Disaster Among the Heavens - Don E Peavy Sr (best books for students to read .TXT) 📗

his neck tie and threw it on top of the coat. He opened the top button of his shirt as he reclaimed his seat and laid the panties on his lap where he could read its message while sipping his drink.
Landest forgot about his Former Assistant and the so-called revolution. His mind cleared itself of The President and all the other thoughts that had occupied him this day. Now, his only thoughts were of His Woman and this place of refuge and the passing of the torch from Lucia to Edgardo, who was singing his aria “Tu che a Dio spiegasti Fali.”
Suddenly, Landest became aware that he was feeling much too at ease -- that his head was too light and his body too relaxed. He watched the glass fall from his hand as he lost control of voluntary action except for the shifting of his eyes.
He tried to get up but could not. His mouth was dry. He tried to call out to His Woman but no sound issued forth. His eyes began to close and his respiration grew ever so faint. Both blood pressure and pulse rate decreased.
The Director fought harder. His eyes opened. He was in the hospital. There was a slap on his rear which caused tears to gush from his eyes -- violence and tears: the drumbeats of human existence. Next, he was seven years of age and his father was scolding him because the bully down the street had sent him home with a black eye. His father made him go back outdoors with a warning that he could not return to the house until he had defeated the bully. It was then he had learned to fight, to use the bully’s strength against him.
Then he was eight and found himself arguing with his mother about his desire to play Little League baseball. She refused and made him take piano lessons instead. At ten his father intervened and signed him up for football and despite his wanting to be a wide receiver, his father had moulded him into a quarterback. By seventeen, the handsome young man was making plans to go to Harvard when his father informed him that the future Director had been appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Next he was twenty-one years of age. Having won the Heisman Trophy, he was anxious for the NFL draft. He was confident he would be selected in the first round. His hopes were dashed when his father announced that the future Director had been commissioned into the Army. Without protest, Landest went off to the Army.
At twenty-five Landest met a beautiful redhead in Germany whom he fell in love with and flew home to secure his parents’ permission to marry. They refused for they had selected the daughter of the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their son to wed. With a heavy heart he submitted to the will of his parents and married a woman whom he not only did not love -- he could never love.
Thus had he spent the best years of his life in the Army and had served with distinction in three different wars and numerous conflicts. Landest retired as a four-star general at age fifty-two and decided that he had fulfilled his parents’ wishes for his life and had earned the right to live as he had always wanted to.
Freedom, ever fleeting in mind and circumstance, did not come. His parents got him appointed to head the CIA and with it life in a fish bowl. Though Landest soon learned that being the head of the world’s foremost spy agency had its advantages; he could construct a private lifestyle which would enable him, the obedient child, hidden from his parents.
Although they had now gone the way of all parents, he continued to live two separate and very distinct lives. However, it was not until he met His Woman that his life really took on new and exciting meaning and he learned the definition of passion.
Away from His Woman, everything seemed so perfunctory. His life was like a movie in which everything he said and did was scripted by someone else and in which he was forbidden from deviating from the script. Consequently, Landest learned to be a good actor and thus far no one suspected him of carrying on an affair with His Woman.
The thought of His Woman brought him back to the now. His Woman? Where is she? He had to see her. In desperation, the Director tried with all his energy to get up from the chair. He finally did and moved swiftly to the bathroom door. Something was not right. Time and space seemed out of harmony. Terror gripped him when he touched the knob of the bathroom door for his hand went straight through it. Hesitantly, fearful of what he might see, he turned and looked behind him. His body remained in the recliner. The futility of his struggle became clear to him.
In recent years, Landest thought himself to be like Sisyphus -- finally having taken control of his life in his struggle against the gods. Now he knew the truth. He was but rolling a stone that signified nothing -- that got him nowhere – defiance yes, but absurdity nevertheless.
His freedom was an illusion. What the Director took for meaning was hollow nonsense. So was the love and trust he placed in His Woman an illusion that now ushered him toward the light.
Here is a man who plumed the depths of the deep and dark recesses of the Russian mind to enable America to stay one step ahead of the Russian Bear. But what man can fathom the depths of a woman’s heart? For in what creature under the cosmos is deceit so firmly entrenched and so perfectly disguised? These last questions dis-eased the mind of Landest as the last note sounded. Edgardo bowed. A bright, encompassing light exploded before Landest. The Director was no more.
Landest could not be blamed for not responding to the doorbell that had now been replaced by a harsh pounding. It was the detail dispatched by The President to verify that the director’s NORAD safe combination was intact. The detail consisted of three Secret Service agents, the Deputy Director of the CIA and the Air Force General who had been at the White House meeting that morning. They too heard the music stop.
The Deputy Director extracted a key from his wallet. He was the only one whom the director trusted with a key and it was the Deputy Director who came over to the apartment twice a week to allow the cleaning crew in. Now, as he extracted the key and inserted it into the lock, a haunting, foreboding fear gripped him. It was a feeling he had not felt since the day he received the telephone call informing him of that tragedy in Dallas that ended the brief reign of Camelot.
The door opened slowly as if it concealed a truth it was reluctant to reveal. A deathly silence greeted the weary visitors as they entered the apartment and saw the limp mass in the chair. The Secret Service Agents withdrew their weapons and motioned for the Deputy and General to wait at the door as they swept the apartment to determine if a threat existed. The Agent who searched the bedroom and bathroom turned the water off in the shower. He was perplexed that no one was in it and yet a female robe was laid out on the bed. This discrepancy caused him to glance at the dead Director And then the robe. A sigh issued forth when he returned to the living room and read the panties. “Oh my God! It can't be!” exclaimed the Deputy Director. His shout was simultaneous with one of the Secret Service Agents discovery that the Director was dead.
Like cowboys jumping from blazing saddles, the group rushed over behind the bar and removed a painting of Prometheus Bound that had been presented to the director by Andy Warhol when the director became head of the CIA. After removing the painting, the Deputy Director opened the wall safe which the painting had covered.
“It’s empty. The damn thing’s empty!” shouted the Deputy Director.
The Deputy Director’s words were drowned out by the scream of one of the Secret Service Agents who beckoned them to the bedroom where he had found a staircase inside a closet. The group ascended the stairs that ended in another closet – the door of which was locked. As he had done before, the Deputy Director extracted another key from his wallet and unlocked the door. They entered into a bedroom that was in disarray. It was obvious that whoever had been there had left in a hurry.
“Okay. Let’s seal this room tighter than Pharaoh's tomb,” fired the Deputy Director.
“I want every inch of it searched and searched again until every loose fibre is tagged and boxed. I don’t want anyone to enter either of these rooms without my express authorization.”
He walked over to a nearby telephone and dialled the private line to The President.
“Hello, Mr. President? We have a problem! The Director is dead.”
The President gave a deep sigh but otherwise remained silent. The Deputy continued.
“Looks like he was poisoned. But our bigger problem is the combination to the NORAD safe is missing along with other documents vital to our national defence,” said the Deputy Director in a barely audible voice.
“Listen to me very carefully,” barked The President. “I want you to take personal control over this matter. The official word is the director died of a heart attack. I don’t want anything to get out about the missing documents. We can do this. We must do this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” whispered the Deputy.
“I want you to tear that place apart,” continued The President, “until you come up with some answers and report directly to me. And remember the admonition of Jawaharla Nehru...”
The Deputy Director did not have the foggiest idea of whom The President spoke. However, rather than ask, he gave the proverbial, “Yes, sir, what was that famous saying of his, Mr. President?”
“He said, ‘Every little thing counts in a crisis.’”
“Of course, Mr. President. What about the Director’s Assistant?”
“Leave that to me. You have your hands full there. Actually, I need to go outside the Agency on this one. I know just who to call to get him. We can do this and by God we will,” concluded The President. He hung up the phone without giving any warning.
The sudden click of the telephone did not faze the Deputy Director who was quite accustomed to such rudeness that others took as the normal way of conducting affairs in Washington, D.C. He shifted his attention to the vital task before him.
And so this motley crew went to work on deconstructing the adjoining apartments in an effort to construct the story which they had to tell. Every item would be inspected to its basic atom. All would be questioned -- nothing would be left untouched or to chance. No matter how innocuous a thing might appear, it would be examined and re-examined.
A specialized crime scene search unit would be called in from CIA headquarters. The Director’s body would be sent to the CIA forensic unit for an autopsy performed by three skilled technicians who would wring