Deep Cover (6 page)

It had been almost a year ago but he still remembered the cop's voice; he had clung to it as the only reality of that ghastly day, the voice of the man in uniform who in those fractured moments seemed the only authority, the only possible wisdom. Later the reason had come to him slowly: the event had made him once again the fourteen-year-old boy whose father in Army colonel's uniform had taken him aside in the hospital corridor and told him his mother was dead. The two women in his life, gone under circumstances eerily similar. And at Angie's funeral on a sun-bright Tucson day that had mocked the solemnity of the ritual he had watched the casket descend
into the grave and wept because he had no son to whom he could try to explain it. Her voice had echoed in him, accusation beyond reply:
We can't just keep putting off till it's convenient, darling. You're forty years old, I'm thirty-four, we've been married almost six years. To hell with all these rationalized procrastinations
—
to hell with the damned population explosion. I want to get pregnant.
When the old Chrysler had smashed brakeless through the red light she had been four months pregnant.

Her face had been full of joy those few months and he had humored her desire to redecorate the house flamboyantly; infected with her mood he had laughed at the growing discomfort of the colleagues and wives who came every other Wednesday to the traditional cocktails
chez
Forrester. Angie had been the compleat Washington hostess; she had delighted in the social hysteria of the capital, the Embassy Row receptions and Georgetown dinner parties at which lobbyists wheeled, wives gossiped, and much of the country's political business was done.

There had been no gatherings in the house since the accident. The room remained empty of everything but Angie's bright colors. Washington society had honored the Senator's grief by granting him a mourning moratorium on invitations. But gradually, because he had to and not because he enjoyed it, he had begun to resurface, to accept the cards and calls. The newspaper chat columns had waited a decent interval and then had begun to describe him as “Washington's most devastatingly eligible bachelor.” Hostesses had begun to pair him off with this Desirable Single Girl or that. He remained quite immune because he could by closing his eyes create a vision of Angie that was almost tactile. The way she pinched her lower lip with her teeth and arched her eyebrows into triangles when she was earnest; the casual elegance of her walk; the way she tossed her head, the way her chestnut hair shone in sunlight. She had often been contentious, stubborn; she was more exciting than cuddly, more challenging than comfortable; but it was the brightest light that lingered longest in the retina.

The old bell-shaped Seth Thomas that Angie had bought
at a Maryland country auction rang the hour and Forrester switched on the television and stood in front of the screen, sipping his drink, debating whether to look at ABC or CBS or the NBC version, and then recalled fielding four or five questions from the CBS reporter which made it a good bet that that network's coverage would be heaviest.

The color screen warmed up; the announcer was revealing the crash in Spain of a Concorde with eighty-nine people on board and there was half a minute of film shot from a copter and relayed by satellite.

Television terrified him, he was appalled by the thought that tens of millions of people could be prodded by simultaneous stimuli into laughter and tension and applause and, irrevocably, opinion. But he had invited television coverage of the press conference because if the cameras didn't cover an event it hadn't happened; without television's stamp of recognition it did not exist, and what did not exist could be disregarded.

A correspondent stood against a background of palm trees and campus buildings and did forty seconds on the skull-smashing arrests of fourteen black students who had attempted to close down the administration building. Four commercials extolled forgettable products and Forrester's eyes strayed toward the glass doors and the surly wintry evening beyond. An avuncular newsman recited a report of guerrilla strikes and government counterstrikes in the hills behind Djakarta. The anchorman uttered unemployment and inflation figures and summarized in brief sentences the daily serial catastrophes of a world in unchanging flux, talking through a capped-tooth smile of destruction and disaster. A slow day for news. That was good, he thought dispassionately, a big story would have crowded him off the air.

He saw his face on the screen, squinting against the portable kliegs like a Hollywood horseman; his own appearance always startled him because he never felt subjectively as tall and rangy-rugged as the lean image on the screen. The voice sounded lower than his own, a silver rolling resonance that only just escaped being guttural.

They had edited him down to essentials but the result did not displease him because they had kept the context intact, which indicated that the news-bureau chief was probably on his side, and for openers that was a good sign.

“It's been brought to my attention that the Pentagon and its tame mouthpieces in both houses of Congress intend to sneak their new Phaeton Three program through passage in the form of riders casually attached to unimportant defense bills. I think the people of this country need to be warned of this attempt to stifle legitimate discussions and inquiries.… We're talking about offensive weapons, not defensive systems. We're talking about a terrifying new form of MIRV—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle. We're talking about deploying a system where each single missile can deliver more than sixty miniaturized nuclear warheads on more than sixty separate enemy targets—and each one of these mini-warheads will have twice the destructive power of the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We're talking about a defense establishment that's so arrogant it expects to ram down our throats a quantum jump in the arms race—an apocalyptic program—that they want us to swallow without a murmur of dissent.”

They cut the rest of it and jumped to the Q & A period. There was some narrative commentary by the reporter and they had edited it neatly up to the beginning of the interviewer's question: “Senator, you've never associated yourself with the disarmament people before. Would you say this stand of yours is a new departure?”

“I'm a firm supporter of national defense. The Pentagon wants us to believe that anybody who questions their hardware salesmen must be a coward who wants to appease the other side the way Chamberlain appeased Hitler. The fact is we have the military capacity to destroy the Soviet Union utterly—we can overkill them forty times over—and we simply don't need another new weapons system that could prove more dangerous to us than to them.”

“Senator, you've referred to that ‘danger to ourselves' several times now. What danger do you mean?”

“Two things. First, what kind of weapons will the other side be forced to develop to counteract ours? And second, what about the risk of accidental detonation? The Phaeton system would deploy thousands of armed hydrogen warheads where we now have hundreds. Multiply the stockpile by a hundred and you multiply the risk of unintentional explosion by a thousand. A calculated risk is only justifiable when you've got something to gain from it, and we've got nothing to gain by this. The odds aren't acceptable. I'm saying it's time, right now, to stop giving the bomb merchants free rein.”

“That's pretty strong talk, sir.”

“I feel strongly about it. We hear a lot about boondoggles and pork barrels and Federal giveaways. I say let's not give away another thirty billion dollars for doomsday toys nobody needs.”

The screen cut away and the moderator said deadpan, “There has been no reaction yet from the White House or the Pentagon to Senator Forrester's remarks.” A kitchen cleanser replaced the moderator's face and Forrester switched the set off and smiled broadly when he heard the telephone ring: whoever it was, he wasn't wasting any time, but Forrester let it ring four times before he picked it up.

It was Woody Guest.

The elder Senator's voice was affable and hearty. “Nice little minstrel show you put on there, boy. Marvelous coverage, too. Did you catch yourself on CBS?”

“They gave it more time than I'd expected. How are you, Senator?” Forrester settled hipshot against the corner of the writing desk and sipped his drink.

“A mite ruffled. Candidly, young friend, you caught me off guard.”

Think of that.

“If I hadn't had an off-the-record tip,” Woodrow Guest continued, “from a journalistic acquaintance, I'd have missed your performance altogether.”

“That would have been a shame.”

“It would.”

“Since you evidently want me to ask, what's on your mind, Senator?”

“You didn't play fair with us, son. Why didn't you come to me first?”

“Would it have got me anywhere?”

“Might have. After all, in our exclusive little club we have traditional ways of handling the decision-making process and getting things ironed out. You break with tradition, young friend, you make things uneasy for everybody.”

“In my judgment this is no time for clubhouse rules.”

“No issue's too important for decent courtesy, son. You've made a bad error.” Guest's voice changed. “God damn it, Alan, have you got your brains up your ass or what? What in God's name got into you? Just what did you have in mind?”

“How about saving the Treasury thirty billion dollars, for openers.”

“Balls. You're forgetting where you come from. I won't be able to hold up my head in Phoenix after tonight.”

“I'm sure you've got time enough left to compose your suicide note.”

Guest ignored it. “I had my suspicions but now I'm sure of it. You've joined the liberal losers at last—the ones who find success vulgar. I should have seen it coming.”

“I haven't joined the crazies just yet, Senator.”

“You may as well. Nobody else is going to give you a place to hang your hat after this little display.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even me. Thank God I'm not the one who's up for reelection this year. At least I won't have to boot you off my ticket.”

“I take it that means I'm not to count on your venerable support in the primary.”

“You can put that in the bank, son. And you won't get much support from the Republican machinery anywhere.”

“All right, Senator. We'll just have to wait and see how it all develops, won't we.”

“Nothing to wait for, young friend. We've dealt with mavericks on the Hill before. It's not your private ball park up here—you
came into our ballgame, son, you play by our rules or else you get out of the park.”

“Receipt acknowledged, Senator.”

“You think about it, that's all. I'll get back to you after you've had time to mull it over. Take care now.”

Forrester depressed the cradle button and waited with the receiver in hand until it rang again as he knew it would. He was smiling a little. “Forrester here.”

It was Les Suffield. “I'm still at your office and the phones are jumping off the desks. What do I tell the ink-stained hacks?”

“You have nothing to add to what I said at the press conference. You're not empowered to speculate on questions I didn't cover.”

“Maybe. Christ, you didn't half sling it all into the fan, did you?”

“If you pull punches you don't get much coverage.”

“Too much coverage, Senator. Too much. You take the lid off the honey jar, you're bound to get all the predators swarming around. Just what effect did you expect to get, breathing fire like that?”

“Not as much as I'd like. It will roll off the ones who want to stay indifferent, it'll appear true to those who want to believe it, and it'll be dismissed as a pack of lies by those who've committed themselves to their own pack of lies.”

“All right. So why did you do it?”

“Let's just say it was a fiendish impulse.”

“Christ on a crutch. All right, you're on the nine-o'clock flight in the morning out of National, tickets at the VIP lounge for you to pick up. If I were you I'd leave the phone off the hook, otherwise you won't get any sleep.”

“Senator Guest has already been heard from. I'm unlisted so there won't be too many more.”

“What did he say? As if I can't guess.”

“I've been drummed out of the party and he's about to bust my saber across his knee.”

Suffield laughed unpleasantly and hung up. Forrester put the phone down properly because there was one more call he
had to take tonight and he would know it when it came. The instrument began to ring immediately but he ignored it after the third ring and went into the kitchen feeling aggressive and alive, up on his toes, full of anticipatory adrenalin. He made another drink and sorted through the refrigerator to find the makings of a supper; the phone kept ringing angrily but he shut it out and thought of Angie, half-wishing she could be here for this fight and half-angry with himself for wishing it because he was very close now to putting her all the way behind him, and he knew he had to cover the last sprint toward escape even though it made him feel as guilty as if he were abandoning her. He supposed another woman would make the escape easier but no casual one-night stand would do it and he was not ready for anything deeper than that yet.

He let his free associations ramble and so he was presently thinking about Top Spode because Top was one of those easygoing philandering grasshoppers who never stored up winter food and went through life regarding women the way most men regarded good cigars, as something to be treasured briefly and discarded when they had served their purpose. Actually he was thinking about Top because he was expecting Top's call. He kept listening for it but it didn't come until after he had finished scraping the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. Then he heard it, two rings and a pause, then two rings and another pause, and he headed toward it when it began to ring again.