The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  Grier, a fifty-year-old Texan with a pot belly, had a wide handlebar mustache and was bald as a marshmallow. His suit looked as though he had borrowed it from a larger friend who slept in his clothes. As always, he had on a string tie with an American flag tie clasp. One of the founders and owners of a commercial freight airline called Globeair, he served the company as their Washington lobbyist.

  Grier fixed himself a bourbon and Saratoga. “Time,” he said. “Let’s get down to the serious business at hand, gentlemen.”

  Ian took a chilled ginger beer from the small bar refrigerator and poured it into a sloping glass. “Thank the Lord that’s over,” he said. “I think I’ll put in for a well-deserved vacation.”

  “Thank the Lord what’s over?” Baker asked.

  “That special I was doing on your presidential election,” Ian said. “You can’t conceive what it’s like to attempt to explain the American presidential process to the great British public.”

  “Say,” Obie said, settling down into his playing chair. “What’s the matter with our elections?”

  “You’ve got no complaints, Obie,” Grier said. “You picked up the biggest majority yet in this last one, didn’t you?”

  “Goddamn right. My constituents know when they’ve got a good thing going. That’s my motto: ‘You’ve got a good thing going in Obie Porfritt’.”

  The last three current members of TEPACS entered during this conversation. They were Rear Admiral David Bunt, son of Admiral David “Pigboat” Bunt of World War I fame, and currently Deputy Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence in the Pentagon; George Masters, Director of Training Aides for the FBI; and Sanderman Jones, who did this and that for the State Department. They fixed themselves drinks and then got down to the serious business of cutting for deal.

  Grier Laporte won the deal with a three of clubs. “A little stud, gentlemen,” he said, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

  “What was that about the election?” Sanderman asked Ian. “Your viewers don’t understand the process, or the result. Or what?”

  “Not particularly the last election,” Ian said. “But American presidential elections in general. In their wisdom, the electorate choose a majority from your Democratic Party. Then they turn around and, by an overwhelming landslide, elect a president from your Republican Party so he can veto all the laws your Democratic legislators enact. And thus does government come to a standstill while two of the coequal branches fight it out. Fortuitously, one of the branches is more equal than the other, so progress is made.”

  “You gonna play cards or lecture us on democratic institutions?” Grier demanded. “Come on, ante up!”

  They played in silence for a while, except for an occasional obligatory poker comment. Then Colonel Baker turned to Sanderman Jones. “Much reshuffling going on in State? Is it going to affect you?”

  Jones shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “There’s a lot of head-rolling going on, but it’s mostly in the more visible sections of the department. Intelligence hasn’t yet felt the ax.”

  “I heard about that,” Faulkes said. “It’s That Man, isn’t it? What does he think he’s doing? First the resignations, now this.”

  “He knows just what he’s doing,” George Masters said. “Our President is a man who demands complete loyalty to himself. Not to the country, or the job, but to himself personally. Some of the people in the Bureau who’ve crossed him in the last four years are getting the word now. It’s either early retirement or field work out in the boonies.”

  “Crossed him how?” Faulkes asked.

  Masters shook his head. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It is rumored,” Adams told Faulkes, “that the President asked his investigative and intelligence agencies to provide him with information regarding his domestic political enemies—among others. For the most part, that information was provided. Some, however, resisted this politicizing of the process of government. Those people are gradually being surgically excised.”

  “Is that right?” Faulkes asked Masters. “Have you any comment? Did anything like that happen at the Bureau? Has anything changed since Hoover died?”

  “No comment,” Masters said, “but I’ll tell you this: A lot of people have been throwing shit at J. Edgar Hoover for the past thirty years for the way he ran the Bureau, but if the facts ever come out, they’re going to eat their words. That man bowed to no political pressure. Everything he did was for what he considered the good of the country. And nobody, in any office, ever used him or the Bureau. And nobody tried more than once.”

  “Are you saying the FBI is being subverted?” Faulkes asked.

  “I’m not saying anything,” Masters said.

  “Could we shut up and play cards?” Obie Porfritt demanded.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kit parked his car in the alley behind the building, but the back door was locked, so he had to walk around to the front. The plaque on the door, a two-foot brass square that jutted out about six inches, said:

  INSTITUTE FOR AN INFORMED AMERICA

  Founded 1973

  Kit rang the bell and after a while a woman came to answer it and let him in. It was Dianna Holroyd, whom he had first met in room sixteen. “Welcome,” she said. “Mr. St. Yves said you’d be coming over. We close at six, but I waited to let you in.”

  Kit checked his watch. It was ten after six. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

  “No problem,” she said. “Actually, I have to stay until you people leave, and close up after you. Woman’s work is never done. They’re upstairs, first door on your right.”

  Kit climbed the stairs and found St. Yves waiting for him on the landing. “Glad you’re here,” St. Yves greeted him.

  “Sorry to pull you into this at the last moment, but Mercer got an attack of—would you believe?—appendicitis, and is now lying in a bed in Doctor’s Hospital while they decide whether or not to cut him open. Come in and meet the crew.”

  The room was small and furnished with no more than a few folding chairs and a bridge table. Kit shook hands with the four men as St. Yves introduced them: Curtis, short and competent-looking; Peterson, blond and tall, with the fingers of a craftsman; Lowesson, who had the distinctive look of an ex-cop; and Berkey, small and skinny, with the equally distinctive look of an ex-con.

  Since his lunch meeting with St. Yves six months before, Kit had been blessed with an assistant and a larger office at the EOB. His title was the same, but most of the job was now done by the assistant, except for the morning ritual of carrying the bound Daily Intelligence Summary over to the White House and putting it on the President’s desk in the Oval Office. His primary job now was liaison between the traditional intelligence services and the “Plumbers,” as St. Yves called the covert group which was responsible, as Vandermeer put it, for “plugging the leaks.” The SIU had just moved this section into the Institute for an Informed America, which St. Yves was still gloating over as being the perfect cover. St. Yves and the planning staff stayed on at room sixteen, to keep immediate access to the President and Billy Vandermeer.

  “Okay, everybody,” St. Yves said, “just sit down and relax. Here’s the drill: it’s a surreptitious entry for the purpose of information-gathering in an apartment over on Twelfth and T.”

  “Great neighborhood,” Berkey commented.

  “Yours not to reason why,” St. Yves told him, “yours merely to drive the getaway car. Now, here’s the way I’ve worked out the division of labor. We’ve set up an OP in an apartment across the street on the second floor. Young and I will work out of there and establish surveillance. The subject should be going out shortly after we get there. When he does, I’ll give Curtis the word on the walkie-talkie, and Curtis will stay on his tail. If for any reason he heads back early—”

  ”You know where he’s going?” Peterson interrupted.

  “Fellow’s going to a party,” St. Yves said. “If he heads back early, Curtis jumps to the nearest pay phone and gives the word, gi
ving you, Peterson, and you, Lowesson, plenty of time to get out. Make sure you keep everything neat and don’t leave a mess. And you, Curtis, make sure you’ve got a dime. You’re the lock-and-key man, Peterson, in case you hadn’t guessed. Lowesson will help you search the place, and Berkey, you drive. Clear?”

  “What are we looking for?” Peterson asked.

  “Ah, that’s the question!” St. Yves said. “The subject seems to have an informant inside the White House, and the Chief wants to find out who the tattletale is. Anything that relates to the White House, or the government, we want copies of. Anything you don’t understand, we want copies of. Also, we want a phone bug and a couple of wall mikes planted. I already have the listening apparatus installed in the OP.”

  St. Yves distributed the small walkie-talkies to his crew, sticking three in a canvas bowling bag for himself. Then they all went through the routine of emptying their pockets and piling all identifying wallets and papers onto the bridge table.

  “If you want to keep the stakeout happy,” Peterson said, “you’ll put in a refrigerator and a hot plate.”

  They went downstairs and left by the back door. “Three cars,” St. Yves said. “I’ll go with Young. Twelve forty-seven T Street, top floor. Name on the mailbox is Ralph Schuster.”

  Ralph Schuster tried for the third time to get the knot to his tie adjusted. For the third time he ripped it out again and started over. He tried a fourth and fifth time, before giving up and leaving it as it was. After all, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, not a fashion plate. He pulled on the jacket of his blue suit and then remembered that one of the buttons was off the left sleeve.

  But at least Suzanne couldn’t complain about the overcoat, since she had helped him pick it out. It was camel’s hair, which was quite nice, shorter than he would have liked, and a hundred dollars more than he wanted to spend. And he really didn’t understand what was wrong with his old trench coat with the zip-in lining. But whatever Suzanne wanted, Ralph was eager to supply. Not that Suzanne wanted much. For the first few months he had seen her, he hadn’t been aware that she wanted anything. It was only gradually that Ralph learned to interpret her look of amused tolerance and ask her what was wrong.

  “Oh, it’s not wrong,” she would say. “I wouldn’t change you for the world.”

  “But if I wanted to change it myself,” he would insist, “what should I change?”

  And she would shrug her amused shrug and smile her tolerant smile and mention the ratty raincoat, or the skinny black tie. When she saw that he didn’t mind, she even started bringing him things, like the wide blue tie with the narrow red and white stripes that he had just given up knotting.

  He shrugged into the camel’s-hair overcoat, picked up the blue card inviting him to the French Embassy reception, and left his apartment, carefully locking the door behind him. He would be early, he noted, looking at his watch. It was just after nine. The reception started at nine, and no guests would really be expected until around ten. But everyone expected reporters to be gauche. And he wanted to be there when Suzanne arrived. She would be with her husband, but perhaps they could slip away for a while.

  Two men who were parking a car across the street looked startled when Schuster came out of his apartment house, but he didn’t notice. As he walked down the block to his car one of the men ran out in the street to stop another car that was going by. He spoke earnestly to the driver, gesturing toward Ralph. Whereupon the driver nodded and did a hasty and illegal U-turn. When Ralph started his car and drove off, the other driver was on his tail.

  “Son of a bitch!” St. Yves said. “That was close. Another five minutes and we would have spent the evening watching an empty apartment, waiting for him to come out.” Pulling his small canvas bag full of walkie-talkies out of the rear seat of Kit’s car, he led the way into the apartment across the street from Schuster’s. “You ready, Red Bear?” he called into one of the three walkie-talkies that he pulled from the bag.

  “Right,” came Peterson’s voice.

  “The den is empty. You may commence hibernation.”

  “Right.”

  St. Yves went to the window and turned the Venetian blind slats so that he could look through them. “Here they come,” he said.

  Kit sat down on the ancient red couch that lined one wall of the furnished apartment. His job didn’t seem exactly essential to the success of the operation, but he thought he had figured out what he was doing there—why he had been called. Having Kit share in the extralegal operation served several purposes from St. Yves’ point of view. It “blooded” Kit, and made him one of the brotherhood by participation. It helped ensure his loyalty. It tested his ability to perform under stress, since even the relatively safe job of standing lookout in an illegal operation can be trying to the fainthearted.

  “How’d you know he was going out tonight?” Kit asked.

  “That’s the preparation that goes into a well-planned job, my boy,” St. Yves said, beaming with self-satisfaction. “I’ve been scouting this job for several days. Got this apartment, set it up. Ran a check on Schuster’s hours. Then, day before yesterday, I happened to be standing there when the mailman came by. A blue envelope with the crest of the French Embassy was dropped into Schuster’s box.”

  “So?”

  “So”—St. Yves fished into his coat pocket and pulled out a blue card—“it was a reasonable assumption that one of these was inside.”

  Kit examined the invitation. “Clever,” he said. “But why didn’t you go? You could have kept a close eye on Schuster.”

  St. Yves turned his head enough to stare coldly at Kit. “I’m not in the slightest interested in Mr. Schuster,” he said. “I’m interested only in the name of his confidential White House source. And when I find out, there’s going to be one less White House employee. He’ll be lucky if the Chief doesn’t file charges.”

  Kit shrugged. “Come on, official sources are leaking information all the time, from all branches of government; it’s the great Washington game.”

  “When you work for someone,” St. Yves said, “you owe that person a certain amount of loyalty. And when the person you work for is the President of the United States, why then, by the nature of the job you owe him your complete loyalty. You don’t have to agree with him, you don’t even have to like him, but you have to be loyal. It’s one of the things he gets in return for the burden he assumes when he takes office.” Kit had never heard St. Yves speak so intently nor so seriously. He was stating his credo, and a man’s religion is not to be argued with lightly.

  “Blue Bear.” Peterson’s voice sounded.

  St. Yves grabbed the nearest walkie-talkie. “Right.”

  “In.”

  “Right.” St. Yves turned to Kit. “Come over here and keep an eye on the door,” he said. “I’m going to set up the scope.”

  “Right,” Kit said. It seemed to be contagious. He got off the couch and pulled a straight-back metal-and-plastic chair over to the window. He stared through the blinds at the deserted street while St. Yves retrieved a small battered suitcase from the far end of the couch. The suitcase was lined with thick foam plastic that acted as a shock packing for its contents. Resting on the foam was a complex-looking set of tubes and lenses which St. Yves began to expertly screw together. When he was finished with the optical erector set, he had produced a small tripod-mounted telescope with a 35-millimeter camera mounted at the eyepiece end. The camera was a single-lens reflex with a ground-glass top, so by looking down at the ground glass you could see whatever the scope saw.

  “You look like you’re preparing for a long watch,” Kit said, as St. Yves adjusted the scope and sighted it in on the doorway across the street.

  “I doubt if the son of a bitch is stupid enough to leave the information lying around,” St. Yves said. “We might have to be watching and listening to him for a while before we get through him to Mr. Rat.”

  “Schuster. Schuster,” Kit said again. “Skinny guy with a big
nose? I met him once.”

  “That right?” St. Yves said calmly, peering into the ground glass.

  “I forgot till just now. He came up to my office to question me about the Watergate business.”

  “What’d you tell him?” St. Yves asked.

  Kit shook his head. “Not a damn thing. What could I tell him?”

  “That’s right,” St. Yves said, his head still down over the scope. “Some of the things he found out, you didn’t know.”

  Kit stared out at the empty street and saw his face reflected back at him in the window glass. Did St. Yves suspect him? Was this a double test to see if Kit would react in some way to the possibility that the name Christopher Young might be found on some slip of paper in Schuster’s desk drawer? St. Yves had clearly known that Schuster had met with Kit even before Kit had placed the name. He must have gone through the name register at the entrance to the Executive Office Building. When Schuster had asked for Kit, both names had been recorded. Had St. Yves invited Kit along to see if he suddenly remembered the name? Did that make him more suspicious—or less? Was St. Yves playing cat-and-mouse with him? Did that explain the lecture on loyalty? Or was this whole thing just making him paranoid? Wheels within wheels. Kit shook his head and decided to ignore the whole business. Schuster was the one with a problem, not him.

  Schuster turned off Massachusetts Avenue onto Belmont Road and began looking for a place to park. The French Embassy was on the next block. There would almost certainly be valet parking, but that meant tipping the valet and Schuster was constitutionally unable to pay someone else to park his car or pull out his chair at a restaurant. He believed in tipping for service, but not when the service was created merely to get the tip.