The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  I thought about it for a long moment – I could see my mother was thinking about it too – before I realized with surprise that I didn’t actually want to. Against all probability, I wanted to stay here and see this through. “No,” I said. “I’m staying put.” Calliope looked worried, but didn’t argue. My mother’s face was harder to read, but in her eyes I thought I saw something like pride.

  “All right,” said Calliope. “Reggie’s mission was to find the Chronomaly, and she’s done that. What’s next?”

  “The mission isn’t over,” I said. “We’re no closer to figuring out who we’re up against. Who’s pulling the strings here? We know what they did but not who they are, or why.”

  “Well,” said my mother, “if you were hunting for a likely suspect to execute a massive espionage campaign against a Democratic candidate, what’s the most obvious place to start?”

  “Probably with the Republican candidate,” I said, and she nodded with approval.

  “That’s what I think too,” she said. “So you’re going to need to stick around the White House a little bit longer. We need to get inside the Committee to Re-Elect the President.”

  * * *

  Mom gave me Sunday off (“There’s nothing you can really do until you’re back in the office anyway,” she said, “except go get yourself arrested again”), so I spent the rest of my weekend lying around in my underwear with beer, take-out hamburgers from the diner across the street, and piles of research on Nixon’s re-election campaign.

  The most perplexing aspect of this theoretical conspiracy was that I couldn’t see any reason for it. Nixon won the election in a landslide, and the polls showed it early. Even his most psychotically paranoid political operatives couldn’t possibly have thought they needed that much extra ammo against George McGovern, his Democrat opponent.

  Wiretaps? Eavesdropping prostitutes? It was like swatting a fly with a wrecking ball. So why, then? I didn’t know. I needed to talk to somebody on the inside.

  I had been in 1972 for weeks already, and it was starting to weigh on me a little that the Embed hadn’t yet contacted me. I pressed Mom yet again for more information, and again she refused.

  “He’s a deep-cover agent,” she said. “Only two people in the entire Bureau – Director Gray and me – know who he is or what he does or who he really works for. He’ll contact you when he decides it’s safe enough. I can’t have you accidentally propositioning him on a park bench or something.”

  So the answer is, no, she did not let that go. But I did know she was briefing him regularly, so I just waited and hoped he would make himself visible soon.

  The Sunday edition of the Washington Post ran an article about the break-in, which was excellent news for several reasons – both because its sudden appearance in Calliope’s press archives was a sign that the Timestream was continuing to slowly shift, and because it contained two very important facts about the man called Jimmy that none of us had known.

  His real name was James McCord, and he used to work for the C.I.A.

  When I arrived at the office on Monday morning, Dean’s door was closed but I could hear raised voices on the other side of it. Beth was in a terrible mood, which I took to mean that Dean was; she bore the brunt of it when he had a bad day, and in turn, generally took it out on me. She had clearly been called in early and had already been at her desk for hours when I arrived at nine (9:02, actually, as Beth pointed out, rather more forcefully than I thought necessary).

  “Who’s in there?” I asked, gesturing to the closed door as I hung up my coat on the rack.

  “That’s not your concern, Regina.”

  I peered over her shoulder at Dean’s calendar, which was lying open on her desk. The entire day’s schedule had been erased (Beth wrote everything in pencil just in case) and in its place was a line going from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. that was marked only “G.L.”

  “G.L.,” I said. “Green Lantern?”

  She was magnificently unamused.

  “Back to your desk, Miss Bellows. That stack of files all need signatures by noon.”

  “Gaston Leroux?” I tried again. “Gypsy Rose Lee?”

  “Miss Bellows—”

  “Why is Mr. Dean in an all-day meeting with Green Lantern?” I said. “He had the Vice President this morning, and a lunch with the Chief of Staff.”

  “He canceled all of that.”

  “He canceled on the Vice President?” I asked incredulously. “Why?”

  “Because he’s a sensible man,” she said, not looking up from her paperwork. “And in a fight between Vice President Spiro Agnew and Green Lantern—”

  I never got to find out the end of the only joke Beth Rutherford ever made in my presence, because the door banged open just then and Dean stuck his head out.

  “Beth,” he barked, “I need you in here.”

  She nodded obediently, gathered her steno pad and a pen, and followed him into the office. “Back on my desk, with signatures, by noon,” she snapped at me, gesturing to the two-foot-high stack of files she had unceremoniously dumped on my desk before my arrival, then disappeared and closed the door behind her.

  Normally I hated being “John Dean’s errand girl,” but today I welcomed it as a chance to see what was going on in the rest of the building.

  Everyone was in a tizzy. The White House press office had of course disavowed any knowledge of the break-in – Jimmy McCord was an outside consultant, not “one of us”, they asserted – but it felt sinister, and the involvement of a former C.I.A. agent gave everybody a case of the shivers.

  I went into office after office, handing files to harried secretaries and whispering, “Beth needs this signed by noon!” and seeing them nod and wave me away without ever pausing in their phone conversation. Every senior staff member’s office door was closed. Every secretary looked frazzled and snappish. Whatever was going on, John Dean wasn’t the only one worried.

  “I don’t see how we could have had anything to do with it,” I overheard one secretary say to another as I took a break from my rounds to stop by the coffee cart.

  “I don’t see how we couldn’t have,” said the other.

  “Did you hear he used to be a spy?” said the first. “Ex-CIA. And you don’t just put away all those skills when you retire, you know. Once a spy, always a spy. Sometimes even when they say they’re retired or quit, they haven’t really.”

  “So it’s kind of like anyone you meet could be a spy,” said the second in awe.

  “Anyone,” I agreed, chiming in. “Me, for example. I could be a spy sent here as part of a far-reaching investigation about why people just stand in front of the coffee cart talking and blocking the way even after they have their coffee in hand and other people are waiting in line.”

  They both stared at me, completely incredulous, before moving away, whispering. “That was rude,” I heard the second one say to the first. I rolled my eyes as I filled up my coffee cup.

  “Is it just me,” I asked Billy, the coffee cart attendant, “or is everyone in this building acting weird today?”

  “Not just you,” he said. “You hear about the burglary?”

  “The one in the papers?” I said.

  Billy nodded.

  “Mark my words, Miss Bellows,” he said. “I’ve worked in this building for thirty-one years, and I can feel when something ain’t right. And something ain’t right.”

  “I think so too,” I said.

  “So you better take an extra cherry Danish,” he said, handing me two of them wrapped in a napkin. “When things go wrong in the White House, sooner or later all hell breaks loose in the Counsel’s Office.”

  I thanked him and wolfed down both the pastries, carefully avoiding any contact between legal government paperwork and my sticky cherry fingers, and continued on my rounds.

  It will probably not surprise you to learn that I had a significantly easier time getting along with Billy the coffee cart attendant than with the secretaries. I was not popular with the
secretaries. Or, in all honesty, with anyone. I had made no friends at the White House, so the mess hall was a hurdle for which Mrs. Graham had failed to prepare me.

  I had finally mastered Mark’s make-up diagrams, I was wearing the clothes correctly, I was a competent worker, and I had memorized a breathtaking volume of information on the customs and social mores of 1972. But nobody had told me I would have to decide whose table to eat at in the cafeteria.

  I solved this mostly by taking my lunch break at strange hours, when the mess was least likely to be crowded, and always having a book in my hands. For that, though, I’d had to pay a visit to the library, since all the books in my luggage had chunks carved out of the middle for storage compartments.

  So I was sitting alone with my turkey on rye and Mark Twain’s Roughing It – which possessed the dual virtues of fitting my wealthy Midwestern Republican backstory while also being incredibly funny – when Beth plunked herself down at my table and took the book out of my hands.

  “You can borrow it when I’m done, Beth.”

  “Don’t be cute.”

  “Literally no one in my entire life has ever accused me of that.”

  She glared at me.

  “Listen to me, Regina,” she said sternly. “There’s a pair of reporters sniffing around this burglary and I want to make sure you’re clear on the procedure.”

  “I would assume the procedure is ‘Don’t talk to reporters.’ Is there more to it than that?”

  “Mr. Dean has a very sensitive position,” she said. “An enormous amount of confidential information, much of it financial, flows in and out of our office. Obviously, all our staff is expected to comply with questions from the federal investigators but we owe no such obligation to the press. So you will respond with ‘No comment’ or refer them directly to Mr. Dean. Is that clear?”

  I set down my sandwich, book forgotten. “What federal investigators?”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said, and I could see on her face that she realized she’d already given away too much.

  “The government is investigating the break-in at the Watergate?”

  “There was talk of a potential situation involving the FBI, but it’s nothing. But most importantly, the reporters—”

  “Screw the reporters,” I said impatiently, and I swear to God she almost, almost, smiled. “Is there something going on here that I don’t know about?”

  “My dear, you are a junior secretary to the White House Counsel. The things going on in this building that you don’t know about—”

  “Don’t pretend like you don’t know exactly what I mean,” I said impatiently. “This can’t be what you signed on for either, can it? Sneaking around, spying on the Democrats, planting bugs in ceil—”

  I stopped short, suddenly afraid of giving away more than the newspaper had mentioned.

  “It’s nothing to do with us,” she said crisply. “It’s nothing to do with the White House.”

  “Well, clearly the FBI doesn’t think so,” I retorted, “if you’re here to warn me about how to proceed when they start asking me questions.”

  “Listen to me, Regina,” she said, her voice hard and cold. “You know nothing. You have seen nothing. And when asked, you will say you know nothing, and you have seen nothing. Do we understand each other?”

  I looked at her for a long moment. I didn’t understand her, not really, but I nodded anyway, and she handed my book back to me and left.

  As the afternoon dragged on, I became more and more curious about Dean’s mystery meeting. Beth did not re-emerge from his office, but either her presence quelled the rage or whoever was shouting in there had worn himself out; although I could still hear voices through the wall, they never rose above a murmur.

  An hour or two after I returned from my lunch, a waiter from the kitchens arrived pushing a cart, covered in white linen and containing a tray of sandwiches under a glass dome, along with the seltzer water Dean liked and a glass pitcher of orange juice. He was about to knock when I jumped up and stopped him.

  “Better let me,” I said in a conspiratorial voice. “They’ve been shouting all morning. I’ll be your human shield; you come in behind me.”

  “Thanks,” said the waiter gratefully, and I stepped in front of him and knocked on the door.

  Beth opened it, and her initial expression of utter horror at my presumption faded only slightly when I stepped aside and she saw the uniformed waiter behind me.

  “So sorry to disturb you, Mr. Dean, but your lunch has arrived,” I said, in my sweetest voice, trying to dig up every last drop of what little feminine charm I could muster, and used the pretext of carrying the orange juice and bottled water over to Dean’s sideboard to scan the room.

  Dean’s office was less flashy and ostentatious than most of the senior staff’s. He didn’t have a sofa in there, like some of the other guys did, no art on the walls, nor even a plant. It was spare, tidy and just big enough for his desk, his private files, a small sideboard where his coffee and water and whiskey sat on trays, and a small table with two chairs, where the man with the raised voice was currently seated.

  I recognized him immediately, though I didn’t know his name (privately I had nicknamed him “Moustache”, as his was particularly ostentatious). I had seen him in the office two or three times since I started.

  When I entered, Dean was standing near the door, and Moustache sat at the table with a glass of Scotch in his hand. I noticed a few things as I carried the orange juice and water over to the sideboard as slowly as I could without looking suspicious.

  I noticed that Dean was sweating a little, though he was a young, fit guy who swam and played tennis and couldn’t have been doing anything more physically demanding than pacing back and forth. I noticed that both men had their sleeves rolled up. I noticed that as I neared the sideboard, Dean moved immediately to pour a glass of water from the tray, putting his body directly between me and the desk – even though the glass of water on his desk wasn’t even half empty yet.

  “Your new girl’s a looker, Dean,” said Moustache in a jovial voice. Dean didn’t appear to hear him, but I saw Beth flinch just as I did. We looked at each other, and something passed between us at that moment that might, just might, have been solidarity. Then it was gone.

  “What’s your name, little lady?” he said.

  “Regina Bellows,” I said, smiling sweetly through gritted teeth.

  He stuck out his hand. “Gordon Liddy. Nice to meet you.”

  Well, that solved the mystery of G.L. at least. The name was faintly familiar to me from my mission briefing; he worked in the building somewhere, I was fairly sure. I shook his hand politely and retreated to the door as the waiter set their lunch on the table where Liddy sat.

  “You know how to make a screwdriver?” said Liddy. It wasn’t clear to anyone in the room which of us he was talking to.

  “Gordon, you have a drink in your hand,” said Dean impatiently.

  “There wasn’t orange juice before,” he said. “Now we have orange juice. You can go,” he said, waving a hand at the waiter, who beat a hasty retreat. “Peggy, can you make me a screwdriver?”

  “Her name is Beth,” said Dean.

  “No, not the old one, the pretty one,” said Liddy, and I was almost, almost grateful to him for saying it, for the way it made temporary but decisive allies between Beth and me. I marveled at her calm collectedness. She didn’t even dignify Gordon’s response by acknowledging it, but returned to the chair across from Dean’s desk at which she had clearly been sitting, and sat down with marvelous poise, whispering “Vodka and orange juice” into my ear as she passed me.

  “You! Pretty girl,” said Gordon, which apparently meant me. “You know how to make a screwdriver? There’s vodka in there.”

  “You know your way around Mr. Dean’s liquor cabinet pretty well,” I said before I could stop myself. Dean looked annoyed, though not at me, while Beth was carefully expressionless and Liddy laughed uproariously.<
br />
  “That I do,” he said. “That I do. Dean can’t hide anything from me.” A flicker of tension passed over Dean’s face, and our eyes met then. And that’s when I saw what I had been missing.

  Dean was afraid. And Beth knew it.

  My eyes asked Dean a silent question, and his shrug and half-smile was all the answer I would get.

  “Left cupboard, bottom shelf,” said Dean, resignedly. “There are glasses—”

  “Don’t need a glass,” said Liddy, knocking back the two fingers of Scotch remaining in his glass and handing it to me. “Anyway. Back to what I was saying before, about the—”

  “You must be hungry, Mr. Liddy,” said Beth politely but firmly, as I pulled the vodka out of the cupboard, my back to the room, pretending not to hear. “Why don’t you both take a break for a little while and enjoy your sandwiches?”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I can take a hint. Loose lips sink ships.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Gordon, don’t be dramatic,” Dean said wearily, taking a sandwich from the tray and returning to his desk with it. “All she means is that we’ve been at this for six hours, let’s take a break.”

  I was almost exclusively a beer drinker and had never made a mixed drink before, but I was certain it couldn’t be that hard. I could just see Beth out of my peripherals. I reached my hand for the ice bucket and then hesitated. She nodded imperceptibly. I plunked two ice cubes into Liddy’s empty glass. I reached for the orange juice. She shook her head. I reached for the vodka. She nodded. So, alcohol first, juice second. Got it.

  Behind me, Liddy was fully occupied with noisily eating his sandwich, but I could see Dean watching our little pantomime, highly amused. I began to pour the vodka. Math, and logic, decreed that if this drink had two ingredients, that the proportion should be fifty/fifty, so I poured vodka until it just about cleared the halfway mark of the glass, ignorant of Beth’s desperate “Stop pouring!” gestures and Dean’s barely-concealed laughter until it was too late. I mimed a question to Beth – “Should I dump it out?”