The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  The word was that if anyone wasn’t there for morning inspection, he would take out the man’s whole platoon and run him to earth. If they didn’t catch him, then they could draw lots among themselves to see who would take his place for punishment, so you could bet they always caught him. When they did, Krall—he was pretty sure it was Krall—would put ropes over the tops of a couple of good, stout trees and have his men pull them down until they were bent over like a pair of croquet hoops. The deserter would have a leg tied to the top of each tree by a short rope, and then the other ropes would be cut. The trees would snap back up like metal springs, and the poor bastard would be torn in half. Krall was the sort of person destined to make a lasting impression.

  Exotic hobbies aside, he was a striking fellow, close to six three, very solid looking, and very blond, even to the eyebrows. You might have thought he was an ex-Nazi, except that he was about twenty years too young. He probably would have enjoyed being a Nazi.

  They had known each other distantly, the way people in roughly the same line of work do—not well, or even personally, but by report and by sight. For present purposes it was enough.

  Apparently it was enough on both sides. Krall was leaning against a car, and when his eyes met Starkman’s he bent down to say something through the window. Starkman ducked into a side street, but not quickly enough to avoid being seen—and to see that Krall was coming after him.

  Well, that settled that. He couldn’t very well go back to his motel—except, perhaps, just to pick up his car—because if these people were on their toes they would find his room and have it staked out within forty-five minutes. And he couldn’t try to leave town because there was only the main road in and out, and they could bottle that up easily enough. While he still had his camera full of exposed film in his pocket, he simply couldn’t afford the risk.

  These slobs couldn’t have any idea what they were here protecting. The President of the United States is a changeling—nobody was stupid enough to trust a thug like Krall with that kind of secret. But once they got their hands on that film, they would know. And their bosses would know how close Austen was to pulling the chain on them. We couldn’t have that.

  So he had to get rid of the camera—send it back to Austen so he could put his jigsaw puzzle together and do whatever it was that he had to do then—and after that he could feel at liberty to worry about parochial interests like his own personal survival.

  But before he could even do that, he had to get rid of Krall.

  He had, he figured, no more than about a two- or three-block lead, probably not even that much. Krall would be on foot and probably alone—that was the way he would want it—but there was probably a car full of his friends cruising the streets. The plan would have to be to keep the main show inside and not let himself be seen until he was ready.

  Starkman ducked into the first doorway that proved handy and found himself in a bait and tackle shop, which was a lucky break. He was packing a .32 revolver, but he figured the easiest way in the world of getting himself picked up by the police—and hence picked off by Krall and his friends; jails were too damned accessible—was to start shooting. Guns were too noisy. He would have to find something else.

  What he found was a hunting knife with a seven-inch blade. It was the sort of thing that could be trusted to do a reasonably efficient job even on a lump of muscle like Krall, and it only cost fourteen ninety-five.

  “Has this place got a back door?”

  The man behind the counter looked at him a little strangely; then he said, sure, through the back—right where you’d expect it to be, mister. Outside, Starkman found himself in a small parking lot blocked on two sides by buildings. There was no one around.

  He took the knife and cut away all the top part of the scabbard, leaving only what covered the blade. The idea was that if he wore the thing inside his waistband, where it wouldn’t be seen, he wouldn’t accidentally slice open a kidney but the knife would come out clean when he was ready to use it. The gun was in a holster up against his backbone, where he hoped it would stay.

  And now for Krall.

  It took him close to twenty minutes to find the goon—like cops, the heavies were never there when you wanted them. Starkman waited in the shadow of a florist shop’s awning for half an hour before he saw his man. He showed himself, trying not to be too obvious about it, crossing the street almost under Krall’s nose. Then it was just follow the leader.

  Buildings with elevators were hard to come by in a town that size—hell, they had all the land in the world—but he finally tracked down a Ramada Inn. After that it was largely a question of timing. Krall had to be allowed to catch up a little and had to be lulled into believing that nobody had noticed him, but it wouldn’t do for him to get close enough to do anything. There weren’t any guarantees that he would have any inhibitions about the use of firearms.

  So it was five blocks of tag—working the streetlights, trying to stay with the crowds of shoppers, keeping anything and anyone between himself and his tail while he made his way.

  The Inn’s lobby was reasonably quiet; why shouldn’t it be at a few minutes before three in the afternoon? The coffee shop cashier was reading a movie magazine, and the newsstand seemed to be unoccupied. Starkman picked the elevator most completely out of the front desk’s line of sight. It was a four-flight ride to the top.

  And there he waited. Krall would hang around, watching the floor indicator, trying to figure out where his quarry was getting off, and then he would follow right along. He would be impatient by then—and maybe just a little annoyed. Like a lot of big men, he would be thinking about all the terrible things he was going to do to the lousy creep when he got his hands on him.

  The lousy creep smiled, stepped into a vacant car, and stood there with his finger on the stop button. He even allowed himself to take out the hunting knife, balancing it carefully in his hand.

  When he heard the little bell ping, prophesying Krall’s arrival, he took his finger from the button, allowing the doors to snap closed, and turned off the power switch.

  It was possible to imagine the little drama that was being rehearsed out in the hallway. Krall was looking around, seeing nothing but a double line of closed doors. By now he would be aware that he had made a mistake, that he didn’t even know whether Starkman was registered here, that he should have checked at the desk, that what he should do now was go back down to the lobby and do that, and maybe wait around down there for Starkman to show himself again. He would be thinking that perhaps he had better call in his friends—that, yes, he was wasting his time up here.

  Through the wall Starkman could hear the elevator button snapping back and forth under Krall’s impatient thumb. As if that weren’t enough, the light on his own control board kept flickering on and off. Our boy was in a hurry, and people in a hurry got careless, especially when they could probably tear a telephone book in half; that kind of strength could lead you to forget that you might have something to worry about from your puny fellow mortals. It was time to let him have his ride.

  Starkman crowded into the corner in front, away from the door, where he figured he could keep out of sight the longest, and turned the power back on.

  The elevator doors moved with almost insulting lethargy. But as soon as they were open even a little, Krall started forcing himself in sideways. The stupid jerk, before he noticed that he didn’t have the place all to himself he was almost all the way inside. And then, when it finally hit him, he didn’t even move. He seemed to be struck dumb with astonishment.

  But Starkman didn’t wait. As fast as he could, and with as much force behind it as he could muster, he straight-armed the knife into Krall’s chest. He could feel the jolt as it deflected off a rib, but that didn’t stop it; the blade buried itself right up to the hilt.

  By every principle of anatomy, it should have been sticking right through Krall’s heart, coming out the other side with any luck. Krall was dead, but some men didn’t figure that out as f
ast as others. Krall might be the type who needed a moment or two before the message made its way upstairs: you’re dead. So Starkman stepped back out of the way, leaving the knife just where it was. More than one corpse had had time to kill someone before it did the decent thing and crumpled to the floor.

  Krall didn’t look dead—merely surprised. It was a couple of seconds before he even seemed to notice the knife. Then he reached up, wrapped his thick fingers around the handle—well, good; then no one would have to be concerned about prints—and seemed to want to pull it out. It didn’t come easily. The more he pulled at it, the more blood started welling down the front of his shirt. It was a painful thing to see; he seemed to be opening himself up like a tin can.

  Quite suddenly, the message got through: you’re dead. Krall simply fell forward, leaving Starkman to dodge out of the way. He fell on the butt end of the knife; there was a little groan, and then with terrible, writhing slowness he turned over on his side. Starkman put a finger against the carotid artery and thought perhaps he felt the last flutter of a heartbeat; then there was nothing. Krall’s face was a mask of astonishment. His pale blue eyes were still open, and his hard features seemed tensed with expectation. He was dead, and it was the biggest surprise in the world.

  Starkman turned off the power again. This wasn’t a little bundle he wanted carried down to the lobby right away, where everybody could look at it. Somebody would come along soon enough, notice the open door, and start screaming bloody murder, because that was just exactly what they would find. But that might not be for five or ten more minutes, and by then Starkman planned to be long gone.

  He had a package to get into the mails, and he would have the whole mob after him now, no holds barred. They would know they had something to scramble for.

  It was going to be an interesting several hours.

  VI

  Frank Austen examined the photographs with painstaking care, even the ones that seemed to have nothing to do with his problem. After all, a man had died delivering this roll of film.

  There was no doubt left—the writing on the high school essay bore no resemblance at all to that of the mature Simon Faircliff. This kid would have grown up to be somebody else entirely.

  But the real clincher was the birth certificate.

  “I did a blowup—see?” Timmler held up an eight-by-ten enlargement of the right footprint of Ray and Esther Faircliff’s baby boy. “That’s what you call an ironclad case. Your prints don’t change.”

  “No, they don’t. It’s very convincing.”

  Tracing along the outside edge of the heel with the point of his pencil, Austen seemed to be confirming for himself the conclusive nature of this new evidence, as if the lines and whorls of his father-in­law’s footprints were just naturally the sorts of things he would have committed to memory. More probably, however, he was only remotely conscious of the thing before his eyes.

  “The point, though, is not to do any more convincing than necessary,” he said quietly, giving the impression that he was merely thinking out loud. “There aren’t any permanent secrets; someday somebody will put this thing together, whether we like it or not. With any luck, it might not be until we’re all dead or too old to care—that would be better for everybody—but for now, for the foreseeable future, we’ve got to keep it as dark as we can. Most of us have got to believe in something; this little piece of news would tear the country into shreds.”

  It was dark outside; it had been dark for hours. The yard that stretched out beneath George Timmler’s office window was covered with long yellowish smears from the searchlights up on the roof. Austen got up from his chair and looked out, trying to see the perimeter wire, but of course that was impossible. It was impossible to see anything clearly; it was that kind of world.

  “I wonder how they happened to miss them,” he said suddenly.

  “Miss what?”

  “The essay, and particularly the birth certificate. Certainly they’ve had plenty of time to remove all traces of the real Simon Faircliff; I just wonder how these two little items managed to be overlooked.”

  “It can happen.” Timmler stirred uneasily in his seat, uncrossing his legs. Perhaps he had been asking himself the same question. “Maybe they didn’t even know about the essay; things like that can lay around in somebody’s bottom drawer for decades and then suddenly float to the surface. The birth certificate—well, maybe they didn’t think it was worth the risk. After all, a forgery might be noticed, and an outright theft might really get people to wondering. And what if they got caught? Besides, suspicions would have to have reached a very dangerous level indeed before anybody was going to have the temerity to ask the President for a copy of his right footprint. Probably they thought it would be safer just to leave things as they were.”

  “I suppose that’s probably it. Actually, that’s the best advice for us too—just leave things as they are. We’ve got our proof. Let’s just hope we never have to use it.”

  “What about the Vice President? We’ll have to tell him.”

  “Bob Donovan? That tower of strength? Will we?” Austen turned around and smiled. “Yes, I suppose we will—but not until it’s all over. Do you think it’ll ever be all over, George?”

  “I don’t know, boss. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know either.”

  They had been at it since before dawn that morning, and during working hours it had been necessary to maintain the fiction that they were busy with the normal Company workload, so perhaps they were beginning to get a trifle punchy. They had come so far—through two and a half years of lies and treachery and fear, months and months of knowing that the slightest error could mean the end of everything, literally everything—and they were alive and undetected. Of course it would be all over. In a few more days they would be either safe or in prison or dead, but in any case it would be over.

  For perhaps an hour now there had been nothing left to do, nothing to decide, but for both of them, it seemed, it was impossible to go home.

  George Timmler sat limply in one corner of his office sofa, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes on nothing. But it wasn’t merely that he was tired.

  “Did you tell Rutledge about Mike?” Austen asked, with all the delicacy one might have employed questioning a bereaved father about how he had broken the news to his surviving children. Timmler shook his head without even looking up.

  “No, I thought it would be better if he didn’t know until after he gets back. Those two were pretty thick, you know. It wouldn’t do for Earl to lose his temper.”

  “Are they on their way?”

  “You know they are, Frank. Schneider, Ross, Rutledge, and Dexter—they’ve all been on their way for hours.”

  “That’s right, I did know that.” Austen smiled again, but with what seemed an enormous effort. “Sorry.”

  . . . . .

  And they really were, all of them, on their way. At almost that precise moment Earl Rutledge was arriving at the Houston airport on the nine-forty-seven flight from Atlanta.

  Before joining the Company twelve years ago as one of George Timmler’s proteges, Rutledge had worked as an undercover agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, and the odd mixture of secrecy and display he had learned in that job had become deeply ingrained in his character. He was a tall, uncouth, ferocious-looking man with the sort of deep-set, baggy eyes that made you believe that he really could have been a drug dealer. For all that he was a temperance Baptist and the faithful husband of his childhood sweetheart, he looked like nothing in the world so much as a sadistic, degenerate gangster. The Company had taken him out of his embroidered Levi leisure suits and his gold chains—he always wore a coat and tie now—but no one was going to mistake him for the fellow in the toothpaste ads.

  So, recognizing the uselessness of striving for anonymity, he had chosen to emphasize his disquieting appearance, wearing his hair long and ragged and affecting the shiny three-piece suits and crocodile shoes of the prosperous hoodlum. A b
lind man could see him coming at five hundred yards, and he tended to scare the starch out of people.

  At the same time, however, he almost never traveled anywhere under his own name and was probably the best man in the federal service at shaking a tail. His neighbors in Falls Church all believed that he was the regional sales manager for a firm of motorcycle-parts suppliers. He was, in other words, precisely the man for the job at hand—a job about which he had been told next to nothing.

  “The guy’s an investor,” Mr. Timmler had informed him. “Oil, natural gas—there’s a lot of money there, so he’ll expect you to be nice to him.”

  “Am I supposed to be nice to him, Mr. Timmler?”

  “No. You’re supposed to present yourself and tell him that a Mr. Storey sent you and that he’s supposed to come along. If he gives you any static about it, you drag him out by the hair. Bring him back to Atlanta by plane and then rent a van and drive him up to Fishing Bay. It would be nice if he arrived there in no condition to give any clear account of the trip—we’re not running a travel bureau.”

  “Fine.”

  Well, Rutledge didn’t really mind if Mr. Timmler didn’t confide in him. He had learned that it’s when they do tell you a lot that you have something to worry about, for the simple reason that you’re supposed to be all inspired to die trying if need be. Rutledge didn’t particularly want to die trying. But this seemed to be a nice, straightforward snatch job; a change from shadowing Russian diplomats around Washington just to keep them on their toes, which was beginning to make him feel like a tour conductor.

  He got his canvas suitcase away from the luggage people and took a bus into town, figuring he’d charge a cab ride to his expense account and pocket the difference. He had a family to think of.

  . . . . .

  Tycoons liked to be inaccessible; it was supposed to be one of the advantages of having all that money. But nobody was inaccessible to Mr. Timmler, who had supplied Rutledge with J. D. Guthrey’s unlisted home telephone number—one of them. The guy seemed to have about four.