Old J. D.—for “Jethroe Dwaine”; you could hardly blame him for falling back on his initials—was an early riser, so if you put in a call to his study phone at about six-thirty in the morning you stood a good chance of his being the only person awake in the house.
Rutledge was an early riser, too. When you had three kids, and one of them was still under five, you just lost the habit of sleeping in. Bright and early, after he had taken his shower and carefully shaved his heavily pitted face, he sat down on the only chair in his hotel room and placed his call. The voice that answered was a rich baritone, the voice of someone with little experience of fear or defeat.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Guthrey?” Earl Rutledge automatically straightened up in his chair; it was the sort of reflex the born bosses of this world seemed to call up automatically as part of what the rest of us owed them. “Is this Mr. J. D. Guthrey?”
“Yes, of course it is; if you have the number you know that. Now who is this?”
That was fine. Mr. Guthrey wanted to start shoving right away. Rutledge grinned to himself, feeling better already. “This is someone from Mr. Storey,” he answered curtly. “Mr. Storey—got that? This is someone you’d better find time in your busy day to see.”
There was a short silence, perhaps no longer than three or four seconds, during which you could almost hear the wind in the phone lines. Mr. Guthrey must have been holding his breath.
“Come to my office this morning about eleven.”
“Sorry.” Rutledge shook his head and frowned, as if the man were there in the room with him. “That’s out.”
He looked at the map of the downtown area that he had picked up in the hotel lobby the night before. There ought to be somewhere. . . “Tell you what,” he went on. “They got a place here they call ‘Tranquility Park,’ just a couple of blocks from your building; that ought to suit you. Meet me there about quarter after one. Look for a man reading the Atlanta Citizen-Journal.”
“I’ve got an important lunch date this afternoon. I—”
“Break it.”
Rutledge replaced the receiver in its cradle and looked at his watch. It was only a few seconds after six-forty; he had hours and hours ahead of him with no demands at all on his time. He would go down and open the coffee shop for breakfast, and then maybe when the stores opened at nine he would go see whether he couldn’t find something to give his wife for their sixteenth anniversary.
. . . . .
Thin-blooded Southern boy that he was, Rutledge hated cold weather. Washington was bad enough, but three years ago he had spent part of the winter working a stakeout in Vermont and damn near died. Even with gloves on, his hands sometimes got so stiff he couldn’t unzip his fly to take a leak. The experience had almost made him wish he were still down in Florida, busting cocaine smugglers. He had told Mr. Timmler that if he’d wanted to freeze to death he would have joined the Mounties, and—so far—no one had ever again suggested that the Company might have a use for him above the snow line.
So he was reasonably miserable waiting on a park bench in the raw Gulf wind, although, quite frankly, he was willing to concede that it was his own damn fault. His wife had warned him that he would need his heavy overcoat, but he had thought, oh no, Texas ...
Guthrey was already ten minutes late, and if he didn’t turn up in another ten Rutledge was going to stumble over to his dazzling fifteenstory office building and, in Mr. Timmler’s phrase, “drag him out by the hair.”
As a means of taking his mind off his own physical discomfort, he tried to interest himself in the paper he had bought during his layover in Atlanta to serve as a means of identification. Three days after a presidential election there was lots of news, but since most of the articles, at least on that page, had to do with strictly local races, Rutledge quickly found that his attention was wandering; he really didn’t much care who was the new Cobb County supervisor.
He looked at his watch for perhaps the twentieth time in as many minutes and decided, reluctantly, that good old J. D. wasn’t going to show up. For this kind of appointment people were either there on the tick or not there at all. You didn’t come breezing in late with some story about how you had lost track of the hour. Fine. If that was the way Guthrey wanted to play it, then he’d get his way. Mr. Timmler had recommended a minimum of fuss, but the orders had been to reel the guy in.
Rutledge got up from his bench, a little stiff in the knees—good old Mike, the lucky bastard, was out there in sunny California; it didn’t seem likely he’d be much worried about the cold—refolded his newspaper along the original creases, and stuffed it into a trash barrel. It was a five-block walk to the corner of Rusk and Capitol, where Mr. Guthrey sat behind his big mahogany desk and played with his millions; maybe he just needed to be reminded that in the real world when the mountain came to Mohammed it usually fell down on him with a thud.
He hadn’t gotten more than a block and a half when a few fugitive words, the broken pieces of a radio news broadcast that had drifted through the open doorway of a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store, stopped him dead in his shoes.
“Guthrey. . . noted financier. . . suicide. . . survived by. . .” And then, before Rutledge had even made it over the threshold, the stupid bastard of an announcer was reading the weather.
“What was that all about?” he asked the woman behind the counter, a white-haired grandmotherly type whose skin was gathered in pouches all over her face. “Did Guthrey take himself off?”
But the only answer he got was a shrug of the shoulders and an annoyed, “Who listens?” That sort of thing, apparently, had become so much a matter of course that it slipped below the level of conscious life.
He kept going, with a certain urgency now, until he came to the site of the Guthrey financial empire and stepped in through the revolving door. The atmosphere alone would have told him everything he needed to know; the place was like an undiscovered tomb.
But there was a security guard. There was always a security guard; nobody was ever that dead. Rutledge stepped up to him in as oblique a manner as he could contrive and tried on a rueful smile.
“Say—are they still doing business up there or what?” he asked in a general, conversational tone of voice. He wouldn’t want anybody to get the idea he was prying.
The guard shook his head. “Not much.” He raised his eyes as if to indicate all the floors and floors of empty offices above him. “Everybody was pretty upset. I guess they all went home. J. D. was pretty popular, you know.”
J. D. Wonderful—when you were dead everybody was your intimate friend.
“Why do you suppose he did it?”
“Who knows?”
. . . . .
“No. . . no. . . I understand. . . no, it couldn’t be helped. . . no, you come back in, Earl—we’ll check it out through regular channels. Goodbye.”
George Timmler replaced the receiver of his office telephone and sighed. It had been a bad day all round.
“He says they found Guthrey in his car at the end of his driveway. He’s supposed to have shot himself with a .38 police special; his wife told the cops that he kept it in his glove compartment. They’re buying it as a straight suicide.”
Austen nodded heavily. “That makes all four. A hit-and-run, a mugging, and now a pair of suicides. I feel kind of bad about Storey; we promised we’d protect him.”
“There aren’t any guarantees in this business, Frank. Storey wasn’t born yesterday. He knew that.”
Yes, Austen knew that too. And he didn’t suppose that Chester Storey, if he had had any time to consider the question while a couple of Yates’s goons were hanging him from a coat hook in his own bedroom clothes closet, would have thought to complain that the Central Intelligence Agency hadn’t kept up its end of the bargain. He wondered what a man did think about while he was being garroted with a halfinch-wide leather belt.
“I’d say that Diederich made a clean sweep,” he said, leaning against the narrow edge of Timmler’
s desk. “I’d say he’s been characteristically thorough and imaginative.”
“Wonderful—but why?” Timmler was sitting with his chair tilted so far back that only his toes were in contact with the floor. He was an old hand, and murder was hardly something that was new to his experience of the world. Still, he looked as if he had been knocked right off his feet by the sheer senseless brutality of this last day of coordinated extermination. “What did he think he had to gain?”
“I think what worried him was what he might have to lose. After all, the election is over. He didn’t need those guys anymore; from this point on they were nothing more than a dangerous liability. And he’s known at least since they killed Starkman that we were on to him. I think he was just cleaning house.” And then all at once Austen laughed. It wasn’t a very pleasant laugh. “But let’s not get too outraged, George. Maybe he’s done us a favor.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Timmler thrust himself forward, bringing the front legs of his chair down with a snap. “What’s that supposed to mean, Frank?”
Austen could only smile. “What were we supposed to do with them, George?” he asked finally. “Put them on scout’s honor not to tell a soul, and then pack them off home as soon as the dust had settled? Remember, the Russians knew those four names just as well as we did— Tidyman, Guthrey, Finch, Storey. They’re all in the KGB files. Could we have afforded to let any of them run around loose? Even Storey? Like I said—maybe Diederich’s done us a favor. Now the blood can be on his hands instead of ours.”
. . . . .
After her husband’s death, Sylvia Burgess had never sold the vast Norman house in McLean, Virginia, where they had lived ever since his first term in Congress. For a while she had stayed holed up in their much smaller residence in Connecticut—presumably nursing her grief for a man who, by every account, was everything any woman could want—and then she had traveled, mostly within Europe. Finally, when she had begun to feel the pressing attractions of Simon Faircliff’s wooing, she had moved back to McLean.
In recent months there had been several important parties at the Burgess mansion. Simon seemed to prefer it to the White House for his less grandiose entertainments, and the fact that Sylvia was the hostess of record made it easier for him to mingle with people. Also, probably, it was his indirect way of making everyone understand that his relationship with the beautiful widow Burgess was on a special footing.
Frank Austen had been inside as a guest three or four times. The house was on about seven acres of wooded land, well back from the road, and this evening there would be no one home except Sylvia Burgess. The President would be calling about nine, and on occasions like this not even the Secret Service was allowed near the place. For Austen’s purposes, the arrangement was perfect.
George Timmler let him off about a quarter-mile from the gate. They would meet again at the same spot after Austen had phoned from the house. If he didn’t phone, then George was to take certain actions on his own.
“Good luck,” Timmler said, smiling tensely. “Don’t get arrested for burglary.”
“I’ll try not to.”
When the car had driven off, Austen started on his way along the well-paved but lightly traveled road that threaded its way through this little island of rural opulence. Within a mile of him lived five or six of the richest men in Washington, and that was saying something. As soon as he got to the Burgess property line, he threw his heavy coat across the barbed wire that topped the eight-foot fence and scrambled over. He didn’t want to be seen going through the gate.
It had rained earlier in the day, and the grass was wet. Austen clutched his briefcase and walked along like someone only half-awake. He didn’t seem to notice anything; he hardly seemed to be alive inside his own skin. The burden under which he almost visibly labored appeared to have ground all normal human sensibility out of him.
After a while he looked up and saw the lights of Sylvia Burgess’s house, and an expression of pain briefly crossed his face.
“Why, Frank—I didn’t hear your car.”
She was standing in the doorway, wearing a black-and-white evening dress. Even in her late forties, with her black hair heavily streaked with silver, she was a beautiful woman. She smiled, surprised, gracious, wondering at the meaning of this intrusion.
“I walked. Are you going to invite me in?”
She smiled again and stepped back to allow him to pass.
“I’ll be expecting guests soon, Frank. Is something the matter?”
“One guest,” he corrected, brushing aside the question. “And the President won’t be here for another two hours. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
VII
“It isn’t true—it couldn’t be. You’re lying, Frank.”
She was standing in the middle of her living room, her fists tightly clenched, shaking so badly that Frank Austen was half afraid she might simply fall down. She had just listened to a tape recording of Yates’s confession, detailing how—and for whom—he had murdered her husband. It was the crowning piece of evidence.
“It’s true, right enough.” He allowed himself to sag into a chair, resting his forehead in the palm of his hand. He felt the full weight of the last several days at that moment, and what he wouldn’t have given for a few hours of dreamless sleep probably wasn’t worth having.
“You know the whole story now, Sylvia. You’re one of only five people outside the Soviet Union who have any idea that any of this is happening, and two of them are on the wrong side. Have you bothered to ask yourself why I’ve gone to the trouble of telling you all this?”
“You’re a monster, Frank,” she said, holding her arms across her breast as if the room had suddenly turned cold.
“Am I?” He smiled sadly and sank back even deeper into his chair. “I suppose I must be by now. Is that what it takes to realize that beside this trouble the lives of people like us don’t really count for very much? Your husband was a fine man. Perhaps by rights he should have been elected President, and instead Messrs. Diederich and Faircliff sent some creep out to murder him. But believe me, that’s the least of anybody’s problems right now. You’ve got to understand what’s at risk.”
“Then go ahead and murder me too.” Her fists were still clenched, and her whole body was rigid with defiance. It was at once ludicrous and heroic.
“Come on, Sylvia, think about what you’re saying. Suppose I do that, and suppose I wait here beside your dead body until Simon comes and knocks on the front door. I’ve got a Smith & Wesson .357 in my briefcase, with drilled points. That’s a very efficient killing machine—I can send him to hell as he stands wiping his shoes on your welcome mat. But what happens then? What happens to the country while everybody tries to figure out why the Director of Central Intelligence has personally snuffed the President of the United States?”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? Getting caught?” The expression in her eyes turned from simple anger into something like contempt, but Austen only shook his head.
“You’re right if you think I want to save myself,” he said finally. “And my motives are at least partly as selfish as you suspect—I’m human, after all. But you and I don’t matter very much. If I have to, if there isn’t any other way, I’ll sit quietly in my cell and keep my mouth shut while they decide how high they want to hang me, but the secret won’t depend just on my silence. Somebody will figure out the truth, or some version of it. And is anybody ever going to be able to govern again once Simon Faircliff has been exposed?”
“These things never stay secrets. You said that yourself.”
“No, they don’t.” He nodded in agreement, glad that at last they were talking like people with a common set of purposes—that was something. “But being fair to Simon Faircliff doesn’t matter either. What do you think, Sylvia? How much grief do you imagine people can take all at once? All I’m trying to do is buy a little time for us, for all of us. Think—what would your husband have wanted done?”
And there they were, the widow and the spy, beyond vengeance or love or even the fear of death; they were excluded from the luxury of such personal considerations. They no longer had that privilege.
“I don’t know, Frank.” She sat down on the corner of the love seat, her feet drawn under her, making her look surprisingly young and vulnerable. “I still can’t believe that any of this is true.”
“Believe this—and not as a threat, merely as a practical consideration—if I didn’t imagine I could convince you that I’m doing what has to be done, you’d already be dead.”
She was surprised and perhaps frightened for just a moment, and then the sense of what he had said impressed itself upon her and she waited for him to continue. Austen opened his briefcase and took out what appeared to be an ordinary pocket-size transistor radio, tossing it onto the seat cushion next to her.
“When he comes, you take that little gizmo and retire to your bedroom. You’ll be able to hear every word we say down here, and when I’m finished I’ll just leave. I won’t lay a glove on you, I give you my word. Then, if you want to, you can call the cops and they can probably arrest me before I’ve left the property. Okay?”
Austen checked his watch. It was eight thirty-two. “Is he ever early?”
“Sometimes—not very often.” She smiled to herself for a moment, and then, as if at some chilling recollection, the smile died away. “More often he’s late.”
“Well, we can’t play the possibilities tonight.”
His briefcase was lying open on the floor. The .357 was wrapped in a towel, and beside it was a portable tape recorder in a black leather carrying case. There were a few other things as well.
Austen rose and took two small listening devices no larger than poker chips out of his pocket, removed the paper from their adhesive backings, and stuck them both under the octagonal table. There was a portable bar in one corner of the room, and he picked up one of the glasses clustered together on a tray and covered the bottom with a white powder from a small aluminum capsule of the type that might once have held a roll of camera film. He left the glass standing by itself and went back to his briefcase to take out the gun. It was a massive, ugly thing, impossible to conceal. Austen hardly seemed to know what to do with it.
The President's Man Page 35
