Authors: Ben Bova
"Brilliant deduction. But which one?"
"The one who phoned me earlier this evening."
"How much earlier?"
I shrugged. "Let's see . . ."
The General hunched forward on the wooden bench. "Jackson's been here for the past two hours. He and I came together, right behind Johnny."
"How the hell did you get past everybody?"
He grinned, and his face folded into a relief map of wrinkles. "A phony mustache and beard, pair of tinted glasses. We came in with my own security men. Those Secret Service kids never tumbled."
"Where is he now?"
"Up in the galleries somewhere, watching his brother, I expect."
My mind was racing. "And he's been here two hours? All that time? Here? With you?"
The General nodded.
"Then if he's been here with you, and John's been outside talking with the crowd . . . and we agree that Joshua's not the one . . . then it's got to be Jeffrey. He's the only one who could have phoned me from the White House."
The General stared down at the floor, silent.
Jeffrey,
I thought.
The expert in defense policy. The one I flew back from Aspen with. He's the murderer.
"You're sure it's Jackson you came here with?"
"I know my own boys," the General said flatly.
I got up from the bench. "I want to see him. Now."
The General pointed skyward. "He's up there in one of the galleries."
I strained my eyes, searching the darkened galleries that ringed the dome's interior. Nothing . . . wait. A shadowy figure. A motion past one of the tall windows. I headed for the nearest staircase.
The stairs had been closed to the public for years. Too steep and narrow for large crowds of tourists. A century ago, visitors had become shitty enough to toss their garbage over the railings just to see who got splatted down on the floor. So the galleries were closed to visitors.
I was intercepted by the inevitable Secret Service agent, of course. A hard-faced woman this time. When I showed her who I was and told her I was going upstairs, and explained that it was impossible to leave the dome from those galleries, she relented. After a radio check with her boss.
The marble stairs are steep and strange in the dark. Half a flight, then a level stretch, then six more steps, then another flat, and then a long flight of narrow stairs, with your feet clacking and making weird, shifting echoes as you go along. The light from the dome was filtered by flimsy-looking metal railings in places, blocked out entirely by solid walls elsewhere, so the going was slow and groping.
I was puffing by the time I reached the first gallery. I thought that was where I'd seen Jackson, but he wasn't anywhere in sight. Footsteps echoed somewhere; it was impossible to get a fix on the direction of sounds up here. The echoes floated ghostlike in the still air. I went to the marble balustrade and looked down. Couldn't see the General from here. The floor of the rotunda looked empty and damned far away. A long way to fall.
I hustled all around the gallery, stopping every now and then to call out, "Jackson!" and get nothing in return except the goddamnedest syncopation of echoes you ever heard.
Why the hell's he playing hide and seek?
So up to the next level I went, stumbling, tripping over the even narrower, steeper steps, cursing the darkness without a flashlight. Once I grabbed at one of the metal railings. It shook in my hand. Not much protection there. Up I went.
Halfway to the topmost gallery I paused to catch my breath. And heard somebody else's footsteps again. Slow, measured, patient, steady.
Clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack.
The echoes surrounded me. They could have been coming from above me, behind me, right beside me, and I'd never know it. But deep inside my scary guts, I got the firm feeling that they were coming up the stairs from behind me. I was being followed.
I pushed myself up the final sets of stairs to the top gallery. Puffing, leaning on the balustrade, and staring down at the hard, hard floor a hundred feet below, I realized that the echoing footsteps had also stopped. But before I could try to figure out what that meant, I heard something else. So faint I couldn't really tell what it was. Breathing. Or maybe the softest kind of a low chuckling laugh.
I looked around the shadowed gallery. Across the dome's open space, on the other side, the half-hidden figure of a man in a light-colored suit stepped out of the darkness and up to the marble balustrade. I couldn't see his face; it was in shadows. But I knew that figure. It was one of the brothers. He beckoned to me, waving with one hand.
Like the helpless ingénue in a Gothic nightmare, I started around the gallery toward him. Something in my head was screaming a warning of danger at me, but my body obediently followed The Man's summons.
As soon as I started moving, the
clack . . . clack
of the other person's footsteps started again.
I paused briefly at one of the narrow, round-topped windows and looked out toward the West Front. The crowd was still there, quiet now, a mass of solidly packed people that covered the western side of the Hill and spilled out across Union Square and around the New Reflecting Pool. Faintly, faintly, I heard the voice of James J. Halliday, electronically amplified, still talking to them. John had been out there for more than two hours now, and was still going strong. Great copy for tonight's news shows and tomorrow's papers. The stuff of legends: President meets people, face to face, heart to heart.
I prayed to God and anybody else who'd listen that John would be alive tomorrow to see those headlines. And Vickie. And me.
The echoes of those following footsteps stirred me out of reverie. I looked across the dome again, and he was still standing there, a little deeper back in the shadows now, so that he couldn't be seen from the floor. But I could see him. I hurried across the gallery to him.
"Jackson?" My whisper bounced crazily and shattered into a million echoes.
"Yes," he whispered back, and the sound seemed to come from everywhere.
I got up close enough to see that he was still wearing the phony mustache and beard. They helped to make his face disappear into the shadows. As I stepped toward him, he slowly pulled them off and stuffed them into the pocket of his mandarin-style tunic. His teeth flashed white in a big grin.
"Someone's following me," I said.
"I know."
I looked down that deep, dizzying well of emptiness and saw that the bench near Old Hickory's statue was unoccupied. There was nobody down on the rotunda floor at all. Even the Secret Service guards seemed to have melted away.
"Why would . . . ?"
Jackson gave me the famous Halliday smile. "This involves more than you and me, Meric."
"But those stairs are awfully tough for a man his age. . . . I damned near collapsed on them."
"You mean the General?"
Clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack. The steps were slow but doggedly steady.
"Yes, the General . . . who else?"
Jackson said nothing. I tried to fathom the expression on his face, but it was too dark to see him that well. He was grinning, that much I could tell.
For some reason my mouth kept making conversation while those clacking steps drew nearer.
"This whole idea of cloning," I said. "It seems awfully . . .
planned.
You guys were practically programmed to become President, weren't you?"
"We didn't lead the carefree lives of your average American boy." Jackson said it evenly. No humor in it. No bitterness.
"It's all terribly cold-blooded. I mean, you and your brothers being deliberately trained like that from infancy."
"Cold-blooded," Jackson said emotionlessly. "You don't know the half of it."
"No, I guess I don't."
"There's nothing wrong with planning," he said. "Nothing wrong with setting your sights on a goal and then doing everything you can to attain it. That's how this continent got discovered, you know. That's how we gained our independence. Move heaven and earth to reach your goal. Pike's Peak or bust. I shall return. That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
"You're a historian?" I tried to make it sound light, but those footsteps echoing behind me gave my voice a hollow ring.
"Every President becomes a historian, Meric. You soak in history once you're in the White House. And what's the basic lesson of history? The goal justifies the means. If you win."
If you win . . . if you win . . .
echoed eerily around the gallery.
"History's written by the winners," Jackson said. "Fix your sights on your goal and stop at nothing to reach it. That's what makes history. Columbus. Old Sam Adams and his Minutemen. The Forty-Niners. MacArthur. Armstrong. Truman. The Kennedys. They all did it that way. And me. That's the way I'm doing it. It's the only way it can be done."
My heart turned to ice.
"You
are
Jackson?" I asked.
His smile returned. "Yes. I'm Jackson. Don't be afraid. I am the President."
Somehow that didn't reassure me at all.
Jackson turned his head ever so slightly, looked past my shoulder. I turned. Instead of the ramrod-stiff figure of the General that I expected, it was Laura. Dressed in white. Like a bride. Or a mourner from some ancient tribe.
"Those stairs," she said breathlessly as she approached us. "They're killers." Her eyes were bright, gleaming.
Jackson nodded. "Tourists used to collapse on the stairs. That's why these galleries were closed to the public."
Laura looked straight at me but didn't say a word. It was as if she were looking through me, as if I no longer existed for her. She stepped over to the stone niche where the window was set and sat on its sill.
"You didn't have to come," Jackson said. "I told you I could handle this by myself."
Laura smiled at him. "I just wanted to be sure, darling. I wanted to see it for myself." Her eyes glittered as if she were on a drug trip. And I knew which drug it was: power.
"This is more than a family matter," I said. "Unless you're thinking of the whole population of the United States as your family."
"Don't be silly, Meric." It was her first acknowledgment of my presence.
"We've got to stop these murders," I said. "And Jeffrey's snatched Vickie Clark, and . . ."
"You're sure it's Jeffrey?" Jackson asked.
"I explained it to the General, downstairs. John's outside with the crowd, right?"
Jackson nodded.
"You're both certain it's John out there?"
Laura said, "Of course it's John. None of the others could handle a crowd like that. John's the face, the public figure, the candidate and handshaker. He enjoys crowds."
The man whose hand I shook,
I remembered.
"And we're agreed it can't be Joshua."
"Josh couldn't . . ."
Laura fidgeted with the little purse she was holding on her lap. "Do get on with it."
"You're absolutely certain Jeffrey's the right one?" Jackson asked me.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he called me this evening and threatened to kill Vickie and me both if I don't call off my press conference tomorrow."
Jackson looked at me curiously. "How do you know it was Jeffrey?"
"It had to be. John was already speaking here. We agree it can't be Joshua. You were here with the General. . . ."
"They have phones here," Jackson said.
I stopped with my mouth still open.
"But . . . your father said . . . the General told me he was with you all night."
"That's right, he was," Jackson said.
"Just as he is now," Laura added. "Down there."
I suddenly understood how a mouse feels when it is cornered by a pair of cats: very small, very alone, and scared mindless.
"Y . . . You're the one who called me?"
"That's right, Meric. Tonight I finish the task I started eighteen months ago. Tomorrow morning I will be the sole occupant of the Oval Office. I will be the President, alone and entirely."
I turned to Laura. "And you're going to let him?"
"Of course."
"For God's sake, Laura—stop him!"
"Why? So John can go on making pretty faces to the public and compromising with every beggar who comes in off the street? Or Josh can stay in hiding all the time? Or Jeff can keep on playing soldier? Jackson's been the only real man in this whole family. I've known that for years. Jackson's the strong one. It's survival of the fittest."
"But he's killing his brothers!" My voice was a mousy squeak. I could barely hear it myself.
"The President's got to be
strong
." Laura's voice practically purred. Her eyes were afire now.
"But he's a murderer!"
Jackson snapped, "Name one President who wasn't. Truman? Lincoln? Either Roosevelt? Nixon? Brown? They all had blood on their hands."
"Sweet Jesus, the two of you are insane."
"Meric," Jackson said, in that
tone,
that
inflection,
that I'd heard a thousand times in the White House.
I stared at him.
"We've been very patient with you, Meric. I've given you every opportunity to stop opposing me. Even Laura has tried to make you see . . ."
"Tried to buy me off, you mean."
"You had your chance," Laura said.
I started to shake my head.
Jackson said, "There's no other way, Meric. We'll have to do away with you. And Ms. Clark, too."
"Like you killed the others?"
"No . . ." He fumbled in his tunic pocket and pulled out a small plastic syringe. "No, you're not going to die of immunological breakdown. That would raise too many questions. And, incidentally, I got the virus from the University of Pennsylvania's biochemistry labs. They have very lax security systems at universities, you know. A Government man can go anywhere and see anything he wants to. The professors all trail him with their tongues hanging out, hoping to lap up some droppings of Federal grant money."
"How'd you know?"
"Don't be naive. I didn't do it personally. I'm an economist, not a biochemist."
I turned back toward Laura. "You're going to let him do it?"