Published by Barkley Press

ISBN: 1-937674-00-2

ISBN-13: 9781937674007

ISBN: 9781937674021

Copyright © 2010 Jim Freeman

Cover design and typesetting: Michaela Freeman

Photography credits:

Front cover President: © Sean Locke

Front cover Computer Circuit Board: © Pgiam

Front cover Capitol: © Alina555

Back cover author photo: © Jana Labutova

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author (contact at www.jim-freeman.com), except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

To Susan and Jack

“It is as easy to dream a book
as it is hard to write one.”

-Honore de Balzac

BOOKS BY JIM FREEMAN

Novels

EVOKE

Letters from Ceilia

The Island

Non-Fiction

Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints

The Dark Side of the Moon

(a five-book series)

Poetry

The Smell of Tweed and Tobacco

Corner of My Mind

Broken Pieces

ONE

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics does not mean politics will not take an interest in you.”

-Pericles, statesman (430 BCE)

And he won’t say what it’s about?”

“Nope. Not mysterious exactly, Senator but close to the chest, like Romeri always is. Said he’d send his personal jet, dinner at his home, just the two of you and have you back in Washington by midnight.”

“Well, I’m not flying halfway across the country not knowing what’s on his mind, private jet or no. Can’t we settle for dinner here in Washington?”

“At a restaurant?”

“Yeah. Private room upstairs at LaFrance if that’ll do it.”

“Personal dinner, personal jet and you’re going to offer a restaurant?”

“That’s a mite on the instructive side, Dan.” Senator Fairweather shifted a bit behind the desk and fiddled with his fingers spread out across his lap, pressing the tips, un-pressing.

“That’s why I’m your Chief Of Staff, Senator. Romeri’s not a guy to piss off. That’s why I didn’t let him through to you or let Sally handle it. Thought we ought to talk this one out.”

“You’re right…” He sighed. “How about out at Fairacres? Think he’d settle for Fairacres?”

“I think that’s what he’s been angling for all along, to get an invitation to your private home. Make himself guest and you the host.”

“Hmmm…” Bob leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “Well, set it up then. A Sunday evening, week from Sunday if he can make it. Otherwise it’ll have to wait ‘till the end of next month.”

“Done.”

“I still don’t like it.”

Robert Billings Fairweather sat the big bay thoroughbred comfortably, alone on the hillside above his hounds, attention riveted on the patch of woods, seeing with his ears as well as eyes. He shifted in the saddle and the bay’s left foreleg trembled in anticipation, ears pricked in the direction of hounds.

“Easy, son. We’ll be away in a moment.”

He moved the coiled whip against the bay’s neck, rubbing reassuringly and standing once more in the irons. Master of the Fairweather Hounds, third term Senator from Virginia, Bob Fairweather had history enough to sit easily in the saddle. Yet he was distracted this morning by events, things vaguely beyond his control.

Son of a Senator, grandson of a coal baron and great grandson of a Senator. Bob belonged in that august body not merely by wealth or the whim of politics, but in the only sense that mattered, the tradition of family. Since the Teddy Roosevelt administration there had been a Fairweather in the Senate, except for grandfather’s years. Grandpa John built a dynasty from West Virginia coal, a vast empire that stretched into Pennsylvania, Illinois and finally Montana. A base of power and wealth that allowed his son and grandson access to the United States Senate, handing off that access from father to son like the smooth pass of a runner’s baton, with never a break in stride.

He steadied the big horse. The days of handing off such power, along with the surety of family empire might well be passing. Probably was…there was trouble in the Senate. Hell there’d always been trouble in the Senate, but the threads of power were coming unstrung and the old steady alliances he’d almost taken for granted could no longer be counted upon. Strange times now, particularly in the EVOKE Committee, his committee. Bob was only chairman EVOKE had ever had during its ten year history and he’d watched it struggle from a tortured and divisive beginning to a phenomenon that worried him. Truth be known, the whole concept frightened him and he was a man unused to fear. Technology galloping full-out, gaining ground on them all and if hounds were loose in the Senate, he was an unwilling fox.

A horn sounded, his Huntsman’s two quick notes, rolling up from the wispy partly obscuring the woods below, a pause, then two more blown on the short brass horn Jerrold kept handy, jammed between the front buttons of his pink coat. Jerrold MacCay had his own traditions and the horn he blew with seemingly casual skill came with him from Ireland, handed from father to son to grandson, three generations of hunt servants and huntsmen all. Endless stories belonged to that battered horn, each dent, crease or scratch in its polished brass a reminder of foxes that ran, hounds that found the line, faltered to lose the scent, found it again and chased off across Jerrold’s dreams of Ireland. It was a rare man who handled foxhounds, a dying breed in a dying sport and Fairweather valued his huntsman, sending him off for a month every year to his beloved Ireland after the season ended in Virginia.

How many seasons left, before that final departure? For either of them, truth be told.

The pack broke from the edge of the woods, Ravage in front, noses down, tails furious with expectation. Their muffled cry broke into frustrated yelps until the seasoned old hound found the line once more. Honoring his deep voice they came together, spilling away down the edge of Bottom Creek. Jerrold burst from the woods on the gray horse he favored, his forearm raised against branches through which he plunged, hard on the heels of his hounds. A faded scarlet coat he’d refused to retire over the past ten seasons caught the early morning light as he galloped, coattails flying, blowing the long wavering call of “gone away.” He glanced hurriedly up the hill at his Master, pointing in the direction of the streaming pack with coiled whip to let Bob know he’d viewed the fox.

Fairweather booted the big bay horse, cross angling down open meadow, sitting well back in the saddle as they finally slid and scrabbled their way to the creek. Bottom Creek wound around this section of woods and doubled back on itself, finally crossing the Middleburg Road at the old steel bridge. This fox was sure to cross it several times, throwing hounds off scent, but Bob doubted he’d cross the road. More likely to run up toward Miller’s place. This early in the game Bob counted on him to hold tight to thick cover and the larger patches of woods.

It was a gamble but he was well behind his hounds now and he’d chance leaving the creek to skirt the edge of the woods, hoping to pick them up again near Miller’s. Damn, he might better have stayed with Jerrold rather than climbing that hill, but it was a great vantage from which to watch his pack work. From the corner of an eye as he galloped, he spotted his Field Master jogging around the edge of the woodlot from which the pack had just come, thirty or forty Members in tow in a long uneven line of men in scarlet and women in black. They’d stay well behind the Huntsman and pack and they’d damned well stay clear of the line.

If he guessed wrong about Miller’s he’d be all but out of the game and a hell of a way behind his hounds, should the fox make an early break for it and cross the Middleburg Road. Have to chance it he thought and spurred the bay again, the horse reluctant to turn from the voice of the pack. Galloping the west edge of the woods, standing now in the irons, he spoke softly to the horse and his thoughts fled back ten years in the Senate. It annoyed him, this scattering of focus on a hunting morning with hounds running, but there it was.

EVOKE occupied the irritated corner of his mind, a force to be reckoned with now and bargained over. Conceived in the early century technology that brought blinding multiplications of chip-power and in their wake corresponding breakthroughs in computer imaging. Born of that, there were astonishing advances in virtual reality, progress so stunning it boggled the mind. Hell, in most ways it was the mind and the implications were so widespread the FCC stepped in. Greasing bureaucratic wheels with uncharacteristic haste and absolute secrecy, they seized licensing, control and distribution, and dragged it kicking and screaming into Bob’s Senate committee, slammed the door and walked away. It was almost like having a lock on the drug trade, though none but a few realized it at the time. Mistrustful of market forces, government had effectively snatched all power and control for itself, creating yet another bureaucracy. Irrevocably, that intervention changed Bob’s steady and predictable life in the Senate.

The bay horse stumbled, recovered handily to gallop on and Bob’s mind snapped back to the matter at hand, listening, aware, making instinctive decisions… then drifting.

True virtual-reality. The real deal, delivered to an implanted chip in the brain. Not some novel theater experience or quirky Internet fascination, the recorded human mind was now as deliverable as an e-book. The final barrier between one mind and another was now no further from access than that chip and a computer. Watching quarterbacks in replay was as passé as network news, as onliners became the quarterback, seeing through his eyes, thinking his thoughts, being him with an adrenaline rush exactly matching his. Recording as they perform and replayed directly into our own minds from a vast and building library of available experience, we become for that recorded period another person.

Demand was instantaneous and overwhelming, everyone clamoring for an invitation to this perpetual sensory banquet. The public demanded access and eventually they’d get it, he mused, for better or worse. There was of course a price to pay. Everything has its price. The entry-fee worried and wearied its way through endless congressional debate while the country waited, eager for the newest and best … anxious to be part of that most American addiction, the thirst for whatever there is.

He pulled the big horse down to a trot, cut a corner of the woods and ducked branches that snagged his coat and breeches, taking in the heavy, decomposing scent of late fall. Finally a kind of lottery for access had been agreed, based on random selection of social security numbers. A million citizens came online the first year, nearly four million the second, popularizing the term onliners and the numbers were growing at a geometric rate. Everyone who cared to would be online, perhaps in another ten years. Perhaps not, it was hard to tell. There was a fairly simple surgical procedure involved, but an invasive procedure none the less and that’s neither as quick nor simple as distributing software.

There were other complicated issues as well, among them the most controversial, morally distasteful and difficult had been the administration’s insistence on voluntary male-sterilization as a condition of becoming an onliner. Controversial hell, that didn’t half state the case for this science fiction trade-off and a predictable firestorm broke over it, with the Catholic Church and right-to-lifers in the front lines. Population was nudging four-hundred million and the reality of that growth, along with a declining manufacturing base, hard core unemployment and the runaway costs of entitlement programs finally broke the back of protest. Doing nothing, there’d be six-hundred million Americans within another forty years.

But it’d been a long, drawn out, exhausting and bitter struggle. Finally the President threatened to veto the entire legislative package without that all but un-swallowable amendment. Congress predictably sputtered and damn near choked, but finally swallowed. As a result of that power play, the first sitting president in memory failed to get his party’s nomination for a second term.

As Chairman of EVOKE on the Senate side, Bob Fairweather had personally fought hard against that amendment. All religious considerations aside, in his heart it represented an intrusion into personal life that was way out of government’s role, probably unconstitutional and far too basic a right to be ceded to politics. Constitution be damned, he’d lost that battle, as finally they all lost to the argument that the sterilization program was voluntary. And even then, sperm banks were available and access to those personal bank accounts was an option once certain requirements were met. A steady job and long-term relationship allowed a couple to conceive a single child. Four years of unchanged circumstances allowed another, the maximum.

Cries of racism were raised, along with unwarranted but always reliable references to Hitler’s genocide. Neither held up under scrutiny and the package finally passed on a voice-vote. No senator or representative was willing to have his personal aye or nay penned in the record and in both houses barely enough legislators to secure a quorum even showed up for the vote. Nonetheless, it cost a good many lawmakers their seats in the coming off-year election. Then like much of American history, as violent the storm, so quick the calm and life went on, attentions diverted to other matters and the anxious wait began for individual lottery numbers to come up.

He pulled the bay to an abrupt halt, its flanks steaming with effort and excitement, snorting and stamping in anticipation, eager to be off again. Bob listened for the faint cry of his pack and then turned, quartering across the pasture. This was his land they hunted, just over eight thousand acres of rolling pasture, hardwood forest and patches of crop land. Secured for his family through past generations against the encroachment of developers and whatever else lay in wait outside the gates to this private world. The mansion, farm buildings, stables and kennel were known as ‘Fairacres.’

Great grandfather built the main house in 1895 and grandfather added massively to it in 1921, four years before Bob’s father was born here. After his death, Bob further remodeled and brought the old place up to date in 1990. Times changed and he changed with them, turning the servants’ wing into several guest apartments, a more habitable layout for the downsized household help. There were only three live-in staff now, Charles the butler whose wife Amy was cook and a widowed chauffeur, Wilson. They occupied two apartments over the gabled red brick garages and the others needed to run the place were all day help, excepting Jerrold and his wife who lived in the cottage at the kennels. Grandfather kept twenty-one full time staff, but those days were gone forever and probably well gone. There were still twelve in the house or on the grounds every day, but you couldn’t call it staff, not in any proper meaning of the word. Sufficient for the constant entertaining that was required of him and Maggie. Sufficient. A twenty-first century word for a nineteenth century property.

Tonight’s dinner would be small, requiring only the cook, butler and two for serving. But they’d pull all the stops for Lonny Romeri and the agenda would be intense, something Bob preferred to keep in Washington, separate from Fairacres. Romeri was as tough and straight as a ten-penny nail, a self-made guy who seemed to live only for business. Shrewd as hell and not at all the type to push his way to your dinner table, yet he’d all but forced the invitation and Bob submitted grudgingly in his mind and graciously on the phone. What the devil could Romeri have to say that wouldn’t more properly be discussed in Washington?

He pulled up the bay at the crest of a small rise and listened, then smiled. Damn. They were indeed headed for Miller’s, he’d guessed right. If he and the big horse were quiet and careful they could get to the edge of Miller’s woods and watch both fox and hounds break out. Unsnapping the cover of the leather flask case attached to the saddle, he slid the glass out, un-stopped the bottle and took a long sip of the liquor, nudging the bay north along the edge of woods he’d hunted for nearly fifty years.

Only the land is constant, he reflected and his entire life, with the exception of boarding school and Princeton, he’d spent here on this land. Fairweather owned for four generations and soon to be five. He’d walked every inch of it, knew the feel of every field and woods and creek bottom underfoot, looked across the marshland where he hunted ducks in every conceivable kind of light. He’d plowed and planted and harvested each cultivated field as a kid, helping the farm manager and keeping the careful records his father demanded. He knew its intimate smell and sound, the taste of what grew there in every season.

He smiled at the memory of courting Maggie here and the first time they’d made love, a spring Saturday afternoon after a picnic up in the north meadow. A warm, sunny day in mid-April and he remembered how she’d touched him with her eyes and her spirit as much as her physical presence. She still did. A quick afternoon thunderstorm caught them naked on the blanket, their minds only on each other and they’d dressed quickly, laughing in the rain on the way back, guessing they were being scolded by the storm and not giving half a damn.

Jerrold’s long wavering “gone away” floated again across the top of the woods and he knew hounds were in full tongue now, hard on a fox that should break from the woods at any moment a little below and ahead of him. He squeezed the bay into a bold trot and headed for the crest of the open, sloping pasture above the north end of the woods.

Standing on the ridgeline, Bob listened to his pack. Working their way steadily through the woods below him, he imagined in his mind the ripple of brown and white, as crossbred English and American foxhounds surged across the forest floor. Jerrold was hunting thirty-two couple this morning, sixty-four well-muscled hounds, averaging sixty pounds apiece, forging their way after a fifteen pound fox. He smiled at the seeming imbalance of power, knowing that the game may be afoot but the odds were very strongly in favor of the fox. Bob grinned at the metaphor of foxhunting to politics. The bay horse trembled again under him, ears pricked and listening.

“There, there by God,” he murmured. The fox broke from the edge of the woods a hundred yards below in a hot coppery streak, angling toward Beecher’s a half mile away. Fairweather held his breath, standing again in the irons to watch the fox pause halfway up the knoll, look back and gauge his lead. Comfortable, he loped easily toward the woodlot. Damn, what a rare view.

He settled back in the saddle, completely contented and immodestly self-congratulatory at his tactic, proud to be in sight of his Huntsman when Jerrold broke from the woods and just the least bit chagrined over his pride. Anyway it felt good, made all the days when he’d guessed wrong worth it. Alonzo Romeri flashed to his mind and he shook off the thought, the intrusion unwelcome in a perfect moment on a near perfect morning.

Seconds later, the pack spilled from the feathered edge of woodlot in full cry, his Huntsman hot behind them. As Jerrold spotted him on the hillside, Bob stood in the stirrups and pointed his whip in the direction the fox had taken, calling the “Tally Ho” of a sighted fox. Jerrold nodded and Fairweather spurred the big bay horse across the meadow to intersect his line. Galloping alongside Jerrold’s lathered gray gelding and standing in the irons, the two rode a carpet of hounds in full cry.

“Wonderful run, Jerrold. Sounded like they never really lost him.”

“Aye, Master. They’re doin’ a hell of a job.” His flushed face broke to a wide grin. “Hell of a job. That Ravage is a hound just made to find foxes.”

“He’ll go to earth in Beecher’s, I believe. Looked back once, but I think he’s had enough.”

“Reckon we’ve all had near enough, Master. This horse’s just about caved in. You made a hell of a judgment, comin’ out on that hillside.”

“Been on this place a lot of years Jerrold.”

“Hell of a judgment, anyway.”

They put the fox to earth in Beecher’s just as expected and Bob decided to ride back the long way, just he and Jerrold and his hounds relishing again what had been a morning of sheer magic. How many more seasons, who could tell? Land was closing in, another big estate up for sale each year it seemed. Middleburg was less than fifty miles from Washington and there weren’t but a couple dozen really large places left anymore.

Hunting took land, as well as the money to support a pack. More than that, it needed men and women to love the sport and keep it going, all of those factors in diminishing supply. Jerrold was fifty and in fifteen or so years when he retired to his beloved Ireland, Bob would be seventy-three. He reckoned that would be the end of hunting horns blowing across the early morning mists of Virginia. George Washington hunted his personal pack of English Foxhounds within a hundred miles of this very place, a continuity that spanned the life of the country, soon to be lost. What the hell, it was no longer a jolting two-day carriage ride into Washington anymore either. Bob shoved his leg forward in the saddle, reached down to catch the buckle, loosened the girth a notch or two to let the big bay horse breathe a little easier on the walk home. Hounds heads and tails were down, they were tired too.

Well, whatever Romeri had on his mind would wait, damned if he’d fret over it. A nap sometime in the afternoon would be just the thing to clear his thoughts and freshen his spirits before dinner. There seemed a hidden purpose in this man, not precisely on the square, a veiled agenda, something to be asked and given. Romeri always carried a trump card to play.

Whatever… it had been a grand morning, a hell of a morning.

Alonzo Romeri lay aside the weekly European Sales Forecast, slid half glasses off his nose and let them drop to his chest, gazing out the window. A cloud bank lay like a white down comforter sprawled across Pennsylvania beneath the World Star corporate jet. How different the world was above and below. One was serene, sun drenched and knowable, the other in turmoil and scattered thunderstorms, unknowable. Damn, he’d had an exciting life though and there was still a lot left of Lonny after fifty-one years, pulling the focus of scattered dreams and achievements into position for the next surge. This would be his most ambitious, maybe the final goal in a life of goals.

A self-made man, he reflected, if you can call starting out with the old man’s five million self-made. Still trim and slight of build, he was unremarkable in appearance, with a slight hook to an otherwise straight nose framed by soft dark eyes that seldom blinked. Not someone to pick out of the yearbook, not by a long shot. If a movie were made of his life, a little known actor could play his part. He scarcely fit the image of a leading man, more the decent looking but unassuming bit player, who would prove to have a shiv up his sleeve.

He touched the intercom.

“Joe, how long to Dulles?”

“Thirty-five minutes, Mr. Romeri,” the pilot answered.

“What’s the weather?”

“Broken cloud cover, scattered showers moving through, fifty-six degrees.”

A pain in the ass, arranging this damned hat-in-hand meeting with another Senator. Pompous sons of bitches these politicians, but it was the way Washington worked, talking around the subject at hand and feigning interest in side issues. Lay ‘em down, I got aces Jack. Whatta you got to beat that? That was his style and with any luck, he’d be back in Detroit by midnight, time enough to spend the night at the apartment. He swiveled the armchair, got up and walked over to the sofa, stretching out full length, fluffing the pillow under his head.

“Anything I can get you, Mr. Romeri?” The steward glanced back from the galley doorway.

“No, thanks Edward, I’m fine. Just gonna relax for twenty minutes.”

He closed his eyes and the image of his father came to mind, sitting behind the wheel of his fearsomely polished Lincoln in the driveway of their big house in Shaker Heights. Honking impatiently, trying to get the family the hell out of the house and into the car, facing another in the endless string of Sunday afternoons that were always spent with Momma and Papa. Italian families. Sundays all over the world were the same in Italian families, spent with grandparents over steaming bowls of pasta. The food always the same, always too much, conversations always the same, always too much, the ritual of family stronger even than the ritual of church. Lonnie grew to despise those Sundays as he entered his teens.

Only now, separated by thirty-seven thousand feet and the thirty-seven years that faded the sepia tones of his youth, did he see those Sundays in a nostalgic wash of color. His grandfather’s face was an unclear memory and only the old man’s strong, enveloping embrace remained. A one word description of the Romeri family would be touch. They hugged, chucked under chins, pinched noses, pulled affectionately at ears, threw arms across shoulders, kissed the kiss that wasn’t a kiss but a touch on each cheek, tackled and wrestled and threw each other down with their love. Romeris never shook hands, that was for strangers who weren’t family, weren’t Italian. He rolled over on his side, lulled by the soft whine of fan-jets.

Papa had made what seemed at the time a hell of a fortune with his Ford dealerships. First one, then another and finally a third, settling the Romeri family firmly into the upper middle class. But they were still Italians, always Italians. Elbows on the table, pass the pasta Italians and that meant you had to take what you wanted, no one was going to give it to you or even give you a straight shot at it.

The summer he turned seventeen, Lonny was top salesman at the Garfield Heights dealership for all three months of school vacation, embarrassing the hell out of the old pros on the showroom floor. That summer the vision formed, took shape in his mind and became a guiding force of what he needed to do. And what he needed to do didn’t include college. Been a hard sell to Papa, but his continued success kept the vision alive and growing until finally the old man had a sense of it too and got off his case. He was grudgingly forgiven for turning his back on Ohio State.

The old pros knew a kid couldn’t sell cars. Who the hell would buy a car from a kid, a snot-nosed teenager? Lonny was only there because he was the boss’s son, to pick up a few pointers from the old pro’s shined shoes, fast talk and juggled numbers. Then he’d move on to marry some local wop skirt, have a bunch of grease-ball kids and finally own the company. But they were careful around him, he was still the old man’s kid. Still, the wariness was there, born of contempt for a punk who had it made and didn’t need the job.

Lonny pulled records of customers who’d bought cars two years back, then three years and called them in the evening at their homes. He told them what their cars were worth on a new Ford or Lincoln and how small the payments would be to move up. He stopped by commuter stations on his way in to the dealership and slipped his card under windshield wipers, with cash offers for the Fords, Chevy’s and Buicks on trade-in. He didn’t sell price, told his prospects flat-out they could buy a new Ford almost anywhere in the Cleveland area for his price. But only at Romeri Motors would someone come out to the house, pick up their car and drop off a loaner for regular servicing. Only Romeri Motors would return the car freshly washed, at no extra charge. It worked, worked so successfully that it became the advertised policy of Romeri Motors and led to two additional dealerships. The old pros sucked it up and took another look at the punk kid.

Free loaners and pickup was a hard sell on Papa too, but he convinced the old man the loaners would be mobile billboards and he knew his ability to see things others missed made him different. The difference brought him this plane, along with the chairmanship and controlling interest in World Star. He sat up and moved back to the swivel chair.

“Edward, please bring me a Coke.”

“Right away, Mr. Romeri.”

The tractor was the start of his real climb, the laughable little tractor.

During Lonny’s senior year in high school, his World Affairs class included a semester of study on disadvantaged countries. He still saw images in his mind of horses and oxen pulling wooden plows and barefoot peasants bent over in rice paddies. Unable to conceive why these people had no mechanical equipment, he drove out one Saturday afternoon to the Ford Farm-Equipment dealer in Twinsburg and learned why. The low end, bottom of the line cheapest Ford tractor was nearly twenty-two thousand bucks. But he couldn’t get all those Third World farmers out of his mind, behind horses and oxen, needing tractors, millions of tractors.

Lonny didn’t know anything about tractors, nothing about nuts and bolts and assembly lines beyond a few obligatory tours of Ford assembly plants and didn’t want to know. He knew there was a market in the Third World and set out to build a tractor to meet that need. It would be, had to be a basic unit he could sell profitably for twenty-five hundred dollars. Twenty-eight hundred, tops.

The prototype took a year to develop and cost Papa two hundred seventeen thousand bucks. It was a grimly beautiful little machine, steel wheeled with no power options, two cylinder and capable of pulling a two-bottom plow. It ran on low grade kerosene, heating oil, low octane gasoline, LP gas and probably Jack Daniels. Lonnie insisted that every exterior nut, no matter the size of the bolt it tightened, be only one size. He then had a wrench of that size fastened under the seat. He drove the engineers crazy with simplification, but they began to see what he was after and he got his way. He demanded a tractor that could be fixed by an illiterate farmer in the field, with a repair manual in pictures. He got that too.

With another half million of Papa’s money and their fingers crossed, the Romeri Tractor Company built a hundred units. Lonny set up a leasing program for lease-purchase contracts and a modest international dealership network. International dealership… he grinned at the thought of those early dealers in the cow pens and chicken coops of remote corners of the world. In five years, at age twenty-three, Lonny was manufacturing in nine countries. His neighborhood buddies were busy graduating from Ohio State, Stanford and Penn State, out looking for their first jobs.

Lonny stretched, took a sip of Coke and gazed out the window. Currency he knew would be a problem from the start, but solving that problem was the key reason he wasn’t just a middling wealthy and still struggling manufacturer. In those days there was no way to convert zlotys and rubles and a slew of other minor currencies into the hard money that had international value, without currency conversion taking a huge chunk. Lonnie saw that as another opportunity and Romeri Tractor bartered in local goods, like a peasant in the Saturday market. Train loads of Polish potatoes bought with zlotys from tractor sales, were shipped to Germany and France for marks and francs. The Russian ruble, worthless on the face of it, was spent in Russia, building oil tankers in Baltic shipyards. Tankers that Romeri leased to the Japanese for yen and the Saudis for riyals.

The profit from his willingness to barter, was ten times the margin on tractors. Lonny’s network of leasing and import-export businesses grew exponentially from the sales of his little two cylinder tractors and took on a momentum of their own. The beginnings of an international business empire was born of the vision of a seventeen year old kid, who knew enough to bring a loaner to the house if he hoped to sell a car.

Lonny always kept himself operationally aloof, raiding executive talent like a pirate on the high seas and becoming a billionaire a dozen times over in the process. Money was an accidental side issue and he was surprised and vaguely disinterested in the ever growing numbers. He recognized only the power of those numbers, the power to fuel a dream, along with the money to see it through.

“Dulles in five minutes, Mr. Romeri,” the pilot announced. “Be a good idea to belt up, there’ll be a few bumps on the way through the cloud cover.”

“Thank you, Joe. Drop her in lightly.”

The Starlight 3000 Joe handled so deftly was simply another profitable appendage. A corporate flying-carpet that Lonny developed in a down aircraft market, another Romeri Tractor scenario covering a need that no one in the industry even recognized. Six years after he’d led the successful takeover of an over extended automobile manufacturer, World Star made a run at Beechcraft. They came up a winner with a loser aircraft manufacturer as the prize. The ups and downs of periodic recession had taken its toll on the corporate jet business and the builders of airframes fought for years over larger and larger pieces of a smaller and smaller market, decimating themselves in the process. Beech was a disaster when Lonny finally got his hands on it and the industry, just like the old pros at the dealership, thought he’d bought himself a pickle. A very expensive pickle was the word on Wall Street.

But he had the staying-power of enormous cash flow by that time and went to work on his concept of a corporate plane. A fan-jet, nearly as fast as a jet, but with better fuel economy, far cheaper maintenance, increased range and the ability to drop into small airports. Comfortable and plain, efficient and cheap by the standards of the day, it sold like hotcakes. Sold like two cylinder tractors and built worldwide markets where there had been none, staggering what little competition remained. Fourteen percent of World Star profits now came from the Starlight Aircraft Company, building corporate and cargo planes in four countries. UPS and Federal Express flew Starlights, as well as a majority of the Fortune 500 and even the major airlines, who found them a thrifty and sustainable solution to feeder routes. He felt the slight snuggling jolt of wheels touching down at Dulles and the plane rolled across the tarmac to the corporate terminal.

If tonight’s dinner at Fairweather’s estate in Middleburg went well, the flight would be time well spent. If not, there were other ways to get to the Senator. All deals were not winners, even Lonnie’s deals. The talent was in turning loss into something that could be leveraged. Fairweather might be a loss as well, it was a ticklish business, but Alonzo Romeri was not a man to be refused access. As long as he had access, a United States Senator was just another potential problem to be levered into an opportunity or defused and shoved aside. He unsnapped his seat belt.

“What’s the return schedule, Mr. Romeri?”

“Midnight, Joe. File a return flight-plan for midnight.”

TWO

Seven hundred miles and one time zone west, Martin Greene suppressed a sense of excitement tinged with guilt, dread or whatever it was that he’d felt as a youngster slipping into an X-rated movie. Today he’d get the keys to an alternative world, after the negligible bother of a neat bit of surgery would bring him online to EVOKE. In his thirty-seven years, Marty’d never been a patient in a hospital, but he’d sure as hell haunted the halls visiting his mother as she slowly and methodically died of breast cancer. The chipped paint and over-waxed tile smell of the old Henrotin Hospital bravely tried to cover the sick and dying smell and never quite made the grade. Those memories left him a little shaky, but this was out-patient surgery and would be a piece of cake.

EVOKE, spinning its illusive numbers had finally caught up with Marty. Even the name was exciting. Evocative all right, fucking by computer and he smiled to himself, thinking what he’d be do when he got home this afternoon. Yesterday’s installation of the EVOKE online setup excited him and he’d had a hard time falling asleep.

He pulled into Henrotin’s parking lot and his stomach churned as he grabbed a ticket and waited for the gate to go up. When his name had finally come up on the EVOKE availability list, he’d been sent a form to fill out asking if he were interested and, if so, an appointment would be arranged to see one of the government agents assigned to explain the technology. Interested? Shit, he’d been living for the day. The whole country wanted on that list and so far maybe only twenty million made it. There were rumors some people got moved up by knowing someone with clout, but what the hell, rumors were rumors.

They told him what everyone already knew, droning along like he was a school-kid. The EVOKE chip implant was entirely voluntary, but not removable once it was done and there was a voluntary sterilization required at the time of surgery, a vasectomy. Truth be known, Marty was quietly relieved to opt out of parenting. He carefully marked ‘No’ in the sperm bank box. He and Jean fought over that and the fight probably wasn’t over yet, but this would settle it for good. She’d just have to live with it.

“Mister Greene?” The nurse smiled up at him, took his admission slip and typed the number into her computer, bringing up his records. “Just have a seat and we’ll be ready for you in a few minutes.” Marty sat down and felt his stomach flip again and it made him need to pee.

“Excuse me, is there a men’s room?” Jesus, he really needed to pee now.

“Second door on the left.” She smiled again, pointing back down the hall. He came back relieved, but had hardly sat down when a nurse in operating room greens poked her head through the door, checked her clipboard and looked up to call his name. He followed her down a short hall with examining rooms on either side, opening the door to the third room on the left, asked him to strip and put on the gown that was folded on the examining table.

Marty felt suddenly very much alone and wished maybe he’d asked Jean to take the day off as she’d wanted to, to come with him and be there to drive him home. The gown only fastened down the back and as he boosted himself up on the examining table, the plastic was cold on his ass. A little dribble of sweat began under each armpit and trickled down the sides of his ribs. The doctor’s pre exam was brief and businesslike, his stethoscope cold as ice and the trickle of sweat kept working its way down Marty’s side. No complaints, no previous illness? Never been in a hospital overnight before? Haven’t had anything by mouth since midnight? Yes, he understood about the vasectomy. Yes, he knew he wasn’t to have sex for three days and to come back in a week for a sperm-count. Yes, he understood that didn’t include EVOKE sex, as there was no actual orgasm involved in the programs. Yes, he knew neither operation was reversible. Yes, yes, yes and let’s get it over.

Marty padded down the hall in paper slippers, clutching the back of the flapping gown, then climbed on the operating table in a small and brightly lit room, kicked off the slippers and put his feet in two elevated stainless steel stirrups. Air from the ventilation system blew up his suddenly bare ass. The nurse from the front desk came in, dressed now in scrubs and began to lather his scrotum. She looked over the tented portion of his gown at him and smiled.

“Find the men’s room all right?”

Sweat puddled at his armpits and he forced a grin.

“I’m your barber today, at both ends,” she smiled. “When I’m done here, I’m going to shave a little tiny place on your scalp. You’ll hardly notice it and can comb your hair right over the spot.”

He felt her fingers and felt the razor against his scrotum and told himself that everything gets over sooner or later. She wiped him with something that had a rough texture to it. The surgeon was more talkative than an airline pilot, explaining every step of the procedure and though the local anesthetic kept him from feeling pain, he was acutely aware of the cutting and fiercely wished the whole thing over. The doctor snipped and he felt the tug of forceps, heard the cut like gristle on a chicken leg. Marty gripped the table and thought he might faint. He felt stitches being made.

“All done and no need to worry. Just walk a little carefully for the rest of the day and don’t lift anything heavy for a few days.”

Marty gratefully took his feet out of the stirrups.

“Just lie there and relax a few minutes,” the nurse told him, “and we’ll take you down for part two. The next will be easier, but when you swing over the edge of the table, keep your legs together and just ease yourself down.” He lay there and began to feel he might not faint and further embarrass himself in front of the slim, dark haired nurse.

She was back in ten minutes and helped him down, holding on to his left arm as they walked to the room next door. Still aware of the opening down the back of the gown and still dribbling sweat down his sides, he no longer gave a shit. She helped him up and onto another table, this one supporting a long sliding carriage and complicated padded clamp for his head. A tunnel at the far end would receive him like a corpse in the morgue or a cigar in a tube, performing a brain scan prior to the implant. The nurse talked to him steadily, smiling, adjusting clamps, telling him the scan would take about five minutes and not to worry, she’d be right there while the doctor read the imagery.

She slid him into the tube, the narrow table gliding on smooth bearings and he heard and felt the slight click of the mechanism locking into place. Piece of cake, lotsa people go through this, be over in no time and drive home. Marty was drowsily aware of a long series of gentle whirring noises that began at his neck and moved slowly toward the top of his head. Moving back and forth several times, the whirr nearly put him to sleep. There was a slight thud, the locking device un-clicked and Marty felt himself rolling back into a wash of light, blinking after the unsettling darkness of the tunnel. He looked up into the welcome face of the dark haired nurse looking down at him as she unclamped his head.

“When do you do the implant?” he asked, as soon as the chin-strap was removed.

“All done,” she said. “That was the little thump you heard just before we brought you back out. Easy, huh?” She put her hand on his. “You can feel for it in just a minute. But for now, lie here and relax, we’ll get you on your feet soon and you can go home.”

He gingerly felt the top of his scalp and ran his fingers over an inserted chip the size of a fingernail, that raised the skin slightly about three inches above and behind his right ear. This very afternoon he’d slide a headset over this small bump and travel where he’d never been before. His heart pounded with excitement and he could feel its pulsing in his neck and groin, but the sweat was gone. In moments he had become one of the special people, an onliner. Still maybe a shipping supervisor at Clark & Anderson, but special, with something even Mr. Clark didn’t have.

The nurse came back with release papers for Marty to sign and walked with him to the examining room. He dressed and began retracing steps, back through corridors, down elevators and out into the bright, cold sunshine of the parking lot. Reaching into a coat pocket for keys and parking stub, he glanced at his watch. Twelve-twenty.

By a quarter to one Marty was home and dumped his coat and scarf on the living room sofa to sit in front of the screen, keyboard and modem. He knew he should call Jean, that she’d be worried about him, but the waiting, the years of anticipation were too much to put off. She’d probably be at lunch anyway and the first run-through should only take about an hour. He’d call her after he’d been where he needed to go.

The headset slid easily into place even though his fingers shook a bit and he had to feel for the spot, brushing his hair back with one hand. Marty pressed the ‘On’ button, watched the screen bloom and the menu come up, just as it had in the practice session. Welcome to EVOKE. Please make a selection from the pull down menu.

Marty scrolled, right clicked the mouse and a menu bar appeared, offering selections from ten categories; Adventure, Food, History, Literature, Music, Science, Sex, Sports, Philosophy and Travel.

Marty highlighted Sex and the screen popped subsections; Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bisexual, Lesbian. Highlighting Heterosexual, and Male-Female, brought him a full range of further choices. The available selections for where offered hundreds of possibilities.

Marty highlighted Apartment, High-rise, New York City, Night, Blonde, Blue eyes, Mildly aggressive and One hour, fifteen minutes. He nearly selected Three hours. Later… no time for that now. Jean would be waiting for his call.

He felt the tightness of excitement in his upper chest and throat as he pressed Select. A rush of blood and heightened senses nearly overwhelmed him, the feeling of being caught in a lie or watching a girl begin to take off her clothes.

The screen sprang at him again in green background, with another message. You have selected a program with an elapsed time of one hour fifteen minutes. Total time remaining, three hours forty-five minutes.

Marty highlighted Start Program, pushed Enter and walked into Cathy’s apartment, easing the door shut with his heel and tossing his jacket on a chair in the entry hall.

He’d always liked the formality of the entry. White columns at the door and again at the two steps down into the living room, a perfect contrast to the dark stained parquet floor. He heard the soft strains of Vivaldi washing through the spacious apartment and smiled. Cathy was partial to Vivaldi. The softly lit oil paintings were bold, yet sophisticated, her apartment elegant in the extreme, just as she was. Her sense of restrained style was one of the many things that made her so attractive.

“That you, hon?” Cathy called from the kitchen.

“Yeah, babe.”

He walked through the living room, glanced at the lighted New York skyline beyond the floor to ceiling windows that showed it so well from the fifty-seventh floor. Settling on the soft black leather couch in front of the fire, he reached for a cigarette from the silver box he’d given her, his initials and hers sprawled in script across the cover.

“I’ll be there in a sec, hon. Just pouring us a couple of scotches.” She came into the room with two shorties of Dewar’s over ice, wearing a long black wool shift, scoop necked with buttons down the front, a sash at the waist of scarlet and green silk. Setting drinks on the table, she slid onto the sofa. Facing him, she pulled her long legs up, wiggling her bare toes under his thigh. “Mmmmm… I’ve been waiting all evening, just for you to walk through that door.”

He liked the way she styled her hair and dressed, casual, yet with a care for detail that set her apart from anyone he’d known. She looked at him now with eyes that crinkled at the corners, lips lightly touched with violet, catching the highlights in her eyes and deepening them. Anticipating their time together, she touched his glass with hers, taking a sip of the scotch, reaching over to set her glass on the coffee table. Her fingers were long and slender, the nails buffed and unpolished, a silver ring he’d given her catching light from the fire. She wore no other jewelry.

“Damn, you look good in that black dress.” He set his drink next to hers on the table and reached down to curl his fingers around the instep of her foot, feeling the warmth.

“You always liked it.” Her eyes were more serious now and her hand slid down her bare leg to cover his. “I always like what you like.”

She pulled her feet back and swiveled on the couch, all in one fluid motion. Laying her head in his lap, she took his hand to brush his fingers across her lips, settling it under hers, across her throat. He could feel her pulse, watched the flicker of firelight highlight the streaks of luster in her dark blonde hair. He ran a finger along the line of her jaw, then back to lie at her throat.

.