By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “You haven’t yet said what it’s about, except that it involves the president.”

  “The president’s dead.”

  The woman with the clipboard returned and put the papers back.

  Jenks sighed again when she had left. “Let’s go find a place with beer,” he said.

  They went to one of the few bars in the neighborhood without ferns. It was a five-block walk, two of them uphill, but well worth it. There was a pool table in the back. Dresden remembered the saloon from their youth, though then it had had another name, and was not so clean.

  He racked for eight ball while Jenks fetched two large steins of dark German lager. As Charley related his story, they played pool. Jenks jumped way ahead at first, even sinking a difficult bank shot, but his play deteriorated as he became engrossed in what Charley had to say. Missing badly a straight-in shot to a corner pocket, he stood a moment, sipping his beer. Jenks always looked concerned about something, even when asleep. Now his expression was that of a man contemplating nuclear war.

  “You say Tracy wants me to believe this?” he said.

  “No. Tracy has no idea I’m here. I just said Tracy believes it. Completely. She made the tape that proves I’m right.”

  Jenks took a quick sip and then his turn, missing once again. He chalked his cue. Dresden had hesitated bringing up the episode with Paul Bremmer and the Santa Linda Press-Journal, for fear it might scare Jenks off. But Jenks was his friend. He was Bremmer’s friend too.

  “Paul Bremmer believes it,” Dresden said. “He put what I had to say in his column this morning. Unfortunately, an editor took it out. A question of taste. The beloved president.”

  “They killed it outright?”

  “It made seventeen hundred copies.”

  “They didn’t make it up here.”

  “I did. So did my tape.”

  Jenks put his cue back in the rack. “Let’s go look at it, in living color.”

  The right rear tire on Dresden’s MG blew just outside of Sunnyvale, sending him across three lanes of Bayshore Freeway and sideways up the shoulder. It must have been the twentieth time an automobile had come close to killing him in California. He was becoming used to the feeling. Though he had almost clipped a station wagon and been broadsided by a postal service truck, he was hardly rattled. But he soon became angry. The spinner hubcap was rusted tight and the spare in the boot was flat. After phoning for a tow truck, he made a quick call to his office.

  “Por que tarda tonto?” Isabel asked.

  “The frailties of the English automobile,” he said. “I have a blown tire and a flat spare. I won’t be back by the time you go home.”

  “Mr. Bolger from the amusement park called, twice. Mr. Novak from Channel Three called. Jim Ireland didn’t call, but a sergeant from the Santa Linda police department called and asked you to give back the tape so he wouldn’t have to go through the foolishness of making out a warrant.”

  “I had a copy made in San Francisco. I’ll give them that.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Aun no lo se. They looked at what I had, and said they’d think seriously about it, but they had to talk to the general manager. If he agrees, they may do something tonight. An editorial.”

  “So now you’ll go back to making commercials, okay? You’ve got to do this week’s ads for Freddy’s Pizzas, you know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh. Two men came to see you this afternoon, Charley.”

  “Clients, or bill collectors?”

  “Quien sabe? They wore suits. They sat quietly for about half an hour, then left.”

  “Did they say they’d be back, when they’d be back?”

  “No. Just that they wanted to talk to you. They were polite, but very serious. They didn’t even look at my legs.”

  Everyone looked at Isabel’s legs.

  “Probably bill collectors,” he said, “from the Purple Gang in Detroit.”

  “Purple Gang?”

  “Never mind. A joke. Don’t work too late, Isabelita. See you tomorrow.”

  It was well past nightfall when he drove into the Tiburcio canyon, a brand new Michelin tire he couldn’t really afford carrying the right rear of the MG over the bumpy surface of the road. He paused briefly at Cooper’s saloon for his mail, but no drink. He hurried home in hopes of finding Charlene, encountering instead only the makings of a meal in the refrigerator and a hasty note. She had gone down to Monterey to meet with a resort developer who wanted her to handle public relations for him.

  “He wants a Zack in his sack,” Dresden muttered. He nibbled at the dinner, cold chicken and potato salad in November, then poured himself a whiskey and went up to the darkness of his hillside lanai.

  The swing creaked as he sat on it. The lights of the cabins and houses below stretched along the creek like warm and friendly decorations, Japanese lanterns at some festive outdoor party. He supposed he felt happy, or at least excited. Bill Jenks had seemed sincere enough. It was a natural subject for an editorial. All Dresden needed was for his message to appear on television and then that would be that. It would be on the record. It could be on the late news that very night.

  He drank to pass the time, finishing another whiskey by the time the eleven o’clock news came on. The reception was abysmal, but he could determine that it was the Channel Six anchorman speaking, and comprehend what he was saying.

  The man went almost immediately to network feeds. There had been a White House news conference that day, Vice President Atherton flanked by the head of the FBI, the director of the Secret Service, and a number of aides. Atherton made a statement, and then the FBI director took questions.

  They had found the assailant’s hiding place—a cheap rented room in Philadelphia. They’d recovered from it material belonging to a Honduran guerrilla group called La Puño, “The Fist.” It was similar to material recovered from a La Puño cell in Chicago. FBI Director Steven Copley said that a portion of what appeared to be a La Puño flag was also found on a rooftop at Gettysburg, within rifle range of where the president had been shot. Tire tracks believed to have been made by the getaway car were discovered about a mile away. Secret Service Director Walter Kreski said he accepted the possibility that at least two or more others in addition to Huerta were involved in the assassination attempt. Copley said a nationwide search was underway for the others who had taken part in the shooting, but he believed the conspiracy had been crushed and no longer posed a danger to the U.S. government. Atherton added that he hoped the news media appreciated how open the administration was being with the conduct of this investigation.

  The questioning abruptly turned to the “slaughter” of Bonnie Greer and the others by the Secret Service. Demands were made as to why there wasn’t a full investigation of that, and why Kreski was still in his job. Atherton started to say there had been a full investigation, but was drowned out by shouts and angry questions. A network correspondent then appeared on the screen standing in front of a large wall map in the State Department press briefing room. He said he had learned from sources that La Puño was heavily financed by the Iranian and Libyan governments.

  After a commercial the station returned to local coverage. A state law enforcement official was interviewed vowing to hunt down every member of La Puño from the Oregon state line to the Mexican border. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously for a resolution condemning terrorism in any form. In an interview outside his San Francisco office, Senator Calendiari warned against trampling on the rights of innocent Hispanics in too zealous a search for La Puño conspirators.

  Then came two more commercials, a lurid story on a sex killing in Oakland, and the weather. It would be unseasonably warm.

  Dresden poured himself another drink. He thought of calling Tracy Bakersfield so that she might watch, but wasn’t sure how well she could receive the station in Villa Beach. She would find out about it soon enough.

  After an interminable sportscast dealing mostly with a 49ers�
� football game that had yet to be played, they came to Bill Jenks’s editorial segment. Dresden’s hopes rose with Jenks’s first words and died with those that immediately followed. It was an editorial that dealt with the assassination attempt but was addressed to the need for gun control. There was no reference to Charley or his all-important question. Channel Six and every other station in the Bay Area must have come out for gun control a dozen times already that year. No one had yet seen the president and no one cared.

  Dresden slammed off the television set and went to the drawer in the bedroom where he kept his handguns. He took out his .357 Magnum revolver. His impulse was to empty it into his television set, but he wasn’t quite that drunk. After a huge swallow of whiskey, he turned his television back on and switched to the channel carrying “ABC News Nightline.” Ted Koppel was interviewing State Department officials and the foreign minister of Nicaragua about La Puño. No one seemed to know much about it.

  Drinking steadily, Dresden propped the barrel of the pistol on his knee and kept it aimed at the television screen, even as the “Nightline” show went off the air and a late movie began. Pouring yet another drink, Dresden let the film’s voice drone on, listening instead to those inside his mind. The president was dead. The president was dead. The president was dead and the vice president was president and no one knew, not even the vice president.

  He looked at the handgun closely, even turning the barrel toward his own face. Incipient death, implicit death, frozen in a piece of metal. Aiming the weapon away, he resisted a tremendous urge to fire it. He had last shot a pistol inside this house more than a year before, at a drunken party, when he and Danny Hill had decided to see which of them was the better shot. The target chosen had been the corner where walls and ceiling met just to the right of the big picture window overlooking the cemetery. A miss by either one of them would have shattered the expensive glass. Hill’s shot, deafening in the enclosed room, struck wallboard about two inches off the exact center of the corner. Dresden’s had been a bull’s-eye. The next morning, he discovered that the exiting bullets had blown several shingles off the roof.

  Zack had been furious. She’d hidden all his guns while he was at work, and it had taken him several days to find them. He promised her he would never do it again—while she was in residence.

  Raising the pistol, he held the sight just beneath the joining point of walls and ceiling and squeezed the trigger, his ears ringing with the shattering noise and his mind’s eye seeing the pink globules floating away from the president’s chest. The president was dead.

  Stumbling slightly, Charley went to the corner and found he had scored another direct hit, this time producing a long crack in the wall, though not the glass. He poured himself another drink. When Zack returned home she found him sleeping on the floor, a spilled glass beside him and a gun in his hand.

  7

  Because of the terrorist attacks, the police had barred the public from the congressional subway line that connected the Senate office buildings with the Capitol basement, and Senator Andrew Rollins was able to get a seat easily. He doubtless would have been given a seat even if the small, open cars were crammed full with senators returning to their offices from a vote. As the president’s closest friend in the Congress, he enjoyed an unofficial power almost equal to the majority leader’s. This was even truer with Hampton up at Camp David, wounded and incommunicado. Rollins was now the Senate’s only real point of contact with the presidency.

  He had flown by helicopter to the Capitol directly from a pre-sunrise breakfast meeting with Bushy Ambrose and presidential political adviser C. D. Bragg. Rollins had at first been more than a little dubious about what they were about to do, but had come to be almost amused at the idea. Nothing that had happened in Hampton’s two years in the White House, including the assassination attempt, had caused as much consternation on the Hill as this move was likely to. Rollins chuckled out loud, startling the man next to him, a senator from Maine.

  “I would have expected you to be a little more somber, Andy, what with what happened to the president.”

  “Don’t worry, Bill. The president’s doing just fine.”

  “A few of us wouldn’t mind hearing from him.”

  “Give the man time. He’s in a bit of pain.”

  “Doc Potter’s statement didn’t say that.”

  “Doc Potter’s statement was accurate enough. The president’s going to make it. Or is that what has you guys worried?”

  The senator from Maine was a frequent opponent of administration policy.

  “For God’s sake, Andy. What a thing to say.”

  “I’m just joking, Bill. Today is a day for jokes.”

  He slapped the startled senator on the shoulder as the little train slid quietly to a stop at the basement entrance to the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Stepping out, Rollins strode briskly along the concrete platform to the escalator, which led to elevators that took him up to the building’s crowded main corridor.

  It was the usual governmental carnival, assassination attempt or no. Markup sessions were underway on the big appropriations and revenue bills that had been deferred until after the election, and seemingly every lobbyist in Washington was now prowling the sacred halls of government. These ranged from eight-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year tax lawyers in Brooks Brothers suits to farmers in overalls and “Cat” caps protesting further threats to dairy subsidies. Hurrying among them were staff aides both youthful and balding. And blond. The election had brought in a new load of college girls who doubtless wrote home about their brilliant new careers in Washington without mentioning that their unwritten job descriptions often called for sex with their esteemed public servant masters.

  In all his years in the Federal City, Rollins had never understood the paradox. In New York, Chicago, or even Nashville, such women were rewarded with expensive apartments and whatever luxuries they might fancy, and frequently marriage to their patrons. In Hollywood, they were given parts in movies and television shows and a chance at careers. In Washington, they got sixteen thousand dollars a year and the right to slave at humble office chores for twelve hours a day. Yet they kept coming and staying, living in constant dread of being fired.

  Rollins had once kept a secretary as a mistress, a former Miss Davison County out of Peabody University, a tall, tanned, dark-haired girl with long legs, a flat belly, and a face that was all eyes and smile. When then Senator Henry Hampton got himself elected president, however, Rollins had quickly put a stop to it, firing the young woman from his office but arranging a job for her on the Agriculture Committee. She raised no great fuss. It was how things were done.

  The senator moved along with the crowd, smiling here, nodding there, exchanging a pleasantry or touching a shoulder, but never once stopping. These days, five minutes with Andrew Rollins was worth a large bonus to a lobbyist. Rollins liked lobbyists to earn their money with as much difficulty as possible. The Founding Fathers had, with much deliberation, structured the American government as an unwieldy and inefficient system, thus to protect democracy. Lobbyists represented an effort by impatient citizenry and special interests to hire their own government. Rollins, a constitutional conservative, resented that. So did Henry Hampton.

  Security had been dramatically increased in the Senate office buildings, with Capitol police and other armed security guards stationed all along the corridors, impeding the flow. Rollins frowned at them, turning finally into the outer office of Senator Moses Goode, the very powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and, though a black, a solid supporter of the administration.

  “He has someone in his office right now, Senator Rollins,” said the receptionist, as she hastily reached for her phone, “but I’m sure the gentleman will be leaving very soon.”

  She spoke a few quick words into the receiver. In a minute, a somewhat startled lobbyist for one of the accountants’ associations emerged from Goode’s office. As Goode appeared in the doorway, Rollins strolled inside, taking a
seat on a leather couch. Goode, in shirtsleeves, eased into a chair opposite.

  “The president’s okay?” he said.

  “He’s fine. Just fine. Mose.” Rollins paused for effect, but not because he felt hesitant. “I’d appreciate it if you could get the word out that the president is backing Senator Dubarry for president pro tem.”

  Goode’s expression went from disbelief to shock to grimness. He was a leading candidate for that post, and had thought he had Hampton’s backing. The caucus vote was just three days away.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s true. The president’s backing Dubarry.”

  “Let me try again. Why is he doing such a stupid goddamn thing? Why do I suddenly feel something sharp inside my back? The president pro tem is third in line of presidential succession. No ‘gentleman of color’ has ever risen so high. I thought we had an understanding.”

  “The president is not forgetful of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to exert the full force of his office on behalf of any such ambition you might have in this regard—two years hence.”

  “But now he wants Meathead Dubarry?”

  “Yup.”

  “How can he get the votes? Meathead’ll be lucky to hold onto Armed Services.”

  “He will not hold onto Armed Services. That’s one way we’re going to get him votes for president pro tem.”

  “Who will get Armed Services?”

  “Carl Pfeiffer.”

  “He’s running for whip.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Goode stood up and went to his window, one of the few in the vast complex of congressional office buildings that actually had a view of the Capitol. He put his hands on his hips and spoke without looking at Rollins.

  “What has Jake Owens to say about all this?”

  “The majority leader, a man of acute perception and sound judgment, is going along with us. He’s been given incentive. North Dakota will soon have more dams than Howard Baker ever dreamed of for Tennessee. And they’re just appetizers. We’re even going to put Owens’s brother-in-law up for ambassador to Guinea-Bisseau.”