The Fourth K by Mario Puzo
“One of my Secret Service men,” Christian Klee said. “They were not supposed to get that close.”
Du Pray was looking at Klee very coldly. And then she became angrier than he had ever seen her. “Why the hell didn’t you cancel the whole thing?” she shouted. “Why didn’t you avert this whole tragedy? There are citizens dead out there in the street who came to see their President. You’ve wasted the lives of your own men. I promise you, your actions will be questioned by me to the President and to the appropriate congressional committee.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Klee said. “Do you know how many threats are made against the President every day? If we listened to all of them, the President would be a prisoner in the White House.”
Helen Du Pray was studying his face while he spoke. “Why did you use a double this time?” she said. “That is an extreme measure. And if it was that serious, why did you have the President go there at all?”
“When you are the President, you can ask me those questions,” Klee said curtly.
“Where is Francis now?”
Klee stared at her for a moment as if he would not answer. “He’s on his way to Washington. We don’t know how extensive this plot is, so we want him here. He is very safe.”
Du Pray said in a sardonic voice, “OK, now I know he’s safe. I assume you’ve briefed the other members of the staff, they know he’s safe, what about the people of America? When will they know he’s safe?”
Klee said, “Dazzy has made all the arrangements. The President will go on television and speak to the nation as soon as he sets foot in the White House.”
“That’s rather a long wait,” the Vice President said. “Why can’t you notify the media and reassure people now?”
“Because we don’t know what’s out there,” Klee told her smoothly. “And maybe it won’t hurt the American public to worry about him a bit.”
In that moment, it seemed to Helen Du Pray that she understood everything. She understood that Klee could have cut the whole thing off before it reached the culminating point. She felt an overwhelming contempt for the man, and then, remembering the charges that he could have stopped the atom bomb explosion but didn’t, she was convinced that that charge was also true.
But most of all she felt despair: she realized that Klee could never have done this without President Francis Kennedy’s consent.
CHAPTER
23
The assassination attempt rocketed Kennedy to the top of the polls. In November, Francis Xavier Kennedy was reelected to the presidency of the United States. It was a victory so overwhelming that it carried into office nearly all his handpicked candidates for the House and Senate. At long last the President controlled both houses of Congress.
In the period before the inauguration, from November to January, Francis Kennedy set his administration to work drafting new laws for his new and cooperative Congress. In rallying support he was helped by the newspapers and TV, which were weaving fantasies to the effect that Gresse and Tibbot were linked with Yabril and the attempted assassination of the President in one giant conspiracy. The news weeklies had given the issue extensive front-page coverage.
When President Kennedy submitted to his staff his revolutionary plans for transforming the government of the United States, they were secretly horrified. Big business was to be crippled by strongly chartered regulatory agencies. The corporations would become subject to criminal penalties rather than to civil law intervention. It was clear that the end result would be indictments under the RICO laws. In fact Kennedy had jotted down the names of Inch, Salentine, Audick and Greenwell.
Kennedy emphasized that the surest way to gain public support for his proposal was to eradicate crime in American society. In his plans were proposed amendments to the Constitution that would impose Draconian penalties on criminals. Not only would the rules of evidence be changed, but by law the brain-probe truth test would become mandatory in criminal cases.
But most startling of all was the proposal to establish criminal colonies in the wilds of Alaska for three-time offenders. In effect, life sentences.
Francis Kennedy told his staff: “I want you to study these proposals. If you can’t go along with them, even though it will be hurtful to me personally, I am prepared to accept your resignation. I expect your answers within three days.”
It was during those three days that Oddblood Gray requested a private meeting with the President. They met in the Yellow Oval Room over lunch.
Gray was extremely formal, deliberately erasing his past relationship with Kennedy. “Mr. President,” he said, “I must state to you that I oppose your program to control crime in this country.”
Kennedy said gravely, “Those programs are necessary. Finally we have a Congress that will pass the necessary laws.”
“I cannot go along with those work camps in Alaska,” Gray said.
“Why not?” Kennedy asked. “Only habitual offenders will go. Hundreds of years ago England solved the same problem by sending its criminals to Australia. That worked very well for both sides.”
Kennedy had been curt, but Oddblood Gray was in no way intimidated. He said bitterly, “You know that the majority of those criminals will be black.”
“Then let them stop committing criminal acts,” Kennedy said. “Let them join the political process.”
Gray shot back, “Then let your big corporations stop using blacks for slave labor—”
“Get off it, Otto,” Kennedy said. “This is not a racial issue. In the years gone by we worked together. I’ve proved to you many times I’m no racist. Now you can trust me or trust the Socrates Club.”
“On this we trust nobody,” Oddblood Gray said.
“I’ll give you the reality,” Kennedy said almost angrily. “Black criminals will be weeded out from the black population. What’s wrong with that? Black people are the chief victims. Why should the victims protect their predators? Otto, I have to be frank. White people in this country, rightly or wrongly, are deathly afraid of the black criminal class. What’s wrong with most of the black population being integrated into the middle class?”
“What you’re proposing is to wipe out a big part of a generation of young blacks,” Gray said. “That’s the bottom line. I say no.” He paused for a moment and then said, “Say I trust you, Francis, what about the next President? He may use that camp to imprison political revolutionaries.”
“That’s not my intent,” Kennedy said. He smiled. “And I may be around longer than you think.”
That statement chilled Gray. Was Kennedy thinking of amending the Constitution so that he could run for a third term? Alarm bells went off in Gray’s brain.
“It’s not all that simple,” he said. And then boldly: “You could change.”
And at that moment he could feel Kennedy change. Suddenly they had become enemies.
“Either you are with me or you are not,” Kennedy said. “You accuse me of wiping out a whole generation of blacks. That is not true. They are going to a work camp where they will be educated and disciplined to support the social contract. I will be far more drastic with the Socrates Club. They don’t get that option. I am going to wipe them out.”
Gray saw that Kennedy had no doubts. He had never seen the President so resolute or so cold. He felt himself weakening. And then Kennedy put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Otto, don’t desert me now. We will build a great America.”
“I’ll give you my answer after the inaugural,” Gray said. “But, Francis, this is agony for me, don’t betray me. If my people have to freeze their black asses in Alaska, I want a lot of white asses to freeze with them.”
President Kennedy met with his staff in the Cabinet Room. Also present by special invitation were Vice President Du Pray and Dr. Annaccone. Kennedy knew he had to be very careful—these were the people who knew him best, he must not let them divine his actual agenda. He said to them, “Dr. Annaccone has something to say that may astound you.?
Kennedy listened abstractedly while Annaccone announced that the PET scan had been perfected so that the 10 percent risk of cardiac arrest and complete memory loss had been reduced to one tenth of 1 percent. He smiled faintly when Helen Du Pray voiced her outrage at any free citizen’s being forced by law to take such a test. He had expected that of her. He smiled also when Dr. Annaccone showed his hurt feelings—Zed was too learned a man to be so thin-skinned.
He listened with less amusement when Gray, Wix and Dazzy agreed with the Vice President. He had correctly predicted that Christian Klee would not speak.
They were all watching Kennedy, waiting for him, trying to see which way he would go. He would have to convince them he was right. He began slowly. “I know all the difficulties,” he said, “but I am determined to make this test part of our legal system. Not totally—there is still some degree of danger, small as it is. Though Dr. Annaccone has assured me that with further research, even that will be reduced to zero. But this is a scientific test that will revolutionize our society. Never mind the difficulties, we will iron them out.”
Annaccone said quietly, “Congress will not pass such a law.”
“We’ll make them,” Kennedy said grimly. “Other countries will use it. Other intelligence agencies will use it. We have to.” He laughed and said to Annaccone, “I’ll have to cut your budget. Your discoveries cause too much trouble, and put all the lawyers out of work. But with this test no innocent man will ever be found guilty.”
Very deliberately he rose and walked to the doors that looked out onto the Rose Garden. Then he said, “I will show how much I believe in this. Our enemies constantly accuse me of being responsible for the atom bomb going off. They say that I could have stopped it. Euge, I want you to help Dr. Annaccone set it up for me. I want to be the first to undergo the PET scan test. Immediately. Arrange for witnessing, the legal formalities.”
He smiled at Klee. “They will ask the question ‘Are you in any way responsible for the explosion of the atom bomb?’ And I will answer.” He paused for a moment and then said, “I will take the test, and so will my Attorney General. Right, Chris?”
“Sure,” Klee joked uneasily. “But you first.”
At Walter Reed Hospital, the suite reserved for President Kennedy had a special conference room. In it were the President and his personal staff, Wix, Gray, Dazzy and Du Pray, along with Congressman Jintz and Senator Lambertino, and a panel of three qualified physicians who would monitor and verify the results of the brain-scan test. Now they listened to Dr. Annaccone as he explained the procedure.
Dr. Annaccone prepared his slides and turned on the projector. Then he began his lecture. He said, “This test is, as some of you already know, an infallible lie-detector test, the truth assessed by measuring the levels of activity from certain chemicals in the brain. This has been done by the refinement of positron emission tomography (PET) scans. The procedure was first shown to work in a limited way at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Slides were made of human brains at work.”
A large slide showed on the huge white screen in front of them. Then another, and another. Brilliant colors appeared, lighting up the different parts of the brain as patients read, listened or spoke. Or simply just thought about the meaning of a word. Dr. Annaccone used blood and glucose to tag them with radioactive labels.
“In essence, under the PET scan,” Dr. Annaccone said, “the brain speaks in living color. A spot in back of the brain lights up during reading. In the middle of the brain against that background of dark blue, you can see an irregular white spot appear with a tiny blotch of pink and a seepage of blue. That appears during speech. In the front of the brain, a similar spot lights up during the thinking process. Over these images we have laid a magnetic resonance image of the brain’s anatomy. The whole brain is now a magic lantern.”
Dr. Annaccone looked around the room to see if everyone was following him. Then he went on, “You see that spot in the middle of the brain changing? When a subject lies, there is an increase in the amount of blood flowing through the brain, which then projects another image.”
Startlingly, in the center of the white spot there was now a circle of red within a larger yellow irregular field. “The subject is lying,” Dr. Annaccone said. “When we test the President, that red spot within the yellow is what we must look for.” Dr. Annaccone nodded to the President. “Now we will proceed to the examining room,” he said.
Inside the lead-walled room, Francis Kennedy lay on the cold hard table. Behind him a large long metal cylinder loomed. As Dr. Annaccone strapped the plastic mask over Kennedy’s forehead and across his chin, Kennedy felt a momentary shiver of fear. He hated anything over his face. His arms were then tied down along his sides. Then he felt Dr. Annaccone slide the table into the cylinder. Inside the cylinder it was narrower than he expected. Blacker. Silent. Now he was surrounded by a ring of radioactive detection crystals.
Then Kennedy heard the echo of Dr. Annaccone’s voice instructing him to look at the white cross directly in front of his eyes. The voice sounded hollow. “You must keep your eyes on the cross,” the doctor repeated.
In a room five stories below, in the basement of the hospital, a pneumatic tube held a syringe containing radioactive oxygen, a cyclotron of tagged water.
When the order came from the scanning room above, that tube flew, a lead rocket twisting through hidden tunnels behind the walls of the hospital until it reached its target.
Dr. Annaccone opened the pneumatic tube and held the syringe in his hands. He walked over to the foot of the PET scanner and called in to Kennedy. Again the voice was hollow, an echo, when Kennedy heard, “The injection,” and then felt the doctor reach into the dark and plunge the needle into his arm.
From the glass-enclosed room at the end of the scanner, the staff could see only the bottom of Kennedy’s feet. When Dr. Annaccone joined them again, he turned on the computer high on the wall above, so that they could all watch the workings of Kennedy’s brain. They watched as the tracer circulated through Kennedy’s blood, emitting positrons, particles of antimatter that collided with electrons and produced explosions of gamma ray energy.
They watched as the radioactive blood rushed to Kennedy’s visual cortex creating streams of gamma rays immediately picked up by the ring of radioactive detectors. All the time Kennedy kept staring at the white cross as instructed.
Then, through the microphone piped directly into the scanner, Kennedy heard the questions from Dr. Annaccone.
“What is your full name?”
“Francis Xavier Kennedy.”
“What is your occupation?”
“President of the United States.”
“Did you in any way conspire to have the atom bomb explode in New York?”
“No, I did not.”
“Did you have any knowledge that could have prevented its explosion?”
“No, I did not,” Kennedy answered. And inside the black cylinder his words seemed to fall back like the wind on his face.
Dr. Annaccone watched the computer screen above his head.
The computer showed the patterns form in the blue mass of the brain so elegantly formed in Kennedy’s curving skull.
The staff watched apprehensively.
But no telltale yellow dot, no red circle appeared.
“The President is telling the truth,” Dr. Annaccone said.
Christian Klee felt his knees buckling. He knew he could not pass such a test.
CHAPTER
24
“I don’t understand how he passed it,” Christian Klee said.
The Oracle said with contempt that barely came across because of the frailties of his age, “So now our civilization has an infallible test, a scientific test, mind you, for determining whether a man tells the truth. And the first person who takes it lies and gets away with it. ‘We can now solve the darkest riddles of innocence and guilt!’ What a laugh. Men and women deceive themselves continually. I??
Christian had retrieved his cigar from the Oracle and now he lit it and that small circle of fire made the Oracle’s face a mask in a museum.
“I let that atom bomb go off,” Christian said. “I’m responsible for that. And when I take that PET scan I will know the truth and so will the scanner. But I thought I understood Kennedy better than anybody. I could always read him. He wanted me not to interrogate Gresse and Tibbot. He wanted that explosion to happen. Then how the hell did he pass that test?”
“If the brain were that simple, we would be too simple to understand it,” the Oracle said. “That was the wit of your Dr. Annaccone and I suggest that is your answer. Kennedy’s brain refused to acknowledge his guilt. Therefore, the computer in the scanner says he is innocent. You and I know better, for I believe what you say. But he will be forever innocent even in his own heart.”
“Unlike Kennedy, I am forever guilty.”
“Cheer up,” the Oracle said. “You only killed ten or was it twenty thousand people? Your only hope is to refuse to take the test.”
“I promised Francis,” Christian said. “And the media will crucify me for refusing.”
“Then why the hell did you agree to take it?” the Oracle said.
“I thought Francis was bluffing,” Christian said. “I thought he couldn’t afford to take the test and that he would back down. That’s why I insisted he take the test first.”
The Oracle showed his impatience by running the motor on his wheelchair. “Climb up on the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “Claim your civil rights and your human dignity. You’ll get away with it. Nobody wants to see such infernal science become a legal instrument.”
“Sure,” Christian said. “That’s what I have to do. But Francis will know I’m guilty.”
The Oracle said, “Christian, if that test asked you whether you were a villain, what would you answer, in all truthfulness?”