The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “Well, I think he’s right about that anyway, Howard. He usually is right about things like that. We bagged the nomination following his advice; we don’t want to ignore him now and have it cost us the election.”

  That seemed to settle the question. Howard Diederich merely nodded as if it were a matter of indifference to him. He had finished his tea but continued to hold the cup, with his fingers wrapped around the outside as if to crush it.

  “Have you considered your choices for after the election? You’ll have to give him something, you know, and it’ll have to be something important enough to keep him from feeling he’s being shunted aside. And, God knows, if you make him Chief of Staff he’ll tie you up so tight you won’t be able to breathe. Have you thought about that, Simon?”

  “No, I can’t say I have.” Faircliff showed his teeth in a stiff little grin the voters would never have understood. “But I’ll bet you’ve done that for me, haven’t you, Howard. Tell me, what am I going to do with my right arm?”

  Howard Diederich actually laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh—just a kind of low gurgle—but it was quite genuine.

  “You’re going to make him Director of Central Intelligence.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. It’s perfect.” He set the teacup down again with the air of a man who is clearing away trifles before he announces some great truth. “The CIA is supposed to be more-or-less nonpartisan—that’ll keep him out of your hair politically. He has a conspiratorial turn of mind—let his attentions be directed outward, toward the Russians and the Chinese and away from us. He can worry about the rest of the world, and we can stop worrying about him. It’s perfect.”

  “But, like you said, it’s supposed to be nonpartisan. They’ll never go for it.”

  Howard Diederich, if he didn’t laugh, at least smiled. “They’ll go for it,” he said. “Kennedy made his brother attorney general; Carter gave the CIA to his roommate from Annapolis. Hell, Casey was Reagan’s campaign manager. We’re the majority party, remember? Make it understood that you want someone in there upon whom you can rely absolutely, that you’ll take direct responsibility for his actions in office. They’ll make a fuss, but so what? You’ll be a brand-new President—they won’t turn the nomination back.”

  “Wonderful.” Faircliff studied Howard Diederich’s face as if looking for some suggestion of a trap. Then he knitted his fingers together tightly enough to make his knuckles white and rested them against his lips, like a man praying. Except that he wasn’t.

  “Come on, Simon, trust me. I’ve never steered you wrong. Didn’t I lay that Kyauktada business out for you? We’ve done all right so far.”

  “And I suppose you also know just what we’re going to do with Clayton Burgess in the meantime.” Faircliff looked up again, his eyes restless, but Howard Diederich’s expression was smooth and uncommunicative. Except that his eyes were open, you might have thought he was asleep.

  “You leave Clayton Burgess to me.”

  VII

  Yates had considered his problem from every possible angle, and it resolved itself into one of access. It would have been a relatively simple matter to plant a bomb in Clayton Burgess’s car, or even to catch him in a crowded elevator and gun him down, but an assassination that was supposed to be indistinguishable from death by natural causes was another matter. You had to reach the man and then somehow get away undetected.

  The means compounded the difficulty. As a general rule, provided there was no particular hurry, poisons were the easiest things in the world to handle. You could put the stuff in the subject’s toothpaste, just around the nozzle of the tube so that only the first dose would be lethal, and you wouldn’t run the risk of giving the show away by wiping out the entire family. Or you could coat the bottom of a drinking glass; since Burgess was living more or less exclusively in hotel rooms just at present, and his wife didn’t always travel with him, nothing could have been easier to arrange.

  But this junk had to be introduced into the bloodstream—Mr. Defoe had been explicit about that. “It doesn’t require more than the merest trace, and a scratch no deeper than a paper cut will do, but it has to be absorbed through a break in the skin.”

  It was a clear, high-viscosity fluid, in a bottle with a nylon brush attached inside the cap; he might almost have been dealing with model airplane glue. It wouldn’t be hard to manage, provided he could come up with an opportunity, but obviously he wasn’t going to be able to walk up on the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, pull out a hypodermic needle, and give him a shot between the shoulder blades.

  He had considered fixing a ring with some sort of tiny barb along the bottom. The candidate walks by, you shake his hand, and the thing is done; it was a technique the Borgias had perfected centuries ago. But there were problems with that idea, not the least of which was Yates’s fear that he might accidentally stab himself, perhaps without even knowing it. How could he know? He didn’t want to wind up the one on a morgue slab.

  And then there was the fact that he had a face people tended to remember. He was no beauty queen, thank God, but he stuck in the mind. He scared people. Ordinarily he didn’t care about that—in fact, he rather enjoyed it—but it was a professional liability of which Yates was perfectly aware. Mr. Defoe wouldn’t be pleased if he turned up in a news photo just a couple of days before Burgess cashed in. He had had a long and gaudy career; somebody might make the connection.

  “Mr. Defoe”—that was a laugh. Well, if he ever needed to know the guy’s real name, he supposed he could find it out fast enough.

  It was easy enough to find out that the candidate planned to be in California for the two weeks before that state’s primary election, and that his people had booked a floor at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles for the entire period. That was reasonable; after all, the southern counties were heavily Republican, and they would decide who won or lost. Naturally he would use Los Angeles as a base.

  Four days before Burgess was scheduled to arrive, Yates booked himself into a room on the sixth floor.

  He spent the better part of a week simply studying the routines of the place—when and in what order the maids did the rooms, how laundry got delivered, where the service elevators were and how often they were used, how often the shifts were changed. He knew that Burgess’s entourage would have the floor above his, and he was down in the lobby when the motorcade from the airport pulled in and everyone started cheering as the People’s Choice made his way through the crowd, pumping hands like a machine. For a moment he was sorry he had abandoned the ring idea; it would have been so simple just to push his way through and pretend he was another true believer eager to touch the hem of the master’s robe.

  Well, fortunately there was no hurry. “Anytime before the nominating convention,” Mr. Defoe had said, and that was still a couple of months off. All the time in the world.

  But it was obvious he would be at it forever if he tried to get to Burgess when he was alone. Burgess was never alone. All the major candidates had by this time been extended Secret Service protection, and besides, their aides clustered around them like flies around a rotting carcass. But if he couldn’t get to Burgess, he could probably arrange a few undisturbed moments in his room.

  The people at the front desk were certainly your typical surfboard Anglo-Saxons, but the language you heard in the corridors and echoing out of the laundry rooms was Spanish. And the nice thing about that was that the hotel patrons hardly seemed to notice that they were there. Who looks at a Mexican pushing a vacuum cleaner? Why should anyone look at him? He might as well be invisible.

  Could he pass for a Mexican? Yates studied himself in the mirror and decided that, dark Irishman that he was, he could. A little make-up perhaps, thinly applied to the face and the backs of the hands just to be on the safe side—the corridors weren’t very well lit. For the rest, all he had to do was not look like himself. He had a black wig, the same color as his own hair but cut much
longer. It made him look like a fag, but he supposed he could stand that for twenty minutes or so; if anybody tried to cruise him they’d be in for a shock. A pair of heavy glasses thick enough to suggest he had undergone cataract surgery would take care of the eyes. Like the wig, they were a souvenir from his days with Air America in Vietnam, standard CIA issue. When you had them on your vision was unaffected, but nobody noticed anything about your face except the glasses. It was as much disguise as he supposed he would need.

  Getting a passkey was easy. He found a room that was being done—the doors were always propped open with a rolled-up towel, but they turned the television so loud to listen to the soap operas that they couldn’t hear a thing—waited until the girl was busy doing the bathroom, and pinched the key, which no one ever bothered to take out of the lock, long enough to make an impression in a piece of wax. Fifteen seconds, start to finish.

  About two-fifteen, he changed into the uniform he had stolen from a fourth-floor laundry room on his second day, donned his disguise, and slipped into the service area to steal a vacuum cleaner from the utility closet. A seven-second elevator ride had him on Burgess’s floor.

  Nobody stopped him; nobody even saw him. Here and there he could hear voices behind a door, but otherwise there were no signs of life. Burgess’s door didn’t have its “Do Not Disturb” sign out, so it was a safe bet no one was home. Yates listened anyway. There was no sound, so he knocked. There was no answer, so he went in.

  It wasn’t a room; it was a suite. But he supposed anybody who was within a hundred delegates of having the Republican nomination locked up could probably afford a little personal luxury. He took the vacuum cleaner into the bedroom with him, just to make it look good if anyone should happen to walk in on him, and left it outside the entrance to the bathroom.

  By then he had settled on a tentative plan—after all, everybody shaves.

  He had ideas, depending upon whether or not the candidate was a blade man. If he used an electric razor, then Yates would fix the protective screen somehow so that whoever drew it across his face would scratch himself, probably several times. It was, by and large, the idea he liked better. It struck him as safer.

  But Senator Burgess was a blade man; he had a little Wilkinson snap-in holder. People who shaved with a blade nicked themselves all the time; the only problem was to know where to apply Mr. Defoe’s magic formula so it would do the job.

  He could simply dump the whole bottle into Burgess’s aftershave—”Royal Lyme” yet, for people with more money than sense—but he didn’t know what effect prolonged exposure to alcohol might have on the stuff. He was no chemist, and nobody had told him how this junk was supposed to work anyway.

  And mightn’t Burgess notice if the blade in his razor was oily? It might feel different and cause him to take a closer look. It had to go totally undetected; Mr. Defoe had been quite explicit about that.

  He found his answer in the black leather shaving kit that was sitting on the marble shelf into which the sink had been built. Burgess apparently cut himself often enough to have invested fifty cents in a styptic pencil.

  Yates slipped on the plastic gloves he had been carrying in his back pocket—with this stuff he didn’t want to take the slightest risk of exposure—unscrewed the top of the tiny bottle, and used the built-in nylon brush to paint the solution over the entire point of the styptic pencil. The alum absorbed it quickly, so he waited a few seconds and applied it again. In no time at all the whole first inch or so was completely impregnated, and no one looking at it would have noticed a thing.

  He put the pencil back into its plastic tube, closed up the bottle of solution, and took off his gloves, being careful to turn them all the way inside out as he did so. Then he dropped the bottle into one of the gloves, folded them together, and returned them to his back pocket. He picked up his vacuum cleaner and left, closing the door behind him and making sure the lock had caught. Altogether, he couldn’t have been inside longer than two or three minutes.

  As he dragged the vacuum cleaner back down the corridor toward the service elevator, he couldn’t help but laugh. Tomorrow morning, or the next, when Burgess skinned his Adam’s apple because he was in a hurry to get to a breakfast meeting of the Knights of Columbus or something. . .

  He only had one regret—that he wouldn’t have a chance to be there for the fun.

  . . . . .

  Immediately after breakfast on the morning of his scheduled motorcade through Anaheim, Clayton Burgess began to notice that he wasn’t feeling very well. It wasn’t more than a stomach ache, so he had an aide go down to the hotel gift shop and pick up some Alka-Selzer. He had been living on this damned hotel food now for at least three months, and he had supposed it would catch up with him one time or another.

  But by ten o’clock the Alka-Selzer hadn’t helped. The pain had moved up into his chest, and he noticed he was beginning to sweat heavily. It was a warm day but perfectly dry, yet he could feel his undershirt clinging to his skin.

  “You okay, boss? You look kind of pale—you want us to call this circus off?”

  “I’m fine, Rudy.” He smiled wanly and allowed the young man to open the car door for him, glad to have a chance to sit down. It was odd, but he just couldn’t seem to catch his breath. It was as if the air had thinned to nothing.

  During the hour’s drive to Anaheim, he seemed to feel a little better. As long as he stayed quiet, the pain in his chest wasn’t more than a dull ache, hardly anything at all.

  They met the local Republican congressman, a slight, ascetic-looking man called either “Melcher” or “Malchak”; Burgess had never met him before and didn’t quite catch the name when they were introduced. They transferred to an old Cadillac convertible for the ride down Lincoln Avenue, so they had to sit on top of the back seat where they could be seen.

  There was a good crowd. The car drove along at no more than five or six miles an hour, and it would probably take them the better part of forty-five minutes to make it through downtown. It worked in rotation—first you waved with the right hand to people on one side of the street, and then you waved with the left to people on the other. By the time they had made two blocks, Burgess was beginning to appreciate that he was in real trouble.

  At first it was just that his arms seemed to weigh about two hundred pounds apiece—he had been doing this kind of nonsense for months without its ever bothering him before—and then he began to experience a strange shooting pain coming out from under his left shoulder and going all the way out to his hand.

  And then the pains in his chest started in earnest. It was like there was a hand in there, squeezing.

  “Get me out of here,” he gasped, trying to slide down onto the rear seat before he simply fell. He could hardly talk at all now; it was absolute agony even to breathe. “Get me to a hospital. Step on it.”

  The people collected along the sidewalks had no idea why Senator Burgess’s Cadillac suddenly shot away. They could only listen to the howl of the police sirens and speculate that something had to be very wrong.

  “Maybe somebody shot him,” one man said out loud to no one in particular. “Remember Kennedy? Maybe somebody got this one, too.”

  Nobody answered.

  . . . . .

  “I called his wife. He’s out of intensive care, thank Heaven. Maybe I should fly down to LA tomorrow and visit him.”

  Howard Diederich merely shrugged.

  “Fine—visit him. I’m sure it’ll go down very well with the voters. Now that he’s out of the race, it won’t do you a bit of harm to be perceived as Clayton Burgess’s friend.”

  “I am his friend,” Simon Faircliff murmured, hardly able to look the other man in the face as they sat at opposite ends of the sofa in the living room of his San Francisco apartment. “We came to Washington in the same year; we used to live near one another in McLean. God, I’m glad he seems to be pulling through.”

  “You certainly can draw a fine distinction, Simon.” The dim smile on Diederic
h’s lips curled contemptuously and then flickered out. “He’s as good as dead. If my information is correct, he’ll probably never be able to walk the length of a city block again. I doubt if he’ll last the year, not that it matters. But by all means go and see him. Maybe he’ll decide the ‘national interest’ would be better served with you in the White House instead of Walter Shepherd and he’ll turn his delegates loose and split the convention. You never know.”

  Faircliff had been listening to that voice all evening, and it was beginning to be almost more than he could bear. He looked at the glass in his hand and, discovering that it was empty, went into the kitchen to fix himself another stiff scotch and water. More than anything, he wanted to get away from Howard for a moment, away from his gloating over how easy everything had suddenly become.

  In the five days since Burgess’s collapse, he doubted whether he had drawn one completely sober breath. He had cut back his public appearances, and when he did go out, he avoided functions where he had to do more than just smile sweetly and wave and say what a sad thing it was for the country that his good friend had been struck down. The voters didn’t seem to mind, but he was beginning to make himself sick. He kept thinking that now it really was going to be easy. He kept thinking that Sylvia Burgess would probably be a widow within the next several months. He kept thinking that Clay really was his friend, had been his friend for twelve years, and then he kept thinking that he needed another drink. It had to stop.

  “What does Frank make of all this, by the way?” Diederich asked from the living room, which was separated from the kitchen by the width of a corridor.

  Simon returned with his drink and sat down. “Why don’t you ask him?” he inquired, not very pleasantly. “He dropped out of sight as soon as Burgess had his attack; I haven’t seen or heard from him since. He’s still running the campaign—he phones in to the office, so they tell me—but I haven’t heard from him. Not even on primary night. Dottie’s down in Pacific Grove with that flaky aunt of hers, but I don’t think he’s been near her either.”