By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Where’s Maddy?” he said to Hyde-Milne as he thrust himself out of the car. “These two bastards don’t seem to know.”

  The ambassador put his arm around him, as though shielding him from some danger, and they started up the stairs. “Don’t be so harsh on these chaps. They know only what they’ve been told. She’s in her room, packing, which you’ll have to do yourself, and soon. Thompson managed to get her out of the Capitol, but only just. It took some doing.”

  “I couldn’t follow the State of the Union address. The car radio wasn’t working right. There was static and some confusion, and then the speaker of the House came on, rambling about Nicaragua and Central America.”

  “That was the State of the Union address, dear boy. Rather than attempt to explain it all, I’ll put you in front of a television set. Llewellyn’s taped everything. I’ll also get you a drink. Then you have to pack. We must get you out of the country tonight. I don’t know where yet. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get you under the permanent protection of the British Crown. It’s likely you’re going to have to become His Majesty’s subjects, I think.”

  “I don’t understand. They have the vice president in custody. What more do they want?”

  “You’ll understand better once you’ve seen the tape. There’s Llewellyn now. He probably has it all set up for you.”

  The tape began with the usual wide shot of the House chambers. Except for the huge screen, everything looked perfectly normal, like a dozen State of the Union addresses before it, until one noticed that the vice president was missing. The speaker was standing and looking off in the direction in which Atherton had fled. The broadcast had apparently begun just after Maddy’s appearance at the railing.

  Finally, Tom Brokaw appeared on the screen, with the House floor projected in the background behind him. After describing the incident of the vice president’s panic in detail, including a reference to a mysterious “lady in blue,” he began talking with White House reporter Chris Wallace about that afternoon’s developments in the La Puño investigation, asking if Wallace thought all the events were related. Their conversation was scarcely underway when it was interrupted by a flurry of activity on the House floor that soon developed into confusion so noisy that the speaker was compelled to pound his gavel with great violence. The vice president was returning. He entered from the rear corridor behind the speaker’s rostrum, Senator Rollins and Walter Kreski to either side of him. They put him in his seat beside the speaker as they might a child and then walked away. He sat without looking after them, without moving at all. His eyes stared straight ahead. He seemed in a trance, almost mindless.

  A hesitant silence followed, enforced by stern looks from the speaker. Then chaos abruptly returned, with everyone rising and straining to see the House doorkeeper. The camera zoomed in on the man as he leaned over his microphone and announced: “Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States!”

  There was more silence, a general reaction of shock and stunned surprise, and then there was a great shouting and an explosion of applause and cheers as Henry Hampton, escorted by his chief of staff, Irving Ambrose; his wife, Daisy; Surgeon General Potter; and a number of senators, congressmen, and Secret Service agents, came slowly down the aisle in a wheelchair. He gave a few weak smiles and raised his right hand slightly once or twice in recognition of friends, but mostly the president looked ahead to the rostrum.

  Dresden was on his feet himself, standing close to the television screen and gulping his whiskey as he watched them lift the president into an elevated chair rigged behind the lectern. Hampton waited for the applause and cheering to abate. When it didn’t after several minutes he looked back, with some difficulty, at the speaker, who brought his gavel crashing down.

  After that, the mewing of a cat could have been heard in the great hall. So might the scratch of a pen, but Hampton’s was not audible as he began to write on a large, brightly lit pad of paper before him. Each word was magnified by lenses and projected hugely on the great screen above the rostrum. If oversized, it was a simple device, that magnifier, one used in high school and college classes every day.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the president wrote, with some difficulty. “Thank you for your warm welcome. I am very glad to be alive.”

  The quiet was interrupted by more thunderous applause, which he halted with a strained gesture of his hand. His left arm hung limply at his side.

  “I was badly wounded in the attack at Gettysburg,” his pen continued. “One bullet caused damage to my spine, and my legs and left arm are paralyzed. The other bullet has temporarily deprived me of my voice.”

  The pages of writing paper fell to the floor as he finished with them, Senator Rollins reaching to recover them.

  “I am sorry it was necessary to keep these facts from you until certain important negotiations were concluded,” the president wrote. “I am thankful to Vice President Atherton and so many others for keeping the government going in my absence.”

  There was a brief scattering of talking, but it trailed off. Most of his audience was rapt, intent on his next written word.

  “I have prepared a speech. I am going to ask the speaker of the House to read each page to you, so that all of my remarks will be perfectly understood.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the speaker began after the first page was handed to him. “The conflict in Central America is over.…”

  Dresden sank back in a chair, his mind swimming with the magnitude of his defeat. When the president had been wheeled into the House chamber, Charley had actually felt elation, the same spiritual lift doubtless shared by everyone there in the Congress and in homes throughout the country. The president lived. The United States of America continued, its institutions and foundations essentially intact and unaltered. Those who had attempted such wrenching, catastrophic damage to the American system had failed utterly and awesomely. They had rendered themselves broken, pitiful remnants of their grandiose ambitions, to be remembered by history only as fools and madmen, if at all.

  But Charley Dresden would have to be numbered among them. He had been propelled by as monumental an ego into as great a folly. He had been colossally sure of himself and he had been colossally wrong.

  He had believed what he and Tracy Bakersfield had seen on the television screen. He had woven of that electronic woof and warp an image of his own making—not a reflection of the stark reality comprehended by millions but of the truth as he had wished to see it. Charles August Dresden, a man so full of himself he would stand up to all the world to prove himself right, had been spectacularly in error. He had played Jesuit scholar to an incorrect premise. The pulsing globules of bright color that he and Tracy had made dance slowly across his videotape projection had indeed been blood, certifiable blood, but they had not been death. They were evidence only of Charley’s monstrous arrogance.

  How could he have been so wrong? He couldn’t blame Tracy. He had bullied her with his insistence, exploited her reflexive and longstanding indulgence of him. He had dominated their lonely little investigation as he had tried to dominate every aspect of their relationship, of all his relationships. Tracy had not wanted to doubt him.

  Because she had not doubted him, she had disappeared. She was now in hiding or held prisoner or dead, just as Charlene and Danny Hill and George Calendiari were dead. Just as he and Maddy were as good as dead, two lost and redundant beings with no place left to them on the planet, left to them in life. Because of him, the president’s desperate, dangerous gambit had almost been thwarted. He was no help to Hampton’s people now. He was a hindrance, a threat to the new deceit they had arranged in the name of the country’s security and stability. He knew all. He knew what the vice president had done. A word from him in the right place, to the right person in the news media—another clumsy, manic crusade for public attention—could undo everything the president’s men had done, could throw the country into a turmoil from which it might not this time recover.

 
He had brought all this on for no reason but his own vanity—a barroom crank who would not leave well enough alone, who would now pay the inexorably demanded price. They would have to remove every trace of themselves, for no trace of them was now desired—or to be permitted.

  The ambassador appeared at the door.

  “I’m not sure I want to go,” Charley said.

  “Mr. Dresden. The time has come for you to do what you’re told.”

  EPILOGUE

  The reward for submission, no matter how much it might represent defeat and failure, can be bountiful. That truth is the basis of many religions, and all governments.

  His work for the day done, Charley met Maddy for dinner at a favorite restaurant, a small, second-story place just up from Trimingham’s department store on Front Street, Hamilton’s principal thoroughfare. The menu was limited, but the pepper-pot soup was famous throughout Bermuda and the tables on the veranda overlooked the harbor and the ferry dock. It was May, and the daylight now lingered brightly into the evening. The afternoon showers had cleared the skies, and they were much the color of Maddy’s eyes. The waters of the Great Sound and Granaway Deep beyond were almost the same blue. It had been a cool day, but the wind had shifted to the south and the breeze was warm, bringing the hint and scent of the approaching summer.

  The waiters hovered attentively nearby, having little to do. Tourist travel had not quite recovered from the terrorism scares of the winter and customers were few. The restaurant staff would have lingered near Maddy in any case, as she had become a great favorite in Hamilton. Even Charley found himself treated as a personage.

  Maddy was dressed for the season, in a soft white dress with matching shoes and hair ribbon, an unbroken habit. In local fashion, Dresden wore shorts and knee socks with jacket and tie. Both he and Maddy were very tan, though they had been there just four months and the weather that spring had been somewhat rainy. Dresden was now managing director of the company that ran both of Bermuda’s small television stations, but he had not yet adjusted to the slow pace of island life. Often, he had entire afternoons free, which he spent in the sun with Maddy, or indulging his new-found passion for small boat sailing.

  He looked down at his bare knees and highly polished loafers. A year before, the hour would have found him in the Tiburcio Saloon and Grocery, rolling dice with men in plaid work shirts for drinks.

  “You’re lost in the past again,” she said, idly stirring her drink with a straw.

  “Yes. You’ve caught me.”

  “You promised not to do that.”

  “I try, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.”

  She paused, staring past his shoulder. “I won’t quarrel with you on that point,” she said, finally. “Guess who’s coming up the street, having just parked his Cadillac Cimmaron?”

  “Not King Charles.”

  “Definitely not King Charles. Though he tries.”

  “Perhaps he won’t see us.”

  “He sees us all right. The way he’s hurrying this way, I think he knew we were here.”

  “Well, Maddy, it had to happen sooner or later.”

  “The same can be said about death.”

  They had seen David Callister several times on Bermuda, the occasions including a large reception at Government House the week before, but had each time avoided an encounter. Now the man seemed bent on one. They had only themselves to blame. Hyde-Milne had offered them any place in what remained of the British Empire, though suggesting they decline the Falkland Islands. They had chosen Bermuda, despite knowing full well that Callister had a house there. As the ambassador had said, it didn’t really matter where they went, as long as it was British. Their safety, such as it was, lay in nationality, not geography. Through a discreet act of Parliament, both had become British subjects.

  Callister had seemed to respect that; there’d been no harassment. But now he was upon them.

  “Good evening,” he said, striding briskly onto the veranda. “Please pardon the intrusion, but I wonder if I might join you.”

  There were at least eight empty tables on the veranda. Dresden glanced at them. “It must be nice having your own network of informants,” he said, finally. “You don’t have to telephone around to find out where people are.”

  “Do be civil, Dresden,” said Callister, pulling up a chair. “I’m trying to be, and it isn’t easy for a man so traduced. I had to have plastic surgery done on my lip after you attacked me. Not to dwell prosily on the subject, but I think I owe you a punch in the nose.”

  “Not here, please. Someone might fall over the railing, and I’ve developed an aversion to corpses.”

  Maddy turned away.

  “So have I, Dresden,” said Callister. “Try to get along, will you? We’re going to have to, you know. I’m going to be American consul here.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  Maddy stood up. “I’m not really hungry, Charley. I’m going to go on home. Good night, Mr. Callister. Perhaps we shall meet again sometime.”

  He started to rise, but by the time he was on his feet, she was gone. Seating himself again, he looked solemnly at Charley.

  “I bring you news, Dresden. Important news.”

  “The president’s disappeared again.”

  Callister hesitated. “Not quite. We’ll discuss that in a moment. This concerns you, Mr. Dresden.”

  He’d been carrying a rolled-up newspaper. He unfurled it, straightened the creases, then passed it to Charley. It was a very recent issue of the Santa Linda Press-Journal.

  “Page three, upper right-hand corner. This just came in. Washington sent it on an afternoon plane.”

  Dresden opened the paper to the page indicated and was startled by the headline. He gazed at it for a long moment, then began to read. He read the story twice.

  “This clears up some misunderstandings we may have had about you,” Callister said. “I hope it clears up whatever misunderstandings you may have had about us. To further that end, I jotted a little something in the margin there.”

  Dresden turned the paper slightly sideways, and held it close. There was a name and telephone number. He recognized the area code. It was for Vancouver, British Columbia.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “She’s been perfectly safe, and so have you. We could have had you extradited, you know, on the murder charges. But it never entered our minds.”

  “I won’t ask what did enter your minds.”

  “You’re not going to be civil after all.”

  “Of course I am. One Westchester man to another. What other news do you bring? All I know is what I hear on my television, and I try to make them keep Washington news to a minimum.”

  “I’ll give you an exclusive, knowing I can trust your discretion. You asked if President Hampton had disappeared. He’s going to retire. He’s not going to seek election to another term.”

  “That will put an end to all the wheelchair jokes.”

  “Vice President Rollins is going to seek the presidential nomination.”

  “Who’s going to be his running mate? Laurence Atherton again? Or are you going to make him ambassador to the United Nations?”

  “Mr. Atherton is still in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. I’m afraid the commitment remains indefinite. He doesn’t recognize anyone anymore.”

  “Really? I must try to visit him sometime. Who’s it going to be then, Senator Dubarry?”

  “Mr. Rollins’s choice, presuming he gets the nomination, is his friend Senator Moses Goode.”

  “Serendipity.”

  “What’s depressing is that the public seems so indifferent. We took a rather comprehensive poll—nationwide sample, more than five thousand people interviewed. Andrew Rollins was by far the favored candidate, but he trailed ‘no opinion’ by almost twenty percentage points.”

  “The public is tired of having to learn new names.”

  “Stop it, Dresden. All that is over. Attorney General Kreski has declared the case closed. Everything’s been lai
d to rest with Steven Copley’s body.”

  “What about the others in the plot?”

  “Except for the vice president, they’re all believed to be dead.”

  “‘Known to be dead.’ I note some awful misfortunes have befallen some people on the vice president’s staff, and in the FBI. Car crashes, boating accidents, a couple of suicides.”

  “Fate is often just, Mr. Dresden. Learn to be satisfied with that.” He paused. “I thought you didn’t follow the Washington news.”

  “A joke. We also follow the international news. Shooting has broken out in Central America again, I see. It’s our lead story tonight.”

  “It’s under control. The Russians are staying out of it, and we’ve kept American troop involvement to a minimum.”

  “Admirable restraint.”

  “I trust we can count on the same from you.”

  “I’m a British subject, sir, running a couple of small-time television stations on a faraway island.”

  Neither said anything for a while. There was a great deal of bustling and noise down by the quay, where one of the cruise liners was preparing to get underway. Dresden watched it, or pretended to.

  “What will you do?” Callister asked. “Do you want to go back to California?”

  “At the moment, that’s not exactly for me to decide.”

  “British citizenship agrees with you.”

  “Quite.”

  “Mrs. Calendiari is now quite wealthy.”

  “‘There is no wealth but life,’” Charley said.

  The cruise liner was a beautiful ship, all white except for its raked, blue and red funnel. After the cruise season was over it would be sailing around the world, to so many places Dresden had not been, to other islands.

  “Callister, I’m not exactly one of your greatest admirers, but I’ve finally learned to take life as I find it.” He signaled to a waiter. “I’m going to make a long-distance telephone call now. In the meantime, let me buy you a drink.”