Authors: Ben Bova
There's a vague air of Groucho Marx about Johnny Harrison. Maybe it's because he's an old movie buff. He always looks as if he knows more than you do, and he's always got a quip ready. He'd put on some weight in the year or so since I'd last seen him, but I knew that if I mentioned it, he'd spill out a string of skinny jokes about me. Besides, sitting next to him was a stranger, a compact young soccer-player type who had the eager puppy dog look of a new reporter all over him.
I slid into the booth. "Hiya, Johnny."
He made a grin. "I was starting to wonder if you'd show up."
Three minutes late. I didn't bother answering that one.
"This here's Len Ryan," Johnny said. "He'll be covering the President's speech tonight from the local angle. Y'know . . . historic Faneuil Hall, where Sam Adams's patriots put on their Indian disguises for the Boston Tea Party, was the scene tonight of another grrreat moment in American democracy . . ."
Ryan clapped his hand to his head. "May my typewriter blow a fuse if I ever write crap like that!"
We all laughed. Then Johnny got just a little formal. "Leonard, me lad, this is Meric Albano, the press secretary to the President of the United States. One of my proteges. We started together on the old
Globe,
and have spent many a lonely dinner hour right in this very booth."
Ryan extended his hand. "An honor, Mr. Albano."
His grip was very muscular. "Meric," I told him.
"Americo," Johnny said. "The son of an overly patriotic would-be poet."
"My father was a civil engineer," I said. "I was born the day he and my mother landed here."
"In Boston?" Ryan asked.
"No. Cleveland. The flight was supposed to land in Boston, but a snowstorm had closed Logan. We got to Boston on a bus, finally."
"Three weeks later," Johnny said. "A fascinating beginning to a fascinating life."
"I've been very fortunate," I kidded.
"And we are honored," Johnny went on, "that you could pull yourself away from your duties to break bread with us."
"And bend elbows," I said.
"Indeed." He took his glass in hand, squinted at the reflections of the overhead bulbs in the red wine, then realized that I didn't have anything to drink. He signaled to Conchetta, who nodded and smiled hello at me.
Dinner was pleasant enough, except when Johnny's bantering got around to Laura.
"She did arrive okay, didn't she?" he asked.
"Yes. They're having dinner at the Harvard Club."
"Laura?" Ryan asked. "You mean the First Lady?"
"Indeed so," Johnny said, twirling a forkful of linguini like an expert. "Laura Benson and Meric were childhood sweethearts . . ."
"Hardly childhood," I said, trying to keep the anger from showing. "She was in Radcliffe and I was going to Boston University."
Johnny shrugged good-naturedly, without losing a single strand of linguini. "At any rate, they went through all the pangs of True Love. Except that somehow she ended up marrying the Governor of Colorado."
"Who is now the President," Ryan finished.
"Exactly. And our dear friend Meric, here . . . stalwart, steady, duty-first Meric, ends up as the President's press secretary. And I am naught but a lowly city editor. Strange world. And to think I taught him everything he knows, too. Do you get to see much of her, Meric?"
My mouth dodged the issue before my brain could think it over. "Why do you think I'm having dinner here with you guys tonight?"
Ryan tagged along with me as I walked through the underpasses beneath the expressway to Faneuil Hall. The night was turning colder, getting cloudy. The youngster seemed to be goggle-eyed at the idea of being among Great Men. I didn't disillusion him, although Johnny's wine-soaked probing had left a sour feeling in my gut.
The auditorium inside Faneuil Hall had just been redecorated from floor to ceiling. As always in Boston, there had been a titanic argument over whether the motif should be Original Puritan, Patriotic Colonial, or Bullfinch Federalist. The patriots won, and the place looked stately and elegant in that Colonial blend of severity and warmth. Blues and golds dominated, with natural wood tones gleaming here and there.
The place was jammed with the Massachusetts research and development intelligentsia. Scientists from MIT and Harvard, engineers from the once-magical Route 128 "electronic highway," the survivors of booms and busts that had staggered the R & D industry and the nation's economy with the regularity of a major league slugger taking batting practice.
I didn't have anything to do with his speech. Robinson and the other speechwriters put it together, although The Man always put a lot of pure Halliday into everything he said. And he tied the speech into the afternoon press conference's questions about the Iranian war in an ad-lib way that no speechwriter can prepare ahead of time:
". . . the real issue is very clear. The basic question is survival. Survival for the way of life we have worked so hard to achieve. Survival for the democratic institutions that have made us a great and prosperous people. Survival for our children and our children's children.
"We can no longer allow ourselves to be dependent on dwindling natural resources for the primary needs of our people. Nor need we be so dependent, when we have within our grasp—thanks to the dedication and perseverance of our nation's scientists and engineers—new sources of energy that will eliminate forever the twin dangers that haunt us: resource depletion and pollution of the environment.
"It is my intention, and I am sure the Congress will agree, to push ahead for the development of new energy systems, such as the orbiting solar network and the laser-fusion generators, with all the vigor that we can command."
They loved it. For the first time in their memories a President was treating them like an important national resource. It meant huge dollops of Federal money for the brainboys, sure. But more important to that audience on that night was the fact that the President, The Man himself, was saying to them, "We need you, we want you, we admire you." They would have followed him anywhere, just as their fathers had followed Kennedy to the moon.
But he seemed stiff to me. Uncomfortable. He was
reading
the speech, something he almost never did. Only an insider would notice it, I figured, but he looked to me as if he weren't really all that familiar with the speech.
Laura was sitting on the stage, just to the right of the podium, looking more beautiful than ever. The limelight of attention and public homage seemed to be making her more self-assured, more pleased with herself and the world around her. She was a goddess whose worshipers were a nation. They knew it and she knew it. So she sat there, smiling, beautiful, adored, and remote. From me.
I pulled my attention away from her and let my eyes wander across the rapt audience. I wondered what Sam Adams and his roughnecks would have to say about this crowd. How many of these well-dressed heavily educated people would daub red clay on their faces and dress in Indian feathers to go out and defy the laws of the Government? A few, I guessed. Damned few. And I wasn't certain I could count myself among them.
The whole stage, up where the President and his group were, was protected by an invisible laser-actuated shield. And there were other, redundant, shields around the podium and the body of the President. If anyone tried to fire a shot from the audience, the scanning lasers would pick up the bullet in flight and zap it into vapor with a microsecond burst of energy. Sonic janglers would paralyze everyone in the auditorium, and McMurtrie's men could pick up the would-be assassin at their leisure. Foolproof quantum-electronic security. All done with the speed of light. The President could appear to be standing alone and in the open, naked to his enemies, when he was actually protected so well that no major assassinations had been successful in years.
Which is why I was more startled than annoyed when McMurtrie grabbed my shoulder and whispered, subtle as a horse, "Follow me."
I didn't have much choice. He had already half-lifted me out of my seat in the press section. Len Ryan glanced at me quizzically. It must have looked like I was being hauled off on a drug bust.
"I'll be right back," I mouthed at him as McMurtrie practically dragged me to the nearest exit.
He waited for the big metal door to close fully before he said, "We've got troubles, and you've got to keep the news hounds out of it."
Framed by the bare-walled exit tunnel that led to the alley, lit from above by a single unshielded bulb, McMurtrie looked troubled indeed. His big beefy face was a map of worry and brooding belligerence.
"What's happened?" I asked. "What's the matter . . ."
He shook his head and grabbed my arm. Leading me down the tunnel toward the outside door, which opened onto the alley behind the Hall, he said only, "Don't ask questions. Just keep the news people off our backs. We can't have a word leak out about this. Understand? Not word number one."
And his grip on my arm was squeezing so hard that my hand started to go numb.
"It would help if . . ."
He barged through the outside fire door and we were out in the alley. It was cold. The wind was cutting and there were even a few flakes of snow swirling in the light cast by the bulb over the door. I wished for my topcoat, silently, because McMurtrie was dragging me up the alley, away from the street and into the deeper shadows, and he wasn't going to give me a chance to even ask for the damned coat.
The alley angled right, and as we turned the bend I saw a huddle of people bending over something. Two of them wore Boston police uniforms. The other half-dozen were in civvies. They had that Secret Service no-nonsense look about them.
McMurtrie didn't have to push through them. They parted as he approached. What they were bending over was a blanket. Lying there on the pavement of this dirt-encrusted alley. A blanket with a body under it. I could see a pair of shoes poking out from the blanket's edge.
"The doctor here yet?" McMurtrie asked gruffly.
One of the Secret Service agents answered, "On his way, sir."
"Both ends of this alley sealed?"
"Yessir. Four men at each end. Ambulance . . ."
"No ambulance. No noise. Get one of our cars. Call Klienerman; tell him to meet us at Mass General."
"He's still in Washington, isn't . . . ?"
"Get him up here on an Air Force jet." McMurtrie turned to another security man. "You get to Mass General and have them clear out the cryonics facility. Screen the place yourself. Take as many men as you need from the local FBI office.
Move
."
The agent scampered like a scared freshman.
I was still staring at the shoes.
Who the hell would be walking around back here?
The shoes looked brand new, not a bum's.
McMurtrie had turned to the two Boston cops. "Would you mind securing the fire door, up the alley? No one in or out until we get this cleared away." He barely gestured toward the body.
The cops nodded. They were both young and looked scared.
Then McMurtrie fixed me with a gun-metal stare. "You'd better go back inside the way you came out. Make sure the press people stay in there to the end of the President's speech. Do not let any of them out here."
"How can I keep . . ."
He laid a stubby finger against my chest. It felt as if it weighed half a ton. "I don't care how you do it. Just do it. Then meet us at the Mass General cryonics facility after the speech. Alone. No reporters."
He was dead serious. And the man under the blanket was dead. My brain began to whirl. It couldn't be an assassination attempt. One well-shod character staggers into an alley to have a heart attack and McMurtrie acts as if we're being invaded by Martians.
But I didn't argue. I went back to the fire door, a couple of steps behind the two cops. Maybe McMurtrie was just overreacting. Or maybe, crafty son of a bitch that he was, he was using this accident as an opportunity to test his troops' capabilities.
Sure, that's it. A practice run, courtesy of a wino whose time ran out. I was about to smile when the rest of my brain asked, Then why's he bringing Dr. Klienerman up from Washington? And what's he want the Massachusetts General Hospital's cryonics facility for? He's going to dip the wino in liquid nitrogen and make a frozen popsicle out of him?
One look at the faces of those two Boston patrolmen drove all the levity out of me. They were
scared.
Not from finding a wino in an alley. Not from brushing against the President's security team. Something was in their eyes that I hadn't seen since the San Fernando quake—these guys were terrified of something that went beyond human control.
They had reached the fire door a few paces ahead of me and turned to stand guard. I stopped when they looked at me. One of them had his electric prod in his gloved hands. The other had hooked his thumb around the butt of his revolver.
"Uh . . . McMurtrie told me to go back inside," I mumbled. Somehow I felt guilty in their eyes.
"Yeah, we heard him." That's all either one of them said. One of them opened the fire door and I stepped back inside the Hall.
I was shaking. And not entirely from the cold.
The President's speech was almost over as I took my seat.
"What happened?" Ryan whispered to me. "You look awful."
I tried giving him a fierce glance. "Just cold. I'm okay."
"What's going on?"
"Nothing," I lied. "McMurtrie wanted to check the arrangements for the President's ride back to Logan. Wanted to know if I had planned a Q and A session after the speech."
Ryan looked a bit puzzled, but he apparently accepted that. I felt lucky that he was a local reporter and not one of the Washington corps, who know that we never have a question period following a speech. Especially when The Man's already given a press conference the same day.
Halliday wound up his speech, the audience cheered mightily, and the usual round of handshaking started up on stage. The Hall emptied slowly, although most of the reporters raced for the nearest exits to get back to their offices and file their stories. The few who tried to take an alley exit were turned back, grumbling.