“I have concerns that it smells a little like ‘industrial policy,’ but I’ll be sure to tell him my people like his proposal.”
“I’ll have my executive summary sent up to Air Force One for your review, Sir.”
“Make it short. I got the whole California congressional delegation flying with me … such fun.”
“By the way, Sir, I had a thought. Ever see a car race?”
“Sure, why?”
“Yellow flag. If you make an executive order locking in and guaranteeing every investor’s current portfolio value at the time of the freeze, then there will be no penalty for them to let go of Pocket Protector … Once the protocol is written to ban it from future trading, that is.”
“No one advances under a yellow flag … good idea, I’ll run that by Treasury. Did you just think that up in your spare time?”
“I just hope it works, Sir.”
“Oh, by the way, I stopped here to tell you that they found out who was behind the attempt on my life.”
“I’m touched that you personally came over here to tell me that.”
“You almost got shot as well. Besides it’s top secret. You’ll be one of less than 20 people who will ever know it was Libya.”
“Libya? No way.”
“Yes.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Hiccock tried to catch his shock before it was apparent but failed.
“Nope. We’re protecting our intelligence methods and not alerting them that their operational mobility is compromised. We’ll get more out of them that way.
“So no public accusations or even a back channel reprimand?”
“I know that Bedouin S.O.B.’s behind it. Why waste the time? I could write their official, public statement right now. They would blame some rogue faction, then garner support from moderate and radical Muslim nations, and we’d end up being the bad guys.”
“So no response? Wow, it’s their lucky year.”
“Oh I don’t know about that. I hear they are going to have a bad crop of poppies this year. Too bad, too. It will decimate their two billion-dollar-a-year heroin trade. But of course that’s top secret, too, Bill.”
The wry smirk was hidden but Hiccock read volumes in the president’s face. “Ah! Gotcha.”
The president stepped away leaving Hiccock stunned. The space-based defoliant was going on-line. In order to protect its secrecy, and in essence its whole purpose, the government was maintaining the “lone-nut” theory to explain the assassination attempt. Bill smiled as he relished in the thought of those Libyans, responsible for planning the attack, believing they had dodged a big bullet when the Justice Department proclaimed the would-be assassin to be a deranged individual acting alone…until their fields turned brown.
When Clark Gable drove up to the sixteen-foot-tall front gates, a security guard would nod and let him in. He would never challenge the movie idol, whose face was known around the world. U.S. Senator Hank Dent, however, had to punch in a seven-digit code to activate the now electrically operated gates. As he drove in, Dent scanned for gardeners, butlers, chauffeurs, and maids, but found no sign of anyone. At least Shari was following the rules that he established in their regular e-mail exchanges. Those personal, private, and often provocative missives were protected by using the U.S. Senate’s secure encryption. This was necessary because his liaisons with her, if discovered, would not be advantageous to his standing in the polls and his ambition to be the next White House resident. He was, after all, a trusted public servant — a married trusted public servant. On the other hand, what was the value of being the senior senator from the state that gave Hollywood to the world, if you couldn’t afford yourself the pleasures of one of its true natural wonders?
Parking in front of the seven-car garage that used to hold David O. Selznick’s sixteen-cylinder Dusenburghs, he walked around back to find Shari sunbathing nude by the pool. God she is beautiful, he thought as he took in every part of her. He stood there for a full minute, as someone would admire a Michelangelo painting at the Louvre.
Lying before him was the most coveted body in America, probably the world. The sexual ground zero of a billion male fantasies. Oceans of sperm had been jettisoned, from young boys and old men alike, just imagining what it would be like to be him, right there, right then. It was worth putting his staff off and canceling a few appointments. After all, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t handled presidential visits before. He could certainly squeeze out a few hours.
As he stepped closer, the sound of his Italian leather soles scraping the Israeli marble with which the pool was encircled brought Shari’s eyes to him. Tall cypress trees, planted in the thirties by Rudolph Valentino’s landscaper, stood guard as the most powerful woman in Hollywood gave the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate a classic, downtown, Avenue A, New York City blow job.
This was turning into quite a good day for the senator. Twenty-five minutes after the poolside oral gratuity, he was in full thrust atop Givenchy sheets on the actual, California-size bed that had belonged to Doris Day, humping the brains out of “eight-million-dollar-a-tit” Shari Saks. She was a wildcat in bed; her every squeal of delight, every shift of her Pilates-honed, yoga-tightened, Tai Chi — balanced, vegetarian-fed incredible body was a signal that he was the only man who ever gave her such pleasure.
The fact that she was also an Academy Award — nominated actress never penetrated his mind — which he was literally fucking himself out of right now. As happens in all Hollywood bedroom adventures, they climaxed at the same time. She was sprawled out flatly beneath him and he collapsed on her. They lay there for a minute catching their breath, squeezing the last bit of pleasure from their loins. They did a little kissing, but mostly just allowed the waves of passion to wash away. His head was buried face down next to hers, his chin on her shoulder, her arm under him, dangling near the bedside table. He felt her move, but didn’t adjust his position. Eyes closed, he never saw her remove the .357 Magnum from between the mattress and box spring. The click of the hammer going back was a curious sound to him, but he never got to lift his head as she pressed the cold steel of the gun’s muzzle into her temple.
Looking up at the ceiling, Shari pulled the trigger. Her eyes widened in her final, frozen-for-all-time close-up as the slug traversed the twelve inches through both her head then his, finally embedding itself in the Chippendale desk under which Harvey Warner was personally serviced by the then-struggling actress Heddy Dukes.
Hiccock entered the conference room with a small blue-and-white box in his hand. Janice was at the far end, underlining phrases on large printouts taped to the wall. He jutted the box under her nose. “Will you take these? I’ve done enough damage.”
“Ooooh, Entenmann’s chocolate donuts! Where’d you find these in Washington?”
“Joey brought ’em to me. He was back in the Bronx this weekend visiting his family.”
Janice selected one from the box and savored that incredible first bite. “Ya know, it maketh you want a glassth of milk.”
“I’ll get you some.”
“Thankth.” She went back to the subliminal messages, trying to divine the method that created the madness. Holding the donut with her teeth, she made red-ink notes in the margins of one of the enlarged outline pages tacked to the wall.
Kronos entered. “I heard the donuts came this way.”
She pulled the donut from between her teeth. “Help yourself. They’re right on my desk. In fact, take the whole box. Less for me to guilt over.” She sighed, taking a step back in an attempt to realize any pattern not yet obvious to her.
Kronos stabbed through the hole of one of the donuts and picked it up from the box like a ring around his index finger. He held it that way as he started to nibble his way around, removing the chocolate covering like a lathe. He walked over to Janice. “Doing a little programming?”
“Kronos, please, I’m trying to work this out. Could you just take your donut and leave? Ewwwww!” She finally looked away from the chart and reacted to the sight of him eating it off his finger.
“Jeez, what a grouch.”
Something ruminated in Janice’s mind. “Kronos!”
He returned. “Yeah?”
“What did you mean ‘was I programming’?”
“What you got plastered on the wall here looks like an old Basic program.”
“How so?”
“Well, in that old language, each line of instruction was numbered, like the way you got it there. And you see that grouping there …” he pointed to a “paragraph” that stood alone. “That looks like a subroutine. This here looks like an old ‘If-Then’ statement. You know, if the proposition is true then do this, if it is false then do that.”
“Hold it, hold it, go slow. What’s a subroutine?”
“Well, it’s a way to get the computer to do repetitive tasks without having to write repetitive code. So you write it once and keep telling the machine to run the subroutine as many times as you need it to. Burying a nasty line of instruction in a subroutine was how I did some of my best hacking, because the program wouldn’t immediately hit it until the subroutine was called up. I named them ‘time bombs’ cause it was just a matter of time ’til …”
She kissed Kronos, interrupting his boasting. “Mister, you just got yourself a year’s supply of donuts!”