We Are Holding the President Hostage

by Warren Adler

  After about a week, the fat woman came in carrying a bucket of warm soapy water and a scrap of towel. Maria stripped down and began to wash herself. The fat woman stripped the boy and began to wash him. As they bathed, the man with the hairy fingers came in and watched.

  “What I like most about this place is the privacy,” she said. With an effort of will, she tried to ignore his gaze, washing herself as if she were alone in the shower. Whatever is done to me, she vowed, I will show him my dignity. She continued to bathe, ignoring his presence. She forced herself to remember her feelings, to record its awfulness in her mind.

  The smell of vengeance, she assured herself, is pungent, like smelling salts. It will keep me from flagging. She made resolutions to herself, folding them inside her memory. Her father would do that. She wondered if she could reach him through a massive effort of will, across oceans and vast spaces. Daddy, your little girl is holding on. And your grandson is showing much courage.

  As she washed, she stared at her tormentor. Let’s see who blinks first. She washed her womanly parts, deliberately, minutely. You do not exist, her eyes told him. His gaze drifted from her to the boy. She wondered if he was deliberately showing her his contempt. Then he sent the fat woman away and knelt before the boy.

  “He is a good-looking young man,” he said. He kneeled down and smiled at Joey.

  “Would you like me to wash you, little fellow?”

  He took the bit of towel and slowly moved it along the boy’s skin, pausing just below his midsection.

  Joey threw his mother a frightened glance.

  “Leave him alone, you bastard,” she cried.

  He looked at her and shook his head in mock sadness.

  “He is such a juicy little morsel.”

  She knew that the perverse demonstration of his aberration was to show his power over her, to diminish her will. There was no question about its effect. It was exactly the right button to push, worse than a knife brandished across the boy’s throat. At least, in that gesture, there was some dignity. When he threw down the piece of towel and left the room, she was relieved, but he had shown his mastery, illustrated his contempt. The woman returned and dressed the boy.

  Later, after she had told her son a story, she urged him to sleep.

  “Imagine I am kissing you, my darling.”

  “I am, Mommy.”

  “Are my lips cool?”

  “Very cool and very soft.”

  “I love you, Joey.”

  “I love you, Mommy.”

  She must have drifted just beneath the surface of consciousness. A wave of thunder seemed to engulf her. She heard heavy footsteps on cement, then smelled sour breath as she was manhandled. Someone was unchaining her. She heard the metal clink heavily as it fell to a hard surface.

  “Joey,” she screamed.

  A voice she recognized as the man with the hairy fingers demanded silence. A hand pinched her arm as she was jolted forward.

  “Mommy.”

  She heard her son’s panicked voice and somewhere in the distance a coughing motor. The pitch darkness confused her sense of time and place.

  “Quickly,” the man’s voice said, an urgent whisper.

  She felt herself pulled forward as if someone wanted to tear her arms out of their sockets. The pain jolted her. Daddy, she cried in her heart.

  Save us.

  11

  THE PRESIDENT PUT HIS FEET UP on the desk and leaned back to the full extent of the swivel so that his eyes could see how cleverly the low relief of the presidential seal had been worked into the white ceiling with its trim of dental work. Was this the power and the glory?

  It was a question he asked himself often. From the very moment when he knew that the presidency belonged to him, his elation had deflated. Suddenly he was frightened. It had taken him all of that election night to understand the sensation. He and Amy had clung to each other in their own bed back home, as if the touch of mutual flesh was necessary to validate reality.

  Just suppose when he got there on top of the mountain, sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, finger on the trigger of a holocaust, responsible for the preservation of the living world, protector of the concept of human rights, of a free people, of representative government, of the Judeo-Christian value system, that he suddenly discovered that he was ineffective, unsure, unwise, inadequate.

  “No way.”

  It was a chorus of protest, echoing and reechoing in his mind. In that chorus were the raised voices of his cheerleaders. His parents, his grandparents, his wife, his children, his teachers, his teammates, his friends. It was his secret assumption that, long ago, perhaps at the moment of his conception, he had been marked and registered for high purpose. It was even embarrassing sometimes to hear the echo of such a presumption in his own mind.

  And yet the evidence was inescapable. Paul Bernard was, indeed, chosen, anointed. Then why the hell was it getting harder and harder to hear the chorus of voices? Where the hell had all the cheerleaders gone?

  Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his chair and looked across the room to the portrait of George Washington in his full-dress uniform. It had been painted by Charles Wilson Peale and was said to be the only full-sized portrait done of Washington from life. The father of our country. Had someone left it there to mock him?

  “What would you do, wise guy?” he said aloud, actually waiting for an answer. “Avoid foreign entanglements, you say? Good advice, George. Send Martha my best.”

  He hadn’t seen his secretary, Barbara Higgins, come in. Looking up, he blushed. His gaze moved to the tall clock. In fact, the hands on the clock had dominated his life all day. He had signed three important bills, taken the usual picture with the congressional leadership, given away the usual quota of pens, had a long meeting with the Secretary of Defense, posed with the poster girl for Juvenile Diabetes, made a round robin of calls to senators pushing his export bill, had a cheese sandwich and a Coke at his desk, both of which were sending back reminders. But it was that damned clock, that relentless tick-tock. Harkins had assured him that he would hear by two at the latest. Well, it was after two.

  “Mr. Harkins and Mr. Foreman are waiting in the outer room, Mr. President.”

  “Well then . . .” He made a waving motion and his secretary scurried out.

  He rose to move to one of the wing chairs in front of the mantel while the CIA Director and Foreman sat down together on opposite couches. He read the news in their faces.

  “Damn,” the President muttered.

  “They had the house staked out,” Harkins said. “They were dead sure. So we let them have it all. They were bitching about our interference. You remember what happened that last time when we offered to go in with them in Malta. Hell, it was a simple house assault. Nothing more.”

  The President tapped his fingers on the arm of a chair. The damned thing was bedeviling him. He felt a stab of pain in his midsection and popped an antacid in his mouth. The recovery of the woman and her child would have bought him a temporary reprieve. He had even discussed it at length with the Egyptian President, that frightened fool. They were sinking billions into the Egyptian pit. What the hell were they getting for their money?

  “So let’s have it straight,” the President said.

  “They went in on schedule,” Harkins said. “Object was to move in, get the woman and her kid, and, if possible, get the hostage-takers alive, parade them in front of the cameras. A real glory scene. They had all the backup needed. Helicopters. The works. Only when they got there, the bastards had flown the coop.”

  “How come?”

  “Must have been an inside tip,” the CIA Director said.

  “They’ve got a massive search going,” his National Security Advisor said lamely.

  “The Egyptians couldn’t find an elephant in a hog pond,” the President said. The antacid hadn’t started to work and the pain was now getting him just below the heart. It occurred to him suddenly that maybe he was having a heart attack. Then h
e belched and the pain disappeared. No such luck, he told himself.

  “Their people assure me—” Foreman began.

  “Their people are full of shit.”

  “Unfortunately, they’re also stupid. They were so sure, they invited media,” Harkins said. “Then they tried to put a cap on it, which only made the media more determined to get a story out. Any story. With them, they love failure better than success. By evening it will be spread over the tube.”

  “Another needle in Uncle’s rump,” the President said. He stood up suddenly, as if he felt the physical pain in exactly that part of his own anatomy. Then he began to walk aimlessly around the office, skirting the couches, over the pale gold oval rug. He secretly avoided stepping on the turquoise rosettes, as if they were cow pats, like a superstitious child. Except that disaster had already struck. He looked out at the Rose Garden through the high windows, a peaceful scene, tranquil. It did not calm his agitation.

  “With friends like that. . .” he began, then swallowed the cliché.

  “It’s not fatal, Mr. President,” Foreman said. “It’s not our blunder.”

  “What’s the truth got to do with it,” the President said. “Name of the game is perception. Guilt by association. Only one Teflon President a century.”

  He turned away from the window and looked down at the forest of family pictures on the little table behind his desk. Amy and the kids. His mother and dad, long dead. Mom, he thought, then shrugged away the image, suddenly remembering himself as a small boy hiding his head in her apron, her sweet dough-smelling starchy apron.

  “Is it a good time to bring it up?” Harkins asked.

  “Oh Jesus,” the President said. He turned away from the window and slipped into the chair behind his desk.

  “It’s not exactly another Iran,” Foreman said. “Don’t let it get out of proportion.”

  He rifled through his desk drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers. Lifting it, he waved it at the two men.

  “Polls, gentlemen.” He slapped them on his desk. “If the vote was today, I wouldn’t be elected dogcatcher. Imagine what it will be tomorrow.” Again he stood up. With the tips of his fingers, he balanced himself on the surface of his desk.

  “Listen. We’ve got one helluva prosperous country out there. We’re rolling in dough. Incomes are up. Unemployment is down. We’re fat and happy.”

  He sucked in a deep breath in an effort to slow down his accelerating agitation. “All that mean anything? Hell no. The box score shows an indecisive, cowardly man chasing phantoms. We’re talking about only twenty-one American hostages. But it’s not the numbers. It’s that this yo-yo who runs the most powerful country on earth can’t come up with a way to stop our people from getting hijacked and free them when they do. It’s the pimple on your ass that always hurts the most.” He stopped in mid-sentence, spent.

  It was futile, he knew, to berate the wind. Simple explanation, he decided. His luck was running out.

  “Well then, why not let me excise that pimple?” Harkins asked.

  The telephone rang at his desk. He looked at his watch. He was scheduled for a meeting with his Chief of Staff and his domestic affairs counselor. He picked up the phone, turning his eyes away from Harkins’ hopeful gaze. No. Not now, he told himself. Never.

  “In a minute,” he said, thankful that he could get on to another subject. Oddly, the men on the couches did not move. They exchanged troubled glances. There was something more, the President speculated, something that neither of them wanted to talk about.

  “Why don’t you toss a coin?” the President asked.

  “We already did,” Harkins said. “I won. I got to tell you the good news.”

  “Well?”

  “The mother and her boy are both well,” Harkins replied.

  “So where’s the punch line?” the President asked.

  “They’re in Lebanon,” Foreman said.

  12

  EVEN WHEN HE STOOD UP and stretched his arm, Giuseppe Carlotti’s shaking fingers could not touch every point of the White House floor plan that required illustration. He was a small round man with a short narrow mustache, slick black hair, and tiny mouse eyes that blinked continuously, a condition that was obviously greatly aggravated by his present state of extreme nervousness. It was quite obvious that this was not his choice of an ideal situation.

  “The pantry is here,” he said, pointing to the plan. “But the food comes up from the floor below. What we do there is assemble, then we move it to the pantry, then we bring it through the door and serve. It is not an efficient way. Even so, everything must be timed precisely.”

  The Padre studied the plan silently. The others waited for. his reaction. Robert seemed to concentrate on the plan so intently that his eyeglasses fogged. He took them off and wiped them with a bit of tissue.

  The Padre nodded and stroked his chin. Like a magnifying glass that gathers the rays of the sun and focuses down to a single pinprick of intense heat, the Padre had thought of nothing else for the past week. The idea had germinated, bloomed, and flowered.

  Events had transformed a once preposterous idea into a possibility. Everyone and everything was vulnerable. This was the axiom of his life. Nothing could be foreclosed if one’s purpose was single-minded. And anxiety was a forceful stimulant.

  The killing of the three hostages, the unsuccessful storming of the villa by the Egyptians, the announcement that Maria and Joey were in Lebanon, all events that had hastened his decision, made action essential. Of all things, the pain of inaction was unbearable. He felt like a conspirator in his daughter and grandson’s agony.

  “There is no choice, Robert,” he had told his son-in-law. Nor had he asked for his approval.

  “I won’t presume to tell you your business, Salvatore,” Robert had said.

  Certain decisions, once made, were irrevocable. This one would take every drop of his concentration, his friendships, alliances, and experience. Above all, he had complete faith in the reliability and efficiency of the network of families and their various and diverse interlocking relationships.

  Tongue to tongue, mind to mind, the system radiated outward, a giant eye fixing on selective targets stashed in crevices everywhere. The vast extended family, knit by blood, obligation, fear, and, above all, honor, would spit out the needed ingredients from its great maw. This, in his mind, would be the ultimate test for the organization. Like the blood of his father, he knew it could not fail him.

  Giuseppe Carlotti was an old marker, like all the others, waiting to be called. He was a cousin of Bernotti, brother of Connie, who had married an uncle of Vincent Moroni, son of his father’s trusted capo Leonardo, whose family had been supported after Leonardo had been gunned down in a West Side alley.

  Old family markers were better than gold, currency waiting willingly for the moment when the debt would be called. They were irrevocable. New generations had to assume payment. Long lists of such obligations were committed to memory, handed down from father to son, uncle to nephew, brother to brother, down through the generations on the river of blood. No questions asked. To renege was a high crime, demanding a punishment that was equal in retribution for that meted out by betrayal. It was simply a matter of honor.

  The technical aspects of getting into the White House became moot the more the Padre explored them. He believed, as a matter of principle, that all security precautions created by the authorities could be breached by flaws both human and mechanical.

  Inquiries among people who made a living out of foiling such technology had come up with an easy method of getting weapons through the technological barrier. The weapon would be liquid explosives carried as a kind of clothes lining in flat plastic containers that followed the body contours.

  Metal detectors simply could not pick up liquid explosives, of which there were a number of common compounds. The most reliable consisted of that old standby, pure nitroglycerin, which could be exploded on impact.

  Of course the carrier of these
weapons would also be demolished, but that was a mere technicality. In the context of the White House, and specifically the President, the actual use of any weapon by an interloper meant automatic death. In this case, if the liquid explosives chosen by the Padre for this job were detonated, everyone within a radius of twenty feet would be also killed.

  Such a possibility had to be the ultimate nightmare for anyone in the business of protecting life and limb. Naturally, the plan’s effectiveness as a persuader depended on the perception of the protectors. The Padre had to be able to convince the Secret Service that he and his men were willing to die in order to save the lives of the Padre’s daughter and grandson.

  The Padre had absolutely no doubts about the men he had chosen to accompany him.

  “Not you, Robert,” he had told his son-in-law.

  “But I must,” he had responded. “She is my wife. Joey is my child.”

  “And if we die?”

  “Am I not worthy to risk my life for my loved ones?” Robert asked.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Then you don’t trust me.”

  “That is not the question,” the old man replied. “She will need someone to be here when she comes home.”

  “But she would never forgive herself if you died because of her. The others as well.”

  “And would she forgive you if you died there? Would Joey forgive you?”

  Robert did not respond, although the Padre knew he had not provided the last word.

  There was an even more important question: How can four men get inside the White House and come within the required lethal proximity to the President of the United States?

  Giuseppe Carlotti, his fear at war with his reluctance, was telling them how. They were sitting around the table in the back room of Luigi’s restaurant. If Giuseppe suspected the real motives behind the rapt attention he was shown by his audience, he did not offer a clue. In fact, his avoidance of the subject was palpable.

  “I’m just a caterer,” he told them repeatedly.