The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Vandermeer flew the helicopter himself. He had spent two hours an afternoon, three afternoons a week, for the past few months recapturing the necessary skills, and he was as proud as Hermann Goering at the stick of an ME-109. Ober and St. Yves were his passengers. St. Yves seemed to be enjoying himself, but Charlie Ober would clearly rather have been almost anywhere else. He sat rigidly in the fold-out back seat with his hands on his lap and refused to look anywhere but straight ahead.

  “There it is, I think,” St. Yves said, pointing ahead of them and to the right. They were flying over low hills covered by a thin forest of evergreens. Yesterday’s mid-January snowfall had blanketed everything below, creating the illusion of picture-postcard clarity, but making it hard to pick out any detail.

  Vandermeer expertly sideslipped the helicopter over to the right, a maneuver that made Ober stare even more rigidly straight ahead. “You’re right,” he said, “that’s the highway. Good. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of miles now. We wouldn’t want Colonel Hanes to get impatient.”

  A few miles ahead of them Colonel Jonathan “Johnny-on-the Spot” Hanes, commanding officer of the Fifth Army Brigade, stood on top of a snow-covered hill in Fort Meade’s backwoods bivouac area and surveyed the surrounding neat rows and files of pup tents with satisfaction. Three days before, Colonel Hanes and his outfit, one of three “quick-response” brigades stationed on the East Coast, had been snug in their home barracks, in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The men were just buckling down to their rigorous training schedule after holiday leave. Then, two hours after receiving their movement orders, they were in their vehicles and rolling. And now the whole brigade—men, gear, food, ammunition, jeeps, trucks, APCs, artillery, and tanks—were on alert in Fort Meade, only seventeen miles north of Washington.

  After satisfying himself as to the geometric precision of the matrix of pup tents, Colonel Hanes peered around, searching the sky for the first sign of Vandermeer’s helicopter. He checked his watch and then peered around again, his impatience growing with every ten seconds. It was already almost a full two minutes past the fourteen hundred hours that Vandermeer and his party were scheduled to land.

  With still no sign of the executive helicopter. Colonel Hanes pulled off his right glove and reached inside his overcoat for his copy of the order that had brought him and his boys out into the snow. He read it over again, searching once more for whatever hidden meaning might lie between the lines of the formally phrased deployment order.

  After spending several hours in the morning thinking it out while the men had breakfast from the spotlessly clean field kitchen, Hanes had reached a conclusion he didn’t even like thinking about. His instructions seemed to indicate that the President feared an armed insurrection in which other military units might play a part. But clearly the President didn’t doubt Hanes’s loyalty, or that of the men of the Fifth. And he would not waver if the call came. He wouldn’t like fighting his brother soldiers, but the President of the United States was the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and orders were to be obeyed.

  The helicopter was in sight now, coming over the crest of the hill, and soon he would know what it was all about. Whatever must be done, Colonel Hanes resolved as the whirlybird settled onto the hastily-scraped-clear landing pad, would be done quickly, efficiently, and with distinction. The Fifth Army Brigade, and its commander, would not be dishonored.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After circling the block three times looking for a place to park, Representative Obediah Porfritt slammed his old Buick into a dollar-bill-sized space in front of a fire hydrant. The House of Representatives medallion on the rear license plate would save him from a ticket, and he would somehow live with the guilt.

  A black Ford stopped about three car lengths back, and two men in gray suits got out and separated, one crossing the street and the other falling into step behind Porfritt. The third man, the driver, stayed with the car.

  Obie, clutching a large paper bag to his stomach as though it contained all the world’s woes, scurried around the corner to J Street. Sticking out of the bag was the top of a brightly colored box, of the sort toys for small children come in.

  The man behind Porfritt watched him enter a nondescript red-brick building and start climbing its worn wooden staircase. The man waited until his partner was in sight across the street and Porfritt was out of sight around the first landing, and then went in after him.

  Obie climbed to the third floor. The only door on the landing was a steel fire door which had once been painted tan. A sign pointing to it read b & j toy wholesalers—receiving. After a moments hesitation, Obie pushed open the door and went in.

  The gray man rounded the lower landing just in time to see the door closing on Porfritt’s back. He went on up the stairs, past the landing to the floor above, and then pulled a miniature transceiver from his belt and said a few brief words into it in a low monotone.

  Behind the door was a small bare room suitable only for meditation. Across the room a wooden office door with an inset glass window provided the only light: a yellow glow that came through the frosted glass of the window. There was a small bell screwed into the side of the window, and, Scotch-taped to the glass, a hand-printed sign that advised: Ring Bell for Service.

  Obie rang the bell. Nothing happened. He heard footsteps outside the fire door. They paused for a moment on the landing before continuing upstairs. Obie didn’t want to think about that. For some time now he had had the nagging feeling that someone was following him, and it was doing bad things to his digestion. Obie gave up on the bell and pounded on the glass. After a moment it slid up. A bulky woman with short gray hair and round steel-rimmed glasses stuck her face through the opening. “Whyn’t ch’a ring the bell?” she demanded.

  “I did,” Obie said.

  “What ch’a want?” she asked, not mollified.

  Obie pulled the box halfway out of the paper bag so the woman could read the legend on the front, bild-a-man, the box said, with appropriate illustrations of the snap-together parts of a plastic body. “This is defective,” he said. “I got it for my son for Christmas, and it’s defective.”

  “What’s a madder widdit?”

  “I want to see Mr. Biddle,” Obie explained.

  “Oh,” the woman said. “Why’n cha say so?” She slammed the window closed and, after a couple of preparatory clicks and thumps, pulled the door open. “Dat way,” she told him, pointing down a narrow corridor. “To de end and torn left. Name’s onna door.”

  Obie scurried down the corridor like a man pursued by invisible demons. At its end he turned left, to find another corridor. The name Biddle was on the glass panel of the third door down, on the right.

  Obie knocked.

  “Come in!”

  Obie entered. The room was filled with unboxed toys and games, and an undifferentiated rubble of thousands of toy and game parts. At the rear a small man crouched behind a large desk was assembling a three-foot plastic dinosaur. “Welcome,” the small man said without looking up. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Porfritt,” Obie said. “I got a note; it said to ask for you.”

  The small man looked up and examined Obie intently for a second. “Next door,” he said, turning back to his dinosaur. “One office down.” He carefully glued one saurian arm into place.

  Obie backed out and closed the door. A feeling of annoyance was beginning to overtake his underlying feeling of fright. The two sat uncomfortably in his stomach. He took two chewable antacid tablets from his breast pocket and popped them into his mouth before knocking on the next, unmarked, door. A voice urged him to enter, which he did.

  This room was small, and packed to the ceiling with banded cartons of posters that celebrated the toys of Christmas Past. There were two chairs in a narrow aisle between the stacked cartons. Aaron Adams sat in the first chair, with his feet up on the second. “Hi, Obie,” he said.

  “Aaron!”

  �
��Close the door, Obie,” Adams said, taking his feet off the chair. “Sit down.”

  Obie closed the door and lowered himself into the folding chair. “Aaron,” he breathed, “do you know what you’ve just put me through?” He dropped the Bild-A-Man kit heavily onto the floor. “This kid slips a message to me in the goddamn men’s room: ‘Bring a toy to the B and J Toy Company. Destroy this note.’ What am I doing here, Aaron?”

  “I have to talk to you,” Adams said,

  “Sure,” Obie said. “But why the toy? Why the back room? Why all the secrecy? I feel like I’m in a grade C spy movie. Why the hell couldn’t you just come up to my office, Aaron, if you want to talk to me?”

  “I didn’t think that would be wise, Obie. You and I are conspiring against the President of the United States, which is, to put it mildly, against the law. Treason is, I believe, a capital offense.”

  Obie shook his head. “I feel like such an idiot. Why, I actually convinced myself that someone was following me around as I came up here. It’s enough to make me paranoid.”

  “Don’t let it get to you, Obie,” Adams said, keeping his own voice calm and level. “You’re just not a born conspirator, that’s all. You’re going to have to be careful; take a few precautions. There’s nothing to worry about. From now on, we’re not going to have time to be worried.”

  Porfritt simply stared at him.

  “Jubilee,” Adams continued, “is called for the day after tomorrow.” He leaned back in his chair until it was balanced on the two back legs. “Two days, Obie. Can you hold out for two days?”

  “Sunday?” Obie fell silent. Crossing his arms, he hugged them against his chest and stared at the gray wooden floor.

  Adams watched Obie, but kept silent, leaving him alone with his thoughts. Obie deserved to spend his declining years in honorable retirement, with a small law practice in Ogallala, telling stories about the big bills that got away. Instead, by an accident of relationship and time, he was thrust into the middle of desperate events.

  But there was no going back now. They must all, as Franklin had said at an earlier insurrection, hang together, or they would most assuredly, all hang—separately.

  Obie looked up. He had come to a decision and the worry lines had disappeared from his face. “Its going to be hairy,” he said. “Congress is just back from Christmas recess. At least, I assume enough of my fellow congressmen are back to call a quorum. But Sunday—”

  ”How many of your comrades have you discussed this with?” Adams asked.

  “A few,” Obie said. “But I wish you wouldn’t use the term ‘comrades.’ It has unfortunate connotations in my business.”

  “You have a point,” Adams admitted. “Call them Sunday morning. Use a pay phone. I assume each of them is primed to call others.”

  “Right,” Obie affirmed. “Each of my colleagues said he could contact at least five others, and the chain will grow from there, but I can’t promise that there will be any senators on it.”

  “Let me worry about the Senate, Obie. Are you ready with the bill?”

  “The bill of impeachment? I’ve been working on it as a labor of love for these past weeks. You should see the list of high crimes and misdemeanors in the statement of particulars. It’s a beaut!”

  “Nothing petty, I hope?”

  “There are a few minor, petty items on the list,” Obie said. “I had to put a few items in for my colleagues to knock out. Even at a time like this, you don’t think they’d pass a bill the way it was written without deletions or amendments, do you?”

  “Okay,” Adams said. “You know your business.” He reached behind him and produced a box labeled tinker-tot with a picture on the cover of a four-year-old child standing next to a three-tower suspension bridge made entirely out of small snap-together plastic pieces. “Take this home with you,” he said. “Inside is a beefed-up CB radio with a strap so you can wear it over your shoulder. Keep it turned on and tuned to channel four. There’s a little earpiece, if you want to listen privately. Pick a code name. So I can call you something besides ‘Congressman Porfritt’ over the radio. Something that has a meaning to you, so you’ll be sure to catch it. Something short.”

  “What about ‘Omaha’?”

  “Fine,” Adams said. “Capital of Nebraska.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Obie said. “It’s the largest city, but Lincoln’s the capital. I was thinking of Omaha Beach. On June sixth, nineteen hundred and forty-four, I was a corporal in a combat assault team. We hit the beach in the first wave. By the end of the day, I was the highest-ranking man still alive in my company. On June eighth I got a battlefield commission. Not because I was brave or clever, but because there were only two officers alive in the battalion. It was then I decided that, if I got out of that alive, I was going to go into politics.”

  “Oh,” Adams said.

  “I don’t follow it either,” Obie said, “not anymore. But it made perfect sense at the time. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the Normandy invasion, I wouldn’t be here today. So, if you don’t mind—Omaha.”

  “Omaha it is, Obie,” Adams said. “When you hear ‘Omaha Go!’ over your little radio, you get that bill of impeachment passed by whoever you’ve got there—I don’t care if it’s only three of you—and over to the Senate. Any senator you can find will serve as ‘the Senate’ for our purposes. The regular channels of government aren’t exactly going to be in order, but I’ll have a couple of senators over in that hall waiting for you.”

  “That’s good, Aaron.”

  “Okay,” Adams said. “Take your new toy and go home.”

  Obie stood up. “It’s going to be hard not to keep looking over my shoulder, but I’ll do my best.”

  “Very good, Obie.” Adams rose and shook his hand. “Good luck.”

  “A hell of a thing,” Obie said. He turned and left the office.

  Adams stayed where he was for about ten minutes; then he left the building by an exit that led to an alley on the side street where he had parked his car. When he was halfway home he noticed that a black Ford with two men in it was staying a steady half-block behind him. Just to be sure, he stopped at a grocery store and a liquor store and made some unnecessary purchases. The car picked him up when he left and fell in behind him again.

  Whistling softly to himself, Adams drove home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Miriam came home to find Kit sprawled on top of her velour bedspread, fast asleep. His jacket was hooked over a chair, and his shoes and tie were on the floor by the bed. One sock was off, but that was where he had run out of energy. He hadn’t even unbuttoned his shirt.

  She sat down on the bed beside him, silent and motionless so as not to wake him. For a long time she sat looking at him. The tension and anger that had become a part of him while he was awake, lining his face beyond its years, were washed away by sleep. She hated to disturb him, to bring him from his peaceful sleep to the nightmare that reality had become.

  After a time he rolled over, and his hand fell on her knee. He groaned slightly and opened one eye. “Huh,” he said, closing the eye and wrapping his arm around her leg. In a little while the eye opened again. “Hello, love,” he said, slurring the words. “You home already?”

  “It’s after eleven,” she told him. “Not that I object to finding you in my bed, but what are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you,” he said. “Taking a nap.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Had a hard day.”

  “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  He kissed her. “It’s good to be seen,” he said. “Hungry?”

  “No,” she said, “but I’ll fix you something.”

  “Don’t bother.” He started putting his shoes on, looked surprised to find one sock missing, and fished around by the side of the bed for it. “Let’s go to that coffee shop on K Street. My treat.”

  “I don’t mind fixing you something,” Miriam said.

  “Apple pie,” he told her, “à la mode. I crave apple pie à
la mode.”

  “You win,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”

  It was cold outside, and Miriam shivered and clutched Kit’s right arm as they crossed to his car. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What?” He focused his attention on her. It had clearly been a long way off.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your cue faster,” she said. “You want to tell me something.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t get used to living in a house that might be bugged,” she said. “I think that’s the worst part: not knowing for sure whether it is or not. Wondering every time I say anything whether or not someone else is listening.… Speaking of which, you’re not exactly listening yourself, are you? To me, I mean.”

  He opened the car door for her. “We can talk in here,” he said. “I had it checked out this afternoon.”

  She slid into the freezing car and unlocked his side while he went around. When he got into the car he sat hunched over the steering wheel, staring off in some private world of his own.

  “Start the engine,” Miriam said, “and turn on the heater. It’s freezing in here. What are we going to talk about? Hadn’t we better drive to that coffee shop, in case anyone’s checking?”

  “It’s tomorrow,” Kit told her.

  “What?”

  “Its tomorrow. Jubilee is tomorrow.”

  “You mean—” She sat there staring at him, unable to say anything and feeling like an idiot because the words wouldn’t come.

  “I spent the afternoon with Laszlo setting things up,” Kit said.

  “Laszlo?” Did they know anyone named Laszlo? Perhaps she’d misunderstood him. Perhaps they were talking about something else. Tomorrow couldn’t be the tomorrow they’d been planning for months, the tomorrow she’d prayed deep in her heart would never really come. If they failed she’d probably stand trial, and God knew what they’d do to her. She didn’t care so much about that. But if Jubilee had come, then win or fail, Christopher Young, her Kit, whom she loved more than breath, would most probably be dead before the long tomorrow was over. She held her breath and felt the air from the car’s heater, still cold, whip under her skirt.