Authors: Ben Bova
"That's not what I came here to talk about," I said.
"You're here," the President said, "because I told you to come here."
I felt a shock inside me. He sounded more like his father than himself. He was blazingly angry, for some reason. Down in the Oval Office, even though he was arguing strongly with Del Bello, he could smile. But now he was radiating anger.
"You were talking about McMurtrie," the President said to me.
"That's right. And four other dead men."
"What about them?"
I'd never seen him this way before. Was he sore about Laura? Maybe it had been her idea to invite me over here and he didn't like it.
"Mr. President . . . do you still want me to keep quiet about the attempts on your life?"
He stood straight and rigid in front of me. Not the usual relaxed slouch, not at all. "As far as I know," he answered stiffly, "there have been no attempts on my life."
I couldn't believe I'd heard him right. "No attempts . . . ?"
"Two imposters have been found, both dead of unknown causes. A helicopter accident has killed the chief of my personal security force and my personal physician. No one has fired a shot at me; no one has made any attempt whatsoever on me."
"And the investigation on those two . . . imposters? Who's taking that over, with McMurtrie dead?"
"Robert Wyatt is handling that. We'll be using selected personnel from the Secret Service and the FBI."
"And you want me to keep it all under wraps?"
"I
expect
you to keep everything quiet, until I'm ready to make a public announcement."
"And when will that be?"
"Maybe never. If we find out who's responsible for those duplicates, and the story's sensitive enough, you might never get to tell the press about it."
About the only thing I could say was, "I see."
"Now I need to know, Meric," he went on, deathly cold now, "if I can count on your cooperation and your help. There's no reason for you to play detective in this. We have enough experts for that. We'll find out who's behind these killings. What I need from you is silence. Or your resignation. Which will it be?"
It was like getting punched between the eyes. I bet I staggered backwards a step or two. "My resignation? You're asking for . . ."
"I'm asking you to decide. I don't want you to resign. But I've got to have absolute loyalty and cooperation. There's no third possibility."
"I see," I said again.
"You can think it over for a day or so. Sleep on it. Let me know Monday."
"No need to," I heard myself say. "I'll stick. I'll get the job done."
"You're sure?"
For the first time in my life, I was knowingly lying about something important. But I had the feeling that if I resigned, a fatal accident might hit me, too. And moreover, if Halliday was starting to purge his staff of everyone except blindly loyal followers, something ugly was going on.
"I'm sure," I said. "As long as you have Wyatt keep me informed on the progress of the investigation. I still have to know what I should avoid stepping on in front of the press."
He nodded once, curtly. "Good. I'll go in and phone Robert right now. I'll tell him that you're still on the team, and he should cooperate with you."
"Fine. Thank you."
"Meet me in the dining room," he said.
My drink arrived as the President left the balcony. Laura excused herself to dress for dinner. I sipped sherry and knew what it felt like to be a politician. I had said one thing and meant something else altogether.
One slip-up, though, and he'll know where you stand,
I thought.
And when that happens, you won't be standing for long.
But by the time we'd gathered together in the President's Dining Room, with its wallpaper depicting wildly inaccurate scenes from the American Revolution, The Man was his old cheerful, relaxed self again. He even joked about how grim-faced I looked.
It wasn't until the dinner was over and I was sitting in the dark rear seat of a White House limousine on my way back to my apartment that I realized the entire truth of it.
He's in on it. Whatever's going on, the President is not one of the intended victims of the plot; he's the chief plotter!
CHAPTER TEN
I never did go out to the country. I stayed holed up in my apartment, thinking, worrying, wondering what to do. I couldn't sleep Saturday night after that dinner with The Man and Laura. I paced my three rooms all Sunday morning, then started cleaning the place, desperate for something to occupy my time and fidgety hands. I wondered briefly if any of the neighbors would complain about the vacuum running so early in the day, or cause a fuss with the cleaning service and its union. But everyone else in the building must have either been out at church or sleeping soundly; the phone didn't buzz once.
By midafternoon I was trying to force myself to watch a baseball game on television. Even in three dimensions it bored hell out of me. I couldn't concentrate on it. My mind kept circling back to the same thoughts, the same fears, the same conclusions.
If he's in on it, then Laura must be, too.
I wanted to believe otherwise, but I knew that was a stupid straw to clutch at.
She's part of it.
Part of what? What in hell is the President trying to do with men made to look exactly like him? Why was McMurtrie murdered? Was there a power struggle going on? A coup?
Have they—whoever they are—already slipped their man into the White House? No. That much I was certain of. They could make somebody look exactly like the President, but not behave so minutely similar to him. Despite that little show of real rage on the back porch Saturday evening, The Man was still James J. Halliday, not a duplicate. Of that I was certain.
But why is he behaving this way?
Why so secretive about it? All right, keep it out of the press. That stands to reason. But most of the White House staff didn't know about this. Certainly the Cabinet didn't. Nor the Vice-President. I wondered if even the FBI had been told about it. There would've been rumors and rumbles all over town if more than eleven people were in on the investigation. Even after McMurtrie and Klienerman were killed, the only chatter was the "too bad, they were good men" kind of talk that follows every accidental death.
Who's trying to get rid of the President? And why is The Man keeping the battle so tightly under wraps?
My apartment was spotless and even the laundry was done by the time the answer hit me. I was standing in the middle of the living room, looking for something else to do, trying to keep myself occupied. The sun was low in the west, sending red-gold streams of light through my windows. The TV set was blathering mindlessly: some game show. And the answer hit me.
The General.
The man who had raised his son to be President, but got a President whom he didn't agree with. The man who grew more paranoid and megalomaniacal each day. The closer he came to death, the more wild-eyed he got about "setting the country straight." And if his son couldn't do the job the way the General wanted it done, then the General would make a new son and put
him
in the White House.
It sounded crazy. But it fit. That's why the President wouldn't come out with all guns firing against his shadowy opponent. That's why McMurtrie was killed just after talking to the General. And Dr. Klienerman—he had probably recognized the symptoms right off.
The dramatic thing to have done would have been to phone the White House immediately and pledge my support to The Man wholeheartedly. Instead, I simply took a frozen dinner out of the refrigerator and popped it into the microwave cooker. There were three things wrong with my terrific piece of deduction.
First, if the President had wanted my help in fighting his father he would have asked for it.
Second, it's always stupid to get involved in a family scrap. In this case, it could be fatally stupid. The President wasn't a killer, I was certain. But there were those around him whose entire careers were based on killing.
And Wyatt—His Holiness: where did he stand? Which side was he on? Both? Neither? Wyatt could order a killing; I knew it in my bones. Under the proper circumstances he could commit murder himself.
Third, and most important, was the nagging doubt in my mind about the whole idea. If it was the General, why wouldn't the President simply drop a battalion of troops into Aspen and cart the old man off to a well-guarded rest home? Why all the pussyfooting? Why let the plot go on, and let good men like McMurtrie die? There was something more involved. Something I couldn't see. As yet.
I thought about calling Vickie to talk it over with her. But I decided against it. No sense getting her more involved than she was, either with the White House power struggle or with me, personally.
Never confuse a hard-on with love,
I warned myself. It was a motto that had saved me from many a pitfall. Ever since Laura.
So I ate my aluminum-wrapped dinner alone, drank the better part of a liter of Argentinian red, and trundled off to sleep on crisp clean sheets. Slept damned well, too, for a change.
Monday morning I got to the office a little earlier than usual. The lobby of the Aztec Temple was still mostly empty; the big rush crowd was a half-hour behind me. I took my usual elevator. Just as the doors started to close, another man stepped in, slipping sideways to avoid the rubber-edged doors.
"Close call," I said to him.
He nodded and mumbled something unintelligible.
I watched the numbers flicking by on the indicator lights. Halfway up to my floor, he said:
"You're Mr. Albano, aren't you? The Presidential press secretary?"
"That's right . . . Have we met?"
He shook his head as he extended his hand. I thought he wanted to shake hands, but instead he put a scrap of paper into my palm. I stared down at it. Penciled on it was: "Hogate's: 5:15 today."
As I looked up at the man again, he was punching the button for a floor below mine. "What in hell is this?" I asked him.
The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.
"Be there," he said as he stepped out.
The doors slid shut before I could say anything else. The elevator went on up to my floor. I got off, thinking to myself,
Now we're getting cloak-and-dagger dramatics.
I wondered if I should eat the note; that would be in style. Instead, I stuffed it into my shirtjac pocket and strode off to my office.
It was a busy morning. My picture-phone briefing with the President was spent going over the Kuwait situation and the upcoming reorganization of the State Department. So the press corps, when I gave them the morning rundown, spent damned near an hour asking about the Neo-Luddites and their impending march on Washington. Lazar's peace mission to Detroit had flopped, and for the moment the Middle East was pushed into the background.
Right after that I hustled over to the Oval Office for a face-to-face planning session about the President's upcoming press conference, which was due that Wednesday evening.
The Man was in his charming mood, relaxed, bantering with Wyatt and Frank Robinson, one of his speech writers. We worked out an opening statement, dealing mainly with the new tax proposals he hoped to get through Congress before the summer recess. Since the package included cuts in personal income taxes, there were damned few Congressmen who'd take a strong stand against it. But since it also included selected increases in some corporate taxes, we knew they'd try to amend it to death. The President wanted to use his Wednesday press conference as a forum to forestall that kind of maneuvering.
"Go straight to the people," The Man told us. "Tell them what you want to do, openly and honestly. They'll recognize what's good for them and lean on their Congresspersons to get the job done. It's the President's task to get the people to think of the nation as a whole, instead of their own individual little interests. That's what we've got to do with every public utterance we make."
I glanced over at Wyatt.
Go straight to the people,
I thought.
But not about everything.
His Holiness looked right through me. As usual.
I was late for my monthly lunch with the Washington press corps. It was at the Van Trayer Hotel, on the site of the old Griffith Stadium in the northeast section of the District. People had called it "Van Trayer's Folly" when he built the hotel and shopping complex in the heart of the burned-out ghetto a dozen years earlier. But with Government help, that whole section of town was reborn and blossomed into an interracial, moderate-to-high-income community within the city. Very nice residential area now. The ghetto slums hadn't disappeared, of course; they'd just moved downtown, to the old shopping and theater areas.
Len Ryan was at the luncheon, a guest of one of the Washington TV stations.
He must be job hunting,
I thought. I got a lot of good-natured twitting about not being able to keep track of my boss's whereabouts, but most of the news people seemed happy enough that I was able to alert them, or their editors, about The Man's last-minute switch in plans before they trekked out to the wilds of Maryland.
I had to introduce the main speaker, a florid-faced publisher from the West Coast who had started his meteoric rise to riches with the first three-dimensional girlie magazine and now was an outspoken champion of "freedom of the press" and the "right of free expression." The Supreme Court was reviewing his case; the state of Utah had tried to lock him up for pornography.
Ryan and I shared my official car back to the office, laughing at the guy's speech all the way. But once we got into my office and he unlimbered his tape recorder and Greta brought in a couple of frosty beers, Ryan got serious.
"I ought to be sore at you," he said, making something of a youthful scowl.
"Why? What'd I do?"
"I went down to Camp David Saturday, on my way down here . . ."
"Oh, crap, I didn't know. We alerted your paper's local office . . ."
Ryan took a long pull of his beer, and I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down.
"Doesn't matter," he said, thumping the half-empty mug on my desk. "The thing that bugs me is that you gave everybody the wrong poop."