The Henderson Equation

by Warren Adler

  “On moral grounds?”

  “How you people harp on morality! In the absence of war such an act could be interpreted . . . it would be interpreted as an act of murder, punishable by death or imprisonment, even though it might be an excellent, a cheap way to remove a tyrant.”

  Nick searched carefully for Myra’s reaction. She was strangely silent. When they were going after the President she became livid whenever the CIA was mentioned. Now she seemed disinterested, docile.

  “What’s wrong with our way?” Nick asked, continuing to watch Myra.

  “Yours is a particularly disgusting form of assassination, involving torture first under the guise of self-righteousness. After all, who made you the judge?”

  “Without us, who would keep you all honest?”

  “Gentlemen, please,” Myra intervened. Ambruster held up his hand, like an opponent asking for time out.

  “I admit our excesses,” Ambruster continued, “but I truly believe we need this apparatus. True, it has gotten too big, too unwieldy, too all-encompassing, too spendy. All right. Let us accept that it’s overgrown and clumsy. But, believe me, it is needed. We have got to keep our iron in the fire.” His eyes drifted over them into the garden as if there were private mysteries to be seen there.

  “And we’ve got to keep ours in,” Nick said.

  “You don’t have to love us, just be tolerant. We’re on your side. All we ask is that you exercise some sense of responsibility. Leave us room.”

  “In other words, screen out what you think damaging.”

  “Not at all.”

  “What then?”

  He could see Ambruster’s rising exasperation. Soon the issue would be joined.

  “This thing with Henderson, for example. It’s preposterous. Your Gunderstein has been burrowing into us like a sand crab.”

  “What’s preposterous?” Nick asked, feeling for the matter’s pulse.

  “The allegation, for one thing. As I’ve just told you, there is no evidence to suggest that the CIA was ever involved in overt assassination operations. Two congressional committees have tried; the Rockefeller Commission has tried. All they’ve come up with is hearsay, circumstantial rot, innuendo, the typical politicized grab bag. Frankly, they don’t worry me as much as you, the Chronicle.” He paused again, his coffee cup descending on his saucer with a clatter. “My God, Nick, isn’t there any avenue of appeal? Can’t you go on trust? The implication of the allegation is that we just shoot down any government leader who does not cooperate. We do owe something to history, you know, and to the generations that come after us; if they come after us. Do you think we’d like future generations to know us as cold-blooded killers?”

  Nick contemplated the elements of Ambruster’s pleading: responsibility, sense of history, decency, national security. He had had them all before. There were times when he could be persuaded, he thought. Perhaps Ambruster’s point was not without value. Was it Henderson who clouded the issue?

  “It all boils down to the same thing, always the same cry. You’d like us to hold the story, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m asking you to be responsible.”

  “And you deny categorically that these operations ever existed?”

  Ambruster thought for a moment.

  “Categorically,” he said finally, “we do not assassinate people. We’ve been repeating it so many times we’re hoarse.”

  Nick suspected that Ambruster was defining his position narrowly. Henderson was not being accused of pulling the trigger. He was alleged to be only the match-maker, the puppeteer.

  “Do you also deny that Henderson ever worked for you?” Nick asked.

  “He’s not in our personnel records,” Ambruster said precisely.

  “He admits being on detached service from NSA for special assignments.”

  “You’d have to check with NSA, then.” It was the usual bureaucratic cop-out. “I suppose it’s now a special crime to have worked for any intelligence agency. Talk about the arrogance of power.” He looked at Myra, whose eyes narrowed. “You have become too powerful for your own good, you know.” Ambruster sighed. He sipped his coffee silently. “I’m here,” Ambruster continued, “because I truly believe that I can appeal to your sense of responsibility. Imagine the kind of power that you now wield in this country in the hands of less responsible people. It could happen. I’ve seen it happen elsewhere. You’re in control of the most powerful instrument in the country. I’m sure I don’t have to make that point. You’ve just toppled a President. I’m sitting here trying to use all my powers of persuasion to make you see that there are some matters that have to be carefully weighed against other factors. Our special problem is that we’re absolutely powerless to defend ourselves and if you continue to discredit us we will ultimately be destroyed as an effective weapon of self-defense.”

  Ambruster was rolling out his big guns now. Was he succeeding? He looked at Myra for some clue to her reaction but her features revealed nothing. She was merely the affable hostess.

  “Suppose, just suppose,” Nick asked, “that we come up with proof, witnesses, participants, who contradict your denials. What then? Is it responsible of us to still kill the story?”

  Ambruster thought for a moment. “My appeal to you is to kill the story in any event. It can build. It can get out of hand. As for so-called witnesses, that too would be pure speculation since I assure you the story would not be true.”

  “But suppose they swore . . .”

  “Look, Nick, the situation is academic. However you ran the story it would be damaging, witnesses or not. You’d be basing everything on half-truths. Impressions.”

  “Facts, Ambruster, not impressions,” Nick shot back. “And we insist on confirmation from at least two sources.”

  “We in the intelligence business know that two sources do not necessarily a truth contain. We sometimes need twenty, thirty, and even then we still do not see the total picture. Ask thirty witnesses to describe an accident and you will get thirty different versions, all insisting upon the truth of their observations, yet somehow off the mark in terms of absolutes.”

  “Then you might as well challenge the whole concept of the news business. We do the best we can.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s really not good enough.”

  “Better our way than yours.”

  “There will come a day when you’ll be worse than we could ever have been.”

  “At least you have the ability to petition us.” Nick looked around the room. “In these pleasant surroundings, everything so civilized. If the situation were reversed we’d be sitting on some wooden bench in some stark whitewashed room with knotted guts and sweaty palms.” Nick felt the sweat of his own palms.

  “You’ve been watching too many old movies.”

  He could see the unyielding stubbornness in the man, the abstracted superior high-mindedness. Surely Myra could detect his insufferable contempt. He watched her calmly sipping her coffee. He felt again the backwash of fatigue. The conversation seemed to be drifting. Perhaps sensing this, Ambruster made one more stab to refocus his plea.

  “Let’s just say that none of us is perfect. I’m here to try and convince you to think carefully before you leap on matters pertaining to us. I’ve tried to be candid.”

  “You couldn’t be candid, even if you tried,” Nick said. He noted the edge of sarcasm in his voice, his politeness worn thin. He turned toward Myra. Her control was infuriating. Why had she maneuvered him into this position?

  “All I can do is appeal to your conscience,” Ambruster said. It was the last arrow in his quiver. Looking into the garden, Nick blinked into the sunlight. If he were not a responsible man, he told himself, he would have run Gunderstein’s piece as is and hang the human fallout.

  Then Ambruster was standing up, a tall corpulent figure, as he moved toward Myra and took her hand. She stood up and took his arm, leading him past Nick.

  “I’m not sure I made any impression,” Ambruster said, holdin
g out his hand. “At least I tried.” Nick gave him a sweaty hand again, having forgotten to rub it dry against his trousers. Ambruster accepted it and smiled as he moved forward on Myra’s arm.

  When they had gone, Nick sat stiffly playing with a spoon, nervously banging it against the heel of his hand. Why couldn’t he make it simple on himself, Nick thought. Why this personal flagellation? Was he determined to make a stand against Myra?

  “Under it all, he’s a rather sweet man,” Myra said, flowing back into the room, sitting down, and pouring another cup of coffee.

  “He’s a viper,” Nick said, pouting.

  “I think we owed him the hearing, Nick. We’ve been murder on the Agency.”

  “The bastards deserved it,” Nick said, lighting a cigarette and drowning the match in tepid coffee.

  “He admitted that, Nick. He’s inherited an awful bag of worms.”

  “They’ll never change,” Nick said. “The old-boy code. Protect the inside. Screw the outside. He would rat on his own mother if it meant protecting all the old boys. I don’t trust him as far as I can spit.”

  “I don’t know, Nick,” she said. She was watching him, but, it seemed, not seeing, looking inward, reflecting on something within herself.

  “Don’t tell me you believed him, Myra?” He hoped he had broken into her thoughts.

  “I felt his sincerity, Nick,” she said, her attention regained. “At least on that single point.”

  “The Henderson issue?”

  “Well, yes.” She was trying to be casual.

  He watched her cautiously, forcing alertness. Behind her tranquil air he could sense the determination, the iron will, assertive now. He knew he was not simply being persuaded. He was being assaulted. The meetings with Henderson and Ambruster were merely strategies. He felt himself grow tense, his vulnerability a heavy weight in his gut, his knowledge of her power over him galling. It was happening now, overtly. She was groping for total command.

  “Maybe Gunderstein always presses too hard,” Nick said. “It’s part of his method.” Hell, why was he going over this ground? Last year she had proclaimed Gunderstein a national hero.

  “Henderson is our kind,” she said quietly, the use of the collective pronoun a continuing offense. “He represents everything we stand for, Nick. We’ve spent hours talking about it. He’s honest, liberal, decent, intelligent. Above all, he’s a leader. And damn it, Nick, this country needs leadership. He’s fair, balanced, objective, charismatic. If we allow him to get entangled in this mess, we’ll destroy him, not as a man, Nick, but as a potential president. And that in my opinion would be a national tragedy.”

  He could not help but admire her calm eloquence, although his essential cynicism about the motives of politicians made her appeal ludicrous. Surely she couldn’t believe what she was saying, not after a lifetime in Washington. He is your man, he wanted to say. Your possession. Your toy. She could, after all, order him to kill the story, he thought. But she was too smart for that. Why confront when you can outflank? Besides she might force him to resign, pressure him to react to some wellspring of pride buried inside of him. Without the Chronicle, what was his life?

  “You know I’m giving it a hard look,” he mumbled.

  “I know, Nick.”

  Looking again into the sunlit garden, he noted that the glint of coldness on the sculptures softened as the sun changed its angle. The sense of age in the pre-Columbian conception seemed to calm him, draw him into a timeless orbit. He could feel her gaze lift, wash over him briefly, then retreat again.

  “Let’s examine it carefully,” she sighed.

  He was happy for the respite, impotence clinging to him like sweat.

  Standing up, he felt a slight nausea as the overdose of coffee sloshed in his stomach. He looked at his watch.

  “I’ll talk to Gunderstein,” he said.

  She followed him into the hallway. From a table in the foyer he reached for a copy of the Chronicle which lay there on a pile.

  “Trust me on this, Nick,” she said.

  “You’ve never given me reason to do otherwise,” he answered. Not until now, he told himself, bitterly, feeling the cutting edge of her growing obsession. He wanted to say more, but turned instead and let himself out into the chilled air. Once outside, his nausea dissipated as he breathed deeply.

  In the back of the cab, Nick watched the stately embassies of Massachusetts Avenue flow past, sensing his smallness, a bit of flotsam churning in the whirlpool of the epicenter. Even as he swirled in the agitation, he marveled at the manner in which power flowed, seemingly with no logical design, pursuing an obscure continuity.

  It could happen with equal force at breakfast over-looking a sunlit garden dotted with pre-Columbian sculptures or beside a urinal. Decisions affecting millions could turn on a minor affliction like acid in the stomach or a father’s long-remembered affront or a mother’s withholding of natural protection. Because Hitler as a boy had observed his parents in a sexual encounter, whole armies could be laid to waste on the frozen steppes of Russia. And Johnson, his macho exploding as the cells in his afflicted body aged, could send 50,000 boys to their death and another 400,000 to the crucible for ritualized maiming. We are all trapped by our own genetic code and how we observe experience, Nick thought, wondering about his own lonely vulnerability in this minuscule gasp of time. He felt his exhaustion and fought against it. The Chronicle needed his strength. After all, life ebbed and flowed; victory and defeat were simply other sides of the same coin, quivering like a leaning horseshoe at the edge of the rounded stake.

  It had been the primary lesson of Election Eve, 1948, the odd, maddening duel between the man on the wedding cake, Thomas E. Dewey, and bumbling, bespectacled, hickish Harry S Truman. It was before the use of computers for election vote counting and the News brought in all the bodies it could muster, including its entire Washington staff, and rearranged its city room to calculate and process election results swiftly. Newspapers were still obsessed, in those days, with the idea of scooping the competition. An army of copy boys were enlisted to rip the copy off the banks of Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service tickers and feed it to people, ranged in desks, representing the complicated geography of states, districts, and precincts.

  A few blocks away, the floors of two major hotels had been booked for the brass of the two opposing political armies. The Democrats were ensconced in the Roosevelt Hotel and the Republicans in the Commodore. The Democrats were enveloped in the heavy gloom of impending disaster, all except old Harry who had gone to sleep in the family bed in Independence, Missouri, while the Dewey team waited for its certain victory.

  Aside from the excitement generated simply by the break in routine, Nick looked forward to seeing Charlie again. They’d been in touch by telephone since Nick’s visit to the Parker place in September, although Nick had noted that their calls were diminishing in frequency.

  By then, his involvement with Margaret had reached pinnacles of possession and passion, and although she officially resided in Brooklyn, she had moved part of her clothes to Nick’s apartment. By going home on most nights, Margaret was able to somewhat placate her father, whose simplistic moral code was beyond breaching, and more important, she could still maintain the hopeless charade that she was “uninvolved.” As for Nick, Margaret had become the quintessence of his existence, the gift of herself an unbearable joy, a delight so excruciatingly ecstatic that he passed through moments away from her suspended between afterglow and expectation. Seeing her walk through the city room, her large wonderful breasts jiggling in their supports, turning the lecherous eyes of his co-workers, gave him a special selfish pride.

  It was not uncommon for them to slip away to the apartment in the middle of the day, after a few hours’ respite, and, like beasts in season, clutch each other, transferring their body heat into an awe-inspiring sexuality. Even now he recalled the memory of the passion in great detail. The tremulous hands unhooking her brassiere strap, the f
alling free of the great white globes with their perfect adornments of large red nipples, the gentle hands unzipping him and pressing together those marvels around the urgent swelling of his manhood. Nothing that occurred later could ever erase the joy of that brief time of his life.

  During that time, too, his by-lines were appearing regularly and he was building a reputation as a zealous reporter, enjoying the admiration of his peers. Dutifully, he would cut clippings of his stories and send them to his mother.

  Margaret, too, was moving into a new orbit and her name was frequently seen on movie posters, proclaiming carefully contrived praise.

  Only occasionally, usually around the onset of her period, did the old demon of feminine insecurity assail the idyllic nature of their relationship. “I will never marry you, Nick,” she would say, the thought articulated at incongruous moments, as if she had suddenly been compelled to eject it. It was always near the surface of her consciousness.

  “I didn’t ask you,” he would respond testily.

  “Well, then, don’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me you won’t.”

  “I promise.”

  She would pause then, her eyes glazed, moistening. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t love you.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re just good chums, Nick.”

  “Good chums.”

  In its way, the return of Charlie to New York became an uncommon intrusion, a break in the rhythm of their harmony. They were both assigned to cover Dewey headquarters. Charlie had arranged it with McCarthy.

  “It’ll get us the hell out of the office,” Charlie said into the telephone.

  “Great,” Nick had answered, calculating the time frame in connection with Margaret’s assignment, which was to assist in the city room vote count. He assumed then that Dewey would win early and they would all be finished working by midnight.

  “I’m bringing Myra up,” Charlie announced. “We’ll have a helluva time.”

  By six the city room was a mass of activity. Desks had been moved into a huge circular chain manned by everybody the paper could muster. The first brief returns began to be ripped off the ticker machines by the copy boys and passed around to the appropriate desks. McCarthy’s face was already beet red with booze and excitement.