by Ben Bova
Wyatt finally stirred himself. “If you think…”
But the President silenced him with the slightest lift of one finger. “Robert, it’s the same conclusion I came to weeks ago.”
The old man looked truly shocked. “What?”
“I think it’s time we brought this all out into the open,” the President said. “Time to clear the air.”
He pushed his chair back from the desk and got to his feet. We automatically got up, too.
“Come with us, Meric,” said The Man.
Wyatt seemed to understand what he was going to do. “Wait up a minute… he’s not family.”
The President smiled sardonically. “He is now. He knows as much about us as anyone. Come on, Meric.”
We went out the side door of the office, down to the basement, past the inspection station where Hank still stood on duty, and along the West Wing to the private elevator. Wyatt pushed the button, the doors slid open as if the machine had been waiting all day to be called on, and we followed the President into the tiny, redwood-paneled elevator cab.
There were no tourists in the White House at this hour of the afternoon, of course, but we rode in the windowless elevator past the ground and first floors and got off in the quiet main corridor of the second floor, the sacrosanct living quarters for the President and his First Lady.
Wordlessly, The Man paced along the richly carpeted hallway and led us to the Lincoln Sitting Room. I had never seen it before, although I knew which room it was, right next to the Lincoln Bedroom. I had seen both of them in photographs.
But when the President opened the door, it wasn’t the fin de siècle furniture or the ornate draperies that hit me. Three more James J. Hallidays were already in the room: one by the window, sitting in a green velvet-covered chair; another at the scroll desk, tapping out something on a computer terminal’s keyboard; the third standing by the portrait of Chester Arthur that hung on the far wall.
I gulped.
The President—the one I had come upstairs with—grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me toward the middle of the room. Pointing, he introduced: “That’s Jeffrey, scowling alongside President Arthur. And Jackson, jiggling the national debt figures. And Joshua, by the window. You’ve met all three of them before.”
They nodded or smiled at me. But Joshua said nervously, “Why bring an outsider into this? There’s been enough trouble already, hasn’t there?”
“Meric’s not an outsider,” John said. “And if we want to keep our troubles out of the public view, we’re going to need Meric’s continued whole-hearted cooperation.”
Joshua didn’t reply, but it was clear that he wasn’t happy to see me up there in their private clubroom.
“What’s going on, John?” Jeffrey asked. “Why the melodramatics?”
I was still goggle-eyed. All of them looked exactly alike. Their voices were the same. The trim of their hair. The way they gestured with their hands. The only discernible difference was their clothing. Jeffrey, the defense expert, was wearing a simple one-piece tan jumpsuit. Jackson, the economist, wore a more conservative dark blue shirtjac and slacks, while Joshua—whose main interest was natural resources and agricultural policy—had a yellow sportshirt over pseudosuede jeans. A soldier, a banker, and a farmer. I tried to fix them in my mind that way. James John—the President, I kept thinking—wore his usual work clothes: dark slacks, comfortable boots and an open-neck light shirt.
Wyatt took a chair near the door and I drifted, weak-kneed, toward the windows as James John answered.
“We’ve all been trying to hide from the facts. I think it’s time we faced up to them. The deaths haven’t been natural. They were murders.”
Jackson looked up from his computer keyboard. “No way, John. If Peña couldn’t find any signs…”
“Peña was convinced it was murder,” John said. “He couldn’t figure out how it was done, but he knew it was murder.”
“No, I don’t believe that,” Jackson said. “Peña was just emotionally unable to accept the fact that his work… well… it’s failing.”
Jeffrey said tightly, “Each of us might go just as the others did.”
“No,” John said. “I don’t believe that.” It was like hearing an echo of Jackson’s words from a moment earlier.
“Sure, you can afford to disbelieve it,” said Joshua. “You’re the natural, the firstborn. Whatever it is probably won’t affect you.”
“That’s not so,” John answered. The voice was still calm, but there was an edge to it.
Wyatt said, “You’re all genetically identical. What happens to one of you, as far as your body chemistry is concerned, will happen to you all. Lord, you all got the mumps at the same time when you were kids, and it lasted exactly the same number of days for each of you. Like clock-work. John’s not immune to anything that the rest of you are susceptible to.”
“That’s only theory, Robert,” Jeffrey said. “Everything about cloning processes is totally new… nobody’s done it before with human beings. We’re the first.”
I was starting to see differences among them. Slight differences in nuance, in character. They were four identical brothers all right. But just like identical twins, although they looked alike on the outside, they saw the world differently, and the insides of their heads were far from identical.
Wyatt was saying, “We could keep you in a germ-free environment, back at the lab. Then you wouldn’t have to worry…”
“That’s impossible!” Jackson snapped. “How in hell can we function in the Presidency from a germ-free cell at North Lake? It’s tough enough playing this seven-man shuffle—”
“Four-man shuffle,” Jeffrey corrected. “We’re down to four now.”
John was still standing in the middle of the room. He raised his hands for silence.
“Now, listen,” he said. “I’ve been giving the matter a lot of thought. The deaths were not natural. They were murders.”
Jackson shook his head but kept silent. Joshua seemed to tense forward in his chair. Jeffrey, who was nearest me, asked quietly: “So what are we going to do about it, John?”
“Find out which one of us is the murderer.”
I think my heart actually stopped beating. For what seemed like an eternity, nothing stirred in the room. Not even the dust motes in the slanting sunlight from the windows seemed to move. Everything froze.
Finally Jeffrey found his voice. “What… did you say?”
I’d never seen such an expression on the President’s face before. It must have been the way Lincoln looked when he learned of the carnage at Gettysburg.
“It’s one of us,” John said, his voice deceptively level. “No one else could be doing it. One of us is systematically killing the others. One of us wants to be the sole occupant of that office down in the West Wing.”
They looked back and forth among themselves. No one spoke. Wyatt seemed to be in a state of shock, ashen-faced, immobile, staring at the floor. I could see the wheels working inside those four identical heads. They recognized the truth of it. Maybe each of them had suspected it from the first, but pushed it away. Now it was out in the open. They could no longer ignore it.
“One of us wants to be the only President of the United States,” John repeated.
“I can’t…” Joshua started, then lapsed back into silence.
“It does make some sense,” Jackson admitted.
Jeffrey said, “But… killing his own brothers. It’s horrible… he’d have to be insane.”
John nodded. “I suppose so. But power can corrupt, we all know that. There’ve been enough murderous families in history to drive the point home. And we’ve done a few kinky acts here and there… we’re not immune to the disease.”
“It can’t be!” Joshua said firmly. “I just won’t believe it. Not unless you can show me how the murders were done. Hell, we don’t even know that they were murders.”
“Wrong, Josh,” said John softly. “I know.”
Wyatt looked
up at him. “Tell me. Tell me how it was done and make it convincing, because I don’t think I could ever believe that one of you boys is killing the others.”
“It’s very simp1e,” John said. “I merely asked myself how I’d go about killing the rest of us. Once I became convinced that they were murders, I tried to work out in my head what I would have done if I’d wanted to murder my brothers. It didn’t take long to figure it out. Just the past few days… that’s all the time I needed.”
“And?”
“The key was Jesse.”
“He died nearly forty years ago.”
“Yes, but how did he die?’
Wyatt answered, “From a breakdown of his body’s immunological defenses. He lost his immunities to disease germs. The only way he could have been saved would have been to put him in a germ-free chamber, but we didn’t recognize that untilit was too late.”
John nodded agreement. “And Joe, Jerry, and Jason all died the same way. All body immunities suddenly gone. Common cold germs became fatal to them.”
No one moved. No one answered. We all focused on John so intently that an ICBM attack could have hit Washington and we’d never have known it.
“I checked with North Lake a week ago,” John said. “Put in a scrambled call to their contracts department. They gave me a list of the research contracts they’re now working on for the Defense Department. One of them is for the development of a mutated virus that breaks down the human body’s immunological systems, like AIDS, only faster. It’s top-secret work. Access to information about it is limited to only a handful of people in the Pentagon.” He almost smiled, sadly. “I had to remind the man I spoke with that I’m the Commander-in-Chief.”
“A virus that breaks down the body’s immune systems?”
“Non-traceable,” John said. “Apparently the Defense Intelligence Agency wants to develop the virus as a standby for perfect assassinations. No visible cause of death. The victim just stops living. Any germs in his body can multiply out of control and kill him in less than a day.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And you’ve known about this for a week?” I asked.
John gave a helpless shrug. “I’ve worried over it for a week. I guess I didn’t want to face reality. You forced me to bring it out into the light of day, Meric.”
“This virus is being developed for the Defense Department?” Joshua asked.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” Jeffrey snapped.
“Nobody’s saying you did,” John answered.
“This virus,” Wyatt asked, “it’s been tested? It works?”
“It’s been used on primate apes and other lab animals. Totally successful. One hundred percent fatal. The North Lake people haven’t tried it on human beings, for obvious reasons…”
“But you’re saying,” Wyatt’s voice trembled badly “that one of you boys—one of you in this room—got his hands on samples of this virus and used it…used it to…” His voice cracked altogether. He buried his face in his hands.
John stepped over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We have to face the facts, Robert. It’s what I would do, if I wanted to be the only resident of this house. And we all think pretty much alike, don’t we?”
“That’s for sure,” Jackson said.
“So—what do we do?” Joshua asked, his voice pitched higher than the others.
Jeffrey gave a sharp, bitter laugh that was almost a cough. “It’s simple. We wait until there’s only one of us left, and he’s the guilty one.”
“Or,” John countered, “we let the guilty one know that we’re aware of what he’s doing, and how he’s doing it, and we ask him to come forward and admit it.”
They looked uneasily at one another.
“I think we all know that whoever’s doing it is mentally unbalanced,” John said. “We won’t punish him. We want to take care of him, cure him. Whichever one of us it is, he’s our brother. We want to help him, not punish him.”
No one moved, except to search one another’s eyes for an admission of guilt.
Finally Joshua said, “We’d better bring the General out here. Maybe he can get to the bottom of this.”
Wyatt shook his head. “No… he’s an old man. He’s not as tough as he pretends to be. If he ever found out about this…”
Jackson said, “If he ever finds out that we went through this without bringing him in on it, it might kill him.”
Jeffrey grinned ruefully. “Or he might kill the rest of us.”
John said to Wyatt, “Robert, you’d better go out to Aspen and tell him about this. In person. No phone calls. See what he wants to do.”
“He’ll come boiling back here at Mach Five,” Wyatt said.
“All right. If that’s what he wants to do, we won’t stand in his way.” He turned to his brothers. “Right?”
“No way we could stop him,” Jackson admitted.
“Someone should check out North Lake Labs,” Joshua said. “It might be possible to find out who took the virus samples.”
“Ridiculous!” Jeffrey snapped. “Even if one of us was foolish enough to acquire the virus cultures in person—which I doubt—he wouldn’t have given his correct name. None of the lab people can tell us apart. Not even Peña could.”
“I suppose so,” Joshua admitted. “We used to play all sorts of tricks on him,” he said to me wistfully.
But John said, “We should check out the lab, though. I’ll get Pournelle at the FBI to take charge of that end of things personally.”
“You’re not going to tell him about us?” Jackson asked sharply.
“Of course not,” John said. “But I want to find out who made off with that virus sample.”
“If anybody did.”
“Somebody must have. And Pournelle’s people can find out who and when. Then we find the man and talk to him ourselves.”
“If it was a man,” Jackson said, with a slight smirk. “You’re lapsing into male chauvinism, Johnny. Don’t do that in front of the voters.”
They all laughed. Somehow, it annoyed me.
“Hold it!” I heard myself shout at them.
They stopped and turned toward me, four identical looks of polite amusement, four faces saying, What’s the hired man doing, yelling at us?
“It’s not good enough,” I said.
“What’s not?”
I had to face them down. All of them. “You’re still treating this as if it’s a family squabble.”
“Isn’t it?’’
“Hell, no! It’s still a plot to kill the President, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Meric, we’re taking the strongest action we can,” John said. “You don’t want us to do anything that will tip off the press to our… brotherhood, do you? That would ruin everything. I’d have to… we’d have to resign the Presidency.”
“That would put Lazar in the White House.”
“This nation’s not ready for a Jewish President.”
“Not with the Middle East at war again.”
I stood my ground. They were making me sore, tinkering with the Presidency, the nation, the whole goddamned world as if it were a private family affair.
“I don’t care what you say,” I told them. “This isn’t enough. Checking North Lake Labs and sitting around here chatting with each other. For Chrissakes, one of you has killed three of your brothers!”
“That’s our business,” Jeffrey said, glaring at me.
“The hell it is! It’s mine, and every other citizen’s, too.”
“What are you trying to say, Meric?”
I really didn’t know, but as usual my mouth worked faster than my brain. “It just isn’t going to be enough. The steps you’re taking… they won’t tell you a goddamned thing. Not until it’s too late. The murderer can wipe out all three of you overnight, if he wants to, while you’re still futzing around checking records at North Lake or consulting with the General.”
Jackson started to say something, but John hush
ed him.
“What do you suggest?” John asked.
“No suggestion. Action. I’m going to call a press conference in forty-eight hours. Two days from now. And I’m going to spill my guts to whoever’ll listen. Unless you’ve got the murderer before then.”
“You can’t do that!” Jackson snapped.
“Try and stop me.”
“The murderer will try,” John said almost sadly. “I think, Meric, for your own safety’s sake, you’d better reconsider.”
I could see differences in their faces now. Joshua looked scared. Jackson was blazingly angry. Jeffrey was angry, too, but the smoldering kind that builds slowly and waits its chance for revenge. John looked sad, and something more—relieved? Glad that the end was in sight?
I shook my head. “No. There’s no other way. Either you flush him out or I break the story. Otherwise he’ll have the rest of you dead and sit down in that Oval Office all by himself. And that’s what I’m really afraid of.”
“He’ll have to kill me, too” Wyatt said.
“What makes you think he wouldn’t?” Jackson answered. The old man sagged back in his chair. But I had a different thought. I could see Wyatt serving the last remaining James J. Halliday, right there in the Oval Office, burying the fact that the President was a multi-murderer under a ton of justifications about family duty and the nation’s needs.
John took a couple of steps toward me. Quietly, he said, “Meric, if we can’t talk you out of this, the least I can do is give you a Secret Service security guard. If you’re going to set yourself up as a target, we might as well try to protect you.”
“All right,” I said. “How about Hank Solomon? He and I get along pretty well.”
He looked at me quizzically. If I’d been really sharp, instead of just dazzled by all the high drama going on, I would have realized that mentioning Hank’s name removed any doubt from the murderer’s mind about who the third member of my pitiful little gang was.
But right at that moment I wasn’t thinking about that at all. As I mentioned Hank’s name, somehow it popped into my mind that there was one person involved in this affair that not even one of Halliday’s brothers had mentioned. Neither Wyatt nor the General had ever brought up her name.
