Behold a Pale Horse Read online

  In May of 1972, Brother Rupert Justice asked God’s permission on the air (after obtaining Claudia Bird’s permission in private) to take a rest, a sabbatical, in Europe. He told his vast flock in TV land that he wished to reflect in the gloomy grandeur of Europe’s cathedrals and monasteries, that, despite the popish grip, remained the monuments of Christianity’s struggle to stave off barbarism in the Dark Ages.

  Brother Rupert Justice began his Grand Tour in Paris. There was a lot going on in Paris in May 1972.

  16

  2000

  THE CAMPAIGN GROUND on through September and October. Zeke Archer watched the polls and scheduled the candidate’s appearances but shut himself out of the “content” meetings that were run by the candidate’s wife, Clarissa and held in check by the glowering countenance of the Mormon. Tolliver’s message didn’t vary, but the emphasis changed, leaning more and more on the theme of government corruption and what to do about it. Demonstrators continued besieging Tolliver’s speeches, and the mysterious toughs the press called, albeit softly, New Zealots, continued to confront them. Vice President Sandman, Tolliver’s target as the symbol of everything wrong with the government and losing ground in the national polls, suggested in a TV interview that the demonstrations and confrontations appeared to be staged, as no group ever acknowledged organizing either side. Confronted with that charge, Tolliver laughed, and said all were welcome to see him and hear his message.

  Two days later a Sandman rally was invaded by thirty men chanting anticorruption slogans. Despite the efforts of unarmed security volunteers, the men reached the temporary stage from which the vice president was speaking and managed to knock it down. Sandman was pitched into the crowd, surrounded by Secret Service agents with guns drawn, but the thugs slipped away in the pandemonium. Sandman climbed back onto the tilted platform, straightened his clothes and smoothed his hair, and gamely resumed his speech to a shaken and much-diminished crowd.

  November 6 arrived cold and rainy in the Northeast and Midwest, fine in the rest of the country. Voter turnout was predicted to be light, and was light. Zeke Archer set up his Death Watch in a basement conference room in the Governor’s Mansion in Austin. He had direct feed from the networks’ exit polling computers; the networks were committed to report no state’s results before the polls closed but in fact had results far earlier, and so did Zeke.

  Governor and Mrs. Tolliver were watching movies upstairs in the family quarters; Justice’s favorites, old Clint Eastwood Westerns. Justice was depressed; the last polls placed him two percentage points behind across the nation, and left the whole game in the hands of the fickle voters of California, where the race was too close to call.

  Zeke liked light turnout, and had been praying for blizzards across the land. Tolliver’s supporters were passionate, committed, and would drive through snowdrifts to vote if they had to. Sandman was a boring policy wonk who looked like everyone’s bland, overweight brother-in-law. At the end of the campaign, Tolliver’s message had sharpened but was still repetitive and approached boredom as well. But Zeke was convinced Justice’s voters would care enough. They had to.

  Zeke had it all laid out before him. Tolliver needed, absolutely needed, Florida and Texas, for 56 electoral votes. He had to carry the Old South: Alabama, (Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, for 73 more. Then he needed all of the West: Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada. North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and of course, mighty California. One hundred ten electoral votes in the West. That would get Justice to 239—31 short of victory. Justice had to gather those votes out of the 53 available in states even harder to predict than essential California: Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire.

  Early exit polls gave Zeke everything he needed in the Northeast and South. Florida teetered as did Indiana, even though its polls closed first in the nation. Results looked good in the West, although California held at fifty-fifty long after the polls closed.

  Zeke sweated it out with the Mormon and just three aides until three in the morning, Central time, when California came in for Justice and Vice President Sandman gave a choked but nonetheless boring concession speech. Zeke stood up, rubbed his sore back and eyes smarting from the computer screen, and went upstairs to congratulate the president-elect.

  17

  JULIA EARLY ARRIVED at her desk in the Credit Department of Capital National Bank thirty minutes late and hungover on the morning after the election. She had gone to a series of press parties with Charles Taylor, who, unlike her, disparaged Governor Tolliver, but like her had predicted his victory. Justice had won the narrowest victory since 1960, near dead even with Sandman at 49.1 percent of the popular vote. Tolliver’s margin in the Electoral College was just twelve votes.

  But Justice had won and Julia had celebrated through breakfast. She hung up her raincoat in the closet, got herself a cup of coffee from the urn in the supply room and sat at her desk. She felt weary, her head ached and her mouth was as dry as cotton. She took a sip of bitter coffee, fought down the urge to gag, and turned on her computer monitor. “You have new e-mail,” the screen reported.

  Julia rubbed her temples. She liked Charles, but she felt he squired her around largely because she thought she had some insight into Rupert Justice Tolliver that she didn’t. His calls became less frequent, not the least, she believed, because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Julia wasn’t ready for any commitment, and she was a Texas country girl with a strong family and a lifelong center on the Baptist Church. She was also a virgin and had no hurry to alter that.

  Besides, Charles had slept with Judith, and that was a little close to home, although Julia had no illusions that either Charles or Judith would care.

  Julia downloaded her e-mail. Six items, five of them administrative notes from the head of training and the head of Credit Policy. The sixth was a reminder from the Americas and Caribbean Lending Group that she was overdue on her review of the Uvalde County Savings and Loan Society.

  Oh God, Julia thought. She considered getting her coat and going home, pleading illness. She certainly felt bad enough, and a review of the poorly organized and neglected credit file would only give her eyestrain and add to her headache. Instead, she took two aspirin from her purse, swallowed them with cold coffee, and trudged to the Credit Library to draw out the hated file.

  The file had increased in size from a single manila folder and a thin correspondence file to two brown expanding files and another labeled “Communications.” One of the bored clerks in the library got a cart and placed the files on its top shelf. Julia reckoned she was looking at four linear feet of documents. The clerk, a pallid girl with dirty red hair and pimples, offered to wheel the files back to Julia’s desk. Julia thanked her but said she would take it herself.

  “I’ll need that cart back.” the girl said suspiciously.

  “As soon as I can,” Julia replied. “I won’t be able to put all this stuff on mv desk.”

  “We only got three carts,” the girl whined.

  “As soon as I can,” Julia said firmly, and lurched off from the door of the library.

  By the time she pushed the heavy cart through the carpet back to her desk, she was sweating and dizzy. She ran to the ladies’ room, skipping, hurrying, thinking she might be sick. She didn’t want to be sick. She splashed cold water on her face and neck, then drank about a pint from her cupped hands. Her face in the mirror shocked her; she hadn’t looked that bad when she had got up to her shrilling alarm barely an hour ago.

  Julia went back to her desk. There were many empty places and the room was very quiet. Smart ones stayed home, she thought bitterly. Neither of her roommates was at her desk. I guess they know better than to think Washington would be business as usual the night after a dramatic, close election.

  Julia selected the thickest accordion file, labeled “Deposits, Transfers and Line Usage,” and opened it to the first page.
/>   The paper file was two weeks out of date and showed infrequent, but increasingly large, transfers from the Nassau, Bahamas, and George Town, Cayman Islands, branches of Capital National Bank, into and out of European and Asian banks, and—

  And back to Uvalde Savings and Little Cheyenne Development.

  Julia keyed the account numbers into her computer to get the current activity. The screen, originating at the current date and flashing backward, was full of entries back to the first of November. Julia kicked it back a screen and found the entries had begun to accelerate around the tenth of October, the time—

  The time Tolliver’s massive ad campaign had kicked in, the time Tolliver had buried his opponent in accusations and innuendo the vice president had no time to refute.

  As much as Julia supported Justice Tolliver, she had felt uneasy. More than uneasy.

  Julia keyed the Little Cheyenne file. Identical transfers in, and mirror transfers to a hundred individuals and companies, mostly in Texas but some offshore. Transfers Julia was sure would have become contributions to the Tolliver campaign in the closing weeks.

  Of course, she thought. Tolliver needed television money to break Sandman’s late surge.

  But where had it come from?

  Julia began to dig a backtrace on the computer. She felt angry and betrayed. Money-laundering was difficult to trace, but not impossible.

  COBRA READ OF Justice Tolliver’s victory in a week-old edition of the Rand Daily Mail. He was amused, but he had more immediate problems. A wet spring and early summer had brought blight to his vines and smut and insects to his wheat fields. He had to plow crops under and buy feed for his thinning livestock. There would be no grape harvest worth collecting.

  Cobra hadn’t worked in his old business since 1981, and over the years since had invested nearly his entire stash of money in the farm, violating a rule of many years to leave the money in Switzerland and Belgium alone as guarantee of his peaceful retirement. But he began to love his land, and his crops and his relations with his workers and the seminomad Zulu herders who grazed their cattle across his grass and recompensed him by trading through him, cattle for sale, goods to be purchased. South African wines became sought after in Europe and the United States, and Cobra brought his money in and bought more good land and cultivated it.

  Then came the international boycott against the white rulers of South Africa, and his wines stayed in their cellars. His farms, bought with cash from Swiss banks, acquired mortgages. His aging stock of wines became collateral for more debt. He despaired of losing all, and wondered what he would do next.

  Then Nelson Mandela made his peaceful revolution, a war not of guns but of flowers, songs, and dances. The boycott fell, and suddenly it all seemed possible again. Cobra continued to hang on, aided by his bankers, who had too many farms under mortgage to foreclose any that had any chance of deliverance. Cobra hung on, but he had no reserve.

  Cobra thought back to his last years in loyal service to any who could pay.

  COBRA HAD BEEN HIRED, by the gun broker Rokovski, to go to Rio de Janeiro in 1973. He was met by a man in plain clothes who took him to a small hotel. The Brazilian identified himself as Coronel Suares of the Serviço Nacional de Informaceos, Brazil’s secret police. There were other officers in the room, in uniform. Cobra was told, obliquely, that a secret operation was planned, that no one expected would be a secret for long. Brazil, whose national motto was Ordem e Progesso, was ruled by a military government. The colonel explained that Brazil felt increasingly threatened by the rise of leftist regimes in Argentina, Peru, and especially Chile. The Brazilians had decided to teach a lesson, and the place to do it was Chile, with its democratically elected (wink), highly visible president, Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens.

  “You see, senhor,” the colonel said. “Brazil respects its neighbors, and all the countries of Latin America have common frontiers with Brazil save two: Ecuador and Chile. If we reach out to Chile, the continent will know we are here and we will not tolerate leftist radicals to infect our continent.”

  “What is the military situation?” Cobra asked. “I confess to be ignorant of this continent.”

  “The Chilean military is united in the need to topple this mad professor, but he is clever. Three months ago, Chilean truckers went on strike because their prices are fixed by the government, but the price of fuel has skyrocketed. So Allende, already suspecting trouble from the army and especially the air force, sent the entire air fleet to Arica, in the far northern desert, then took all military stocks of fuel and sold it to the truckers, who generally support his syndicalist madness, at low prices. Most of the army’s tanks are restricted to barracks in the north and also without fuel.

  “What we will do is refuel and rearm that air force and army. We have the cooperation of the Government of Bolivia, who thinks much as we do. Nothing on paper, nothing official, but our tanker trucks and munitions trucks will travel unimpeded across Bolivia to Arica and other locations. We have no intention of being subtle, although of course we will issue the usual denials. The fuel trucks will be borrowed from Petrobras, and will have the normal yellow paint job with the green ‘BR’ on the sides. The operation will begin in seven to ten days.”

  Crazy, Cobra thought. It’s better to strike from darkness and without warning. “What do you wish of me?”

  “Go to Santiago de Chile. We will furnish papers and money, and of course your payment. The Hilton Hotel is across the central plaza from the Case de Moneda, the presidential palace. You will stay at the Hilton, on the top floor. The Moneda will be precision-bombed; it’s sufficiently isolated that the Chilean air force expects little collateral damage. The armor, however, will be late arriving, since they can’t leave their cantonments before the air force flies at the risk of tipping the government and allowing it to flee.

  “We have therefore engaged three shootists, all untraceable foreigners like yourself, to cover the exits from the Moneda. You will be in your room or on the roof of the Hilton with a view of the main entrance, and also of the balcony from which Allende likes to make speeches, and may appear to rally his supporters, the underclasses of Santiago. If he appears at either the door or the balcony, he is not to speak or depart.”

  Cobra nodded. “Claro,” he said. Understood.

  Seven days later the coup exploded from the north. The bombing was precise and devastating. Salvador Allende Gossens did indeed appear on the balcony, wrapped in the Chilean flag. The plaza had been emptied by the bombers, but he began to speak anyway, into a microphone Cobra presumed to be radio or television.

  Cobra dropped him with a single shot from a German Mauser SP66 sniper rifle supplied by the Brazilian SNI. Cobra left the roof immediately; state television, in the hands of the military under General Pinochet, the new president, later reported Allende had been shot by a Chilean paratrooper while armed and trying to flee.

  Cobra didn’t care about the lie. His business did not benefit from press cuttings.

  Cobra was back in Africa in a week, his bank account once again flush.

  FOR SEVERAL YEARS, 1974—1981, he stayed home in Africa, a continent that continued to create great wealth for a few based on grinding poverty for the masses. Cobra hadn’t been proud of his service with Idi Amin Dada and Mad Mike Harris, but Amin had paid well for a while, and it was possible to overlook the madman’s excesses as being nothing more than the continental norm. Both Harris and Cobra had been forced to run, unpaid, from Amin’s anger after they failed to prevent or defeat the Israeli raid on Entebbe Airfield in 1976, although they were later invited back. When Milton Obote invaded from Tanzania in 1979 to reestablish his own cruel rule over the tortured citizens of Uganda, Harris went to South Africa while Cobra returned to Southern Rhodesia. He was badly wounded in a raid into Mozambique two years later, but at least collected most of his pay. In the same year he bought his farm in the hills near Stellenbosch.

  He invested, more than he should, he knew, of his reserves. Perhaps it was a
vanity when he acquired his own presses and winery and started marketing his own label, the fixed costs of which nearly drove him under during the boycott. Then things began to ease, and when the opportunity came along to take his shot in St. Petersburg, he banked the money in Europe, once again swearing to put no more into the land.

  But when his neighbors, a young Boer family he liked very much, decided to emigrate with their young children to the white haven of Australia, he had to buy their farm. It was a lovely piece of bottomland that had been cultivated for three hundred years along a river that never failed even in droughts. Cobra planted the hillsides with vines from California and the Loire, and planted fruit trees as well in the lush soil. His Russian windfall dwindled but the farms prospered.

  Cobra stopped his musing. Last dry season the river had shrunk to pools strung together by a thread of flowing water, and the vines had shriveled. The deeper rooted trees survived but bore little fruit. This year, the river had dried to a few water holes and buffalo wallows. Cobra was once again up against it with the banks.

  Cobra rode around the farm on his favorite walking horse, a shiny-coated bay gelding. Another extravagance, he reflected, patting the horse’s shoulder. He stopped and talked to each of his field bosses; the news was universally bad.

  I’m fifty-five, he thought. Four years since the Russian job, the one he’d thought would be the last. He hadn’t even hunted game since then, hardly ever fired a rifle. It had been fully twenty years since he’d fought as a soldier.

  I’m still fit enough, he thought as he rode among dying orchards. But the world was distressingly peaceful, and he had no idea how to reestablish contacts with the shadow world of killers for hire.