“Alta was a real person, not a piece in a game.”
“Only to you.” He took a long puff and blew a ring of smoke towards the ceiling. “I’ve been covering the tracks of that pair for more than a decade. You don’t think this is the first time I’ve had to do something like this, do you?”
“No. I’m sorry that I don’t.”
“Good for you.” Karp said sarcastically, then his manner turned sly. “You understand why I’m talking about this, right?”
“You mean to kill me.”
Karp grinned malevolently. “Smart boy.” He polished off his drink and eyed the wet bar.
“You’ve forgotten the tapes. You’re using them to enhance your power. That’s the way you think. You can’t afford to have them released to the public even if the President could somehow manage reelection afterwards because then you’d have no leverage. My copies are in a safe place, but if anything happens to me they’ll be released.”
Karp glared at Powers. When he spoke his speech was even more heavily slurred. “You’re a fucking bastard and not even half clever! I’ll get them back. You’ll see. I can still put a lid on this. The bitch is dead. You said so yourself, and that was key. You’ll talk, believe me. I’ve got people who can make anyone talk.”
“It’s over, Karp. It really is over. For you, and them. The American people will feel betrayed when they learn what the President’s been up to with Saddam. His posturing will be seen for the manipulation it was always meant to be. The lies and deceits to our allies will damage us internationally. Hell, the scandal over Alta and Shankens’ deaths will hardly be a blip on the radar screen. It’s over.”
“I... I...” Karp leaned forward and punched at the buttons. “Where the hell is Lily, goddamn it!!”
“That’s enough, Marty.” Powers turned in his chair and stared up at Becky standing in the doorway. She was looking under strain, but very controlled in an ebony pinstriped power suit and red scarf. Her one green eye was alit as she entered the room. For the first time since Sunday, Powers was genuinely frightened. She smiled at him benignly. “Did you see me on television?”
“Some of it.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Not my best performance, but good enough. Marty, stop it with the fucking telephone! You’re drunk, aren’t you? As always, you’re sense of timing is impeccable. Everything’s under control. This area’s clear now. I saw to that. That’s something you should have thought of half an hour ago.”
“Where’s Lily?” Karp demanded drunkenly.
“Here, sir.” Despite the change in weather Lily was still wearing a black raincoat. He stood barring the doorway, his stone faced revealing nothing.
Karp looked at him, his eyes focusing then blearing then focusing again. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day! Forget that. I’ve got orders for you. Now listen closely. Becky, you get to your office and I’ll see to this. Maybe you’re right. I have had a bit too much to drink, but I’m sober enough to close this final detail.”
“What detail is that, Marty?” she asked.
“This hick. Alta’s dead, he says, and so is Chesty. He’s trying some kind of shakedown but I’ve got a handle on it.”
“Is that right, Danny?” the First Lady said. “You’re blackmailing us?”
“I’m trying to get out of this alive.”
She smiled. “I don’t remember you as being all that smart when we were kids. Maybe the hormones got in the way, wouldn’t you agree? Your survival is certainly a motive with which I’m in complete agreement.” She looked at Lily. “Did you get them?”
He nodded. “They were in the safe in the bedroom of his townhouse just as you said. It wasn’t difficult.”
Karp stared at Lily then at Becky with his mouth slightly agape. Powers saw for the first time that the man was mildly bucktoothed. “What are you talking about?”
“Lily recovered the tapes and letters from your place. The letters aren’t all that important, what with current developments, but the tapes would definitely cost us the election.” She looked at Powers. “Were there copies at the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose you’ve already sent them to someone you trust?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s not necessary. I’d like them back, please.” Powers shook his head side to side once. “So it’s like that, is it?”
“Yes.”
Becky smiled almost tenderly. “Like I said, you’re a lot smarter than I remember.”
“Give me ten minutes with this guy,” Karp slurred. “We’ll break him into pieces. We’ll know everything there is to know about Mr. Hayseed here, including where he’s stashed those tapes. Just trust me...”
“Marty, there is something you don’t know. The New York Times is running the communiques between the President and Saddam Hussein on the front page tomorrow morning. Our renomination for the presidency will be a sidebar.”
“The New York... Oh, shit.” Karp seemed to shrink in size.
“The French and British are demanding to know what we’ve been doing behind their backs these past months.”
Karp’s eyes closed and remained shut.
“I think you’d agree, Marty, that this changes matters just a bit.”
“I don’t... What... What are you...” He stopped. Then said quietly, “I guess it is over.”
“Yes, and no, Marty.”
Karp lifted his eyelids. “There’s no explanation that will wash, Becky. He’s been dealing in secret, playing everyone for suckers. He’s agreed to turn two-thirds of the world’s oil supply over to a mad man and there’s been no time to sell it to the public. Just think of the goddamn speech he gave in Philadelphia last week. The elections only 10 weeks away. If it came out afterwards there’d be no problem, but now...”
“We’ve issued a denial.”
Karp blinked slowly, incomprehensively, then blinked again, very slowly. “You can’t... Saddam will confirm the negotiations. He’s got no reason to protect Dick now that the negotiations have been blown. His position’s only worse.”
“The President has denied any knowledge of this matter.”
“Denied?” Karp laughed, a short bark like a nervous house dog. “Becky, it won’t wash, I tell you. It...”
“Hear it out, Marty. I think you’ll like the way it plays, on an intellectual plane of course.” Becky’s voice was even but every word dripped malice. “The President has been victimized by one of his most trusted confidants, not to mention my longtime friend and mentor. This man has used his mistress, a French national and stewardess,” she might as easily have been saying prostitute, “to pass communications to Saddam Hussein in the name of the President, all in a misguided, pathetic attempt at megalomania – and without the President’s knowledge. This confidant’s been unstable for some time but we never imagined the extent of it or that he’d go so far. As it became apparent that his plot to save the world from nuclear destruction, with himself cast as savior, was about to come undone he finally cracked and descended into madness. He murdered his courier mistress in order to silence her, but when he learned his betrayal was to appear in the New York Times it was just too much and he killed himself. It’s a great tragedy. The only fault to be placed at the President’s feet was his misplaced trust in a long time friend.”
Karp sat stunned, his mouth moving but no sound came out. Finally he said in a near croak, “You can’t be... serious. It’s absurd. No one will...”
“It’s a game winner, Marty. I thought you’d enjoy the ingeniousness of it, even though, I’ll admit, it lands a bit harshly on you.”
“It... It will never...”
“That’s the way we’re playing it, Marty. It’s the only scenario that fits the facts, at the least the facts we can’t control, and I for one think we can pull it off. Hell, Marty, it’s my idea. If you consider it for a moment you’ll see it’s only a slight variation of the original plan, although I’ll admit, th
at variation doesn’t play out very well for you personally. But then you’re the one who burned bridges around here, not me. I know how to reward loyalty... and how to treat traitors. Dick and I worked it all out hours ago. He’s rehearsing his acceptance speech. I’ve just been waiting for Lily to return with the tapes you had hidden away.”
“Becky, we should talk about this.”
“There’s nothing more to say, lover.”
“I don’t think you’ve considered...”
She cut him off. “You know what to do?” she said to the man in the doorway.
Lily nodded. “I have my orders.”
“Be certain we know everything he’s been up to.”
Karp looked at the First Lady then at Lily. “Becky!! No!! You can’t...”
“Shut up, Marty!! You made this decision yourself this morning over my breakfast table. Danny, this way.”
The First Lady marched from the office. Powers watched Karp crumble then pull himself erect. As he left the office Karp was shouting over and over, begging, threatening, finally sobbing. But there was no one to hear him. No one, that is, who mattered.
TWENTY-SIX
The West Wing, 9:13 p.m.
The First Lady’s office was as determinedly feminine in decor as Powers remembered, though tonight the shades of muted green and yellow appeared forced. She sat behind the dark wood desk, extracted a cigarette from a drawer and lit up. “Smoke?”
“I’ve got my own.”
“Welcome to the club of ‘I can quit anytime I want.’”
Powers lit one of the last of Nasr’s Turkish cigarettes. Coughed, then breathed smoke in again.
“It smells a bit like hashish.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s got a hell of a kick.” He looked up from the cigarette. “Now what?”
“In large part, Danny, that’s up to you.”
“I’m acting in the assumption that keeping the tapes out of the public eye is a matter of concern to you and your husband. If I’m in error then I expect to see Lily at the door any moment.”
“You’re a cold one. I don’t remember that about you at all.” She laughed bitterly but not without genuine amusement. “It’s turned out just the way I feared. My white knight is now our blackmailer. Bravo, Danny. Frankly, I didn’t think you had it in you. My concern all along was that you weren’t hard enough to do what was necessary.”
“I doubt I’ve ever been the person you thought I was, any more than you were as I remembered.” She didn’t like that but said nothing. “Tell me about Marei. Why did you attack her?”
Becky undid the buttons of her suit jacket and he could not help looking at the expanse of breasts that were freed. “They aren’t that much, Danny. Believe me. You saw them at their best.” She drew smoke into her lungs and breathed it out as she spoke. “Maybe I should have been the one doing the fucking instead of Alta. I considered it, you know, but I thought you’d prefer someone young, and what with everything going on I just couldn’t fit you into my schedule. You want to know about... that night.” She shrugged, stabbed her cigarette out and lit another. “First off, I didn’t know my idiot husband was using her for some kind of secret work with Saddam Hussein. I only went there to tell the bitch to stop seeing my husband. There had been comments around the White House about them and it would have been pointless to tell him to stop seeing her. At first it went about like I expected. She was very full of herself. They often are. They think because they hold his attention long enough to get him off, they can take my place.” Her mouth formed a mocking grimace. “At one point she struck me. Me! It got out of hand after that. I don’t... really... remember it all that well. I wasn’t seeing red so much as black. I remember blood... I thought it was mine... screams. She fell on the carpet, dead I thought.”
“Why did you attack her?”
“It all happened so fast. It was just... too much I suppose. To be completely candid I don’t think it had all that much to do with her. I considered killing myself right there.”
“But Alta came in.” Becky nodded. “Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
Becky tipped ashes into a crystal ashtray. “What?”
“Aren’t you bothered at all that you used Alta and her trust in you? That you turned her into a murderer?”
Becky snorted. “Her father and brothers made her a killer. All I did was channel it and direct her to a higher cause. As for what I think of Alta? She didn’t do her job. I warned her she was no Mata Hari but she had an exaggerated opinion of her hold over you.” Becky’s eyes turned the same shade of cold grey. “Grow up, Danny. This is the real world. Everyone uses everyone else. Sometimes they bother to sugar coat it with mouthings of love or talk of patriotism. Well, I can’t be bothered unless it’s on national television or a media sound bite, where it does me some good. We all use each other. You were doing me this big favor to get back into the sack with me, to rekindle that puppy love you’ve carried all these years. I let you think it might happen.” She took him in as she inhaled smoke. “You’re dead inside. Don’t you know that? I saw it in your eyes the moment we met on Sunday. You jumped at this for a chance to feel alive again. You were using me even more than I used you, so don’t go hypocritical on me.”
“Karp told me it was your plan from the first.”
“Marty says a great many things and some of them are even true. Events were well underway by the time I got off Librium. By then there weren’t that many options.” His eyes softened and for an instant he experienced an irrational wave of empathy.
“Alta’s dead, you know,” he said harshly to kill the emotion. “I shot her through the eye.”
Becky looked at him in shock that turned abruptly to hate, then slowly, almost imperceptively, into a twisted kind of respect. But she didn’t speak.
Finally Powers said, "Why? Whatever happened to you? You weren’t always like this. I’d have seen it.”
“Leave it to Danny to still be using rose-colored glasses. Don’t you know the first rule of life? People don’t change, not ever.”
“But what you do is... it’s evil, Becky.”
She laughed. “You are so quaint. Evil? You think there is such a thing? If there’s evil in the world, it’s turning children in Bangladesh into prostitutes, it’s selling drugs to kids, it’s slicing the female genitalia from little girls in West Africa. I intend to end that kind of evil, Danny, but I can’t do it without power, without a world stage. Dick gives me that for now. For all his faults, and no one knows them better than I do, he’s my ticket, as we used to say. I’ll do – I’ve done – whatever is necessary to safeguard his career because he gives me my platform.”
“You’re saying the ends justifies the means.”
“Hasn’t it always? Didn’t you bend the law as a cop? Even break it when you thought you were right?”
“It wasn’t the same.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“I never had anyone murdered.” Her look was malevolent in intensity. Powers continued, “I never much cared for your politics and I knew that there was something to this securities investigation since you were stonewalling the special prosecutor, but I always thought, deep down inside, you were a decent person, trying to do what was right. In these cynical times, it sounds corny, but I was proud of you. You were my last illusion, Becky.”
She considered that for a long moment as something was happening behind her eyes. Finally, she pulled the drawer open for another cigarette. After lighting it she said, “You’re a little old for pretend, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I am.”
You won’t change your mind about the tapes?” she asked. He shook his head. “I can make you very rich. Tonight.”
“I’d rather stay alive.”
“Danny,” she said, her demeanor suddenly that of a Southern belle. “Whatever you must think of me.”
“As it turns out, Marei’s father got the letters to the New York Times after all. Before you had he and his wi
fe murdered.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“A distinction without a difference, given what I’ve seen today and tonight. To coin a phrase, I’d say the jigs up, lady.”
“Hardly. There are always options, variations, contingencies. I resisted using you, but you were the one with the fewest strings.”
“That must have been a hard decision.”
“I hesitated, Danny. That means more than you think.” She shrugged. “Now I owe favors to others. So what else is new?"
“And Karp?”
“A variation on a theme. Once the letters were released, someone had to take the fall. There aren’t that many options, other than the truth, you understand. He’s the right man in the wrong place. At least that’s how he sees it. He fits, and frankly, he got too full of himself. I had no choice, not that he left me any. It’s all a neatly tied package now.”
“He’s your lover, Becky.”
She raised her chin. “So was Alta,” she said harshly, “and you don’t see me shedding any tears over her, do you?”
There was a muffled explosion. Becky jumped in her seat. She looked past Powers, then slowly bit her lower lip before swiveling her chair so she was nearly facing away.
“You’ll never get away with it,” Powers said lightly, thinking he sounded as if he was playing a scene in a bad movie.
Becky didn’t speak for a very long time. When she did her voice was flat and so low he could barely hear it. “We all blame ourselves, of course, for not reacting in time to Marty’s deteriorating mental state. If we hadn’t cared so much about our longtime friend, we might have saved his life and spared the nation an awkward international incident. It’s unfortunate that woman was murdered. She could have explained all this, but...” Her voice trailed away.
“That’s impossible to sell.”
She looked at him, then arched her eyebrow. “Difficult, but not impossible. The media will go along with any plausible accounting we give to keep Guthers from becoming President. They’ll raise questions, but nothing of substance until after the election. They’re after the same things we are and they may not like us or our methods, but they know where we plan to take this country and fear what Guthers will do to it.”
Shadows and Lies Page 23
