Interface

52

Eleanor's motorcade steamed across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, and then immediately on the Maryland side, took the exit to the Inner Loop. To the left was the sewage plant, Boiling Air Force Base, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Navy Yards. To the right, wooded hills, and then the projects, and then the decay of Southeast - one of the great free fire zones in urban America. Eleanor had been for three funerals of friends and relatives who had been shot to death there, and on her way to the third one she had almost been run off the road by a careening SWAT van.

D.C. was a great, historically black city that had been colonized, in a few places, by rich whites. Lacking a traditional organized crime network, it had become the battleground of a drug war among competing groups: Jamaicans, Haitians, New York elements, and home-grown Washingtonians competing for the lucrative trade to service the insatiable demand of the Beltway professionals. The police could only wait until the "market worked itself out," as one police official put it. Once turfs and boundary lines had been established, the murder, it was thought, would stop.

Instead the violence had infected a whole new generation with the notion of the cheapness of human life, and the flow of weapons into the region that made semiautomatics available to even preteens. The doctors who worked emergency rooms in the District had become some of the world's leading experts on the treatment of gunshot wounds. During the Gulf War they had been sent straight to the front lines, where they felt right at home.

Awaiting Eleanor was the Lady Wilburdon Gunshot Wound Institute, an ugly, brand-new, fortresslike structure built on the bulldozed foundations of the first of the War Against Poverty projects. Its architecture reflected its function, which was to treat people involved in deadly combat. The place had been made secure and bulletproof to discourage shooters from coming by to finish off their victims while they were being worked on by the doctors.

The only shooters here now were carrying cameras. Eleanor got out of her limo and followed her advance person through a wall of photographers and cameramen. She made her way, along with her Secret Service escort, to a small auditorium in the institute. Already present on the stage were the Mayor of D.C.; the medical director of the institute, who was a young black Gulf War veteran named Dr. Cornelius Gary; and the founder and namesake, an imposing Englishwoman named Lady Guenevere Wilburdon. An empty seat awaited Eleanor.

"Ms. Richmond," Lady Wilburdon said, extending her hand, "it's a pleasure to meet you. I look forward to your inauguration."

"Thank you so much, Lady Wilburdon, but we do have to go through the election."

"Pfft," Lady Wilburdon said, and waved her hand as if shooing flies away.

Eleanor repressed an urge to laugh. This was exactly the kind of attitude that she had sported, back before she was a candidate.

They were not able to converse anymore before the ceremony began. It opened with a presentation of songs by the massed choirs of several local churches, a lengthy, involved oratory-cum-prayer by the Mayor, and the presentation of Dr. Cornelius Gary, the executive director of the institute. Who in turn presented Lady Wilburdon, who said nothing except to introduce Eleanor, who dedicated the institute.

"It was nice to have met you, Lady Wilburdon," Eleanor said after it was over.

"Not so fast, Ms. Richmond," Lady Wilburdon said. "We are going to have a chat."

"I would like nothing better, but my schedule- "Arrangements have been made," Lady Wilburdon said firmly.

On their way out the front doors they had to jump out of the way of an incoming gurney: the institute's first patient, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been gunshot with a .357 Magnum.

Eleanor's advance person explained it to her in the motorcade. Eleanor's next two engagements had both been cancelled at the last minute. She had a couple of free hours. Nature abhors a vacuum and Lady Wilburdon had rushed in to plug the gap. They would be having lunch at the Willard.

It was a small lunch too - just Eleanor, Lady Wilburdon, and her secretary, Miss Chapman. Lady Wilburdon used both force of personality and sheer physical bulk to eject all of Eleanor's hangers-on from the room. Then they sat at the table together and lunched on tiny sandwiches.

"I should explain that I knew Bucky," Lady Wilburdon said.

"Bucky?"

"Salvador. The fellow who was shot by the madman across the river and exploded in front of the sushi bar. It is tasteless, I know, but I have become inured."

"I didn't know him myself," Eleanor said. "All I know is that he ran the company that does media consulting for our campaign. And that Cy Ogle has taken over from him."

"Bucky was the very embodiment of low cunning," Lady Wilburdon said. "Impressive in a superficial way. But flashy." She said this word with the same intonation she might have used if she were calling him a child molester. "In a way it is surprising that the Network hired him. Normally we have higher standards. But we are in an age when high standards are no longer fashionable."

"Network? He worked for one of the television networks?"

Lady Wilburdon rolled her eyes. "Certainly not. Not even Bucky would do that. You need to know about this, as you will be spending the next eight years - possibly the next sixteen - in a position of great responsibility."

"We have to win the election."

"You will," Lady Wilburdon said. "We have solved the problem of elections."

It was somewhat later in the afternoon. Lady Wilburdon had dipped into a bottle of sherry and held forth at some length on the subjects of Bucky, Ogle, Cozzano, and the functioning of the PIPER 100. Eleanor listened politely, soaked it all up, and made up her mind that she would not try to figure out until later whether this woman was completely out of her mind or telling the truth.

It would be easy enough to pass her off as a dingbat. But her words explained a lot. From time to time Eleanor would feel an uncomfortable shock of recognition as Lady Wilburdon's explana­tions matched up perfectly with what she herself had noticed. Consciously she kept an open mind. Subconsciously she had long ago decided that everything Lady Wilburdon said was true.

"If what you're saying is true," Eleanor said, "an unbelievable amount of money has been spent."

"It's all relative," Lady Wilburdon said. "It's all part of a long-range strategy."

"How long-range?"

"Centuries."

"Centuries?"

"There are only five entities in the world with sufficient wisdom to pursue consistent strategies over periods of several centuries," Lady Wilburdon said. "These entities are not national or govern­mental in nature - even the best governments are dangerously unstable and short-lived. Such an entity is self-preserving and self-perpetuating. A world war, or the rise and fall of an empire or an alliance such as the USSR or NATO, is no more serious, to it, than a gust of wind buffeting the sails of a clipper ship."

"What are these entities?" Eleanor said.

"In no particular order, one is the Catholic Church. One is Japan - which is nothing more than a group of zaibatsus, or major industrial combines. The third is a loose network of shtetls. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, they forcibly realized the importance of long-range planning, and in the intervening years have accumulated formidable assets. The fourth one we don't know much about; it seems to connect many of the recalcitrantly traditional cultures of the Third and Fourth Worlds and to be headquartered somewhere in Central Asia. And the fifth is the Network. It is an alliance of large investors, both individual and institutional, predominantly European and American. You might think of it as the legacy, the residue, of the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the American railway companies, Standard Oil, and the technological empires of our time. It is the most decentralized of the five entities - really just an effort to pursue investments, and certain other activities, in a coordinated fashion. Before the war its funds were managed by a lovely Scottish gentleman who lived in an old castle near Chichester. Afterward it was moved to the interior of the States and placed in the hands of an American fellow, a mathematical prodigy who attended the Lady Wilburdon School for Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum."

"The Network owns Ogle Data Research?"

"Yes."

"And by implication, Cozzano?"

"Yes."

"So you're saying that the Network is going to take over the United States?"

"The Network wouldn't want it," Lady Wilburdon said. "Governments, as I mentioned, are dodgy. All the Network wants is to stabilize the return on its investment in the national debt."

"Wait a minute. You're saying that the Network would put together this incredible conspiracy just to get a couple of extra points on a loan?"

The idea did not seem troubling to Lady Wilburdon. She seemed a bit surprised that Eleanor didn't accept it. "My dear lady," she said, "do you have any idea how much money your government has borrowed?"

"A lot," Eleanor said. "Ten trillion dollars." It was a figure she had to cite regularly during campaign debates.

"Well, you certainly can't expect to borrow that much money from someone without incurring certain obligations, can you?" Lady Wilburdon said, as if it were all perfectly obvious. And it was, in fact, perfectly obvious.

"Of course, not," Eleanor said, "you're right."

"When a business borrows money from a bank, and does so irresponsibly, and is profligate and incompetent, what happens?"

"It goes bankrupt. And the bank takes it over."

"Yes. The bank simply wants what is best for the business. It gets rid of the dead wood, fires the miscreants who drove the business to ruin, cleans it out, and sets everything right, so that the business is once again able to meet its obligations."

"And I'm one of the people who is supposed to set everything right."

"You and Mr. Cozzano, yes. And I'm sure you'll do a splendid job of it."

"You are? Are you kidding?"

"Of course not. I've been following your career, Ms. Richmond. Everything you've been saying in the last year about the failure of American politics is correct," Lady Wilburdon said. "Without going round and talking to them personally, I daresay that most of the people in the Network consider you something of a folk hero."

Eleanor's mind was whirling, and not just because she had taken two glasses of sherry. She had to see Mary Catherine. And providentially, one of her assistants broke through and signaled it was time to go. Eleanor had been listening with such rapt attention that she had not moved for an hour. One of her legs had gone to sleep, and the sherry also had reduced her coordination. When she stood up, it showed.

"You need to do some stretching exercises," Lady Wilburdon said. "Take it from me - I travel even more than a presidential candidate."

"I'll keep that in mind, Lady Wilburdon. Thank you for an illuminating chat."

"It was my pleasure, I assure you," Lady Wilburdon said, seeing her to the elevators. Eleanor had now been enveloped by her campaign staff.

"Good-bye," Lady Wilburdon said, as the elevator arrived, "I should enjoy paying a call on you at the Naval Observatory, if you would have me. I love telescopes."