by Ben Bova
“Close call,” I said to him.
He nodded and mumbled something unintelligible.
I watched the numbers flicking by on the indicator lights. Halfway up to my floor, he said:
“You’re Mr. Albano, aren’t you? The Presidential press secretary?”
“That’s right… Have we met?”
He shook his head as he extended his hand. I thought he wanted to shake hands, but instead he put a scrap of paper into my palm. I stared down at it. Penciled on it was: “Hogate’s: 5:15 today.”
As I looked up at the man again, he was punching the button for a floor below mine. “What in hell is this?” I asked him.
The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.
“Be there,” he said as he stepped out.
The doors slid shut before I could say anything else. The elevator went on up to my floor. I got off, thinking to myself, Now we’re getting cloak-and-dagger dramatics. I wondered if I should eat the note; that would be in style. Instead, I stuffed it into my shirtjac pocket and strode off to my office.
It was a busy morning. My picture-phone briefing with the President was spent going over the Kuwait situation and the upcoming reorganization of the State Department. So the press corps, when I gave them the morning rundown, spent damned near an hour asking about the Neo-Luddites and their impending march on Washington. Lazar’s peace mission to Detroit had flopped, and for the moment the Middle East was pushed into the background.
Right after that I hustled over to the Oval Office for a face-to-face planning session about the President’s upcoming press conference, which was due that Wednesday evening.
The Man was in his charming mood, relaxed, bantering with Wyatt and Frank Robinson, one of his speechwriters. We worked out an opening statement, dealing mainly with the new tax proposals he hoped to get through Congress before the summer recess. Since the package included cuts in personal income taxes, there were damned few Congressmen who’d take a strong stand against it. But since it also included selected increases in some corporate taxes, we knew they’d try to amend it to death. The President wanted to use his Wednesday press conference as a forum to forestall that kind of maneuvering.
“Go straight to the people,” The Man told us. “Tell them what you want to do, openly and honestly. They’ll recognize what’s good for them and lean on their Congress persons to get the job done. It’s the President’s task to get the people to think of the nation as a whole, instead of their own individual little interests. That’s what we’ve got to do with every public utterance we make.”
I glanced over at Wyatt. Go straight to the people, I thought. But not about everything. His Holiness looked right through me. As usual.
I was late for my monthly lunch with the Washington press corps. It was at the Van Trayer Hotel, on the site of the old Griffith Stadium in the northeast section of the District. People had called it “Van Trayer’s Folly” when he built the hotel and shopping complex in the heart of the burned-out ghetto a dozen years earlier. But with Government help, that whole section of town was reborn and blossomed into an interracial, moderate-to-high-income community within the city. Very nice residential area now. The ghetto slums hadn’t disappeared, of course; they’d just moved downtown, to the old shopping and theater areas.
Len Ryan was at the luncheon, a guest of one of the Washington TV stations.He must be job hunting, I thought. I got a lot of good-natured twitting about not being able to keep track of my boss’s whereabouts, but most of the news people seemed happy enough that I was able to alert them, or their editors, about The Man’s last-minute switch in plans before they trekked out to the wilds of Maryland.
I had to introduce the main speaker, a florid-faced publisher from the West Coast who had started his meteoric rise to riches with the first three-dimensional girlie magazine and now was an outspoken champion of “freedom of the press” and the “right of free expression.” The Supreme Court was reviewing his case; the state of Utah had tried to lock him up for pornography.
Ryan and I shared my official car back to the office, laughing at the guy’s speech all the way. But once we got into my office and he unlimbered his tape recorder and Greta brought in a couple of frosty beers, Ryan got serious.
“I ought to be sore at you,” he said, making something of a youthful scowl.
“Why? What’d I do?”
“I went down to Camp David Saturday, on my way down here…”
“Oh, crap, I didn’t know. We alerted your paper’s local office…”
Ryan took a long pull of his beer, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, thumping the half empty mug on my desk. “The thing that bugs me is that you gave everybody the wrong poop.”
I blinked. “Say again?”
“You put out the word that the President was staying in the White House all weekend. But he was actually having a secret conference in Camp David with the top Pentagon brass.”
“Don’t kid me, son,” I said. But my stomach was starting to feel hollow. “You couldn’t get close enough to see him if he was there, and he wasn’t there in the first place.”
“Wrong on both counts.” Ryan leaned over and delved into the quarter-ton leather carrysack that he had brought with him. Out came a camera with a foot-long lens attachment.
“Electronic booster,” he said. “Japanese. I could get close-ups of guys walking on the moon with this.”
I tried to hide behind my beer mug.
“I figured something screwy was going on when the guards wouldn’t even let me turn off the road,” Ryan said, with a smug smile on his face. “They told me the President wasn’t there—”
“He wasn’t.”
“But the word before I’d left Boston was that he’d be at Camp David all weekend.”
“He changed his mind at the last minute.”
“Yeah? Well, driving up to the camp, I saw enough helicopters—Army, mostly—to make it look like the place was being invaded.”
My stomach lurched at that word.
Ryan was cheerfully oblivious to my distress. “Anyway, I figured something big was going on. So I drove a mile or so up the road, parked the car, and climbed a tree.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Couldn’t see much, but I got this one shot… He pulled a three-by-five photograph from his pocket. Black and white. Handed it to me.
It was fuzzy, but it showed four men duck-walking out from under an Army helicopter’s whirling rotors. Off to one side of the picture, three other men were standing waiting for them. The tallest one looked a helluva lot like James J. Halliday.
“Can’t really see his face,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “But you can see the stars on those generals’ shoulders. And when they came up to that man they saluted him, like he was the Commander-in-Chief.”
I shook my head, but without much enthusiasm. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“What time was this taken?”
“Saturday… around six-thirty, seven o’clock.”
This time I felt as if I were dropping down a chute. “I had dinner with the President at seven Saturday evening. In the White House,” I said as evenly as I could. “He couldn’t have been at Camp David when you took this photo.”He couldn’t have been. But another double could. A double who was meeting with a lot of military brass, secretly, while the President argued with Admiral Del Bello.
Ryan grinned at me skeptically. “Okay. Go ahead and cover for your boss. It’s part of the game. I expect it.”
“Let’s drop the subject,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth and you don’t believe it, so let’s just drop it here and now.”
“Okay by me,” he answered. But the smug smile remained. It was a smile that said,See, I’m still pure and holy, but you’ve sold out to the Establishment, and now you tell us lies.
The thing that really pissed me
off was that he was right, but in a way he didn’t understand. I realized that I couldn’t tell him what I knew, couldn’t break the story to him. He probably wouldn’t believe it. But he’d report it quickly enough. Oh sure, he’d report it. And inside of ten minutes I’d be wrapped in a plastic cocoon and on my way to the most remote funny farm in the land. And Ryan would be laughing about how guys crack up when they go to work for the Establishment.
I couldn’t break this story with nothing to go on but my unsupported word. It would never get off the ground. Even if it got into the headlines, there’d be an official investigation, a whitewash, and the guy who originally spilled the story would quietly drop out of sight. I’d end up in an alcoholic ward somewhere, or maybe dead of an overdose of truth.
Not for me. Not yet, anyway. Not until I learned just what in hell was really going on.
So Ryan and I fenced our way through an interview, pinking each other here and there about the need for honesty from the President and his staff, and the need for responsibility from the news reporters. By the time he left, I was sore at him, more scared than ever, and even angrier at myself for whatI had to do next.
I called Johnny Harrison in Boston and told him about Ryan’s photograph.
“The kid’s a little overeager, isn’t he?” Harrison smiled slyly at me.
I grinned back into the phone screen. “He could get himself into trouble pulling stunts like that. Those laser-directed intruder alarms don’t recognize press passes.”
“Martyred reporters are good copy,” Johnny said.
What about martyred editors? Iwanted to ask. Instead, I said, “When you see that photograph, give me a call and tell me what you think of it.”
“I’ve already seen it,” he said. “Len sent a wire copy of it to me Saturday night. Interrupted my dinner with it.”
“Well? What do you think?”
He shrugged. “Tempest in a teapot. I can’t swear that it’s the President in that picture, and neither can he. You say The Man was in the White House. Ryan says he’s sneaking around with generals. Maybe. But that picture doesn’t prove anything.”
“There’s nothing to prove,” I insisted.
“Sure.” But his face did a Groucho Marx version of, If I believed that, I’d be as dumb as Harpo.
“Well,” I said weakly, “I just wanted to know what you planned to do.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t worry about that photo. But, ahhh, I am going to keep Ryan down in Washington for a while. Beef up our Washington bureau. And keep him out of my hair.”
“Thanks a helluva lot,” I said.
“All in a day’s work,” he answered cheerfully.
* * *
I damn near decided not to go to Hogate’s that afternoon. I couldn’t decide whether my elevator rendezvous was a joke, a serious attempt to recruit me for something secret, or a step in setting me up for the same kind of treatment McMurtrie had got.
But I went. Cursing myself for a damned fool, I went without telling anybody a word about it.
Hogate’s had been a landmark in Washington for more than a century. The restaurant had gone through several incarnations, including being burned to the ground by insurgents once, during the battles of the nineties. The newest Hogate’s showed nothing more aboveground than a fair-sized plastic bubble. It was built down at the foot of Eleventh Street, right by the river. Most of the restaurant was subsurface. Not underground, but underwater: very fitting for a seafood restaurant.
It was like going to have a drink with Captain Nemo. You walked down a long, dank, tubular corridor, guided by faintly fluorescent patches of color arranged to look like moss or algae. The air was spiced with a salt tang, and a faint murmur of distant surf. A live mermaid with a plastic tail smiled at you through a heavy-looking hatch and you stepped into an aquarium. You’re on the inside; the fish are on the outside, all around you. Fantastic effect with the shimmering light from the water and big toothy sharks sliding by six inches from your nose.
The main dining area was actually built like the interior of Nemo’s Victorian submarine, complete with bookcases, pipe organ, and portholes that looked out on the ever-present fish.
I stood blinking in the dim light, trying to locate my taciturn contact man. I didn’t remember much of what he looked like, and I didn’t see anyone who seemed to be searching for me. So I sat at the bar and ordered a synthetic rum collins. The synthetics were pretty good; they tasted right and even got you high, but without the after-effects. The FDA was investigating claims that they were addictive and carcinogenic. Considering what was boiling in my mind, I couldn’t have cared less.
I was just coming to the conclusion that it was all a false alarm, when a lanky young man with longish sandy hair and a sad hound’s face pulled up the stool next to mine.
“Mr. Albano,” he said, without even looking at me.
“That’s my name. What’s yours?”
“Hank Solomon.”
“Hank …Solomon?”
“Don’t especially care for people callin’ me Sol. Or Henry.” His voice had the dry drawl of the Southwest: Texas or Oklahoma.
The bartender was dressed like an old-time tar, with striped T-shirt and buttoned pants. Solomon ordered a straight bourbon and said nothing until the computer-operated mixing machine produced his drink and the bartender placed it in front of him.
“Good t’meet yew, Mr. Albano,” said Hank Solomon.
“Thanks.” I raised my glass to him.
“McMurtrie said yew were one of th’ good people around th’ President.”
I felt my eyebrows hike up. “You knew McMurtrie?”
“Worked for him. I was one o’ his outside boys. Naw, yew never saw me. I was always up ahead, makin’ sure the President’s path was cleared.”
Inodded.
“Got a problem,” he said. He was talking to me, but his eyes kept searching the room, going from the fairly well lit area of the bar out toward the dimmer sections of the restaurant and back again, ceaselessly.
“Something I can help you with?”
“Hope so.” Solomon took a small, flat black box from his inside jacket pocket. It nestled easily in the palm of his hand. “Put this in yore shirt pocket and press this li’l button on top.”
I did. Nothing happened.
Solomon glanced around the bar again, then added, “Now reach down alongside th’ button and feel th’ catch…” It was like a tiny metal hook. I could feel it with my fingernail. “Pull it loose and unreel th’ earphone.”
Now I got it. I gripped the tiny earphone between my forefinger and thumb and brought it up to my ear. It was a plug that fitted into my ear snugly.
“…until further evidence is accumulated. End of report.” It was McMurtrie’s rumbling voice. I looked at Solomon; he sipped his bourbon and kept scanning the area. What’s he looking for? I knew, in the abstract. But maybe he knew specifically what he was afraid of. McMurtrie’s voice, a tiny pale ghost of his real voice, continued whispering in my ear. He gave the day and date and said:
“Progress report number six. Subject: investigation of possible Presidential assassination plot. Trip to North Lake Research Laboratories. Visited Dr. Alfonso Peña, head of lab. Also spoke with Dr. Peter Thornton and Dr. Morris Malachi. Was accompanied by Dr. Adrian Klienerman.
“Peña reports both Presidential doubles died of cause unknown. No violence. No poison. Klienerman checked Peña’s test data but was not allowed to check the actual corpses. Nasty argument between Peña and Klienerman. Peña passed out. Thornton claimed it was heart trouble. He suggested that we get permission to let Klienerman do his own tests from General Halliday, who is the majority owner of North Lake Labs. Have booked flight to Aspen for Klienerman and myself to see the General.”
My eyes focused on Solomon, the bar, the shadowy flickering underwater lighting beyond. But before I could say anything, McMurtrie’s voice came on again.
“Additional note. Klienerman says duplicates could not
possibly be so exactly similar to the President without, quote, biogenetic mapping, unquote. Then he said something about a band of brothers, or brotherhood. He was dozing as he said this and is sleeping now, as we fly to Aspen. More later. Action item: get full background on Peña and North Lake Labs.”
The spool stopped with a sharp click. I pulled the plug out of my ear and let the wire whiz back into the tape player in my shirt pocket. Solomon had almost finished his drink. “That spool was mailed to the office from the Aspen airport, when Mac first landed there, on his way to see the General. He addressed it to himself. Standard operatin’ procedure.”
I grabbed at my drink, suddenly wishing it were real rum. It took only one swallow to finish it.
“So what’s your problem?” I asked as I put the glass back on the bar.
Solomon nodded to the bartender and kept silent until the refills were in front of us. “My problem’s kinda simple. And kinda complicated. Nobody in the office is followin’ up on Mac’s reports.”
“What?”
“I got th’ tapes and papers and his… well, what they call his ‘effects.’ I got assigned to sortin’ ’em out and sendin’ his personal stuff back to his wife… er, widow.”
“I never knew McMurtrie was married.”
“Got two boys. One in college, th’ other in the Aerospace Force. His wife lives in California.”
“Hell,” I said.
“Anyways, these progress reports on Mac’s incomplete investigation sounded damned important to me. I took ’em to our section chief. He comes back a day later and says t’ forgit ’em. Bein’ handled higher up.”
“By whom?”
“By nobody, it turns out. Took me a coupla days of sniffin’ around to find out. All Mac’s reports were just tucked away in a file, locked up tight. And everybody in th’ office is stonewallin’ it. Mac’s dead an’ nobody’s movin’ an inch toward finishin’ the investigation he’s been workin’ on.”
“They wouldn’t do that without orders from higher up,” I said.
“Yeah. I figured. But when this here tape arrived in th’ mail yesterday, I got aholt of it before anybody else. Just luck. I was in the office early, when the first mail delivery come in.”