Something was rattling behind the bird's-eye maple paneling next to David Channing's elbow: some loose screw left behind by a quote-unquote "Old World master craftsman." If they were too inept to screw in the paneling, what did they manage to mess up with the wings or the avionics? You had to be suicidal to fly these days.
Boston was looming below him in the haze, lit by the early-morning sun. Somewhere under the soup was Cambridge… Harvard. Mother of Christ. And to think that puffed-up jackanapes Summers was going to run the place. He should have been impeached along with Clinton.
He looked over to the galley where Jesse was preparing breakfast. "Jesse, come here," he shouted. "I need another come-to-God talk with you." He motioned to the seat next to his. "See what we're flying over, Jesse?" "Boston, Mr. Channing."
"No. Harvard. You know how much those little snot-nosed kids pay to go to school there?"
"No, sir."
"Thirty-seven thousand dollars, Jesse, more than I pay you in a year, and that's without buying toilet paper to wipe their asses. And do you know what they get for it?" He paused two beats, waited for Jesse to answer although he knew he wouldn't.
"You're right: fuck-all. It's branding, Jesse, branding. They're putting lthe mark on them so that when they drive away on Commencement Day in their spanking-new BMWs, everyone will know: 'I've never had an original thought of my own. I'm safe. I take tests, I build resumes. I'll never ffock the boat. Daddy has enough dough so I'll never be tempted to steal from you.'"
Jesse remained silent looking out the window, his black face impassive. That's why he found Jesse fascinating: He had no idea what he was thinking. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.
"Who was the last revolutionary to come out of Harvard? Don't bother!" he screamed. "I'll tell you! John Reed! John Fucking Goddamn Reed. Instead of the grand tour of Europe, he took the grand tour of the Russian Revolution, and the poor, dumb sonuvabitch didn't understand fuck-all about anything going on around him. That's Harvard for you."
Jesse kept looking out the window.
"Jesse, Jesse, Jesse. We don't seem to be getting anywhere. Remember [now we talked about my great-great-granddaddy? How he stole half the [forests of North America? Cut 'em down and made so much money that po one in his family for generations and generations would have to clean his own toilet again?"
"Yes, sir," Jesse said, staring straight ahead. "Yes, sir, I do remember."
"That's my point, Jesse. That's why I get to be a happy cliche and you don't. That's why I own a four-thousand-square-foot pied-a-terre on Cental Park West. That's why I have my own island off Maine, why my sec-°nd cousin is secretary of defense, why everyone's afraid not to take my Ca'ls. It's Great-Great-Granddaddy. He understood. He knew that power,
real power, has nothing to do with those little Harvard shits. They're the ones I hire, Jesse. They're the ones I pay to clean my toilets because they'd so fucking safe."
Jesse lifted an eye at him. He'd been Lysoling and polishing the head to a bright shine while the plane was taxiing for takeoff.
"It's a metaphor, for crissake. Figurative language! Dammit, Jesse, something's wrong. If there's something I can do and you don't tell me, I'm gonna get mad."
"Nothing, sir."
"Go get yourself a drink and me one, too, a champagne. A blanc de noir."
Harvard. The great liberal camp-out. More clueless, whining intellectuals per square inch than any other place on earth. Kennedy's brain trust, the kindergarten that completely missed the Sino-Soviet split and got us into Vietnam. And now it's 2001 and they're still trading in that Fukuyama crap about liberal democracy and the end of history. The global village, globaloney.
It's as if they'd never heard of an intercontinental ballistic missile. As if the Chinese hadn't stolen the plans for our miniaturized nuclear warheads and weren't peddling copies around the world like egg rolls. Rwanda is going to go nuclear before those dumb bastards stir from their slumbet And oil? They think you can go down to the local Starbucks and put all you need on your credit card. When the Chinese own it all, they might just catch on. Just wait: They'll get their wake-up call to the twenty-first cen* tury. The sooner the better.
There was a glint off to his left, low on the bulkhead opposite him-" some kind of nameplate he had never noticed before. He slid into the seal next to it and bent to read: "The cabin of this Gulfstream G5-400 has been customized exclusively for the comfort of…" And then his own name in^ flowing script-all of it, for crissake: "David Oliver Channing." They even managed to work in the logo he had designed himself: a C impaled o"i a sword.
The loose screw or whatever the hell it was was ping-ping-pinging in his head.
He crossed back over to his own seat, called out a number in Falls Church, Virginia, and listened as the recognition software converted his voice into beeps and whirs-another company he owned, which incidentally was a gold mine. The telephone rang seven times before the Lowering machine kicked in. Count on it: General Dynamics stock might be doing okay for the moment, but it was headed for the crapper. Flush and gone. It was-what?-already 8 a.m. and the goddamn owner of the company was still fiddling with his dick at home. Why didn't he have his secretary answer his private line? That's what civilized people do. Maybe the bastard was caught in traffic. Traffic is a goddamned nightmare in Washington. Everything is a nightmare in Washington, no matter who's in charge.
"George," he yelled when the please-leave-a-message beep finally came on. "I didn't spend forty million for your goddamn G5 so I could listen to screws rattle like some goddamn mariachi band. Fire the sonsuvbitches, or I'll buy the company and fire you!"
Channing roared with laughter as he hit the "off" button. "Welcome to your new day, Georgie." He made it sound like an obscenity. "Hope it's • swell one."
They'd known each other since they were kids: York Harbor, Yale,
Skull amp; Bones. They'd even dated the same girl for a while back when
they were classmates at Choate: a Cabot from Miss Porter's who spoke
0n'y to the Lodges, who spoke only to God. Stuck-up, lockjawed bitch
wouldn't let you have any titty if you begged for it. Where was she now?
p* reet under probably. Thin blood. The curse of the Brahmin class. He
^ched up and found the little pulsing artery in his neck, timed it against
* watch: fifty-seven beats a minute. A congenitally slow heart: He'd live
forever. Ha!
Breakfast in Bar Harbor, lunch in Sun Valley. Life is good.
Ihey were still climbing. He could see Providence below; New Haven
Long Island, just cresting on the horizon.
"Nils," he said into the intercom, "don't forget to take her low around the bottom end of Manhattan."
He loved Nils, had hired him away from SAS. Nils could put a plane down on washboard rubble, and you wouldn't feel a thing. They were still climbing.
"Nils?"
"Permission, Mr. Channing. I'm trying to get permission to alter our flight plan."
He called out another phone number, knew this one would be answered. No one ever slept at the White House.
"Yes?"
"I want you to call my pilot immediately, and I want you to tell him he has permission to alter our flight plan as requested."
"I'll need-"
"Immediately. I think that still means 'at once.'"
He clicked the phone off, signaled to Jesse for another champagne. Seventy seconds passed by his watch before the plane began to level out. Ninety-three seconds before he felt the first slight shift of a descent.
He called the White House number again. "You're very good," he said, and hung up. He could hear it through the silent phone line: The man he had just spoken to would sell his own daughter into white slavery for the chance to come work for him. And why not? Administrations come and go. Incompetents elected by morons. Morons voted out by nincompoops. There's only one constant in the primeval soup: oil. Buy it from the rag-heads. Sell it to the Harvard grads. And let the Hebes keep everyone in line. Better than Great-Great-Granddaddy's trees. Trees are renewable. Sort or. Oil is the endgame.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, lead* on to fortune." He could remember the little androgynous prig of a teacher reciting that to them in Fourth Form, in his fake Shakespearean English-Still, something must have stuck because that's precisely what he had done-taken the tide at the crest, seen first from a little perch at State, then* higher one in the Reagan administration, and rode the wave all the way 'n-Georgie-Porgie had been there with him-dueling assistant secretaries ¦
defense-but Georgie had the imagination of dog shit. Always had. That's why he was a boardroom serf. That's why I'm not.
Channing made a note to himself: Endow chair. Surely someone would remember the teacher's name.
The G5 was hugging the coast of Connecticut: Bridgeport, Westport, parien, Stamford, Greenwich. Sweeping down the East River, he could see the commercial jets backed up on the runway at La Guardia, the helicopters grounded on their rooftop pads, all for him. And then there they were, right out the starboard windows: those twin Bastard Bauhaus atrocities, banality itself posing as architecture. God, they're hideous.
The Weimar Republic. There was that fraud Fukuyama's great goddamn liberal democracy. What a wonderful success that was. And let's not forget we have Weimar to thank for the Bauhaus movement that single-handedly destroyed two thousand years of architecture. Walter Gropius was a Jew, wasn't he? Jew-loving Harvard Rockefellers did the World Trade Center deal. Jew movies, Jewollywood, Jew-loving faggots and niggers conned the rest of the morons into believing it was-What? What?- architecture? Beauty? Truth? Fuck. Skirting the towers in a hard bank, putting them out of his sight, climbing into the thin air over New Jersey- it was the closest thing he'd had to an orgasm in a long time.
"Nils," he said into the intercom, "that was memorable." I'll take him skiing in Chile, he thought: He'd once seen Nils snowboard down a thirty-nve-plus-degree chute and never slow down-amazing!
There was a hum up by the front bulkhead, some beeps and rings barely audible. The HP fax, not the clattery Brothers one next to it. Only °ur people knew the HP number. Jesse jumped up to attend to it.
"Down!" Channing shouted. "I'll get it!"
He gathered the pages as they came out, pulled out a new packet of ammermill Copy Plus from the drawer below the machine, and fed a •fcck into the back, just in case.
He waited for the fax machine to beep that it was done receiving, then he
k the papers that had arrived, spread himself across both seats, nestled 0 me kid-soft leather until he was entirely comfortable, and began to
Q- Pennsylvania was disappearing beneath him.