Authors: Ben Bova
Ryan didn't leave, though.
"Don't you have a deadline to meet?" I asked him as we walked slowly toward the back of the Hall, following the emptying throng.
He paced alongside me, stubborn faced and tweedy. "I'm doing the color piece for the afternoon edition. Got plenty of time. I was wondering . . . Johnny thought it might be fun to do an interview with you."
"Me?"
"Sure." He waved an arm in the air. "Local man makes good. What it's like to work in the White House. The inside story of the most popular President since Roosevelt . . . that kind of stuff."
"Not now," I said. "I've got to join the rest of the staff and get back to Washington. No time for an interview."
"Too bad."
I didn't like the look on his face: more curious than disappointed. Or maybe I was projecting.
"Look," I said. "Why don't we do the interview by phone. Give me a call early next week and we'll set up a time. Okay?"
He nodded without smiling. "Sure."
Ryan offered me a ride to the airport, once we got outside to the windy, cold street. I told him I was going to ride in one of the staff limousines; it was all set up. He took it with an air of dubious graciousness, shook my hand, and jogged off through the shadows to the parking lot. I watched the wind pluck at his coat.
There was one cab left in front of Faneuil Hall, and I felt damned lucky to get it. I ducked inside, glad to be out of the wind.
"Mass General," I told the cabbie.
"Ya know how t'get there?" he asked from the other side of his bulletproof shield.
"Damned right I do!" I snapped. Boston cabbies have sent their kids to Harvard on the meter readings of their excursions. The city is small, but no two streets connect in any logical way. You could spend two hours circling your destination if you didn't know where it was.
I gave the cabbie detailed instructions on how to get there. His only response was a grumbling, "Awright, awright," as he snapped the meter flag down and put the taxi in gear.
Any large hospital is a maze of haphazard corridors, buildings joined together in an unplanned sprawl of growth, cloying smells of medicine and fear and pain. It makes me nervous just to visit a sick friend.
I finally found the cryonics unit, where they freeze clinically dead people who have enough insurance and the proper papers to be held in cold storage until some brilliant medical genius figures out a way to cure what they "died" from.
It looked more like something out of NASA than a hospital facility. Lots of stainless steel, metal desks, and computer consoles lining the walls. Everything painted white, like a clean-room facility. Fluorescent panels in the ceiling overhead cast a glareless, shadowless light that somehow made me edgy, nervous. One whole wall of the main room was a long window. At first glance I thought it was an operating "theater" on the other side.
McMurtrie was sitting at one of the desks, out-bulking it and looking grimly ominous. A covey of green-smocked hospital people worked at the other desks. The computer was humming to itself, lights flickering on its read-out console as if it were telling itself a good joke. McMurtrie's agents were standing around, looking uneasy and suspicious.
As I stepped in, I realized that McMurtrie was talking to someone on the picture-phone. The tiny screen on the desk top showed a middle-aged man who looked rather rumpled and unhappy.
"I'm very sorry to have to bother you at this hour, Dr. Klienerman," McMurtrie was rumbling in a tone as close to politeness as I've ever heard from him. "If you agree to freezing the body we can transport it back to Walter Reed and have it ready for your examination in the morning."
Klienerman said something, but I didn't hear it. My eye had caught the scene inside the cryonics "theater."
A long stainless-steel cylinder was lying on its side, like a section of gleaming sewer pipe. All around it were blue-painted tanks of liquid nitrogen, with lines leading from them into the cylinder. The hose lines were caked with frost, and steamy white vapor was eddying out of the cylinder's open end. It looked
cold
in there; colder than Dante's frozen hell.
At the open end of the cylinder was a hospital table, holding the whitely lifeless body of a man. The man who had been covered by the blanket in the alley behind Faneuil Hall. He was uncovered now. Completely naked. Obviously dead. My knees sagged beneath me.
The dead man was James J. Halliday, the President of the United States of America.
CHAPTER TWO
It was McMurtrie who grabbed me. He wrapped his gorilla arms around my shoulders. Otherwise I would've gone right down to the floor.
"It's not
him
," he whispered fiercely. "It's a copy, a duplicate . . ."
I was having trouble breathing. Everything seemed to be out of focus, blurred. I couldn't get air into my lungs.
Next thing I knew I was sitting down and gulping at a plastic cup's worth of water. McMurtrie was looming over me. But I was still looking past him, at the body lying in the cryonics chamber. Cold. Dead.
"It's not the President," McMurtrie said at me. "He's on the plane, on his way back to Washington. I talked to him ten minutes ago." He jerked a thumb toward the picture-phone on the desk.
"Then who . . ." My voice sounded weak and cracked, as if it were coming from someone else, somebody old and badly scared.
McMurtrie shook his head, like a buffalo getting rid of gnats. "Damned if I know. But we'll find out. Believe it."
I was beginning to register normally again. Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in the chair and looked around the glareless white room. Four of McMurtrie's men were standing around. They had nothing to do, but they looked alert and ready. One of them, closest to the door, had his pistol out and was minutely examining the action, clicking it back and forth. The ammo clip was tucked into his jacket's breast pocket.
"Somebody's made a double for the President," I said to McMurtrie, with some strength in my voice now, "and your men killed him."
He glared at me. "No such thing. We found this . . . man . . . in the alley. Just where you saw him. He was dead when those two cops stumbled over him. No identification. No marks of violence."
I thought about that for a moment. "Just lying there stretched out in the alley."
"The cops thought he was a drunk, except he was dressed too well. Then when they saw his face . . ."
"No bullet wounds or needle marks or anything?"
McMurtrie said, "Go in there and examine him yourself, if you want to."
"No, thanks." But I found myself staring at the corpse in the misty cold chamber. He looked
exactly
like Halliday.
"Are you in good enough shape to walk?" McMurtrie asked me.
"I guess so."
"And talk?"
It was my turn to glare at him. "What do you think I'm doing now?"
He grinned. It was what he did instead of laughing. "There're a few reporters out at the front desk. The local police and two of my people are keeping them there. Somebody's going to have to talk to them."
I knew who somebody was. "What do I tell them? Disneyland's made a copy of the President?"
"You don't tell them a damned thing," McMurtrie said. "But you send them home satisfied that they know why we're here. Got it?"
I nodded. "Give 'em the old Ziegler shuffle. Sure. I'll walk on water, too. Just to impress them."
He leaned over so that his face was close enough for me to smell his mouth freshener. "Listen to me. This is
important.
We cannot have the media finding out that there was an exact duplicate of the President running loose in Boston tonight."
"He wasn't exactly running loose," I said.
"Not one word about it."
"What'd he die of?"
He shrugged massively. "Don't know. Our own medical people gave him a quick going over, but there's no way to tell yet. We're going to freeze him and ship him down to Klienerman at Walter Reed."
"Before I talk to the reporters," I said, "I want to check with The Man."
McMurtrie grumbled just enough to stay in character, then let me use the phone. It took only a few moments to get through on the special code to the President in Air Force One. They were circling Andrews AFB, about to land. But one thing the President insists on is instant communications, wherever he is. He's never farther away from any of his staff than the speed of light.
In the tiny screen of the desk-top phone, he looked a little drawn. Not tired or worried so much as nettled, almost angry. I reviewed the situation with him very quickly.
"And McMurtrie thinks I ought to stonewall the reporters," I concluded.
His public smile was gone. His mouth was tight. "What do you think?" he asked me.
One of Halliday's tenets of faith had been total honesty with the press. He was damned fair to the working news people, which is one of the reasons I was attracted to him in the first place. Completely aside from Laura.
"I'm afraid he's right, Mr. President," I answered. "We can't let this out . . . not right now."
"Why not?"
It was a question he always asked. Working for him was a constant exercise in thinking clearly. "Because"—I thought as clearly and fast as I could—"a disclosure now would raise more questions than answers. Who is this . . . this double? How'd he get to look like you? And why? How did he die? And . . ." I hesitated.
He caught it. "And is it really James J. Halliday you've got cooling down in there, while I'm an imposter replacing him? Right?"
I had to agree. "That's the biggie. And if you're an imposter, who're you working for?"
He grinned. "The Republicans."
Seriously, he asked, "Meric . . . do you think I'm an imposter?"
"Not for a microsecond."
"Why not?"
"You wouldn't be challenging me like this if you were. Besides, you're behaving exactly the way you always behave."
He cocked his head to one side slightly, which is another of his personal little pieces of action. I had never paid much attention to it until that moment.
"All right," he said at last. "I don't like hiding things from the press unless there's a damned vital reason for it."
"This is very vital," I said.
He agreed and then asked to speak with McMurtrie. I got up from the desk and stared again into the cold chamber. The team of green-gowned meditechs was starting to slide the corpse into the stainless-steel cylinder that would be his cryonic sarcophagus. Liquid nitrogen boil-off filled the chamber with whitish vapor. Each of the meditechs wore a face mask; I'd never be able to identify them again.
Then that one word struck me.
Exactly.
The man I had just spoken to on the picture-phone acted exactly like the James J. Halliday I'd known and worked for since he first started campaigning. The corpse they were sliding into that cold metal cylinder looked exactly like James J. Halliday. My knees got fluttery again.
McMurtrie came over beside me. I could see our two reflections in the glass that separated us from the cold chamber. He looked as grim as vengeance. I looked scared as shit.
"Okay, kid," he told me. "You're in the big leagues now. Put on a straight face and get those newsmen out of here while we ship the casket out the back way."
One of his men walked with me up to the waiting room near the hospital's main entrance. He was a typical McMurtrie trooper: neatly dressed, quiet and colorless to the point of invisibility. And perfectly capable of quietly, colorlessly, maybe even bloodlessly, killing a man. It was something to think about.
Len Ryan was among the news people in the waiting room. There were eleven of them, a modern baker's dozen, sitting on the worn and tired-looking plastic chairs, talking and joking with one another when I walked in. Ryan was off in a corner by himself, writing in a thick notebook. He threw me a look that was halfway between suspicion and contempt.
"Don't any of the news chicks in this town work late anymore?" I cracked, putting on my professional smile.
"They were all at the airport interviewing the First Lady," said the guy nearest me. He was grossly overweight, not the type you'd expect to chase ambulances. I hadn't known him when I'd worked for the
Globe,
but he looked older than I. New in town, I figured.
It was a small room. I stepped into it a few paces and they all stood up expectantly. The floor tiles had been patterned once, but now the colors were all but obliterated from years of people's frightened, weary pacing. The lights were too bright. The heat was up too high. Through the two sealed windows I could see cars whizzing by on Storrow Drive, and the river beyond them, and MIT beyond the river. I wished I could be out there someplace, anyplace, away from here.
"What's going on, Meric?" asked Max Freid of UPI. We used to call him "Hotdog Max," because he was always shooting for the spectacular story. "Why all the hustle with the Secret Service? Who's the stiff?"
"Take it easy," I said, making slowdown motions with my hands. "Don't get yourselves excited. Apparently some wino staggered into the alley behind Faneuil Hall tonight and keeled over from a heart attack."
McMurtrie can arrange with the local FBI office to slip a real wino who really died tonight into the Mass General files.
"The police patrolling the area found him and alerted the President's security team. They are very protective guys, as you may have noticed, and they had the body shipped here immediately. Just routine precaution, that's all."
Better get those two Boston patrolmen sent to Washington or otherwise put on ice. If these wiseasses get their hands on them, the story'll pop out in fifteen minutes. The meditechs were Army people, from what McMurtrie said. Check on it.
"Seems like a helluva lot of overreaction for one dead wino."
I nodded at them. "Yeah. I suppose so. But that's the way these security people react. Nobody's hit a President—or even a candidate—in a lot of years. Right?"
What about tonight? Was it an attempt? Did it succeed?
They muttered reluctant agreement.
"Listen, fellas." Now I had to throw the strikeout pitch. "I spoke to the President on the phone just before I came over here. I suggested, and he agreed, that I ask you guys not to print anything about this little incident . . ."