A Creed for the Third Millennium (10 page)

When she had first presented Operation
Search to him, his reaction had been mixed and cautious. But no administration
had ever been as conscious of the mood of the people as Tibor Reece's. Nor had
any President ever been faced with such profound consequences of national
humiliation and demoralization, even Tibor Reece's predecessor in office,
Augustus Rome. For old Gus Rome had held the people together by the sheer force
of his personality, and in that respect his successor in office was not so
fortunate.

Harold Magnus, playing safe, had taken Dr
Judith Carriol and her schema for Operation Search to the President, and the
President, while not wildly enthusiastic (he did not have an enthusiastic
nature), had seen enough potential to direct them to
go ahead immediately.

Dr Carriol was perfectly aware of how
Harold Magnus felt about her, for he was not a man able to conceal his
instinctive reactions to people. It suited her to work for a man of this type;
she didn't have to waste time and energy flattering and fluttering him into
assent. Actually they understood each other very well, for they were both
ring-wise fighters who had learned to spar for points.

'Hillier, of course,' he said.

'Yes. And eight others.'

'It
has
to be Hillier!'

She looked at him very directly. 'Mr
Secretary, if Senator Hillier was a foregone conclusion, we had no need to spend
so much time and money mounting an Operation Search! Hillier's was the name that
sprang to mind in the beginning, but he was too young then. However, Operation
Search was not mounted merely to buy the Senator time! It was mounted to make as
sure as human fallibility can that we pick the one and only man for the job. It
is the most important job this country — or possibly any country — has offered a
man in God knows how long. I can't even think of an equivalent.'

'Hillier,' he said, obdurate.

'Mr Magnus, if I had had
my
way we
would have excluded political men and women even from our first sample! I do not
consider a politician suitable for this job.'

They would never agree about Hillier, so
he abandoned the argument. 'What about phase two?' he asked.

'It goes forward at once. I've given Dr
Hemingway Dr Abraham's candidate to investigate, and vice versa. I am
investigating Dr Chasen's three people myself.'

The Secretary sat up straight. 'What's
happened to your blue-eyed boy Chasen?'

'Nothing. He did brilliantly. To use him
on phase two would be a waste of the man. Besides which, he's not a good
personal investigator, where the other two are. So I'm giving him the job of
revamping our relocation methodology.'

'Shit! That ought to keep him
busy!'

'Yes, it ought. I've turned over
Abraham's and Hemingway's teams to him as well as allowing him to keep his own
staff. There's no point in having trained twelve people to really complex work
and then putting them back into chickenshit computer routines like analysing the
amount of money we're having to spend dropping feed by helicopter to starving
deer in the national parks. The relocation mess is big enough for Moshe to use
eighteen assistants, probably until they and he are due for
retirement'

'Pessimist!'

'Realist,
sir.'

'So phase two involves only you and
Hemingway and Sam Abraham.'

'The less people involved, the better.
With John Wayne holding the Washington fort, we certainly won't need the U.S.
Cavalry,' she said, and grinned.

'What shall I report to the President,
then?'

'Oh, that we're moving from phase one to
phase two right on schedule, and that phase one went very much according to
expectation.'

'Oh, come on! I'll have to tell him a bit
more than that, Dr Carriol!'

She sighed. 'All right, then tell him
Hillier rose to the final nine, as predicted. That of the nine selected for
phase two investigation, seven are men and two are women. One candidate has two
children, SCB second-child approval, of course. Only two are unmarried, one man
and one woman. Three of the nine are directly concerned with NASA and with
Phoebus in particular, which just goes to show how important our space programme
has become, and how prominent its personnel have become. Tell him
too that no candidate met with hard-line opposition from anyone present this
afternoon.' 'Any genuine household names besides Hillier?' 'Oh, I would classify
seven as household names, including the two women. Two of the men are not
nationally well known.' 'Who didn't get to the top of the pyramid?' 'Impossible
to tell, really, as I deliberately refrained from personally checking the
hundred thousand names in the final sample. There must, I imagine, have been
many who didn't even make it that far. As to who fell by the wayside between one
hundred thousand and nine, I don't know that, either. If I did, Mr Secretary, I
would be defeating the whole purpose of Operation Search.'

He nodded, swung round rudely to face the
window. 'I thank you, Dr Carriol. Keep me informed,' he said to the big sheet of
triple-layered glass insulating him from the cold hard world outside on K
Street.

She didn't go home at once. Section Four
was deserted until she entered her own offices, where John Wayne looked up from
his desk as she passed. Good John! If you want your boy to be a tower of
strength to those around him, name him John. What's in a name? Dr Carriol
believed in names, only from personal experience. She had never known a Pam who
wasn't a sexpot or a John who wasn't a tower of strength or a Mary who wasn't
down to earth. Joshua Christian.

In the small safe built into the lower
regions of her desk all the files were already tucked away, filling it to the
last millimetre of its capacity. She brought them out and strewed them around
the desk in front of her, frowning as she debated how many of the nine
candidates' file copies she should retain, how many destroy. John Wayne walked in just as her
hands crept over Joshua Christian.

'Sit down, John. What did you
think?'

Section Four's chief recreation was
rubbernecking to see exactly what was the nature of the boss's relationship with
her odd-looking secretary, its chief amusement ribald and mostly physically
impossible speculations about them; but when Section Four was not present to see
Dr Carriol with her secretary, he changed, became much less a neuter without
becoming more a man. Only he and she knew that with the single exception of
herself, he possessed the highest security rating in the entire Department; they
both rated far higher than Harold Magnus.

'I think it went very well,' he said. 'A
few surprises, one really unexpected. Do you want the minutes?'

'Done already?'

'In very rough draft only.'

'Thanks, but no thanks. I remember enough
to suit my purpose for the moment. Plenty to mull over.' She sighed, put her
fingertips against her closed eyes, then suddenly dropped her hands and looked
at John Wayne piercingly; this was one of her favourite tricks, and a very
effective one. It didn't work on John Wayne, nor had she intended it to. Sheer
habit was all.

'Old Moshe Chasen really trumped the
other two, didn't he? I knew that man was worth stealing from HEW!'

'A brilliant man,' John agreed. 'You're
going to put him to work on relocation, of course.'

'Of course.'

'And have a look at his three candidates
yourself.'

'There's no way I'd let anyone else!' She
gave a huge involuntary yawn and smothered it behind her hand, her eyes
watering. 'Oh, Lord, I'm flagging! Do you mind getting me some coffee? I don't
want to take any of this stuff out of my office,
so I'm going to stay for a while.'

'Does that mean you'd like me to order
you a dinner of some kind?'

'Too much trouble for you. If there's a
sandwich left from the conference cart, that'll do.'

'Who are you going to tackle first,
ma'am?' Even when they were alone he never addressed her by her given name, and
she never asked him to. It kept the status quo nicely.

She opened her eyes wide and contorted
those expressive brows. 'Why, who else than Senator David Sims Hillier VII? He's
right here in Washington.' She shivered, a new thought occurring. 'Brr! Do you
realize I'm going to have to go to Connecticut and Michigan for the other two?
In
winter!'

John Wayne smiled wryly; he had nice
teeth, but this was not the kind of smile that showed them. 'The new
Alaska.'

'Oh, not quite!' Then she shrugged.
'Well, not yet.'

In the end she stayed in her office until
after the sun had risen. By then she knew the entire contents of every file,
could place names and faces with even the most unimportant scraps of history,
and hypothesize about possible strengths and weaknesses. Two of the candidates
she had mentally discarded already, sure that when the big moment came they
would not be worth mentioning to Tibor Reece.

Of course Dr Joshua Christian was not one
of the two candidates thrown onto that internal refuse heap; after reading the
thick wad of notes and reports on him, she was intrigued. The man had coined
some very quotable quotes, and his name for the increasing depression and lack
of hope which had begun to creep across the country thirty years before she
found most satisfyingly apt. Millennial neurosis.

He was going to be difficult to
investigate, though. Already she had tabulated the points his
dossier revealed as negative; he was a maverick in his field rather than well
accepted and respected by his peers, he was not always very consistent in his
attitudes, his operation was so small-scale it suggested he thought on a small
scale, and there was a distinct possibility that he was riddled with Oedipal
guilts. Dr Carriol did not think highly of the internal resources of men in
their thirties who still lived with Mother and to all intents and purposes had
never embarked upon a sexual encounter with man or woman. Like the rest of the
world, she found self-imposed celibacy a great deal harder to understand than
any alternative sexual state, including the basest perversions; and this in
spite of the fact that she was herself a frigid woman. The strength to resist
one's primal urges was far more suspect than the weakness of succumbing to them
or avoiding them. For he didn't have the eyes of a cold or an unfeeling
man…

No use just fronting up to his clinic out
of the blue; after studying his file she thought him bound to view her with
alarm and mistrust. Nor could she breathe the word 'Washington' to him; his
opinion of the federal capital and its bureaucracy was not exactly hostile, but
it was wary. Unlikely too that she could wangle an invitation from him to visit
by going through one of her many contacts in the Chubb psychology echelons. No,
whatever approach she finally selected would have to seem so natural that he
would find it — and her — unimpeachable.

Time to go home. Time to run the gauntlet
of the main entrance and its daily suicides on the way to catch the bloody bus.
It wouldn't be forever, she told herself. One of these days she would be
numbered among the very few people anywhere in the country privileged enough to
command a car for going to and from work. In the case of the general population,
cars were permissible for vacation purposes only, a maximum of four weeks annually. Sensible and
farsighted, turning vacation time into a precious interlude eagerly welcomed and
mournfully farewelled. No government in the history of the United States of
America had been so dedicated to sensibility and farsightedness as the one
currently in office. But no government in the history of the United States of
America had been so depressing, either. Hence the need for an Operation
Search.

Georgetown was home, and home was
charming. Since this part of the country was not yet consistently excruciatingly
cold in winter, Dr Carriol had decided to forgo the additional degrees of warmth
boarding up the windows of her little red-brick house would have given her,
preferring to look out all year round onto the delightful tree-lined street and
the lovely old houses along its far side.

All her spare money and her prospects had
been mortgaged two years earlier to purchase the house, and she was still
groping through difficult financial woods. Oh,
pray
this major gamble of
her professional career paid dividends to her as well as to the country! If
Harold Magnus had his way, she would receive very little of the credit, but
(and
luck had nothing to do with it) she had managed the conduct of
Operation Search in such a manner that he would find it very difficult to steal
all her thunder.

There was no man in her life apart from
the occasional date she accepted more to be seen to be dating than from any
genuine desire to court an intimate relationship. She cared nothing for the sex
act, so obliged indifferently whenever it was demanded of her without attaching
one iota of importance to it, neither resenting nor thinking better of a man who
did demand it. Washington was an easy city to become a mistress in, a hard city
to find a husband in. However, a husband would not have suited her at all; he
would have taken up too much of time and energy she needed to apply to her work.
And a lover was basically a nuisance. Children she had taken care of when she
turned twenty-five by undergoing hysterectomy. These were not times to pin your
hopes and spiritual fires on domestic bliss anyway, but she was the kind of
woman who genuinely adored her work and could not imagine any close relationship
with a man rivalling it in her affections.