‘Well,’ said Rick, ‘that’s what I know it to be.’
‘You know about this?’ asked Kathy, in disbelief. ‘You know about Cuba and Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe?’
‘I don’t know about Marilyn Monroe - what about Marilyn Monroe?’
‘She was killed because she was involved in all this, whatever it is. But not in 1962 … this month, only a week ago.’
Rick said, ‘Listen, I’ll have to come clean with you people. I intended to a little later anyway. But our meeting out there on the Pacific Coast Highway wasn’t an accident. I’d been following your car for two days, seeing what you were up to. When you stopped by the beach, my friend left me by the side of the highway there, and I asked you for a ride. If you’d turned me down, well, my friend would have picked me up straight away and we would have followed you again. But we reckoned that you looked like the kind of people who might give a guy
a ride in their car - and that hitching a ride would be one of the best ways of getting to know you.’
‘Who are you?’ Kathy asked him. ‘Are you some kind of detective, or what? You’re obviously not in cahoots with those people.’ She nodded towards the bathroom where Skellett was locked up.
‘No, I’m not,’ said Rick. He tugged his fingers through his hair, and stretched himself out, relaxing. ‘I’m the chapter chief of Free Columbia. You’ve heard of Free Columbia?’
Daniel shook his head, but Kathy said, ‘I’ve heard some rumours about it. It’s supposed to be an amalgamation of all the subversive groups of the 1960s, isn’t it? The Panthers, the Weathermen, the Yippies. Some people even say ex-Mansonites, the Dune Buggy Attack Battalion.’
‘Whatever you’ve read about it, or heard about it, is bullshit, said Rick. ‘Free Columbia was a get-together of all these groups to liberate America from one thing and one thing only: the Soviets. Of course, the propaganda you get in the media makes us out to be a bunch of irresponsible terrorists. And anybody who attempts to stand up and tell the truth gets wasted pretty quickly. But it’s true. Ever since 1962 the United States has been controlled by a Soviet committee, chaired by an old-time Bolshevik politician they call Ikon.’
‘Are you high or something?’ Daniel demanded.
I wish I was, Rick told him. ‘But I’m not, and it’s true. Kennedy didn’t succeed in facing down Khruschev over the Cuban missiles at all. By the time the “Cuban missile crisis” was supposed to be coming to a head, the Russians were already in charge, and infiltrating the government and the armed forces. As far as any of us have been able to find out the missile crisis was simply a way of concealing the shift in government and giving the American public a feeling of false security. It also made the fake “disarmament” talks of 1963 seem justified. You know, we’ve licked the Russians, let’s be magnanimous.’
Daniel said, ‘You’re trying to tell me that the Soviet Union is in charge of America? That’s what you’re saying?’
‘Don’t worry,Rick reassured him. ‘Everybody reacts the same way when they first find out. A couple of people I know have even committed suicide. You know, suddenly they discover that the life they’ve been living for the past twenty years was something altogether different. The world is someplace alien and strange.’
‘But how can it possibly have been kept a secret for so long? When so many people must know?’
‘How did Hitler keep the concentration camps secret? How did Stalin conceal the deaths of thousands of Russians? A secret doesn’t have to be too much of a secret if you can enforce its secrecy with terror. You say they killed Marilyn Monroe, recently. Well, I believe you. That’s exactly the way they do things. They never let you escape. They hunt you down and hunt you down until they find you, and then they kill you and there’s no mercy. I mean that. We lost eight Panthers in April. Did you hear about eight black guys dying in a blazing bus in Georgia? Not the kind of news story you’d remember, is it? But that bus was bombed by Ikon’s people. Look at you - you’re afraid to go to the police. You don’t know who’s going to be a Soviet stool-pigeon and who isn’t; and believe me, if you open your mouth to the wrong person, you’re dead.’
He reached over and poured himself some more whiskey. T don’t know how many members Free Columbia has altogether. It could be as few as thirty thousand, or as many as a million. We’re trying all the time to raise the public’s awareness to the Soviet takeover, but do you know how difficult it is to get a message like that across? One of our members used to work for a print union, and he managed to run a story in The New York Times, foot of page one, announcing that the United States was under the control of the Soviet Union and that we should all rise up and overthrow them. That was July 17, 1964. And do you know what happened? Two people railed up The New York Times and asked if it were true. Two people. And of course that brought the story to the attention of the subeditors, and they knocked it out and replaced it with a
story about a British mail strike. A week later the guy who had sneaked the story into print was found drowned.’
Kathy said, ‘I don’t understand why the Soviets haven’t put the country under more overt Russian rule.’
They don’t need to. They can exploit us economically and politically without having to turn us all into Communists - although we’ve always believed that this is their eventual aim. That’s what all these disarmament talks are all about: they want gradually to educate the American public into thinking that there’s no more prospect of nuclear war, and that it’s time the USA and the USSR were all buddies. That’s what this economic recession is all about, too. The Soviets are manipulating American banks and funds so that huge amounts of investment money simply aren’t reaching American industry. The recession isn’t real at all. We’re simply the victims of the greatest siege in global history. Outside of our borders, in Japan and Switzerland and the Soviet Union, there’s enough American money stashed away to end the recession overnight - and I mean overnight. But the Soviets aren’t going to let us get our hands on it until we’ve turned to international socialism, and Leninism, and it’s only then they’re going to release their grip on the world economy, so that we believe that Communism has brought us instant prosperity.’
They sat in silence while the sunshine blew through the net curtains, and the sounds of Sunset Strip came faintly across the flowering back yard. Daniel felt as if he were dreaming, as if he would wake up in a minute or two and find that he was back in his bed in Apache Junction. Kathy finished her drink, and then said, ‘I’m stunned. I don’t know what to think about it. I mean, the whole of my world has turned out to be something I didn’t imagine it ever could be, and I don’t know how to work it out in my mind any more. There’s nothing to relate to any more.’
There is one thing,said Rick, ‘and if you ever thought you’d hear a one-time card-carrying member of the Weather Underground say this … well, I wouldn’t believe you. But the one thing you can relate to is the American Constitution. What it says in the Constitution is what we’re fighting for now. And everything you learned in school. John Paul Jones, Sam Houston, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington. The spirit lives on - and always will do. They still have their own heroes in Poland, remember. They still remember Imre Nagy in Hungary.’ Softly, Kathy said, ‘What are we going to do?’ There’s nothing we can do, except go on fighting. If you want to join in, you’re welcome.’ Daniel said, ‘The risk - ‘
‘Is very high,’ Rick interrupted. ‘You saw for yourself today what Ikon’s hit-men can do. It was only by plain old California luck that we managed to get away.’ ‘Why were you so keen on capturing Skellett?’ ‘He’s a leading agent of theirs, that’s why. And he has a reputation for being one of the most vicious. We’ll take him out to the Mojave Movie Ranch, that’s where we usually take any Soviet infiltrators we capture. We’ll interrogate him; and then I guess we’ll probably kill him.’ ‘That’s murder.’
‘You think so? There are dozens of agents like Skellett, and they’re all as cold-blooded as anybody can be. They’ve got Siberian ice-water in their veins.’ ‘Is he Russian?’
‘Some of them are, not him. The Soviets have a programme of recruitment from most of the major American penitentiaries. They pick the real hard nuts and train them in weapons and unarmed combat to make them even harder. Some of them are kind of weird, you know, head-cases. That’s why you get the occasional well-publicized mass-murder, or shoot-out. And we’ve believed for about a year now that there’s something of a power struggle going on inside the Soviet committee, and that some of Ikon’s agents have become polarized to another leader. Ikon is obviously ruthless, but there’s some evidence now that one or two agents are acting even more violently and even more openly than Ikon’s men usually do. It could be that one of the Soviet leaders is trying to
show Ikon up, or threaten him in some way. We don’t know, and that’s why I want to interrogate Skellett.’
‘Do you think he’ll tell you anything?’
‘I don’t know. Some of them do. We’ve captured maybe six in the past three years. But some of the new agents are like kamikaze pilots, completely indoctrinated to the point where they’ll shoot themselves just to annoy you.’
‘I saw one like that,’ said Kathy. ‘A young man in Arizona, who packed his own intestines with explosives and blew himself up, simply to give Skellett time to escape.’
‘Some way to go, huh?’ nodded Rick.
Later, Daniel went into Susie’s room and watched her sleeping. Her hair was spread on the pillow, one hand was clutching the sheet, as if to prevent herself from falling into some dark and unwanted dream. Daniel wondered how he would ever be able to explain to her that America was no longer free, that within her lifetime she may be a slave to Communism, that the land he had hoped to give her as her birthright had been forfeited before she had even been born.
‘My daddy is dead, but I can’t tell you how
He left me six horses to follow the plow.
I sold my six horses to buy me a cow;
And wasn’t that a pretty thing to follow the plow?
I sold my cow to buy me a cat,
To sit down before the fire to warm her little back.
I sold my cat to buy me a mouse,
But she took fire in her tail and burn’d down my house.
With my whim wham waddle ho!’
Susie stirred. Daniel closed the bedroom door, although he stood outside for a long time, listening, keeping guard.
Thirty-Two
Nadine came back to the house at midnight that night to find that Titus was still up, sitting by himself in the library, drinking the bottle of 1924 brandy which had been given him by President Giscard d’Estaing of France, and which he had always sworn he would never open. He raised his head in some surprise as she came through the door, and stood there in her smart grey-flecked dress, her gloves upraised in one hand, her hat at an angle so that the brim shadowed her face.
‘Well,’ he said gruffly, ‘you’ve got a goddammed nerve. I’m surprised they let you in.’
‘Don’t worry. They’ve probably called the FBI already.’
Titus said, ‘You killed those people, all of them. You actually killed them.’
‘You won’t find any proof. Nor will you ever find your precious videos again.’
‘God damn it, Nadine. I know you killed those people.’
‘What you know and what you can prove are two very different things. Now, since you’ve opened up your precious bottle of 1924 brandy, aren’t you going to offer any to me?’
A security guard arrived breathlessly in the hallway outside, and knocked on the panelling.
‘Mr Secretary? Are you okay?’
‘It’s just as well that I am,’ growled Titus. ‘If she’d had any intention of killing me, I would have been well dead by now.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’
‘You’re sorry? Get back to your station.’
Titus poured Nadine a small measure of brandy and held it out to her, without getting up from his chair. Nadine came forward with an arch smile and took it.
‘I’m sorry it had to happen this way,’ she said. ‘You didn’t leave me with any alternative.’
‘I’ve been hearing a lot of people saying that lately.’
‘You seem angry.’
‘I am angry. I’m also sick, confused, bewildered, frightened, disoriented, upset, and tired.’
‘That’s quite a list.’
Titus swallowed the remaining liquor in his glass, stared at the bottle, and then poured himself another one, much larger this time. ‘What the hell, it’s only brandy.’
Nadine sniffed it. ‘It’s very fine.’
Titus said, ‘Yesterday afternoon I went down to Boiling Air Force Base and spoke to my old friend Pierce Caulfield.’
‘General Caulfield? I know him,
‘You should. He’s one of your stooges. He’s known about Ikon since 1974, and do you know something, he’s never once breathed a word about it. Never once! God damn it all, I’ve been to dinner with that man, gone fishing with him, attended his stupid daughter’s wedding, and all the time he knew about Ikon and he never told me!’
Nadine sat down on the floor, and rested one hand on Titus’ knee. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a remarkable husband, even if we have argued all the time. An unparalleled lover. And you’re the best Secretary of State that America ever had.’
‘America?’ asked Titus, bitterly. ‘The Autonomous Capitalist Oblast of Sod-all.’
Nadine said, ‘Joe was one of ours too, you know.’
Titus stared at her; and then said, ‘Really?’ and then ‘Mmh’, as if he didn’t care at all. He had already suffered the greatest disenchantment, a few minor betrayals didn’t seem to make very much difference.
I wasn’t going to leave you, you know,’ said Nadine.
‘I think I’d prefer it if you did.’
I want you to come and meet Ikon.’
‘You want what?’
Tomorrow morning, I want you to come and meet Ikon. I want you to see what he’s like, talk to him, and understand his problems. Ikon needs all the help he can get right now, and whatever you think about the Capitalist Oblast of America, Ikon is the lesser of two evils. I think you have a duty to help him survive.’
‘I’ll tear his goddammed Commie head off.’