by Ben Bova
“Not this one.”
“I’ve got to see the President,” I said again. “This is too big to keep out of the news indefinitely. If there’s a plot to slip a double into his place… or if they’ve already…”
“They?” The strength flowed back into him. He frowned at me. “What do you mean they?”
“How the hell do I know? The Russians. The Chinese. The Saudis. Somebody’s trying to get a man who looks exactly like the President into places where the President is. Who and why?”
He said firmly, “That’s a matter for the internal security people, not the press secretary.”
I made my voice as stubborn as his. “Robert, sooner or later I’m going to have to either tell what I know to the press, or try to hide this from them. I won’t act in the dark; I’m not going to be a trained parrot. I want to see The Man this morning. I want to make sure that he’s the same man I agreed to work for.”
His mouth opened, but no words came out. Not for several seconds. Finally he glanced down for a moment, then looked back at me and said, “Eleven forty-five. The Vice-President will be in with him, too, but I suppose it’s a matter that you should participate in with them. And then you can stay for a few minutes after the Vice-President leaves.”
I nodded. “Oval Office?”
“Yes.”
* * *
Visitors to the White House go in through the East Wing and are guided past the showy open rooms on the ground and first floors: the library, the diplomatic reception room, the East Room, the Green Room, that stuff. The President’s Oval Office is on the other side of the mansion, in the West Wing, overlooking the Rose Garden. No tourists.
There was the predictable line of tourists winding all the way around the block and disappearing behind the tree-shaded curve of South Executive Avenue. I could see them from my office window. Somehow, even this early in the day, they looked worn and bedraggled, kids whining, heat making their tempers short. They looked like a line of refugees whose only sacred possessions were cameras and souvenir balloons.
I took the underground slideway to the White House. It saved time and aggravation. There was a uniformed Marine Corps guard at the basement entrance to the slideway in my building; a half-dozen or more of them in pillboxes along the cleanly tiled tunnel, armed with automatic rifles and God knows what else; and another squad at the end under the White House, When the elevator opened in the West Wing’s corridor, a trio of Secret Service agents, all in civvies and very polite, walked me under the identification arch.
The arch is like the old-fashioned inspection machines they have at airports, where they check you and anything you’re carrying for weapons. But at the White House, the advanced technology of the identification arch checks your fingerprints, retinal patterns, voiceprint, physiognomy, and weight, all in the three seconds it takes you to walk through the portal. All you have to do is say your name aloud and hold your hands up, palm-outward, as you walk through. The machinery in the arch checks you out against a preprogrammed list of cleared personnel. If you don’t check out, those polite and soft-talking Secret Service men will quietly ask you to wait while they check further on you. If you try to push past them, chances are you’ll be dead in less than a minute.
Nobody gets to be President without inspiring a personal loyalty in the people around him. How else do you explain such an unlikely duo as the worldly, urbane Dean Acheson and the bantam rooster from Independence? Or the men around Nixon, who would’ve rather had their fingernails pulled out than admit anything that would hurt their Chief? Or Morton Rochester, the assistant speechwriter who threw himself on top of a grenade to protect the life of his President?
James J. Halliday was my President. God knows I had a tangled web of motivations in my head when I first went to work for him. I still haven’t straightened them all out; in fact, now it all seems even more complex and involved. But from the instant I first met him, I felt—hell, I knew— that this was a man I’d be proud to work for. In fact, he always gave you the impression you were working with him, not for him. Harrison and the other guys in Boston thought I was stark crazy when I dumped my job there to go to work for Halliday. He was just a “dumb blond” governor from a sparsely populated Western state making a dark horse bid for the Presidential nomination on the strength of his father’s money and his handsome face and not much else. They thought.
I had never regretted a moment of that campaign, nor the first few months of his administration. Halliday showed me more brains, more guts, more honesty than I had ever believed possible in a politician. He was no dummy. He could be ruthless and ice-cold when he wanted to be. He sidestepped traps laid for him by the top people in his own party. He destroyed a few self-styled enemies and then allowed the rest to join him as allies. He cowed them all into working hard and playing it straight.
And, above all, he awed them with his intelligence. There wasn’t a facet of the campaign that he didn’t know in microscopic detail, From the campaign financing to the intricacies of international economic policies, from dickering with the big unions to negotiating oil treaties with the Saudis, from showing the multinational corporations that a Democrat in the White House would be good for business (and making them believe it) to balancing the Russian Premier and the Chinese Chairman against each other—Halliday displayed the knowledge, the energy, the skills of the previous seven Presidents all wrapped up in one man.
There could be only one man in the world like him, and if someone had planted a double behind his desk in the Oval Office, I would know it immediately. I had seen Halliday through all his moods, all his private agonies, all his public triumphs for more than two years. If the man behind that desk wasn’t Halliday, I’d know it.
But, I asked myself as the final security guard opened the office door before me,what will you do about it?
Wyatt was in the office, sitting in his usual rocker by the fireplace, under the Remington painting. Lester Lazar, the Vice-President, was in the caneback chair right in front of the desk. He looked like a kindly old country doctor, graying and slightly portly. Actually, he was a New York lawyer who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from a poor man’s tax adviser in Queens to a big union lawyer on Wall Street.
“Ah, Meric, you’re here,” said the Vice-President. “You tell him; maybe to you he’ll listen.”
I walked across to the Scandinavian slingback that I usually sat in during my infrequent visits. As I reached for it, I noticed The Man smiling at me.
“Do you realize you always walk around the Great Seal?” he said to me. “You never step on it.”
I eased myself into the slingback and glanced at the golden eagle with the arrows and olive branch inside a circle of fifty stars: the background of the carpet was blue.
Before I could think of something to get me off the hook, Lazar said, “Was the President’s appearance in Boston a success or not, from the public relations point of view?”
The President was smiling easily at me, but Wyatt, tucked away behind Lazar’s back, made a sharp “no-no” motion with his head. The Vice-President wasn’t in on the dead duplicate. Which wasn’t unusual. Vice-Presidents are seldom privy to the real goings on of the White House.
“It was a smashhit,” I said. “I wish I could talk the President into making more public appearances. They loved him.”
Lazar flourished a hand in the air. “You see? It’s you who should go to Detroit, not me. Nobody wants to see the Vice-President…”
The Man shook his head, still smiling. “Lester, I’m not going to Detroit. I’m not going to address their meeting…”
“Whose meeting?” I blurted.
“The Neo-Luddites,” said the Vice-President. “They’re putting together a national meeting in Detroit to plan a march on Washington.”
“To protest job losses from automation,” the President said. Then, turning back to Lazar, “Lester, they know my position. I’ve made it abundantly clear. We can’t slow down the economy by stopping automation. It’s th
e increased productivity from automation that’s put the lid on inflation.”
“Such as it is.”
Such as it is,” the President admitted. “But I will not go to Detroit or anywhere else and promise unemployed workers that I’ll put the brakes on automation. And that’s what they’d expect to hear.”
Lazar raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“In the long run,” the President continued, “automation will increase everyone’s standard of living.”
“And in the short run,” Lazar countered, “people are losing jobs to machines, and hating it a lot. A lot.”
“We’ve got aid programs…”
“They want jobs! And, Mr. President, they want to see you. You’re the man they voted for last year; I’m just an afterthought.”
The President shook his head.
I had been prodding the President to get out into the open and meet the people more. He had won the election by campaigning with enormous vigor; he literally outran the opposition. But once he settled into the White House, he had dug in like a cave-dwelling hermit. It was primarily my urging that shook him loose for the Boston trip. He’d originally wanted to address the Faneuil Hall meeting over closed-circuit television.
But the aftermath of the Boston speech was still shaking my guts. I wasn’t going to side with Lazar now.
“The people want to see you,” Lazar repeated, more weakly.
“Not just now,” the President said. “Detroit is the wrong place, and the Neo-Luddites are the wrong crowd.”
“You’ll be perfectly safe…”
“It’s not security I’m worrying about.” Halliday looked over to Wyatt, then returned his attention to the Vice-President. “Lester, I can’t make you go to Detroit. But I am asking you to do it.”
Lazar made a very Semitic shrug. “Of course I’ll do what you ask. But I think you’re missing an opportunity to show the people…”
“Some other time. Not now.”
“All right,” Lazar said. “And what should I tell these jobless people?”
The President didn’t hesitate an instant. He ticked off on his fingers:
“First, automation is a fact of life. If we tried to stop the automated factories now in operation, our GNP would drop by at least ten percent.
“Second, that means a similar loss of jobs. Unemployment would go up even more, because of the echo effect. There would be more people unemployed, not fewer.
“Third, automation means higher productivity, which in turn means lower inflation levels. The prices of consumer goods and food have been holding steady the past few months. Stop automation and…”
Lazar held up both his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I know. I know. It’s our standard line of reasoning.” He let his hands drop and looked wistfully at the President. “But you know, sometimes people don’t think with their heads. The opposition, now, they’re making a big emotional scene out of this.”
“Let them,” the President said. “By the end of the year prices will have stabilized and employment should be starting up again. Let them damn the machines then.”
The Vice-President stayed and chatted for a few minutes longer, mostly about the local politicians he should butter up in Detroit. And the union people, of course. He was smiling when he left the office. Smiling, but his eyes were still unhappy.
As the door closed behind him, Halliday said to me, “I can only give you a few minutes, Meric. Arguing with the Vice-President always seems to take more time than it’s worth.”
He was grinning when he said it. Earlier this morning, during our picture-phone review of the day’s news, he had seemed tense, impatient, almost angry. Now he was relaxed and friendly. Maybe talking with Lazar did bother him.
“And you’ve got the Secretary of State due in another fifteen minutes,” Wyatt reminded him.
The grin faded only slightly. “Oh, yes, Reynolds’s plan for restructuring the Department.”
“That’s about like trying to restructure mud,” His Holiness groused from the rocker.
The President gave a “what the hell” kind of shrug and then turned to me. “McMurtrie tells me you did a fine job last night. I appreciate it.”
It all came back into focus immediately. I’d actually been trying to forget the whole thing.
“Do you think we can really keep the press from finding out about it?” he asked.
“For a time,” I said. “Nobody can keep them at bay indefinitely.”
His face was completely serious now. “I don’t like to skulk around under a cloak of secrecy. There hasn’t been a President yet who didn’t stub his toes that way.”
“This thing is too big and too scary to let loose on the public,” His Holiness said.
“You’re probably right, Robert,” the President answered, “Still…” His voice trailed off and he leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling the way he always does when he’s mulling over a problem. Damn! He looked like Halliday. He sounded like Halliday. He acted like Halliday. But yet…
“Mr. President,” I asked, and he gave me a cocked eyebrow for being so formal, “What’s being done about the situation? I mean, what steps have you taken?”
Halliday glanced at Wyatt, then sat up straight and focused his gaze on me. “McMurtrie is picking a handful of ultra reliable people to serve as an investigating staff. He’ll report directly to Robert, here.”
“And?”
“And we’ll find out what’s going on.”
I thought I had missed something. “Wait a minute. How does the FBI fit into this? And the National Intelligence Commission? What about…”
“We’re keeping the investigation small and quiet,” the President said.
Wyatt added, “And restricted to people who are personally loyal to the President.”
“But…”
“The FBI’s too damned independent,” Wyatt went on. “Always has been. Leaks to the press. Too damned busy keeping its public image polished to maintain the kind of secrecy this needs.”
“You do understand,” Halliday said to me, “that if any word of this leaks out to the public, we’re in for it.”
I nodded. “It’d cause a panic, all right.”
“Worse than that. If there’s the slightest doubt that I am actually the duly-elected President, how do you think the Congress will react? What do you think will happen to every piece of legislation we’ve sent over to the Hill?”
“There’ll be a hundred and fifty investigating committees formed overnight,” Wyatt growled.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” I heard myself say. And immediately wished I hadn’t.
Anyone else would have at least frowned. I could see Wyatt, out of the corner of my eye, scowl darkly at me. But The Man grinned.
“Why do you say that, Meric?” he asked. I was stuck with it. “We-ell… if there’s a lot of noise and hoopla about the incident, then whoever’s trying to ship a double in here might get scared off.”
The President looked over to Wyatt. “Hadn’t thought about that angle of it. Have you?”
“It’s not worth thinking about,” he answered testily. “The whole goddamned Government would grind to a halt while everybody in the world tried to figure out if you are who you claim you are.”
“I suppose so,” Halliday said.
“This isn’t the first time?” I asked. “It’s happened before?”
He nodded. “In Denver, just before the Inauguration. A body was found in the same hotel Laura and I were in, the night before we left for Washington.”
“He looked just like you?”
“So they tell me. I didn’t see him. McMurtrie had been assigned to me all through the campaign. He took care of it. Cleaning woman discovered the body, I understand, and ran into one McMurtrie’s men without even taking a look at the corpse’s face.”
“Lucky,” I said.
Wyatt grumbled, “With a little more luck like that we can all go down the chute.”
I
must have been staring at the President, because he gave me his slow, personal smile and said, “It’s okay, Meric. It’s really me.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… I, hell, I’m scared of this.”
“That’s a healthy reaction.”
“But don’t you think you ought to be digging into this harder? Deeper? I mean, McMurtrie’s a bodyguard, not a detective. You’ve got the entire apparatus of the Government at your disposal…”
He stopped me with an upraised hand. “Meric… Meric. Think a minute. I’m not Premier Blagdanoff, much less Chairman Chao. It’s not my Government. I don’t own it, and I can’t use it to suit my whim.”
“But the intelligence people… the Justice Department…”
“Might be in on it,” Wyatt snapped.
“ What!”
“How do we know who we can trust? Somebody’s doing this… somebody damned close to the White House. Maybe somebody in the White House.” The blue vein in the old man’s forehead throbbed angrily.
Halliday fixed him with a gaze. “Robert, this is no time to go paranoid.”
“I know, I know…”
“That’s another reason why this investigation must be kept as small and quiet as possible. We could unleash a witch hunt that would make the McCarthy craze in the fifties and Alonzo’s purge of the eighties look like kindergarten games. We’ve got to keep things under control.” And his hands pressed flat on the desk top, a gesture I had seen him use in moments of stress a hundred times.
“But McMurtrie can’t handle it,” I insisted. “He isn’t the right man for the job.”
It was my turn to get stared at. “He’s the man I assigned to handle it,” the President said. His voice was calm, quiet, and iron hard.
I guess I still didn’t look convinced, because he went on, “He’ll have access to anyone in the Executive branch of Government that he wants. He can pick out the best team of investigators that the nation can produce. But it will be a small team, working directly for McMurtrie, on leave from the regular departments.”
“And reporting to me,” Wyatt said, “instead of some agency director who’s worried more about his bureaucracy than the life of the President.”
