"I am so sorry, Madame. I had the assumption that the direction from the first floor to the sixteenth was upward. It should be so, mathematically speaking, but—"
A frown from his OPEC superior stemmed the falsetto babble, so he turned his attention to the taut nape of Miss Swivven's neck.
The OPEC troubleshooter (codetermed Mr. Able, because he was top man in an able-baker-charlie-dog sequence) was embarrassed by his fellow Arab's twittering voice and blundering ways. A third-generation Oxford man whose family had long enjoyed the cultural advantages of participating with the British in the exploitation of their people, Mr. Able scorned this parvenu son of a goatherd who had probably struck oil while overzealously driving a tent peg.
He was further annoyed at being called away from an intimate social affair to deal with some unexplained problem resulting, no doubt, from the incompetence of his compatriot and these CIA ruffians. Indeed, had the summons not borne the authority of the Chairman of the Mother Company, he would have ignored it, for at the moment of interruption he had been enjoying a most charming and titillating chat with a lovely young man whose father was an American senator.
Reacting to the OPEC man's frigid disdain, the man stood well back in the elevator, attempting to appear occupied with more important worries than this little matter.
Darryl Starr, for his part, sought to maintain an image of cool indifference by jingling the coins in his pocket while he whistled between his teeth.
With palpable G-press, the elevator stopped, and Miss Swivven inserted a second magnetic card into the slot to open the doors. The goatherd took this opportunity to pat her ass. She flinched and drew away.
Ah, he thought. A woman of modesty. Probably a virgin. So much the better. Virginity is important to Arabs, who dread comparison, and with good reason.
Darryl Starr quite openly, and the Deputy more guardedly, examined their surroundings, for neither had ever before been admitted to the "Sixteenth Floor" of their building. But Mr. Able shook hands with Diamond curtly and demanded, "What is this all about? I am not pleased to be called here summarily, particularly on an evening when I had something else in hand."
"You'll be even less pleased when I explain," Diamond said. He turned to Starr. "Sit down. I want you to learn the magnitude of your screw-up in Rome."
Starr shrugged with pretended indifference and slid into a white plastic molded chair at the conference table with its etched glass surface for rear projection of computer data. The goatherd was lost in admiring the view beyond the picture window.
"Mr. Haman?" Diamond said.
The Arab's nose touched the glass as he watched with delight the patterns of headlights making slow progress past the Washington Monument—the same cars that always crawled down that avenue at precisely this time of night.
"Mr. Haman?" Diamond repeated.
"What? Oh, yes! I always forget this code name I have been assigned. How humorous of me!"
"Sit," Diamond said dully.
"Pardon me?"
"Sit!"
Grinning awkwardly, the Arab joined Starr at the table as Diamond gestured the OPEC representative to the head of the table, and he himself occupied his orthopedically designed swivel chair on its raised dais.
"Tell me, Mr. Able, what do you know about the spoiling raid at Rome International this morning?"
"Almost nothing. I do not burden myself with tactical details. Economic strategy is my concern." He flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the sharp crease of his trousers.
Diamond nodded curtly. "Neither of us should have to deal with this sort of business, but the stupidity of your people and the incompetence of mine makes it necessary—"
"Now, just a minute—" the Deputy began.
"—makes it necessary that we take a hand in the affair. I want to sketch you in on the background, so you'll know what we've got here. Miss Swivven, take notes please." Diamond looked up sharply at the CIA Deputy. "Why are you hovering around like that?"
Lips tight and nostrils flared, the Deputy said, "Perhaps I was waiting for you to order me to sit, as you have the others."
"Very well." Diamond's gaze was flat and fatigued. "Sit."
With an air of having won a diplomatic victory, the Deputy took his place beside Starr.
At no time during the conference was Diamond's snide and bullying tone applied to Mr. Able, for they had worked together on many projects and problems, and they had a certain mutual respect based, not upon friendship to be sure, but upon shared qualities of administrative skill, lucid problem analysis, and capacity to make decisions untrammeled by romantic notions of ethics. It was their role to represent the powers behind them in all paralegal and extradiplomatic relationships between the Arab oil-producing nations and the Mother Company, whose interests were intimately linked, although neither trusted the other farther than the limits of their mutual gain. The nations represented by Mr. Able were potent in the international arena beyond the limited gifts and capacities of their peoples. The industrialized world had recklessly permitted itself to become dependent on Arab oil for survival, although they knew the supply was finite and, indeed, sharply limited. It was the goal of primitive nations, who knew they were the darlings of the technological world only because the needed oil happened to be under their rock and sand, to convert that oil and concomitant political power into more enduring sources of wealth before the earth was drained of the noxious ooze, to which end they were energetically purchasing land all over the world, buying out companies, infiltrating banking systems, and exercising financial control over political figures throughout the industrialized West. They had certain advantages in effecting these designs. First, they could maneuver quickly because they were not burdened by the viscous political systems of democracy. Second, the politicians of the West are corrupt and available. Third, the mass of Westerners are greedy, lazy, and lacking any sense of history, having been conditioned by the atomic era to live on the rim of doomsday, and therefore only concerned with ease and prosperity in their own lifetimes.
The cluster of energy corporations that constitute the Mother Company could have broken the blackmail stranglehold of the Arab nations at any time. Raw oil is worthless until it is converted into a profitable pollutant, and they alone controlled the hoarding and distribution facilities. But the Mother Company's long-range objective was to use the bludgeon of contrived oil shortages to bring into their control all sources of energy: coal, atomic, solar, geothermic. As one aspect of their symbiotic affair, OPEC served the Mother Company by creating shortages when She wanted to build pipelines over fragile tundra, or block major governmental investment in research into solar and wind energy, or create natural gas shortfalls when pressing for removal of price controls. In return, the Mother Company serviced the OPEC nations in many ways, not the least of which was applying political pressure during the oil embargo to prevent the Western nations from taking the obvious step of occupying the land and liberating the oil for the common good. Doing this required more rhetorical suppleness than the Arabs realized, because the Mother Company was, at the same time, mounting vast propaganda programs to make the masses believe She was working to make America independent from foreign oil imports, using major stockholders who were also beloved figures from the entertainment world to gain popular support for their exploration of fossil fuel, their endangering of mankind with atomic wastes, their contaminating of the seas with off-shore drilling and reckless mishandling of oil freighters.
Both the Mother Company and the OPEC powers were passing through a delicate period of transition; the one attempting to convert Her oil monopoly into a hegemony over all other energy sources, so Her power and profit would not wane with the depletion of the world's oil supply; the other striving to transform its oil wealth into industrial and territorial possessions throughout the Western world. And it was to ease their way through this difficult and vulnerable period that they granted unlimited authority to Mr. Diamond and Mr. Able to deal with the three most dangerous obstacles to their success: the vicious efforts of the PLO to use their nuisance value to gain a share of the Arab spoils; the mindless and bungling interference of the CIA and its sensory organ the NSA; and Israel's tenacious and selfish insistence upon survival.