The Incumbent

by Brian McGrory

  I poured some spring water into a cup and noticed that the plastic bottle was the only food I had in the refrigerator. I slumped down in my moss green couch and punched a code into the telephone to access my messages, and immediately a computerized female voice told me that my voice mail was full. There were thirty in all, from people I had never met, from my younger sister, from colleagues at the paper, from far-flung relatives, one from Gus, and the last message on the machine was from Agent Samantha Stevens of the FBI, who had a textured voice, almost a singer's voice. "I'd like to talk with you again as soon as you feel able," she said. "I'll call you again in the morning, or you can page me at this number-"

  Without Baker trotting around, chewing on a rawhide bone or making his stuffed hedgehog squeal, the house seemed vacant, like a fishbowl without water. As I climbed the stairs to bed, there was an uncomfortable silence. Every step echoed off the walls. I thought about turning on the stereo, but there was really no music I wanted to hear. Arriving upstairs, I looked at all three doors. In the back, there was the bedroom, overlooking the patio and back garden. In the front, we had set up an office with a computer atop an antique library table and some nicely framed prints and old maps on the wall.

  The middle room was the nursery. When I came home from the hospital after my wife's death, I pulled the door shut, and through some quirk of the human psyche, I hadn't been in there since. Friends, family members, have all offered, even pleaded, to clean the room out, to pack up the crib and the changing table and put the stuffed animals neatly in a box and carry them wherever it is that such things should go.

  I've always said no. "What are you waiting for?" they asked, repeatedly. I've never known, but maybe it was this, the night I came home a national celebrity.

  So inexplicably, rather than go into my bedroom or the bathroom, I pulled the door open to the nursery, flicked on the light, and walked inside. I felt like I had stepped into some strange universe, into a part of my life that had ended before it ever began. The walks were a pale blue with the stenciled letters of the alphabet dancing down from the ceiling in various shades of violet and pink. There was a light layer of dust on the windowsill and atop the small bureau. The little blankets were still spread in the crib, waiting for our baby to come home. Though shuttered for this many months, the room had the surprising aroma of newness in it-new woods on the crib and changing table, a new can of wet wipes that had been opened in anticipation of their use, new stuffed animals on the bureau. I stood there, not really frozen, just still, exhausted, then walked slowly around the room, peering into the crib, putting my finger on the play carousel above it, running my hand across the top of an elephant-shaped toy chest that was a gift from Katherine's mother. I thought about what would have-no, what should have-been: fatherhood, an ever-changing relationship with my wife, the adjustments and the laughs and the burdens and responsibilities. The meaningfulness of it all. I wondered if it would ever happen again. I couldn't picture it, starting from scratch in those first awkward days of dating, marriage to someone else, a new set of in-laws, another pregnancy. It struck me that even though she was gone, I still very much considered myself to be Katherine's husband. Fatherhood, that was different. It had ended before I knew what it was. And here I was, a visitor to a life I never had.

  All these thoughts made me more tired. I only know I flicked the light out and sat down on the floor, on a Winnie-the-Pooh rug, all soft, never used. After sitting for a minute I spread out and lay down on my back, the sliver of light from the hall just missing my face, the furniture and toys just visible in the shadows. And I slept, fitfully, until the birds chirped outside and the sun hit me square in the eyes.

  When I awoke, I felt as if my melancholy had lifted, like a morning fog from a Maine harbor.

  I was oddly lighthearted, as if I had gotten rid of something I should have been rid of long ago. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was ignorance.

  I'm not really sure. I pulled myself to my feet, my ribs throbbing from sleeping on the floor. I kind of lurched out the door toward the shower. A small part of me felt as if I had just conquered something, but most of me just felt an unfamiliar sense of peace.

  five

  Saturday, October 28

  I picked up the telephone on the first ring.

  "Have you seen the Times yet?" It was Peter Martin, being his usual personable self.

  I replied, "I'm feeling much better, thanks. And how are you?"

  "Look, this story is spinning out of control. You ready to come back to work?"

  I cradled the phone in my neck as I tucked a fraying blue oxford-cloth shirt into my favorite old jeans. Someone banged on the front door, and I hurried downstairs with the portable phone still at my ear. When I opened the door, Baker, in all his glory, came charging inside.

  He looked wonderful, I must say. He circled me twice, his tail wagging and slapping me on my knees. He suddenly lunged for his stuffed hedgehog, which was lying on the rug, and paced about the room with the toy lodged deep in his mouth. The hedgehog was squealing, the dog was snorting, I was down on one knee, smacking him lovingly on his side.

  "Hold on, Peter," I said into the phone, putting it down.

  "What is going on there?" I heard him say.

  "Kristen, this was really great of you," I said to the dog sitter, an adorable graduate student who lives down the street. "Let me grab you some money." Kristen had fallen in love with Baker in the local park nearly two years earlier, and told Katherine and I that if we ever needed a sitter, she would actually appreciate the chance. Ever since, she had proved to be one of the most reliable people in a life that seemed less reliable by the day.

  "That's all right, Jack. I'll get it some other time. Here, I got you some bagels. I know you don't have any food here. By the way, you looked great on TV."

  She seemed to be looking at me differently as she backed out of the door, and it made me uncomfortable. Television has a power that newspapers simply don't, an ability to convey celebrity on, quite literally, an ordinary jack like me. But before I could say anything, she was gone, Baker was sprawled on the floor with his fat face pressed up against his empty food bowl, and I was back on the phone with Peter.

  "What's the Times have?" I asked.

  Knowing he had my attention, he sounded more thoughtful now, a little less panicked. "It's kind of strange," he said. "They have a front-page story, quoting anonymous sources, saying that the FBI can't pin the gunman in the assassination attempt, identified as Tony Clawson from California, with a specific militia group. They ran a headshot of Clawson from some ID badge he wore at his job at Home Depot.

  Scary-looking guy. These same sources said that no militia group in the country has yet to claim any knowledge of the assassination attempt, which probably isn't surprising. Why would anyone want to say they knew, and be charged with aiding and abetting or whatever? But here's what I think is the most interesting part: about halfway through the story, the FBI spokesman says they believe that the gunman was a militia member. The Times doesn't make too big a deal about that, but to me, that seems like the feds are backing away from how definitive they were right after the incident. This opens up a whole lot of questions."

  I was with him about 90 percent, but given the interruptions, the early hour-it was, I think, about eight-thirty Saturday morning-and everything else, if he quizzed me on what the questions were that the Times story opened up, I fear I'd have failed miserably. Still, I had an innate trust in Martin's abilities. He might be nervous as a cat.

  He may never have been around for a presidential assassination before.

  He may even be in well over his head. But he possessed wonderful powers of observation and a vast capacity to understand the business of journalism, and combined, that placed him in the right far more than it didn't.

  "So what are you saying?" I asked, hoping to keep the ball in his court.

  "We need to be on this. We need to be on this right away." His tone changed here, becoming softer. "I kn
ow you're not going to like this, but Havlicek is on his way out to California from Boston. The editor wants him on this story, and I didn't want to fight it. I didn't know how you were feeling physically and guessed you wouldn't want to make that flight. And minimally, he'll be good to do the initial sweep on Clawson, then go through documents, do some scut work. I don't think the extra hands can hurt on a story this big."

  I was fine about it. Steve Havlicek was in his late fifties, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with a sweet personality that masked a near manic drive to land stories that he knew no one else could get. He was the chief investigative reporter in Washington before I was, and Martin, looking out for my interests, was nervous that I would feel threatened by him poaching on my turf. In fact, Havlicek was an old friend, a quasi mentor, and I welcomed the help.

  "We'll work well together," I said, and just about heard a sigh of relief on the other end of the line.

  "You have a line in with the FBI on this one?" Martin asked. "The president? Can you flip any of these guys, put them on your side?"

  My call-waiting tone sounded, and I took a pass on it. I figured I'd get enough calls today.

  "The FBI agent seems pretty standoffish. That woman Stevens. She's going to be tough work, but I'll stay on her. I'm meeting with her at some point today. I'll spread some other calls out from home this morning and give you a ring if I get anything back. Have Havlicek give me a call when he gets on the ground in California."

  It suddenly struck me: the anonymous caller. Maybe I had just lost his call by not picking up the other line.

  "One more thing, Peter," I said, and then caught myself, quickly deciding not to tip my hand yet, not even to Martin. I had no real reason to keep it secret, but my instincts told me to maintain my own counsel on this right now, until I knew more.

  "What?" he said, urgently.

  My mind raced to fill in the blank. "Never mind" was not going to be good enough with Peter Martin. So I quickly came up with this: "You remember the militia stories I did last year? I made some good friends out west on that one, including one guy in Idaho, a militia leader, who is especially well plugged in nationally. I might be able to squeeze him."

  It worked, strangely enough.

  "Jesus Christ, that's right. Maybe you ought to just get out there and see whether this guy has anything. I'm going to check the flight schedules, and I'll call you later."

  I hung up the phone, wondering what I had just done to myself. My caller ID read "Private name, private number." I checked to see if the caller had left a message on my voice mail. I was in luck.

  Indeed, it was the shamefully aloof voice of Samantha Stevens, special agent with the FBI, requesting an audience at three o'clock that afternoon. "If that works for you, no need to call back," she said.

  "We'll just plan on meeting you at your house. See you then."

  Immediately, I tapped out the number for the Record's library up in Boston, and luckily my favorite researcher answered the phone, someone who would get me exactly what I needed.

  "Dorothy," I said, in a singsongy voice that I always thought she liked, but who really knew? Actually, I probably sounded like an ass.

  "Jack Flynn here. Howaya?"

  "Jesus, Jack, you're all over CNN. The networks are flashing your picture every other minute. One of the affiliates had a reporter in here last night interviewing people about you. I told them I thought you were a gifted writer, and was thrilled that you finally decided to confront your impotency problem."

  Ah, that Dorothy, such a card. "You're a laugh a minute. Listen, here's what I need: can you pull me some good background stuff on one Samantha Stevens, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the pride of this great land?" I continued, "And while you're in the system, could you see if there's anything on another agent, a man by the name of Kent Drinker, an assistant director?"

  "Coming your way. I'll ship it through the computer?"

  "Yeah. I'll look for it in a while. You're the best, Dorothy," I said, hanging up the phone.

  Impotency. How would she know? I mean, how would I even know? You have to try to have sex to know you're impotent.

  In the journalism business, we look at shards of people's lives and pretend we see the whole. We spend a day with someone, maybe just an hour, flitting in at some inopportune moment, maybe a drunk driving death or an arrest on child sexual assault. We talk to neighbors, get some quotes about the time the suspect returned a borrowed rake with a sack of warm nuts from a gourmet food store, then write as if we understand the very fiber of his soul. We look at silhouettes and pretend we see real flesh. I'm as guilty as anyone else, but I'm smart enough, or have been around long enough, to at least know that what I'm doing might not be entirely right.

  Which is exactly how I felt as I sat in my study and scrolled through the computer file that Dorothy had sent me from the Record library.

  There was nothing on Stevens, not a blessed thing. But on Drinker, the stories were voluminous, most of them taken from the Los Angeles Times, and dating back several years. According to the accounts, Drinker worked as an FBI liaison to the U.s. Marshals' Witness Protection Program at the start of his career, rising steadily through the hierarchy. In an enormous promotion for largely thankless work, he was moved to Los Angeles, to take the number-two slot in the FBI'S regional office.

  He wasn't there but a year when a story broke in the Los Angeles Times that the special agent in charge of the region, a veteran FBI man by the name of Skip Weaver, had been blocking the promotions of Hispanic agents in favor of promotions for less experienced, less qualified white agents. The paper quoted from a batch of highly sensitive internal personnel documents that it said it had obtained from sources familiar with the office. Shortly after that, the paper conducted a review of FBI arrests in the region and found that the bureau arrested Hispanics in greater proportion than any other racial or ethnic group.

  This was enough to unleash a racial backlash the likes of which had not been seen there since the Rodney King riots. Black and Hispanic city councillors called for Weaver's immediate dismissal and presented the director of the FBI with a petition filled with 35,000 names. The city's race relations commission launched its own investigation. So did the FBI, but rather than investigate its personnel or arrest policies, it furiously probed into who had leaked the documents to the newspaper.

  A federal grand jury was formed. Threats were made within the organization. Weaver virtually locked himself in his office, waiting for the culprit to be found. The reporter, a young man who thought his career had been made, was hauled before the grand jury. Next, he was brought into court and ordered to reveal his source. When he refused, the conservative-minded judge told him he faced jail time for contempt.

  Federal prosecutors treated him nicely, but outside court, several FBI agents informed him he would be charged with receiving stolen property and thrown in prison. Unbelievably, he caved, and informed investigators that Kent Drinker had leaked him the documents. When he tried to explain that Drinker was only trying to repair a grave injustice, that a few good, qualified hardworking Hispanic agents were being discriminated against, no one was around to hear him.

  So Drinker was immediately called back to Washington. He was told he could face dismissal for stealing government property. He was reviled by a large segment of the bureau. In law enforcement, there is the code of silence, and he had just violated it, he had trampled it. In many quarters there, he would never be forgiven. He was assigned a desk job, menial work, really. That was all nearly a decade before.

  For several years, apparently, he committed himself to the pick and shovel work of rejuvenation, keeping a low profile, going along, getting along, as much as they would let him, doing whatever he was asked. Eventually he played a key role in helping to solve a terrorist bombing in Nevada. And his fortunes took their sharpest turn for the better about four years ago, when Hutchins came to the White House as vice president. From the depths of penance
, Drinker was pulled to nearly the pinnacle of the agency, named assistant director-a move interpreted by the national press as a message that the new administration wanted an honest, open government. For the past four years Drinker had launched an increasingly successful campaign for approval among the rank-and-file agents.

  So what did this tell me? Well, perhaps it explained why someone with as lofty a title as assistant director was helping with the street work of a major investigation, rather than supervising it from his office.

  Maybe this was another example of him trying to curry favor among his underlings by working in the trenches alongside them. And perhaps it explained why he had been so quiet with me in the hospital room that day, why he let Stevens ask nearly all the questions. Because he had been burned by reporters before, perhaps he quite simply didn't like us as a breed.

  The telephone rang, and I just about knocked it off my desk in my haste to pick it up.

  "Hey, old boy. I have to get on a godforsaken jet airplane and fly all the way out to Fresno, California, just to bail your fat ass out one more time." It was Havlicek, and if Martin was apologetic to me about his assignment on this story, obviously he wasn't himself.

  "Not what I heard," I said. "I heard there's an issue over your output up there in Boston, and they decided to put you on this story to work with the master for a while. They want you to kneel at my knee. Watch and learn. Watch and learn." Now that this macho turf ritual was over, I cut to the point. "What do you have?"

  "Nothing yet," Havlicek said, his taunting tone changing to one of honest bemusement. "I'm on an airplane. I'll be on the ground soon.

  I haven't worked in Washington for five years. Most of my people are gone from Justice. We're just trying to play catch-up with the Times for tomorrow. When are you on board?"

  "Well, now. I have a couple of FBI agents coming over this afternoon, and I'm going to see if I can trade information with them, but it doesn't look real promising. I'll be working the phones all day, trying to find out anything I can on Clawson and the militia angle from here. If I get anything, I'll write it up, obviously, and we'll probably feed it into whatever you get. Otherwise I'll be in the bureau tomorrow."