Then, that November, he had taken a gamble with the man from Moscow, inviting Mikhail Gorbachev up to Nantucket for a long weekend. And the Russian had loved it.
His KGB heavies had been as distraught as the Secret Service men, but both leaders were adamant. The two men, wrapped against the knifing wind off Nantucket Sound (the Russian had brought a sable fur shapka for the American), took long walks along the beaches while KGB and Secret Service men plodded after them, others hid in the sere grass and muttered into communicators, a helicopter clawed its way through the winds above them, and a Coast Guard cutter pitched and plunged offshore.
No one tried to kill anybody. The two men strolled into Nantucket town unannounced and the fishermen at Straight Wharf showed them their fresh-caught lobsters and scallops. Gorbachev admired the catch and twinkled and beamed, and then they had a beer together at a dockside bar and walked back to Shawkemo, looking side by side like a bulldog and a stork.
At night, after steamed lobsters in the frame house, the defense experts from each side joined them and the interpreters, and they worked out the last points of principle and drafted their communiqué.
On Tuesday the press was allowed in-there had always been a token force pooling pictures and words, for after all this was America, but on Tuesday the massed battalions arrived. At noon the two men emerged onto the wooden veranda and the President read the communiqué. It announced the firm intention to put before the Central Committee and the Senate a wide-ranging and radical agreement to cut back conventional forces across the board and across the world. There were still some verification problems to be ironed out, a job for the technicians, and the specific details of what types of weaponry and how much were to be decommissioned, mothballed, scrapped, or aborted would be announced later. President Cormack spoke of peace with honor, peace with security, and peace with good will. Secretary Gorbachev nodded vigorously as the translation came through. No one mentioned then, though the press did later and at great length, that with the U.S. budget deficit, the Soviet economic chaos, and a looming oil crisis, neither superpower could finally afford a continuing arms race.
Two thousand miles away in Houston, Cyrus V. Miller switched off the television and stared at Scanlon.
“That man is going to strip us naked,” he said with quiet venom. “That man is dangerous. That man is a traitor.”
He recovered himself and strode to the desk intercom.
“Louise, would you send in Colonel Easterhouse now, please.”
Someone once said: All men dream, but they are most dangerous who dream with their eyes open. Colonel Robert Easterhouse sat in the elegant reception room atop the Pan-Global Building and stared at the window and the panoramic view of Houston. But his pale-blue eyes saw the vaulted sky and ocher sands of the Nejd and he dreamed of controlling the income from the Hasa oil fields for the benefit of America and all mankind.
Born in 1945, he was three when his father accepted a teaching job at the American University in Beirut. The Lebanese capital had been a paradise in those days, elegant, cosmopolitan, rich, and safe. He had attended an Arab school for a while, had French and Arab playmates; by the time the family returned to Idaho he was thirteen and trilingual in English, French, and Arabic.
Back in America the youth had found his schoolmates shallow, frivolous, and stunningly ignorant, obsessed by rock ‘n’ roll and a young singer called Presley. They mocked his tales of swaying cedars, Crusader forts, and the plumes of the Druse campfires drifting through the Chouf mountain passes. So he was driven to books, and none more than The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Lawrence of Arabia. At eighteen, forsaking college and the girls back home, he volunteered for the 82nd Airborne. He was still at boot camp when Kennedy died.
For ten years he had been a paratrooper, with three tours in Vietnam, coming out with the last forces in 1973. Men can acquire fast promotion when casualties are high and he was the 82nd’s youngest colonel when he was crippled, not in war but in a stupid accident. It had been a training drop in the desert; the DZ was supposed to be flat and sandy, the winds a breeze at five knots. As usual the brass had got it wrong. The wind was thirty-plus at ground level; the men were smashed into rocks and gullies. Three dead, twenty-seven injured.
The X-ray plates later showed the bones in Easterhouse’s left leg like a box of matches scattered on black velvet. He watched the embarrassing scuttle of the last U.S. forces out of the embassy in Saigon -Bunker’s bunker, as he knew it from the Tet offensive-on a hospital TV in 1975. While in the hospital he chanced on a book about computers and realized that these machines were the road to power: a way to correct the madnesses of the world and bring order and sanity to chaos and anarchy, if properly used.
Quitting the military, he went to college and majored in computer science, joined Honeywell for three years, and moved to IBM. It was 1981, the petrodollar power of the Saudis was at its peak, Aramco had hired IBM to construct for them foolproof computer systems to monitor production, flow, exportation, and above all royalty dues throughout their monopoly operation in Saudi Arabia. With fluent Arabic and a genius for computers, Easterhouse was a natural. He spent five years protecting Aramco’s interests in Saudi, coming to specialize in computer-monitored security systems against fraud and theft. In 1986, with the collapse of the OPEC cartel, the power shifted back to the consumers; and the Saudis felt exposed. They head-hunted the limping computer genius who spoke their language and knew their customs, paying him a fortune to go free-lance and work for them instead of IBM and Aramco.
He knew the country and its history like a native. Even as a boy he had thrilled to the written tales of the Founder, the dispossessed nomadic Sheikh Abdal Aziz al Sa’ud, sweeping out of the desert to storm the Musmak Fortress at Riyadh and begin his march to power. He had marveled at the astuteness of Abdal Aziz as he spent thirty years conquering the thirty-seven tribes of the interior, uniting the Nejd to the Hejaz to the Hadhramaut, marrying the daughters of his vanquished enemies and binding the tribes into a nation-or the semblance of one.
Then Easterhouse saw the reality, and admiration turned to disillusion, contempt, and loathing. His job with IBM had involved preventing and detecting computer fraud in systems devised by unworldly whiz kids from the States, monitoring the translation of operational oil production into accounting language and ultimately bank balances, creating foolproof systems that could also be integrated with the Saudi treasury setup. It was the profligacy and the dizzying corruption that turned his basically puritan spirit to a conviction that one day he would become the instrument that would sweep away the result of a freak accident of fate which had given such huge wealth and power to such a people; it would be he who would restore order and correct the mad imbalances of the Middle East, so that this God-given gift of oil would be used first for the service of the Free World and then for all the peoples of the world.
He could have used his skills to skim a vast fortune for himself from the oil revenues, as the princes did, but his morality forbade him. So to fulfill his dream he would need the support of powerful men, backup, funding. And then he had been summoned by Cyrus Miller to bring down the corrupt edifice and deliver it to America. Now, all he had to do was persuade these barbarian Texans that he was their man.
“Colonel Easterhouse?” He was interrupted by the honeyed tones of Louise. “Mr. Miller will see you now, sir.”