Читать книгу Power Play - Gavin Esler - Страница 12

Plans involving heads of state, kings, queens, presidents, vicepresidents and prime ministers are like plans involving oil tankers. They take a long time to execute. The idea of bringing Bobby Black over for a kiss-and-make-up trip to the Scottish Highlands took a while to ferment, and then required agreement from everyone you can think of: the Office of the Vice-President, the White House, the State Department, Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and Buckingham Palace.

The date was eventually set for the October of the Carr administration’s second year, two weeks before the mid-term elections when most of Congress is up for re-election. It seemed a long way in the future, but just the fact of the acceptance by Bobby Black helped improve relations between London and Washington. The Vice-President was interested. Enthusiastic. He asked Johnny Lee to get him books on grouse shooting. He knew that the birds fly at speeds of up to eighty miles an hour and he wanted to prepare himself as best he could. He commissioned family research from a genealogy company and instructed Johnny Lee that he needed to visit churches in the Aberdeenshire area to find graves of his ancestors. Perhaps most importantly, the plan to require British citizens of Pakistani origin to apply for special visas if they wanted to travel to the United States was quietly dropped.

‘At least for now,’ Johnny Lee Ironside told me. For me, ‘for now’ was good enough.

Susan Fein Black’s desire for the trip also helped. She quickly realized that the Queen was genuinely interested in horses and called me one evening to ask if Her Majesty would like to know about Mrs Black’s own rare-breeds programme for horses on her ranch in Montana. I said I would find out. It is one of the curiosities of the world that the more republican the country, the more fascinated the citizens are about the British royal family. After all their exertions to get rid of the monarchy, you might have thought Americans would be different, but they are not. Susan Black sounded unbelievably girlish on the phone.

The plans for the trip to Scotland started to develop. The Blacks were to go shooting, they were to have tea with the Queen–informal–and then come to a dinner–formal–with Her Majesty, other members of the royal family, and the Prime Minister. Then Davis and Black were to spend a whole day together trying to work through all their differences. Well, as I say, that was the plan.

The biggest thaw in US–UK relations came when I heard from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Hamish Martin, that the Queen would be delighted–(‘absolutely delighted, Alex,’)–to hear about the Montana rare-breeds programme, and Her Majesty wondered if, instead of joining her husband on the shoot, Mrs Black would care to visit a horse-breeding bloodstock facility near Balmoral in the company of the Queen herself.

(‘Very, very informal,’ Sir Hamish whispered to me.)

When I phoned the Naval Observatory to relay this request, a secretary passed me over to Susan Black in person, and I could again feel the excitement in her voice. I imagined her turning cartwheels across the floor. A little royal stardust had been sprinkled on the visit. Even the dark heart of the Vice-President began to melt under its influence.

Over the next months, as I spent more and more time organizing these few days in Scotland, things with Kristina changed completely. From the moment Fiona had left me I had been busy and lonely, although the busy part usually helped me forget about the lonely part. I soon realized that, at every stage, seeing Kristina seemed to help. Perhaps it was that my friends and family were all in London, hers all in California. Whatever the reason, we became closer and closer. She confided in me how she continually felt sidelined. She had been specifically forbidden by Bobby Black from playing any part in his National Energy Security Taskforce, even though it dealt with areas–the Arab world and Iran, mostly–in which Kristina spoke the main language and had special experience.

‘It’s like I’m the National Security Wife,’ she told me bitterly, biting energetically at a bagel with cream cheese at one of our regular breakfasts. ‘I get allowed to dress up and look good, but when it comes to anything important, the men go talk somewhere else. I need to find a way around this.’

We both knew there was no way, not unless Kristina was prepared to take on Bobby Black directly. But that would be a battle she was destined to lose.

‘Can’t the President…?’ I wondered.

‘He doesn’t want to lose his impeachment insurance,’ Kristina joked. She was helping herself to scrambled eggs. I said I didn’t understand. She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation.

‘We have a Democratic Congress, Alex,’ she explained, her eyebrow arching skyward, ‘you with me so far? The Democrats are hoping to pick up seats in the mid-terms, big time.’

I nodded. The American political process, to outsiders at least, seems like a series of permanent elections. Presidents are elected every four years, but Congressional elections take place every two years, and in the ‘mid-terms’ all of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election.

‘Arlo Luntz says the polls look bad and that Bobby Black is to blame. Vice is very unpopular, Arlo says. A vote-loser. And the Democrats are claiming he was at the heart of the corruption in the Iraq contracts. They say there were kickbacks from Goldcrest and Warburton to the Carr campaign. But even under a flaky liberal like Speaker Betty Furedi, no Democrat will ever impeach President Carr, no matter what he does wrong, if they know he will be succeeded by President Black.’

I must have looked stunned at this impeachment talk. ‘Theo Carr hasn’t done something really bad, has he?’

‘It’s a joke, Alex,’ Kristina laughed, and I felt her hand gently on my arm. She paused for a moment and scowled. ‘Kind of.’

I laughed too, as much at my own inadequacies as at her humour. She poured me a fresh black coffee. I always had gossip to trade, and Kristina usually listened more than she spoke, but that morning it was like some kind of therapy for her to get it all out.

‘Luntz told me he advised the President to make sure Bobby Black goes to Scotland on your shooting trip in the run-up to the mid-terms,’ Kristina told me. ‘Says the further Vice is away from the campaign, the better. I even think Arlo wants the President to drop Bobby Black from his own re-election ticket, but that’s real tricky.’

For me this was all heady stuff. Knowing who was up and who was down at the White House was a key part of my job. I had some gossip of my own to trade.

‘Vice enjoys being thought of as the President’s Dark Side,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’ Kristina looked at me, stunned. ‘What do you mean, enjoys?’

‘Johnny Lee Ironside told me. We have a few beers from time to time. We talk.’

I had mentioned the Congressional hearings into the Iraq contracts to Johnny Lee. The Vice-President had been described in all kinds of ways, usually beginning with the prefix ‘Un-’–uncooperative, unforthcoming, unreliable, unwilling to appear before the Joint House and Senate Investigative Committee, and then–when he was subpoenaed and had no choice but to appear, he pleaded executive privilege, refusing to say on what basis the contracts had been awarded to Warburton, except that it was a ‘national security matter’. He was declared uncommunicative and unhelpful.

‘That shit makes his goddamn day,’ Johnny Lee laughed. He told me the Vice-President routinely asked his staff to search out any negative comments in newspapers that suggested he represented President Carr’s ‘Dark Side’, so he could have the best ones framed for his Ego Wall. An ‘Ego Wall’ is the wall in the private office of any Washington politician dedicated to the qualifications and citations that mean the most to the Big Political Beast–military honours, photographs showing the Big Beast shaking hands with a past president, a world leader or Hollywood movie star, plus university degrees and military citations.

‘You want to put the Boss in a good mood,’ Johnny Lee Ironside had told me, ‘tell him some pinko Democrat bedwetter like Hurd or Furedi called him a mean SOB: that’ll do it. The sun comes out all over Planet Black.’ Johnny Lee giggled like a schoolboy. ‘Ma-aaan, he Baaa-aaaad!’

Kristina looked at me, fascinated, as if I was reporting on a new species of ape from the African jungle or an alien civilization discovered on a distant planet.

‘Un-fucking-believable,’ was all she said. Then she traded one further important piece of insider gossip. She handed me a draft speech that Vice-President Black was about to deliver at the US Naval College at Annapolis, Maryland, to a class of midshipmen. I pushed my scrambled egg to one side and started to read.

‘The next stage in Spartacus,’ Kristina suggested.

‘All options remain open’, the Vice-President was scheduled to say, ‘when dealing with Iran.’ In case journalists were too stupid to get the point, he added, ‘Including military options. Neutrality on Iran’s nuclear programme is immoral. The programme itself is immoral. It has to be stopped. It is a threat to Israel, to other countries in the region, and to world peace. An Iranian regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons is a nightmare for the entire world. The administration of President Theo Carr will end the nightmare. We will do so by all necessary means.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. ‘All necessary means’ is the phrase diplomats use when they want to threaten a war. ‘We need to tone this down.’

Kristina nodded.

‘He’s getting ahead of where the President is,’ she said. ‘Vice says that unless we are prepared to at least threaten an attack, the Iranians will not take us seriously, and the Israelis will go ahead anyway, with extreme prejudice.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘The Israelis would need to fly through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace. If you didn’t want them to do so, they couldn’t.’

Kristina shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s not my point. Once Vice makes public any kind of threat against Iran, we will end up going to war. I know how he operates. He will argue that our credibility is at stake and we have to follow through. It’s like World War One–you have train timetables and you start mobilizing your soldiers and in the end you can’t stop the war even if you want to. But that’s not the worst. The Israelis are letting it be known that the bunker-busters that we supplied them cannot get the job done.’

Bunker-busters are bombs or missiles capable of causing an explosion a long way underground.

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘which is why negotiations are the only way …’

She interrupted again, very impatiently. ‘Which is why there are those within the Israeli government who are talking about Canned Sunshine.’ My jaw dropped. ‘Canned Sunshine’ is a military expression for a nuclear bomb. ‘They are calling for nuclear pre-emption.’

‘Nuclear pre-emption?’ I blurted out. ‘That’s … that’s like committing suicide because you fear dying. They couldn’t possibly drop a nuke …’ She waved me quiet.

‘Vice says Spartacus applies to states as well as to individuals, and if ever a regime needed to be crucified, it’s the Iranians. He wants to hit them after the mid-terms. Or to get the Israelis to do it.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said.

‘And if we do go in, we will call on all possible support from all our allies. Which means you, Alex.’

I didn’t feel like eating breakfast any more. I drank my coffee and left to return to the embassy, where I called Downing Street immediately on the secure line.

‘How do we feel about being sucked into war with Iran?’ I said to Andy Carnwath.

‘What the fuck do you mean, Alex?’

I explained about Canned Sunshine. For once Andy Carnwath could not think of any expletives appropriate to the information.

Later that night, around midnight, I was lying on my bed reading a book, sipping whisky and water and listening to a CD of Charlie Parker. Kristina called me on my private cellphone.

‘You’re up late,’ I said.

‘You got time to talk?’

‘Of course.’

I pushed the book I was reading to one side. It was called Sleepwalking to Hell, a recently published history of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, written by Kristina’s former lover, the University of California history professor Stephen Haddon. A liberal, I guessed, with a strong libertarian streak. Haddon argued that the transition from a sophisticated and prosperous Weimar democracy to a Nazi dictatorship was not one catastrophic leap. It was a series of little steps.

Any one of these steps might seem sensible by itself because the German people wanted to escape Bolshevism, anarchy, and economic collapse, but taken together they led decent people inexorably towards the Nazis. Haddon wrote in his preface that it could happen again. Terror produced terrified people, and terrified people made bad decisions.

‘Is that jazz?’ Kristina said.

I turned it down.

‘Charlie Parker.’

‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Just perfect.’

Kristina was on her way home. President Carr and the First Lady, Rosa Carr, had invited her to the private White House movie theatre to watch a film with the Carr family, Bobby Black and his wife Susan, Arlo Luntz, and a couple of Democratic senators that Theo Carr had decided he should get to know better. The senators were on the Armed Services Committee, and Carr was still after more money for the Pentagon budget. It was a huge mark of confidence in Kristina to be invited to share private time with the President, and she was bubbling with enthusiasm. I wasn’t really listening. I had something I had been meaning to say, and that night I said it.

‘Instead of going home, Kristina, why not come here right now. Spend the night with me.’

She giggled. Then the line went quiet.

‘You mean it, Alex?’

‘Yes, I mean it,’ I said. ‘I have meant it for months.’