4
When he received word of Julian Hubbard’s resignation several hours before the story broke on television, Mallory was reading Macaulay’s essay on Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He had just come to the passage about a philosopher who remarks that life and death are the same to him. “ ‘Why then,’ said an objector, ‘do you not kill yourself?’ The philosopher answered, ‘Because it is just the same.’ “ On reading these words, Mallory, remembering the sight of Susan Grant’s skull being shattered by her assassin’s bullets, slapped the book shut with a shudder of revulsion. His loss, his loneliness, suddenly seemed unbearable. He tried to remember Grant’s face; he could not do so. He tried again, concentrating hard; he felt that he owed this to Susan. He failed again; Susan’s murderer had obliterated her.
Just before dawn, Mallory tried to call Zarah. There was no answer. He went out into the hall, intending to walk over to her house, but Wiggins and Lucy, who had just arrived at the front door, advised against this. They had confirmed Sturdi’s surveillance of Zarah Christopher at the same moment that Zarah herself recognized Sturdi in Rock Creek Park. The derelict in the sleeping bag had been Lucy; Wiggins, wearing running shoes and a Heidelberg (Pennsylvania) College sweat suit, was a pistol shot behind Sturdi when she loped by. Earlier, just as Hammett had feared, Wiggins had spotted her stretching and running in place and watching Zarah outside the National Gallery. Where Zarah went, this person appeared. Why? Only one answer to this question worked in terms of Wiggins and Lucy’s mission: because Zarah was close to Mallory, and the stranger wanted to do harm to Mallory. They did not summarize these findings to Mallory or mention their working hypothesis, because this would have meant worrying him needlessly over Zarah’s safety. Lucy merely said, “There’s an unexplained stranger in the neighborhood. We’ve had three or four sightings of the same person in various guises.”
Mallory looked up in interest. “ ‘Guises’?”
“As a runner, as a dog walker, as a bicyclist.”
“This neighborhood is full of people like that.”
“Yes, but we know them all except this one. Plus the computer doesn’t like this person’s body language.”
“What?”
Wiggins said, “We videotaped the subject and the computer analyzed movements against a profile of natural, spontaneous behavior. The un-naturals were abnormally high.”
“What does that mean in plain English?”
“The subject walks the dogs, runs, and goes for bicycle rides at odd hours. Is seen in too many places where you are. Behaves too naturally. This is a trained operative.”
Mallory said, “What do you want me to do?”
“We think you should go to Great Falls until this is cleared up. By helicopter. It’s waiting on the pad at National.”
Mallory paused, then nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”
For all his night wanderings Mallory never argued with security precautions. His incognito comings and goings were based on the principle that he controlled the element of surprise because the strangers he encountered did not expect to see him. If this situation was reversed, if someone he did not expect to see was lurking about with the idea of taking him unawares, then the risk became foolish.
“One thing,” he said. “I still want to talk to Zarah Christopher. Will you please have someone bring her to Great Falls?”
Lucy spoke up. “She isn’t home at the moment, Mr. President.”
Mallory looked puzzled. It was five o’clock in the morning. “She’s not? How do you know that?”
“She was sighted leaving her house forty minutes ago.”
“At this hour? Alone?”
Lucy said, “She’ll be all right, Mr. President. Wiggins and I stayed with her, then another team took over. She just seems to be walking. Thinking.”
Mallory frowned. Zarah was certainly capable of detecting surveillance, even of recognizing the people who were following her as members of his security staff. Then what? With a brisk nod, he dropped the subject.
On arrival at Great Falls, Mallory found O. N. Laster’s confidential aide, Hugo Fugger-Weisskopf, awaiting him in the foyer. Like many other citizens of countries that had been sealed off from the rest of the world by Communism for most of the twentieth century, Hugo had the manners and attitudes of an aristocracy long since vanished from the West. With Teutonic clicks of his leather heels, he bowed stiffly to Mallory and kissed Lucy’s right hand—surely a breach of intergender etiquette and probably of security, since her shooting hand was the one that he kissed. With another flourish he handed Mallory an envelope. It was ostentatiously brown and plain, and perfectly blank, yet subtly unlike any other envelope in the world. Mallory would have recognized it as coming from Laster if he had found it on the street. He went into the library and opened it in privacy.
The language of the report was just as economical as the format: no date, no greeting, no signature. It was a description of the meeting between Hammett and Julian Hubbard in the Corcoran Gallery of Art—not just the actual words spoken, but the atmospherics, the demeanor of the two men, Julian’s obvious agitation at the end, and his sudden resignation. Mallory did not doubt the accuracy of the report. Laster was never wrong about such matters. Through its dozens of subsidiaries, foundations, and international agencies, Universal Energy had many, many relationships of trust, mutual interest, and confidentiality inside the government and throughout the Washington Establishment.
Following the report of the meeting was a detailed history of the long relationship between Hammett and Julian. Though rigorously condensed, it was astonishingly complete, beginning at Yale and progressing through the next quarter of a century. None of it was speculation. Every fact was confirmed, every conversation documented. Every man and woman quoted in the text was a primary source of proven reliability with firsthand knowledge of the confidential information they supplied.
The second page was headed THE APPARATUS, and it listed in chart form the names of many men and women in Congress, both members and staffers, together with scores of others in key positions within the executive departments and regulatory agencies; dozens more in the loose confederation of pressure groups that called itself the Advocacy Constituency; in the legal and other learned professions; in the universities and the national educational bureaucracy; in the national headquarters of the churches; in the news media, and in other centers of political activism and opinion-making.
All of these people had one characteristic in common: they owed something valuable to Archimedes Hammett or Julian Hubbard, or in many cases to both. The precise nature of the debt—usually their admission to graduate school, their government jobs, the funding of their organizations, or all three—was noted in parentheses after each name.
Mallory put down the report, laid his head on the back of the easy chair in which he sat, and closed his eyes. What was he supposed to make of this information? Before a rational answer to this question could form in his mind, a phone rang on his direct, scrambled line, as if activated by a timer set to go off when he finished reading. Even before he picked it up, he knew that he would hear Laster’s voice on the line. No doubt Hugo had sent his chief a signal stating the exact time of delivery of the message, and Laster, working from a computerized estimate, had given Mallory the precise amount of time required to read the text.
Laster’s voice, broken down by the scrambling equipment into digitalized gibberish and then reconstituted as a slightly slurred version of the original, said, “Have you read it?”
“Just this moment finished,” Mallory said.
“Glad I didn’t interrupt. Have you talked to Lockwood?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you’ll have something new to tell him.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Laster made an astonished noise. “How can you possibly believe that, after what you’ve just read? Julian’s defected. Hammett’s mixed up with him in this. The left is going to stab Lockwood in the back.”
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Mallory replied, “To what purpose?”
“What purpose do you think? To steal the presidency again, and this time do it right, under color of law.”
“That’s one possibility. It’s also possible Julian is leaving to save his own skin or to try to save Lockwood’s.”
“Right, true Americans like Julian and Hammett deserve a presumption of innocence,” Laster said. “All that crowd has done in our lifetime is take over the federal budget, the universities, the schools, the do-good movement, the civil and foreign service, the news media, world literature, the movies, the theater, the ballet and the opera, plus the Democratic Party and organized religion minus the evangelicals. Why would they try for the big hit?”
Listening wearily to words he had often heard before, Mallory did not open his eyes. He said, “Oz, I appreciate your keeping me informed. I know your concerns. But all this is just speculation.”
“The enemy’s plan is self-evident, my friend.”
“That’s what my enemies have been saying about my operation, not to mention your own, for a long time.”
“They’re a bunch of paranoids, for God’s sake. What you’ve just read is a keen perception of reality. Of course the radicals will say black is white and up is down; that’s the way they do it. But something’s in the wind, Franklin. You’ve got to make a preemptive strike or lose it all.”
“I thought I’d done that. Lockwood is going to be impeached and removed from office.”
“Maybe. But what happens then? I’m telling you: If you don’t get busy, and damn quick, you’ll see things happen that you really won’t be able to believe.”
“Maybe.”
“ ‘Maybe’ is a word for losers.”
Mallory let a moment pass before replying. Finally he said, “Oz, forgive me for saying so, but the fact that this scenario seems plausible to you doesn’t mean that it won’t be laughed out of court by the media.”
“The radicals will try to do that. They always do. But the American people won’t be laughing.”
“Or listening. They’ll think it’s just politics as usual.”
“It is. Life-and-death politics.”
Wearily Mallory said, “Oz, forgive me again, but you’ve spent your life behind the scenes, giving orders to people who were eager to carry them out because they’re paid to do just that. You’ve never had to convince the electorate of anything.”
“The only one you have to convince is yourself.”
“And then what? Do I tell Lockwood that I’m the devil he knows and that the man he just appointed Chief Justice of the United States is the devil he doesn’t?”
“Exactly. And then tell him to get his ass out of the White House like an honest man while he still has the chance to save the country and his own soul.”
“I told him that the night before he took the oath of office. He didn’t listen to me then. Why should he listen now?”
“Because everything has changed.”
“In his eyes all that’s changed so far is that he’s gotten rid of a chief of staff who had outlived his usefulness.”
“A chief of staff who has already stabbed him in the back twice. You’ve got to move Lockwood out now,” Laster said, spacing his words for emphasis. “You’ve got the means. Just think of America and do it. Remember your Machiavelli: ‘When you strike at a prince, strike for the heart.’”
“A sound principle,” Mallory said. “But Washington is not sixteenth-century Florence.”
“Only because nobody’s got the guts to act like a Medici, in his own interests.”
Mallory said, “Oz, in everybody’s interests let me do this my way.”
“To what end?”
“To save what’s left of the people’s trust in the government. The presidency isn’t worth much without it, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
“ ‘The people.’ “ Laster’s sigh of heavy disappointment seemed even louder than it was in the metallic echo chamber of the scrambler phone. He said, “This conversation reminds me of what someone said to Marshal Pétain when he was selling another trainload of Jews to the Nazis to save the French people from additional suffering: ‘You think too much about the French and not enough about France.’ ”
“Goodbye, Oz.”
Mallory looked at the clock again: 6:57 A.M. He went to the window and looked out on the formal garden and the vineyards beyond, harshly floodlit as a precaution against assassins. Was Zarah home now, was she safe? His mind returned to Macaulay. Life and death were not the same. Marilyn was gone, Susan was gone, Zarah was leaving before he knew her. He had never felt so lonely in his life. Looking out on the shadowless no-man’s-land that surrounded his house, he fell back into a state that was part memory, part thought, part dream. But the impressions that formed in his brain were not about Laster, not about the Apparatus—if such a thing even existed—not about Lockwood or the knot of history in which he and all the others were the tightening strands, but about Zarah Christopher. About love, which was to him the difference between life and death.
5
On the morning after Julian’s resignation, Emily Hubbard awoke to see blurry images of her husband flickering on the four small muted television screens that stood in a rank along the far wall of their bedroom. Still only half awake, she saw him depicted in a montage of stock footage as a skinny youth whispering into Lockwood’s ear at a long-ago Senate committee hearing while Franklin Mallory, off to one side, browbeat a defiant witness; then as a somewhat less melancholy version of the man he was now, walking with Lockwood and some forgotten foreigner through a ruined and smoking city, which one she could not make out; and finally dripping with gore a split second after a suicidal terrorist from the Eye of Gaza blew up himself and some innocent bystanders with a bomb during a campaign rally in front of the Alamo.
Emily reached for her glasses. Between the bed and the television sets, Julian’s long-shanked hairy body bounced up and down, arms flailing, knees pumping energetically. He was running in place on a small collapsible trampoline while listening to the commentary over wireless earphones and switching from network to network with a hand-held remote control. Trapped in a sedentary way of life, Julian hungered for exertion. Here and in the office, where he kept dumbbells and a stationary bicycle, he exercised in solitude, as he did practically everything else, because his time belonged to Lockwood and no one else could be permitted to have a claim on it, even as a tennis partner. Usually his predawn exercises, a daily ritual, did not wake Emily; she had got used to his calisthentics in the same way she had got used to the early-morning traffic when she lived on Connecticut Avenue before her marriage. Looking at the television images—they were essentially the same shots, arranged in the same sequences, filling the same time slot, on all four networks—she thought that it must have been his thoughts or his emotions that had pulled her up out of slumber.
But why were they showing pictures of Julian on network television? He hadn’t been mentioned by the news media in weeks. She felt a stab of fear: if she had not seen him in the flesh bouncing on his trampoline, she would have assumed he had been murdered by the Eye of Gaza or some other pack of maniacs and this was his obituary. She knew nothing of Julian’s resignation. The night before, she had gone to the opera alone, an empty seat beside her; Julian had neither shown up at the Kennedy Center as they had arranged nor called. She had stuck the atonal opera out to the end, though it had turned out to be a depressing tale of a loveless marriage and a passionless adultery sung in Cantonese. When she came home quite early, just after eleven, she found her husband already asleep in their bed. Because he had slept so little since the presidential campaign—actually since that terrorist bomb had gone off in Texas—she had not had the heart to wake him up, despite her astonishment at finding him home from the White House and already asleep hours before he usually arrived.
On screen, talking heads grimaced and moved their lips but issued no sound. There was no point now in asking Julian to turn o
n the speakers; he could not hear her through his earphones. She got out of bed, hair tousled, and ran down the length of the long room to the control panel. She wore an old gray sweatshirt as a nightgown. Fixated on the screens, Julian did not notice. Out of the stereo speakers that surrounded them, Patrick Graham’s rich baritone intoned, “And so the amoeba of this remarkable identity of minds and purposes has split in two. What consequences this development will have for the evolution of the drama surrounding the presidency no one yet knows. Julian Hubbard, right-hand man extraordinary, has given up the only job he ever had or wanted, and the isolation of Bedford Forrest Lockwood intensifies. Hubbard’s letter of resignation, a single terse sentence after a lifetime of devoted service to a President he revered—and some would say invented—has the ring of mystery. The reasons why he left so abruptly and without explanation remain an enigma because Julian Hubbard, a chamberlain of the old. silent school, will not comment. But this is surely not the end of the story, for as another pragmatic idealist, Benjamin Disraeli, put it, ‘Finality is not the language of politics.’ ”
Emily said, “ ‘Amoeba’? ‘One terse sentence’? ‘Finality is not the language of politics’? What is this?”
She turned to Julian, waving her arms frantically to get his attention, but he made no sign that he saw her. He was hypnotized by the kaleidoscopic images of himself that seemed to be spilling out of the past and back into his life. That life, a peculiarly American one because nearly every significant moment of it had been reduced to an electronic image for public consumption, was passing before his eyes. Emily realized that he had not even noticed that she had moved into his field of vision. He was sprinting in place now, as he always did during the final segment of the news; the half hour he had been running was, he reckoned, a fair approximation of a ten-thousand-meter run, which had been his best distance in college, and he ran it like a real race, pacing himself against imaginary Harvards and Princetons over the first twenty-five minutes, then going all-out for the finish line, sweating and gasping for breath, for the last five. This room, which ran the length of the house and went up to the roof, was the only one large enough to contain him when he was in such violent motion; still, because he was six feet five inches tall, his head barely missed striking the slope of the ceiling as he bounced furiously up and down, lost in whatever sensation this strange exercise produced. Suddenly Emily slapped him hard on his bare thigh. He looked downward, puzzled and annoyed, and saw her at last, a small. sleepy-faced woman with wild hair and electrified eyes behind big horn-rimmed glasses.
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