The Lure

45 Brandy and Cigars

Now the cloud was enveloping Camp David like a white blanket, muffling sounds and creating a sharp, penetrating air. And it isolated the place, giving the guests in the cottages scattered around the mountain slope a feeling of intimacy, of sharing a village.

In Aspen, three men wore dinner suits round a table. Hazel was sitting, glamorous like an aging film star, in a long black cocktail dress. She wore a Mexican silver necklace and matching silver earrings which swung with every move of her head. Bull loosened his bow tie and swilled an amber-coloured brandy in a glass the size of a small goldfish bowl. He looked around at his guests.

Hazel Baxendale, my Scientific Adviser. A turbulent priest, highly capable, a wonderful technocrat. She’d been devastatingly right about the ET signal. She’ll be pushing me to go for the new knowledge, to reach out to the aliens. But her background is academic, she’s only ever worked with people like herself. She knows nothing about the range, scope and depths of wickedness on the planet, and thinks of the ET as saviours of mankind, like something out of a Spielberg movie.

Logie Harris, my spiritual mentor and old pal, all the way back to ’Nam. He’s slowing down, and falling victim to a sort of dogmatism: he’s turning into a man who’s often wrong, but never in doubt. But he’s still my moral compass in an immoral world, and the only individual round the table who shares my religious convictions. And the only man in America who knows about that little incident, long ago, with Miss Saigon.

Al Sullivan, the Director of the CIA. Now DCIs come and go with alarming speed but Al’s been in the job for five years and brilliantly supervised the transition from remote satellite sensing to work in the field. Good old reliable Al. He won’t have much to say about the issues, but if the defence of the country calls for sordid action in the dark alleys of the world, Al will be there with the knife.

Hazel Baxendale sat directly across from the President. From her end of the table she saw decisions which would affect the lives of billions and set humanity on an irrevocable course, being made over brandy and cigars. She wondered if Bull liked to see himself as another Churchill. Logie Harris, of course, was the big problem. He was a throwback to a darker age, a man who thought all problems could be solved by reference to revealed wisdom. He had a pernicious influence over Bull. Somehow she was going to have to lever the President away from him. She didn’t know how. But it would be criminal beyond belief to turn down the invitation to a better future for humanity, doubly so if it was rejected because of this theocratic bigot.

Logie Harris, unlike many of his more calvinistic compatriots, enjoyed a good brandy. If the Lord was happy to turn water into wine, he wasn’t about to thwart His purpose by refusing it. There was, he had now been persuaded, a message directed at us from something out there. But that fact had to be weighed against another message, the clear statement that we and we alone were the children of God. That being so, the message was coming from some alien creature which had no more right to salvation than Seth’s Labrador, now under the table and sniffing at his shoes. The signallers — divorced from God’s salvation — could only have malevolent intent. Their earthly spokeswoman in the form of Hazel Baxendale was right here, advising the President. I sense great danger, thought Logie, and pray that God will help me steer the President on the true path. We must have nothing to do with these entities.

Al Sullivan pondered. An issue like this needed a huge input of expertise, the wisest heads going. But there were no specialist advisers, there was no NSC meeting, no Chief of Staff, nobody outside this room. The Chief clearly saw this as a matter for the most extraordinary security. He wondered how Il Presidente was going to play this one. The man had some tough choices to make in a matter of hours, especially with those people running loose in Europe. He’s surprised a lot of us, Sullivan mused. He’s turned out to be quiet, stoical, dignified even, and to have an open and reflective mind. I also know him as one tough-minded and obstinate SOB. Once he knows the right course of action, he’ll pursue it relentlessly. The question is, what is the right course of action?

The CIA Director took a cigar from the proffered box. The President nodded at the table. Stewards quickly cleared it, piled logs on the fire. There was a flurry of cold air as they left.

Sullivan puffed at the fine Macanudo. ‘The situation has changed, Mr President.’

‘Uhuh?’ Bull gave an encouraging nod.

‘When the Russians and British had a monopoly on the disk, we stood to fade out.’

Bull nodded again. ‘I can see that. We’d have been excluded from the game.’

Sullivan said, ‘But now we have this Petrie guy, and the disk. Now we can access the message.’

‘Assuming we can persuade him to hand over the encryption keys, which are safely in his head.’

‘That’s not a problem,’ the CIA Chief said confidently.

‘Mr Sullivan, that has a sinister sound to it.’ Hazel said it light-heartedly. She had settled for a cranberry juice and, in contrast to the men around the table, was sitting upright and tense.

Sullivan said, ‘Relax, Ms Baxendale, we’re not talking medieval torture.’

‘I’m relieved to hear it.’

The DCI grinned. ‘Not exactly.’

The President too was lighting a large cigar. ‘I don’t want to know, Al.’

Sullivan blew a flawed smoke ring. ‘There could be overwhelming military advantages tucked away in these disks, even if they only let us jump fifty years ahead.’

Hazel nodded her agreement. ‘Petrie’s interrogation mentioned new force fields at energies beyond anything we understand now. They won’t make practical weapons, not for a long time, but we have to keep a weather eye on anything that increases our understanding of subnuclear matter.’

‘I’d go along with that,’ the President said.

‘So. Bring them over, let’s analyse the material. You saw what was on the sample disk. It’s just fantastic.’

Bull said, ‘But the British and the Russians had their chance and turned it down.’

Logie Harris said, ‘I praise God that they did, and trust our President to do the same.’

Hazel said, ‘Their mistake is our profit.’

‘These are not God’s creatures, Ms Baxendale. They can only be motivated by malice.’

‘Rubbish. There are strong selective advantages to the old-fashioned ethic of helping your neighbour.’ Hazel turned to Bull, who was watching the exchange with careful eyes. ‘Sir, you heard Petrie’s interrogation this morning. Well, I took advice on the issue.’

‘I know you did.’

‘The opinion concurs with Petrie. If advanced civilisations hadn’t evolved a code for living with their neighbours they’d have self-destructed long ago. The message is on the level. We’d be fools to turn our back on them.’

Harris said, ‘Your argument is as false as the message because you base it on the idea of evolution.’

‘Here we go, still stuck in the nineteenth century.’

‘In the twenty-first, I assure you. Evolution is a story, no more. It fails to explain the irreducible complexity of even a single cell. Tiny evolutionary steps cannot have created it. From molecules to a living cell is a fantastic jump which no evolutionists have explained.’

‘Hey, you’ve been reading up on this, Logie.’

‘Indeed, Ms Baxendale. And what I also read is that the evolutionists believe mind was created from inert matter by mindless forces. They believe that all the complexity and structure of the world generated itself. They even believe that the Universe created itself out of nothing, a miraculous feat indeed.’ Harris turned to the President. ‘Your Science Adviser called me a backwoodsman, Seth, blinded by faith. But the evolutionists have their own faith, that of materialism. They will die rather than admit to design even when the evidence of design is staring them in the face.’

Hazel said, ‘The fossil record speaks for itself. Life has evolved. And the genetic code backs this up. There’s a ninety-nine per cent overlap between the genes of chimps and humans. How can that be if we aren’t closely related?’

‘You mean you’d let your daughter marry a chimpanzee?’

Bull grinned, and Hazel said, ‘Oh Christ.’

Sullivan said, ‘Mr President, perhaps I can bring some clarity to the situation here.’

‘Al, please do.’

‘We can remove this Petrie and destroy the disk. That way everything stays the way it was before.’

The President’s cigar was well alight and he looked at the glowing end with satisfaction. ‘We could just hand him over to the Slovak authorities. Let them, or the Russians or the Brits, do the throat-cutting. Our hands would stay clean.’

Hazel bit her tongue.

Sullivan sipped at an Armenian cognac. ‘Too risky. We’d have no control over the situation. We’d have to do the job ourselves.’

Good old reliable Al.

The DCI continued: ‘Or we could get hold of the disk and the encryption keys in his head. Make use of the knowledge already in the disks but just don’t reply to the signallers, so avoiding the danger inherent in a reply. We could control the flow of the new knowledge, feed it through our institutes, make it look like a wonderful new renaissance of science or something.’

‘Maybe we should be taking that route,’ the President wondered. ‘Now that this guy has walked through our door.’

Hazel said, ‘That’s unrealistic. Science doesn’t work that way. Hundreds of people would have to be told the truth. Hundreds or thousands of others would guess it. If just one individual susses out there’s an extraterrestrial signal, we don’t know what would follow.’

The DCI grinned again. ‘Disinformation is my trade, Hazel. Don’t underestimate the power of a good cover story.’ Hazel shook her head sceptically and her earrings swung like little pendulums.

Harris said, ‘This Petrie knows where the signal came from. He could talk. Some fool would then fire off a reply.’

Hazel said, ‘We must go for it, Mr President. We’ll never get another opportunity, not just for ourselves, but ultimately for the whole of humanity.’

Harris said, ‘Join the Galactic club, huh? We become immortals, gods on Earth? Producing children in the image of little gods?’ There was a smattering of uneasy laughter around the table. He continued: ‘Who needs Frankenstein? The signallers are doing it all for us. And I’ve seen no more concern here about the moral issues of tampering with life than I suppose Baron Frankenstein did in the book.’

‘If we have the knowledge we can choose whether or not to use it,’ Hazel said. ‘Sort out the ethical issues at leisure.’

Harris shook his head. ‘That’s pretty naive, Ms Baxendale. The knowledge would eventually be misused.’

‘Or used. Even kept in reserve, to rebuild society if we were ever nuked or hit by an asteroid or blanketed with comet dust.’

Harris said, ‘You’re evidently a godless woman, Ms Baxendale, and I don’t expect you to appreciate this point, but the fact is that God made Man in His image. There’s nothing in sacred texts about extraterrestrials. And redemption is at the core of all Christian doctrine. But as I’ve explained to the President, there is nothing in the Bible to say that unearthly creatures have obtained redemption. That being so, they are not God’s creatures. We are. It follows that we must reject whatever message they send, and make no response. We already have a saviour of mankind. All we have to do is listen to His message.’

The President, half-smiling, looked at Hazel expectantly. She controlled her temper and kept her voice even. ‘Mr President, I have no answer to this Antichrist rubbish. If you believe it, there’s nothing I can say.’

The CIA Director said, ‘You know better than to question a man’s religious faith, Hazel.’

‘No, sir, I don’t know better. We have a golden route to the future in our hands, the conquest of disease, unbelievable longevity, great wisdom. It’s in our hands and from where I sit we’re being denied it by one man’s medieval superstition.’

Sullivan opened his mouth angrily.

Bull said, ‘It’s okay, Al, calm down. I’m not looking for Yes men.’

Sullivan strode over to a side table and poured coffees. The flames from the fire were now leaping up the chimney. He came back with a tray and distributed cups. ‘If the disks end up in the wrong hands it would be a catastrophe. It could reduce our nuclear arsenals to the level of pikes and swords. They must either be destroyed or delivered into our hands.’

The President turned to his Science Adviser. ‘Say we had to remove Petrie, Hazel. What’s your view on that?’

Hazel replied tensely, ‘Not my field. I’m just a hack doing my job.’

‘If I thought that, you wouldn’t be here. But I’m never quite sure what’s going on behind those beautiful dark eyes of yours.’

‘I just do my job, sir.’

‘Uhuh. Tell me something. Would you kill a man for your country?’

‘If I had to. Like any soldier.’

‘Say some terrorist in Teheran needed to be stopped before he set out to spray New York with botulinus toxin? Me, I’d knife him in some dark alley and sleep like a baby after it. But you?’

‘Pass me the knife.’

‘But now suppose the man is innocent. That he just happens to know too much.’

‘I’ll pass on that.’

‘See what I mean, Hazel? That’s what I call an ambiguous answer.’ This time the laughter was subdued, and had a nervous edge to it.

Bull finally dipped his nose in the brandy glass, took a deep sniff and swallowed half the liquid. ‘Politicians have this in common with soldiers: they don’t like ambiguities. It makes them nervous. We give a directive, we like to be sure it’ll be obeyed.’ He gave his Science Adviser a quizzical look. ‘Having you around can be, let’s say, uncomfortable.’

He looked across at Sullivan, who was eyeing the President speculatively. ‘We’ve got this mathematician guy in a safe house?’

‘The word “safe” is an exaggeration, sir. We haven’t had much call for safe houses in Central Europe these last ten years.’

‘What are you saying? That the Europeans could find him?’

‘And soon. The Russians have sent in a team of specialists and the border is effectively sealed. They must know that this Petrie and his girlfriend might approach us.’

The President had been about to finish the brandy. He stopped, the glass poised at his lips. ‘Yeah. The girlfriend. What do we know about her?’

‘A young lady by the name of Freya Størmer, part of the team. She’s a Norwegian astronomer, co-opted like Petrie. Our information is that they’ve become close.’

‘And where is this Freya Størmer?’

‘Vanished. But she must be at the end of her tether by now. She can’t stay free without money.’

‘Hell, Al, if they get to her…’

‘Yes, sir. I’ve a team flying out there now. She was last seen in southern Slovakia, a few miles from the Austrian border.’

The President stood up. Light from the room was catching snowflakes just outside the window. Ford had used a snowmobile to get around the site and he wondered idly if he ought to get one in for himself.

He turned back from the window. ‘Who do you have out there, Al?’

‘A man by the name of Joe Callaghan. His file says he’s third-generation Irish. Not what you’d call a high flier, but he has a reputation for reliability.’

‘Christ, Al, we’re talking about the vital interests of America, and an unsafe house, and specialist Russian teams looking for these people and the clock ticking away. And what do you give me? A footsoldier. Some third-rater out in the boondocks waiting for his pension.’

‘As I said, sir, I have a team flying out at this moment.’

‘A team? What sort of team?’

‘Specialists,’ the CIA Director said vaguely.

‘Specialists.’ Bull nodded thoughtfully.