by D. W. Buffa
“What do you know, Senator? What is the reason you wanted to see me?”
“What’s the reason…? No, you tell me—why would anyone be following me?”
Atwood shrugged his shoulders. There was no change in his expression.
“No reason.”
Hart would have none of it.
“Of course there’s a reason. You wouldn’t have asked if there wasn’t.”
There was no response. It was not that Atwood had not heard the question; the question did not count. His gaze remained the same: steady, and if it is not too strange a thing to say, relentless, as if this were some kind of psychological experiment designed to test the reaction of someone systematically ignored. Hart was not in the mood to play.
“You wouldn’t have called me last night to ask if I’d meet you here instead of your office if you didn’t think—what is this place, anyway?” he asked as he cast a glance of disapproval around the soulless, sparsely furnished room. “A safe location, a place you have meetings you don’t want anyone to know about?”
There was nothing, not the slightest movement, in Atwood’s immobile face. Hart’s voice echoed into a silence that became profound.
“What do you know, Senator?” asked Atwood, and then repeated the second question. “What is the reason you wanted to see me?”
This was maddening. Hart felt the anger rise in his throat. He turned his head, ready to lash out, when he suddenly thought he understood.
“You’re afraid of something. What is it?—That someone is going to find out that the president didn’t die of a heart attack in that hotel room, find out that he was murdered? Why are you afraid of that? You’re the head of the Secret Service—you don’t have any reason to cover this up….”
Finally it was there, the first glimmer of something genuine in that manufactured face, a spark of anger in those deliberately impenetrable eyes.
“It wasn’t our fault. We did everything we’re supposed to do.”
Hart was quick to take advantage. He fixed Atwood with a piercing stare.
“Not your fault? You let a woman into his room, a woman you obviously knew nothing about; a paid assassin, as it turns out, who murdered him. I can understand why you might not want to see that story in the papers, but that doesn’t change what happened, or what has to be done about it.”
“That was always the hardest part about protecting Robert Constable: protecting him from himself,” replied Atwood with a brief nod. “You think we had time to do a background check on every woman he had to have? Do you know how many times he had an agent bring a woman to his room, someone he had just spotted in the crowd? I lost a couple of the best agents I had. I had to transfer them to other duties or they would have quit. President or not, they weren’t going to be anybody’s pimp. To tell you the truth, they’re the ones I most admired. Now, what do you know and why do you want to see me?” He paused, and then relented. “I know what she told me, but I need to hear it from you.”
Did that mean that Atwood did not trust the former first lady, wondered Hart, or that he did not trust him? It seemed a point of some importance.
“I understand that you became the head of the Secret Service on her recommendation.”
A slight smile flickered briefly on Clarence Atwood’s stoic mouth.
“She told you that, did she? It might even be true, for all I know.”
“She doesn’t always tell the truth?”
“Do you know anyone in this town who does? But don’t misunderstand, Senator; I have no complaint of Mrs. Constable. She—and her husband, within his limits—always treated me fairly.”
“‘Within his limits’? That’s an odd way of putting it.”
“There were things he did, things that put me in an awkward situation, things I can’t talk about.”
“I think I understand,” replied Hart, trying to feel a little more sympathetic. “You want to know what I know and why I wanted to see you. Because the president’s widow asked me to, after she told me what you told her: that the president was murdered. She knows the truth will have to come out, but she first wants to know what happened: who killed him and why. Because otherwise—”
“Everyone will have their own idea, each one more vicious than the last. I can’t say I disagree. There are only a handful of people who know about this, and you’re the only one I don’t quite trust. It’s nothing personal, Senator. I don’t trust anyone I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t trust most of those. I’ve been here too long; I’ve seen too much. And the others that know about this—it isn’t that I trust them any more than I trust you, but they have careers they want to protect. Most of them, anyway,” he added in an allusion Hart grasped at once. Hillary Constable had a lot of things, but a career of the sort Atwood could affect wasn’t one of them.
“It’s true, then?” asked Hart. “There isn’t any doubt? A woman he was sleeping with shoved a needle in him and killed him with a drug.”
“What have you been able to find out—anything useful, anything at all?”
Hart had agreed to look into things, to see what he could find out; he had not agreed to report to the Secret Service.
“Your job is to protect the president, not conduct an investigation into the cause of his death. This is something for the FBI. The president has been murdered, and you still haven’t told them?”
Atwood looked down at his large hands with their three misshapen fingers, broken years earlier in a fight. The lines in his forehead deepened as he pondered over what he was going to say next, and just how far he could go.
“I’ve had conversations.” He said this slowly, as if to impress upon Hart that he knew what he was about; that he knew to protect himself from any later charge that he had withheld information, or delayed revealing what he knew, in a murder investigation of this magnitude.
“You’ve had a conversation—with the director? You told him that the president was murdered, and the FBI hasn’t started an investigation?”
Atwood answered with another silent look.
“They have started an investigation,” said Hart, “but quietly, discreetly. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“There is some concern about panic, the way the public might react, the kind of rumors that might—”
“Yes, I know all about that,” said Hart with a show of irritation.
He got to his feet and walked over to the window. He pulled the drapes open far enough to look out. When he turned around, he did nothing to hide his disgust.
“If it wasn’t bad enough that Constable did something that got himself killed, he’s managed to involve first his wife, and then the head of the Secret Service, and now the director of the FBI, in a conspiracy to conceal a murder! Don’t you see the irony in that? We’re doing everything we can to stop speculation about what might have happened in that hotel room when its becoming more and more likely that the truth is far worse than what anyone right now could possibly imagine!”
With a halting, disjointed movement, Atwood got to his feet. He stood there, staring at Hart in a way that, with those who worked under him, was usually all that was necessary to force an explanation. But Hart did not work for him, and the only effect was to make the senator less inclined to tell him anything.
“You know something,” said Atwood. “What is it? What have you found out?”
Hart ignored him.
“How long do you think it’s going to be before the fact that the president was murdered leaks out?” Before Atwood could respond, Hart shook his head as if to tell him that it did not matter, that the question was irrelevant. “It’s already leaked out. There’s at least one reporter who is all over this story. This secret you’re trying to keep—you’re going to be reading it in the papers and there’s not a damn thing you or I or anyone else can do about it. So it seems to me that unless you want to find yourself on the wrong end of a congressional investigation, you better start telling me what you know and you better start doing it now.”
<
br /> To Hart’s immense surprise, Atwood actually seemed relieved, as if he had been expecting him to put it in precisely these terms.
“Wait here a moment.”
He was gone a few moments and when he came back he was not alone.
“This is Dick Bauman, the agent in charge that night.”
For the next several hours, until well past midnight, they sat there, the three of them, going over everything that had happened the night Robert Constable died. Atwood became a different man around poor Bauman, who had almost reached the point of blaming himself for the president’s murder. Atwood kept telling him that it was not his fault, that his only failure was a failure of decency, trying to protect the president, and the president’s family, from Constable’s gross misbehavior. Hart agreed, telling him that in the circumstances in which he had found himself, it would have been heartless, almost an act of cruelty, not to keep the tawdry details of Constable’s last night private. Bauman’s answer stopped them both.
“The fault goes farther back than that. There wouldn’t have been any need to do what I did, clean up after him, if we had made it plain in the beginning, when we first started guarding him, that there were some things we wouldn’t do.”
Atwood could not argue the point; Hart did not try.
“Tell me everything that happened. How did the girl get there?”
“We’re not sure. He had this arrangement—whenever he stayed in the city. There was always a second room connected to the suite. He kept the key himself and gave it to whomever he chose. There was always someone.”
“But there was Secret Service protection all around him,” objected Hart.
Bauman exchanged a glance with Atwood.
“Go ahead. It’s all right. You can tell him.”
“We learned to look the other way. A woman—a good-looking woman—gets off the elevator. We all understood.”
“But this woman—where did she come from? Did Constable meet her somewhere that night? Where was he earlier that evening? What had he been doing?”
“He gave a speech at a fundraising dinner at the Plaza Hotel. It finished up around ten-thirty, but we did not get him out of there for another half hour. He never wanted to leave anywhere if there was someone left to talk to, another hand to shake. It’s funny, but now that I think about it, I don’t remember him ever saying even once that he wanted to be alone.”
“The girl—how old was she, anyway?”
“Late twenties, early thirties, the way most of them were.”
“Was she there, at the dinner? Is that where he met her?”
Bauman tried hard to remember. His eyes began to move side to side, seeing in his mind what he had seen before, the tables full of rich contributors and women dressed with money.
“If she was, I don’t remember seeing her. She might have been there, but if she was she must have gone somewhere first to change. It was a formal affair, not the kind of clothes she had with her.”
“So he must have known her before that night. He must have—”
“Not necessarily,” interjected Bauman reluctantly. “There were people, friends of his, who sometimes….”
“Set him up with someone?” asked Hart. Everyone had heard the stories about how helpful certain of the president’s friends could be. Hart glanced toward Atwood, sitting back in the recliner, his face again without expression.
“And you kept all this from his wife? Never told her what was going on?”
“It wasn’t our place to do that,” replied Atwood, looking straight at him.
Was he lying? wondered Hart, searching Atwood’s eyes for an answer they would not yield. Or was Atwood telling the truth, and Hillary Constable had been lying when she told Hart that she was kept informed about anything Constable did that might threaten his presidency? He had the feeling that neither one of them had been entirely truthful; that she had been kept informed, but not so often, nor so fully, as she had thought. Whatever deal Atwood had made with Hillary Constable, he would have made another, better one with her husband.
Richard Bauman was a different story. As near as Hart could tell, the agent had only wanted to do the right thing and had not realized that doing that almost always got you in trouble. He liked Bauman, liked him precisely for that reason. Bauman would have done what he was sworn to do: protect the life of the president at the cost of his own, and done it without a moment’s hesitation. Atwood, on the other hand, was more likely someone who instead of acting instantly, would think instead of how he could act the hero’s part and live to gain the benefit.
“He was lucky to have you,” said Hart suddenly, and for no apparent reason. “I know you feel responsible, but you shouldn’t. But now, tell me about her, anything you can remember.” He turned sharply to Atwood. “I assume that with Agent Bauman’s help you worked up a sketch of what she looks like and that you’ve given it to the FBI. I’d like a copy of it as well, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Atwood suggested that there was very little chance it would do any good.
“Twenty minutes after she left the hotel, she probably didn’t look anything like the way she did. This was not some amateur; she was a professional. Her hair will be different; her eyes won’t be the same. She’ll look like a thousand other people no one knows anything about. She was probably on a plane out of the country later that same night. There really isn’t any chance we’ll ever find her.”
“The real question,” said Hart as he got ready to leave, “is whether we can find the people who hired her.”
“Whoever they are, they aren’t taking any credit for it. Which means it wasn’t some group out there that hates America and wants to show what it can do.”
But Hart was not thinking about that. He wanted to know something more about the girl.
“Her manner, the way she talked—anything, the way she moved, anything about her clothes.”
Bauman thought about it, or rather tried to think. He was exhausted, wracked with all the psychic pain of endless self-recrimination; haunted by what he thought was his failure to recognize an assassin when she was standing right in front of him.
“Nothing. She was great looking, and she seemed scared, or I thought she was at first, but then—there was something in her eyes—I thought she wasn’t. It all happened so fast, and my first thought was—well, you know what I did. I almost pushed her out of there, told her to get her things and get out of the hotel. Unbelievable! But that’s what I did.”
“Was there anything about her, anything that was different? Her voice—what did she sound like?”
Bauman sat bolt upright. His eyes grew larger and almost frighteningly intense.
“She had an accent! Not much of one, but a little. Why did I forget that? She had an accent, maybe British, or someone who went to school there.”
Chapter Eleven
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bobby Hart was in a better position than most people to know what was going on in the world. Meeting behind closed doors, he and a handful of senators were given regular briefings by the various intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The committee was not always told everything, however, and there had even been occasions when what they were told was not the truth. When you were trained in the arts of deception, taught how to mislead the enemy, it was not that difficult to convince yourself that lying to Congress about something you wanted to keep secret was not really lying at all. Those who thought like this were mainly the ones who had come later, part of the generation born after the war; the ones who, because they had never been put to the test, never faced an enemy in combat, did not understand what it was they were really there to protect: the country and what it stood for, not the power of some agency that thought it was bigger than the government.
“Some of these guys think they’re so tough,” his father had said with contempt one day shortly before he died. “They should have been with me at the Battle of the Bulge, freezing their nuts off at Bastogne. That’s a little diff
erent than plotting the overthrow of some two-bit dictator in the comfort of an air-conditioned room.”
Bobby Hart liked to think of that, his father’s gruff laughter, the straight, no-nonsense look in his eyes when he talked about the way things had changed in the agency he had once loved. There was always a difference, he had insisted, between those who were there at the beginning of something and those who came later. That was the lesson he had learned, the lesson he wanted to pass on: you had to be there at the beginning to know what it was about and what you were there to do. Things changed, got all mixed up, and before you knew it the thing you created became more important than what it had been created to do.
“I’m not just talking about the agency, you understand. It’s true of everything: things are always clearer at the start.”
And then he had looked at his son in a way Bobby never forgot, with pride and hope, but more than that, a sense of trust, the certain knowledge that Bobby would not disappoint the high expectations he had for him.
“The first time you ran for office, that first campaign for Congress—you weren’t thinking then what you had to do to get reelected; all you thought about were the things you wanted to do, the changes you thought needed to be made. That’s why you’re different from all the others, the ones who just want to stay in office—you still think like that. The whole point is not to stop.”
Though Bobby was certain that his father had given him far too much credit, what his father had said became a kind of second conscience, a constant reminder of the kind of man he was supposed to be. It was surprising how often it had worked in the early years after he was first elected; how often, when he was tempted to go along with a majority opinion with which he disagreed, he heard not just his father’s words, but his father’s voice. It had become so much a part of him over the years, that second, deeper judgment, that he seldom any longer had occasion to remember where it came from and how it had started, but he remembered it now, as he took his chair in the committee room and looked across at the director of the CIA sitting with his hands folded at the witness table. From somewhere in the shadows of his mind, he heard his father’s voice reminding him of his obligation, as clear and distinct as the day he first heard him say it.
