'In various forms it is throughout Europe,' said Guido. 'Here in Switzerland I think many of the youth are concerned, but only a small percentage riot, and that is concentrated in the cities.'
'Bern, too?'
'A little,' said Guido, 'but not so much. The Bernese have their own ways of doing things. They don't like confrontation. I think, perhaps, the authorities in Bern are handling it better.'
'I thought you were suggesting that the Bernese were a little stupid,' Fitzduane, recalling an earlier remark by Guido.
'Slow; I didn't say they weren't smart. But I'd like to show you something.' He smiled, then stood up and went over to a closet and removed a bulky object. He placed the assault rifle on the dining room table against a backdrop of cheese and empty wine bottles. The weapon glistened dully in the candlelight. The bipod was in place.
'The SG-57,' said Fitzduane. 'Caliber 7.5 millimeter, magazine capacity twenty-four rounds, self-loading or fully automatic, effective range up to four hundred and fifty meters. No dinner table is complete without one.'
'Always the weapons expert,' said Guido.
Fitzduane shrugged.
'About six hundred thousand Swiss homes contain one of these rifles,' said Guido, 'together with a sealed container of twenty-four rounds of ammunition. Just about every male between the ages of twenty and fifty is in the army. Over six hundred and fifty thousand men can be fully mobilized within hours. We are prepared to fight to stay at peace. The army is the one major social organization that binds the Swiss together.'
'Supposing you don't want to join?'
'Provided you are in good health,' said Guido, 'at twenty years of age, in you go. If you refuse, it's prison for six months or so – and afterward there can be problems in getting a federal job, and other penalties. But there are more important things to know about the army. It's not just an experience common to all Swiss males between the ages of twenty and fifty. It is also one of the main meeting grounds of the power elite.
'You start off in the army as an ordinary soldier. You do your seventeen weeks of basic training and then you return to civilian life with your uniform and rifle – until next year, when you do a couple of week's refresher course, and so on, until you are fifty.
'However, the best of the recruits are invited to become corporals and then officers, and later, conceivably, they end of on the general staff. There are about fifty thousand officers, and only two thousand of these are general staff – and it is officers of the general staff who dominate the power structure in this country. The higher you go in the Swiss Army, they more time you have to put in away from your civilian job. We call it ‘paying your grade.’ That's especially difficult for an ordinary worker or a self-employed businessman. As a result, the general staff and, to a lesser extent, the officer corps as a whole are dominated by senior executives of the large banks, industrial corporations, and the government.'
'In Eisenhower's phrase, ‘the military-industrial complex,’' said Fitzduane.
'He was talking about America,' said Guido, 'and collusion between the military and big business. Here it is not just collusion. The senior army officers and the senior corporate executives are the same people. They don't just make the weapons; they buy them and use them.'
'But only for practice,' said Fitzduane.
'That's the good part.'
Later, when the exhausted Guido had retired, Christina showed Fitzduane to his room. By the window there was a huge potted plant that was making a serious attempt to reach up and strangle the light bulb.
'It's doing well,' Christina said proudly. 'It came from England in a milk bottle.'
'A two-meter-high milk bottle?' said Fitzduane.
'It grew since then.'
'What's it called?'
'It's a papyrus,' said Christina. 'The same thing that's at the head of your bed.'
'Jesus!' exclaimed Fitzduane. 'How fast do these things grow?'
Kadar did not speak. He was remembering.
He wondered if he should have felt remorse. In truth he hadn't felt much of anything immediately after the event except an overwhelming feeling of fatigue mixed with a quiet satisfaction that he had been able to do it. He had passed the test. He had an inner strength possessed by few people. He was born to control.
He tried not to remember how he had felt one day later. From the time he had woken he had been unable to stop shaking, and the spasms had continued for most of that day. 'Classic reaction to shock,' the doctor had said sympathetically. Kadar had lain there in quiet despair while his body betrayed him. In later years he had undergone training in a variety of Eastern combat disciplines to fuse his mental and physical strength, and the post-action shock had not manifested itself again. Very occasionally he wondered if such stress symptoms were nonetheless there, but in a more insidious, invisible way, like the hairline cracks of metal fatigue in an aircraft.
The silence continued for several minutes. Kadar was caught up in the excitement of that time and the almost unremitting stimulation offered by his new life in the States. The greatest surprise of that period had not been the luxury of his new home, or access to all the material goods he could reasonably want, or the effect of an environment in which almost anything seemed to be possible. It had been the attitude of his father.
At their first meeting in Havana, Henry Bridgenorth Lodge had been cold, hard, and cynical – almost dispassionate. He needed a son to satisfy his wife. So be it. Subsequently, although his manner remained superficially distant and though the hardness and cynicism proved to be real enough, Lodge displayed a concern for and attention to his son's well-being that almost made Kadar drop his guard and develop an affection for him.
Kadar had to exert all his formidable sense of purpose and self-discipline to resist an emotion that threatened to overwhelm his sixteen-year-old frame. He reminded himself again and again that to be in control, truly in control, he must remain above conventional emotions. He repeated this constantly in the privacy of his room at night even while the tears trickled down his cheeks and his body was suffused by feelings he could not, or would not, begin to understand.
Shortly after he had settled into his new home – a comfortable twenty-minute drive from Langley – he was subjected to what seemed like a barrage of examinations and tests to help determine how the next phase of his education might best be carried out.
It emerged that he was unusually gifted. His IQ was in the top 0.1 percent of the population. He had an ear for languages. He showed considerable artistic promise. His physical coordination was excellent. He was an impressive if to outstanding athlete.
It was clear that a conventional school would not be adequate. For the first year he was tutored privately. Lodge tapped into the immense pool of highly qualified academics and analysts that were part of the CIA community, and Kadar was exposed to a quality of mind and a sharpness of intellect that up until then he had only read about. It was exciting. And he flourished both intellectually and physically.
For his second academic year he was sent to a special school for the gifted, supplemented by private tutoring, a routine that was to remain constant until he left Harvard. It was during this second year that he discovered he had charm and a naturally magnetic personality – and that he could use these qualities to manipulate people to his own ends.
He was conscious that his experience in dealing with people was inadequate and that such a deficiency could be a weakness. He studied other people's reactions to him and worked hard to improve his overt personality. The public persona became further divorced from the inner reality. He became one of the most popular boys in his class.
Lodge had some instinctive understanding of the nature of the son he was nurturing. He knew there were risks, yet his perception was counterbalanced by a weakness: Lodge was excited by talent. To such a man, Kadar, who responded to intellectual and other stimuli in such an attractive, dynamic way, was irresistible. It was like having a garden where every seed germinated and flourished. Educating, training, and encouraging this astonishing young stranger who was his son became an obsession.
Henry Bridgenorth Lodge came from a family that had been so wealthy for so long that career satisfaction could not be achieved by something as mundane as making money. The Bridgenorth Lodges did make money, a
