The candidate was about to collapse back to the bed when someone knocked on the door.
“What is it?” he asked, trying not to sound grumpy.
“Mr. Augustus Pickett is here, sir. He’d like to talk to you, if it’s convenient.”
Gus Pickett. That was good. That was better than good. Gus Pickett was the richest man in the Party. He was into gold and bauxite and gypsum, practically anything that could be found in the ground. He lived in Colorado. If he had come to New Hampshire it had to have something to do with the primary.
The candidate sprang from the bed. He was about to tell his aide to have Pickett wait until he was dressed. Then he thought, no. Here was a chance to be Presidential and human at the same time.
“He can come in right now,” the candidate said. “If he doesn’t mind watching me dress.”
There was a gravelly laugh from outside the room. Pickett liked it. Good. He’d have to see that the press found out about this.
The candidate went over and opened the door and welcomed his visitor. Gus Pickett was a small man, but tough. He had a mop of thick white hair and pale, cold, blue eyes. Everything else about him was brown. The grooved skin, stretched tight over a face that was all planes and angles; the suit, tie, shoes, overcoat.
“You should have let one of the kids take your coat,” the candidate said.
“It’s all right, I won’t be here long. I just wanted to say hello, ask how you’re doing.”
Change jingled as the candidate let his pants fall to the carpet. He started to unbutton his shirt.
“I’m fine,” he said brightly. “Not too much time to rest, but that’s campaigning.”
“Sure,” Gus Pickett said. “Politics ain’t shelling peas.”
The candidate looked at him. Gus Pickett? He stood gaping for a moment, then said, “I thought the expression was ‘Politics ain’t beanbag.’”
Pickett smiled. “Peas, beans, what’s the difference?”
There was no doubt about it, now. Sign, countersign, confirmation. Gus Pickett, it seemed, was not just the richest man in the Party, he was the richest man in the party. The room had already been checked for bugs and was clear. Now that the signs had been given, whatever Pickett said next, the candidate was to take as coming directly from Control. From Moscow.
The candidate stood there in his socks and underwear, listening to Gus Pickett tell him how Control was going to place the candidate in the White House.
The plan was brilliant. He couldn’t see how it could fail.
Gus Pickett seemed pretty sanguine about it, too. The grooves of his face rearranged themselves into a bright smile. “See you at the dinner, Mr. President,” he said.
Mr. President. I might as well get used to hearing that, the candidate thought. He was going to be President! He would remove America as a threat to World Peace. He could lead his country the rest of the way into true Socialist justice. He would be one of the great heroes of history.
Then he saw himself in the mirror. The Great Hero of history looked at himself in his underwear, smiled sheepishly, then hastened to get dressed.
Chapter Three
Kirkester, New York
TROTTER HAD COME BACK to Kirkester depressed. His little expedition had been a total washout. Worse—he had to have strings pulled to get the police to let him leave Minnesota. It is never good to leave people wondering what’s so important about you.
And though New England was freezing (according to USA Today’s weather map), Central New York had just undergone the annual Midwinter Thaw. This meant that the snow that had fallen since late November had melted all at once, which meant in turn that everything that was not paved was mud, and much of what was paved was covered with mud.
The only good thing about his return was seeing Regina again.
When the welcome-back kisses were finished, she said, “I’m not pregnant.”
“Ah.” Trotter was strangely sad. He knew he was being stupid but he went on feeling that way. There’d be a lot more chances, and trying to make her pregnant was fun.
Then he realized how she probably knew she wasn’t pregnant. “Does that mean we can’t ... ?”
Regina frowned. “Not for a couple of days, anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll have a quiet dinner and snuggle.”
Regina smiled and shook her head. “I have a hard time figuring you out,” she said. “I know what you’ve been trained to do, and I’ve seen you in action. You’re the tough, deadly spy.”
“The spy who loved you,” Trotter said.
“Yeah, exactly. Then when it comes to you and me, not only are you sweet and gentle, you’re almost sappy, like a high school kid.”
“Sappy?”
“I like sappy. Ifs just a strange picture, you know?”
“I guess. Maybe it’s because I never had a chance to do any sappy stuff when I was the right age for it. I’m a late bloomer. Maybe I’ll grow out of it. Probably by the time we’re eighty or ninety, I won’t be sappy at all.”
They had their quiet dinner and snuggled, then went to bed. Trotter spent a large part of the night staring at the ceiling wondering about what he’d had in mind when he talked about being eighty or ninety years old. Had he meant it? He hoped not. There had been a time when Trotter had been convinced he wouldn’t live to see thirty. That birthday was safely past, but the one thing someone in his business, even in the administration end, could not allow himself, was the future. The only way you could go on living was to be ready to die at any second. The man who called himself Allan Trotter was beginning to doubt he was.
The next day he decided to go into the office, more because he wanted to be in the same building with Bash than anything else. He went to the basement, where the Kirkester Chronicle’s offices were, and made his way to the desk he barely used.
As he sat down, he heard hands clapping from across the room. Trotter looked up to see Sean Murphy grinning sardonically at him.
Murphy walked across the room to him. “Regina said you’d be here. I could hardly believe it. Glad you could find your desk.”
“Secret homing device inside. What can I do for you?”
“How about a drink?”
“First you make remarks about my showing up, now you want to haul me out of here.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
“Not here. Come on.”
“Isn’t it a little early for a drink?”
“Bars open at eleven. It’ll be eleven by the time we get to one. That’s the one trouble with having your paper on a big estate like this. No bar next door. All the great journalistic enterprises have bars next door.”
“All right,” Trotter said. “Don’t want to overdo it, anyway.” His smile was a challenge. Murphy rolled his eyes a little but he didn’t say anything. He did have something on his mind.
“We’ll take my car,” Trotter said.
“Mine’s right outside,” Murphy protested.
“I am not letting a man who’s got to find a saloon at eleven o’clock in the morning drive anywhere. You might kill me, or you might kill you. And you’re too valuable to the Hudson Group.”
“Your concern for the Hudson Group is touching.”
“Thank you. Got any particular bar in mind?”
Murphy picked a place called John’s in downtown Kirkester. They knew him there. Murphy waved to the bartender, who was still taking chairs off tables, and told him they’d be sitting in a booth in the back when he was ready.
They only had to wait about half a minute. Murphy ordered a double Irish; Trotter had a club soda. The bartender gave him a suspicious look. “You want lime?” he said.
“No, thanks,” Trotter said. The bartender walked away, apparently mollified. He turned to Murphy. “What does he want from me at eleven o’clock in the morning?”
Murphy sipped his whiskey. “This is a serious drinking bar. I used to be here a lot.”
“Yeah. I didn’t w
ant to say anything, but your behavior this morning doesn’t make you seem like someone who’s cut way down.”
“This is different. This is therapeutic.”
“For what?”
“Stomach trouble. Lack of guts.”
Trotter considered digging for the meaning in that, if any, but decided against it. “Okay,” he said. “We’re here, you’ve got a drink, can you finally tell me what your problem is?”
Murphy took another sip. “Not yet. I have to work up to it. We can talk about other stuff, though.”
“Fine. How long do you think it will take for the mud to freeze up again?”
“Usually takes three days to a week. Here, let me start a topic with a little more body to it. Regina has decided that Worldwatch is going to urge the new President to press forward with Star Wars.”
“I know.”
“You wouldn’t have anything to do with that decision, would you?”
“Not a thing. I’m proud of her, though.”
“I’ll just bet you are.” He tossed off the rest of his drink and called for another one. “I advised her against it, you know.”
“I know,” Trotter said. “I wondered why.”
“It’s an unpopular issue. Discredited.”
“With the kind of bullshit press it’s gotten, I’m not surprised.”
“A little hard on your colleagues there, aren’t you, Trotter?”
“I wear glasses. Does that mean I have to approve everything a nearsighted person does? Besides, it’s immoral to oppose SDI.”
“Immoral? How do you get that?”
“I get it from the fact that SDI is designed to blow up Russian missiles. Everything else we’ve ever built—anything we will ever build with a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction—is designed to blow up Russian children.”
“It will cost trillions.”
“What’s civilization worth to you, Murphy?”
“That would be swell if it worked.”
“Uh-huh. I told Orville, and I told Wilbur, and now I’m telling you, that thing will never get off the ground.”
“So you think it will work?” The second drink had lasted a much shorter time than the first. Murphy got started on the third.
“I know it will work.”
“Oh, come off it. A bunch of technology that doesn’t even exist is going to keep us one hundred percent safe from atomic missiles. Right.”
Trotter smiled. “Let me ask you a question. If SDI is such a pipe dream, why are the Russians practically shitting their pants in an attempt to make us give it up? They’re not stupid, you know. Besides, they’re building one, too.”
“How the hell can you be so sure about that?”
Trotter smiled. He could be so sure because he’d seen the satellite photographs of the construction of Russian SDI command stations. It probably wasn’t a good idea to say so.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s leave it I am strongly of the opinion that they are. I’m not a hundred percent sure.
“And speaking of one hundred percent, it was the press who started this crap about ‘one hundred percent safe’ from Russian missiles. What bullshit. You might as well say that a welfare program is a failure if anyone in the United States feels hungry for ten minutes.”
“So you’re saying a nuclear missile here and there is okay.”
“I’m saying that all SDI has to do to be worthwhile is make it impossible for the Russians ever to think they can knock us out of action with a first strike. Period. If we can protect half our missile silos from a first strike, they’ll never attack. They’re not stupid. They want to control a planet, not a cinder.”
Murphy was looking skeptically at him. Trotter shook his head. “I know. I know. God forbid you should actually think about something for thirty seconds. Might unsettle your prejudices. Look, I’ll make it simple. There are four possible reasons to oppose SDI: It costs too much, which means making your society safer from Armageddon is not something you care about. You think it won’t work, in which case you think the Russians are a bunch of assholes, because they would practically give Minsk to get us to stop. You’re against it because the Russians want us to stop, though why an American gives a shit about what the Russians want is beyond me. Or you simply prefer the idea of wasting schoolkids, grown-ups, cats, Russian wolfhounds, millions of lives, to the idea of blowing up hardware.”
Trotter leaned back. “Now. You pick one of those and tell me how it’s a moral choice.”
Murphy poured the rest of his drink through a thin smile and said, “You’re good. It’s not your arguments, your arguments are simplistic bullshit—”
“That’s not going to refute them.”
“—it’s your face and your eyes. And of course, you’re brave. You took that fall off the catwalk saving Regina from something, though us poor working stiffs were never allowed to know exactly what. I can see why Regina is so taken with you.”
“Yeah,” Trotter said. “Her mother likes me, too.”
“I didn’t say I like you. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?”
“Do you think I had to jump off the wagon and get myself sloshed to get up the guts to talk to you about Star Wars, for God’s sake?”
“You mean we’re finally getting to the point?”
“Yeah. I’m drunk enough now not to give a shit.”
“Finally.”
“Yeah. Who the hell are you, Trotter?”
“You just used my name.”
“I mean, who are you really? You’re not who you say you are, I’ll tell you that. I mean, your name might be Allan Trotter, but you’re no reporter.”
“Did you get hold of my résumé and check me out?”
“You know I did, you slippery bastard. And it checks out, all the way down the line. That’s the scary part. For instance, it says you worked for the Baltimore Sun. I’ve got dozens of friends on the Baltimore Sun. You never worked for the goddam Baltimore Sun!”
“Maybe your friends have poor memories.”
“Yeah, good, make me laugh. I’ll like you better. And another thing. Nobody here has ever seen you write a rucking thing. Christ, listen to my rucking mouth. I must be drunk.”
“You are. I think you wanted to tie one on, so you made up some kind of paranoid fantasy about me for an excuse.”
“Don’t try to hand me that shit. I’m drunk now, but tomorrow morning I’ll be sober, and I still won’t trust you any farther than I could throw a rhino by the dick.”
“You don’t have to trust me. Your boss trusts me.”
“Yeah, that’s the bitch of it, isn’t it? Too bad she doesn’t remember Tony Prolone.”
Trotter kept his face straight. “Who’s he?”
“Feature writer. I used to work with him in Phoenix. Won the Pulitzer way back.”
“What about him?”
“You write—or the stuff that gets printed with your name on it, at least—that stuff is identical in style with his stuff. Absolutely fucking identical. Like you had his brain in a jar or something.”
“Maybe you ought to check with this Tony Prolone and see if he’s ghosting my stuff.”
“I would, but he’s dead.”
“Oh, too bad.”
“Yeah. He drank and gambled himself into a hole and wound up giving a gas pipe a blow job. Six years ago. I was at the funeral.”
Trotter knew all about it. He’d been at odds with the Agency then, but his father had filled him in. Tony Prolone had gotten in too deep and he screamed for help. That cry, like the cry of anyone at the end of his rope who could be of use to the Agency, reached the Congressman. He provided Prolone with a fake death, a new identity, and a decent living, in exchange for the journalist’s furnishing the Agency with whatever readable writing it needed. Trotter made a mental note to tell Rines to make sure that Prolone had remained discreet about his new identity.
“You’re not making a lot of sense, Murphy,” Trotte
r said.
“I’m making perfect sense. You’re the one who doesn’t add up. You, my friend, are running a goddam scam. I don’t know how or why, but you are.”
“I still don’t know what the point is.”
Murphy leaned forward and thumped the table with his fist. “This is the point, you son of a bitch. Regina Hudson is a sweet kid, and I’m sick of you messing her around.”
“We’re getting married,” Trotter said. He hadn’t planned to say it, but now that he saw the effect, he was glad he had. If he’d smacked Murphy, the man couldn’t have been more stunned. “I wanted you to be the first to know. We haven’t even told her mother yet.”
“You bastard,” Murphy breathed. “You bastard. That’s your scam. You’re not after a slice of the money, you want the whole Hudson Group.”
“Murphy,” Trotter said, “you’re kind of a jerk, but I like you. Let me tell you one thing. No man has ever been more wrong than you are right now.”
“I’m not done with you,” Murphy said. “You cocksucker. I’ll get the goods on you yet. It’s bad enough you’ve got Regina climbing all over you as it is, but to marry her—” Murphy ran out of words. He tightened his lips and sawed his head viciously side to side.
Trotter said quietly, “You’re in love with her yourself, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m in love with her, you fucking asshole! Since she was a little girl, I’ve loved her. I waited, I—oh, fuck you, Trotter. I know I’m just a pathetic old fart with a pipe dream. But you’re no good for her! The only way you can keep me from breaking it up, I swear to God, is to kill me right now. Are you going to?”
Trotter sighed. “Murphy—”
“Then get the fuck out of here! I’m going to drink until I pass out.”
“I don’t think so,” Trotter said. “You get going good, you may never crawl out of the bottle, and the Hudson Group needs you. I want it in perfect shape when I take it over.”
“You bastard,” Murphy said. His eyes were hot.
Trotter grabbed him under the arm and yanked. Murphy had thought he wasn’t going to budge, but to his own surprise, he rose.
Atropos Page 10
