by Ben Bova
“I will. But while we’re both here, I’d like to get your opinions firsthand.”
“Waste of time,” he snapped.
“Why?”
“Because I have no opinions!”
“Suppose I asked you if the man sitting in the White House this morning is actually James J. Halliday?”
His breath caught on that one.
I stepped closer to him. “Is one of those… corpses… the President?”
He glanced at Thornton, then back to me. “I can only tell you that each of those corpses looks exactly like the President. Same height, same weight. Same fingerprints, retinal patterns, ear-lobe structure, cephalic index. Every physical determinant I have measured is precisely the same as the records Dr. Klienerman gave me for the President.”
“Fingerprints,” I echoed.
“Everything,” he repeated. “They are physically identical to each other and tothe President. They are not machines, not automata or plastic creations. They are completely human, as human as you or I. More human than I am, considering…”
“Who could produce such exact duplicates?”
Dr. Peña was silent on that one.
“Well… what killed them?” I asked.
His head sank onto his chest. His eyes closed. Thornton stepped between us. “I told you not to tax him too far.”
But Peña waved a feeble hand. “No… it is all right. I’m perfectly capable of… answering him.”
“You should be resting,” Thornton insisted.
“What killed them?” I asked again.
He gave a one-gasp laugh, a nasty accusative little snort. “What killed them? A very good question.An excellent question.”
“Well? What did?”
He looked up at me, his eyes glittering with pain or hate or maybe both. “Nothing killed them. Nothing at all. No marks of violence. No poison. Not even asphyxiation. They simply died. Like marionettes whose strings have been cut. They simply fell down and… died.”
SEVEN
All the way on the flight from Minneapolis to Denver I nibbled on Dr. Peña’s words.Nothing killed them… they just fell down and… died. Cause of death: unknown. They just stopped living. Two adult human males who looked exactly like the President of the United States. Each died within a hundred yards of the real President. Each died of—nothing.
I was out of my league and I knew it. But something stubborn in me (or maybe something scared witless) told me to follow McMurtrie’s trail. McMurtrie knew what he was doing. If he had gone to Aspen to see General Halliday, that’s where I was going, too.
It’s hard to believe that Aspen was once a center of the youth cult. The old city had begun as a silver miners’ boom town, then rusticated for a long while, and then had become a ski resort. Kids from all over the country flocked there a couple of generations ago, to ski and loaf in the winter snows and summer sunshine. Easy living. But all things change. The kids grew up, started businesses, got respectable. Aspen became a very exclusive resort, especially after Colorado followed Nevada’s lead and legalized gambling and prostitution.
Funny. Old Las Vegas had become a ghost town after the Shortage Riots of the nineties. It was really a defenseless city. When Dahlgren led his army of unemployed against the “temples of sin and gold,” as he evangelistically put it, they burned the casinos and hotels to the ground. When they tried the following year to sack Denver, Morton J. Halliday, an obscure colonel in the Colorado National Guard, became a national hero. He saved Denver from the mob. He faced them down with trained, disciplined troops. And then he fed them, put them to work rebuilding the damage they had done in Pueblo and Albuquerque, and became the first honest-to-god hero this nation had seen since Sirica.
So now Aspen was a stronghold of the rich and the elderly, a bastion of wealthy and quiet luxurious living tucked among the mighty guardian peaks of the Rockies. Las Vegas was this generation’s youth center; kids lived out on the desert in communes all around the burned-out Strip, using the still-functioning solar power stations to pump up water from the deep wells.
Flying into Aspen had never improved much from the earliest days. You still had to bounce through the rough mountain air, lurching every which way while the plane’s entertainment tape fed you P.R. garbage about how “the clear air makes the peaks seem much closer than they actually are.”
I had white knuckles and sweaty palms all through the forty-minute flight. By the time we landed, my stomach was in a mess. It calmed down a bit on the taxi ride to the Halliday enclave. You didn’t just drop in on General Halliday. Not even if you worked in the White House. He ruled this area—the whole state of Colorado, in fact—from his mansion on Red Peak—the Western White House, when his son was home. When James J. had first become governor of Colorado, most political pundits had assumed that he was just a front man for his powerful father. They got several stunning surprises when James proved to be his own man. You couldn’t predict the Governor’s behavior by finding out what the General wanted. This caused some towering arguments between them. I’d seen a few that raged from cocktails through dawn.
The taxi dropped me off at the gate house, a solid stone, pitched roof, four-story building that could have held a couple of Swiss chalets and Fort Apache inside it. Actually, it quartered most of the General’s security staff. Many of the older men had been the scared young troopers who’d made a hero out of the General back in Denver. And there was enough new blood to take on the state police, it seemed to me.
A helicopter droned past as I crunched along the gravel walkway up to the guardhouse’s front door. The reception area was sliced into two spaces: a small lobby just inside the door, where visitors stand, and, on the other side of a transparent bulletproof screen, a much larger area staffed mostly by women sitting at desks, phone switchboards, and television monitoring devices.
The girl at the desk closest to the partition looked up as the door closed silently behind me.
“Yessir, can I help you?” She had a pleasant smile, the kind they teach you in those schools that specialize in getting ahead in the world.
I told her my name, and she recognized who I was almost instantly. The “almost” was a glance at the little computer screen on her desk. Fast computer, with deep personnel files.
It took only a few minutes for her to phone the main house, then smile up at me again and tell me that a car would pick me up outside in a few minutes. I thanked her and went outside to bask in the spring sunshine.
Snow was still banked deep around the building, but the sun was warm and birds were chirping cheerfully in the newly leafing trees. I walked across the cleared gravel-covered parking area to the lip of the trail. You could see the whole valley from up here, sparkling in the snow like a picture in a tourist brochure. The air was clear, and clean. I remembered nights up here when I had first started working for The Man, going out for long walks with him. We’d start out talking about R D policy and end up stargazing.
The car came and I was driven to the main house. The driver took me inside and ushered me into a library: dark woods; ceiling-high bookshelves covering three walls, except for a stone fireplace; windows on the fourth wall overlooking a pine forest. The fireplace was empty, although the room was comfortably warm. I paced between the easy chairs in front of the hearth and the couch alongside the windows.
The door opened, and Robert Wyatt stepped into the room. I felt my mouth open in surprise.
“I thought you were in Washington.”
He looked annoyed, thin lips pressed tight. “I could say the same for you.”
“I’m looking for McMurtrie. I told the woman at the gate house that he’s the one I want to see.”
“Too late,” His Holiness said.
My stomach clenched. “What do you mean?”
“He just ’coptered out of here, going back to Denver and then to Washington.”
For a few heartbeats we stood facing each other, me by the windows, His Holiness across the room, only three paces
from the door. Between us was a Persian carpet, glowing red and gold where the sun streaked across it.
“What did you want with McMurtrie?” Wyatt asked me.
Good question. What could I answer?I wanted him to hold my hand and tell me everything’s going to be okay. I said, “I want to stay on top of this investigation. I decided to stick with him. This is too big…”
“How did you know he was here?”
“Dr. Peña told me.”
Wyatt’s head actually jerked back a few centimeters. The vein in his forehead pulsed. “You were at North Lake? When?”
“This morning…” Which reminded me. “Robert, I haven’t had anything to eat all damned day. How about a sandwich or something?”
He almost looked as if he were going to say no. Instead, “Wait here. I think the General will want to see you.”
So I waited. I sat at the desk near the door and phoned Vickie, told her where I was. She looked funny; not upset, really, but kind of tense.
“You all right?” I asked her.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “It’s you I’m worrying about. Hunter’s getting to enjoy talking with the President and briefing the press corps. He’ll probably want to move into your office by tomorrow morning.”
“Let him,” I said.
“Be serious.” She was. Her elfin face was as close to grimness as it could get. On anyone else it would look like the beginnings of a smile.
“Okay. Serious,” I said. “Get me a rundown on Dr. Alfonso Peña. College degrees, career, the whole curriculum vitae. And a rundown on North Lake Research Laboratories. I want to know where they get their money from.”
“You ended a sentence with a preposition,” she said.
“Arrant nonsense, up with which—”
“—I shall not put,” Vickie quoted with me. We laughed together.
“All right. I’ll be back in the office tomorrow. Have that information ready for me early. And tell Hunter to hold off on moving his office furniture.”
The door to the library opened and Wyatt came in, followed by a self-driven cart loaded with lunch.
“To hear is to obey,” Vickie was saying.
I glanced at the food, then back to the phone screen. “Hey,” I said to her, “you’re supposed to smile when you say that.”
She made a smile, but it didn’t look very convincing.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Call me if your plans change, will you?”
“Okay. Will do.”
I clicked off and turned to Wyatt. “The General still sets a good table.”
“There’s beer in the refrigerator section,” he said, “underneath the tablecloth on your side.”
“Terrific.”
We were halfway through our first sandwiches when the General strode into the library.
Morton J. Halliday looked as though he were in uniform even when he was wearing an old cordu-roy shirt and faded chinos, his costume at that moment. He was tall, with an imperious look to his eyes, a haughty nose, and an iron-gray mustache. His hair was clipped short, in time-honored military style, and nearly all white now. He didn’t show the least sign of baldness, something he teased Wyatt about on those rare occasions when he’d had enough to drink to let down his self-control a little.
He had the mien and style of an emperor, and some of his very oldest friends—like Wyatt—could recall when the General had first married and quietly proclaimed to his closest associates that he was going to father a President. He’d done exactly that, even though his wife had died while the son was an infant and he had raised James J. by himself.
Not exactly singlehanded, of course. But the General had never let James J. wander far from this mountain stronghold on Red Peak. Instead, he brought the world to the boy. The best scholars on the planet tutored James. Local gossip had it that there were more Nobel Prize laureates on Red Peak at any given moment during the boy’s schooling years than anywhere else on earth. The General bought the Aspen Institute and gave it to his son as a sixteenth birthday present. And when James did travel, it was with a security team as large and dedicated as the Secret Service guards for the President. It was like a small army traveling. He was born to be President, and he started living like one so far back in his childhood that he had taken to living in the White House as if it were his natural habitat.
There were always those who tried to find the strings that controlled James J. Halliday. The obvious link was from his father to the banking, mineral, and industrial interests that the General was tied to. I have to confess that my own first interest in Governor Halliday, the dark horse candidate for the Presidency, was exactly for that reason. I was going to find his feet of clay. I was going to expose his connections with the oil and banking and God-knows-what other big-money manipulators who were using him as a front man. I was going to knock him down. The son of a bitch had stolen Laura from me.
I never found those links. They just weren’t there. Halliday was his own man, as fiercely independent and tough-minded as his hero father. Despite myself, I liked the man. I wound up working for him, of course. And the relationship between James and his father reminded me of the relationship between the ancient conqueror Alexander the Great and his father, Philip of Macedon: pride, love, competition, maybe envy. Philip had been assassinated, probably on order of his son.
Now the General stood before me, saber-straight and lean. He fixed me with his eyes as I was about to take a bite of my half-finished sandwich. I felt like a very small mouse that had just been spotted by a very hungry cat.
“Just what in hell is going on?” he said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. There was enough iron even in his calmest tones to swing a compass needle around.
A slice of tomato oozed out of my sandwich as I replied, “Good afternoon, General.” Dazzling comeback.
He strode over to our table. Wyatt got up and fetched a chair for him. I got to my feet.
As we all sat down, the General asked me, “Are you supposed to be the President’s press secretary, or some amateur detective out of a lousy TV show?”
I let the rest of my sandwich drop into the plate. “Is that a riddle or do you want a serious answer?”
He glared at Wyatt, as if it were his fault, then returned to me. “Listen, sonny, you’re supposed to be working in Washington. What in the name of hell are you doing running around the country-side to Minnesota and up here?”
“I’m trying to find out what’s going on, and who’s attempting to kill your son.”
“We have the whole mother-thumping FBI and Secret Service available for that. Plus the Army, Navy, and Aerospace Force, if we need ’em. Who the hell gave you a sheriff’s badge?”
I took a deep breath. His bark’s worse than his bite, I told myself, even though I didn’t believe it. “General Halliday… sir. It may come as a shock to you, but I cannot, and will not, try to keep this story away from the news hounds unless I know exactly what the story is. I’m not going to operate in the dark.”
Wyatt smirked. “And how much have you found out by running up to Minnesota?”
“At least I know as much about what killed those duplicates as Dr. Peña does.”
“You met Peña?” the General snapped.
“Yes.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“Not a helluva lot. Said he can’t determine what killed the duplicates. Apparently they just keeled over and died.”
“That’s the same report we got,” Wyatt said. “And the same information you would have gotten, if you’d been in your office this morning.”
“Really?” I asked.
His Holiness clenched his teeth and said nothing. I turned back to the General. “Why was McMurtrie here? Did he bring Dr. Klienerman with him?”
Now it was the General’s turn to keep his mouth clamped shut. He looked at Wyatt and cocked an eyebrow.
“The first… body,” Wyatt said, his voice chokingly strained, “was foun
d in Denver. McMurtrie figured as long as he was coming that close, he might as well drop in here and tell us what was going on.”
“He knew you were here?” I asked Wyatt.
“We were in constant communication all the time,” he answered.
“What’s Dr. Klienerman have to say about all this?”
“Nothing,” the General snapped. “Not a damned thing.”
“He and Dr. Peña didn’t get along very well,” Wyatt explained. “You know how it is when two prima donnas get under the same roof.”
“What do you mean?”
Wyatt looked even more uncomfortable. “Peña wouldn’t allow Klienerman to see the bodies of the duplicates.”
“What? But he’s the President’s personal physician! If one of those bodies is the President…”
“They’re not,” said the General.
“How can you be certain?”
“Peña’s satisfied…”
“Dr. Peña told me they were exactly alike, for Chrissake!” I knew I was shouting, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. “He can’t tell one from the other, and he can’t tell either one from the President’s medical profile.”
“They are not the President,” the General insisted.
I took a good look at him. Arguing with him on that point would have been like trying to tear down Red Peak with a soggy toothpick. He had made up his mind and that was that.
Wyatt said, “Meric, you really ought to get back to Washington and stay close to your office. We’ll keep you informed.”
“I still want to see McMurtrie,” I said.
“That will be impossible,” the General said.
“Why can’t—”
“McMurtrie’s helicopter crashed between here and Mt. Evans. I got the word just before I came in here.”
I couldn’t move. Not even my mouth would work. It was like being paralyzed.
Wyatt seemed stunned, too. But only for a moment. He asked, “McMurtrie…?”
“Dead. Everybody on board was killed. McMurtrie, Klienerman and the pilot.”
