by Ben Bova
“I’ll have to check with—”
“Check with whoever you want to, after I’ve landed. We’re coming down and we don’t want any interference. If there is any trouble, the President will hear about it immediately.”
We landed without trouble. But it seemed to me that my pilot could’ve waited until I was clear of his rotor downwash before he took off again. He jerked that whirly-bird off the General’s property like a spatter of grease jumping off a hot skillet.
I coughed the dust and grit out of my face and followed an escort of three very large men—the kind who go from careers in the state police to careers in private goon squads. They led me up to the house, but apparently they were strictly outside men. I was picked up at the door by a very polite Oriental, dressed more or less as a butler. Probably could crack bank vaults with a single chop of his hand.
The butler was extremely polite. He showed me into a very comfortable sitting room with a view of the valley through the ceiling-high windows. He spoke in a very soft voice, with an accent that was more UCLA than the other side of the Pacific. He asked me if I cared for anything to drink. I said no. He bowed slightly, just a slight inclination of his head.
“General Halliday was not expecting visitors this afternoon. He begs your indulgence for a few moments.”
“I’ll wait,” I said.
“Is there anything I could do to make you more comfortable?”
“You could tell Dr. Peña that I’m here and want to talk with him.”
He blinked. For a moment I got the impression that he was a cleverly built transistorized robot, run by a computer that had to search through its entire instruction program to find the correct response to the mention of Dr. Peña’s name.
At last he said, “I don’t believe Dr. Peña is receiving any visitors at all.”
“But he is here.”
“So I have been told. I have not seen him myself.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
He bowed, a little deeper this time, and withdrew from the room.
It was a large room, very pleasantly decorated. Rustic style. Knotty pine paneling. Big gnarled beams across the ceiling. Stone fireplace with a grizzly bear rug in front of it. Balcony outside the windows. I walked across a scattering of Navaho carpets and admired the view: the mountains were still glittering with snow, forests of pine and spruce marching up their flanks. I couldn’t see the valley or the town from here. Maybe from the balcony. I tried the sliding glass doors. They were locked.
I spun around and saw that the room had only one other door, the one I had come in through. It was closed. I hurried across to try the handle. It was locked, too. I wasn’t getting out of this room until the General wanted me out.
So I sat around and waited, trying not to get the shakes. There were no books to read. The fireplace was cold and dark. A few magazines were scattered on the coffee table in front of the room’s only couch—old issues of Camping Guide and Investor’s Weekly. I gave the phone a try and got that oh-so-polite Oriental butler, who informed me that General Halliday had requested that I refrain from making any outside calls until he had spoken with me.
In disgust, and to keep my mind from winding itself up into a terrified little knot, I turned on the television set and watched an idiotic children’s show about a park ranger and his teenaged kids who somehow had gotten themselves mixed up with dinosaurs.
During the fourteenth breakfast food commercial, the General came in. I didn’t hear the door open behind me, but the TV picture winked off. I turned and there he was, leaning over stiffly, one hand still on the control keyboard set into the little table next to the door.
“I’m glad to see that you found something to occupy your mind while you were waiting,” he said as I got up from my chair. He was far from smiling.
“I’m glad to see you didn’t keep me waiting all that long. Time passes slowly in jail.” I decided as the words were coming out that I’d better not let him think he could cow me. Old reporter’s habit: mouth first, then brain. Instinct followed by rationalization.
“Just what in hell are you trying to do, Albano?” The General normally looked annoyed at lesser creatures. Now he looked blazingly angry.
“I’m trying to save your son’s life… and his Presidency. Or doesn’t that matter to you?”
He hadn’t budged an inch from where I’d first seen him. “Get out of here,” he said, his voice low and slightly trembling. “You wise-mouthed son of a bitch… get out of my house!”
“Sure,” I said, taking a couple of steps toward him and the door. “But once I’m outside I’m going to call a press conference and blast this story wide open.”
“Like hell you will.”
“If you’re thinking I won’t make it back to Washington, guess again. An assistant of mine knows all about this, and she’ll take over if anything happens to me.”
He didn’t bat an eye. “If you mean Ms. Clark, forget it. She can be bought off very easily. Or silenced.”
Jesus! “Maybe so,” I bluffed. “But I’ve also spilled the story to a reporter who’ll break it as soon as anything happens to either one of us.”
“And who might that be?”
“You’ll find out if you try to hurt Vickie… or me.”
“Ryan? That young pup from Boston?”
“It doesn’t make any difference. We’ve got this thing fail-safed. You can’t hurt us.”
He stamped into the room, right past me and over to the windows. I could see the cords in his scrawny old neck popping out. His fists clenched.
“Why?” He whirled around to face me again. “Who’s backing you, Albano? Who’s behind you?”
I should have tried eloquence and said, The people of the United States of America. Instead I answered, “Nobody. Except the President.”
“Cut the crap.”
“I mean it! Somebody’s out to get the President—your son. Either to kill him or discredit him so completely that he’ll be forced to resign.”
The General shook his head.
“And whoever’s doing this, he’s operating from right here. I think it’s you, or somebody working for you.”
“You’re dead wrong,” he said quietly, without fire.
“We know about the cloning,” I said. His face went white.
“We know that Dr. Peña did it. And we know that he’s here. That’s who I came to see. I want to find out what he knows about all this. And I want to hear what you’ve got to say. You’ve got at least two murders on your doorstep…”
“Murders?”
“McMurtrie and Dr. Klienerman.”
“That was an accident!”
“The hell it was!”
“It was, dammit!” he shouted. But standing there by the windows, with the fading afternoon sun at his back, he somehow looked weaker, less certain of himself, starting to bend.
I pushed harder. “McMurtrie and Klienerman were killed after they talked with Peña and he sent them here. Two cloned duplicates of the President were killed…”
“No…”
“Goddammit, stop lying to me!” I exploded. “Stop this motherfucking phony shit or I’ll go right out of here and tear your son’s Presidency apart! Is that what you want? Is that what you’re after?”
For a long moment he didn’t answer. Didn’t move. Just stood there with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, looking old and uncertain. He shook his head and mumbled something too low for me to hear. Then he walked slowly to the phone, pressed the ON stud, and said softly:
“Ask Dr. Peña if he feels up to joining us here in the first floor sitting room.”
I let my breath out in a long, slow sigh.
The General looked up from the phone, his face more sad than angry. “Don’t think you’ve won anything, wise mouth. And don’t think you know anything.”
“And don’t think I can be conned,” I replied.
He seemed to regain a little of his strength. “Sit down. I’ll order some drinks. You�
�ve got a lot to learn, Mr. Press Secretary. A hell of a lot.”
The Oriental brought a tray of decanters and glasses and bowed his way out of the room again, all without making a discernible sound. When I hesitated at accepting anything, the General laughed at me, not without some bitterness.
“Stop playing cloak and dagger. I’m not going to poison you, for Christ’s sake.”
I picked up one of the glasses and poured from the same decanter the General did. Took ice from the same bucket with the same tongs. It was straight rye; not my favorite, but he was drinking it, so I sipped at mine.
He leaned back in one of the deep leather chairs. “You know about the cloning, then.”
“Yes… and the fact that two of the clones have been killed.”
“They’re dead,” he insisted. “That doesn’t mean they were murdered.”
“Peña can prove it, if he wants to.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
At that moment, the door opened again and Dr. Peña wheeled into the room. He did look even more frail and drawn than when I’d seen him ten days ago. His face was sinking in on itself, cheeks hollow and eyes cavernous pits so deep you couldn’t see any spark of life in them. The skin on his hands seemed paper thin, so that every tendon and blood vessel stood out like a drawing in a medical textbook. He was wearing an oversized caftan, although for all I know it might have fitted him perfectly at one time. The robe bulked oddly, showing the outlines of the equipment that was fastened to his body. The General shot me a black look as Dr. Peña wheeled his chair slowly toward us. He was saying,See? You’ve come to persecute a dying man.
God help me, I had just the opposite reaction. I wanted to pump his information out of him before he dropped dead.
“You asked me to join you,” Dr. Peña said to the General. It was a flat statement, neither questioning nor accusatory. His voice was a bare whisper, nothing like the strong baritone he had commanded back in Minnesota.
“Our pesty friend here,” the General waved vaguely in my direction, “has found out about the cloning. Now he thinks I’m responsible for the deaths of Joseph and Jerome… and for Dr. Klienerman and that Secret Service agent.”
Peña turned his head slowly from the General toward me. “That is nonsense.”
“Who killed them, then?” I asked.
His chest rose and fell twice before he answered, still in a breathless whisper, “Why assume… they were… killed? I told you…”
“You told me the two duplicates of the President died of unknown causes.”
“Yes…”
“Does that sound like a natural death? Do people normally just—turn off, stop living? Isn’t there always some cause of death? Heart attack? Stroke? Cancer? Gunshot wound? Something?”
“Usually… but…”
The General broke in. “You don’t understand the situation at all, dammit! Stop browbeating the man.”
“Then you explain it. You tell me what the situation is.”
He glowered at me. “I still want to know just what in the hell is pushing you, Albano. What’s in this for you? What do you want?”
For an instant I got a mental picture of retiring in luxury to some South Pacific atoll. And the next instant I saw myself in the lagoon with cement boots and a delegation of sharks coming to destroy the evidence.
“This may sound kind of hokey to you,” I said, “but I shook hands with the President of the United States and agreed to do the best I could to help him be the best damned President he could be. Somebody’s trying to kill him, or replace him, or fuck up his name so thoroughly that he’ll have to step down. I want to prevent that from happening. That’s what’s pushing me.”
“And you think I want to kill my own son? Or hurt him in any way?”
“You tell me.”
Dr. Peña fumbled under his caftan and pulled out a face mask. He clamped it over his nose and mouth. Oxygen. He waved feebly with his free hand, telling us to continue.
“You were saying that I don’t understand the situation,” I said to the General. “So explain it to me.”
He gave Peña a worried glance, then hunched forward in his chair and stared hard at me. “You know how I acquired control of North Lake Labs, I suppose.”
“We figured it out.”
“Nothing really illegal about it, you realize, although I suppose some purists might rant about conflict of interest.”
“You weren’t the first Pentagon officer who made himself rich.” Oh, goodness, was I being tough.
He grunted. “Do you know why I bought North Lake?”
“To get rich quick.”
A sardonic smile this time. “Sure. And do you know why I wanted to get rich?”
I shrugged.
“To help make my son President.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes,” he said. “That. Every man wants his son to be President, right? It’s the great American fantasy. But I knew how to make it happen. I knew! I needed three things: money, and lots of it; a laboratory facility that I could control absolutely; and this wonderful old man here. Alfonso Peña.”
“So you made a son and had him cloned.”
“Exactly. And do you know why? Do you understand why he had to be cloned? Why there had to be more than one James J. Halliday?”
I started to think about that one, but the General didn’t wait for my retarded thought processes.
“I didn’t just want my son to go into politics,” he said, edging forward eagerly in his leather chair. “I wanted him to be President! Which meant he had to be a better politician than anyone else. And more knowledgeable about economics. About defense. About foreign policy, and labor, and commerce, and welfare, and everything else that the President gets hit with.”
It was starting to dawn on me.
He bounced up from the chair and started pacing the room, face glowing with ancient excitement, arms gesticulating.
“Look at the Presidents we’ve had before him! Half of them were clowns who didn’t know anything—not a damned thing—except how to win an election campaign. Public relations candidates! Once they were in office they turned into marionettes, run by whoever got closest to them, manipulated by their own White House staffs.
“And the other half… even worse. Single-minded ideologues and fanatics. Jurgenson and his New Capitalism. Fourteen million permanently unemployed and he’s building a retirement villa for himself on public funds. No wonder there were food riots. And that idiot Neo-Socialist Marcusi… I still think he was a Mafia candidate…”
“So you were going to produce the perfect President,” I said.
“Damned right!” He pounded a fist into his palm. “A candidate who knew more about the problems and solutions than any single human being could possibly know. A candidate who had all the time he needed to make the right political contacts, and all the time he needed to learn everything there was to know about every problem area of the Presidency. The perfect candidate and the perfect President.”
“Each member of the clone group is an expert in a different field,” I said.
The General nodded hard enough to send a lock of iron-gray hair down over his forehead. His eyes were bright. “The boys were trained from childhood, from the time they were old enough to read. They knew their mission.”
“How many of them were there?” I asked.
“Eight. Eight brothers… James John Halliday and his seven identical brothers. My son. My sons. Eight sons—and one. Eight bodies and brains, but all the same. My only son—the President of the United States.”
“They were not… totally identical,” Dr. Peña’s weak voice whispered.
The General frowned. “Yes, sure. Not fully identical, no more than identical twins are exactly the same. They all looked and acted alike, but each one of them is a little different from the others. They all have their own little quirks. The psychologists claim…”
“One of them,” Peña gasped, “died… in childhood.”
&nbs
p; “Died? Of what?”
“Doesn’t matter,” the General said, annoyed. “He died of natural causes.”
But Dr. Peña, his oxygen mask fallen to his lap, said, “Smallpox. He died… of smallpox.”
“ What?”
“The inoculation… when we vaccinated him… his body failed to develop the immunological response… instead of developing… an immunity to the disease… he died from it.”
The General seemed angry again. “But the others were all healthy, perfectly sound. There’s always a runt in every litter.”
Peña seemed to want to say something more, but instead he fumbled for his oxygen mask and lifted it up to his face.
“So there were seven brothers—identical septuplets—running the campaign for the Presidency.”
“That’s right,” the General said. “You’ve dealt mainly with James John, the first of them. He’s the public-image maker. He makes the political speeches, handles the personal contacts. He’s good at it.”
“Damned good,” I said.
“On occasions, as I understand it, you’ve dealt with James Jackson and James Jason—economics and foreign policy. And Jerome—science policy. He’s the one who died in Boston. Johnny had to give Jerome’s science speech for him. If those two cops hadn’t surprised my men in the alley there…” His voice trailed off. Might have beens.
“And I thought it was just moodiness, or the pressures of the day,” I said, more to myself than to him. “I never knew the difference from one to the other.”
“Nobody does. Nobody except Robert Wyatt and a dozen of my people who work inside the White House.”
“Which is why security has always been so tight around him.”
“Not security. Privacy.” The General’s mouth curled slightly. “It wouldn’t do to have somebody like you burst into the Oval Office and see three or four Presidents conferring with each other.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
“So there you are,” said the General. “No plot. No cabal. No attempt to kill the President and slide in a phony look-alike.”
“But two of the clones have died.”