Deep Cover

by Brian Garfield

  The sky was a dense slab of lead and the cold air was viscous as syrup. Breckenyear’s remark still hung vivid in his skull because there was no place to hide it away. “You ought to be able to figure that out for yourself, a smart redskin like you.” Breckenyear had smiled and the crafty aged eyes had disappeared into the wrinkles to indicate he was just joshing but the old bastard had known Spode would take it as an insult.

  Spode couldn’t remember two dozen words of Navajo. He’d been only nine years old when his father had packed up the family and moved to Willow Run to help build B-24 Liberators. If he went back now they’d laugh him off the Reservation. But he was still and always an Indian, even if sometimes he almost felt like a white man. Almost.

  The girl he had sighted going down to the subway was one of those complaisant blondes who had turned out afterward to be a Groupie and when she had shown him her score card—diplomats and flunkies of every known skin hue—he had politely shown her the door; it had been weeks ago but the bad taste was still in his mouth. It did not please Spode to be a number on a list of Costa Rican chauffeurs and Tanzanian Second Secretaries. In the right company he was prepared to joke about his Dignity as a Noble Savage but neither the blonde nor Breckenyear was right company by Spode’s definition.

  He went down the third-floor corridor to Senator Forrester’s door and found Lester Suffield in the outer office eating a cheese sandwich. The secretary’s desk was unoccupied and the door to the Senator’s empty private office stood wide open. Spode said, “There’s three sizes of nuclear bombs. Large, extra large, and where did everybody go. Did somebody set one off in here?”

  Lester Suffield gave him a bleak glance of recognition. “That’s a sensitive subject around here. We don’t make jokes about it.” He exposed his wrist watch and shot his cuff. “He’s down on the floor. There’s a flap on.”

  “The Court nominee?”

  “They’re taking the vote. He’ll be back, I guess, if the Dixierats don’t start a filibuster.”

  “I’ll wait.” Spode parked his briefcase and shrugged out of his coat. His brown suit needed pressing. He unbuckled the galoshes. “Les, you wouldn’t have another half-sandwich you could spare?”

  “Help ‘self.” Suffield proffered a waxed-paper wedge. “I’m supposed to be on a diet anyhow.” He was a big florid man, shaggy with a soot-gray pelt, but his eyes were clever like a terrier’s.

  When Spode walked over to him the open buckles of his galoshes chinked like Mexican spurs. He unwrapped the sandwich and held the waxed paper under his wide blunt chin to catch crumbs while he ate. “Where’s Gloria? Lunch hour?”

  “Gone for good. Buying her trousseau.”

  “I forgot.”

  “He still hasn’t hired a replacement.”

  “Figures,” Spode said. He always took sergeants for granted, too.

  “I think I’ve got a girl lined up,” Suffield said. “Remember Veronica Tebbel?”

  “Ronnie Tebbel? Sure. Isn’t she still running the home office? What makes you think she’s willing to move back East and take a demotion to common secretary?”

  “I asked her, son. That’s the first rule of detective investigation. You spooks could save a lot of sweat if you remembered once in a while that the easiest way to get an answer to a question is to ask it.”

  “Us investigators don’t look at it that way,” Spode said. “Us investigators figure the less questions you ask, the less you get lied to.”

  “Which may explain why you never find out anything worth knowing.”

  “It could explain that, come to think of it.”

  Suffield settled a wistful glance on the empty chair behind the secretary’s desk. “Sic transit Gloria,” he said.

  “Oh Christ.” Spode crumpled the waxed paper in his fist, launched the wad toward the wastebasket, and missed by two feet.

  Suffield said with mild interest, “For a spook with your second-story history, you’re about the most spastic excuse for a human being I ever saw.”

  Spode leered at him. “White man, you want to go five rounds with me, I’ll call the gym and tell the medics to stand by to haul your carcass away.” His look traveled up and down Suffield. “God knows you could use the exercise. Look at the gut on you.”

  “Sure, Jaime. A nice fair fight. My high-school boxing and your karate.”

  Spode snorted and went over to put the wadded waxed paper in the basket. “Karate. Christ.”

  “Didn’t they teach you that stuff in the spooks?”

  “You’ve been looking at television.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “Maybe we learned a little hand-to-hand. It was a long time ago.”

  “Did the Senator get the same kind of training?”

  “The Senator wasn’t in the spooks with me.”

  “The hell he wasn’t. He told me about it once.”

  “That was military counterintelligence. A thousand years ago—Korea. We were kids, it was one of those games they told you to play when they put the uniform on you.”

  “But you stayed in and he didn’t.”

  “Because he’s got brains and money and I’m dumb and poor and anyhow what else could I do? You’re right, you do like to ask questions.”

  “Let’s swap jobs, then. You be the Senator’s aide and I’ll be his investigator.”

  “Forget it, I know when I’m well off.”

  “Then you’re not as dumb as you look.” The corners of Suffield’s wide mouth turned down. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m wet-nursing a mental retard. Will Rogers must have had our private Senator in mind when he said every now and then an innocent man gets sent to Congress. I hate to think of what’s going to be left of us when Webb Breckenyear and Woody Guest get done dribbling the Senator’s head on the table like a basketball.”

  The Senator came in grinning. “No way to talk about me behind my back, Les.”

  Suffield turned a dismal glance on him. “I’m glad you think it’s funny.”

  “Nothing cheers me up like enthusiastic optimism.” The Senator’s tough gold-flecked eyes pivoted to Spode. “How’re they hanging, Top?”

  “Loose and shriveled,” Spode replied. The Senator had called him Top for twenty years. It was a habit Spode had stopped trying to break him of.

  Senator Alan Forrester walked into his private office and peeled off his topcoat. Went around behind the big desk and pawed through the litter of papers to see if anything had been added to it in his absence. Spode strolled into the office behind Suffield and sank into a chair. The Senator pulled his chair out and said, “God, what a grim day.”

  The Senator had a deep tan, made ruddy by the chill wind outside, and all his bones were big. His patrician good looks masked a hide as tough as a dollar steak. He had the Forrester grin that, on the face of his eminent father, had appeared eleven times on the covers of Newsweek and Time when the old man had owned this Senate seat. There was a lot of the old man in the young Senator—and of the grandfather who had come to Arizona in the 1880’s with a Yorkshireman’s canny acquisitiveness and in twenty years had built an empire of mines and ranches and railroads. But Alan Forrester was his own man and nobody had known that better than the late Senator Hayden Forrester.

  The Senator sat with one arm hooked over the back of his chair. He had enormous hands—but Spode had seen how gently they held newborn calves and voters’ babies. The creases that bracketed his mouth had grown deeper since Angie had died.

  The Senator said, “Report, Top.”

  “I ain’t got much.” Spode admitted it apologetically, spreading his palms.

  “Such as it is, let’s have it.”

  “I spent two hours over at the Rayburn, standing in line in Webb Breckenyear’s waiting room. The old bastard ought to sell tickets—he’d make a fortune. For a senile politician with a two-horse constituency he’s got a fan club can’t be beat.”

  “Lobbyists or down-home folks?”

  “Lobbyists. Panting around for scra
ps from the pork barrel.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Let’s say he talked to me.”

  “Get anything?”

  “After he asked after you with plenty of affectionate chuckles, he made it clear the Honorable Webb Breckenyear is still Chairman of House Military Appropriations, and until the pit-viper liberals and the pinko-pacifist disarmamenters pass a Constitutional Amendment putting military affairs in the hands of Junior Senator Alan Forrester—and I emphasize ‘Junior’—until that time, the Constitution provides that military appropriations are the bailiwick of the House in general, the Committee in particular, and Webb Breckenyear in person. I think I’m quoting him more or less verbatim.”

  “In other words, no dollar figures.”

  “For a wild-eyed revolutionary radical redskin like me it would’ve been easier to get General Custer to pin a patriotism medal on Sitting Bull.”

  The Senator’s face hardened. “Is that the way he treated you, Top?” He sat up straight.

  Spode waved his hands. “Forget it. I don’t want to start a civil-rights sit-in on the old curmudgeon’s doorstep. Forget I said it.”

  “No.”

  “I wish you would. Maybe I’m just using it as an excuse because I didn’t get anything out of him.”

  The Senator settled back slowly in his chair. “I’m sorry you had to waste your time.”

  “You pay me by the week.”

  “At least he can’t come back at us later and push his old ferret eyes wide with innocence and say, ‘Why didn’t y’all jist come rat out an’ aisk me?’” A smile touched the Senator’s mouth. “Sometimes I take pleasure in knowing Breckenyear would like to see me right where I’d like to see him. No satisfaction in hating a man if he won’t hate you back.”

  Les Suffield stirred in his chair. “Breckenyear’s in a position to hate pretty hard.”

  “Good. I’m tired of knocking down straw horses.”

  Suffield said slowly, “You want this fight, don’t you?”

  “Why not? I feel like busting a few heads.”

  “You’ll only bust your own. You know that.”

  Spode looked from one to the other. They were staring at each other like pugilists before the bell. Through the door Spode heard the dim sounds of junior staffers returning from lunch to their desks in the bullpen office across the way, to handle the Senator’s routine paperwork, talk to the Senator’s constituents, answer the Senator’s phones, stuff the Senator’s newsletters into franked envelopes, and in general keep trivia off the Senator’s back.

  Spode sat back in the chair. He crossed his legs at right angles and laced his hands together behind his head and told himself, I am going to keep all the way out of this.

  The Senator said, “You’ve had it in your craw for a while, Les. You may as well cough it up now.”

  Suffield’s shoulders dropped, as if with relief. “All right,” he said. “I will.” He was beginning to perspire. “You’ve been right in there waving all the right flags. Right in there reforming welfare, civil rights, getting a fair shake for the chicanos, whipping the tails of the nasty bad guys behind environmental pollution. It’s all fine by the voters—our voters, we haven’t got any thick-smoke industries down home and they don’t build cars in Arizona. You went out on a limb pushing tax penalties for big families but you probably picked up enough support from the anti-population-explosion crowd to offset the damage you did with the diehard Catholics. You get high marks right down the line as the perfect image of the crusading young progressive Republican. The right amount of stir in the press about standing you for President in a few years’ time. In short, an impeccable record, a toothpaste smile, broad-based popularity, and no skeletons in your closet. No mortal enemies either. You’ve never made the mistake of pushing anybody into a corner he couldn’t get out of gracefully. The extremists won’t vote for you, but they won’t spend their every last dime fighting your reelection. Nobody’s got a chance in hell of unseating you this November. With the right stand-off at the next convention, you could walk right into the presidential nomination, and who have the Democrats got who could beat you for the White House?

  “Those are the stakes,” Suffield continued, “and you want to forfeit. You want to tie the rope around your own neck and hand the end of it to Woody Guest and Webb Breckenyear.”

  The Senator smiled. “In other words, don’t rock the boat.”

  “Rock it my ass. You’re hell-bent to sink it. Don’t I make any sense to you at all? Don’t you see what happens when you go after Breckenyear’s hide? For openers you’ll get Senator Guest on your ass, and when you get Woody Guest on your ass you get Woody Guest’s friends on your ass. You have any idea how many friends he’s got?”

  The Senator murmured, “It happens to be a simple question of right and wrong.”

  “This is no simple question of right and wrong. This is a question of the precedence of one right over another. Go after the old guard now and I guarantee you, come November they’ll hand you your head. Then you’re out of office and how many wrongs can you right from there?”

  “You’re talking like a campaign manager, Les, and this isn’t—”

  “I am your campaign manager!”

  “—the time for it. I’m not running for anything right now. The primary campaign doesn’t open till June. A lot can happen in three months.”

  “Hell, the minute you got elected five years ago you were running for reelection.” Suffield leaned forward, elbows on knees, earnest and intense. “You want to monkey with the sacred cow of National Defense—why don’t you just lie down on the floor right now so you won’t have so far to fall when they stick the knife in you? Down home in Tucson and Phoenix the Pentagon stands for Daddy Warbucks and Santa Claus and Jesus H. Christ all at once—and you want to charge right in on your horse and break your lance against it!”

  Spode studied his galoshes. A little pool of melted snow was drying into the carpet beneath his foot.

  Suffield hunched farther forward on the edge of his seat. “Without the defense establishment your whole constituency would dry up and blow away. It was fine for Ike to bleat about the military-industrial complex—he was retiring, he wasn’t looking for votes from the good people of Arizona. Am I getting through to you yet?”

  “You’re waving an empty gun in my face, Les. I’m sorry. I’ve never attacked legitimate defense needs. There’s a difference between real needs and phony boondoggles.”

  “Try that persuasion on a voter with a four-second attention span.”

  “I will.”

  “You say one unkind word about the Pentagon and all they’ll remember is who got them their jobs.”

  Forrester looked at him and smiled a little but he wasn’t amused. “All right. You’ve had your say, now I’ll have mine.”

  Spode studied the hard jut of the Senator’s face. Alan Forrester went on, “If Breckenyear’s buddies have a little accident and it happens to set the planet on fire then it’ll make just a whole lot of difference how well the civil-rights fight goes in Arizona, won’t it.”

  “We’ve been over all that before. They’re not going to have any little accidents. They never have before, why should they now?”

  “The odds have caught up. The mathematics is no good.”

  “That’s what Moskowitz told you, but he’s just one scientist. Look, suppose you’re right, suppose Moskowitz is right and they’re going to blow up the world if they get Congressional authorization. Then suppose I tell you you’re still crazy. You open you mouth in public and you’ll get an ICBM crammed right down your throat, multiple warhead and all.”

  “You can’t always go by that.”

  “Look, I’ll tell you what, you’re so dead set on this, at least keep a low profile till November—get reelected first.”

  “That would be too late, I’m afraid.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Too late to stop the Pentagon from building the Phaeton Three system
.”

  Jaime Spode sat bolt upright and blinked. The Senator added, “They’ll be rolling on it by then. The appropriation is scheduled to come out of Breckenyear’s House committee in May, eight weeks from now.”

  Spode interrupted. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Sometimes it helps to be in high places, Top.” The Senator went back to Suffield. “Unless we make a great deal of noise between now and May, Breckenyear will follow his usual pattern: draw up the bill by himself, walk into the committee with copies already printed up, pass them around the table and give the committee half an hour to discuss it and eighteen hours to get up a minority report before he shoves it out onto the floor as a rider to some harmless bill. He’ll get it to a vote before anybody knows enough about it to start a floor fight. He’s always operated that way. And Woodrow Guest will ram a carbon copy of it through the Senate in exactly the same way.”

  Suffield’s upper lip was pinched between his teeth. The Senator said, “It’ll add thirty billion dollars’ worth of redundant hardware to the capacity we’ve already got for overkill. It’ll multiply the chance of an accidental nuclear explosion by a thousand times. I don’t think we need that kind of protection, Les.”

  Suffield scowled at the floor. “And you’re willing to stake your political future on it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re still a fool. All right, look, do it off the record. Leak it to the press, let them send up a trial balloon, see what the public thinks. Find some lame-duck Congressman on Breckenyear’s committee and get him to make the indignant speeches and feel out the reaction. There’s a hundred ways to do it without showing your own face. You’ve got to stay out of it—you just can’t afford to be the one who pulls the plug. Not on the record.”

  “I can’t do it that way,” the Senator said, and smiled because he was anticipating Suffield’s inevitable reaction.

  “Sure,” Suffield said obliviously. “Now tell me how you’re too honest and red-blooded and forthright to work behind the scenes. You that was born in a smoke-filled room with a silver campaign promise in your mouth.”