BOOK ONE
AUTUMN, 1952



It was an unusually cold September morning, even for Scotland. The mist so darkened the moor that the heather seemed pitch black. The mounds of freshly dug earth, which rose up at intervals of thirty feet, were hardly visible. Just before noon, the sun poked a burning finger through the haze revealing, concealed behind each mound, a man with a highly polished gun. Behind each man stood a woman with a card in her hand, ready to mark for the hunter the location of his kill. And behind them both, dogs, alert in every muscle, pawed the muddy ground. The ragged line of beaters, carrying white flags, which fluttered in the wind, waited on the moor.

Lord Crumonde, in the first butte, peered in the direction of the yelping dogs. He realized that the light would not get much better. Anyhow, it was his moor, his grouse and his guests. He would start this shoot when he liked. With a shrill blast of a whistle, he signaled for the first drive of the day to begin.

Lou-Anne Bell stood only a few feet behind Crumonde, much too close for comfort. Even with her sable coat and hood, she shivered. She couldn't help staring at her host's gnarled legs. His tweed plus fours exposed them precisely at the point where they were most bony. She wondered how such spindly underpinnings could support such a burly body. Lord Crude, Lou-Anne thought to herself. That was what her husband, Frank, called Crumonde, and that's what he was. Crude. She hadn't wanted to come on this ridiculous expedition to Scotland, but Frank had insisted. "It's business, important business," he had explained the night before, reminding her, as if she hadn't heard it a hundred times before, "Lord Crude runs Anglo-Iranian Oil, and that means we gotta be very charming to him." Frank always used "we" when he meant her.

"I do declare..." she drawled in her Texas accent. "I never met anyone like Nubar. Is he really one of the richest men in the world?"

Crumonde did not answer. He didn't like her, or her husband, and was sorry he had had to invite them or tolerated another of her annoying questions. The beaters were emerging on the moor, poking the bushes with sticks to flush out concealed birds. The grouse ran in short spurts, trying to hide in the purple heather, only to be driven out again by the beaters. They had nowhere to go but forward, where they would be blocked by the mounds of earth and have to fly right into his ambush. He raised his Purdy gun to the ready position, trying not to think of the silly Texan’s chatter.

In the next butte was Nubar Gulbenkian. Even though he could hear the dogs yelping, he did not raise his Purdy. Instead, he carefully adjusted his monocle under his right eyebrow. He imagined it completed his image by magnifying his otherwise mild brown pupil into the demonic eye of a predator hawk. It also broke the bland symmetry of his face. He never wanted to think of himself as the moon-faced Armenian he had been as a child. So, every morning, he tweezed his eyebrows into wild, wooly arches, and shaped his waxed beard into a dagger like “V” to hide his weak chin. In his lapel was a blue orchid

He had not much interest in the grouse coming towards his butte. All his life, he had detested shooting birds, and certainly he had no particular love for Scotland; it was too uncomfortable for his taste. He had not come to this grouse shoot for pleasure. He had come solely because Lord Crumonde had insisted, in his imperious way, that he be there and had even sent a private plane to fetch him from London. Crumonde had said only that there was some new "crisis"-and Raven and Bell would also attend. "Be there," Lord Crude said.

Gulbenkian had no illusions why he had been summoned. He was a means to an end. The end was his father, Calouste Gulbenkian. His father owned five percent of all the oil in Iraq which had made him the richest man in the world. More to the point, he controlled, through two decades of secret baksheesh, the people Lord Crude and Raven needed to solve their problem in Iran.

Behind him was Tony Raven’s wife, Diane. Gulbenkian had known her since she was eighteen. Her father had built Royal Dutch Shell into the largest oil company in the world. She had gone through three husbands before she was was forty, all of whom had married her for her money. Then Raven married her for power, her father’s power.

“Your friend is darling,” Diana was saying in her hesitant voice.” She wanted to know why Gulbenkian had brought this twenty-one-year-old gamine to Crumonde's for the weekend. She was, after all, standing dangerously close to her husband in the next butte. Was he showing off? Was she his latest acquisition? Nubar always liked to describe himself as a collector of old masters and young mistresses “Is she an artist?”

“Chrissy is an art consultant,” Gulbenkian replied, parting his lips just enough to affect his most satyric smile. “I asked her to come this weekend to look at some of the old oils in the castle.”

Raven, in the third butte, stood poised to kill. His head, with its chiseled features, dominated his entire body. His tweeds, though expensive, looked disheveled.

Chris Winchester, in her tightly stretched jeans, shaggy sweater, and rainbow-colored socks, stood behind Raven, feeling foolishly out of place. What was she doing here on some forsaken moor, watching the back of a man’s giant head and clothes that it looked like he had slept in. A man, moreover, who had not said more than one word to her in two hours It seemed totally mad when she thought back over the events that had led to her being behind this heap of mud.

Only a few weeks earlier, she had been sitting by herself at a table in a peaceful fishing village in the south of France, nibbling at a croissant and enjoying the Mediterranean sun. A handsome sailor with the eyes of a schoolboy had sat down beside her, and pointing out the largest yacht in the harbor, invited her aboard. Why not? she shrugged. She was too intrigued to do anything but accept; she had always believed in seeing what life had to offer.

She had followed the sailor up the mahogany gangplank. He had led her to a table for two set with crystal, under a red-and-white striped canopy, and left her sitting there alone. A waiter filled her glass with champagne. A moment later, Gulbenkian appeared and introduced himself. When he heard she was an art consultant, he took her to see his collection on the yacht. A dazzling dozen Degas ballerinas. He then offered her an equally dazzling fee— 2,000 pounds— to evaluate some paintings belonging to an oil baron he called Lord Crude. He had not told her that it was a ghastly bird shooting weekend.

Men usually drooled compliments on her, but Tony Raven had ignored her very existence. Since Nubar had mentioned Raven had just returned from abroad, she initially tried to break the ice, asking him where he had been. “Hell,” he answered, without even turning towards her. “The hell with him,” she now thought.

Frank Bell was in the last butte. He was a tall, muscular man, with closely cropped gray hair and baby-blue eyes. Like his wife, he made no secret of his Texan roots. Holding his shotgun in both hands, he seemed supremely confident. Lady Crumonde, standing behind him, found him very handsome, though without much charm. She knew her husband had a reason for inviting him. He always had a reason for his shoot that went beyond killing birds.

Just as she was about to speak, a grouse flew overhead. Bell blasted away, killing it.

Almost simultaneously Crumonde was firing, winging one bird as it took flight and, with a second quick shot, bringing down another one.

As a pair of grouse flew over his butte, Raven slowly turned around until he was directly facing Chris. His eyes widened as the birds gained altitude. Then he methodically squeezed off two blasts, and both birds tumbled from the sky.

Gulbenkian didn’t shoot. The waving flags and booming guns brought back for him memories another massacre. When he was two years old, the Turks had slaughtered thirty thousand of his fellow Armenians in Istanbul, first herding them with shotguns against the rough , stone walls of the city and then shooting and clubbing them to death. His family was one of the few that escaped.

"Got you," Bell whispered to himself as he hit his third bird. Thirty years of shooting birds in Texas had sharpened his aim and confidence,

It was over in less than five minutes. Except for the birds that escaped over Gulbenkian's butte, the guns had brought down nine grouse. The dogs quickly retrieved the kill.

Crumonde approached Gulbenkian's butte with angry strides. He had ruined a near perfect drive. "Why the hell didn't you shoot?" he shouted.

Thinking that the tiny arc of jagged teeth in Crumonde's enormous mouth resembled the spikes of an exotic flower, Gulbenkian answered distractedly, "Shoot? Sorry, I was waiting for a more sporting shot."

Crumonde walked off shaking his head. As the son of a Scottish bookkeeper, he could not tolerate waste, not even a few grouse.

"Oh, dear, it's starting to drizzle," Lady Crumonde said to Bell. "Pity you won't get in another drive in this afternoon. You've come all the way from Texas for this ..."

"New York," Bell corrected. Though born in Houston, he had been working in the New York offices of Standard Oil for nine years now, as head of International Marketing.

The group walked together toward a jeep-drawn wagon as the moor began to turn muddy. A flash of lightning cut across the dark sky. The gamekeepers had already hung the dead grouse by their necks on the wagon's sideboards.

"Let's go," Crumonde barked, as he clumsily hoisted himself up on the back of the wagon. Then he lowered the tailgate, which served as a ladder. The shotguns were neatly stacked in a hand-hewn rack in the front of the wagon, and everyone scrambled aboard and huddled on the narrow wooden benches. Two smelly dogs also jumped in.

The jeep, which the gamekeepers piled into, lurched forward, dragging the wagon behind it. The beaters waved enthusiastically as the shooters left. Their day was over.

Before they had proceeded a mile, the drizzle turned into a drenching rain. Lady Crumonde handed out blankets to the women, but they did little good.

While Lou-Anne sat shivering, faintly resembling a seal in her soaked sable, Frank Bell was telling Diana Raven about quail shooting in Texas. "You'll never get wet there. We just sit inside our little streamlined lots with trailer whiskey and women and use cowboys to get the birds right up to the front door."

Ridiculous Americans, Crumonde thought, turning his head away. Looking at Gulbenkian, his eyes focused with displeasure on the blue orchid in his lapel. "Don't you think it's a bit strange to wear an orchid to a grouse shoot?"

"Not for an oriental like me," Gulbenkian replied. He enjoyed rubbing in his oriental heritage. After all, the oil Combine that Crumonde was part of owed its success in no small measure to the fact that the Gulbenkians were oriental and could deal with other orientals.

"Aren't blue orchids very rare, Mr. Gulbenkian?" Lady Crumonde intervened, trying to divert the conversation. The last thing she knew her husband wanted to hear about was orientals. "I don't think I've ever seen a blue orchid before."

"This single flower cost me ten thousand pounds, Lady Crumonde."

"Impossible," Crumonde grumbled.

"You see, blue orchids can be raised only in one area of Tibet, where the altitude and oxygen level are conducive to their growth. I have to organize a private yak caravan to get him to an airport in India."

Crumonde looked at him goggle-eyed with dismay, then turned back to Bell, who was still talking about quail.

Raven stared out the moors, detached from this banter.

“Do you approve of blue orchids,” Chris asked, turning to Raven.

“There are no blue orchids, Miss” he answered dismissively. “Quite right, Tony” Gulbenkian chirped in. “Its a 10 shilling orchid from Charlesworth and Company dyed blue.” He had invented the story, he whispered to Chriss, just to annoy the frugal Crumonde.

Everyone was soaked by the time they reached Lord Crumonde's lodge. A half-dozen servants scurried out, holding umbrellas for them.

The immense lodge was built on the side of a steep hill, overlooking Loch Eddy. A fireplace, large enough for logs to burn vertically, dominated the living room. Above the stone mantelpiece were the heads of stags that Crumonde had shot.

A weathered old servant then passed around hot bullhots, which had been prepared in anticipation of the arrival of the hunters. The women, meanwhile, then were shown to their rooms upstairs.

Chris had insisted on her own room. She shook her head in disbelief when she saw that her suitcase had been unpacked, her clothing ironed and neatly hung in the closet. It's all magic, she thought. Taking out another pair of freshly laundered jeans, she prepared for lunch.

An hour later, they were all sitting around a massive oak table in the dining room, eating gulls' eggs, game pie, and a crumbling Stilton, and drinking a rich Petrus. Crumonde, having already rehashed every shot of the morning, raised his goblet high and roared a toast. "To all the brave guns that shot this morning!"

"Ah, tradition," Gulbenkian drained his goblet. “But of course there are other traditions.”

"In Kuwait...” Gulbenkiann waited until he had the attention of the table, “My father wanted me to personally deliver the present of a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce to Sheik Abdullah. No sooner did I show him how to start the car, than he drove me out to the desert to shoot gazelle. He used a falcon to peck out the eyes of the gazelle, and then, when it was running in blind circles, he shot it from the open back seat of the Rolls. I told him it could do thirty miles an hour right across the desert, and he turned to me and said, as if it were the solution to all his country's problems. Now the shieks could get close enough to shoot the gazelles without first blinding them. Much more humane."

"How bizarre desert arabs are, hunting from a Rolls," Diana Raven injected. “Tony’s just back from oasis-hopping in the Iranian desert.”

Raven looked up at his wife disapprovingly. He thought how ill-informed her whole noblesse oblige class was in reality. After all these years, she still made no distintion between the different countries of the Middle East.

"Visiting the ruins of Persipolis, no doubt,” Chris filled in the gap. She smiles to herself at the idea of this strange man, with a Roman bust of a head, visiting the ruined capital of ancient Iran

"I saw a country that is a ruin and may soon be dead," he answered coldly, looking squarely at her until her eyes avoided his gaze.

The uneasy silence was broken by Crumonde, “Brandy, gentlemen!" It was a signal the mixed conversation was over. Raven, Bell, and, finally, Gulbenkian followed him into the library.

As they entered, Chris could see over the fireplace the oil that Gulbenkian had wanted her to assess for him. It looked very prosaic: two men, each holding in his hands a gun. The doors then closed . The women had tea. After ten minutes, Chris could not stand their chatter. “Do you mind if I look at some of your magnificent oils?” she asked Lady Crumonde.

In fact, she wanted to explore the castle. Most of the paintings turned out to be ghastly. The principal subjects were Crumonde's bearded ancestors, all of whom had the same craggy nose with splayed nostrils. None looked anything like Raven, who interested her, even though, by her precise count, had spoken no more than eleven words the entire day. When she asked the ordinarilly loquacious Nubar about Raven, he had fallen strangely silent.

Who was that arrogant person, she wondered, as she continued through the corridor, testing doors as she proceeded, to see what surprises lay behind them.

In the library, After the cigars were lit, the brandy snifters filled and the waiters left the room, the men got to the subject that brought them to Loch Eddy. Iran. Mossadeq, the elected prime minister, was threatening to nationalize the crude that belonged to the cartel. Raven reported that Mossedeq had made a secret offer to sell twenty million tons of Iranian oil to independent American oil companies.

"We wont allow it out. We own the ships, the pipelines, the refineries. Let them try to eat the bloody oil they can't sell, Crumonde roared. He had insisted on rule-or-ruin. After Mossadeq nationalized the Anglo-Iranian's oil concession earlier that year, he had ordered all 1,800 British technicians out of Iran and the giant refinery at Abadan closed. "Our embargo is certainly effective. Abadan is locked up tighter than a drum."

Raven now spoke. “That not true, Crumonde. No embargo had ever worked with oil. And yours won’t work. The reality is, bullshit aside, we will lose everything"

Bell, deferring to Raven’s assessment “ What can we do?”

“You are seeing the Prime Minister on Monday, Crumonde. Tell him this."

Crumonde took out his pen.

"Mossedeq must be taken out. Dead or alive. Full stop. Six months."

The side door to the pantry creaked open. Chris again saw the painting Gulbenkian wanted. Then she saw Crumonde writing, word for word, what Raven dictated. Only Raven fierce eyes spied her before she discretely re-closed the door.

BOOK ONE
OCTOBER, 1952



"Why do we study coup d'etats in a course on politics?" asked Jacob Foxx, Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard.

Foxx slowly surveyed the packed lecture hall, letting the students stew for a moment in their own silence. The five-hundred-odd seats in Lowell Lecture Hall were full. A few students were even squatting Indian-style in the aisles. Without question, his course, "The Pathology of Politics," was now the most popular in the Government Department. Not the great Galbraith in the Economics Department nor the celebrated Schlesinger in the History Department had as many students in their lectures.

"No takers?" Foxx asked, breaking the silence. His wiry brown hair, which flopped over his brow like a schoolboy's, made him look more relaxed than he was "Then let me answer my own question." After pausing a moment, he began. "The coup in its purest form is an act of' statecraft. Its objective is not overthrowing the mythic political system nor paper constitutions, but the instruments of power that control the state. Perhaps it is not in your standard textbooks, but the coup cuts to the heart of the study of politics."

Like an orchestra conductor, Foxx punctuated each point he made with both hands slicing the air. Finishing this brief introduction, he stepped back from the lectern. He tended to slouch slightly when he relaxed. Being nearly six feet four inches tall, he was somewhat self-conscious about his height. The undergraduates seemed quite impressed with his lecture. This was only his third year at Harvard, and already his course had received a rave review in the "Confidential Guide to Classes" published by the Harvard Crimson. It described Government 233a as "the hottest thing going on in an otherwise dead Government Department." And it was especially kind to him, noting that "Professor Foxx avoids the usual humdrum about legalities, constitutions, etc. Instead, he applies his own Machiavellian cunning to political power." It concluded its recommendation with "New, original, and requires very little outside reading." Actually, the review had proved something of an embarrassment. His colleagues in the Government Department were teaching courses about the very sort of constitutions and formalities his course derided. The review added fuel to an already burning fire. Foxx knew from remarks made at faculty meetings that his colleagues considered his presentation overly dramatic and overly conspiratorial. On the other hand, he was undeniably drawing more students than any other lecturer. They would have to take that fact into account when he came up for tenure in the spring.

While the class watched, Foxx quickly drew a maze of circles, squares, arrows, and interconnecting lines on the backboard behind him. "Think for a moment of government as a labyrinth," he resumed. "Painted on the outside Walls of this labyrinth are figureheads— a president, Congress, Cabinet members. To find the power, it is necessary to enter into the maze itself. Here, in nameless bureaus are faceless men that keep records, reports, and dossiers." He paused to allow the students to catch up with him in their note taking.

A hand shot up in the front row. Foxx instantly recognized it as belonging to Brixton Steer. Even down to the bow tic, young Brixton looked like an exact replica of his elegant father, Ambassador Steer. Since Brixton was also his tutee, Foxx knew how conscientious he could be. "Question, Mr. Steer?"

"If I understand you correctly, Professor," Steer began over-deferentially, "you suggested that elected officials are merely fronts for hidden power elites."

"You got it. The modern bureaucratic state," Foxx replied.

"Then I don't quite understand why coup d'etats often aim at overthrowing these figureheads?" Steer sat down, knowing his question would be answered.

Foxx said, nodding as if he were taking in its fullest implications. He welcomed questions because they broke the tedium of the lecture, and allowed him to refocus the students' attention. "I did not mean to minimize the important function of elected leaders. Even though they do not exercise real power in this model, they still symbolize it in the public's imagination. The first objective of the coup d'etat is to capture the real nerve centers of government. This may be a military communications center, a counterintelligence agency, the censorship authority, or whatever. Once the coup controls the inner machinery that collects and disburses information, it controls the government. If the coup-makers want to publicly identify this change in power, this requires some sort of symbolic coup d'etat-which is what we read about in the newspapers. It involves overthrowing and possibly arresting the elected leaders. Such a symbolic coup should not be confused with the real coup which preceded it."

Foxx could see that he was losing the interest of the class. The signs were unmistakable: papers could be heard rustling, eyes began wandering around the amphitheater, and shoes scraped together. He could almost feel the students becoming fidgety. He had been too analytical in describing the coup d'etat, he thought. What students at Harvard demanded was not disembodied concepts but interesting anecdotes— anecdotes they could repeat in their houses and clubs-- they could use later to impress their friends.

"Consider, for example, what really happened in Venezuela in 1948." As he began his anecdote, he could see students perking up their cars. It reminded him of police dogs responding to a subsonic whistle. "I happened to be in Caracas that year doing research on my thesis. The real coup occurred in October, when the counter elite seized control of such power centers as the liaison with the U.S. Military Mission in Caracas, which then operated all the military airports in Venezuela; the Central Telephone Exchange, which controlled communications between the capital and the provinces; the anti-subversive unit of the National Gendarmerie, which held dossiers on key politicians; and the State Security Agency in the Ministry of Interior, which could neutralize any pro-government military unit by issuing fake marching orders. After they had gained real power, the coup-makers in turn waited until November fifteenth, 1948, before overthrowing the President and closing down Parliament."

He hesitated for a brief moment, seeing his tutee, Arabella, out of the corner of his eye. She was entering the lecture on mock tiptoes.

When she reached the third row, a young man in a charcoal suit and white buck shoes offered her his seat. She had that effect on men. She sat in his stead, easing one leg over the other, she dangled her calf so that her toe just touched the floor.

Foxx touched his hand to the back of his neck. It was damp, the first sign of anxiety. "The coup may thus provide us with the only glimpse we will ever get of the actual power structure."

Arabella couldn’t help but smile at her tutor’s performance. He reminded her of a man on a tightrope, who smiled to impress the audience with his utter confidence while betraying his fear with short tentative steps. At times, she held her breath, sure that he would fall flat on his face with some point he was making, but he always managed, somehow, to regain his balance. At Oxford, where Arabella had studied Philosophy, three years, she had never seen a professor quite like him. She thought that he was pushing his "hidden power structures" much further than logic allowed, but his enthusiasm to clear away the underbrush made her head spin, like when she had drunk too much champagne.

His lecture concluded, as it always did, just as the chimes began ringing. He was nothing if not punctual. He always tried to avoid watching the students as they filed out. Experience had taught him that even the briefest eye contact might cause students to linger and ask half-articulated questions about the nature of politics. He knew by the time the last chime struck the lecture hall would empty out. Like everyone else, students were creatures of habit. Turning to the blackboard, he began erasing the maze of symbols.

Foxx whistled a tune he couldn't quite remember as he walked across the Yard. It was only November, but the frost had already defoliated most of the trees on in Harvard yard. He tried to protect himself against the cold wind by hunching his shoulders, though he knew it was a illogical gesture.

His office was on the third floor of Littauer Center. It wasn't very large, but he had taken pride in furnishing it with the few possessions he care about. His ex-wife Lulu, a luscious Parisian photographer, had bought the Spanish colonial desk in Venezuela. It was all he had to show for his four years of service there or, for that matter, his four years of marriage. Lulu turned out to be a lulu: She went to France to visit her parents and never returned. Eight months later, he received a note from her saying, "Sorry but I don't breed well in captivity. Divorce papers on route."

The leather Chesterfield sofa he had bought soon after receiving Lulu's letter. He got it at Turtle’s auction house in downtown Boston. Its previous owner, a professor of Art history, was famous for seducing his tutees on it. Its seventy-six inches of black pleated leather turned out to be a perfect length for him to snooze on. Over it was his latest acquisition, a Belle Epoch etching by Beardsley.

The shelves were conspicuously empty of books. As far as he was concerned, few books had been written on politics that deserved to be reread. On the floor was an Armenian dragon carpet. It had been a gift from his mother. She never said where she had gotten this museum piece— or very much else, except on a “need to know” basis. She had refused even to tell him even his father's proper name. All he had ever learned of him was that he was some sort of international businessman. Most of Foxx's youth was spent traveling through Europe with his mother. She usually identified him as a nephew or cousin. He played along with this deception, arranging his identity and cover story to fit hers. Only after die died in a car crash did he begin to establish his own identity, first as a political scientist at UCLA, then as a propagandist in Venezuela, Now, at thirty-three, he was an Assistant professor at Harvard.

Sitting at his desk, he leafed through the report on his desk called “'Praetorian Politics." He would be presenting it at the colloquium he had been invited to in New York that Friday.

His eye than fell on a post card. It was the latest move in the correspondence chess game he had been playing for two years with an opponent whom he had never met. He slid out the chess set from his desk drawer. It was more interesting than his presentation. Was his opponent attempting to lure him into a trap? He scribbled a counter move on a postcard.

A knock on the door interrupted him. Through the translucent glass, he could see a student's silhouette. "One moment, please," he called. He put the chessboard back in the drawer— he want his students to think of him as a compulsive game player— and returned the report to his desk.

"Sorry to break in on you like this," Arabella said, standing in the open doorway. "I was hoping that we could re-schedule my tutorial."

"Isn't it scheduled for later this afternoon?" "Yes, 4 pm. But my sister Tina left a message she is going to call me at home then. Can't be in two places at one time, though I sometimes wish I could. She is coming to Cambridge. Perhaps I can bring her to your lecture, Professor Foxx."

"why not. Is she interested in politics: "Pathological politics," she corrected. "No, not really. Tina's interests lie..." She was quite content to let her sentences dangle in midair. Men usually rushed in to complete them favorably for her.

"Elsewhere," Foxx completed the sentence on cue. "When would you like to do the tutorial?" Is this a convenient time."

He picked up the report on his desk as to show how busy he was “I have to edit this paper..."

She had that confidant glint in her eye saying, as if to say she knew something he didn’t know. He wanted to tell her to come back the following the week, just to teach her a lesson about who was in control. Instead, he heard himself say, “"But I can do that later paper later. Sit down, please”

Leaving the door slightly ajar, she made her way to the Chesterfield. The sun, streaming in the window behind her, revealed the outlines of her lithe body through a loose gauze dress. She slid into the sofa, tucking her legs under her skirt, with great agility.

He again felt those tell-tale beads of perspiration forming on his neck. He hoped she did not see them. He had known Arabella only since September, when she had transferred from Oxford to Harvard. He had been impressed first with her mind. Although she was only nineteen, she applied the rigor of a trained logician to everything said in her presence. She relished challenging whatever points he made. A belle dame sans merci. But it was her body that came to unnerved him. "Have you had a chance to read the chapter on the labyrinth, Arabella?"

“Every word, twice.” She poised her head, sphinx like, on a bridge she made for it by clasping her hands together.

"Do you agree that possessing a blueprint to the labyrinth of government is in itself tantamount to power?"

"The terms of your argument are clear enough. The power to control a government resides in the agencies that control intra government communications. If a potential usurper can identify and locate these agencies, his chances of success are increased."

"That's an excellent summary of the thesis." He liked the terse way she stated things, like precise hammer blows on a nail head.

"It's your basic assumption I question." As she spoke, her ryes remained fixed on him.

"Yes?" He swivelled uncomfortably in his chair, opening himself to her attack.

"You assume that power will be concentrated in a few key Centers, but what if it is widely distributed throughout a government?"

"Even if power is dispersed, communications will inevitably be focused in a few command centers."

"Why inevitably?" She spoke without hand gestures. Her body held its positions as tenaciously as her mind.

"Because that is the model that I've chosen to describe: a nation in which communications are transmitted through closely held channels." He strode over to point out the relevant section on "Selection of models" in the manuscript she was holding.

"Then isn’t it' tautological."

"Its political science. We describe empirical situations. We have givens."

“But then its conditional, not inevitable, right?”

"It's inevitable under those hypothetical conditions," he shouted at her.

“Do you have a fever?” she suddenly interrupted. “You’re soaking wet.”

She reached out towards his shirt. Without thinking, he grabbed her wrists, arresting them in mid air, clamping on invisible handcuffs. He didn’t want her to feel the nervous sweat or know what she aroused in him.

She pulled away with a jolt and started moving back, towards the door.

He closed his eyes, wondering if she would complain to the Dean. The last thing he could afford was a scandal: HARVARD TEACHER MOLESTS TUTEE was the headline he was envisioning as the door banged shut.

But she was still in the room. After locking the door, she was walking towards him. Then, putting her arm on him for leverage, she slipped into his lap. "I still say it's a tautological, but so are you.”

That was it. Only two months earlier Harvard summarily dismissed an Assistant Professor of History for just such all indiscretion. Yet, he knew that it was no use pretending that he could be a rational calculator in this situation. He could feel his excitement growing. He wanted Arabella more than anything else. Up until now, it had been merely a secret fantasy that he had managed to repress.

It took him only a minute to unbutton her dress, and, with a firm tug, pulled it over her head. Raising her hands in mock surrender, she allowed him to finish undressing her.

She pressed her lips to his lips with determination. Then her her right hand, expertly guided by his own, began undoing his zipper.

Suddenly he heard footsteps shuffling down the corridor. "You can't believe what's happening in Washington," a distant voice was saying. Foxx recognized it as the voice of Professor Edward Wiley, the antitrust expert, who taught at the law school. "Are you telling me that they are going to drop the cartel case, Wiley?" said Professor W. L. Lock, Chairman of the Government Department. Lock's office was next to Foxx's.

Foxx froze as he listened to Wiley and Lock chatting in the hall. They paused for a moment, and then continued into Lock's office.

"They are now claiming that national security transcends the criminal code of justice," Wiley continued in an agitated voice.

"Bosh, it's crude oil, that's all," Lock replied.

Foxx could hear Professor Wiley in the next office explaining: ". . .The cartel controls everything, ships, pipelines, refineries. If the truth be known they control the British government. The risks would be enormous...”

He could no longer concentrate on what was being said in the adjoining office. But Arabella seemed to enjoy their enforced secrecy.

"Enormous, indeed," she echoed.

BOOK ONE
NOVEMBER, 1952



Raven arrived at the Milan headquarters of ENI, the Italian National Oil Company precisely at 9:50 am. His appointment with Enrico Mattei, its chairman, was not until ten, but he made it a practice to be early. He was always the first to arrive for any appointment.

Raven had been working for the cartel now for just over five years at least five years he was aware of. After getting his double-first at Christ Church College at Oxford in 1939, his professor recruited him to work for a special double-cross counter-intelligence compartment in MI-5. Not being upper class enough for the elite there, he was given the job no one else would take: liaison officer with their American counterpart in London. "The Kin," as the Americans were called, were brash, unsophisticated and inexperienced. They also played to win at any cost. After the war ended, the Americans needed "wet jobs" done on some embarrassing double-agents in Germany, but their law forbid them from undertaking assassinations. So, as liaison officer, he arranged a convenient exchange: British agents would do American "wet jobs" in return from American agents doing some equally sensitive British dirty work in oil sheikdoms that were British protectorates. It was then that Lord Crude, who had somehow heard of his "exchange program," offered him a position with the seven oil companies that owned most of the worlds crude oil. His job was to, by diplomacy or any other means necessary, to prevent interlopers from undercutting the cartel's control.

The modest card Raven had given to the attractive receptionist identified him as "Executive Director, Coordinating Committee, International Petroleum Institute," but, by the rapid "uno momento" response she got from Mattei's assistant, she guessed that the badly-dressed Englishman represented something more than an academic institute. She smiled and said in her best English"Dottorie Mattei will meet you in his office."

She escorted him to huge sparsely furnished office, with two ultra-modern black leather sofas facing each other across a marble coffee table. She guided him to his designated place. On the wall, there was a map of all of ENI's assets.

As always, Raven had made a careful study of his quarry. He had found that Mattei's success in building ENI into a force that threatened the cartel proceeded from a combination of bluff and ambition. Nothing more. In 1947, when he was still in MI-5, Mattei had gotten himself appointed head of ENI, then only a small, government-owned gas company in the Po Valley. Mattei then used his bluff to convince journalists that ENI was sitting on top of enormous gas reserves, and to cow other bureaucrats into lending ENI state funds to develop these largely fictional resources. With the government funds, he constructed refineries, chemical plants, fertilizer companies, pipelines, gas stations-even hotels. The only problem was that ENI had, in fact, no energy to feed into this growing complex. As ENI became more and more financially overextended, Mattei upped the bluff. He got the Italian government to supply ENI with the funds to seek its energy abroad. The politicians had little choice. They couldn't let Mattei's empire collapse into bankruptcy. He wasted this money drilling dry holes.

So Mattei was desperate. When Mossadeq seized the cartel's oil in Iran, he saw it as his golden opportunity. He told Mossadeq that ENI would take all the oil that was formerly purchased by the cartel. He planned to refine it in Sicily and sell the refined products throughout Europe.

Mattei, suave and energetic as always, entered with a hand-wringing gesture. "Tony, I"m so sorry to be late."

"I was early." Raven wasted no time getting to the point. "I don"t need to beat around the bush with you, Enrico. I am here because my principals are concerned about your plan to buy Iranian crude."

"Italy needs to buy oil," Mattei shrugged. "Mossadeq needs to sell oil." "The oil does not belong to Mossadeq. Or Iran. It belongs to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company."

"Not according to Italian law," Mattei countered, "Iran nationalized the oil."

"Illegally nationalized it," Raven reminded him.

"Will Anglo-Iranian sue Italy?" Mattei had scoffed, blushing as he tended to do when he felt prodded or pressed.

"No need to be litiginous," Raven said. "How are you planning on shipping a million barrels of Iranian oil to Italy?"

"If we can't charter enough tankers, we'll build them," Mattei answered.

At that point in the meeting, a buzzer sounded and Mattei, with a surprised look on his round face, picked up the red phone on his desk, listened a moment, and then, excusing himself for a moment, left the office.

Raven had a fairly good idea what the call was about. Before coming to ENI, he had sent out telegrams to the seven companies he represented---Standard Oil, Mobil, Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Anglo-Iranian, and Socal--- asking them not to deliver one drop of oil to Italy until they received clearance from Raven's Coordinating Committee in London. They could invoke the Force Majeure clause in their contracts, and provide any excuse, even if it was transparently untrue. Tankers headed for Italian ports were to turn around immediately. Pipelines in Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia were to cut off both oil and gas to Italy. under the pretext of urgent repairs. Trucks on the highway were not to cross the border.

Mattei returned to the room looking grim. His black hair was slightly ruffled. "Sorry to keep you waiting . . . but there has been an unfortunate avalanche in the Austrian Alps."

"No one hurt, I hope." Raven smiled politely.

"No, but it buried a pumping station. The pipeline is shut."

"Bad luck. I assume you have reserves stockpiled."

"Of course." Mattei knew, as did Raven, that ENI had less than a week's oil in its reserve. After that, Italy would close down, and the politicians would have his scalp.

The phone rang again. Mattei listened, looking increasingly concerned. He then said, "There seems to be another force majeure: a storm in the eastern Mediterranean . No tankers are delivering oil. Such a storm can last for weeks."

Raven suggested, "You can charter your own."

"We tried but there are no tankers presently available anywhere."

"It must be the storm, or the avalanche. Not much you can do about force majeures. You can't sue nature, can you?"

Mattei's eyes narrowed, focusing on Raven. He realized that the "avalanche" and the "storm" were Raven's work.

"Pity you don't have time to build tankers," Raven's head remained immobile as he sketched out what continuing force majeures might do. "ENI's chemical plants could run out of feed stock and have to shut down. There would be no fertilizer for the crops. Your friends in the government might begin asking what happened to ENI's reserves."

"You know we need that oil," Mattei answered.

Raven knew that Mattei needed it. He was not a man who could stand up under such pressures. His power rested solely on his reputation as a producer of energy supplies. If this buckled, Mattei was through as a political force in Italy. Mattei could not afford to have his bluff called over Iran. "No man in your position would risk seeing the entire Italian economy grind to a halt because of a lack of oil." Raven said, "I got a plane to catch."

At 5PM that afternoon, Mattei called a brief press conference in his offices at ENI. He announced that although Premier Mossadeq of Iran and he had offered ENI a million barrels of crude oil, ENI would not take delivery of the Iranian oil until after the International Court in the Hague had ruled on the legality of Iran's nationalization of foreign oil concessions. He added that he didn't expect such, a decision for at least one year,

By the time Raven's flight landed in London that evening, oil was again moving to Italy. The Force Majeure crises had ended as abruptly as it had begun.

Raven's Daimler was waiting at the airport. The driver handed him his mail. In it was an hand-delivered envelope. It came from Suite 42, Hotel Aviz, Lisboa, an address with which Raven was well acquainted. It was from the suite of Mr. Five Percent himself, Calouste Gulbenkian. Raven opened it immediately. It offered him, as he expected, a gift.

Raven knew that Mr. Five Percent was an Armenian who understood the art of baksheesh in a way no Westerner could. He had begun as a paymaster for Nubar Pasha, who he named his son after, who represented the Rothschild bank in the far-flung Turkish empire. By the time he was thirty, he knew the precise position of every court official in the baksheesh chain, from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy, and paid informants to apprise him of the exact state of mind of each key official in the Sultan's court. He would find out when someone had had a satisfactory time with a woman, or when, through some business reverse, someone was more amenable to accepting a bribe. He would even secretly consult the court astrologist, who, for a price, would supply him with the charts, he had drawn up for each official, so that he could offer them a bribe on the very day that they were expecting good fortune. He found ways of bribing that did not compromise officials, such as giving them Korans encrusted with diamonds since they could commit no crime in accepting the word of Allah. By the time the Sultan was driven from power , he had gotten the Rothschilds and their allies the giant oil concession in Iraq, and, in return, kept five percent for himself.

"My Dear Antony," the letter began. " I hope you will accept a small token of my appreciation of your untiring work on all of our behalf. Nubar has told me of your interest in the picture of the Achnacarry Shoot in Lord Crumonde's library. As you no doubt know, it is one of seven copies of the painting by Allen Julian in the Gulbenkian collection. The original was personally given to me by Sir Henry Deterding in 1928. I would very much for you to have the original. You, as a connoisseur of such art, will appreciate its unusual provenance. I have also taken the liberty, if you have no objection, of arranging for an art consultant from Christie's, Miss C. Winchester, to deliver it to your home, and provide any assistance you need in mounting it."

"C. Winchester would be that girl with the glancing eyes at the shoot at Loch Eddy, the girl who saw too much." Raven thought. He had tried all that weekend to hide the attraction she had aroused. He did not ever like losing control of that part of his brain, the sensorium, that substitutes passion for reason. But there had been a moment of weakness, when peeking in the library to see the painting, she had caught him off guard. Had sly Nubar seen that weakness as an opening?

The Daimler passed White's, the only club he ever lunched at, and turned into St. James place, where he lived, and where Diane would be waiting up for him. But he was still locked in his train of thought. "It is always a mistake underestimating the Gulbenkians. They have their own agenda in Iran. Were they gifting him more than a painting. Were they sending him another force majeure." It was not an offer he could turn down.

BOOK ONE
NOVEMBER, 1952



Dr. Foxx, Professor Tracy is waiting for you in the library. Please follow me." The white-haired porter whispered just loud enough for Foxx to hear him. The Brook was a club that prided itself on its exclusive quiet. Its heavy stone walls and shrouded windows were meant to keep out all the street noise of midtown Manhattan.

Foxx walked a few paces behind the porter up a carpeted staircase, then down a mahogany-paneled corridor. On the walls were oil portraits of the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Wideners, Roosevelts, and other founding members of the Brook. Foxx felt slightly intimidated by the gauntlet of domineering faces. The library, with its floor-to-ceiling rows of dusty books, was a welcome relief.

Bronson Tracy was standing on a small fenced-in platform on top of a ladder, absorbed in his search for a missing volume. He turned around abruptly as he sensed a visitor, and gestured with a hand motion that he would be right down.

Foxx noticed that even the rungs of the library ladder were padded with carpeting as Tracy climbed down it with long strides. From his craggy face, he guessed that Tracy was in his mid-fifties. Though he was quite tall, Tracy did not seem conscious of his height.

"Sorry to drag you here, Foxx," Tracy said in a cultivated accent that distinguished him as a Boston Brahmin. "Just wanted to finish some work before dinner, and with the traffic, I didn't know what time you'd get here."

"It's quite an impressive library." Foxx found himself whispering, though there was no one else in the room. "Do you spend much time here?"

"The Brook is my working habitat in New York. So quiet you can hear a pin drop. You should think of joining, Foxx.

"I don't get to New York that often," Foxx demurred. He was not a joiner, and anyway he doubted that he would be accepted. He had only met Tracy a month before, at the colloquium on "Political Succession in the Age of Bureaucracy" at Pierson College at Yale. Tracy was the only political scientist there that seemed to understand the distinction he tried to make between the traditional army putsch and the modern coup d'etat. Foxx was quite surprised by his quick grasp of a problem that he himself had been laboring over for months. Despite his trendy appearance and impeccable credentials as a traditional political scientist, Tracy seemed to appreciate his ideas on the mechanics of power better than most of the postwar generation political scientists. He must have impressed Tracy as well, since Tracy had invited him to attend his present seminar on "Praetorian Politics in the Nuclear Age," which was being sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Understand you spent some time in Venezuela working for Rockefeller," Tracy murmured as he lit his pipe.

"In a manner of speaking. I was sent to Venezuela at the beginning of the war to do political analysis for the Office of Information. Rockefeller was Coordinator of Information, but I didn't have much time to see him..."

"Spent the whole war there?" Tracy was adept at eliciting information.

"From 1942 through 1947."

"My understanding is that Rockefeller was doing a bit of psych-ops warfare---or whatever they call it."

"He called it that. All I was involved in was writing news releases. We fed them to the wire services. They reported them as news."

"Aren't you being a bit modest, Foxx? I understand you received a personal commendation from Rockefeller?"

"The stories were, of course, designed to provoke a reaction against the Nazis in South America..." Foxx hesitated, wondering how Tracy knew so much about his wartime service record. He and his small staff in Caracas not only had written more than 90 percent of the "hard" news in South America, they had carefully designed it to manipulate the actions of every country on that continent. The ease with which this sort of disinformation could be put onto the news wires had given him many of his ideas on the vulnerability of government to coups.

"Yes, of course," Tracy said, cutting short his inquiry. "Let's have something to eat."

The oval dining room, like the club itself, was small and intimate. Rather than individual tables, there was a common table. Tracy quietly introduced Foxx to the other members at the table. Their names all sounded like endowed buildings at Harvard.

A waiter wheeled over a cart with a side of roast beef on it. Tracy nodded, and the waiter cut off an end piece for him. "Do you like your beef rare, or well done, Foxx?" Tracy asked.

Foxx pointed to the rare side of the beef. The waiter smiled indulgently, as though Foxx had made an extraordinary request, and cut him a blood-red piece. He garnished it with a small baked potato. Decanters of red wine were already on the table. Foxx noticed that although the members of the Brook sat around the same table, they made a point of not talking to, or even looking at, each other. They might as well be seated at separate tables, he thought.

"I've been involved in something that I thought might be of interest to you," Tracy began.

"At Yale?" Foxx asked. He had heard that Tracy was being considered as the next master of Pierson College there.

"No, in Washington. I've taken a temporary leave from Yale to work out a problem for the State Department."

"What kind of problem?"

"The State Department is concerned that its diplomats are not prepared for the sort of crisis that might occur these days. We're attempting to design a few simulated crises. It's a sort of board game for diplomats."

"Board game?" Foxx had always been intrigued by games. He had basing a seminar on one. The idea of the State Department using them to simulate the real world piqued his interest.

"Well, it's not exactly like Monopoly," Tracy explained, slowly pouring a glass of wine for Foxx. "It's called the Game of Nations. The diplomats who play the game are each assigned some special role. For instance, they might play a king, an intelligence chief, or what-have-you. They have to respond to a hypothetical crisis that we design for them. It's all adjudicated by a computer."

"Fascinating..." Foxx began.

Tracy interrupted: "Does your teaching contract at Harvard allow you to consult?"

"Yes, as long as it's only part-time."

"Then why not try your hand at designing a scenario for us. The pay is probably better than at Harvard." He added precisely, "One hundred dollars a day and travel expenses to Washington."

"What kind of crisis would you want?"

Tracy nodded good-bye to one of the men who was sitting across the table from him. Then he turned back to Foxx. "You teach a course on coup d'etat, don't you?"

"It's really on political pathology, but it includes analyzing coups." Foxx looked around. The dining room was empty, except for himself and Tracy.

"What about designing a coup? I would, of course, give you the basic parameters. You could work it out in, say, thirty-six moves. The game is based on thirty-six moves."

Tracy looked at his watch with some concern. "I had no idea of the time. I hope you don't mind if I rush off."

After leaving the Brook, Foxx walked from Fifty-fourth Street up Madison Avenue to Eighty sixth, peering into the galleries along the way. He looked at paintings, sculptures, furnishings, carpets, and advertisements, as well as at other window shoppers. It was a visual feast for him.

He stayed that night at the Croyden Hotel. In the morning he had to wait fifteen minutes for the receipt for his breakfast, which he needed in order to get reimbursed by the Council on Foreign Relations. Then he rushed to get to La Guardia Airport to catch his plane.

During the bumpy flight back to Cambridge, Foxx reflected on Tracy's offer. Designing scenarios for some State Department game sounded like a fairly juvenile idea. But the consulting fee Tracy had offered him would help him finance the research he needed for his book. And, with the Arabella situation, he might need alternative employment. In any case, organizing these hypothetical scenarios would also give him a chance to work out some of the theories he had been developing on coup d'etat. The most important consideration was, however, the connection. Tracy could be very helpful in finding him a job at Yale if Harvard failed to promote him.

He had decided to accept the offer even before his plane landed on the runway at Logan Airport.

When he got back to his office, he found two notes slipped under his door. Both were from wayward students. The first, Brixton Steer, wrote:

"Dear Professor Foxx, I have a problem. Would it be possible to write a paper for you in lieu of taking the Midterm exam on December 16? My father wants me to be with the family in Teheran for Xmas (which would mean leaving Cambridge December 15). If this would be permissible, I would like to write a paper on the 'Politics of Usurpation in the Middle East,' and do research on it over the Xmas recess."

Foxx could see that young Steer already knew how to get a leverage out of being the Ambassador to Iran's son. "Excused from exam. Look forward to reading your paper," Foxx scribbled on the bottom of the note.

The second note was from Arabella. "You missed our tutorial. When can I have a make-up assignment, I'm will do whatever you suggest (Pathological Politics, if that is what you want to call it). Can't wait. Can't Wait. Can't Wait. Arabella."

Three "cant waits!" He realized how much trouble he was in now.

BOOK ONE
NOVEMBER, 1952



Raven didn't mind the chilly autumn wind as he walked back across St. James park from White's. He did mind the chaos awaiting him at home. He sought order, not confusion, in his life. First, he heard pounding and shouting coming from his upstairs sitting room. Then saw a canvas bag of tools on the mahogany staircase. He then sensed Lane, his aged butler, was apoplectic. And knew his wife was gone. "Lady Diana left an hour ago for the country...." Lane spluttered, always calling Raven's wife, the daughter of Lord Tuttman, by her ancestral title. He added, "The people from Christie's are upstairs. Lady Diana told them to install the painting over the desk."

The hammering suddenly stopped. A workman came down the stairs, picked up his loose tool kit, and then was ushered out the door by Lane.

Chris stood in her stocking feet on the partner's desk in the Edwardian sitting room, engrossed in adjusting the painting, She wore a thin blue dress lashed to her taut frame with a sash, with a fashionable slit up its side, exposing the whiteness of her leg. The afternoon light hit her like a spotlight. She did not hear Raven enter.

She spun around. "Sorry I didn't hear you come in, Tony. What do you think? Isn't it magnificent? Allen Julian, in my opinion, is England's finest painter of castle art, and this may be his best painting. The detail is incredible."

Raven, coming closer, could see that the colors in the original were much richer than in the copy in Lord Crude's library. The shooters were far much more life-like, Achnacarry castle more realistic, the dark sky more ominous. He could see that the original contained something not in the copy: a third shooter. He also knew why the third shooter had been deliberately left out from the copies.

"It's looks perfect there, Miss..." He resisted, as he had from the moment he met her, calling her by name. He feared she already had too much power over him.

"Castle art of course is not everyone's cup of tea," she said, nimbly climbing down from the desk. "But this painting has a special meaning to you, doesn't it."

He looked up sharply. How much did Nubar tell her, he wondered, "Dogs. Grouse. Hunters. Moors. Castle? What's special about that, Miss --- ?"

"Chris," she reminded. "Your wife just told me she that she was actually there, at this very shoot, at Achnacarry. "

"1928. Lady Diana was just a child then, too young to really remember it."

"Quite the contrary. She vividly remembered the castle had been scaled off from the public by round-the-clock guards for a fortnight. Each day limousines arrived with new guests. And each afternoon, while she and the other children played, and the women took naps, the men locked themselves away the library. She even knew the shooters. She said they were all oil men, like her father."

"We never really discussed the castle parties she attended as a child," Raven said, trying to cut off any further discussion.

"Look, there is an additional shooter in this painting." Chris' face grew animated, her cheeks puffing up like a squirrel. She pointed to a squarely built man with a grouse in his game bag, smoking a pipe. "There were only two shooters in the one in the Lord Crude's library. None with a pipe."

Raven said " I think you are mixing it up..."

"Absolutely, not. "Crude has two shooters, you have three. "That Sir Henry Deterding, isn't it,"

"Yes," Raven acknowledged. " Deterding owned Achnacarry Castle, where the shoot took place."

"And lots of oil, I bet" "He was chairman of Royal Dutch Shell. He was rich enough to afford the shoot."

"And this shooter with the dead bird. He also look suspiciously familiar," she pointed to the tall aristocratic-looking man.

"That is Lord Cadman. As I recall, he was Chairman of Anglo-Iranian Oil. The third man, for your information, is Walter Teagle, the head of he head of Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust. They were all sportsmen who had come to Scotland to shoot grouse. They shot 200 birds in a weekend, as I understand it. That was it." Raven said, closing the discussion by slicing his hand through the air.

"It wasn't just sport, was it? Something else happened there, didn't it. Something secret. Was the painting sent to you as a reminder? Is that's why there are truncated copies of this painting?" She smiled tauntingly.

"You have an over-active imagination, young lady. Its getting late..."

"Is it getting late?" Chris had a way of turning a statement into a question when pressed. "That's what you were saying to Lord Crude about Iran," she continued in her chirpy, teasing voice. "I love secrets."

"Let me tell you are a story with a moral, young lady. There once was wise man that saved a king from ruin. The King told him, as a reward, he could have anything he possessed. The wise man replied, give me anything but your secrets. The moral?"

"It may be dangerous to know a King's secret." Chris answered. "How exciting. Would it be that dangerous for me to know your secret."

"My car can take you home, Miss. I appreciate..."

She didn't want to go. He intrigued her, even attracted her. "Nubar told me you were a man of mystery?"

Raven brought his eyes were level with hers. You're the dangerous one, he thought. You look into men's faces with your bright eyes, not giving a damn how you play on their weakness. He suddenly wanted her in his power. "OK, young lady your secrets for mine? Fair exchange? I will tell you whatever secret you want to know--two, if you like if you'll do likewise. If you cannot answer both truthfully, you'll have to pay a consequence. "

"I'll go first," she accepted his challenge.. "What was really going on at Achnacarry, other than birds being shot."

"Negotiations," he decided to be brutally honest. "The men at the shoot represented seven companies that owned the world's pool of crude. But it was inevitable new pools of oil would be found. They had two choices: they could compete for the new oil or they could make an arrangement to share it. They choose an arrangement." He didn't mind telling her, it was all history now. "My turn. What question would you not answer truthfully under any circumstances?

"That's easy," Chris laughed, "I would never tell a man I was sexually attracted to him. What does that old arrangement have to do with that man, Moose-a-day, is that how you pronounce it."

"Without the oil in Iran, the arrangement cannot work. Iran is now led by a madman named Mossedeq. He runs around in back pajamas, weeping. Hopefully, through an election, he will soon be replaced by a saner man.," Raven hoped he had a benevolent spin on what she had evidently over heard in the library.

"My turn," he continued, "Are you sexually attracted to me?" "No, I mean..." she hesitated, realizing that she had already logically excluded a truthful answer. "You know I can't answer that."

"Consequence, Chris," it was the first time he had called her by name.

"What do I have to do?" she asked, petting the finely-carved ebony camel, across from the desk.

Raven left and returned with a bottle of Kristal champagne on ice and two large crystal glasses. He filled one glass and handed it to Chris. "Is this my consequence?" Chris asked, then drained it. She loved really bubbly, cold champagne.

"Not quite," he answered, refilling her glass.

Chris drank again. She felt strangely light-headed and uninhibited. The room seemed to wobble. She put her glass down. Raven, touching her incredibly lightly under her elbow, guiding her towards the Tang dynasty opium bed. It was covered with cushions.

She lay back on the silky cushions, looking at the three shooters in their plus-four tweeds, their mangy dogs, their unhappy-looking beaters, murky Achnacarry castle while Raven's grip on her was growing firmer. She could feel his finger undoing her sash, her buttons and all the other attachments that held her clothes to her body. She made little effort at resisting, things had gone too far. She had no exit strategy.

"The Consequence," he said, kissing her.

BOOK ONE
DECEMBER, 1952



Foxx was just getting ready to start the Game of Nations, the role-playing exercise he had organized for the State Department, when a large bald man wearing earphones and carrying a four-foot pole entered. "McNab, Security Officer," he identified himself with authority.

He proceeded to crawl around the floor like an old-time prospector searching for water. He poked the pole under various objects in the room, disappeared under the huge round table in the center of the room, resurfaced, and made a reconnaissance around the edges of the room waving the pole in front of him. Foxx watched in amazement, not sure what was going on.

McNab said that he had to "sweep all the damn operations rooms in foggy bottom because one lousy limpet was found in the Secretary of State's dining room." A "limpet" was, he further explained, a miniature radio transmitter used by foreign intelligence agents. "Someone stuck it under the table with chewing gum."

Foxx wondered what a foreign agent eavesdropping might overhear: fictitious scenarios for a coup d'etat? Economic destabilization programs for non-existent countries, assassination plots against imaginary leaders? Would he assume that places with such odd names as Zemblia, Transvania, and North Arcania were code names for existing countries? He couldn't help but be amused by the international muddle that might result from such spying. How would the incoming President, General Eisenhower explain it? Would a foreign country believe that what was overheard was nothing more than hypothetical scenarios designed by an ambitious Harvard assistant professor for the benefit of under-employed diplomats?

McNab announced, by making a zero between his thumb and forefinger, that there were no bugs, and left with his equipment. "The gaming center is secure."

Foxx could now commence the second round. When Bronson Tracy had first told him about the Gaming Center, he pictured it as something housing a collection of board games, like chess, checkers and monopoly. But he had then found on his Thanksgiving weekend trip to Washington that the it was far more sophisticated. Everyone sat around a round table, twelve feet in diameter, in a windowless room. Inlaid into it were sixteen triangles, one for each player. Each triangle contained different colored pegs representing the "resources" allocated to that particular political role. Each player had both a phone he could whisper into to make secret deals with other players, and a console into which he could enter his move. At the heart of the system was a UNIVAC computer that determined the outcome of each move and automatically reallocate the "resources." Each player could see on his console what he had won or lost.

They played one game Thanksgiving weekend, this would be their second go at it. The had only got to move eight on Thanksgiving Sunday. Then, Tracy halted it abruptly.

"Lets hope we get further this round," Tracy said. "A sixteen step scenario will be used today to simulate an attempted coup in a fictitious nation. It will be called Ajax." He turned to Foxx, "OK, lets have the skinny on it."

"There are special rules in the Ajax version," Foxx began, as the players leafed through briefing books. "First of all, the port of Achillea is highly flammable. There can be no military action there."

"So what if it blows up?" Wilmot Abraham asked. An overweight political scientist from the University of Michigan, he liked to ask queries that made him sound tough.

"If you look at page one-thirteen of your briefing-book, Dr. Abraham, you will see that Ajax is the world's leading exporter of chromium, which is vital to the production of steel here and in Europe... Achillea is the only deep-water port. If it is destroyed, there will be no means of shipping the chromium. Ajax will go bankrupt and everyone loses," Foxx explained.

"The second special rule is that any intervention by the chromium cartel on behalf of the King of Ajax must go undetected. If it is traceable back to the cartel, the King loses automatically," Foxx continued explaining the rules. The participants nodded in agreement.

The lights in the room dimmed. On a large screen overlooking the table, the first move flashed in computer type:

#1. CHROMIUM CARTEL ANNOUNCES SUSPENSION OF ALL FURTHER PAYMENTS TO THE GOVERNMENT OF ZEMBLIA.

A syncopated clock clicked out the time remaining to complete the move. The players scrambled for their phones and began their mock diplomacy. Wilmot Abraham, the KING instantly called Myles Smithline, a bright-faced State Department employee, who was, according to the name plate in front of him, CHIEF OF STATE SECURITY, ZEMBLIA. After five minutes had elapsed, a red light blinked, requiring all players to type their "action plan" into the computer. This was Foxx's favorite part: the whirling of lights and the automatic changing of positions on what nor looked a giant Chinese Checkers board.

The next four moves went by without a hitch. Then came the sixth move, which Foxx was particularly proud of designing.

KING OF ZEMBLIA DISMISSES PRIME MINISTER

At this point, he saw a group of men had entered the room from the rear door. One of them had a jaw that jutted out like the prow of ship. He reminded him of someone he had seen recently. Was it in the Brook Club?

Tracy said "We have some observers tonight."

When the game continued the jutting jaw took a position directly behind Foxx's neck. He could feel the man's presence for the next four moves. "Good show, Foxxy," the man with the jutting jaw whispered the in his ear.

The twelfth move caused a stir:

KING OF ZEMBLIA FORCED OUT

The man now strode over to Tracy. Foxx saw him, teeth glistening, count off four points on his fingers. He then wheeled around and left through the rear door. The other observers followed.

Tracy abruptly announced, "that's enough for this round. See you all next week."

Foxx wondered why the game was terminated . They were still four moves to go. He half-rose to leave along and then caught Tracy's eye. Tracy motioned him to stay.

"Jake, I'll just be a moment..." Tracy seemed flustered, picking up his yellow pad and ducking out the back door.

The others straggled out the front door, looking more exhausted than exhilarated. It was past midnight.

Foxx was alone in the Gaming Center. He slumped back in his seat looking at the tangle of pieces on the board. His mind was also occupied with a tangled mess, but it was not this silly Game of Nations. He was obsessing about a dilemma that had been tormenting him since Thanksgiving. He felt impaled on the horns of two sisters.

He had invited Arabella over for a late-night turkey tryst in his apartment. He had lit the scented candles in both the dining room and bedroom, decanted a bottle of Bordeaux, set the table for two and re-heated the wild turkey from Lochaber's restaurant. As an private joke, he now greatly regretted, he had hung on his bedroom door his office "Tutorial In Progress" card. The two hands on its "Will Return" clock face were suggestively merging into one.

Arabella had arrived promptly at 9PM but not, as he expected, alone.

"Jake meet Tina," Arabella had said.

Arabella had mentioned in passing that her older sister would be coming to Cambridge to curate some show at the Fogg Museum, but she had said nothing to prepare him for her stunning beauty. She was three years older than Arabella but looked three years younger. She was also taller. Her black hair flowed down over her white fur coat. Under her fur coat, she wore tight jeans and a skimpy sweater that did not quite meet at her waist. He had found it impossible to take his eye's off her as she hopped about the room pulling off her snowy boots. She wore multicolored socks.

"Look, Bella, Midnight tutorials," she had said, spying the hands on the clock face on the bedroom door.

He could feel his face reddened. Arabella, the eternal picador, twisted the knife in further, chortling,"Candle-lit, no less. Don't you regret Tina not getting an American education?"

After that introduction, they sat down to eat the overcooked turkey. The meal turned out to be very tense. The sisters were as competitive as determined tennis players. When Tina had described her success in assembling in the Fogg pre-Raphilite paintings that had only hung previously in private homes, Arabella compared it to "caging a bunch of animals, never meant to be in proximity to each other in zoos, for the convenience of tourists."

It was a smash to Tina's career. Tina had shrugged, "That explains Bela why you always have avoided Museums."

Turning his head back and forth as they volleyed, he sensed that different they were. Arabella was hard, unyielding and logical: Tina, soft, acquiescing and intuitive. They all had drank quite a bit. Then, it started. a stocking toe began intermittently tapping his leg, and, inch by inch, it traced a line up his leg. Both sisters were within range: but which one was it? Like Cinderella's Prince, he tried to visualize which girl's foot fit the sensation, and, in his mind, choose the shoeless Tina. The fantasy had ended abruptly. Glimpsing down, he saw that the intruder was Arabella, who had also kicked off her shoes.

So had Tina seen. "Sorry but I am still on London time," she had said, excusing herself from the table, while slipping on her boots and fur coat. Before he could even see her out, she had left his apartment.

Arabella had whispered, "Tina could see you were aroused. The trick is to conceal your passion." She arched her eyebrow, as if he had been responsible for Tina's quick exit. She then unbuttoned her blouse. "Time for my tutorial, Lets see how hard it is to get an "A," she said, reaching for belt, and leading him towards the bedroom.

But he was still thinking of Tina. By the time that they had reached the bed, he pulled Arabella back. "Bela," picking up Tina's name for her, "Tonight is wrong. You know it, I know it."

"Not up to it. Is that the story? Is that why you lit all those stinking candles? Is that why you flirted with Tina all night?" She screamed, "I don't mind rejection, but I can't stand inconsistency. No more tutorials for me, Prof." She threw her coat on over her unbuttoned blouse, opened the door. "One more thing, don't ever try to see my darling sister." She slammed the door closed behind her with rage. That unpleasant confrontation was two weeks ago. He had seen Arabella sitting, legs crossed, in the back of his lecture, but they had not spoke. He had not seen Tina again, though he desperately wanted to.

Tracy barged back through the door. "We need to do another Ajax round. There is a problem in Move 12."

"Did one of your associates object," Foxx asked, "Was it the guy who was breathing down my neck for three moves?"

"Didn't you recognize him, Kim?"

Suddenly, The portrait he had seen at the Brook Club popped into his mind. It was of Teddy Roosevelt. He had the same jutting jaw, square face.

"You'll meet Kim, "Tracy continued. "He's quite a character. Taught history at Harvard, wrote three books. Did you see the story on him in the paper today? He's going to be appointed to John Foster Dulles' personal staff."

Kim Roosevelt, Foxx realized. But why would the grandson of the dead President be watching this game? "Kim loved your Ajax scenario," Tracy but thought it needed another option for Zemblia. Say, a Plan B."

Foxx nodded. His mind was no longer focused on the Game of Nations. It was formulating a plan to solve his two-sister dilemma

Đây là một tiểu thuyết rất hay và sâu sắc thuộc về thể lọai mô tả những âm mưu và hành động đen tối trong chính trị phương Tây. Tôi sẽ viết lời giới thiệu và dịch truyện này trong 1 thời gian rất gần.

BOOK ONE
DECEMBER, 1952



Calouste Gulbenkian leaned slight forward on the Louis Quatorze settee in his suite in the Aviz. His octogenarian face remained as immobile as that on the bronze bust behind him. His bald head glistened in the setting sun that streamed through the hotel window. He had lives in hotel suites most of his life. After the first world war ended, he moved out of his house on Rue de Grenelle in Paris the only house he had ever really lived in, and gifted to the Finance Minister of France who had arranged for him to keep his oil concession in Iraq. For the next two decades he had lived in the Ritz. He moved on to Lisbon when the second world war made Paris inconvenient, and made the Avis his home.

Raven sat across from him. He had come to Lisbon to thank him for gifted painting. He knew that this Armenian billionaire required that appreciation be demonstrated. With him it was not merely a formality, it was a way of life.

Korkik, his hunched servant for as long as anyone could remember, poured two demitasses of thick coffee. Raven knew the ritual. He waited until Gulbenkian sipped his coffee, before broaching his request. When Gulbenkian picked up the cup a second time, the subject was closed.

"I am moved that you came all the way Lisbon to see an old man," Gulbenkian said, with feigned humility. He picked up and sipped his coffee. "Is there any service I can be to you?"

"It is important you know what progress the coordinating committee is making in the Iranian matter. We could use your wisdom, your experience," Raven said.

"You overestimate my experience. What do I know about oil. I've never even seen an oil field, not once. I have an art foundation, a dance foundation, some investments in oil. I wish I could be of help but I am too old. You someone who understands the modern world better than I. There are much more experienced hands on the coordinating committee, like yours"

"No one with experience would ever make the mistake of underestimating your power."

"Power? Fifty years ago, I thought I had power. I thought I could draw a red line on a map and change the world."

Raven knew he was talking about the red line he had drawn Saudi Arabia, the Red Line Agreement which stopped anyone drilling there for two decades, and kept of unwanted crude off the market.

"Then, I saw my hair fall out. Every day, until there was not a hair on my head." Gulbenkian continued. " To get it back, I would have gladly exchanged my oil concession indeed, all the oil in Arabia. I tried. I brought in the greatest hair specialists from every part of the world. I consulted doctors surgeons, nutritionists, faith healers, phrenologists, herbologists, you name it. A shaman from Siberia suggested young girls would revive my hair cells, so I had Madame Claude provide me that kind of therapy for years. Nothing worked." He pointed to his bald head. "Count the hairs on my head, that is how much power I have."

"Mossadeq will destroy everything we built. You must be concerned," Raven said, getting to the point.

"Mossadeq is a fool. And we stand to lose a great deal, but he is in power there, and we are not. That is the sad reality."

"You once told me your golden rule," Raven said. "He who hath the gold..."

"Makes the rules," he completed Raven's sentence. "I'm flattered you remember my old foolishness. Yes, there was a time when gold made the rules. We gave the desert sheiks bags of gold sovereigns, and they gave us deeds to their oil. Has Nubar told you how he delivered a Rolls Royce full of gold sovereigns to a sheik hunting gazelles, and we got the oil field?"

"Nubar loves telling stories," Raven said, recalling he had told only part of the story at the shoot at Loch Eddy.

"That one was true, But those days are now gone. So are the sheiks hunting gazelle with falcons. You know have Mullahs, Russian troops, the Tudah party, an atom bomb, Israel. It is too complex to be settled with the golden rule. Alas, its no longer a matter of gold sovereigns, or even diamond Korans."

Gulbenkian shrugged. His hand began reaching in the direction of his coffee cup. Raven now spoke quickly, "We also have other means. A silent partner."

Gulbenkian hand stopped in mid air. His eyes focused. He had a one word question. "Who?"

"The American. The CIA."

"Ah, but can you trust the Americans. Didn't they, with their romantic ideas about democracy, let Mossadeq get out of hand?"

"Everything is about to change in Washington," Raven explained. "Eisenhower will be President in just five weeks. John Foster Dulles will be Secretary of State and Allan Dulles will be head of the CIA. The Dulles Brothers fully realize the importance of our arrangement."

"Will they get rid of Mossadeq?" "Let's say they will do what we cannot do," Raven measured his words carefully. "As I'm sure you will understand, we don't want them doing everything."

"What further service could you need that the Americans can't provide?"

"A meeting with the Shah. A very discrete one."

"I understand he will be spending his Christmas in St. Moritz this year. Do you ski, Antony?"

"The golden rule may need to be applied." Raven said. He no longer needed to mince words with this wily Armenian.

"I unfortunately cannot help you with that," Gulbenkian now brought his cup towards his lips. "But there is a man who has helped me in the past in similar matters. His name is Ali Darius. I suggest he deserves your respect." He took his second sip.

Raven politely excused himself. Rituals have to be followed. He knew that Gulbenkian would put Darius at his disposal.

The heavily-carpeted lobby of the Aviz reminded him of a mortuary. He went to the phone room and asked the operator to dial Christie's, wondering whether he entice Chris into a ski weekend in St. Moritz. An officious voice told him "I'm very sorry. Christina Winchester is in America curating an exhibition. Is there anyone else who can be of assistance..."

Raven hung up.

BOOK ONE
DECEMBER, 1952



Foxx, after weighing his limited choices, decided on option A: a well-planned accidental meeting at the Fogg Museum opening. He made two seemingly logical assumptions. First, Tina, who he desperately wanted to see, would be at the Fogg. She had, after all, come all the way from London to help curate the show. And second, Arabella, who he did not want to confront, would not be there. She, after all, had made a point of despising museum art.

The opening was in the Fogg's Italian Renaissance courtyard, a venue that he particularly admired. Its sixteenth-century Florentine facade replicated the world in which Machiavelli had devised, The Prince, a book about the Game of Nations before they were nations. It had provided Foxx with many of the ideas for his Ajax Scenario. After checking his duffel coat and book bag, he found a strategic niche in the courtyard from which he could scan the arriving guests as they cued up at the bar for a drink. When he located Tina, he would choreograph the necessary steps to bring about the chance encounter.

The courtyard filled up dozens of people. He could see professors in their tweedy jackets with arm patches, straggly-dressed students and well-suited Brahmins from Boston, but not Tina. There goes assumption one, he thought, looking at his watch. It was 6:30 PM. Disappointed, he walked over to the bar and, crashing the cue, got a drink. Then, he saw his second assumption also was mistaken. Standing diagonally across the courtyard from him, wearing a sexy blue dress, with a slit that ran up to her thigh, was Arabella.

Arabella was pointing to a painting on the wall while talking to the man in a charcoal jacket and khaki pants. He could see that her dress, lashed around her, was much too tight. She seemed to be bursting through the slit. He wondered if she had borrowed it from her thinner sister. He then recognized who she was taking to. It was his obsequious student, Brixton Steers. Wasn't he supposed to be in Iran? He hoped they were not discussing his Pathological Politics.

Arabella and Steers moved towards the next painting. Then, turning towards the bar, she cocked her head suddenly, looked in Foxx's direction, and turned away.

Had she seen him? Foxx didn't wait to find out. Putting his drink down, he ducked out of Machiavelli's court, reflecting on, as he retrieved his coat and books, how even the best laid plans go astray.

He trudged through the snow on Quincy Street. Harvard Yard was almost empty. The caroling bells in Memorial Chapel reminded him most of the students had gone home for Christmas. He cut across the quadrangle, heading towards the Yard entrance to Widener Library. Tracy had told him Kim Roosevelt had written a monograph on diplomacy in the Levant. Foxx wanted to read before he returned to Washington for the third round of the Game of Nations. After making his way up the slippery steps, he found the door was shut. A sign instructed him to use the front entrance. Another reversal. He started back down and saw the white fur coat propelled by jean-clad legs crossing Harvard Yard.

He made an instant mid-course correction. Keeping a safe interval, hee followed the fur coat across Harvard Square, down Brattle Street.

Tina knew exactly where she was going. Casablanca. Cambridge's newest movie house, The Brattle, had just opened with a re-run of the nineteen-forties classic. She stopped to admire the poster showing Humphry Bogart in a trench coat kissing Ingrid Bergman. Then, she bought a ticket.

In hot pursuit, Foxx entered the lobby. He then paused. Better not rush in, he thought. He still wanted her to interpret their meeting in the dark as an accident of fate. He bought a large bag of buttered popcorn and waited ten minutes.

Tina was sitting in the middle of the second row in a near-empty theater. Her long legs were uninhibitedly draped over the row in front of her. Her fur coat occupied another seat. Why not, the theater was practically empty.

Foxx hesitantly shuffle down the aisle, pretending not to notice Tina, as he sat down two seats away. She seemed totally engrossed in the movie. He put the popcorn bag on his lap and tried to focus on the film he had seen a dozen times before.

On the screen, Rick's Cafe filled with an assortment of Moroccans in silk robes. Turks in fezzes. German officers with Swastikas, French Legionnaires. Everyone was plotting with everyone. Off- screen, he felt an intruder in his lap.

Tina had moved next to him and was dipping into his popcorn. He feigned surprise, "Tina? I thought you'd be at the opening."

"What for? I've seen the paintings," she said, scooping out another hand of popcorn. "I don't enjoy intellectualizing about them at openings. That's Bela's department."

"I need to speak to you about Arabella..."

"This in my favorite part. Ssssh." She raised her finger to her lips, first to command his silence, then to lick off the butter from the popcorn.

Back on screen, Bergman was confessing to Bogart, "If you knew what I went through! If you knew how much I loved you, how much I still love you!" Tina, without diverting her eyes from the screen, she reached over and scooped another handful of popcorn.

"Arabella was my best student..." he had carefully rehearsed his explanation in his mind.

"I'll bet," she said, her hand scraping the bottom of the bag for the last kernel of popcorn. Bogart gave Bergman a nineteen-forties style kiss. "Misunderstandings happen," he resumed his rehearsed speech.

She leaned over to his ear. "Will you shut up about Bela," she whispered. "What she wanted from you was an A, which I'm sure you will give her. "

"There also might have been some silly infatuation..."

"Infatuation? Maybe with her beau, Brixton. She's going off to Teheran with him for Christmas. Now can I watch the movie in peace," she said, turning away and leaning on the seat in front.

He shut up, doubly-crushed, watching Bogart walked off into the desert with a French policeman, saying it was the beginning "of a beautiful friendship." He didn't buy that ending. Tina slipped on her fur coat, without even looking at him.

"Bye, Tina," he began to leave. No response. "Small world. Quite a coincidence running into to you in Casablanca." He walked up the aisle alone.

"Small world? Coincidence?" she said, catching up with him and looping her arm though his arm. "You followed me here all the way from Harvard Yard. "You need to take a remedial course in spy-craft. C' mon, I'll take you to the Blue Parrot."

They had their giant cappuccinos in the Blue Parrot, the theater's cafe, which took its name and decor from Casablanca. They both sat in huge white wicker, as a waiter in a fez served them from a copper tray. Life imitating art, as it always does, Foxx concluded.

Foxx described his consulting work in Washington. He told her about the bizarre Gaming Center, the Ajax Scenario he had designed and the computer. "They even have a man search the Gaming Center for hidden microphones as if any would care?"

"I am fascinated by what men try to keep secret but can't," she said, listening with rapt attention.

"That could be a dangerous hobby."

"Don't I know it," she answered.

He could see she was intrigued. He described the machinations over chromium the mythical country called Zemblia in the Middle East. He spoke of his role with a touch of self-deprecating humor, which allowed him to brag without sounding immodest."Can you believe grown men, diplomats, no less, actually play out my mad scenario to get control of Zemblian chromium?"

"Chromium? In the Middle East?" Doesn't sound very likely."

"Its a fictional situation." He explained, as Tracy had explained to him, that hypothetical constructs were used teach crises-management. The idea was to exclude personal biases. The purpose was to prepare for an unforeseen event. He could see that she did not understand hypothetical constructs. He moved his hand on top of her hand. "Its only a game, Tina."

"Game?" she said, squeezing his hand. "Is it only a game? Maybe it's not chrome they are playing for."

"It could be any hypothetical commodity."

"Has it occurred to you, Jake, that they are after a real commodity and a real countr?." Foxx was willing to humor her. He saw the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

"Ah, intrigue," he smiled. "Ok, what do think it's all about?"

"Crude," she answered. "Millions of barrels of crude oil."

"But there is no oil in Zemblia," he said, taken back.

"Its not Zemblia. It's Iran."

BOOK ONE
DECEMBER, 1952

THE SHAH'S RETREAT

Nubar Gulbenkian strode toward the chalet against a cold Alpine wind. He was not accustomed to the altitude of St. Moritz and was already out of breath. Nor was he used to the sub-freezing temperature. His beard felt like a jagged icicle, and he feared his other extremities would soon freeze. He abhorred all extremes: extreme behavior, extreme style and extreme men. What was intolerable to him, was that they lacked finesse. Raven, he thought, was an extreme man.
A skier stopped dead in front of him with a beautifully executed parallel christie. The moment the skier raised his black goggles, Nubar recognized him and bowed his head in courtesy. It was the Shah of Iran.

The Shah looked a good deal older than thirty-two. His hair was gray at the temples, his brow was cut by deep wrinkles, and his eyes seemed sad. About six feet tall, he looked extremely handsome in his raw silk parka.

He stood ramrod straight as he greeted Nubar by his formal name, Nubar Sarkis Gulbenkian, son of Calouste. He also pointed him back toward the path to the chalet, which he strayed from.

Plunging his poles into the snow, the Shah continued his downhill course. Two bodyguards shadowed him as he zigzagged down the slope.

The shah seemed nervous, Nubar thought, as he trudged up the path. But why shouldn't he be? Nubar knew that there had been three recent attempts to assassinate him, and his throne in Iran was becoming increasingly shaky. His dynasty, after all, was only twenty-seven years old. His father had told him the Shah's father, Reza Khan, was, a man of great strength and daring. He had begun his rise to power as an uneducated soldier in a Russian-trained Cossack regiment. When a virtual civil war broke out among the Russian officers of the regiment during the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, he took advantage of the confusion to seize control of the Cossacks. With the only disciplined military force in Iran under his command, he went on in 1921 to engineer a coup d'etat against the reigning Qajar dynasty. As a military dictator, he was not a man to tolerate distractions. He had his enemies in the army hanged by their heels, and whenever he slept in a village he had all the dogs in the area killed lest he be wakened by the barking of one. And, of course, he had himself proclaimed "Shah Reza Pahlaver," taking his new surname from the ancient Persian word for language. He was crowned "King of Kings" on the Peacock Throne, an emerald encrusted trophy that the Persians had stolen from India centuries earlier. It was Iran's only asset at the time except for oil.

Nubar also had heard from his father how Shah Reza had turned his attention to the rich oil fields in the south of Iran. They were then leased to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and provided the oil that floated Britain to victory in the First World War. Anglo-Iranian was paying only a million pounds a year rent for these fields, and the Shah thought he could negotiate a higher price by threatening to nationalize them. The company cut the payments to three hundred thousand pounds, and the Shah, threatened with imminent bankruptcy, gave in and granted the company a new sixty-year lease. That was in 1933. A few years later, the Shah tried to escape from his dependency on the British by inviting the Germans to build a railroad. He loved to ride on trains. The British responded in August of 1941 by dropping paratroopers into the southern provinces of Iran. They had made a secret deal with the Soviet Union, which invaded the northern provinces at the same time, to partition Iran for the duration of the war. That had been the end of Reza Shah. He abdicated in favor of his twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammed, and then went in exile to Africa, where he died three years later. The new Shah had no choice but to reign as a British puppet while the occupation continued. In 1946, when the British and Soviet troops finally left, a group of feudal lords used the Iranian parliament to gain personal power for themselves, and retained the Shah only as a convenient figurehead. Mossadeq, one of the more feudal lords, had now consolidated power to such an extent that it was doubtful that the Shah would remain, even as a token ruler.

Nubar pulled himself up the wooden steps of the chalet, using the rope handrail for support. His handcrafted leather boots were heavy with snow and felt cold and clammy on his feet. He wondered who would be inside in she middle of such a brilliant skiing day, except for Ali Darius, who he come there to meet.

Darius had the proportions of a bear, but an extraordinarily gentle face. He practically lifted Nubar off the steps with his hug.

Inside, Nubar shuffled across the Isfahan hunt carpet to the stone fireplace, shaking the snow out of his hair as he moved. He sat on the fender of the fireplace, which was covered in needlepoint. Leaning the weight of his torso on his right arm, he stiffly extended first one leg, then the other, to a servant who, with a dazzling zigzag motion, unlaced and pulled off his boots. A magnificent tapestry of stylized lions chasing a deer filled the wall opposite him.

Darius brought him some mulled wine and asked, "What happened to the mysterious guest you were bringing for lunch?"

"Raven decided to charter a helicopter. Perhaps the weather held him up." Nubar drew a leather case from a pocket deep inside his gray wool jacket and handed Darius one of his custom-blended cigars. He also put one in his own mouth. A servant promptly lit them both.

"And who exactly is this man?"

"Anthony Raven? His title is director of the Coordinating Committee of the Petroleum Export Association, or whatever its called. But in fact, he does what needs to be done."

"A hatchet man for the cartel." Darius gritted his teeth. The word "cartel" pained him. As one of the Shah's most informed economic advisors, he was well acquainted with the nefarious activities of the oil conspiracy. Yet, he had received a request from Calouste Gulbenkian to help Raven, and he could not prudently turn it down.

"My father greatly appreciates your help," Nubar said.

Darius did not need to be reminded of the golden rule that would benefit him. "There was a time when I assumed that all the things that happened in the Middle East assassinations, revolutions, tribal wars, coups d'etat were unconnected events."

"And now?" Nubar asked. "Now I know that no matter how random events seem, they are pulled into position by a single force, oil..." His voice trailed off, then he raised his hand and pointed outside. "Your friend Raven has just arrived."

Raven burst through the door, beaming and exhilarated, bringing with him a pocket of cold air from outside. Apart from a slight reddening of his ears, he seemed oddly untouched by the storm outside. He transformed himself from a traveler to a guest with great dispatch. Before Nubar had even finished the introductions, Raven had thrust his parka into the outstretched arms of one servant and taken a goblet of wine from another. Quickly, he shed his zippered boots and stepped into a pair of felt slippers, all the while apologizing for arriving late. Raven always made himself instantly at home wherever he was. His air seemed easy, his brown suit still crumpled from long hours of travel, his hair unruly, and his tie-made of alligator skin-skewed slightly to the left. Though usually unaware of his own appearance, he was keenly alert to all that was going on around him.

Extending his hand to Darius, he said warmly, "I've so looked forward to meeting you."

"I've heard a great deal about you, Sir Anthony," Darius answered, leading his guests to a small wood-paneled dining room.

As the three of them sat down, a waiter placed a bowl of pearly caviar on the table and uncorked a bottle of champagne. Darius performed the ritual of preparing caviar sandwiches on black bread for his guests. "I hope you don't mind eating black-market caviar," he said smilingly as he passed a sandwich to Raven. "Unfortunately, we granted the Russians the concession to market Iranian caviar. It's rather sad what has happened to Iran: the British claim our oil, the Russians our caviar." He passed another sandwich to Nubar.

"A temporary situation," Raven said, without looking up from his caviar. Running his tongue over his teeth, he savored the individuality of each tiny egg's oily contents as he crushed them. "The future will be much brighter for Iran."

"I understand that you are interested in our future."

"Let me be perfectly frank with you, Darius." Raven's amber eyes softened with affected sincerity. "I am primarily interested in helping the oil combine I represent, not Iran, but in the case of the Shah, I think we have a coincidence of interest."

Nubar marveled at the speed with which the conversation turned from caviar to politics.

Raven explained. "We all know that Mossadeq's time is limited. According to our calculations, denied oil sales, he does not have the money to last another nine months. He won't survive past August, and someone will have to take his place in Iran. It will either be the local Communists with Soviet backing, or the Shah. We want to make sure it is the Shah."

"But Mossadeq plans to sell the oil in the world market. What will stop him?" Darius asked, confronting Raven." Mossadeq is counting on Mattei."

"Negotiations between Mattei and Mossadeq will not be resumed."

"And the United States. Will they help?"

"With Eisenhower as president, there is no chance that Mossadeq will receive any last-minute aid. "

"If you're right and the Mossadeq government collapses. How can you be sure it will be the Shah and not the Communists who pick up the pieces?"

Nubar nodded. He had been just about to ask the same question.

"There is only one way to be sure." Raven paused for effect. "Before Mossadeq actually collapses The Shah be in control of the sinews of power the army, the police, Savak, the broadcasting center."

"That in itself would require a coup Mossadeq's supporters hold all those positions."

"A coup is precisely what we propose," Raven said, as two waiters waited at the door.

The three men fell silent while the waiters carried a tray of veau en papillotes into the room and placed it in front of Darius. Then they brought fresh glasses for each man. The wine, Nubar noticed, was Batard Montrachet, which went perfectly with the veal. Nubar looked on as Darius carefully unwrapped the veal from the paper parcels. He knew how important food was to oriental transactions. He remembered his father explaining to him that the Sultan in Turkey insisted on serving sweet, syrupy pastries such as baklava, because they would perfectly conceal the taste of any poison, and therefore those who did business with him knew that they were always at his mercy. And now, he mused, the fate of Iran was waiting in abeyance for veal to be unwrapped and served.

When Darius had finished serving the portions of veal, he asked, with a tinge of sarcasm, "How will you manage that? Will British paratroopers land in Teheran or lead a tribal revolt in the desert?"

Raven raised a scraggy eyebrow. He now realized that Darius hated the British. He also assumed he would do what Gulbenkian instructed. "it wont be the British, I assure you. It will be the Americans the CIA. They have the means, very subtle means, to bring about a silent coup. No one in the country will even realize it has taken place."

Darius now understood, the message he was to convey. He excused himself, asking his waiters to serve the dessert, cerises au kirsch, in his absence.

"His Majesty would like you to stop by his villa for tea at two-thirty," he said, when he returned. Nubar turned to Raven, who seemed unsurprised by the invitation.

It took them less than five minutes to walk from the chalet to an immense house across the road. They passed six armed guards policing the compound. Promptly at 2:30, they were ushered into a sitting room of palatial proportions. Almost sixty feet long, it was divided midway by a set of six steps into an upper and a lower level. The eaves, roof, and exposed rafters gave it the feeling of a hunting lodge, which somehow seemed appropriate. The windows were completely shrouded with heavy velvet drapes. The carpets were all from the Teheran museum that the Shah had flown in from Iran, along with his wife, twin sister and forty members of the royal entourage.

On the lower level, about fifty guests in casual after-ski clothes milled about in small clusters while an almost equal number of tuxedoed waiters circulated, pouring tea from ornate samovars and offering pastries from silver dishes. Four huge Cossack guards in their native tunics stood at attention at the top of the stairs, part of the formidable barrier that separated the king from his court.

On the upper level, four people sat conspicuously at a table playing bridge. The Shah peered at his cards through horn-rimmed glases. He had on now his military uniform with its gold braid. He chain smoked gold-tipped cigarettes and drew in his cheeks in moments of deep concentration. The dark woman across from him was his twin sister, Princess Ashraf. Darius guided Raven past the guards towards the table. "After you meet His Highness, back slowly away. Be sure not to turn your back on him," he advised, and looking at the cards on the table, added." He's just in the process of making a grand slam."

The Shah laid down his hand, claiming the rest of the tricks. All congratulated him on the slam. When he looked up, Darius presented Raven.

"Have you recovered yet from your flight?" the Shah asked. The Shah rose, taking Raven to one side of the Cossack Guards. "Calouste Gulbenkian is a serious man," he said in a deep, melodious voice. "I have less trust of British interests." He could never forget that the British invaded his country when he was Crown Prince, sent his father. off under armed guard to die in exile in South Africa, and then humiliated him for five years by making him issue royal decrees protecting the privileges of British subjects in Iran. He would rather be deposed as Shah than accept help from the British.

"There will be no British involved. None, whatsoever," he stressed. He knew he only had only a few minutes before the Shah returned to his bridge game.

"I will take your suggestion under advisement." He then rejoined his bridge game. As he studied the new hand he had been dealt Raven discretely backed away.

The audience with the Shah was over. Darius beckoned him towards the door. "No British," Darius whispered.

"You will have your American," Raven promised.