(1976) The R Document

by Irving Wallace

  All of this had been on Chris Collins’ mind as he had tried to read meaning into his address.

  He had reached the last page of his speech. He tried to devote himself to it, to infuse it with feeling.

  ‘And so, friends, we have arrived at the crossroads,’ Collins continued. ‘We are on the threshold of dramatically changing the Constitution of the land in our pursuit of law and order. But to maintain a peaceful society of human beings, more, much more, is needed. I have outlined some of these needs here today. Allow me to summarize them in the words of a former Attorney General of the United States.’

  Collins paused, scanned the rows and rows of faces before him, and then undertook to quote the words of this former Attorney General.

  ‘He reminded us firmly to remember the following: “If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what must be seen is the dehumanizing effect on the individual of slums, racism, ignorance, and violence, of corruption and impotence to fulfill rights, of poverty and unemployment and idleness, of generations of malnutrition, of congenital brain damage and prenatal neglect, of sickness and disease, of pollution, of decrepit, dirty, ugly, unsafe, overcrowded housing, of alcoholism and narcotics addiction, of avarice, anxiety, fear, hatred, hopelessness and injustice. There are the fountain-heads of crime. They can be controlled.” We must act now. Thank you for your kind attention.’

  He had not told them the name of the former Attorney General he had quoted. He had not told them the words had originated with Ramsey Clark.

  The applause was light, and his agony was over.

  He returned to his seat, relieved, shook a few limp hands, and prepared to wait out the last speakers and final business of the formal convention.

  Half an hour later, he was free. He left the Guildhall ballroom and was joined by Hogan, his bodyguard, who saw him up in the elevator to his corner suite, 1700-01 on the seventeenth floor. At the door, he told Hogan that he would be in his suite the rest of the afternoon. He suggested this was a good time for Hogan to go down to The Greenery, the hotel’s cafe, and grab a bite to eat. The bodyguard was quick to assent.

  Once inside his suite, Collins waited a brief interval, then opened his door and glanced into the corridor. It was empty. Hastily, he slipped out of his rooms, found the stairs.

  descended to the fifteenth floor, and located the unoccupied single room with the number 1531 on its door. Making certain he had not been followed, he entered it, leaving the door ajar.

  He took inventory of the room. A double bed. An armchair. Two straight chairs. A dresser. A television set. Unprepossessing for a member of the President’s Cabinet, but it would do the job.

  He was tempted to telephone Karen in Washington, if only to reassure her again. He considered the wisdom of using the telephone, but before he could decide, he heard a short knock on the door. He spun about prepared to greet Tony Pierce alone, but to his surprise not only Pierce entered the room but two other men as well.

  Collins had not seen Pierce since they had been adversaries on the television show Search for Truth. He cringed inside at the remembrance of his role and performance on that show, and he wondered what Pierce must be thinking of him at this moment.

  On the surface, Pierce seemed to display no resentment and no reluctance about their second meeting. The freckled, frank face beneath the head of sandy hair was as good-natured and enthusiastic as ever. ‘We meet again,’ he said, shaking hands with Collins. ‘I’m glad you could come,’ said Collins. ‘I wasn’t sure you would.’

  ‘I welcomed the chance,’ said Pierce. ‘I also wanted you to meet two of my colleagues. This is Mr Van Allen. And this is Mr Ingstrup. We were all together in the FBI, and we resigned within a year of one another.’

  Collins shook hands with each of them. Van Allen was a blond with a prominent jaw and restless eyes. Ingstrup had a shock of chestnut hair and a weatherbeaten visage that sported an untidy brown moustache.

  ‘Do sit down,’ Collins said. As the others took their places on the bed and the two chairs, Collins remained on his feet. ‘You must wonder why I asked you to meet with me here,’ Collins said to Pierce. ‘You must wonder what we have in common to talk about. In your eyes, I’m FBI Director Tynan’s superior, and a Cabinet member in President

  Wadsworth’s Administration, a cabal that is advocating passage of the 35th. In my eyes, you are the hard-core opposition to the 35th. Don’t you find it surprising that I wanted to see you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Pierce, fishing for his pipe and finding it. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on you, even up to early yesterday afternoon when you were planning to go to California to testify against the 35th Amendment. We know where you’re at today.’

  Collins was genuinely startled. ‘How could you possibly know that?’

  ‘Since we can trust you now, we can tell you,’ said Pierce cheerfully, enjoying this. As he tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, he went on. ‘After the three of us left the FBI, we went our own ways. I formed a law firm. Van Allen here has a private detective agency. Ingstrup is a writer, with two exposes of the FBI under his belt. We all shared a single belief. That Vernon T. Tynan, for whom we’d worked so long a time, was a dangerous man, dangerous for the country. We saw him becoming more threatening every year. We found other former FBI agents around the United States who felt precisely as we felt. All of us still possessed the discipline, know-how, skills we had learned and practiced in the FBI. We asked ourselves, Why not put all this knowledge into practice? Why not work to protect each other, to save the FBI from that megalomaniac, and to defend democracy itself? So, at my suggestion, we set up a loosely knit, unpublicized organization of ex-FBI agents who would be fact finders and investigators - to counter Big Brother, who was watching our every move. We don’t have an official name, but we like to call ourselves the IFBI - the Investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have sympathetic informers everywhere. We have six in your Department of Justice, including two in Tynan’s J. Edgar Hoover Building. We gradually learned of your defection to our side. Yesterday we learned you were planning to fly to Sacramento. From our previous dossier on you, we deduced that you were making the trip to break from the President and Tynan and to denounce the 35th publicly.’

  ‘That’s correct ‘ admitted Collins.

  ‘Yet you are not in Sacramento this minute,’ said Pierce. ‘You are here in Chicago. In fact, I was surprised when I found the message from you last night. I worried that your change of travel plans might mean your political plans had changed again also. But then I decided that this could not be, or you would not have wanted to see me.’

  ‘Once more, correct,’ said Collins. ‘My politics remain the same. I’m wholeheartedly against the 35th. I wanted to go to Sacramento to fight it. At the last minute, something came up -‘

  ‘Tynan came up,’ said Pierce simply.

  Collins wrinkled his forehead. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Pierce, ‘but I was sure.’

  Van Allen spoke for the first time. ‘Tynan is everywhere. Never underestimate him. He’s all-knowing and he’s vindictive. He picked up where J. Edgar Hoover left off. Remember Hoover’s OC - Official and Confidential - files? Hoover had his gumshoes getting information on Dr Martin Luther King’s sex life. He had personal information on Muhammad Ali, Jane Fonda, Dr Benjamin Spock, and at least seventeen high Government officials, Congressmen, newspapermen. Well, that was amateursville compared with what Vernon T. Tynan has done. He has tripled Hoover’s OC files. He has used them consistently for blackmail. For the good of the country, he would tell you -‘

  ‘Patriotism,’ interrupted Ingstrup, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel, to quote Dr Samuel Johnson.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Van Allen went on. ‘When Tynan assigned me to investigate the personal lives of the Senate and House majority leaders - that was some time before the 35th was presented to Congress - I guess he wanted to be sure it passed - I went to him and objected. I told him I�
�d prefer another assignment. “I’ll be happy to arrange that, Van Allen,” he said to me. The next thing I knew, I had been reassigned - away from the Washington office. I was notified of my transfer to the FBI field office in Butte, Montana. That’s Tynan’s Siberia. I got the message. I resigned.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Pierce.

  ‘Ingstrup was the main speaker at his daughter’s high school graduation. He spoke of the role of the FBI in our democracy, and made the mildest suggestions for a reform or two in the Bureau. It got back to Tynan overnight. Immediately, Ingstrup was demoted, his job downgraded, and he resigned. Still Tynan was not satisfied. When Ingstrup tried to get another job in law enforcement, Tynan’s long arm followed him. Tynan informed one and all that Ingstrup had a dishonorable record with the FBI. When Ingstrup turned to free-lance writing, his first book was a critical assessment of the FBI’s operation. Tynan set out to block the publication of the manuscript. He was successful enough so that Ingstrup had to settle for a vanity publisher. Fortunately, the book became a big seller.’

  ‘And what about you?’ Collins inquired.

  ‘Me?’ said Pierce. I protected Ingstrup’s demotion. I defended him. Tynan’s only response was a curt memo notifying me of my transfer to Cincinnati, Tynan’s second Siberia. I knew the FBI held no future for me after that. So I quit. No, Chris - if I may call you Chris - nobody tangles with Tynan and wins.’

  ‘You’re tangling with Tynan now over the 35th.’

  ‘And I don’t expect to win,’ said Pierce. ‘But I’ll give it the old college try. Anyway, when you said you had planned to oppose Tynan but something had come up to change your plans, I knew the something was someone named Tynan. I assume you’re not going to come out in the open on our side.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Collins helplessly. He studied the three in the room with him, these veterans of Tynan, these men who had gone out on a limb to oppose the Director of the FBI and his mammoth apparatus, and he suddenly felt close to them. They had gained his confidence completely. He decided to tell them how Tynan had, at the last minute, rendered him impotent. ‘All right, I guess there’s nothing to hide. I’ll tell you why I can’t side with you in public’

  Pierce offered him a half smile. ‘You can trust us, Chris.’

  Collins pondered how much to tell them, even where to begin. ‘I went to see President Wadsworth yesterday. I told

  him that I had information that Tynan had been resposible

  for the murder of Chief Justice Maynard - ’

  ‘Wow!’ Pierce exclaimed. ‘We hadn’t heard that. Do you know it to be a fact?’

  ‘I believe it to be a fact. I have it from a person who was involved. But I can’t prove it. I couldn’t prove that, or a number of other things, to the President. Nevertheless, I laid out a good case against Tynan. I demanded that the President fire Tynan. He refused. I told him that I had no choice, then, but to resign and go to California and take a public stand against the 35th Amendment. I was prepared to do so, as you have learned.’

  ‘But then you ran into Tynan,’ said Pierce.

  ‘Exactly. The next thing I knew, there he was in my office in person.’

  ‘To blackmail you into silence,’ said Ingstrup.

  ‘Yes, he was ready to blackmail me,’ said Collins.

  Pierce was refilling and lighting his pipe. ‘Tell us what happened.’

  Haltingly, Collins complied. He related every detail of the evidence Tynan had collected against his wife, and of the new eyewitness being held in the wings.

  ‘There was nothing subtle about it,’ Collins concluded. ‘He offered me the terms of surrender. I could not resign. I could not go to California. I could not voice my opposition to the 35th. If I accepted these terms, Karen was safe. Her case in Fort Worth would not be reopened. If I defied him, went ahead, then Karen would have to stand trial again. I had no place to go. I surrendered on his terms.’

  ‘But she told you she was innocent,’ said Van Allen.

  ‘Of course she did. She is innocent. I believe her. Still, I couldn’t let her be put on the rack again. I had to give in.’ He threw up his hands. ‘And here I am - Samson with a crew cut’

  He saw Pierce glance at Val Allen, who gave an almost

  imperceptible nod, then saw Pierce look at Ingstrup, who

  also nodded. Pierce’s gaze rested on Collins once more.

  ‘Maybe we can help you, Chris,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘By getting into this ourselves with the

  rancher, Jim Shack. He was an FBI agent for ten years, but he became fed up after Tynan became Director. We have two others down there, still members of the FBI, who hate Tynan. They might be able to do a lot for you - maybe even give Samson a hairpiece.’

  ‘I don’t know what they could do.’

  ‘For one thing, they might check out your wife’s old case, find out what it was really all about. Then, they might poke around, try to find out if Tynan actually has a new witness, as he claims - or if he’s fairing, rigging a blackmail scheme on evidence that doesn’t exist’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘You’d better. It’s barely possible.’

  Collins frowned. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like to take the risk. If Tynan found out -‘

  ‘Jim Shack and the other men are very discreet. They’re better than the best Tynan has today.’

  Collins was still worried. ‘Let me think about it.’

  ‘There isn’t much time,’ Pierce reminded him. “The California Assembly votes today -‘

  ‘Hey!’ exclaimed Van Allen, jumping out of his chair. ‘It’s on television. We almost forgot.’

  He hastened to the television set on the dresser.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pierce. ‘Let’s see if all our lobbying with the Assemblymen did any good. If they should vote against it, it’s all over for Tynan, and our work is done. But if they pass it-‘

  ‘What are the odds?’ asked Collins, finding a seat in the armchair.

  ‘At last count, the Assembly was leaning toward passage. It’s the State Senate that’s a flip of the coin. Yet you never can tell. Let’s see.’

  The television set was on. All four in the room gave it their undivided attention.

  The camera was focused on the gold-lettered motto over the framed portrait of Abraham Lincoln above the elevated speaker’s rostrum. The motto read, Legislatorum Est Justas Leges Condere.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Van Allen asked.

  ‘It means, “It is the duty of legislators to make just laws”,’ explained Collins.

  ‘Ha,’ said Pierce.

  The camera was slowly pulling back to show the desks below the speaker’s rostrum where bills and resolutions were processed. Now the camera revealed the eighty Assemblymen at their individual desks in the chamber and the standing microphones in the five aisles.

  The third and last reading of the resolution, the 35th Amendment, was taking place.

  ‘Section 1. Number 1. No right or liberty guaranteed by the Constitution shall be construed as license to endanger the national security. Number 2. In the event of clear and present danger, a Committee on National Safety, appointed by the President, shall meet in joint session with the National Security Council. Number 3. Upon determination that national security is at issue, the Committee on National Safety shall declare a state of emergency and assume plenipotentiary powers, supplanting Constitutional authority until the established danger has been brought under control and/or eliminated. Number 4. The chairman of the Committee shall be the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

  ‘Tynan, the Tynan clause,’ Pierce said to no one in particular.

  The reading on the television set continued.

  ‘Number 5. The proclamation shall exist only during such time as the emergency is declared to be in effect, and shall be automatically terminated by formal declaration upon the emergency’s resolution. Section 2. Number 1. During the suspensory period,
the remainder of all rights and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution shall be held inviolable. Number 2. All Committee action shall be taken by unanimous vote.’

  The hushed voice of the network newsman came on.

  “The critical vote is about to begin. Each Assemblyman votes by moving a toggle switch at his desk. If he votes “Yes”, a green bulb lights up alongside his name on the scoreboard in the front of the chamber. If he moves his toggle

  switch to ‘No’ a red bulb lights up.

  Keep your eye on the electric scoreboard, where the votes are automatically totaled. A mere majority will pass this Constitutional Amendment. That means, if the total vote in favor reaches forty-one, the 35th Amendment is passed in this chamber. A vote of forty-one opposed means it has been voted down. If it is voted down, that will spell the end, the death of the much-debated 35th Amendment. If it is passed, that would put the final decision as to its ratification or rejection into the State Senate of forty members three days from now.’ He paused. ‘The vote is beginning.’

  Collins sat glued to his chair, watching.

  The bulbs were lighting on the screen, as the minutes

  ticked by.

  Collins watched the electric scoreboard and the tallies. The green bulbs dominated the screen. The count moved to thirty-six, then to thirty-seven, then thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one.

  A roar of delight could be heard from the visitors’ gallery, intermingled with groans, and now this was interrupted by the voice of the newsman.

  ‘It’s over in the California State Assembly. The 35th Amendment has gained its majority vote, forty-one votes out of eighty. It has been passed in the first of the two houses. Now its fate is entirely in the hands of the California State Senate less than seventy-two hours from now.’