Pyramid Power: Chapter Twenty Nine

PART IV

When Hel freezes over

    The senior CIA official looked at the list and frowned. “Remember, Miggy, I never said this to you. But, these men… three of them were ours. They were… well, we were trying to get rid of them. They should never have made it through training. We had a bad patch a few years back.”

    He made a face. “The truth is the agency was furious when the PSA was formed. We were asked to second some staff.” He pointed to the list. “Guess who.”

    Tremelo nodded. “Was Megane one of yours?”

    “Sad to say, he was. There’s a story—I’ve never tried to confirm it, but I know the agents involved swear it was true—that when he was stationed in Venezuela he got the bright idea of publicly embarrassing the Venezuelan government. We haven’t had good relations with them in a long time, as you know. So, the screwball put sugar in the gas tanks of several official limousines which were to be used in an official motorcade the following day.”

    Miggy winced. “Oh, Lord. He got caught, I assume?”

    “No. But when the motorcade got stalled in Caracas, the Venezuelan government was not amused. Neither was the special U.S. envoy who was making a semi-secret visit to see if we could iron out at least some of the controversies. Not only was he stalled in one of the vehicles himself, but the Venezuelans immediately accused us—the CIA, I mean—of being responsible for the affair, and broke off the talks as a result.”

    The official sighed. “Of course, we denied it vigorously. Even after we found out it was true. That was Megane’s last overseas assignment. We were in the process of figuring out how to quietly ease him out of the company, when the PSA got set up and Garnett demanded that we provide her with some agents.”

    He leaned back in his chair and gave Tremolo a considering look. “You’d better know one thing, though, Miggy. Whatever else he is, Megane’s not a stoolie. Even if you nail him for something, I doubt you’ll be able to follow it up any further. He’s the kind of person who can get the goofiest notions of what constitutes his duty, sure enough—but he also takes it dead seriously. I guess you could call it part of the syndrome. He’ll clam up and take the rap himself, even if it means a long prison sentence.”

    “I can live with that. In a perfect world, I’d be able to get rid of Garnett and the PSA altogether. But I’m sure the best I can hope for is a much muddier conclusion. Garnett aside, there are a lot of powerful people and special interests who are backing the PSA for their own reasons.”

    He shrugged. “So it goes. I don’t really care all that much if the PSA would simply restrict itself to gathering intelligence about the Krim pyramid, even though they’ll make a royal nuisance of themselves when they try to insist on their authority to ‘co-ordinate’ all intelligence activities. It’s when the stupid bastards try to create intelligence that they became a real threat to the nation. Intelligence, yes, so-called ‘operations,’ no. We simply don’t know enough to be trying to conduct operational efforts. None of us—me included—much less people who are so inattentive to the intelligence they’re supposed to be ‘co-ordinating’ that they send some poor schmucks into the pyramid with fancy technical equipment that won’t work.”

    “Good luck,” said his friend.

    Common sense would have had PSA headquarters somewhere in Chicago. Political sense had the office exactly where it should be, in Washington. The meeting that was going on there right now, was anything but cordial. Agents Reno,

    Schmitt, Erskine were considerably the worse for wear, still, from the prequel to their visit to the cells at Fort Campbell. Agent Supervisor Megane and his two men were less battered, perhaps because the Greek hoplite outfits had protected them to some extent.

    But the only protection that would really have worked against the fury of Ms. Garnett would have been to be like Agents Sternal, Bormann, or Liber—dead.

    “This has turned into a complete fiasco,” she said coldly, grinding her words out between gritted teeth.

    They all stood looking at her, like a bunch of dumb oxen. “Get out,” she said. “I’ll deal with you later.”

    After the agents had filed out, Garnett swiveled in the chair behind her desk and looked at Assistant Director of Operations James Horton. She was actually more furious with him than any of his subordinates, and was deeply tempted to order him out of the room also. But, at least for the moment, she still needed him.

    She had one satisfaction, though. “You’re coming with me, Jim. No way I’m sitting through that so-called cocktail party this evening on my own.”

    Horton looked alarmed. That made her feel a little better.

    After the drinks were served, and the waiter withdrew from the private room in the very exclusive club in the nation’s capital, Garnett looked around the table. The expressions on the faces of the four men and one woman who’d joined her and Horton for cocktails were subdued, of course. They were all long-time veterans of the Beltway, and, like experienced poker players, knew better than to wear their sentiments on their sleeves. Still, only someone a lot more obtuse than Helen could have failed to detect the anger, irritation—and apprehension. The room seemed practically saturated with those emotions, especially the latter.

    Nothing for it, as much as Garnett hated doing so. She had to start with an apology. These people were beyond her control, if not her influence, and she had to stay on their good side.

    “Sorry about this, everyone. But we’ll get it straightened out soon enough.”

    The Secretary of Defense exchanged a glance with one of the two senators at the table, Senator Andrews from Texas. Then, Secretary Antonelli said: “How soon is ‘soon enough,’ Helen? I warn you, you don’t have much time. Tremolo’s already arrived—and don’t ever let that tweedy academic image he loves to cultivate fool you any. When it comes to Beltway knife-fighting, he’s as tough as anyone.”

    “Tougher, you ask me,” chimed in Senator Andrews.

    Roger Delacorte, the lobbyist from the defense industry, made a face. “Yeah, he’s a real shithead.”

    The Texas senator gave him a hard glance. “Cut it out, Roger. I like Miggy Tremelo personally.”

    His fellow senator from California chimed in. “So do I. And whether you do or don’t, Mr. Delacorte, I’d advise you to remember that most Congressmen who’ve dealt with the man like him also—and so does the public. Unfortunately, while I enjoy it in private, Miggy’s got a good sense of humor—which means the talk shows love having him as a guest. “ Senator Martinez took a sip from her cocktail glass. “The problem isn’t Miggy’s personality, it’s his policy. And since he won’t budge on it—and, for the moment, has the confidence of the President—we have to do an end run around him.”

    She used the glass to gesture at Garnett. “Hence, APSA and the PSA. But let’s not lose the forest for the trees. If we could have persuaded Tremolo, I’d have had no problem at all leaving him in charge. God knows, at least he’s competent.”

    Helen did her best not to stiffen angrily at the sideswipe. There was no love lost between Paula Martinez and her, and never had been—not since they’d first encountered each other years back in the course of a clash over environmental policy, when Helen had been on the staff of one of the senator’s opponents. But she simply couldn’t afford to lose Martinez’s backing. The big money on their side of the dispute came from the defense industry, and no senator in the country had more clout there than the senior senator from California.

    Roger Delacorte held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Fine, fine, fine. Professor Tremolo’s the greatest guy in the world. He’s still got his head up his ass when it comes to dealing with the alien pyramid—and let’s also not forget that that’s the name of the forest in the first place.”

    As he listened to the byplay, Melvin Steinmetz found himself wondering whether he’d backed the wrong horse in this race. Unlike everyone else at the table, Melvin didn’t really have a personal stake in the outcome. True, if the policy he advocated were to be adopted by the administration in place of Tremelo’s, his think tank would land a very juicy contract. So what? The Future Enterprise Institute was one of the three or four most prestigious and sought-after independent research and policy development outfits in the nation. They already had plenty of juicy contracts.

    He was simply convinced that Tremelo was wrong, dead wrong, and the consequences of his erroneous thinking were likely to be disastrous. As bad and probably worse than any major nuclear exchange—and Steinmetz’s think tank specialized in studies of nuclear war. Whether he realized it or not, Tremelo’s policy with regard to the Krim pyramid amounted to a revival of the Mutual Assured Destruction policy that had governed relations between the US and the USSR during the Cold War, when it came to all-out war. “You leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone, because we can each destroy the other.”

    For all its somewhat surrealistic nature, MAD had worked pretty well during that era—but only because the “mutual destruction” part had been true. What Tremelo couldn’t seem to grasp was that it was not true when it came to the pyramid. Who knew what the Krim could do, or not do—or would be willing to do? What Tremelo advocated amounted to…

    “We’ll leave them alone, and… we’ll see what they do.”

    That wasn’t good enough, not by a country mile. The United States had to take a pro-active stance toward the pyramid. Simply waiting and watching—what Tremelo called “quarantine”—gave all the advantage to the enemy. It amounted to unilateral disarmament.

    The problem, unfortunately, was that—so far, at any rate—Tremelo had all the proven and capable experts on his side of the debate. And it didn’t help one damn bit that the public doted on them even more than they did on Tremelo himself.

    One of Melvin’s associates at the Institute had called it the American nation’s “ingrained Humphrey Bogart complex.” Beneath the somewhat rueful whimsy, he had a point. No professional security force had been able to penetrate the pyramid without suffering 100% casualties—all of them fatalities except for a few still listed as missing in action. Whereas the “amateurs” had come out of it unscratched. A professor whose absent-mindedness was simply charming, when coupled with the rest—and with a zaftig new blonde girlfriend, to boot, who exuded “outdoorswoman” rather than “bimbo.” The country had gone even more gaga over her Afrikaans accent than they had over that silly Australian actor’s accent a few years back. A black maintenance man. Two paratroopers, one of them Hispanic and the other a Midwestern good-ole-boy.

    Racial harmony, even. It was enough to drive you mad—not because the people themselves did, but because they backed Tremelo to the hilt.

    So…

    With misgivings, Steinmetz had been persuaded to throw the considerable if very non-public influence of the Future Enterprise Institute behind the drive by the senators from Texas and California, with the open backing of the defense industry and the covert backing of the Secretary of Defense, to get APSA enacted and set up the PSA. The defense industry, of course, had its own completely material reasons for opposing Tremelo’s policy, which came down to nothing more subtle than that Tremelo’s approach didn’t produce any big fat defense contracts. With a somewhat less pig-in-the-trough mentality, the secretary of defense and the senators from the nation’s two biggest defense-industry states shared their views.

    Melvin’s misgivings had grown when Helen Garnett emerged as the front-runner for the new post. He’d had to hold his nose at some of the legal implications of APSA, to begin with, figuring you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. But what he hadn’t foreseen was that a vigorous egg-breaker like Garnett would wind up running the show. Yeah, fine, the woman was tougher than nails and was possibly the best political fund-raiser in the country. And… this qualified her how, exactly, to oversee setting up a hands-on approach to the pyramid?

    The plan she’d developed that had turned into a mare’s nest was typical, he thought. Using the “need to rescue Tom Harkness”—who’d been nothing more than a second-rater on the National Security Council’s staff—as an excuse to set up an “Operations Directorate” was a scheme right out of the woolliest days of the OSS in World War II. Except that Helen Garnett was no Wild Bill Donovan, and the team of operatives she’d picked bore a lot more resemblance to the Watergate plumbers than they did to OSS agents.

    What a mess. Maybe if he bailed out now, he could still get Tremelo to listen to him.

    Probably not, though. Miggy and he got along well enough, but Tremelo was just plain stubborn. Always had been.

    While he’d been ruminating, the conversation around him had continued. Melvin had paid just enough attention not to lose track of where things were. So, he wasn’t taken by surprise when Delacorte—he’d be the one, naturally; the coarse bastard—finally said it out loud.

    “All right, Helen. We’ll back you in the coming hearings, of course—although you do understand that you’re going to have to let some heads roll.”

    That much was obvious, of course. They could only hope that Agent Supervisor Megane shared G. Gordon Liddy’s stubborn sense of honor as well as his screwball cowboy attitudes. If all went well, he’d just take the fall and keep his mouth shut. If he turned out to be another John Dean, though…

    Steinmetz couldn’t help but wince a little. He didn’t know any of the details of what had happened in Fort Campbell—and didn’t want to know, either—but he was dead certain there’d be all hell to pay. Just from what he’d learned, he didn’t doubt for a moment that the PSA’s agents on the spot had grossly transgressed even the wide latitude APSA have them. Not to mention their grasp of public relations, which made that of the devil look good. What sort of lunatic goes out of his way to infuriate officers and enlisted men in a military unit as well-known and well-regarded as the 101st Airborne, for God’s sake?

    Delacorte cleared his throat. Here it was. “As for the rest, since you have no way of getting in touch with your two agents still in the pyramid, we’ll just have to hope…”

    But he let the words trail off, the gutless prick. So Steinmetz said it for him. “We’ll just have to hope that we don’t wind up with the same scorecard. You’re all aware, I trust, that in his talk show last night—the most widely watched in the country—Orville Trenton made the remark that, in less than three days, three out of the five PSA agents who went in came out dead. But ‘the real pros’—yeah, that’s what he called them—still seem to be intact.”

    That was good enough, he figured. He was not going to say out loud that the best thing that could happen now would be for the dead bodies of Jerry Lukacs and Liz De Beer—and practically the whole Jackson family, including four kids—to come plummeting out of the skies.

    Melvin Steinmetz wasn’t sure if he was backing the wrong horse. But he was surely backing the one that stank the most. He’d have to take a shower when he got home.

    “That’s it, then,” said Senator Edwards, finishing his drink and starting to rise from the table. “Helen, we’ll see you at the hearings.”

    Outside the club, while they waited for the limos, Senator Martinez leaned over and said softly to Melvin: “I still can’t believe she was dumb enough to authorize such a wild-ass project.”

    Steinmetz shrugged. “The problem isn’t her intelligence, Paula. She just still hasn’t learned the same lesson that the man who was possibly England’s most competent king had to learn the hard way.”

    Martinez frowned. “Which means…”

    “Do not state, in front of drunken and stupid knights—and someone like Megane makes up for sobriety by being at least as dumb as any knight who ever lived—‘will no one rid me of this turbulent priest’?”

    The California senator chuckled softly. “Oh, that Thomas à Becket business. In fairness, Melvin, she didn’t go that far.”

    Steinmetz gave her a cold eye. “I’m sure she didn’t suggest anyone commit murder. But who knows what other foolishness she set in train, Paula? Who knows what cowboy agents will do, or try to do, if they think they’re interpreting tough talk properly?” He gave Garnett a look that was colder still. She was standing out of hearing range thirty feet away, talking with the secretary of defense. “And unfortunately, that’s Helen Garnett’s stock in trade. Talking tough.”

    “The problem with Scandinavian mythology,” said Dr. Gunnarsson, finishing his presentation to the Senate committee the next morning, “is that the area was thoroughly Christianized. Reading Dr. Lukacs’ debriefing report it seems pretty certain that we need some deity or power in the Ur-Mythology that is also worshiped in earnest here, acting as a linkage.”

    Miggy took it from there, to the room full of powerful people. “There is plainly more to belief than even churchmen were sincerely able to appreciate. We’re also getting hints that not all ‘believers’ are identical. Careful measurements of the pyramid expansion indicate that although it grew slightly with all intakes, it grew at different rates with each person. Look, we know from the debriefing reports that the Krim expected the pyramid to cross some threshold relatively soon. We do not know at what point that happens. We simply cannot take a chance that through badly researched cowboy efforts, following a very private agenda, the PSA is going to put the country in jeopardy. Under military control, containment and isolation worked. We had zero growth and zero snatches for three weeks, Senators. We can cope with that. What we can’t cope with has been the results of this foolishness. I’ve presented the evidence to you, and later on in the hearings you’ll be able to hear the eyewitness testimony of such people as Sergeant Cruz and Corporal McKenna and their families, as well as Colonel McNamara and the Greek sphinx Throttler. There is simply no longer any question that the PSA operatives took highly unauthorized actions. I’m sure Director Garnett will insist that none of these actions were authorized by her, and that may well be true. But whether authorized or not, they were done by people on her staff, and on her watch.”

    By the early afternoon, as he watched from the audience, Melvin Steinmetz knew that Helen Garnett was in deep trouble.

    And it only got worse after she took her seat at the witness table. Not more than two minutes after Helen finished her opening remarks, Senator Larsen picked up a piece of paper in front of him. An aide had just slid it in front of him. The fact that the senator didn’t give it more than a glance made clear to Melvin that Larsen already knew what it contained. In fact, he was pretty sure having the aide hand it to him in front of the whole room was simply the senator’s clever stage management.

    Rustling the paper in front of the microphone, the senator from Montana said:

    “I was wondering if you could shed some light on this subject, as well, Director. I’ve just received a report from Director O’Hare of the Fish and Wildlife Service, who’ll be testifying tomorrow or the day after. But he felt this item of information was important enough to ask me to bring it up immediately. Fish and Wildlife did blood tests on the Greek sphinx Throttler and discovered that your PSA agents had injected her with a tranquilizer after they got her on board the cargo plane.” He glanced back and forth along the long hearing table, making eye contact with as many other senators as he could. “I hope I don’t need to point out to the senators here that any such action is a gross violation of the law. I was wondering if you could explain to us how that criminal action came about.”

    Garnett stared at him, for a moment, seeming to be frozen. Like a rabbit in front of a snake. Watching her closely, Steinmetz was quite sure the information came as a complete surprise to her.

    Marvelous. The captain of the ship had just found out that she had loose cannons rolling all over the deck. Melvin lifted his eyes and exchanged a glance with Senator Martinez, sitting at the long table with the other senators. After a couple of seconds, she looked away. Fortunately, she had an excellent poker face.

    “Well… I certainly don’t know anything about it, Senator,” insisted Garnett. “I can assure you—”

    Larsen cut her off abruptly. “Assure me of what? That you’ve lost control of your own subordinates? That much is obvious. Even leaving aside this latest escapade involving the sphinx, your PSA agents ran roughshod over officers and enlisted men of one of our nation’s most decorated military units, even going so far as kidnapping—yes, that’s what it amounts to, for all practical purposes—the families of two of its soldiers.” He let that sit for a moment. Then added, grimly: “This is a nation of laws, Ms. Garnett. Even the Alien Pyramid Security Act—which I opposed at the time, and now intend to see repealed if I can—is a law. It is not a blank check.”

    Quietly, Melvin Steinmetz rose from his seat and made his way toward the exit at the rear of the big chamber.

    Time to bail out. Miggy was partial to Italian food, if he remembered correctly. Maybe he’d be free for lunch in a day or two.