By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  The marines were still in place at the White House but, on belated orders from Bushy Ambrose, Secret Service personnel were now on station with them and overall charge of the security for the Executive Mansion had been placed in the hands of Kreski and the man he had tentatively named to fill Berger’s post, Agent Hammond. As he drove through the main gates, Kreski felt as though he were passing through a border checkpoint, as though Camp David was the capital of one country and the White House that of another. The difference was that the leader now waiting for him in the White House was someone tangible he could talk to—must talk to, as commanded.

  Kreski had expected to find a number of people in the vice president’s office—the attorney general, the treasury secretary, the director of Central Intelligence, and other important officials and aides. Instead he found only Atherton and Steve Copley, who once again had arrived before him. Copley’s report, now grown in size, was on the vice president’s desk. Kreski placed his own next to it, then took a chair.

  Atherton pulled the stack of paper toward him without speaking, and then began to read. He appeared somewhat agitated. Kreski remembered how cool, calm, and gracious George Bush had been on the occasion of Ronald Reagan’s shooting. Atherton was no Bush. For all his studied manners, Atherton was not gracious. The Secret Service code word for him was “Suntan.” Kreski could remember when these code words were almost poetic. The one for President Eisenhower had been “Providence.” That for Jacqueline Kennedy was “Lace.”

  “Well, Walt,” said Atherton, finally. “This is very disturbing. When I read Steve’s report I came to one inescapable conclusion. Your report states it even more clearly. There was a second gun, a second assassin—or would-be assassin—and he got away clean without leaving any evidence. We have a great big loose end.”

  “Yes, Mr. Vice President.”

  “We’re not even sure that this Manuel Huerta’s shots even hit anybody.”

  “Just as I said, Mr. Vice President,” said Copley.

  “He might have hit the president,” Kreski said. “But Dr. Potter’s medical statement didn’t make that clear. We’ve no idea, really.”

  “So we have a definite conspiracy, a conspiracy of at least two. At the same time, it appears we’ve arrested a lot of people we shouldn’t have.”

  Copley looked down at the carpet. He’d been in the Maryland mountains and up at the crime scene for most of the day, but his shoes were perfectly clean and polished.

  “We had to move fast, sir,” he said. “This was an attempt on the life of the president of the United States. As Walt will tell you, there wasn’t much time for Miranda and the rules of evidence. And we did recover those firearms from the motorcade route in New York. There were those simultaneous bombings here in Washington. If we can tie Huerta to La Puño in Chicago, we may not have to let anyone go.”

  “Walt, what do you think?” Atherton leaned far back in his chair. His agitation had subsided. His question was uttered almost as though he had asked about a new campaign slogan. His dark eyes were studying Kreski with great intensity.

  “I have to defer to the ranking police authority,” Kreski said with a nod to Copley, “but going by standard operating procedure, there’s no grounds for much of a case yet. Border violations and illegal possession of firearms in New York; no reason at all to hold those people in Chicago, until someone can tell us more about La Puño. I don’t doubt there’s a conspiracy and a Hispanic one involving Central America, but we’ve got to prove it.”

  “I agree,” said Atherton, letting his chair drop forward. “But you have to understand my problem—indeed, the president’s problem, if we can ever get to talk to him about it. The war in Honduras already has a lot of people fired up, on both sides of the issue, now that we’ve got U.S. troops in combat. If the attack upon the president is related to the war, as it appears, there’s going to be tremendous public pressure to do something about it. It won’t do just to start letting people go.”

  “But if there’s no evidence of their being involved in the crime,” said Kreski, “or any crime …”

  “The American Civil Liberties Union is already moving in the case of the Chicago arrests,” Copley said. “Habeas corpus.”

  “The president has the constitutional right to suspend habeas corpus,” Atherton said.

  “Sir,” said Kreski. “That’s not been done since Lincoln and the Civil War.”

  “We don’t know what we have on our hands here, Walt,” Atherton said, rising. He walked over to his fireplace, which was crackling noisily. Like so many Californians, he did not bear well the damp cold of Washington winters. “In any event, I don’t have that power. I don’t know what power I do have. Steve said Ambrose indicated that would be decided soon.”

  “‘Shortly,’” Kreski said. “I suppose that depends on how quickly the president recovers.”

  “If he recovers,” Copley said.

  “Don’t talk that way,” said Atherton, nervous again. He began to pace back and forth in front of the fire. “I’ll have to continue as spokesman. No one up at Camp David seems interested in the job. The networks are howling, gentlemen. We’ve got to calm them down, calm the nation down. We need to give them some facts.”

  He settled into a chair next to the fireplace, hunched over with his chin on his fists.

  “Walt,” said Atherton. “I gather you’ve got the city pretty well secured.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve had to pull in agents from all over the country. I’m afraid I’ve given counterfeiters a big window of opportunity. The other police agencies were very helpful. The military wasn’t, but Ambrose finally got them off my back late this afternoon.… Sir. In my report. There’s a list of those I’ve added for Secret Service protection.”

  “I looked at it. Seems fine.”

  “I had requests from nearly every member of the Senate and about half the House. We have no responsibility for the Congress, but I—I didn’t want to leave security only to the Capitol Police. I did what I could.”

  “Don’t worry, Walt. No assassin is going to want to waste a bullet on the likes of Meathead Dubarry.” He stood up and resumed his pacing. “We’ve got to get more facts. More facts. Steve, I want your people to concentrate on this La Puño thing. Lean on the CIA for help. The old admiral’s acting like a stone wall. Walt, pursue the second gun. Work it hard. Your men on the scene are our best bet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, that’s all for now. Keep me informed the way you do Bushy Ambrose. Steve, can you spare me another five minutes? There’s another matter I want to talk to you about.”

  Kreski was glad to leave. He wanted fresh air and to put the White House out of sight and mind. He wanted sleep. He would embrace sleep as he would a woman, as he would his wife.

  Reaching his car, he found someone else in the driver’s seat, Agent Lockhart, a huge young man just three years out of Yale.

  “Glad I caught up with you, Director,” he said. “Mr. Hammond said you weren’t to be left alone.”

  Kreski sighed and got into the front seat. “All right. I’m too tired to be driving anyway.”

  “Where to?”

  “Home. Tell Hammond he’s in charge until he hears from me. I’m going up to Gettysburg, first thing in the morning. I want you at my house at six A.M.”

  “Are we going to drive, sir?”

  “Negative. I’ll want a chopper. I’m going to be in a hurry to get up there.”

  When they were certain Kreski had left the White House Atherton and Copley slipped from the vice president’s office and took a corridor that led to a side door opening onto the gallery adjoining the Rose Garden. Wearing nothing warmer than their suit coats, they stepped out into the windy cold. No one was naïve enough to believe there was such a thing as an unrecorded conversation anywhere inside the White House anymore.

  “Do you trust Kreski?” Atherton asked.

  “He’s about as reliable a man as you’ll find in Washington.”

/>   “But where are his loyalties? Now, after what’s happened.”

  Copley stuck his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders against a gust of wind. “I’m sure his loyalties are still to his job.”

  “I think Ambrose trusts Kreski,” Atherton said. “I think Kreski can get close to him; can find out what’s going on up there. But I don’t think he’ll do it. For us, I mean.”

  “I think he’ll do whatever he’s ordered.”

  “I want to penetrate Camp David, Steve. On our own. Do you have any agents working under military cover?”

  “Yes. I’ve a special task force team in California working with the DEA on some military drug smuggling. And some at Fort Bragg on a civil rights case.”

  “Fort Bragg? Eighty-second Airborne?”

  Copley nodded.

  “That’s a godsend, Steve. Work out some way to get a guy or two sent up to Camp David, the lower ranking the better. The only pass an enlisted man needs to go anywhere is a mop and a bucket.”

  “All the men on that detail are outfitted as privates.”

  “Good. We’ve got to get in there, Steve. We’ve got to find out just exactly what in hell has happened to the president of the United States. I could be president of the United States at this very moment, and not know it!”

  When Copley had gone Atherton returned to his office and summoned Press Secretary Neil Howard and Chief of Staff Richard Shawcross, who’d been told not to go home until Atherton released them.

  The day had been taken up by a seemingly endless succession of conversations, both public and private, in meetings, in interviews, in corridors, even in the bathroom. He’d met with his contingent of the cabinet, with all manner of security officials, with his staff, and with his allies from the House and Senate. He’d had a session with the head of the Business Roundtable, a discreet lobbying group consisting of many of the chief executive officers of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies, as well as with the ambassador from Honduras. He’d granted interviews to five television networks, including cable and satellite, both wire services, all three news magazines, and five newspapers. He’d had little time for food and was on the point of being willing to kill for sleep.

  There was one thing he had had no time for at all. He had failed to watch or listen to a single newscast. Howard was about to correct that failing.

  “I made a tape of all three evening news shows,” he said. “Do you want to start with the segments with your interviews in them?”

  “No,” said Atherton. “I was at the interviews. I want to see all the things that went on in other places. I want to see the entire newscasts.”

  “It’ll take an hour and a half.”

  “That’s all right. I want to see what the people of America have been seeing. Next time edit out the commercials.”

  As Howard went to the videotape machine, Atherton turned wearily to Shawcross, who was sweating again.

  “Dick. In the morning, issue a directive that, starting tomorrow, there will be a National Security Council meeting every morning and a cabinet meeting every afternoon, until further notice.”

  “What are you going to talk about?”

  “Plans for the Thanksgiving holidays, if need be. Maybe we can draw Ambrose out.”

  “All set,” said Howard. Atherton nodded, a button was pushed, and in a moment, NBC’s Tom Brokaw was on the screen.

  “Tonight,” he said, “the government of the United States is under siege. The president is in hiding in the Maryland mountains. The vice president is barricaded in a White House bristling with troops and weapons. The Capitol is a fortress and its members are escorted by armed guards. And in Central America, the war goes on. For more, we’ll start with Chris Wallace in Thurmont, Maryland …”

  “What you have to realize,” Howard said, “is that Brokaw’s piece is the most responsible and dispassionate of the lot.”

  Atherton put a hand over his eyes and slid down further in the cushions of the couch. He listened to every word the newscasters uttered, however.

  Paul Bremmer was a creature of habit to the same excessive degree that Charley Dresden was one of compulsion. They had been friends for fifteen years and at one time neighbors in a pool and balcony apartment building on the east side of Santa Linda. Bremmer’s apartment had been kept almost militarily neat while Charley’s grew ripe with the accumulated aftermath of endless parties. Paul had driven a pristinely kept Jaguar XK-E that he had taken in for tuning and servicing exactly every one thousand miles. Dresden had run through a collection of cars as varied as his women friends, keeping, finally, only the Armstrong-Siddeley that he often had to push out into the street to solicit a starting push from passing motorists. It had been Paul’s custom to retrieve his newspaper from his doorstep at exactly the same time every morning. He never knew what he might expect to find on Dresden’s doorstep—sometimes empty whiskey bottles, occasionally a piece of furniture, once, a sleeping woman.

  For all his fastidiousness, Paul was a newspaperman, and a very good one. He had been a reporter on the Santa Linda Press-Journal when he and Dresden had first met. By the time Dresden had been fired from Channel Three, Paul had risen to the rank of city editor. Now he was the Press-Journal’s lead columnist, appearing three times a week on the front page of the paper’s second section.

  As reporter and city editor, it had been Bremmer’s habit to pause for two beers after work in the bar of the Santa Linda Hotel next to the newspaper’s offices downtown. Now, though quitting time was more likely to be five in the afternoon instead of one A.M. and he had a wife and three children waiting for him in his big, rambling house in the mountains east of Santa Linda, Bremmer still stopped at the hotel bar for two beers. Dresden caught him just two inches from the bottom of the second.

  “Paul, I need to talk to you.”

  Bremmer motioned to the empty stool next to him, glanced at his beer, then his watch.

  “Have another,” Charley said, “on me.” He signaled to the bartender.

  “I’ve got to get home, Charley.”

  “Of course you do. And you will. But I’ve got a good story for you. About the president. Indulge me and have another.”

  Bremmer nodded to the bartender. Dresden ordered a bourbon and water for himself. When they’d been served he sipped and waited for Paul to show more interest, to bite.

  “All right, what’s the story?”

  “Simple enough. The president’s dead.”

  “He’s dead? It’s on the wires?”

  “No. I seem to be the only one aware of it. And Tracy Bakersfield.”

  “Charley, old buddy. The president is at Camp David and you’re here, three thousand miles away. How did you come by this information?”

  Dresden set the videotape cassette on the bartop. “It’s all in there.”

  “You have a new tape? It shows the president dead?”

  “It’s the same footage everyone’s been looking at for a day now, only no one’s really looked at it.”

  Bremmer shook his head. “I’ve really got to get home, Charley.”

  “Just take a look at it, Paul. It won’t take three minutes. Do you have access to a video recorder?”

  “There’s one in our conference room.” He finished his beer and stood up, shaking his head once more. “You make life too interesting, Charley,” he said, and picked up the tape.

  The conference room was just off the news room, and the night city editor and a rewrite man joined them, the former much younger and the latter much older than Dresden. They all stood in front of the screen as the tape began to roll.

  “There,” said Charley, as the succession of long freeze frames Tracy had prepared went by. No one said anything. All faces, including his friend Bremmer’s, were blank. Dresden rewound the tape a short distance, then played it again. “You see, no pink dots, the gun shot, and then pink dots, right in front of the president.”

  The city editor came close and peered at the screen. “I think you just have
a bad tape,” he said. He paused at the door, ignoring Charley. “Sorry, Paul.”

  The rewrite man shrugged and followed after. His eyes looked as though he saw pink dots most of the time.

  Bremmer dropped into a chair. “Run it one more time, Charley.”

  When the tape had completed its third performance Dresden shut off the machine. Bremmer continued to stare at the blank screen.

  “Charley, old buddy, you say Tracy Bakersfield put this together for you?” Bremmer had known her from the days Dresden had worked for Channel Three.

  “Yes.”

  “And she believes you?”

  “She believes what’s on the tape.”

  There was another pause. Bremmer used to smoke and looked like he wanted to again. “Okay. I can do this much for you, Charley. I can get a short item in my column for tomorrow. There’s still an hour and a half before they lock up the first edition. I wanted to write something about the shooting. I guess you’ve given me a local angle.” He grinned the way he always did when he said something witty, but his uneasy expression quickly returned.

  “Muchas gracias, amigo,” Dresden said.

  Bremmer waved his hand. “Don’t thank me yet. I’ve gotten you out of a lot trouble over the years. Now I’m probably going to get you into some.”

  6

  Bushy Ambrose emerged from his lodge, followed by several men in both uniforms and suits. His stride was brisk, reflexively if reluctantly matched by the others, rendering their walk a military procession. They headed down the slope in the first hour of sunlight of a very cold morning, their destination the helipad where Marine One, the president’s helicopter, and an escort chopper waited, their crews already aboard.

  Ambrose’s breath came in quick, short puffs of vapor, not from strain but from purpose. He was not only in command but was actively commanding. They had agreed upon a plan, had drawn up a set of actions requisite to implementation of the plan, and were now commencing to carry them out. The troops were moving. The battle was joined.