Point one. The Administration was ready to release Cathryn and Denise Vreeland to Dr. Vreeland. A major bone of contention had just been broken by Elliot’s appearance: Dr. Vreeland had not believed the FBI director when he maintained that he did not have Elliot in custody.
Point two. Dr. Vreeland had agreed never to mention the arrest list, the capture of his wife and daughter, or the real reason for his death charade. Instead, his “death” was to be explained, in a joint statement, as a plan between Dr. Vreeland and the FBI to avoid an assassination plot on Dr. Vreeland by the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre while Dr. Vreeland was working to save the economy. It would be charged that the Cadre—
learning of Dr. Vreeland’s reformist solution—planned to kill him to disrupt his counterrevolutionary intentions. Point three. As soon as Cathryn and Denise Vreeland were free, Dr Vreeland was to accompany the FBI director to the White House. Immediately following detailed agreement on the plan, Dr. Vreeland would appear with the President before a joint session of Congress to announce their emergency restoration of a hard-money, unregulated American economy, and to ask for immediate legislation to approve the EUCOMTO loan Alongside Night
193
and Dr. Vreeland’s appointment to the new Cabinet post. This plan granted everything that Dr. Vreeland and Citizens for a Free Society had been demanding all along, and was politically feasible—because ruling American interests were pressed—for all parties.
All parties excepting, naturally, those damned revolutionaries of the Cadre. To Lawrence Powers they were just criminals—terrorists and racketeers—to be “dealt with.” He even convinced Elliot that he was sincere in this view. To Dr. Vreeland, the Cadre were not criminals or terrorists but merely anarchists who had bet on revolution and would lose. Under different circumstances—had they advocated minimal rather than no government—Dr. Vreeland said he could even have worked with them, as he had worked with Al.
Lawrence Powers made the connection. “Dr. Vreeland, have you been having dealings with the Cadre?”
“Only one of its allies—clients—who once offered to sponsor me to them. A person of no importance to you whatever. “
The FBI director shrugged.
Elliot asked his father, “You don’t care about what happens to the Cadre?”
“Losers always submit to victors’ justice,” Dr. Vreeland explained. “It is, sadly, a law of history. The best the Cadre can hope for is king’s mercy.”
“Now, son,” Lawrence Powers said to Elliot, “I’m willing to forget this ever happened if you put that gun away and let your father and me proceed with getting your family released. Deanne, you took property of mine. I need it back. We have a lot to discuss when we get home. “
Lorimer lit a cigarette. Elliot could see by Powers’s expression that this was an act of defiance. “Do you really think I’d go back with you?”
Powers remained calm. “Deanne, right now you’re an outlaw. You’ve stolen valuable government property. There is no 194
Alongside Night
way that even I can stop the chain of events that will occur if you do not return it, but if you come home with me and give it back, I’ll see that nothing more comes of this.”
Lorimer stood up. “Over your dead body.”
Lawrence Powers winced, his daughter’s words driving home her decision more forcibly even than her pulling a gun had done.
Elliot stood up also. “Dad, the two of us are leaving.”
“You can’t just leave them here,” Lorimer told Elliot. “My father will have both New York police and his agents after us in minutes.”
“Not without his passe-partout,” Elliot answered, holding up the telephone key, “and not without his ammunition.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something, Elliot?” Dr. Vreeland said. Elliot looked over to his father.
“You gave me your word to accept my orders.”
Elliot took a deep breath. “Don’t hold me to that, now. Please.”
Dr. Vreeland studied his son for a moment. “All right. If you must go, I won’t stop you.”
“But, Vreeland,” Powers started. “Surely—”
“And you won’t, either,” Dr. Vreeland went on. “Not if you want my cooperation.”
Lawrence Powers lowered his head, then, a moment later, raised it again. “I won’t stop them.”
Suddenly, Elliot remembered. He caught his father’s glance and hitched quickly at his belt. Powers, who was looking at his daughter, did not notice.
Neither did he understand when, just before Elliot and Lorimer left the hotel room, Dr. Vreeland told his son: