call 'masturbating adolescents.' They live partly in a fantasy world. To them, there are never any crossroads in life, just forks in the road, never more than two choices, never more than two ways to see a thing: yes or no, good or bad, stop or go, buy or sell, do or don't, us or them.”

Frowning, the President said, “A lot of very nice people look at life that way.”

“Of course,” McAlister said. “But the difference between the nice people and the men like West and Rice is that the nice people, the decent people, aren't consumed by a lust for power.”

“Masturbating adolescents.”

“That's how Canning sees them. But that doesn't mean that they're harmless. Far from it. You read in the newspapers about wholesome teenage boys who murder their parents in the dead of night. A fool can be amusing — and be a killer at the same time.” He ran the tape ahead for a few seconds, stopped it, checked the numbers in the counter, and punched the Start button:

mcalister: Unless I'm mistaken, the Russian and Chinese operations are only two parts of a three-part plan.

rice: That's correct.

mcalister: The third part is for The Committee to take control of the U.S. government.