The Multiple Man

by Ben Bova

  Laura. The First Lady. What did she know about all this? And whose wife was she?

  FIFTEEN

  I deliberately avoided calling Vickie when I got out of the White House. My mind was in turmoil. Too much had happened too quickly. If I was going to be a murderer’s target, okay, there wasn’t much I could do about it. But no need to set her up as the next clay pigeon.

  Besides, it would be too easy to get damned romantic about the danger of it all, and start acting like some asinine shiny-armored knight and make a real idiot of myself. Vickie was an adult; she didn’t need me in her life. I’d bring her nothing but grief.

  Okay, she was good to be with; she brightened up a room and brought warmth to my life. She was fine in bed. And keep thinking with your gonads instead of your brains, I warned myself,and you’ll both end up on the next cold-storage shipment to Minnesota.

  As I thought about it, in the cab on my way back to my apartment, I doubted that the murderer would use the same technique on me that he had on his brothers. But he didn’t have to, of course. Hell, he was the President! He could get rid of me in a thousand ways, from a fatal accident to a nuclear strike. Even if I wanted to bow out gracefully and exile myself in Afghanistan, he’d never believe it. He’d send someone looking for me—a clean-cut, reliable, terribly loyal assassin.

  So it was a nasty shock when I opened the door to my apartment and found Hank Solomon sitting there, reading a magazine.

  “Jesus Suffering Christ!” I swung the door shut behind me. As I calmed down from the shock of fear at seeing a potential assassin waiting for me, I griped, “Does everybody in creation have the combination to my front door?”

  “Only us friendly helpers and bodyguards,” Hank said easily.

  “You got here pretty damned fast,” I said, not yet ready to forgive him for scaring me.

  “When the President his own self calls yew, yew move your butt, buddy. Yew got friends in high places.”

  “And enemies.”

  “Yep. Guess that’s so. What’s been happenin’?”

  I hesitated and he told me the room was clear of bugs. How he knew was beyond me; he couldn’t have had more than a few minutes alone in the room before I came in. But my faith in modern electronics was strong enough to take him at his word. So I told him what had happened in the Lincoln Sitting Room.

  Hank listened without emitting so much as a grunt until I was finished. Then he said, “Well, ol’ buddy, yew kinda put me right there on the spot alongside yew, dintcha?”

  I admitted that I had. He grinned and said, “Okay, least yew can do is take me out t’dinner. And we can stop in a post office along th’ way.”

  “Post office?”

  He had already unfolded himself out of the seat and gone to the door. “Yep. Make a tape recording of everything yew just tole me and mail itto a few trustable friends with orders nott’ open it ’til Christmas… or your untimely demise, whichever comes first.”

  “You’ve got a helluva way of cheering up a guy.”

  But the idea made sense. I thought about Len Ryan, then decided that Johnny Harrison, back in Boston, would be less tempted to ignore my instructions and listen to the tape prematurely. And I knew a couple of good men overseas in London and Kyoto.

  * * *

  It wasn’t difficult to get to see Laura. The next morning, as soon as I got into the office, I went over the assignments involving her. She was addressing a special meeting of delegates from Working Office Women who were joining in the big Neo-Luddite rally at the Capitol Building to protest the loss of jobs to automation.

  I called the kid who was assigned to handle the meeting’s press relations and told her that I was coming along. She got the impression that I had my eye on her, and there was a promotion in the air. I didn’t disillusion her.

  The next thing I did was call Vickie in to set up my press conference for the following afternoon.

  “You?” she asked, surprised. “A personal press conference?”

  “That’s right. Make certain that all the wire services and the international reps get the word.”

  “We’ll have to tell them the subject.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Just tell them it’s the most important story of their lives, and it’s too hot to even name the subject beforehand.”

  She leaned back in her chair. “You’re going to tell them about the President.”

  “Either that or get thrown out of town for canceling the conference at the last minute.”

  “Or get killed,” Vickie said, very matter-of-factly. No histrionics.

  “If that happens,” I said, trying to stay equally controlled, “the story will break right away. Last night I sent tapes of the whole thing to a few trusted newsmen, with instructions to do nothing unless I die or disappear.”

  “And tomorrow’s press conference…”

  “Either they nail the murderer by tomorrow afternoon, or I blow the whistle.”

  “They’ll kill you,” Vickie said. “They’ll kill all of us.”

  “No,” I said again. “They won’t touch you because I haven’t told you what I know. I’m keeping you in the clear. You’ll be safe.”

  “You’re keeping me in the dark,” she said, her voice rising slightly.

  “For your own protection.”

  She slammed her hands down on the arms of the chair. “So you’re going to take the whole burden on yourself. You’re going to let them kill you, in the hopes that a few news people you once worked with will have the guts to publish the story and expose the President.”

  “They will,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the first time that only a couple of newsmen have stood between the people and a national catastrophe.”

  “Wonderful!” she said. “And in the meantime you’re dead in some back alley in Georgetown.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I shouted back at her.

  “Nothing.” She got to her feet. “It’s too late. You’ve done it all. They’ll give you a big funeral, I bet.”

  “You just set up the press conference,” I told her. “Let me do the worrying.”

  “Sure. Thanks for the advice. It was swell knowing you. You’re a credit to your profession.” And she stamped out of the room, furious.

  But safe. Whoever was bugging my office now knew that Vickie was small potatoes, and didn’t know enough to be dangerous. I hoped so she was sore at me. Probably a good thing. We’d been getting too close. Not good for either of us. And I was going to see Laura in another couple of hours.

  * * *

  WOW had set up its meeting at the Van Trayer. Laura spoke to the delegates in the main ballroom. The ornate crystal and chrome room was only half filled with WOW delegates—secretaries, file clerks, office managers who were inexorably being replaced by electronic memory systems, voice-operated typewriters, picture-phones, and computers.

  I stood in the back of the room, alone. The news people, mostly women, were off to one side of the podium up at the front of the ballroom, taping sound and pictures. I frankly didn’t recognize which of the women up there was the one who worked for me. They all looked pretty much alike.

  But Laura was something else. She wore her hair tightly pulled back, in a no-nonsense way, straight and efficient, as if she had only a couple of minutes to take care ofit each day. Her suit was also an efficiency-image, neat and simple, bright enough to be attractive but absolutely without frills.

  I came in toward the end of her speech. She was saying: “I’m a working woman, too, and have been all my adult life. As you all probably know, I was a dancer before I was married… and not such a very good one that I could afford the pampering of a star. I was just one of the ‘girls’—” She put a special emphasis on the word, and a few sympathetic hisses rose from the audience. “—who had to pay her rent and buy her groceries with a pretty tiny paycheck.”

  She paused and smiled at them, a smile that said, But I made it, and so can you! “And if you think that being the First Lady isn�
�t a full-time job, then guess again. I’m still a working woman, and proud of it.”

  They applauded enthusiastically.

  “And I can assure you,” she said, as the applause died down, “that you have a friend in the White House. More than one, in fact, because the President is vitally interested in the effect of automation on your jobs.” Then she added, in a different tone, so that it seemed like an ad lib, “And if he weren’t, he’d hear about it from me!”

  More applause. Cheers. Laughter. She had them in her proverbial palm.

  “As you know, the President has proposed legislation that will ease the economic burdens of job dislocations caused by automation. His motto is, ‘Don’t try to stop automation; try to use it.’ I think that each of us here, if we really worked at it and took advantage of the new programs that the President was proposed, could become managers of one-person offices. We should be using these new machines to make our careers better, not resisting automation and clinging to our old dull jobs. It’s time we stopped thinking of our-selves as some man’s employee and started seeing ourselves as the managers and decision-makers of four-fifths of the nation’s businesses. Thank you.”

  They rose and cheered. Maybe when they sifted through all that rhetoric and realized that only one woman out of five could possibly attain the managerial positions that Laura dangled before them, they would stop cheering. But for the moment they were solidly with her, and the President.

  I made my way through the exiting crowd, getting some dirty stares from a few of the WOW delegates, and stood on the fringes of the impromptu press conference that had gathered around the First Lady. The news people ignored me; probably thought I was one of her Secret Service guards. These were mostly “Female Features” type of newspersons, not the usual White House corps, and my face meant nothing to them. The only one who seemed to recognize me was the kid from my office, whom I finally spotted after she smiled and nodded to me.

  Laura fielded the newspersons’ questions expertly and stood through three “special” network interviews of five minutes each, in which each of the network interviewers asked exactly the same questions. But each of the chicks could go back to her station claiming an “exclusive” interview with the First Lady. That word “exclusive” had changed its meaning a lot in the television industry.

  I spotted Hank Solomon among the fringe of security men and grinned at him. He gave no indication of even noticing me. Professional ethics, I guess, in front of his peers. They were all stony-faced types and trying to melt into the background.

  Finally the news people snapped shut their cameras and tape recorders and filed out of the room. I made a few nice words to the woman from my office, told her she handled things very well. She went off beaming.

  When I looked around, Laura was watching me, a curious smile on her face.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said. “When you came in, I nearly lost my place in the speech.”

  “I want to talk with you. In private.”

  She was sitting on the edge of the ballroom’s dais, long legs held out straight in front of her. She gestured with a bob of her head to one of the women among her security guard. The woman looked more like a college undergrad than a Secret Service agent. Where she could have been carrying a gun under the summery little dress she had on was an intriguing mystery to me.

  “Jennie,” Laura asked, “can you move the team to the outside of the doors? Mr. Albano and I want to speak privately.”

  She nodded, just as tight-lipped and hard-eyed as the men. Inside of thirty seconds, the room was empty, but we both knew that nobody could get in with anything less than an armored squad of commandos.

  Laura still had a look of casual amusement about her. “What was it you wanted to talk about, Meric?”

  She had moved from the dais to one of the folding chairs in the first row of the audience. I was still on my feet, standing before her.

  “I know about the cloning.” I said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “I was wondering how much you know. What ideas you have about which of them might be the murderer.”

  She arched an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “You agree that one of the brothers is… killing the rest of them?”

  “I suppose that’s what it is,” she said. Then, looking up at me, “But it might be someone else… someone who wants to see just one of the brothers in power, and all the others out of the way.”

  “You mean Wyatt?”

  She made a small shrug. “Or Lazar.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Or Mandella, the Secretary of Defense… Or anybody.”

  She was teasing, toying with me, not taking it seriously.

  “Or you,” I said suddenly.

  Her smile got wider, but her eyes went cold. “Yes,” she said slowly, “it might even be me. Maybe I want to be President.”

  “Or in total control of the President.”

  “It’s a thought,” Laura said.

  It was like trying to interview a piece of sculptured crystal. Laura sat there, beautiful, smiling, knowing— but not giving me anything.

  “I’m calling a press conference tomorrow,” I said. “If there’s no answer by then, I’ll throw it open to the public.”

  “Yes. He told me.”

  “Who told you? Which one?”

  An annoyed shake of her head. “I don’t know. I make it a policy not to ask.”

  “You just deal with them…”

  “As if there were only one,” Laura finished for me. “It’s easier that way. They’re careful not to let anybody see more than one at a time. They do the same for me… most of the time.”

  I could feel my knees getting fluttery. “But… but you are married to James John I mean, he’s the one…”

  Her eyes never faltered. She kept looking straight at me, kept her smile going, although now it was starting to look mocking. “I told you, Meric, I never ask. Was it Franklin who said, ‘In the dark, all cats are gray’?”

  I felt myself sit with a thump on the edge of the dais.

  “Oh, don’t look so shocked,” Laura said, her voice getting sharp. “You’d do exactly the same thing… men have been doing it for ages. It’s called a harem.”

  “No… it’s not…” I was shaking my head.

  “Poor Meric. Still a Yankee frontiersman in your head, aren’t you? All the old morality. All the lovely old chauvinist attitudes.”

  There wasn’t much I could say.

  “Come here, Meric. Sit beside me.” Laura patted the seat next to her.

  I went over and sat, like an obedient puppy.

  “You realize that if you make this story public it will ruin the President. He’ll be forced to resign.”

  “At least.”

  Laura put a finger on my lips. “Do you realize that you’re doing this to hurt me? To punish me for choosing him over you?”

  “You mean choosing them, don’t you?”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m not trying to hurt you, Laura. God knows that’s the last thing in the world I’d want to do.”

  “Then drop this press announcement. Cancel the conference.”

  “And let one of those brothers finish murdering the rest of them?”

  “Let them settle their family matters by themselves. It doesn’t concern you.”

  “I can’t!” It sounded more like pleading than a mighty affirmation of morality, justice, and the rule of law.

  “Not even for me?”

  “Not even for you,” I said. Miserably.

  Her hand came back to my face. I could smell a fragrance that she used, a scent I hadn’t known since we were in college together. She brushed at the hair over my ear.

  “You don’t understand what I just said, Meric,” she said, very softly. “You can have me… if you still feel the way we used to.”

  “The way we used to?” My voice was a strangled squeak.

  “Yes. When yo
u loved me and I loved you. We can have that again. The two of us. Just like before.”

  I pulled myself away from her. “How in the hell… you must be out of your mind, Laura!”

  Very patiently she said, “Listen to me. Jim has a little more than three years to his term. He won’t try for reelection… too much has happened for him to expect that. After he’s out of office, there will be a quiet, amicable divorce. Then you and I… together… anywhere in the world, Meric.”

  There must be an instant in a heart transplant operation when the surgeons have removed your original heart but haven’t yet put in the donor organ. That’s how I felt right then. There was a hole in my chest, an aching cavity, livid with flame-hot pain.

  “Three years…” I heard myself mumble.

  Laura said “I never loved him, Meric. I realize that now. It was all ambition… the power trip. And we could get together from time to time even before the three years is up. I travel a lot, and so does…”

  A sudden vision of me waiting at the end of a line, with everybody ahead of me looking like the President snapped me back to reality.

  “Sure, we could get together,” I said. “With three of the brothers dead, your dance card must have a lot of holes in it.”

  “Don’t be vicious.”

  “Then don’t treat me like some high school kid with a hard-on. Jesus Christ, Laura, you’re nothing but a high-classed whore.”

  “And what are you?” she snapped back, taunting. “A sniveling little boy who works at the White House and still believes everything they taught him in grammar school about patriotism and loyalty.”

  “Damned right I do!”

  “Grow up, Meric! Be a man! It’s power that makes the world go ’round. Power! And no matter which one of them ends up with the power in his hands alone, he’ll be mine. I’ll share his power.”

  “Yeah… he pumps it into you, doesn’t he? How the hell do you arrange it? Do they each have a certain night, or do you take them all on the same night? Do you have gang bangs in the Queens Bedroom?”