“Look, Senator, you’re a fine man. Simon’s a fine man. Either one of you would make a terrific President—the great American public, the lucky jerks, will probably have in front of them the best choice they’ve ever had. It doesn’t need to get nasty. Besides, neither one of you is very good at going for the jugular. But Simon’s got me, and I’m the biggest son-of-a-bitch in the business.”
“Come on, Frank.” The Senator laughed—apparently he knew better. “I always thought of you as a nice guy. Hell, I’d offer you half again what Faircliff pays you if I thought you’d take it. How long have I known you? Four years? Five? You’re not anything like the bad ass you like to think; you shouldn’t say things like that about yourself, or somebody might believe you.”
“I’m a politician, Senator. I make my living by the badness of my character. But you and Simon are something else, something better. For practical reasons—and for the sake of the country—I just think it would be nice if we kept it that way. Oh, I’m not saying the occasional swipe isn’t okay. The voters expect it and it’s good for the circulation. But if you concentrate on your Republican brethren, I’ll keep Simon on a leash. See if I don’t.”
Burgess rose out of his chair and put his hand on Austen’s shoulder. It was a friendly gesture, an indication of the man’s refinement of feeling. “I always liked you, Frank, and I’ll think about it. Say, listen—why don’t you come up to my room in a couple of hours and you, me, and a couple of the boys can have some dinner. Room service. Nobody’s going to put it in the papers.”
“Sorry, Senator.” Austen smiled and shook his head as he too rose to his feet. He tried not to show it, but he felt enormously honored. “Hotel waiters sell that kind of thing, and tomorrow you’d read the New York Times and find out all about how the front runners are ganging up to squeeze out the competition. Ask me again after November, when the smoke’s had a chance to clear.”
“When you’ve whipped my ass?”
It was a joke, and they laughed together.
“Believe me, Senator, I wish you both could win.”
. . . . .
His original plan had been to drive back to Manchester as soon as his meeting with Burgess was finished—even stopping somewhere along the way for dinner, he probably could have made the distance by early the same evening—but Austen was absolutely at the end of his tether. As soon as he had closed the door on his visitor, he sat down again on the corner of the bed and simply went blank for about three quarters of an hour. It could have been longer—it could have been three-thirty in the god damn morning for all he would have been able to tell the difference in those first few seconds after he came out of his trance—but all he knew was that his mind had simply gone numb for a while, and that nothing like that had ever happened to him before.
It was obvious he was in no condition to drive, so he placed a long-distance call to the campaign headquarters in Bedford, left a message that there were a couple of loose ends that would keep him in Berlin until the morning—the fuzzier the lie the better, he figured—and walked across the street to a coffee shop for a chiliburger and a chocolate malted. After that he went back to his hotel room and slept straight through until seven the next morning.
The road was still icy in places from the blizzard a few days before, so it was a good idea to be careful. Fortunately traffic was thin. It was actually a kind of restful pleasure; the necessities of driving didn’t allow you to think about anything else, so you got a little vacation from the part of yourself that found it necessary to worry about the future and the past. On this highway threading through the New Hampshire mountains, there was only now.
He was just coming down the grade from Whaleback Mountain when he noticed the pale green Ford that was keeping a discreet two hundred yards behind him.
It wasn’t anything he was worried about—after all, Interstate 93 was just about it in terms of significant roadway. Except that this guy never seemed to gain on you and never seemed to fall behind. You’d lose him going around a turn and then, sure enough, there he would be in your rearview mirror again. It was as if he were pacing himself against just you.
The only other time in his life Austen had ever been followed was by a pimp in Saigon. The pimp had some idea that he was entitled to restitution for one of his whores whom Austen had arranged to have introduced to an ARVN general, who subsequently made her his mistress, but Saigon could be a very scary place, where every day nice American soldier boys ended up in alleyways with their guts leaking out through their fingers. In the end it had been necessary to take a couple of MP sergeants and call on the pimp at the bar he used as a headquarters to invite him to reconsider his position, and after that the matter had been tactfully dropped.
They had hit a flat stretch by the time the Ford started to close the gap. He didn’t come roaring up, but it was clear after a couple of miles that follow-the-leader time was over. A hundred fifty yards, a hundred twenty, a hundred ten. He knew what he was doing.
Still, Austen wasn’t going to worry about it; he hardly gave it a thought. After all, it was a great big divided highway. There was plenty of room for everybody. Maybe the guy was just bored and wanted to play tag. To hell with him. Austen got over into the right-hand lane.
Finally they weren’t more than twenty yards apart. The Ford kept the inside lane. They were coming up on a bridge—you could just see it in the distance, a couple of low silver arches in the morning sunlight—and the Ford pulled a little ahead. There was only the driver, and he took a quick glance at Austen as he went by.
So much for the reporter theory. Two can look as cheaply as one, and this was nobody Austen had ever seen at any of the dozens of press briefings he had attended since the struggle for the minds and hearts of New Hampshire had begun back in the last millennium. He would have remembered.
This joker, if you could judge by appearances, looked like he was in another line of work altogether. Austen recognized the type; he had seen a lot of them lounging around in the air terminals or leaning up against the rail in certain bars, talking in low tones to the little old Chinese gentlemen who ran the contraband weapons traffic over the border into Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge paid off in raw opium. ’Nam had been full of them.
Generally they started out as soldiers, fighting in somebody’s war somewhere, and when their hitch was over they changed out of their uniforms and just stayed on. They worked for whoever had the folding money; they flew planes or acted as bodyguards or taught the tribesmen up in the Laotian mountains how to use a mortar piece. They were the scariest people in the world.
This one had the tight, hard face of someone in constant physical pain; his eyes weren’t much more than just a pair of horizontal creases. And the impression of immobility was somehow intensified by the straight black moustache that went across his upper lip as if it had been branded on.
And then he pulled away, leaving Austen to study the back of his head and draw what conclusions he could from that.
The bridge was probably less than a quarter of a mile away—the shoulder of the road was beginning to slope off more and more—when the Ford pulled directly in front of Austen.
Suddenly, just before they would have made the bridge, the red tail lights on the Ford lit up and Austen saw they were going to collide if he didn’t do something. He slammed on the brakes, bracing himself against the wheel as he waited for the impact.
BAM!
But it was more like a small explosion than the tearing of metal. Austen’s car began to turn into a skid. All at once he was fighting to keep control, and he wasn’t winning. God, if he could just keep it on the road—he was going all over the place.
Austen tried to aim for the first bridge support, hoping for a glancing blow that wouldn’t kill him outright and would get him inside and onto the bridge itself, where the guardrail might keep him from dropping over the side like a stone.
All he could really do was keep hold of the wheel and pray. The Ford was gone as if it had disap
peared. He could see the bridge coming at him. He could see. . .
. . . . .
Afterward, when he woke up—whenever that was—he couldn’t remember the impact. Everything else was perfectly clear, but the shock, the noise, had gotten lost somewhere. For the first few seconds all he knew was that he hurt practically everywhere; then, when he tried to move, he discovered that his left arm wasn’t working. He couldn’t even move it.
He was lying on the floor, most of him on the passenger’s side, and he could taste blood. A little investigation revealed the cause—there was a cut on his forehead that felt like it was probably all the way down to the bone, and he was practically covered in the stuff. He had to blink several times, very hard, to get his right eye open.
But what the hell—he was alive.
Slowly, with the pain in his arm hardly allowing him to breathe, he managed to get up onto the seat and have a look outside. The car was on the bridge all right, smack in the middle and blocking off both lanes in that direction. There weren’t any other cars in sight—he didn’t have a line of traffic backed up behind him—so he couldn’t have been out more than a couple of seconds. He took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his trousers and put it to his head, nervously wondering where else he was injured. That was about as far as he cared to take the inquiry just at that point, thank you very much. If he could stay conscious and keep from collapsing back down on the seat like a rag doll, he would be delighted.
Pretty soon there was another car—a blue Pinto, thank God—coming from the other direction. It went past, turned around, and came back to pull up behind him. Austen watched in the rearview mirror without much interest as the man got out, slammed the door behind him, and cautiously walked up to the car as if he expected it to burst into flames within the next second.
“You all right, mister?” he asked, looking in through the broken side window.
Softly, because his ribs were beginning to bother him, but nonetheless quite audibly, Austen began to laugh.
The man in the blue Pinto, whose name was something like “Furbrick,” drove him into a little town, the name of which he never did find out, about five miles down the road. The state police dispatched a tow truck to pick up his car, and the local doctor, who had his offices on the second floor over the Panhandle bar and steak house, sewed up his head and assured him that all he had done to his arm was dislocate it at the shoulder. By two o’clock in the afternoon, with his arm in a sling, he was able to hobble over to the garage at the Chevron station across the street and see about his car. He had rented it in Manchester and it was fully insured, which from the look of things was probably just as well.
“Yer tire blew.” The mechanic grinned with the joy of absolute conviction. He was a tall, cadaverous-looking individual with hands that were completely blackened with axle grease, and the biggest elbows Austen had ever seen on anybody. “You got lucky, mister. People die all the time from stuff like that.”
Sure enough, on the left front tire there was a piece gone right out of the whitewall, about two inches by three and almost perfectly rectangular. Austen put his finger into the hole and felt around on the inside, although precisely what he was looking for he couldn’t have said.
“What would do something like that?” he asked. The mechanic only shrugged, as if it hardly mattered.
“Couldn’t say, mister. Maybe jes’ a defect—they don’t make ’em like they used to.”
“Right.”
No factory defect ever made such a nice neat hole as that, but a little patch of plastic explosive would. Put one on the inside of the tire, with a small radio-controlled detonator, and every trace would be blown right out when the tire exploded. Austen remembered how the light green Ford had climbed in front of him and then hit the brakes, forcing him to do the same, and how it had shot away immediately afterward. The son-of-a-bitch had been trying to kill him.
“What d’you want me to do with the car, mister?” The mechanic smiled once more; he was safely back in the world of the practical. “It’s gonna take some work to get this baby rollin’ again.”
“I don’t know. I’ll call the rental company—it’s their headache.”
. . . . .
Fortunately, there was bus service to Manchester, so after Austen had phoned Penny-Pincher Rent-a-Car and explained that a defect in one of their tires had nearly left him at the bottom of the Pemigawasset River Gorge, he caught the three-seventeen south.
All the rest of the way down Interstate 93, there wasn’t a thing in the world to do but think. He tried to imagine what he could have done lately to make anyone, anyone in the wide world, want to kill him. True, there were several dozen professional Democratic politicians, loyal to other candidates, who might bear him some ill will—after all, his man was going to wipe the plate clean tomorrow—but generally people like that didn’t think in terms of anything so subtle as a plastic bomb on the inside of your tire. And there was no one else—no jealous husbands, no stiffed bookies, no one. No one except, perhaps, Chester Storey.
Of course, it could have been simply a coincidence. What, really, could old Chester have to be so nervous about? Anyway, he didn’t want it to be Chester Storey. Chester Storey, whatever the hell else he was, was strictly a family scandal, the private business of the Faircliff-forPresident cabal and no one, absolutely no one, else—and we do not want to go looking for things with which to tarnish the candidate’s halo. Whatever this stupid business was ultimately about, it had to be kept away from Faircliff.
Still, that might not be so easy. Even if you forgot all about motive, you were still stuck with the problem of opportunity. The guy had planned it, followed him up to Berlin, rigged his car, and then followed him back so he could do his little trick. Ergo, somebody had known right where to look for him.
And who would be able to know a thing like that? When Austen had phoned back to Bedford to tell them he wouldn’t be returning that night, how would the message have been routed? Who generally took care of that kind of routine business? Who else but Howard Diederich?
And now some guy with a face you could probably strike matches on had tried to tumble him off the road. To roll and burn, just like the late Congressman Boothe.
“But you don’t really think Ted Boothe was an accident. Like my mother was an accident? You’re not satisfied with that, are you?”
No, he wasn’t. He had never come right out with it, not even to himself, simply because it sounded so goddamned dumb. And because Dottie hadn’t believed in accidents either, and he hadn’t wanted to set that pot boiling again. And the result had been a gradual, almost imperceptible estrangement. There seemed fewer and fewer moments when her father’s shadow didn’t fall between them. And now they hardly ever even saw one another. They hardly ever. . .
And it wasn’t just that he was busy with the campaign. It was that, too, but not the way anyone else might have expected. It wasn’t just that he was away all the time, but that he was away trying to make Simon Faircliff, her father, the Simon Faircliff who kept a man like Howard Diederich as his familiar, into the President of the United States—that was what she couldn’t bring herself to forgive him for.
When he got into Manchester, he was exhausted. Perhaps it was his being troubled in his mind, or perhaps it was nothing more than the constant little adjustments he had had to make to protect his arm and the bruises on his ribcage as the bus jolted along; it had been rather like having to stand at attention during the whole one and a half hours. He had had a long and eventful day, so he indulged himself in the luxury of a taxi ride out to the hotel in Bedford.
He asked at the desk whether Senator Faircliff was in, and the clerk smiled and nodded and said, yes, the senator had been in since at least four that afternoon; he knew because the girl at the switchboard had been kept very busy. He looked as if he were ready to laugh discreetly at this little shared joke—we all understood the idiosyncrasies of these famous politicians, now didn’t we?—but Austen wasn’t in the m
ood. The clerk’s smile withered up like a daisy in the Sahara.
Faircliff’s room—his suite, actually; the bedroom was next door—was 426 and, as usual when he was home, the door was open. When Austen walked in there were five people sitting around on the sofa and the two armchairs. There was Faircliff, of course, and Diederich, naturally, and then there was some kid named Gorman, who seemed to belong to Howard. Then there was Percy Grube, the New Hampshire chairman, and somebody Austen had seen once or twice but whose name he couldn’t remember—he had something to do with voter registration.
Faircliff was perched at the far end of the sofa where he could watch the door, and when he saw Austen he suddenly rose about halfway out of his seat, exactly as if the burlap upholstery had all at once been turned up to about five hundred degrees.
“Jesus, Frank—what happened to you?”
“Nothing. I had an accident with the car. I’m fine.”
Faircliff came over to him and brought him to the unoccupied end of the sofa, as if he were helping an invalided old woman into her wheelchair. Austen sat down and smiled, and everyone shook their heads and looked worried and inquired whether there was anything he wanted—like maybe a doctor, or perhaps just a bourbon and water to dull the pain. None was more insistent than Faircliff, whose face, when he wasn’t trying to persuade his son-in-law that he really ought to check into a hospital, was set in a grim, worried, resentful mask, as if he were just beginning to figure something out.
But in that first moment, that half-second or so before they had fallen into the roles the situation demanded of them, they had all betrayed themselves. And now Austen had his answer.
Because Howard Diederich had been startled enough to have forgotten for just an instant that he was always supposed to be as smooth as a dish of cream, and the first thing he had let show on his face was less surprise than disappointment.
The President's Man Page 15
