Grand Master (22 page)

Burdick riffled through the next several
pages, but there was nothing about when she finally met Constable
or what happened between them when she did. If the evidence, or the
lack of evidence, was any indication, she did not make reports. It
occurred to him that perhaps she did not have any contact at all
with those who hired her, that she simply did what she was paid for
and then vanished out of sight. But that, he realized immediately,
would not explain the photographs and the fact that they were in
Atwood’s possession. She could not have been a hired assassin, in
the sense in which that was usually meant: someone who worked for
anyone, someone who would kill anyone for a price. Someone like
that would never allow anyone to know what she looked like, much
less let them have half dozen photographs of her.

She was a hired killer - there was no
question about that - but a hired killer who worked for only one
kind of employer, the kind that had a regular need for the service
she performed. That meant the government, and perhaps other
governments as well; intelligence agencies that shared with each
other not just information but the means by which to eliminate
someone seen as a threat. Whatever laws were on the books against
political assassination, everyone understood that it was sometimes
necessary to choose the lesser of two evils.

Burdick turned the page, and then he turned
another, and each time he did it, turned to the next page in
Atwood’s secret file, he did it with reluctance, worried what he
was going to find, a feeling followed almost immediately by a
strange sense of relief when, instead of a shattering revelation of
the sort Bauman had talked about, it was another fairly pedestrian
report, an account of expenditures, a reckoning of costs. Then he
found it, a chronology of what had happened, a list of everyone
involved, a detailed account of the first, and every subsequent,
meeting where the matter had been discussed, debated and
decided.

He had not finished the first paragraph when
he mouth went dry and his stomach started to churn. For a moment he
thought he was going to be sick. Bauman’s words echoed in his
brain, not just about not wanting to believe it, but what he had
said about Bobby Hart, when he asked if he trusted the Senator
enough to tell him something that was not just unbelievable, but
impossible. Because that was what this was: impossible. It could
not have happened, not here, not in our lifetime; but it had. The
impossible had happened, and with what he had in this file he could
now prove it.

Quentin Burdick had read enough. He pulled
out his cell phone and called Bobby Hart. There was no answer and
all he could do was leave a message that he had to see him right
away. He was not sure what to do next. Then he remembered what he
had been going to do earlier, when he was sitting at the station
and thought Bauman was not going to show up. The Senate was in
session. He could talk to Hart when he finished on the floor. He
left the waitress a sizeable tip and caught a cab.

Clutching the package in his arms, Burdick
found himself watching the passing sights of Washington with new
eyes. All the old, familiar landmarks had taken on a strange and
different meaning, almost as if the country had been taken over by
a foreign power. The buildings, the monuments, the vast open
avenues - none of that had changed, but instead of a tribute to the
nation’s greatness, it now seemed to represent something important
that was in imminent danger of being lost.

Burdick got out in front of the Russell
Senate Office Building and hurried inside. The receptionist told
him that the Senator was not available; David Allen told him the
Senator was in New York.

“She’s new,” explained Allen as he led
Burdick through the narrow passageway to his small back room
office. He removed a pile of documents from the only other chair
and then went round to his desk. “Is that for him?” he asked,
nodding toward the package Burdick held in his lap.

“No; I mean yes…well, sort of. It’s something
I wanted to talk to him about. But you say he’s in New York. I just
came down this morning.”

He looked around the cluttered room, books
and papers everywhere; the plain wooden desk behind which David
Allen somehow functioned, a mountain of what looked like debris,
but which Burdick knew from experience was actually organized in a
scheme that only Allen could understand, a method that allowed him,
and no one else, to find anything he needed. It gave a certain
antic, almost magical quality to the otherwise humdrum exercise of
filing papers, the ability to find a needle in a haystack without
so much as the bother of a search. Despite everything he had been
through that day, despite everything he had learned, Burdick could
not quite suppress a smile.

“When do you expect him back?”

“I thought tonight, maybe tomorrow; but now -
he just called a few minutes ago - I don’t really know.”

“Can you find out? I have to see him; it’s
very important.”

Allen had known Burdick a long time, not
well, it is true, but in the way someone who worked on the Hill,
someone who dealt with the press on a daily basis, would know a
reporter. He knew him well enough, or at least he thought he did,
to detect a nervous anxiety he had not seen before. Quentin Burdick
was smart, insightful, with a judgment about people and events that
went as deep as anyone and deeper than most. He had covered
politics and government since the year before Richard Nixon was
elected and he could still rattle off the names of those who had
served in the cabinet of Lyndon Johnson as easily as he could give
you the name of the present Secretary of State. Burdick had seen
everything, from Watergate to war, enough to know that most of what
the current crop of politicians thought new and innovative was
little more than a pale imitation of things that had been tried
before. Nothing surprised him; nothing made him lose the calm,
unflappable demeanor that Allen had often marveled at and sometimes
envied; nothing, that is, until now.

“What is it?” asked Allen. “You look like
you’re ready to come apart.”

Pressing his lips, Burdick spread his long
tapered fingers and began to tap them together. Then he locked his
fingers and tapped his thumbs, and then, shaking his head, he threw
up his hands in frustration. With a quick glance, and a brief,
apologetic smile, he let Allen know that it was not something he
could talk about.

“Not yet, anyway; there are some things I
still need to do.”

“Like talk to Bobby?”

“Yes, as soon as possible. He knows what it’s
about.” Burdick looked away, struck by how incongruous that now
sounded. “No, he doesn’t know what it’s about; he’ll think he does,
but he doesn’t.”

He realized that it made no sense, that Allen
could not possibly know what he meant. He felt a strange giddiness,
a compulsion to laugh out loud; what he might have felt listening
to an argument about who was going to win the World Series, or the
next election, after just learning that the world was going to end
the day tomorrow. He did not laugh - he had not lost quite that
much control - but a stupid grin hung for what seemed forever on
the ruined simplicity of his mouth.

“No, he doesn’t know what it’s about,” he
said, pulling himself together. “If you talk to him, tell him it’s
about what we talked about before: The Four Sisters; only that
there’s more, a great deal more, to it than what I had thought
then.”

Allen knew that, whatever it was, it was
serious. He picked up the telephone and called Hart’s private
number.

“He has it turned off. He’ll call me back as
soon as he is finished whatever he is doing. I’ll ask him to call
you right away.”

Burdick thanked him and started to leave, but
Allen did not want him to go.

“Let’s talk a little - not about what you’re
working on, what you want to talk to Bobby about - about what’s
going on this week.”

Burdick sank back in this chair, glad for the
chance to think about something else, to have a reprieve, as it
were, from what had been weighing so heavily on his mind.

“There are a lot of rumors,” continued Allen,
as he put his feet up on the corner of his cluttered desk.

His shirtsleeves were rolled up almost to the
elbow and the striped tie he wore almost every day was pulled down
from an open collar. The lamp light glistened on his round, balding
head. As he started to talk, his eyes took on the manic quality of
the player who loves the game, the political insider who can never
stop talking about things that have not happened and might never
come about, a future formed by speculation that changes with the
hour. Who was in, who was out; who was up, who was down; and all of
it conditioned by the certain knowledge, which made a principle of
uncertainty, that if the future was like the past, nothing would
turn out even close to the way everyone was convinced it would.
Where else but politics could you gain a reputation for wisdom by
talking about things that did not yet exist?

“Rumors that Russell is going to try to get
the nomination; rumors that he is going to step aside; rumors that
Madelaine Constable is going to run and no one, least of all Irwin
Russell, can beat her; rumors that even if she doesn’t run there
are others he couldn’t beat either.”

He started to list them, the other potential
candidates to succeed Irwin Russell in the office to which no one
had ever seriously thought him qualified. Burdick stopped him.

“Have you talked to anyone in the White
House? What are they saying? Do they think Russell is going to
run?”

Burdick’s expression had changed. In place of
the nervous anxiety, the palpable sense as of something gone
terribly wrong, there was now an intense interest, a single-minded
concentration on the issue at hand. Noticing the difference, Allen
wondered at the cause.

“I’ve had a few conversations,” he replied,
guardedly. “But those were all with Constable’s people. Whatever
they really think about her, and some of them - This is off the
record, right? - have, to put it charitably, never liked her; but
they’re all part of the Constable machine. They worked in that
first campaign; that’s how they got their jobs in the White House;
everything they have, everything they want, has always depended on
the Constables staying on top. They have no loyalty to Irwin
Russell. Hell, most of them thought it was a mistake to put him on
the ticket. They thought -”

“Why was he put on the ticket?” interjected
Burdick, sliding forward until he was close enough to put his
forearm on the desk. “I know the reason that was given: that
Russell brought Ohio into play; I know that the real reason was
that they wanted someone who didn’t have ambition, someone who
wouldn’t challenge Madelaine for the nomination when Constable
finished out his term. But there were others who could have served
the same purpose - Why Russell in particular?”

Allen pulled his legs off the desk and sat
up. Pondering the question, he thought back four years to when it
happened, remembering what he could about the backstairs intrigue
that had had everyone in Washington talking. It had proven, as if
any more proof had been needed, that Robert Constable had a genius
for the game, the way he had replaced one vice-president with
another and made it seem, publicly at least, that he was doing both
of them a favor. Anyone could be ruthless with their enemies, once
they had them in their power; Robert Constable could be ruthless
with his friends.

“He knew Russell better than he knew the
others. Remember, Russell was chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee. He always did what the President wanted him to do. And
that’s what he wanted on the ticket: someone he could trust.”

Burdick nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s always been Russell’s strength: he
knows as much about the federal budget - about money - as anyone in
Washington.”

“Sure. The only person who might have known
as much was Frank Morris, who chaired Ways and Means.”

Burdick crossed one leg over the other and
sat sideways in the chair. A look of puzzlement and doubt spread
slowly across his long, angular face.

“So you take someone who as chairman of the
Finance Committee can do more than anyone else to help you get
through Congress what you need and make him vice-president because
he doesn’t have any ambition for higher office? Why would Constable
have done that? And why did Russell go along with it? It seems to
me that, on the surface anyway, both of them gave up something they
wouldn’t have wanted to lose: the President, automatic support on
the committee; Russell, control of one of the two or three most
important committees in the Senate.”

Allen was surprised. No one in the press had
written more thoughtfully about what made Robert Constable
different from most of the other men who had had become president.
How could he have forgotten this? He felt almost a fool, quoting
back to the man who first wrote it the sentence that had become the
conventional wisdom about the failure of the administration to
measure up to what had seemed its promise.

“Constable was always more concerned with
politics than with legislation.”

Allen paused, expecting some reaction, but
Burdick was too impatient, too caught up in the conversation, to
notice, or, if he noticed, to care, about the origin of words. He
was only interested in what Allen thought.

“He wanted someone on the ticket he knew
would not try to challenge his wife, and in Russell, he got
it.”

“Even granting that,” remarked Burdick, “it
doesn’t explain why Russell did it, gave up all that power and
prestige to hold an office that if you don’t want to be president,
doesn’t mean a thing. The only one who stood to gain from that
arrangement was the President’s wife. Or so she must have
thought.”