Benchley, Peter - Novel 06

by Q Clearance (v2. 0)

  Burnham's footsteps rang out in the still night. He wished he could creep up on the White House and peek over the shoulder of the guard at the West Gate to see if his name was flashing on an electronic hit list. But the concrete bulwarks and security fencing, the bright lights and electric gates and bulletproof-glass observation windows, made sneaky arrivals impossible. These nights, one approached the White House like a submissive dog—all smiles and waggy tails and floppy ears, and keep your hands out of your pockets.

  So he continued noisily down the block, clutching the Gucci bag in one hand and his White House pass in the other. He tried to imbue his step with a confident bounce. He didn't feel like slinking into federal prison.

  He turned in at the West Gate. Through the window he saw the guard leave his seat and turn to the door at the gatehouse and, his right hand resting on the butt of his pistol, take a half step outside.

  Burnham held his breath and forced a smile and raised his White House pass for the guard to see.

  The guard took the pass and compared its picture with the reality of Burnham.

  What would the words be? Burnham wondered. "Wait right here"? "Hands up"? "Gotcha!"?

  The guard squinted at Burnham and said, "You're either awful late for yesterday, or awful early for today." He returned Burnham's pass and motioned him through the gate.

  "Working hard to build a better tomorrow," Burnham said, and he stepped quickly out of the circle of light.

  There was another guard, at the desk inside the West Lobby, and he looked up when he heard the door open, and when he recognized Burnham his languid face snapped to attention.

  "Mr. Burnham!" he said.

  Oh-oh, Burnham thought. Goodbye. Visions of Danbury and Allenwood danced in his head. He said, "That's me."

  "Just the man I wanted to see."

  "Oh?" Burnham said weakly, thinking: This is some laid-back arrest.

  "I hope you don't mind, but—"

  "Don't worry about it."

  "You know a four-letter word for 'mine entrance'?"

  Burnham's mouth dropped open. He stared at the guard. "I . . . beg . . . your . . . pardon?"

  " 'Mine entrance.' Four letters." The guard tapped his pencil on the crossword-puzzle book open on the desk.

  Burnham felt little rivulets of sweat running down the insides of his thighs. "Adit," he said, and he spelled the word.

  " 'Adit.' Great. Hey, thanks a lot."

  Burnham's fingertips felt numb as he reached for the door that led to the interior corridors of the West Wing. His underarms were beginning to itch, he tasted a salty hint of blood in his saliva, and the outer limits of his peripheral vision were slowly closing in.

  He wasn't afraid—the symptoms of stress overload were old acquaintances—and, thinking about them now, he was surprised that they hadn't arrived sooner. Discovering that he was a spy, being chased by federal agents through the alleys of Georgetown, facing the prospect of a life of penal servitude— these were triggers that a month ago would have reduced him to a drooling, suppurating, dysfunctional corpse. It was testament to the effect of his relationship with Eva that he had gotten this far without collapsing.

  Maybe we are what we eat, he thought, but we're also what we love.

  As soon as he got to his office, he reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and found a box of Snickers bars. He ate one in three bites, and his system, deprived of sugar for eight or ten hours, now cried for more, so he ate another one. Then he lay on his couch and waited for the glucose mellowness to wash over him.

  Gradually, like water running out of a sink, the itching and the bleeding and the numbness drained from him, and when he opened his eyes his vision had returned to normal.

  He grabbed the Gucci bag and walked down the hall to Epstein's suite of offices. They were dark. Even Epstein had to sleep sometime. He entered the outer office, turned on a desk lamp, shut the door and looked around the room.

  A bin, Dyanna had said. Where would you keep a bin? The desks were clean of all but personal paraphernalia, the file cabinets closed and locked. He tugged on one of the drawers in one of the desks. Looked. The bin could be in a deep bottom drawer. How do you pick the lock in a desk? With a paper clip?

  There were two doors in the back of the room. One led to Epstein's inner office. The other was a locked closet.

  Screwed, Burnham thought. The best-laid plans . . .

  He was about to turn and go, to abandon himself to life as a fugitive, to sleepless nights and spastic colitis and cosmetic surgery, when he noticed that the hinges on the closet door faced out, not in. The door couldn't be opened, but it could be removed.

  He slipped off his belt and, with its brass buckle, forced the hinge pins up to where he could grip them with his fingers and pull them out. When the door was secured only by its own weight, Burnham tugged on one of the hinges, and the wood slab fell off its mount and thumped onto the carpet on its edge. Burnham supported the door and held his breath, praying that the guard in the lobby would be too intent on finding a five-letter word for an Indian potentate to pay heed to any single distant noise.

  He pushed the door against the wall and looked into the closet. It was full of office supplies: paper and paper clips, pencils, rubber bands, tape, glue, stationery, stencils, typewriter ribbons and a couple of folding umbrellas.

  On the floor of the closet was a plastic bin about the size of a liquor carton, half full of used audio cassettes and micro-cassettes. He knelt down and opened the Gucci bag and culled the bin for all the microcassettes. There were three or four dozen. Then, because room remained in the Gucci bag, he filled it with regular cassettes.

  Before he replaced the door—propping it on the toe of his shoe so he could fit the sections of hinge together—he removed a roll of Scotch tape from the closet.

  He opened the door to Epstein's inner office. He thought he remembered that Epstein's private bathroom was behind and to the right of the massive mahogany desk.

  When he was finished in the bathroom, he backed slowly out through the suite of offices, looking left and right, trying to focus on everything, wanting to have disturbed nothing.

  He leaned down to turn off the lamp on the last of the secretary's desks, and he noticed that the ashtray wasn't clean. It was empty, but not clean, which meant that this secretary had worked later than the cleaning staff and when she had finished for the night, she had dumped her cigarette butts but hadn't bothered to wipe the ashtray.

  On a whim, Burnham stepped behind the desk and examined the secretary's IBM Display writer. He saw that she had left discs in the toasterlike device beside the main machine. He turned the word processor on, and when the letters IBM flashed on the screen to show that it was ready for action, he removed the diskette, read its label, replaced it, armed the toaster, pushed "request," typed in the name of the diskette, commanded the machine to display its contents, and stood back as an army of green letters advanced on the screen.

  It was at the top of the list: "Burnham memo."

  Burnham told the machine he wanted to see the Burnham memo, and, obediently, the machine showed it to him.

  It was dated today, eight a.m. It would be printed and distributed in—Burnham looked at his watch—three and a half hours.

  It was addressed to the White House police, and it instructed all gate officers to, on sight of Timothy Y. Burnham, apprehend him, confiscate his pass, escort him to the West Basement and notify Mario Epstein's office immediately.

  Burnham told the IBM machine to erase the memo. He typed a new one, substituting Epstein's name for his own, instructing the police to notify the President as soon as Epstein was apprehended. Then he ordered ten copies of the memo and, as each came off the printer, signed it with a dramatic "W." He slid the copies into an interoffice envelope, slugged it "Rush" and, on his way back to his office, dropped it in a routing cart. The memo would greet every gate officer at the change of shift.

  Mischief, Burnham admitted to himself, puerile mischief
. But it would provide a suitable beginning for Mario Epstein's memorable day.

  He sat at his desk and typed out the Honduras notes for the President. He knew it was a reckless, probably dangerous gesture—he had already missed the hour mark with Hal, and he would likely miss the hour-and-a-half mark, too—but he felt an obligation to the President, to himself and (he was interested to discover that he actually believed this) to the country. He might crash and bum, but he would leave a little legacy.

  The notes were six pages long. He clipped them together, walked them into Evelyn Witt's office and placed them in the center of her desk.

  Back in his office, he removed from their frames his signed photos of the President and, along with a folder of memos in the President's handwriting, slipped them into the Gucci bag. Someday, perhaps, they would mitigate his infamy in the eyes of his children.

  He left a note for Dyanna, wishing her well and offering to provide exculpatory testimony, should anyone attempt to tar her with his brush, and apologizing for purloining her microcassette recorder, which he took from her desk and put in his jacket pocket.

  As he passed out through the West Gate, he stopped and listed with the guard a name—the name of a visitor to be cleared through to see Mario Epstein at ten o'clock that morning.

  A TAPEWORM. That had to be it. Ivy decided. No other way to explain an eighteen-year-old boy who never gets any more exercise than going tippety-tappety, tippety-tappety on a computer keyboard all day long eating a breakfast every day of almost a dozen fat, doughy pancakes and half a pound of bacon and a pint of whole milk, and he stays as skinny as a lizard.

  Ivy stood at the stove and flipped four more pancakes. Jerome sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, eating as fast as his mother cooked and watching a CBS Morning News interview with one of those people whose daughter had just had a kidney transplant from a baboon. The morning shows must keep a whole warehouse of such people available to be trotted out on slow news days.

  Jerome didn't care about kidney transplants or baboons. If there was no news about supercomputers or computer piracy or computer software, he wanted to watch about baseball: He didn't care about the game, but he loved the statistics. They were graspable, quantifiable, recordable. They represented order to Jerome. He kept a disc with the statistics of every member of every team in the American League East, and he updated it every day.

  So he switched channels on his brand-new Sony 12-inch color TV. Maybe Good Morning, America would have something about baseball. After all, David Hartman used to play ball.

  The words were out of David Hartman's mouth and vanishing in the ether before they imprinted on Ivy's mind. Something about spies, he said. Something about the White House.

  She went rigid. She stopped breathing and aimed her hearing at the TV set. But whatever it was had gone.

  "What'd he just say?"

  "Nothing," said Jerome.

  "Don't tell me 'nothing.' I heard him. About the White House."

  "Rumors. He said there's rumors about someone leaking documents from the White House, and maybe there's spies involved. They're working on the story. That's all."

  Ivy flipped the pancakes. How serious could this be? She flipped them again. What was she supposed to do? She flipped them a third time. What could she do? Flipping pancakes wasn't helping at all. She piled them on the spatula and dropped them on Jerome's plate. They weren't done, they'd taste like mucilage, but Jerome wouldn't care. Bulk, that's what he cared about, bulk and maple syrup.

  She went into her bedroom and shut the door. She tried to dial Mr. Pym's phone number, but her dialing finger shook so badly that she punched the wrong buttons and got that annoying, mocking intercept buzz from the phone. She grabbed her left index finger with her right fist and—as carefully as a policeman fingerprinting a suspect—pressed the seven numbers.

  The phone rang five times before a man's voice answered with a cheery, "Hello." It was a happy, singsong voice. It sounded like honey would sound, if honey had a sound.

  "Mr. Pym?"

  "Why, no. He's not here right now. May I ask who's calling?"

  "Mrs.''—don't be stupid. Ivy told herself—' 'just a friend.''

  "I see." The voice lost some of its treacle. "I'm looking for him myself. I'm a big customer of his, and I have a big order for him. When did you see him last?"

  "What're you doing in his house?"

  "Looking after it for him. I expected him back by now."

  "Maybe he's gone on holiday."

  "Maybe he has. If you'd just give me your—"

  Ivy hung up. Were the TV people on to Mr. Pym already? Was that fellow trying to keep her on the line till he could trace the call? If David Hartman had Mr. Pym, how long could it be before he'd come knocking at her door?

  No, thank you. She'd had her fill of TV people. After she spoke her mind about that Mengele fellow, she'd had calls from a bunch of kooks. Morning, noon and night, even a couple after midnight. Some had called her a Communist. Some had called her a barbarian. One guy had wanted to know exactly how you go about skinning somebody.

  She called her supervisor and said she was sick and asked how much sick leave she had accumulated.

  More than a month, her supervisor said, but why did she want to know? Was she that sick?

  "I'm afraid so," she said. "This could be the end."

  She returned to the kitchen and asked Jerome how much money he could get for her as soon as the bank opened.

  "Why?" Jerome asked.

  "Your Uncle Buggywhip's sick. I have to go to him."

  "In Bermuda?"

  Ivy nodded. "But if anybody asks, you don't know. I told 'em at work it was me that's sick. Say I'm at one of those fancy sanatoriums where they don't give out information about the patients."

  "How long you'll be?"

  '*A while, I expect." Ivy touched Jerome's head. "Don't you worry. You're a big boy. It's time you struck out on your own."

  ''I TOLD Hal," Eva said. "I had to, if we're going to ask him to help us."

  "Sure. Fine." Burnham shook himself awake and accepted a cup of coffee from Eva, who sat on the edge of the bed. "What time is it?"

  "Nine-thirty."

  "Will he do it?"

  "Ask him yourself." Smiling, Eva pointed across the room.

  Burnham rolled over and propped himself on one elbow.

  There was Hal, proud as a schoolboy on graduation day, standing like a model in the middle of the room. He was wearing new white espadrilles, pressed white ducks, a lavender Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, a foulard ascot and a blue blazer so well worn that its elbows shone. His skin was the color of meringue, against which his teeth stood out like drops of amber.

  "Reporting for duty," Hal said, and saluted. "How do I look?"

  "Perfect. Don't change a thing. You sure you want to do this?"

  "Timothy, my life is a monotone of dirty towels, forsaken sweatsocks and shower drains clogged with unmentionables. I've forgotten what a thrill feels like."

  "If something goes wrong, you could—"

  "So I'll move on, to another town and another Y, or maybe I'll get lucky and find a tennis club. At least let me have the memory of excitement."

  "It's yours. Got the tape?"

  Hal grinned and patted the side pocket of his jacket.

  "Let me brush my teeth, and I'll rehearse you." Burnham climbed out of bed and walked to the John. "By the way, you're cleared through as Mr. Prince."

  "Hal Prince." Hal savored the words. "Prince Hal. Dashing. I like it. Suppose he won't see me."

  "He'll see you," Burnham said. "I guarantee it."

  Hal departed at quarter to ten. At ten of, Burnham sat on the edge of the bed, with Eva beside him, and dialed the White House number and asked for Epstein's office.

  Burnham heard the secretary draw a short, sharp breath when he identified himself.

  He said immediately, "Don't put a trace on this call. I'm in a phone booth in Bethesda. I know all the tricks, and I'll hang up befor
e you can get to square one."

  "But—"

  "Just put me through. Now."

  "Yes, sir."

  Epstein came on the line, as amiable as a puff adder. "Well?" was all he said.

  "In about eight minutes, you're gonna have a visitor, Mario. See him."

  "Fuck you!" Epstein shouted. "Who do you think you are, giving me orders? Listen, you two-bit phony, you're as good as crucified. If you think I'm gonna—"

  Burnham let Epstein fulminate, venting his rage and frustration. He wished only that he could have seen Epstein's face as he arrived at work this morning and found himself locked in the basement, surrounded by armed guards.

  "Mario," Burnham said pleasantly when Epstein had run out of steam, "you're in over your head. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life as the special assistant to the assistant vice-president of the Allstate Insurance Company, you'll do what I tell you. Now get up and go into the bathroom."

  There was a pause while Epstein challenged his ears and composed a new outburst. "I'll see you bum in hell, you . . . you Communist."

  "You'll be sorry, Mario. Look how I've already spoiled your day, and it's not even ten o'clock. Don't you want to know what else I did at three o'clock in the morning? Sure you do. You don't want another nasty surprise. Forewarned is forearmed."

  When Epstein said nothing, Burnham repeated, "Now get up and go into the bathroom. Pick up the phone in there."

  Burnham heard the telephone receiver clunk against the wooden desk top, and the wheels of Epstein's chair roll across the plastic carpet shield, and the bathroom door open, and then the phone click off its hook on the bathroom wall.

  "Good," he said, trying to picture Epstein standing by the toilet, his face livid. "Now pick up the toilet seat."