By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “What a way to die. Who’d want to die in a garbage bag?”

  “When you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s all the same. All the dead are garbage.”

  When Bushy Ambrose was awakened to be given the news he allowed himself thirty seconds of profane outrage, then got down to business—all military commander again.

  “Get Jerry Greene here at once, and that goddam Callister too,” he said to the army colonel who had burst in on him. “And I want the name and 201 file of everyone on duty inside the perimeter tonight, including yourself.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ambrose paced the room.

  “Don’t call in C. D. Bragg or Schlessler, not yet, anyway. I want them to finish what they’re doing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But get another team of DIA agents up to New Jersey. They’re beginning to get rough, and I don’t want the same thing happening to Senator Dubarry.”

  22

  No one had followed Charley and Maddy. They were not certain of that until across the mountainous span of the Bay Bridge and well along the four-lane Highway 50 that led into Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but when they turned off onto the smaller, two-lane Route 404 that cut across the peninsula into Delaware, no lights came after. Not for miles. When a tiny pair finally did prick the darkness behind them it was not for long. They fell behind and faded, then were gone, leaving Dresden and Maddy to speed their course across the moonlit flatness of winter-fallow farmland alone.

  Dresden had taken the wheel. He had put his arm around her and she had nestled her head against his shoulder and chest. He had long before turned off the radio. They were completely unto themselves.

  “How different,” he said, “and how much the same.”

  “Whatever are you talking about, Charley?”

  “I was thinking about a night when we were almost killed.”

  “When on earth was that?”

  “Years and years ago, a millennium ago. You were still in your last year of college. We went up to San Francisco for an evening that went on a bit too long.”

  “How long?”

  “At three A.M. we were still necking at Coit Tower. It was a warm night.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember that night. I remember Coit Tower. How did we almost get killed?”

  “Driving back to Santa Linda on the Bayshore Freeway. I couldn’t stay awake. We were in your father’s car. A big Fleetwood.”

  “That part I don’t remember.”

  “You shouldn’t. You slept the entire way back. I kept trying to wake you up, but you wouldn’t.”

  “You tried to get me to sing. ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’ and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’”

  “You sang two words and went to sleep again. I had to do the whole stretch myself. I lost control twice.”

  “Oh, dear. Did we make it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened when we got home?”

  “We had a big fight, and you left me standing on the walk outside your father’s house.”

  “What’s different? And what’s the same?”

  “What’s the same is that it’s the two of us all alone rolling along the highway in the dark again. What’s the same is that we’re in love again. What’s different is that everything is completely different. Everything’s for keeps now.”

  She snuggled closer. “Let’s not get killed. And when we get home let’s not have a fight.”

  “Home.”

  “It’s my house. George bought it for me. He almost never uses it. I consider it mine. Now it’s ours.”

  A winter’s owl, pursuing something in the fields, flew in a quick, darting swoop across the road, then vanished, a dark flicker in the moonlight.

  “For now,” Dresden said.

  “Home” was a large, contemporary wooden house just behind the dune from the sea, raised on pylons, surrounded by deck and walled mostly with windows. It was a little way down the shore from the town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, near a neighborhood of substantial, year-round homes with lawns and hedges, streetlights and sidewalks. A private road led to the Calendiari home, and beyond it to other shore houses just as large. To the landward side of the road was the still, black, glimmering surface of a large lake. If they had to run, there was only one route out, except for the beach, but Dresden had no care for running again. As they stood in the darkness in the main floor living room, looking out large sliding glass doors past the grassy top of the dune toward the sea, it occurred to Charley they could go no farther in any event. He had traveled from one ocean to the other, had crossed three thousand miles of America from a cabin in an obscure canyon in California to the Washington residence of the vice president of the United States, in reality, the president of the United States. There was nowhere else he need go.

  She turned on a bright light, and the ocean vanished. He looked about the room. It was simply but elegantly furnished, in California style.

  “When we’re in Washington I’m out here whenever I can get away, from May well into October. George comes out in late July and August, when the half of Washington that doesn’t go to Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons flees here to the shore. George does business down on the beach, standing in the water trading votes with sleazy, fat-bellied committee chairmen who have condominiums and bimbos down the coast in Ocean City. I pray for Labor Day then. After Labor Day, till the next August heat, this is mine. This is where I’m my own person.”

  He put his hand on her back. “A lonely person, out here.”

  “No more so than when I’m in Washington.” She put her arm around him. “And I’m not lonely now.”

  They turned and kissed, gently, looking into each other’s eyes for a long time afterward. Then she moved away, busying herself with preparing the place for their stay. There was a kitchen off the main room, beyond a long counter. Dresden noticed some liquor bottles.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “I suppose. A scotch. You’ve only had two drinks today. I took careful notice. Are you improving?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the word for it.”

  She set their bags by the stairs, straightened some chairs, then joined him, taking the cold glass he handed her. “We’ll worry about that some other time. Not tonight.”

  “Not tonight. Let’s go out on the deck.”

  The breeze greeted them at the opening of the door, coming at them obliquely from the south, a slight sting of sand in it. They went directly to the rail and leaned against it, standing close together, hip to hip. The moon was almost directly above them, brightening all the ocean before them except for the dark stretches at the horizon.

  No ripples curl, alas!

  Along that wilderness of glass—

  No swelling tell that winds may be

  Upon some far-off happier sea—

  No heavings hint that winds have been

  On seas less hideously serene.”

  She looked up at him, eyes widened, lips parted, half smiling. “What was that?”

  “My favorite poet. Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “I’d forgotten. I remember you reciting Robert W. Service to me, and A. A. Milne. And singing some Civil War folk songs.”

  “It’s from ‘The City in the Sea.’ Rather gloomy, I suppose. Among other things, it’s about Hell.”

  “No, Hell, please. We’ve had enough of that.”

  By a route obscure and lonely,

  Haunted by ill angels only,

  Where an Eidolon, named Night,

  On a black throne reigns upright,

  I have reached these lands but newly

  From an ultimate dim Thule—

  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime

  Out of Space—out of Time …”

  “I like that better.”

  Bottomless vales and boundless floods,

  And chasms, and caves and Titan woods,

  With forms that no man can discover

  For the tears that drip all ove
r;

  Mountains toppling evermore

  Into seas without a shore;

  Seas that relentlessly aspire,

  Surging into skies of fire …”

  He held her very close. “I’ve forgotten the rest.”

  “That’s enough. It’s a good place to stop.”

  “The poem’s title is ‘Dream Land.’”

  “Dreamland. Dreamy dreamland.”

  “Many kinds of dreams.”

  “Let’s go inside, Charley. The seas will be surging into skies of fire soon enough.”

  The sea was taken from them with the closing of the sliding glass door. She turned off the bright lamp and started toward the circular, wrought-iron staircase that led to the bedrooms, taking him by the hand, but he halted, holding her back.

  “I’m sorry, Maddy. There’s something I have to do.”

  “Something you have to do here?”

  “I want to call California. I need to keep trying.”

  She turned on another lamp, irritated slightly at the interruption of her mood. “The phone’s on the desk.”

  He nodded his thanks. It was not quite midnight on the West Coast. Tracy’s phone never answered. Bill Jenks’s phone rang many times. He was either in heavy sleep, or not home. Dresden was about to hang up when Jenks’s groggy voice at last came on the line.

  “Bill, it’s Charley. Are you alone?”

  “None of your business. Where are you, amigo?”

  “Far, far away.”

  “Good. The police have come to see me twice about you.”

  “I’m sure they have. Is everyone all right?”

  “‘Everyone all right’? That’s a hell of a question. Zack, Danny Hill …”

  “I didn’t kill them, Bill.”

  “Nobody thinks you did. None of your friends, anyway. But your taking off like that—it spooked a few people. Jim Ireland, I’m told, thinks you finally went off the deep end. He ordered special security guards at Channel Three.”

  “He would. Bill, no one else has been hurt—or killed? No one I knew, or worked with? Isabel? Anyone?”

  “Everyone’s fine. Even Jimmy Moon.”

  “I’m serious, Bill. Tracy. What about Tracy Bakersfield?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I hadn’t seen her for weeks before all this happened. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “I told her to leave town for a while. Maybe she took my advice. If she shows up, look out for her, will you? I’m afraid I got her mixed up in my trouble.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can. When will I hear from you again? Will we ever see you again?”

  “Oh, yes. Sometime. Who knows when, but sometime. You’re my best friend.”

  “Ain’t that the unfortunate truth.”

  “Goodbye, amigo.”

  “Adios, best friend.”

  Dresden hung up slowly. Madeleine was leaning against the stair rail, not impatient, but weary.

  “I was trying to reach Tracy Bakersfield. I told you about her. She didn’t answer. I’m worried.”

  They started up the stairs. “I guess you have reason to be, but there’s nothing you can do now, Charley. Not from here.”

  He rose early, washing and dressing quietly, leaving her to her sleep. Downstairs, the huge windows revealed a vast stretch of sea and shore, but no skies of fire for the sun to rise into. A straited overcast had drifted over the coast, the sun visible only as glimmers and flares amid the soft ribbons of cloud. Dresden found a plastic mug and poured some whiskey into it. Taking it out onto the deck, he lingered, alone and lonely, at the rail a moment, remembering with sweetness the night before. Then, beckoned by the shrill scree of gulls, he descended the wooden stairs to the sand. The wind had fallen, and the day seemed even warmer than the one previous. Only wavelets and the occasional shrug of a shallow, breaking swell disturbed the sea’s calm. Conscious of his city shoes, he took them off and rolled up his trousers, walking north along the curving lines of wetness drawn and fading on the hard-packed sand, the water cold but tolerable against his bare ankles and feet.

  In California the sea was a patient, if sometimes violent, sculptor, carving its rock faces and pinnacles and tunnels over the millennia from cliffs and mountains that were its equals. Here it was a thief, dragging back into its swirls and currents the endless tonnages of sand that were the work of its ceaseless labors, shifting and heaving the dunes and shoreline as pleased it, despite the feckless insistence of man on keeping everything where it was. Man’s habitations—cabin, cottage, grand house, and concrete building—stretched in a crowded line to the hazy apex of a horizon’s joining of land, sea, and sky. Each one doubtless gave its occupant the sense of permanence, of sameness, of the sea’s eternity. But it was delusion. To watch the sea was to observe the constancy of change, the brevity of life. Whatever one put here, the sea would take back again. This was no place to plant a tree, or dig a grave; no place to build a house. If unknowingly, Maddy had chosen a fitting sanctuary. No surrounding spoke so much of the temporary.

  Pausing as he passed the groins and sand-catching jetties to sip of the warm, scentful scotch, he moved on among the wheeling gulls and dark-windowed houses, passing only one other human being, an elderly man surf-casting in windproof clothing. He nodded a morning’s greeting, but kept his eyes on his line out to sea. A few sips later and the old man was a dark dot far behind, and the wide wooden boardwalk of the town of Rehoboth Beach was just ahead. At a set of steps rising from the deep, soft sand, he set his cup where it would not be disturbed, and ascended, stopping to put on socks and shoes at the top.

  The main street of the town, a broad resort boulevard of four lanes divided by a grassy esplanade and bordered by perpendicular parking places, was nearly as empty as the beach and boardwalk had been, with only a few cars parked here and there and no one visible on the sidewalks. It took some walking, but at length he found an open drugstore that sold Washington and Wilmington newspapers, and another with beach clothing among other general merchandise. There he bought some boating shoes, a pair of khaki slacks, and a red Windbreaker. He would once again look like he belonged, though he didn’t. This was George Calendiari’s place, a Washington place.

  The plastic mug of whiskey was still where he had left it, unmolested, the alcohol’s warmth gladdening him as he started back along the sands to the house. The wind had begun to rise and was blowing full in his face.

  She was still asleep on his return, and he slid the door closed quietly. Changing into his new clothes, he sat down at a long wooden table in a dining alcove that also possessed a sea view, spreading the newspapers in front of him. They took only about forty minutes to get through, and he had pushed them aside by the time he heard her come down the circular staircase.

  Maddy came up behind him and put her arms around him, lowering her head until her warm cheek was against his. She sniffed the mug.

  “Our morning coffee smells strangely of fermented grain,” she said.

  “Stirrup cup.”

  “You’ve been to town, I see. New duds.”

  “I thought a three-piece suit was a little conspicuous for the beach.”

  “Only when you go clamming. No one ever goes clamming in three-piece suits around here.” She kissed the top of his head and stood up. “I’ll make breakfast. I don’t know what we’ll have, but whatever it will be, it will come out of a can, at least until we can get to a grocery.”

  “There was nothing in the papers.”

  “Nothing?”

  “The Washington Post is full of stories about the Gettysburg investigation, just as it has been for weeks, but there’s nothing really new. Nothing at all concerning the vice president.”

  “We get the early edition out here. It probably went to press before we even saw Atherton.”

  “There’s a story that things are getting worse in Central America. Russian ships are in the Caribbean—freighters escorted by naval vessels.”
/>
  “What are we doing about it?”

  “Apparently nothing. We are ‘concerned.’”

  She brought plates of corned beef hash, with artichoke hearts on the side. “We must get to the grocery.”

  “This will do,” he said. “My friend Danny Hill used to eat meals like this all the time.”

  She sat down opposite him. She was wearing running shoes, white duck pants, and a white sweater. Her blond hair was carefully brushed, held back with one of her ubiquitous powder-blue hair ribbons. She still was not wearing any ring. He smiled, then looked back to the sea.

  “The waves are breaking twice,” he said. “A hundred feet out, and then again at the shoreline.”

  “Sandbar. They’re frequent along this stretch. You can probably see it at low tide.”

  She went to do the dishes. He followed to help her, and she kissed him for that.

  When they were done she put on a navy blue sailing jacket. “Did you enjoy your walk?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Good. Because we’re going to go on another one, a long one. It’s the major part of my day out here.”

  They headed south, into the wind, hand in hand. Glimpses of blue appeared from time to time in the clouds, but there was no sign of clearing. Farther to the south, the horizon was darkening.

  “I’ve been thinking about us,” he said. “About the future.”

  “Me too. Not happy thoughts.”

  “I’m down to about twenty-four hundred dollars of Charlene’s money. Whatever happens in Washington, I’m wanted for murder in California. You’re very much married to the very much Catholic George Calendiari.”

  “That’s not what’s troubling me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Money is the least of my worries. If Laurence Atherton is able to prove that the president’s dead, that he’s president now, he can order an FBI investigation into what happened to your friends in California—show that they were killed as part of this assassination cover-up. God knows, enough people have been killed because of it. As for George, an annulment is within the realm of possibility. Given the fact of our adultery and the lack of children, it’s quite possible. The alternative would be a messy California divorce. I’d automatically come in for a great deal of community property I’m not even interested in, and the public aspects of it all would be something neither the Calendiari family or George’s political mentors would appreciate.”