The President's Man
Page 19
He set up shop at the Doral and once again went about the business of making sure that Faircliff’s assumption of power took on the character of a destined thing.
“Who’s going to get the nod for Vice President?” Pete Freestone asked him the second evening of the convention. It was just a friendly probe; he wouldn’t be offended by the usual flimflam.
“Bob Donovan. You got that from ‘reliable sources close to the Faircliff campaign.’ No names.”
“Thanks, Frank.” Pete grinned—his editor was going to love him when he phoned tonight. “Just between you and me, how does that sit with you?”
“Personally, I think he’s a lamp stand. But what the hell—he gives the ticket balance and he’s pretty to look at. I only hope Faircliff doesn’t catch cold anytime in the next four years.”
Pete just laughed. He didn’t care; as far as he was concerned, he was on vacation. Nothing, but nothing, was going to bother him in Miami.
“Oh God,” he said, wincing at the recollection. “It rained almost the whole time in Denver. By the time Canby was ready to make his acceptance speech, half the delegates were back in their hotel rooms with the flu. He doesn’t have a chance, does he.”
“Not a chance. For one thing, nobody’s ever heard of him.”
“Well, I don’t think anybody really wants him to have a chance. It was nasty, Frank. The Republicans were split up into more factions than the Spanish Popular Front. Burgess had it all wrapped up, and then. . .”
They were walking back from the Convention Center to Freestone’s hotel, where they hoped the crowds in the dining room had thinned sufficiently to allow them to get some dinner in under two hours. It would be a close thing. It was quarter to eight, and the night was warm enough to make it more comfortable to walk with their jackets off. Little halos of light had collected around the stars, which was supposed to be the effect of the humidity.
“You know, it’s a funny thing about Burgess,” Pete said, kicking absent mindedly at a pebble that happened to be lying on the sidewalk. He was a good journalist, and it was impossible to tell whether his casual manner was real or some kind of setup. “I talked to the pathologist down in Los Angeles, and they found the clots all right—he said it was a miracle the guy didn’t croak from the first one before they ever got him to the hospital—but you know what else he said? He said that Clayton Burgess had the cleanest set of arteries he had ever seen in a man that age. He said that in the normal course of things Burgess should have died in his nineties. He couldn’t understand how somebody like that got a killer heart attack on the sunny side of fifty.”
“Maybe somebody iced him—did they check?”
“Yes. It seems to have crossed their minds.” And yes, it was some kind of setup. Pete was studying him out of the corner of his eye like he was something good to eat. “They spun down tissue samples until there was hardly enough of him left to bury. They went over him with a magnifying glass, looking for some kind of puncture wound, and you know what they found? Zip, that’s what they found. Clean as a whistle. “
“Then maybe he just had a heart attack. I suppose it actually could happen—none of us is immortal.”
. . . . .
When all the balloons had been let down and the maintenance men at the Miami Civic Auditorium had swept up all the confetti and the placards and the paper cups, Frank Austen went home. There was no one to meet him at the airport, so he took a cab to Alexandria and carried his suitcase and his clothing bag up the driveway.
“I’ve moved your stuff into the spare bedroom next to your study,”
Dottie announced. Those were her first words when he found her in the backyard, sitting on a lawn chair and drinking a glass of iced tea.
“What do you want, Dottie? Should I move out? Do you want a divorce? What?”
The sun was very low on the horizon, so she had to shade her eyes with the flat of her hand when she looked up at him. Whether she had actually smiled or was just squinting at the glare was difficult to say.
“You’re the one with all the plans, Frank.”
“You come back after all this time and then just push me out? Is that it?”
“That’s it. I live here too, but I wouldn’t let that give me any ideas.” She allowed herself to sink back against the lawn chair without, it seemed, a care in the world. “We live in a building together, that’s all.”
“What do you want from me, Dottie?”
“Sweetie, I just want you in the spare bedroom. After that—well, you don’t take up much space. I don’t care what you do.”
Terrific. Without another word, he went back inside to the kitchen and made himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich for dinner. At any rate, he didn’t suppose he’d be home much over the next several months anyway.
. . . . .
He wasn’t. As he had expected, Faircliff kept him moving all over the country; he was the perpetual-motion machine, part advance man, part coordinating strategist, part Lord High Executioner. The local Democratic organizations hated to see him coming. He buried himself in his work and didn’t pick his head up to look around him until the fourth of November, at eight forty-five in the evening, when he found himself wandering around among the crowds in the ballroom of the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco.
There were television sets everywhere—in the corridors, even in the bathrooms—and a band was playing ragtime loud enough to peel the wax out of your ears. It was hellish, with people in plastic straw hats running around everywhere and shrieking like demons. Austen decided he had a headache and went up to his room for two aspirin and a couple of minutes of quiet with the lights turned off.
He hadn’t even gotten to the medicine chest when the phone rang. It was Howard Diederich. “Frank—can you come up? Simon wants a word or two.”
“Sure.”
The guard in front of the door to the penthouse suite let him in, and to his surprise he found Faircliff alone.
“Sit down, Frank. Did you see? CBS just threw in the towel for Canby—as of two minutes ago, we’ve won!”
“Congratulations, Mr. President.”
Faircliff rose out of his chair, and the two men took each other’s hands and grinned like idiots. At that moment Austen didn’t think of his doubts—he didn’t have any doubts. He didn’t think that his wife was no longer his wife and that his peace of mind had been a distant memory for months. None of that mattered. They had done it. In eight years, they had pulled it off. All he knew for certain was that he loved Simon Faircliff and he was glad they had won. Nothing mattered but that.
Suddenly Faircliff’s smile collapsed.
“I want you to take over the CIA, Frank,” he said, sitting down again and motioning Austen toward the other chair. “I want somebody in there I can trust. I don’t want to end up getting suckered by those jokers the way Kennedy was. I want to know they’re telling me the truth—all of it. And there’s only one way I can do that. Will you take it, Frank?”
For a moment it was impossible to speak. He had expected maybe a special assistantship, something like that, but never in his wildest dreams. . .
“Nothing will change,” Faircliff went on; maybe he thought Austen was holding out for something better. At any rate, his tone became a shade more conciliatory. “I’m making Lyle Des Georges the national security chairman, but you can bet he’ll know who’s calling the shots in foreign policy.”
“I can see confirmation problems, Mr. President. I’m a political partisan, and the CIA is supposed to be outside politics. And I’ve no experience—”
“Bullshit.” The smile returned to Faircliff’s face. “You’re the sneakiest bastard I’ve ever met. If there’s a human being on earth who was born to run a spy shop, it’s you. And besides, how loud can they scream? You’re a lawyer, after all. And George Bush was Republican national chairman before Ford tapped him for the job. You let me worry about that end of it. Will you do it?”
“If you want me to do it, I’ll do it,” he said, with a pe
rfectly straight face. “I’ve always done what you wanted of me, chief.”
“Good boy.”
On the elevator down, Austen’s mouth compressed into a bloodless line. All through the campaign they had kept him busy, letting him retain the illusion that he was still at the center of events, but it had all been emptiness. And now he was to be shuffled off to run the CIA, where he would have an impressive title and lots of money and be out of Howard’s hair. If he and Diederich had been struggling over the heart and soul of Simon Faircliff, then Diederich had come away with the prize. Now he would have the President of the United States all to himself.
But, to his credit, Austen’s grief was not that of the slighted courtier; the wound was to his conscience, not his pride. What he felt was guilt and fear, as if he had delivered Faircliff over into the hands of his enemies. And the poor fool didn’t even know who his enemies were.
Howard Diederich had won.
Well, perhaps we would just have to see about that. One time or another, Frank Austen and Howard Diederich were going to have to settle up everything between them, and Langley, Virginia wasn’t the edge of the world. Austen could imagine that there were still ways of hitting back. Who could say?— Howard might just discover that he had provided him with the means he had been seeking all along.
Part Three - SOROKA
THE new Director of Central Intelligence spent his first full day on the job trying to keep from smothering down in the vaults. “Jesus, don’t you guys believe in dusting?” he asked, after he had exhausted the resources of his pocket handkerchief and George Timmler had had to fetch a box of Kleenex from the basement utility closet.
“Hardly anybody comes down here,” Timmler answered, standing beside his new master’s desk at a kind of aloof parade rest. “We don’t much encourage the writing of histories.”
Timmler, who was Deputy Director of Intelligence—the DDI to his friends—wasn’t very friendly. Perhaps he had expected to succeed the former director, whom President Faircliff had retired to a melon ranch in North Carolina, or perhaps he had expected to be canned himself and figured he had nothing to lose. Either way, he hadn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet.
“Fine—then I can only assume that most incoming presidents aren’t left totally in the dark right up to Inauguration Day. Your ex-boss wasn’t terribly forthcoming; we were just wondering what he wanted to hide.”
“He wasn’t hiding anything. He didn’t like your boss.”
“Well, he’s everybody’s boss now, so I suggest we all try to make the adjustment.” Austen got up from the little steel desk that was just inside the door to the main safe; he tried to stretch his arms and was immediately caught by an attack of sneezing instead. “But you’re right—there’s nothing here worth hiding. What happened, did Coppard burn everything the day after the election?”
He wiped his nose, and Timmler’s eyes narrowed with professional disdain. “You’ll learn, Mr. Austen, that there are some things around here that even the Director isn’t allowed to do, and one of them is destroy the conduct papers. Somebody would have shot him if he’d tried.”
“Who would have shot him?”
“I would have shot him.”
Judging from the look on his face, Austen was inclined to believe him. Timmler was a small, slight man, with the sort of countenance that is usually described as “birdlike,” and the lines around his mouth and the thick streaks of gray through his dark brown hair didn’t suggest that life had been an unending series of triumphs for him. But Austen made an educated guess that old George probably wouldn’t have hesitated before burning down a renegade DCI if it had come to that. That kind of toughness had nothing to do with size.
“Good for you. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see the files relative to everything presently on the boil.”
That was how the first two months went. As Austen prepared his massive document on the current operational posture of the CIA, he began to feel his way into the new job and discovered that he liked it. It was every bit as much a gutter game as politics, but it had something that politics lacked: a certain disinterestedness. “The cause,” in this case, was not the career and fortunes of a single man, even if you could see him as the last best hope. No; here, if it was us against them, then at least us was big enough to include the whole country. That provided a measure of saving grace. And he liked George Timmler, who hadn’t even bothered to vote since 1956.
“What does he want it for?” Timmler asked, as he sat in the chair opposite the director’s desk and watched him proofing the final pages of his single-copy report. He had unfrozen enough that he would sit down now and even bring his cup of morning coffee in with him.
“Faircliff likes to know what’s going on. Why? Didn’t Brubaker ever request this kind of a breakdown?”
“We were lucky if Brubaker read the morning briefing book.”
Austen looked up and smiled. “You won’t have those problems with Faircliff. As soon as he gets this, he’ll be all over us with follow-up questions. Get used to it; he’s going to wring us all dry. And he loves the little details—conclusions won’t be enough; he’ll want the data behind them, right down to the shirt size and social security number of the agent who cleaned out that particular Kremlin wastepaper basket. You wait and see.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, surprised at how much they burned, and then threw the report on his desk with a sigh. The monster was finally finished, and none too soon—Faircliff had wanted it yesterday. They were all going to have to adjust to the new volume of work.
“I don’t like to see a thing like that go out of the building,” Timmler said, resting his fingertips on the top sheet of the fifty-page document. “For that matter, I don’t like seeing it in the building. Summaries like that always contain more than anyone needs to know.” He allowed his thumb to ruffle the corner as if doing a quick page count, and his face contracted into a slight frown. It was touching in its way, like a man sending his only daughter out on her first date.
“Relax. This is the only copy, I typed it myself, and the carbon ribbons and backup sheets went through the shredder yesterday. I’ll take it over to the White House personally; nobody’s going to read it except the President, and he’s not apt to leave it lying around for the amusement of the housemaids. He knows it’s not a reference report; he’ll commit it to memory and give it back. I’ve already settled it with him. Okay?”
“Okay. It’s nice to know you’re familiar with the drill.”
He tried to smile, but Austen was figuring that perhaps it was time to straighten out who the new boss was. He held Timmler’s eyes with his own, keeping his expression deliberately blank. “I’m not exactly fresh out of school, George,” he began quietly, folding his hands together across his stomach as he leaned back in his chair. “Simon Faircliff may have put me in this job, but I put him in the presidency.” Austen’s eyes narrowed—he didn’t feel at all like letting anybody off lightly. “You look up my file sometime, and you’ll find that when I was in the army during the late unpleasantness I was a point man for military intelligence. Do you know what we used to say about the CIA? ‘If you want to check the accuracy of a Company scoop, consult the Saigon Yellow Pages, because that’s probably where they got it.’“
Timmler didn’t like it much, but he was smart enough not to say anything or even to let it show. That was another point in his favor. Austen allowed the moment of awkward silence to drag on a little longer, just to be sure.
“What’s eating you, George?” He unfolded his hands and laid them delicately on the edge of the desk, like a presiding judge; it was a gesture he had unconsciously copied from Faircliff. “You haven’t had a Company man in this chair since the Colby purge. Or is it just me?”
“You want an answer?” The atmosphere in the room had suddenly grown noticeably more tense, as if at any moment the two men might come at each other with knives. But neither stirred, and at last Austen merely nodded his head.
Austen had listened with polite attention, betraying nothing, and when it was clear that Timmler had finished, his only immediate response was to nod his head once more, the way a man might who has just had a puzzling phenomenon explained to him. “Is that it? Or is there more?” He raised his eyebrows expectantly and finally smiled.
“No? Good—it was beginning to sound like a replay of the confirmation hearings. Well, I hope at least it made you feel better.”
“What do you want from me anyway, Austen?”
“Now we’re getting down to business.” He threw himself back in his chair, bracing himself against the armrests as if he expected someone to fight him for possession. “You want a nice clean nonpolitical Company; do I read you? Okay—you’ve got it, but it’ll cost you. You’ll have to stay on with me. You keep Intelligence, but you move over into the office next door. You become my right-hand man, in effect the associate director. Is it a deal?”