by Ben Bova
“Tried to buy me off, you mean.”
“You had your chance,” Laura said.
I started to shake my head.
Jackson said, “There’s no other way, Meric. We’ll have to do away with you. And Ms. Clark, too.”
“Like you killed the others?”
“No…” He fumbled in his tunic pocket and pulled out a small plastic syringe. “No, you’re not going to die of immunological breakdown. That would raise too many questions. And, incidentally, I got the virus from the University of Pennsylvania’s biochemistry labs. They have very lax security systems at universities, you know. A Government man can go anywhere and see anything he wants to. The professors all trail him with their tongues hanging out, hoping to lap up some droppings of Federal grant money.”
“How’d you know?”
“Don’t be naive. I didn’t do it personally. I’m an economist, not a biochemist.”
I turned back toward Laura. “You’re going to let him do it?”
She pulled a small handgun from her purse. “I’m going to help him.”
“It’ll be hard to explain a gunshot wound.”
“This doesn’t shoot bullets,” she replied. “Tranquilizer darts. They make the same puncture as a doctor’s needle.”
“You’re going to die of a fatal heart attack,” Jackson said, holding the syringe up beside his face. “The stairs were too much for you. You’re really not in good physical shape. All the excitement of the President’s impromptu meeting with the Neo-Luddites outside the Capitol… too much for the press secretary’s heart.”
“The day I die,” I said as evenly as I could, “my whole story gets published. Not only here, but overseas as well.”
“Wrong,” Jackson said. “We’ve already intercepted the two tapes you sent overseas. They’ve been destroyed.”
“I don’t believe you!” But I really did. Why else would they feel free to knock me off?
“And we have a good idea of where the third tape went,” he added. “The publisher of the Globe likes to think he’s a friend of Presidents. I’ll get the tape before any of your old cronies listen to it.
I started to reply, but clamped my mouth shut instead. “That leaves only your erstwhile bodyguard,” Jackson said, “who seems to have run off to parts unknown.”
“Nope. I’m right here.”
Hank Solomon’s voice!
“Y’all jes’ better line up along th’ railin’ there and put yer assorted instruments down on th’ top of it.”
Jackson spun around fiercely and tried to find the source of the disembodied voice. Hank’s twang echoed through the shadows. He might have been anywhere. Laura jumped to her feet and also peered into the darkness.
“Now lissen,” Hank said. “I got a regulation 7.6-millimeter pistol in mah hand. Nothin’ fancy. It makes a lotta noise, and it puts a big ol’ hole in yew. It’ll make a mess outta yer pretty white dress, ma’am. So put them instruments down. Y’hear?”
But Laura, instead of giving up, grabbed me by the collar and jammed her gun to my head. “I’ll kill him!” she shouted, and her voice shrilled off every corner and curve of the stonework around us.
I reacted without thinking. Instead of being scared, I was damned sore. I shoved Laura away from me and turned toward Jackson. Something went pop and I felt a sting in the back of my neck.
Jackson pushed past me and ran clattering along the gallery, heading for the stairs. I saw Laura glaring pure hatred at me. I took a step toward her, but my feet wouldn’t work right. I stumbled. She cracked me in the face with her goddamned popgun and down I went.
The marble was cold.
Somebody turned me over on my back. Hank grinned down at me. “Y’all got a buzzful of trank in yew, boy.”
“Get them,” I mumbled, feeling like my head was numb with Novocain. “Why dintcha shoot him?”
“Eighty Secret Service agents down there and yew want me t’ take a shot at the President?”
“You’ve got to…” I tried to get my legs working, tried to get to my feet.
“Stay there,” Hank commanded. “I’ll get him.” He disappeared while I was still doing an imitation of a beached flounder. The echoes! I heard feet running on marble as if they were racing in circles inside my head. Hard breathing. Whispers. Coughs.
I finally struggled to my feet and grabbed the balustrade. Leaning over it like a seasick tourist, I tried to peer into the gloomy shadows to find out what was happening. Couldn’t see a damned thing. And it was all wavering in front of my eyes, lurching up and down and sideways. Damned if I wasn’t seasick.
I looked down to the floor of the rotunda. A long way down. Tiny little people were slowly gathering down there, their heads craned upward. They had heard the sounds of a struggle coming from somewhere.
A shout. A pair of voices cursing. Then a body crashed through one of those flimsy railings, screaming all the way down to the floor. It hit with a solid thunk that ended its screaming forever. The body was wearing a light-colored mandarin suit. I threw up.
I must have passed out. The next thing I knew, Hank was bending over me, his face very solemn. “I got him,” he said simply. Then he helped me to my feet and we staggered downward, on those dark narrow stairways, toward the floor of the rotunda.
I heard the pounding of an army rushing up the stairs toward us. It turned out to be only a dozen or so Secret Service men. They looked grim, angry, puzzled, all at the same time. We passed the broken railing, and I glanced out toward the floor. A crowd of agents was surrounding the body. From this high I could see that Jackson’s fake mustache and beard had floated out of his pocket and landed almost on top of his grotesquely twisted body.
The agents with us didn’t ask any questions. They didn’t say a word. It was damned eerie. Silently they escorted us down to the floor.
Across the way, beside the huge Columbus Portal, stood the General, flanked by two agents. He looked old and bent. But when he saw us, he straightened.
“He killed my son!” he shouted, and suddenly grabbed the gun from the shoulder holster of the agent on his left.
Hank pushed me to the floor as the General fired. A long ugly gouge ripped up the floor inches from my face. I heard Hank’s gun go off, deafening, right in my ears. The General crumpled.
I looked up at Hank. He was smiling.
“That’s the one I was after. He’s the sumbitch that killed McMurtrie.”
EIGHTEEN
I woke up in a hospital room.
It was spinning around in circles, slowly, and refused to stop. I squeezed my eyes shut and then cautiously opened them again. Still circles. I didn’t remember being brought here. Didn’t remember a damned thing, in fact, since Hank had killed the General. Just his grim, death’s head smile as he let his gun drop to the floor and all the Secret Service agents in the world rushed him.
Gradually the room settled down. I expected to feel a monumental headache, but I didn’t. I felt foggy, but without pain. Kind of stiff, heavy-limbed. It was a real effort to lift my head and squint at the brightness outside the room’s one window.
Looked like midday out there. Maybe afternoon. I could see the double-tiered roadway of the Route 495 Beltway, and a forest of radio-TV antennas off among the checkerboard of neat little suburban houses that covered the once-green and rolling hills. Walter Reed, I realized.They’ve stashed me at Walter Reed Hospital.
Even if I’d felt strong enough to get up, I knew the door would be locked, and an armed soldier or two would be on the other side of it. Maybe Marines, in their flashy dress uniforms and theirthey shall not pass faces, with those neat little automatic pistols on their hips, the kind that can clean out a room in twelve seconds flat.
I wondered for a long while what had happened to Hank. And Vickie. And those tapes I’d sent overseas. And Johnny Harrison. I began to try to figure out how I could get word to Len Ryan about everything that had happened. It was quite a surprise when I looked out the window again and it was
dark outside. I must have fallen asleep in the middle of my intense thinking.
A sweet-faced black nurse came in, all serious business in stiff white uniform and no chitchat with the patient. She raised my bed without asking me if I wanted it that way, looking as if she were afraid to exchange words with me.
“Will I live?” I asked.
She almost smiled, then caught herself. “The monitors are all in the green.”
The bed was loaded with sensors, she meant, and my temperature, heart rate, breathing, and everything else—including conversation—was being monitored automatically at the nurses’ station somewhere outside the room.
Will I live? I asked myself. A subtler question than that nurse knew.
She left the room momentarily and came back with a tray of food. To my surprise, I was really hungry. I went through the chicken dinner in record time. Even demolished the pasty-looking bread slices. No wine. Just milk and coffee. I drank them both.
The nurse took the tray and left. I remained sitting up in the bed, with no way to crank the damned thing down again. Not that I wanted to. I was feeling okay now. For the first time, I studied the room I was in. Not much to see. One chair, a bureau made of walnut veneer, pastel green walls, a mirror—I looked seedy, needed a shave, but otherwise unhaggard—one window, a doorless closet in which hung the clothes I’d come in with, and the door to the corridor outside.
Which opened, just about then, to admit the President.
Somehow I wasn’t surprised. He looked drawn, strained. Must’ve been one helluva day for him.
He reached for the room’s only chair as the door clicked firmly shut behind him. I had a chance to glimpse the corridor. There were soldiers out there. Armed.
The President sat down like an old man, slowly, painfully. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a long time.
“My father’s dead,” he said wearily.
“It was self-defense,” I answered. “I saw it. He shot at Hank and…”
“He shot at you, Meric. He was trying to shut you up once and for all. Solomon killed him to get even for McMurtrie. Half the agents there were McMurtrie’s friends. They damned near pinned a medal on Solomon.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Guess I missed today’s press briefing.”
“I guess you did. Hunter handled it.”
“How’d he explain…?”
“He didn’t. He said you’d collapsed at your desk and had been taken to Walter Reed Hospital. Most of the press corps seemed surprised but not suspicious. One of them… a new man, from Boston…”
“Len Ryan?”
The President nodded. “He wanted to interview you here in the hospital. We let him see you this afternoon, while you were asleep. That seemed to satisfy him.”
“He wanted to make sure I was alive.”
“Apparently.”
“Sir,” I asked, “you are John, aren’t you?”
“Yes. There are only three of us left. It’s getting easier to guess, isn’t it?” He smiled, but it was the kind of smile a soldier makes after a battle, when he’s come through it alive but most of his buddies haven’t.
“Hunter didn’t tell them anything about last night?”
“Two nights ago. It was two nights ago that it all happened.”
“I’ve been conked out that long?”
“You took a powerful dose of tranquilizer.”
“But nothing was said to the press?”
“No. Not a thing. My father’s going to officially die of a heart attack in Aspen in a few days. Robert is out there now, getting things arranged. Laura…” He stopped, and for an instant I thought his control was finally going to break. But he went on, “Laura is going on a round-the-world trip. Under heavy guard. We agreed to keep her out of it, to keep the marriage going for the rest of my term. It won’t be the first White House marriage between enemies.”
“You’re going to try to cover up the whole story?”
His eyes flashed. “Try to?”
“You can’t keep it quiet forever.”
“For God’s sake, Meric, haven’t you had enough?” His voice rose. It didn’t get louder, but it got an edge of steel to it. An edge that could cut.
“What do you…”
“Four of us killed. My father. He may not have been the closest father a man ever had, but he’s dead. My wife. Because of you.”
“I didn’t…”
“You didn’t pull the trigger, but if you’d kept your damned mouth shut none of this would have happened.”
“And you’d be dead.”
“Maybe.”
“And Jackson would be on the throne.”
“It’s not a throne.”
“It would be, once he got his hands on it. He was insane, sir. Crazy. Power-mad.”
“He was my brother!”
“He would’ve killed you in a hot second! He killed three of your brothers. You were going to get yours right there in the Capitol. He told me so.”
He glared at me, teeth bared, hating the whole ugly business and hating me because of it.
“It’s true, sir. He would’ve killed you and taken over the Presidency and turned this nation into his own private dictatorship.”
“He couldn’t have gotten away with that.”
“He would’ve tried. He would’ve demolished everything you’ve been trying to accomplish. And you know damned well there are plenty of people around this town who would’ve gladly helped him do it. Including your father.”
The President looked away from me. He pushed himself up from the chair and went to the window.
After several minutes of silence, he said, very low, “You’re right. I know you’re right. But it still doesn’t go down very easily.”
“I don’t see how it could.”
He turned back toward me. “All right. It’s all over with. Finished. The ship of state has weathered another storm. The problem is, what do we do next? There are still some odds and ends to clean up.”
“Where are Vickie and Hank?”
“Solomon is in protective custody over at the FBI Center. They’ve pumped him full of truth drugs and wrung him dry, but otherwise he’s unhurt.”
“And Vickie?”
“She’s being held in one of the Federal housing developments in Anacostia. She has a very nice apartment and two friendly women security guards to see to it that she’s comfortable. Apparently she’s quite anxious to find out what happened to you.”
I let out a sigh of relief that I hadn’t known was in me.
“That brings it all down to you, Meric,” the President said.
“What do you mean?”
He spread his hands in a gesture somewhere between disgust and helplessness. “I can put Hank Solomon in a bottle and make certain he never bothers me. I can see to it that Ms. Clark is bought off, or moved out of the way…”
“You’d better not…”
“Listen to me,” he said, and it was a command. He pulled the chair around backwards and sat on it again. “My real problem is you and your damned Boston conscience. Are you going to keep quiet about this business or aren’t you? I can handle the others, but only if you stay shut.”
He folded his arms on the back of the chair and rested his chin on them. He was smiling! He was enjoying this… this game, this deadly round of give-and-take. It was the kind of thing he’d been born—no, raised—to do. The battle of wills. The old political infighting: I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that.
I looked at him for a long, long time. Seemed like years. Must have been a few minutes, at least.
“Well?” he asked. “I want your promise of silence. Everything is settled now, except for you. It all depends on you, Meric.”
“No, Mr. President,” I finally said. “It all depends on you.”
His chin lifted. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve got to tell them.”
“Them? The press?”
“The people. You’ve got to tell them the
whole thing.”
“Never!”
“You’ve got to tell them there’s more than one of you, at least,” I said. “Use your father’s death as an excuse, if you want to. But you can’t go on with a committee in the White House. Not unless the people know about it and approve.”
“That’s impossible. No way.”
I felt my own voice getting stronger. “The people didn’t elect a gang of brothers. They elected one man. You. You’re the only one they saw; you’re the one who made the speeches and did the campaigning.”
“But I was using the expertise of my brothers,” the President said. “They put the ideas into the speeches. They worked out the problems and the solutions.”
“Tell the people,” I urged. “You’ll never be able to keep this thing covered up now, anyway. Too many people know about it. It’s going to leak sooner or later. For God’s sake… go to the people and tell them!”
“They’ll want me to resign,” he said.
“Maybe.” “Can you picture this country with Lazar as President?” he demanded. “It’d be a catastrophe.”
I answered, “Can you picture what Lazar will do when he finds out what’s been going on? I won’t tell him, but you know damned well somebody will. You can’t keep this quiet forever.”
“You think not?” And I saw some of Jackson’s power lust glint in his eyes.
“I think not,” I said. “The story will leak out. It’s too big to keep covered. If it doesn’t come out now, it certainly will in the next election campaign.”
He nodded grimly. “During the primaries.”
“Sir,” I said, “even Lazar as President would be better than a man the people couldn’t trust. Maybe you could call for a national referendum… a vote of confidence. Then if it goes against you, both you and Lazar resign and call for a special election.”
“That’s crazy. Nobody would go for that.”
“The people would.”
“I mean nobody here in Washington.”
“But the people would. It’s their Government, you know.”
“Stop mouthing sermons. This is politics. This is real.”
I took a deep breath. “Sir, I honestly think that the only way you can survive in the Presidency is to tell the entire story. Freely. Now. Don’t wait for somebody to dig it up and lay the skeletons on your doorstep.”
