Free Forty-Eight X by Barry Pollack Page B

full of pens, and a cheap digital Casio watch. He started out making simple gadgets in his garage and went on to create a Fortune 500 telecommunications conglomerate. He acquired a beautiful wife, celebrity friends, the requisite professional sports team, and with age and a chin implant, he actually became somewhat handsome. When the Democratic senator from his state died in a plane crash with less than one year left in his term, the Republican governor was urged by his party to appoint a Republican politician to the vacant seat. The press and the public pressured him to appoint a Democratic politician to the seat that had been held by a Democrat. To avoid the quandary, he appointed Bruce, a Republican contributor who announced that he had no political ambitions and wouldn’t run for reelection. Career politicians spent millions jockeying for position in the months before the senatorial election. Political power, however, was as addictive as a narcotic. Two weeks before the filing deadline, Leland Bruce announced that he’d sold his company for nearly twenty billion dollars because he felt he could do more for the nation continuing as a U.S. senator than as an entrepreneur. Then he made several personal calls to his most likely opponents from both parties. Matter-of-factly, he told them the dirty truths he’d uncovered about their lives and the untruths he was prepared to tell as well.
    “I’m prepared to spend half my fortune—ten billion dollars—to win this office,” he told them.
    That was more than all the campaigns had cost for every contested seat in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in the previous election. That was the stick he proffered. He also offered a carrot.
    “Support me now,” he said, “and instead of spending my fortune on ruining your good name, I’ll either make you wealthy or put you in power once I’m in office—perhaps a congressional seat, a governorship, an ambassadorship. But I promise you one thing,” he added. “You’ll either have a loyal friend forever, or the worst of enemies.”
    Leland Bruce won his first election for the U.S. Senate virtually unopposed. It was the least expensive campaign run in his state in a decade. Bruce well knew that strange paradox—having obscene amounts of money often means you don’t have to spend it to get what you want. In getting people to capitulate, it was like having a gun pointed at someone’s head. Having the capability of pulling the trigger, most often meant you never had to.
    The senator often met with administrative aides, fellow congressmen, petitioners, and foreign statesmen in his offices at the Capitol or the Hart Senate Office Building. But when he had something important to say, nay secret, he preferred talking on the run. He’d been in political life too long to trust the ears of his sycophants or the walls of his offices. His task now included funding the Lemuria Project. None of his staff and only a few of his peers knew that such a thing existed. It was a secret scientific endeavor that could change the face of war, the balance of power of nations, and do as much to preserve the United States as the preeminent world power as the atom bomb did to make it one. The costs of the project, cheap compared to most military research efforts, were buried in obtuse descriptions among the vast resources of the military’s research and development budget. Only the president, a handful of congressmen, and the military elite knew of its nature. The president would keep it secret even from his most ardent and loyal supporters because he knew many would oppose it on moral grounds. And, should word of the project leak and adverse public opinion come to bear, Bruce imagined the president would be prepared to distance himself and disown it as well. Was it legal? Well, he was a U.S. senator after all. He made the laws. And anyway, he couldn’t think of any senators who had actually spent any time in jail. He knew that he and his