He could feel their eyes on him. He cracked a little smile. All the pointy heads, listening to him.
'But Ralph Goldstein had published a paper in Duke Higher Mathematics Quarterly, which he called 'Certain Higher Algorhythmic Functions of Topographical Form Reading in Orbital Applications.' Don't mean a thing to me. But guess what? We now got about 350 satellites in orbit watching the world because Ralph Goldstein figured out the math of it. He was only a grad student, and he himself didn't even know it, but he'd been picked to join the staff at the Satellite Committee at the Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab in Maryland, where they did all the high- power number crunching that made the satellite program possible. Okay, so what his death meant practically was it took us three extra years to get terrain-recognition birds in the air. If it matters, that's three years where the Sovs upgraded their own satellite program, and closed a gap in the Cold War. That's three more years that kept them in the race. Which one of you geniuses or experts can tell me which part of Soviet staff was responsible for strategic warfare?'
'GRU,' came the reply.
'That's right. And what was Pashin?'
'GRU.'
'That's right. So guess what? His job wasn't to stop the war in Vietnam. He didn't give a shit about the war in Vietnam, or about Trig Carter or about nothing. It was to kill a little Jewish guy in an office in Madison, Wisconsin, who was just about to put the Americans way ahead in the Cold War. Kill him in such a way that no one would ever, in a hundred years, think it had to do with the Russians.
Kill him in such a way that no one would even think about his death but only about the death of the man who killed him. To make him an extra in his own murder. That was Pashin's mission: it was straight GRU wet work, a murder job. Trig Carter and the peace movement were just part of the props.'
He could hear them breathing heavily in the room, but no one spoke.
'And don't you see the cynicism in it, the goddamned motherfucking brilliance? They knew this country so goddamn well. They just knew that when any of you Ivy League heroes looked at that data, you couldn't see past Trig, because, no matter which side he was on, he was one of you. That would be the tragedy, and the fog it would release in your little pea fucking brains would keep you from ever figuring it out. It takes an outsider, someone who ain't been to no college and doesn't think the word Harvard or Yale means shit in this world. It takes gutter trash rednecks who you all pay to do the dirty work with the rifles so you can sit in your clubs and make ironic little jokes. Or plan your little wars that the Swaggers and the Fenns and the Goldsteins have to go fight.'
The silence lasted for a long moment.
Then finally, Bonson spoke: 'Class anger aside, does this make any sense to you Skull and Bones boys?'
It took a while, but finally someone said, almost laconically, 'Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It even explains why it's happening now. It puts them in a desperate situation.
They--that's PAMYAT, the old GRU security bunch hiding behind nationalism and financed by mob money-have to keep this information quiet. They couldn't take a chance that just as he's closing in on the presidency, their man is revealed as a murderer of American nationals on American soil. That would make it impossible for him to work with any American president or with big American corporations. That information has to be buried at all costs. Their lives, their futures, their party depend on it.
They had to eliminate the last witness, particularly as Pashin's fame is getting bigger and bigger.'
'Sir,' said someone else, 'I think we could game out some very interesting tactical deployment for this information.
We might have a hand ourselves in determining who their next president is.'
'Okay,' said Bonson, 'you game it out. But I want it going in one direction. I want to kill this motherfucker.'
PART IV
BACK TO THE WORLD
The Present
CHAPTER fifty.
The snow didn't last. It melted on the third day after it had fallen, causing floods in the lowlands, closing roads, wrecking bridges, creating mud slides. But on Upper Cedar Creek it was a serene day, with blue skies, eastern zephyrs and creeks full of sparkling water. The pines shed their cloak of snow, the grass began to emerge, green and lush, and seemingly undamaged by the ordeal.
By now the excitement was over. Bonson had departed with a handshake the previous morning, after ensuring that a quickly convened Custer County grand jury found no culpability in the death by misadventure of one Frank Vborny, of Cleveland, Ohio, as the fake identification documents read in the dead sniper's pocket. Ballistics confirmed that indeed Mr. Vbomy had shot and killed two innocent people in the Custer County Idaho Bell substation in Mackay, obviously a berserker, he next attacked a house that was luckily rented out by a gun owner, who was able to defend himself. The gun owner's name was never published but that was all right, and in Idaho most people took satisfaction from the moral purity of the episode and its subtle endorsement of the great old Second Amendment, a lesson most Westerners felt had been forgotten in the East.
Up in the mountains, the state police had pulled out, the helicopters and all the young men and women had gone back to wherever it was they came from, and there was little sign that they'd been there.
Bob and Julie had a check, in the odd sum of $146,589.07, and had no idea how that exact figure had been selected. It was from the Department of the Treasury, and the invoice banally read, 'Consultancy,' with the proper dates listed and his Social Security number.
The last of the security team left, the rifle and recovered Beretta were returned, the foam case with its cargo marked officially as 'operational loss,' and Sally had taken Nikki for a walk down to the mailbox on Route 93, when he at last had an opportunity to talk to his wife.
'Well, howdy,' he said.
'Hi,' she said. Doctors had examined her after her ordeal, she was in fine shape, her collarbone knitting properly. She seemed much stronger now, and was able to get about better. Sally would soon be leaving.
'Well, I have some things to say. Care to have a listen?'
