the President had added.
What had performed such a feat of political alchemy on Dr. Vreeland was a telephone call, Saturday evening, that the Chancellor of EUCOMTO had made to the President of the United States. The Chancellor’s eleven o’clock call from Paris (5 P.M. in Washington) informed the President that in a closed emergency session thirty minutes earlier, EUCOMTO had voted no longer to accept the American New Dollar. The Chancellor 190
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explained, as politely as possible under the circumstances, that the council had felt this necessary to protect European interests from the monetary consequences of American political instability.
“Instability?” the President had asked testily. “What do you think, that you’re dealing with some banana republic?”
“Mr. President,” the Chancellor had replied, “even bananas do not decay as quickly as the value of your currency these past few months.”
The vote was final; the announcement would be made in Paris, 10 A.M. Monday,. at the opening of EUCOMTO’s trading session.
The President had said, somewhat tentatively, that he assumed it was not merely courtesy that prompted the Chancellor’s call.
The Chancellor had replied that he did not intend to mince words. He knew as well as the President what this action would do to the American economy in its current condition; most of Europe had gone through a nearly identical inflationary crisis fifteen years earlier. It meant an imminent collapse of the New Dollar, wildcat strikes not only in industry and the civil service but in the military as well, almost total financial chaos, and widespread civil insurrection that—without the military behind him—the President might never quell.
The President had said to go on.
Very well. A consortium of EUCOMTO banks was willing to lend the United States government enough gold to float a new hard currency. Obviously, a country as large as the United States still had a wealth of material and industrial resources to call upon. What it currently lacked was a stable atmosphere—political and economic—in which to guarantee the repayment of such a loan. Frankly, after the debacle of the last two American monies, European bankers did not trust the United States government not to pay off its debts in inflated currency—and Alongside Night
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they doubted that the American people were willing to be trusting again, either. What the Europeans would require was a person to act as a top-level comptroller of the American government, with full, irrevocable power to guarantee to EUCOMTO American fiscal responsibility. Probably a new Cabinet-level post was called for, combining the functions of Treasury Secretary, director of the Office of Management and Budget, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and a number of lesser offices. Secretary of Economic Recovery, call it. This person would have to be acceptable both to EUCOMTO
and to American popular sentiment—a person in the past widely critical of the policies that had brought about the present Administration’s current dilemma. And the only person whom the delegates of EUCOMTO had authorized the Chancellor to suggest was Dr. Martin Vreeland.
The President had paused a very long moment before he had ventured the thought that Dr. Martin Vreeland was dead. The Chancellor replied that if this is what the President had been told, then his own people were lying to him. The Chancellor had said that he himself had been in communication with Dr. Vreeland during the past week, and the latter was perfectly willing to discuss such a proposition with the President—the moment the FBI returned his family to him unharmed. And EUCOMTO was willing to act as go-between for further preliminary negotiations.
The President had said that he would call the Chancellor back the next afternoon, Washington time. After switching off, the President then told his appointments secretary to have Lawrence Powers in his office first thing the next morning. Powers had not liked the tone in which the President spoke to him that morning. But he also knew that as long as the Administration needed Martin Vreeland’s goodwill, and as long 192
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as that goodwill rested on getting Vreeland’s wife and daughter (and his son, too—if he ever got his hands on him) safely out of Utopia, then Lawrence Powers could not be dealt out of the game.
This hand he was dealing.
Normally, it was unthinkable that two seventeen-year-olds would be privy to any piece of this information. When one of those seventeen-year-olds was holding a gun in a manner suggesting that he knew how to use it, the unthinkable was thought.
Elliot learned, during this discussion, that his father and the Administration had already outlined the basics of a deal; all that remained was to work out the bugs.