“Naturally,” Bigelow tossed back, as though he had never trashed the German repatriation program on television worldwide, “and when folks are unhappy, Fritz, no tellin' what they'll do. Now let's us just suppose for a minute that we've got a different group of unhappy people runnin' around Berlin. Turks'd make real good whipping boys, wouldn't you say, for anybody else operating in the region?”
“Perhaps. But whether we are talking about the Palestinians or the Islamic fundamentalists or even the Kosovo Liberation Army, Jack, we both know that we are talking about the same thing. Third-world extremists who bring their battles right to the doorsteps of Europe and the United States. We have got to start cutting the ground from beneath their feet. Denying them a platform from which to launch their attacks.”
“Sending 'em back home, eh, Fritz? Well, as we like to say around here, that's just openin' a whole nut her can of whup-ass, now i'n'it?”
“Pardon?”
It was as well, Dare thought, that Voekl couldn't see the joyful malice on the President's face.
“Just an expression,” Bigelow said. “You know how much I deplore the use of terrorism. Jack.”
“Don't we all.”
“But you will agree, I am sure, that a nation without hope may naturally turn to violence to achieve its ends.”
“That's the story of America, Fritz.”
“Yes, well .. . you have publicly stated that the fight to end terrorism will be this century's greatest challenge. I agree I have always agreed and I am ready to help you in your fight. For fifty-five years the German people have stood on the front line of Western civilization. Beyond us, and the protection of our culture, lies all the anarchy of the East. We have already begun to see the destructive tide of Muslim immigrants from Yugoslavia and the disintegrating Central Asian republics. They all end up in Germany eventually, ripe for violence.”
“Not to mention the Palestinians you folks've been harboring for decades,” Bigelow added.
“The policies of my predecessors were lamentably lax. But I know that terrorism will be the twenty-first century's Cold War, Jack and I remember the Cold War better than most.”
“It was the making of you, Fritz, as I recall.”
Before he had founded the Social Conservatives in the former East Germany, Fritz Voekl had been a rising star of the Communist Party. He'd begun public life as the young director of the most efficient munitions complex in Thuringia; he'd parlayed that success into a berth in the Party hierarchy. By 1988, however, it was clear that Voekl found the Party too confining. He publicly denounced Communism and was imprisoned for his pains. That act of defiance instantly made him a local hero. Not to mention a political phoenix. When the Party structure collapsed like faulty scaffolding a year later, bringing the Wall and everyone down with it, Voekl was set free to enjoy the show. He opened champagne amidst the barbed wire, he swung a pickax at Checkpoint Charlie. He had always possessed an exquisite sense of timing and a shrewd ability to read the people's mood.
“So it was,” he said to Jack Bigelow now. “I learned many lessons from my life behind the Iron Curtain. Chief among them is this: The nation that denies a people hope will never win the war. A nation that gives its people hope, Jack, gives them a reason to fight.”
“And you see hope as … ?”
“Money, Jack. Money. If I can pour deutsche marks into the developing economies of my buffer states Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, even Poland with time, I will turn despair into hope. I will deny the terrorists a foothold for their anarchy. And protect those who fall within the German sphere of influence.”
Dare frowned slightly at the phrase “German sphere of influence.” But Bigelow was tired of chatter. He made a lewd gesture in the speakerphone's direction something suggestive of a giant hand job and prepared to sign off.
“Listen, Fritz, we're always glad to know you fellas in the Federal Republic are fightin' the good fight. You get any news of Sophie Payne, you call me right away, y'hear? I'll be sendin' those Bureau boys over to Berlin ASAP.”
“Thank you, Jack.”
“You give that pretty little daughter of yours my best, okay? Bye, now.”
Bigelow snapped off the speakerphone, then glanced around the faces assembled in the Oval Office. There was Matthew Finch, the National Security Advisor, a quiet, bespectacled, kindhearted man with an absolute intolerance for bullshit; Gerard O'Neill, Bigelow's Secretary of State, who was drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair; Al Tomlinson, the FBI director; and General Clayton Phillips, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Phillips frowned as he studied his notes.
“Hope, my ass,” Bigelow drawled. “Somebody better tell my friend Fritz about Osama bin Laden, terrorist billionaire. Now that's the kind of money gives people hope. Wouldn't you say so, Dare?”
“A chicken and an AK-47 in every pot,” she replied. “One can hardly blame Voekl, Mr. President. He has to be feeling rather stupid right now.”
“He may sound that way, Dare, but problem is, Fritz is no dummy.” Bigelow lifted his boots off the desk and thrust himself out of his chair. “So what's he tryin' to pull, anyway? I call him about Sophie, and I get a stump speech about investment opportunities in Central Europe.”
“Trying to change the subject?” suggested Al Tomlinson, the FBI director.
“Then he's doing a lousy job of it,” said O'Neill, the Secretary of State. “No bunch of disaffected gastarbeiters kidnapped the Vice President. A bomb in Berlin gets them nothing but bad press.”
“I agree.” Dare glanced down at her notes, feverishly thrown together in the past forty minutes by a senior analyst in DI/OREA.
“But the Berlin police have issued a curfew for all Turkish aliens resident in the city and placed a cordon of riot police around guest-worker neighborhoods to deter reprisals. They're also conducting a house-to-house search for the Vice President and her captors. We don't believe they'll find a trace of them in Germany. In our opinion, the terrorists are long gone.”
“I can see Turkish extremists bombing the Gate,” the President said thoughtfully, “but not snatching Sophie in a stolen chopper.”
“They'd be more likely to kill her outright, just to make the German government look bad,” agreed Matthew Finch.
“Or target a German they hate, like Voekl.”
“Who, instead of being dead, now has the ideal excuse to hit the Turks harder. Do me a favor, Dare.” Bigelow wheeled suddenly toward her. “Start snoopin' in Fritz Voekl's backyard, okay? I want to know what time his daughter Kiki's curfew is, who Fritz calls for phone sex late at night, whether he puts whole milk or two percent on his Wheaties in the morning.”
“Done.”
“Fritz Voekl wasn't flying that chopper,” objected Gerard O'Neill.
“No. But he wasn't in the square to take the blast, either, now was he, Gerry?”
Bigelow pinned him with a look.
“Any of your cookie-pushers over in the Bottom of the Fog get a better idea, you be sure an' send 'em to me.”
O'Neill smiled nervously.
“I think we can usefully speculate about the parties responsible,” Dare interjected. “The resident Turks are probably a scapegoat. Both the Voekl regime and possibly several other groups operating in the region would kill to discredit them publicly.”
“Could be Kurdish separatists,” Al Tomlinson said abruptly. “They love it when Turks get egg on their faces.”
“But the PKK has been in disarray in recent months,” Dare pointed out, “since Turkish forces captured their leader.”
“Who snatched all those guys from Beirut in the eighties?” The President glanced around inquiringly.
“Terry Anderson. Bill Buckley. That whole bunch. Who grabbed them?”
“Hizballah.” Dare had spent most of the eighties on the National Security Council, frantically trying to get the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, home before he died of torture. She had failed. Jack Bigelow, on the other hand, had spent the eighties reinventing himself from corporate raider to the most trusted man in America.
