But Washington was a town acutely attuned to the merest hint of a shift in the wind, and there was a silent gale howling around J. Edgar Hoover. He still held power, but the perception that it might ebb away was enough to start the collapse, and he was the sort of man who would take half the city down with him when he went. As a rule, it was always best to distance oneself from such spitefulness. Unfortunately, it wasn't always possible.
Congressman Summers, like every politician who arrived in Washington, had an FBI file with his name on it. He assumed that Gentry did, too. Otherwise why would he be here? The existence of these files was an open secret. They were probably illegal. They were certainly dynamite. A complete file would allegedly document entire family backgrounds. Education and employment history, whether or not they'd played sports, whom they had socialized with, slept with, feuded with, cheated, betrayed, and so on. Of most interest to the director, however, was whom they had slept with.
That's why Summers was at dinner with Hoover, despite his best efforts to be somewhere else. He had made a few mistakes, and they had been discovered. He'd taken the call at home, lying in bed beside his wife for a change. Just two months after he'd been elected Hoover had called him personally-at one in the morning to say that one of his agents had come across the most awful photographs of the congressman. It was clearly the congressman: he was easily identifiable. But he didn't need to worry, because the director understood that he was a friend of the Bureau, and the Bureau looked after its friends. There would be no chance of this scandal ever seeing the light of day.
And then he had hung up, without waiting for a reply.
Summers could only wonder what awful indiscretion Gentry had committed.
"Would you like some butter with that bread roll, Congressman?" Hoover asked in his squeaky voice. "You haven't touched your plate or had a sip of wine all night."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Hoover," Summers replied. "I'm simply very tired. The war, you know."
"I know, I know," said Hoover. "We all work like Trojans, don't we? Not like some of those union sluggards in California, I'll bet, what with their mandated hours and legislated undutifulness. I swear, Congressmen, that if this tergiversating Herr Kolhammer had his way, the national defense would be subject to veto by the Wobblies and the Comintern."
For one horrid moment, Summers wasn't sure if Hoover was making a joke, and he remained suspended in an agony of indecision. Should he laugh, and risk enraging the vindictive faggot? Or should he nod vigorously and pound the table with an open palm and exclaim something like "Exactly!" thereby looking like a fool who couldn't appreciate Hoover's mordant wit? He could feel his fellow congressman stiffen with tension beside him.
Tolson saved them by snickering cruelly, providing him with a cue to chuckle. Hoover joined in the happy moment, his braying laugh sailing over the heads of the other diners.
Surely this was hell.
Summers was actually grateful when the deal came down at the end of the main course, and Hoover leaned forward to turn the screws. "Congressmen, this week your committee will be reviewing significant expenditures allocated for the Special Zone, if I'm right."
"We will," said Gentry, trying to appear eager to please. "We're looking at an appropriation measure to pay for emergency housing, for all the workers flooding in there."
Hoover stared at him for a long, long time without speaking. His pouchy, bulldog eyes burned fiercely. Air whistled between his crooked teeth. He wouldn't even let the congressman drop his gaze. Summers was glad he wasn't on the receiving end. It felt like staring down the barrel of a gun.
"I am sure," the FBI director said at last, "that you will take as long as is absolutely necessary… to give full and proper consideration… to the best interests of the country… and all of its servants."
"Of course," agreed Gentry after a slight delay.
Summers just nodded. His throat was so dry, he could hardly form the words.
"Excellent," said Hoover. "You can pay your bill on the way out."
17
The Trident's Eurocopter hammered across the green patchwork of the southern counties at top speed. Villages, woods, cricket grounds, lakes, and farms all slipped by in a blur as Karen Halabi wondered what might be waiting for her at the other end.
Before taking off, she'd downloaded the latest compressed burst from California. Admiral Kolhammer had fought hard to keep his command in one piece, but strategic surprise had made that impossible. The destruction of the contemporary Pacific Fleet, the invasion of Australia, and the threat hanging over Britain meant that any Allied resources had to be sent where they would be most effective in forestalling an enemy that was lashing out in all directions.
To some extent, they'd done well. The Japanese thrust into Australia seemed to be doomed, as the ground combat elements of the Multinational Force moved to directly engage Homma's forces. Reports of atrocities had aroused outrage in the press and Parliament, and led to another round of accusations that Britain had abandoned her former colony in its hour of need. But really, it was nothing out of the ordinary.
The Japanese continued to reinforce their holdings in the southwest Pacific, using the divisions they had stripped from China. The Clinton and the Siranui had left Honolulu for San Diego, but some of the carrier's surviving air wing remained on the island as a guarantor against misadventure by Yamamoto.
There was the usual level of witless hysteria on the mainland United States. The encrypted briefing from Kolhammer, for her eyes only, covered the rather tense political situation of the Special Administrative Zone.
The Soviet-German cease-fire remained intact, for now. Stalin was still refusing to return any of the Allied ships or personnel that had been trapped at Murmansk when he unilaterally withdrew from hostilities against the Reich. The German buildup continued, but there had been no obvious surge to indicate that an attempted channel crossing was likely to being immediately.
There was nothing, really, that justified dragging her away from Portsmouth and the Trident without notice.
She heard the pilot's voice through her earpiece. "ETA twelve minutes, Skipper. We'll be setting down at Biggin Hill. There's a car waiting there for you."
"Thanks, Andy," she said. "Don't hang around if there's a raid inbound while I'm gone. I wouldn't trust that hardened shelter to stand up in a sun shower."
"Righto, Skipper."
They passed over a convoy of American trucks on a road heading south. The line of vehicles stretched out for well over a mile, and at least half of them seemed to be towing artillery pieces. Troops in the open trucks waved as they roared over.
A thunderhead far away to the west dropped sheets of gray rain on rolling farmland, while beneath them she could see dozens of schoolboys in uniform, digging with spades to widen a stream into a makeshift antitank ditch. Fields and pasture were marred by the sprouting spikes of sharpened stakes to prevent gliders landing. The sight reminded her of Branagh's Henry V, which was immensely popular in the movie theaters at the moment. The BBC had telerecorded a master copy to film from her own ship's video library. Here and there, crossroads were marked by barrel-like blocks of concrete, or piles of wrecked cars, rusty plows and mounds of rubble, ready to be pushed on the road surface to form another small obstacle to any possible German advance. Sometimes she saw trees that had been cut down by the roadside, ready to be dragged across as further obstacles.