by Ben Bova
Halliday’s long-term plan was to build new communities in the land the internees had reclaimed and let them settle there permanently. He insisted that returning a ghetto kid to the place where he had committed his crime was merely inviting him to commit more crimes. The psychologists were behind him on this, but a strange combination of urban political bosses, real estate manipulators, and civil libertarians had formed a coalition against the program.
They preferred to sit in their armed, walled-in enclaves and let the cities crumble. I paced back and forth across the department store’s main entrance, watching the shoppers hustle in kind out, their faces intent on buying and prices and what to do about dinner tonight. They went thinking ahead. They seldom did.
My mind had wandered so far afield that I nearly jumped out of my boots when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned to see a Secret Service security guard type, neatly dressed in a conservative suit that was probably bulging with armaments.
“The First Lady will see you on the roof of the store, sir,” he said quietly, automatically eyeing the shoppers passing by us, “near the helicopter pad.”
He quietly led me through the store. It wasn’t very crowded. Most of the Plaza housewives were on their way home now to prepare dinners for their husbands and kids. I wondered why the management maintained such a big, expensive store when anyone with a modern picture-phone and home computer could do all the shopping from bed. But then I guessed that the store was more of a showplace, a central meeting ground, an entertainment center, an excuse to get out of the house.
All this philosophizing, of course, was my feeble way of keeping me from getting all worked up about seeing Laura. Think about other things—an old Catholic remedy. But as I rode up three flights of escalators behind that Secret Service guard, I could feel my temperature rising. We went through an office area and up a flight of metal stairs, my pulse throbbing in my ears louder and louder with each step.
He opened a metal door and we stepped out onto the cement roof. A blue and white helicopter sat in the middle of the flat expanse, idle and empty. Smallish job; probably could hold no more than six. The rest of the roof was bare, unoccupied.
“Mrs. Halliday will be here in a few minutes,” the security man said. He shut the metal door, leaving me totally alone on the roof.
A decent breeze was blowing, and from up here I could see all the way across the sprawling rooftops of Greater Washington to the Monument’s spire sticking into the light blue springtime sky. Some high wispy cirrus were the only clouds, except for the contrails of jets.
I walked over to the edge of the roof, feeling like a duke standing atop a king’s palace, surveying his liege’s domain, about to have a private meeting with his queen. Dangerous business, I thought. Especially if the king doesn’t know about it.
It suddenly hit me that I was very vulnerable. Physically. Alone up here on the roof, I made an easy target for a sniper perched on any of the other rooftops around this building. I backed away from the edge. The thwap-thwap-thwap of a nearby helicopter startled me. They could get me from the air.
I could feel myself sinking into paranoid fears when the metal door opened again and three security men stepped through. I stood frozen, as if my shoes had been welded to the rooftop’s concrete. But they ignored me totally and fanned out across the roof to take up stations exactly 120 degrees apart. You didn’t need any measuring instruments to know how precise these guys were.
A half-minute passed; then the door opened again and Laura came through, followed immediately by two more guards. One stayed at the door and the other walked straight past me to the helicopter.
Laura came to where I stood, still rooted—but for another reason now. She smiled and held out her hand.
“Hello, Meric. It was good of you to come.”
This was the first time I’d seen her, close enough to talk to, to touch, since the Inauguration. And the first time I’d seen her without Halliday between us in nearly three years. She was stunning. You’ve seen her face on all the magazine covers and on television. You’ve heard beauty experts take her apart, claiming her eyes are a bit too large for the shape of her face, her cheekbones a shade too prominent, her lips thinner than they ought to be. Fuck ’em all. She was beautiful.
She gave the impression of being tall, although actually she was a head shorter than I am. (She looked taller with Halliday, for some reason.) Dark, dark hair, pulled straight back. And a slightly olive cast to her complexion that hinted of Mediterranean origins. The slim, almost boyish body of a ballet dancer. The first time we had made love, my first sight of her naked body had almost dismayed me, she looked so bony and stringy. But I quickly learned that she was soft enough. And wondrously supple.
It was awful. I felt like a kid who’d been caught jerking off in the bathroom. My throat was dry, my palms sweaty.
“Hello, Laura,” I managed to say. My voice sounded cracked and hoarse.
“You’ve put on a little weight,” she teased. “Washington life agrees with you.”
“Rubber chicken… the banquet circuit.”
She nodded and toyed with the shoulder strap of her handbag. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, very summery. No sunglasses. Her eyes were just as gray-green as ever.
“You wanted to talk to me,” I said.
She took a deliberate slow breath, like an athlete preparing herself for a supreme effort.
“Yes,” Laura said. “I know about what happened last night. And in Denver.”
“And?”
“And I know Jim has asked you to keep the entire matter hushed up.”
“We talked about it this morning, he and Wyatt and I.”
“Yes.” She looked up at me, searching my face. It was all I could do to keep my hands at my sides. “Meric… I’ve got to know where you stand on this. You might… well, it occurred to me that you might not want to keep the story quiet.”
I guess I blinked at her. “Why?”
She suddenly looked annoyed. “It’s a story that could ruin Jim. And you… the two of us before I met him…”
“Hold it,” I said. “You’re afraid that I’ll blow the story open to hurt him? Or you?”
“I know it’s wrong for me even to suggest it…”
“It sure as hell is!” I snapped. “Okay, so I’m still zonked-out over you. But what kind of a son of a bitch do you think I am? I work for The Man. I work for him.”
“I know, I know… it was stupid of me to ask. But I couldn’t help wondering… I had to hear it from you…”
“You never did understand me,” I grumbled. “You want me to swear a loyalty oath? You want to go down to a bookstore and find a stack of Bibles?”
“Don’t, Meric. That’s not fair.”
“The hell it isn’t! You had to hear it from me in person. Crap! Sounds like something His Holiness would do—him and his suspicious goddamned mind.”
Her expression changed. “I did speak with Robert about you…” She let her voice trail off.
“He put you up to this?”
She looked away from me. “I wouldn’t say it that way. But… well, I did begin to wonder about you… about how you’d react… after he spoke to me.”
“That gritty old bastard,” I fumed.
She put her hand on my arm and started making soothing sounds and offered me a ride back downtown in her chopper. I went along with her, probably wagging my tail like a puppy dog that’d just gotten a pat on its head from its mistress.
It wasn’t until I was safely back in my apartment, and the city outside had gone dark with night, that I realized Wyatt couldn’t possibly have talked with her before she called me. He and I had been together in the West Wing staff dining room when she had called.
FIVE
St. Louis is a dull town. The people are dull.
The atmosphere is humid and oppressive. Old Man River is wide and sluggish and closed in on both banks by factories that keep the water rank and brown, desp
ite a whole generation’s steady work at cleaning up the pollution. The factory owners buy off the city fathers, who not only pocket the graft, but get extra money from Washington for pollution control, since they can show that their pollution problems are still serious. It was something that Halliday had his personal hounds sniffing at; the smell was easy to detect, but tracking it back to its source—with courtroom -tight proof—was another matter.
The hotel where I stayed was dull, too. The staff was downright sullen, as if they resented the idea of cash customers who asked them to rouse themselves and put out a little work. I got the feeling that the chambermaids would be perfectly happy to let me make my own bed. The bartender down in the lobby was no better. Even the lifeguard at the fenced-in pool acted as if his duty were to prevent anybody from disturbing the water. The pool was nearly deserted.
The National Association of News Media Managers held their meeting in the hotel’s main ballroom, which was beautifully decorated in Gay Nineties gilt and rococo: cherubs on the ceiling, bunches of gilded grapes adorning the window frames, heavy velvet drapes. I half-expected to see Mark Twain give the first evening’s keynote address, instead of me. He would have done a lot better.
They applauded my speech, all fifteen hundred of the NANMM representatives, especially the trigger words Vickie and my staff had put in:freedom of information, open access to the newsmakers, making the Constitution work, andthe healthy adversary relationship between the Government and the news media. Especially that last one; they loved that one.
These overweight desk jockeys, these owners of newspapers and television stations, these white-haired tight-fisted executives who had never been on the firing line trying to dig the truth out of a reluctant politician, who had suppressed more stories about their friends than they ever published about their enemies—these money handlers loved to think they were Hildy Johnson, Ed Murrow, Walter Lippmann, and Horace Greeley, all rolled into one. They pictured themselves as Citizen Kane, and maybe in that, at least, they were close to the mark.
So I gave them what they wanted to hear, and they applauded enthusiastically. Up until the previous week, I would have believed what I was telling them. The Halliday Administration was open, honest, and anxious to play fair with the media—not these stuffed penguins and their bejeweled ladies, but the real, working media.
But while I was speaking those glowing platitudes to them, I knew that I was sitting on the biggest story of them all, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it.
I made polite conversation through the reception after my speech, and got back to my suite upstairs as fast as I could. I felt drained, exhausted. And—as there had been for the past week—somewhere deep inside of me there was a fear gnawing away, like that last instant of a nightmare just before you awake, falling, falling, falling into something dark and terrible.
It was after midnight. My hotel suite was plush: bed big enough for half a dozen people, automated bar, comfortable sitting room for entertaining business guests. I plopped on the bed and called Vickie’s home number. The phone buzzed four times. I was about to click off when her voice answered, throaty and sleepy. The screen stayed a flickering gray. Then I realized it was after 1:00 A.M. in Washington.
“I woke you up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Meric?” Her voice brightened. “Hi. I must’ve just dozed off. I was sort of expecting you to call. Wait half a minute…”
The screen cleared and showed her, yellow hair tousled and eyes a little bleary. She had a green robe pulled up around her throat.
“How’d the speech go?” she asked.
“Good enough.”
“Count the applause?”
“No, let the computer analyze it when the tapes get to the office tomorrow.”
“You’re down.”
“It’s a down city,” I said.
But she was looking at me from the phone screen very intently. “No, you’ve been down for the past week or more. Whatever it is, it’s really got you bugged.”
“Never mind. I’ll live through it.”
“It started when she called you, didn’t it?”
“She?”
“The First Lady.” Somehow Vickie put an accent on the word “lady” that wasn’t entirely wholesome.
“Laura’s got nothing to do with it,” I said.
Vickie just shook her head. She wasn’t buying a word of it.
We just sat there for a silent moment or two, neither of us wanting to say anything, neither of us wanting to break the connection. I was totally alone except for this flickering electronic image of her.
“The convention’s not much fun?” Vickie asked at last.
“Bunch of bloodsuckers,” I grumbled. “I’m surrounded by the kinds of people I had to fight when I was a reporter. Fight them for raises. Fight to get the real news printed, the stuff they wanted to cover up to protect their friends. Now I’m a big-time political person. I’m supposed to smile at them and tell ’em we’re all in this together.”
She laughed, and the sound of it made me smile, too. “It’s a good thing you didn’t go into the State Department.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “maybe so.”
“Will you be able to stand it for another day? You’re scheduled for three network interviews tomorrow.”
“That’s okay. That’s with the working slobs. I get along fine with them.”
She tried to stifle a yawn.
“Hunter do okay with the daily briefing this morning?”
“Oh, yes,” Vickie said. “He was fine. No problems.” She yawned again.
“Aw, hell, I shouldn’t be keeping you up all night—”
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“But I do. Go to bed. We both need some sleep.”
“Meric?”
“Yeah?”
“I wish I were there with you.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it. She said it straight out, no games, no tricks.
Without thinking about it for an instant, I decided to misunderstand her. “You’d be just as bored and sore at this bunch of self-righteous hypocrites as I am.”
Her face didn’t change expression. But her voice went fainter. “Yes. I guess so.”
“Good night, Vickie.”
“Good night.”
I touched the button on the tiny keyboard alongside the phone, and its screen went blank and dead.
Shit! Added to everything else, now I was sore at myself.
The phone chimed softly. I punched the response button. A woman’s face filled the screen: middle-aged, but well kept; expensive makeup and hair styling.
“Mr. Albano, are you retiring for the evening?” I had seen her before. Where? Behind the hotel service desk down in the lobby, when I had checked in that morning.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is there anything we can provide for you?”
I heard myself chuckle. “Sure. A fifth of Scotch, a bucket of ice, and a tall redhead.”
She didn’t even blink. “Any particular age?”
“On the Scotch?”
“That, too.”
“Make it the best Scotch you’ve got. And the lady should be in her twenties. I’ll settle for that.”
“Certainly, sir.”
Like the rest of the hotel’s services, my night-cap left a lot to be desired. The redhead was willing, even enthusiastic. She was young and well built, the kind that would go to fat in another five years. Big bouncy siliconed breasts. And a brain the size of a walnut. Most intellectual topic of discussion: the local hockey team. Apparently she and another girl were keeping the visiting teams so busy that they inevitably lost when they played in St. Louis. So she claimed. Showed me a purseful of still photos of herself, her friend, and the top stars of the hockey league. Offered to run a videotape cassette in the room’s TV, if I’d add twenty to her fee.
At least she didn’t talk with her mouth full.
* * *
I got through the interviews the next day with a b
uzzing head and a rasping conscience. While I was sitting there pontificating on freedom of the press and being congratulated for my forth-rightness by the interviewers (Why are they all so alike? Movie idol faces, leather jackets and flowered shirts that were “mod” years ago, fag-English accents) the inside of my head was shouting at me that I was just as big a hypocrite as anybody in the game. The President was in danger and I was playing it quiet.
The last interview that afternoon was conducted by a boy-girl team. It was a typical TV studio: one corner cluttered with the benches and phony ship’s deck of a kiddies’ show; across the way, the podium, clocks, maps for the evening news show. We were sitting under the lights on a comfortable pile of cushions arranged to look like a conversation pit in a Persian palace. Sure enough, the “boy” half of the interview team wore a rust suede jacket and a gold silk shirt. At least the “girl”—a sharp-eyed woman in her thirties—had the brains to wear a slacks and vest outfit, the kind that lots of women were wearing back on the East Coast.
Halfway through the interview she impatiently interrupted her teammate to ask me, “But what’s the President really like? I mean, in person? When the doors are closed and the cameras are off?”
I shifted mental gears and launched into my standard paean of praise aboutJames J. Halliday, the man. Sure, we had worked out this spiel in the office, but most of it was from the heart. We didn’t have to labor very long or hard to come up with a good three minutes worth of glowing description about The Man. We all liked him.
But while my mouth was going through it’s motions, my brain decided that if I liked The Man so goddamned much I shouldn’t be sitting on these non-allergenic cushions talking about him. I ought to be helping him to find out who, or what, was trying to kill him.
I put in a call to McMurtrie right there in the studio as soon as the interview was over. It was late afternoon, nearly 4:00 P.M.
The White House operator told me that Mr. McMurtrie was out of town on a special assignment.
“Where?” I asked.
She looked like a chicken. Beady eyes, hooked little nose, pinched pasty-skinned face. She clucked impatiently once and answered, “We are not permitted to reveal that information.”
