and lawyers, and lobbyists, and somewhere along the way the taxpaying citizens are just plain forgotten. We don't care that they can't make sense of the system that's supposed to serve them. It's not supposed to be that way.' Winston leaned into the microphone. 'I'll tell you what I think 'fair' means. I think it means that we all bear the same burden in the same proportion. I think it means that the system not only allows but encourages us to participate in the economy. I think it means that we promulgate simple and comprehensible laws so that people know where they stand. I think 'fair' means that it's a level playing field, and everybody gets the same breaks, and that we don't punish Ken Griffey for hitting home runs. We admire him. We try to emulate him. We try to make more like him. And we keep out of his way.'
'Let 'em eat cake?' the chief of staff said.
'We can't say hot dogs, can we?' Kealty asked. Then he smiled broadly. 'Finally.'
'Finally,' another aide agreed.
THE RESULTS WERE all equivocal. The FBI polygrapher had been working all morning, and every single set of tracings on the fan-fold paper was iffy. It couldn't be helped. An all-night session, they'd all told him, looking into something important which he wasn't cleared for. That made it the Iran/Iraq situation, of course. He could watch CNN as well as anyone. The men he'd put on the box were all tired and irritable, and some had fluttered badly on telling him their proper names and job descriptions, and the whole exercise had been useless. Probably.
'Did I pass?' Rutledge asked, when he took off the pressurized armband in the manner of someone who'd done this all before.
'Well, I'm sure you've been told before—'
'It's not a pass-or-fail examination process,' the Under Secretary of State said tiredly. 'Yeah, tell that to somebody who lost his clearance because of a session on the box. I hate the damned things, always have.'
It was right up—or down—there with being a dentist, the FBI agent thought, and though he was one of the best around at this particular black art, he'd learned nothing this day that would help the investigation.
'The session you had last night—' Rutledge cut him off cold. 'Can't discuss it, sorry.'
'No, I mean, this sort of thing normal here?'
'It will be for a while, probably. Look, you know what it's about, probably.' The agent nodded, and the Under Secretary did the same.
'Fine. Then you know it's a big deal, and we're going to be burning a lot of midnight oil over it, especially my people. So, lots of coffee and long hours and short tempers.' He checked his watch. 'My working group gets together in ten minutes. Anything else?'
'No, sir.'
'Thanks for a fun ninety minutes,' Rutledge said, heading for the door. It was so easy. You just had to know how the things worked. They wanted relaxed and peaceful subjects to get proper results—the polygraph essentially measured tension induced by awkward questions. So make everybody tense. That was simple enough. And really the Iranians were doing the work. All he had to do was stoke the fires a little. That was good for a smile as he entered the executive washroom.
THERE. MOVIE STAR checked his watch and made a further mental note. Two men walked out of the private dwelling. One of them turned to say something as he closed the door. They walked to the parking lot of Giant Steps, eyes scanning around in a way that identified them as positively as uniforms and rifles. The Chevy Suburban emerged from the private garage. A good hiding place, but a little too obvious to the skilled observer. Two children came out together, one led by a woman, the other by a man… yes, the one who'd been in the shadowed doorway when they'd gone out for their afternoon playtime. Large man, formidable one. Two women, one in front, one behind. All the heads turning and scanning. They took the child to a plain car. The Suburban halted in front of the driveway, and the other cars followed it down the highway, with a police car, he saw, fifteen seconds behind.
It would be a difficult task, but not an impossible one, and the mission had several different outcomes, all acceptable to his patrons. Just as well that he didn't get sentimental about children. He'd been involved in such missions before, and you simply couldn't look at them as children at all. The one who'd been led by the large hand of her bodyguard was what he'd decided before, a political statement to be made by someone else. Allah would not have approved. Movie Star knew that. There was not a religion in the world that sanctioned harm to a child, but religions were not instruments of statecraft, regardless of what Badrayn's current superior might believe. Religions were something for an ideal world, and the world wasn't ideal. And so one might use unusual means to serve religious goals, and that meant… something he simply didn't think about. It was business, his business, to see what could be done, rules or not, and Movie Star wasn't the least bit sanctimonious about it, which, he thought, was probably why he was still alive while others were not— and, if he read this properly, still others would not be.
28 BUT A WHIMPER
POLITICIANS RARELY LIKE surprises. Much as they enjoy dropping them on others— mainly other politicians, usually in public, and invariably delivered with all the care and planning of a jungle ambush—they reciprocally detest being on the receiving end. And that was just the political sort, in countries where politics was a fairly civilized business.
In Turkmenistan, things had not gotten that far yet. The Premier—he had a wide variety of titles to choose from, and he liked this one better than 'president' — enjoyed everything about his life and his office. As a chieftain of the semi-departed Communist Party, he would have lived under greater personal restrictions than were now the case, and would always be at the end of a telephone line to Moscow, like a brook fish at the end of a long leader. But not now. Moscow no longer had the reach, and he had become too large a fish. He was a vigorous man in his late fifties and, as he liked to joke, a man of the people. The «people» in this case had been an attractive clerk of twenty years who, after an evening of fine dining and a little ethnic dancing (at which he excelled), had entertained him as only a young woman could, and now he was driving back to his official residence under a clear, starry sky, sitting in the right-front seat of his black Mercedes with the sated smile of a man who'd just proven that that's what he was, in the best possible way. Perhaps he'd wangle a promotion for the girl… in a few weeks. His was the exercise of, if not absolute power, then surely enough for any man, and with that came near-utter contentment. Popular with his people as an earthy, common-folk sort of leader, he knew how to act, how to sit with the people, how to grasp a hand or a shoulder, always in front of TV cameras to show that he was one of them. 'Cult of personality' was what the former regime had called it, and that's what it was, and that, he knew for sure, was what all politics had to be. His was a great responsibility, and he met that duty, and in return he was owed some things. One of them was this fine German automobile— smuggling that into the country had been an exercise in panache rather than corruption—and another was now returning to her bed with a smile and a sigh. And life was good. He didn't know he had less than sixty seconds of it left.
He didn't bother with a police escort. His people loved him. He was sure of that, too, and besides it was late. But there was a police car, he saw, at an intersection, its light turning and flashing, blocking the way, just beyond the cross street. A dismounted policeman raised his hand while talking into his radio, hardly even looking at them. The Premier wondered what the problem was. His driver/ bodyguard slowed the Mercedes with an annoyed snort, stopping it right in the intersection and making sure his pistol was readily accessible. Barely had the official car stopped when both of them heard a noise to their right. The Premier turned that way, and scarcely had time for his eyes to go wide before the Zil-157 truck hit him at forty kilometers per hour. The high military-style bumper hit just at the bottom of the door glass, and the official car was thrown ten meters to the left, stopping when it hit the stone walls of an office building. Then it was time for the policeman to walk over, assisted by two others who had appeared from the shadows. The driver was dead from a broken neck. The policemen could see that from the angle of his head, and one of them reached through the shattered windshield to shake it around, just to make sure. But the Premier, to everyone's astonishment, was still moaning, despite his injuries. Due to all the drink, they thought, his body limp and limber. Well, that was easily fixed. The senior cop walked to the truck, flipped open the tool box, took a tire iron, returned, and smashed it against the side of his Premier's head just forward of the ear. That task completed, he tossed the tool back to the truck driver, and the premier of Turkmenistan was dead as the result of an auto accident. Well, then, their country would have to have elections, wouldn't it? That would be something of a first, and it would call for a leader whom the people knew and respected.
'SENATOR, IT'S BEEN a long day,' Tony Bretano agreed. 'And it's been rather a long couple of weeks for me,
