I had read the Times already, out on my back patio after my morning walk with Baker. The story at issue was a pretty damned good one. FBI sources, quoted anonymously, said they had serious questions over the motive of the assassination attempt, mostly because they had no clear idea of who the would-be killer was. Havlicek was at least able to match the part of the Times story that said no family members of the attempted assassin Clawson could be found, no history, no criminal record based on his fingerprints.
"A good story," I said. Before I could go on, Martin stepped in to cut me off.
"Look, we need a larger piece of this. This is our fucking story. You were there. You were almost killed. Somebody's got to want to help us."
As he spoke, the telephone rang, and a pleasant woman's voice asked if I could hold the line for the president of the United States. Would-be assassins, broken ribs, appearances on CNN. Now Sunday-morning calls from my pal, the president.
"I'd be honored to talk to the president," I said, even though by the time I said that, the woman had already put me on hold, but the intended effect was not lost on those around me. Martin, pacing around as he spoke, looked at me skeptically.
"Quit fucking around," he said after a moment. "We have a shitload of work to get done."
I ignored him as the booming voice of President Hutchins filled my ear.
I felt around my desk for a fresh legal pad, tossing aside a folder marked "Presidential pardons," as well as the last three issues of Golf Digest. "The hell are you doing back at work already? You nuts or something?"
"Mr. President, democracy needs to be protected every day of the week, injury or no injury. You know my devotion." He laughed at that, which I appreciated. He didn't seem like such a bad guy. Martin stood in front of me, his eyes glued to mine, like a retriever staring at a brand-new yellow tennis ball, all clean and firm. He sensed our best avenue to another story, and he was trying to will me in that direction. I was already there, waiting for my opening.
"I'm not heading out on a campaign swing until late this afternoon.
You have a few minutes to come over to the house and chat?" Hutchins asked. By house, I assumed he meant the White House.
I knew full well what he wanted to chat about, but I also knew I could trade on that for another story, or at least the pieces of another story. And if I had this anonymous source filling my ear, it was good to get as much exposure to Hutchins as I possibly could.
"Of course I could come to the White House, sir," I said, speaking more formally than before. Martin pumped his fist into the air. I noticed a couple of other early-arriving reporters falling quiet and leaning in my direction for a better hearing vantage.
"Good. How about noon? We'll take a little lunch here, the two invalids. Just show up at the gate, and someone will guide you in."
Hanging up, I said to Martin as casually as I could, "Going in to see the president at noon."
He appeared ready to sit in my lap. His prior look of exhaustion had turned into one of exuberance. One thought did strike him, and he expressed it pretty clearly.
"Why?" he asked.
"Don't know. Maybe he likes my company. Maybe it's good PR for him, lunching with the injured reporter. Maybe he liked my stories Friday and is ready to spout off again. We'll see soon enough."
"Let's draw up some questions and angles before you go," Martin said.
"We should still be scouting for something else, in case he fails to make news." With that, he left my desk in a half trot, half skip. He could have been floating on air. Next I saw of him, he was standing in his glass office, holding the phone up to his ear in a familiar position, a smile spread across his pale face.
By now, a few more colleagues were filtering into the room to cover the assassination or the election that it affected. One or two gave me a hard time about my newfound fame. Julie Gershman was first. When I was married, she was as reliable a flirt as you could ever desire, constantly looking me up and down, tossing seductive smiles in my direction at the drop of a dime. She was compact, tight as a drum, with red hair and almond-shaped eyes that looked like sex personified.
And she knew it. After Katherine's death, she either stopped flirting or I stopped noticing. I think it was the former. I was treated with kid gloves after that, pitied, much to my disdain. I spent most of my time on the road, writing stories from afar, working out of hotel rooms, watching time fly by, stopping in the office only for a day or two at a stretch.
"Well, look who's here, the second coming of Christ," Gershman said, flipping her little Jackie Onassis haircut behind her ears. "Taking a break from CNN and the nets to check your messages in here, Jack?
Calling Hollywood? I hear Brad Pitt wants to play you in the movie."
Well, this was certainly different, and I rather liked it. I had the telephone receiver wedged between my shoulder and ear, and cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. "Julie, give me a minute, okay? I've got Larry King on the line."
Actually, I was waiting for directory assistance, listening to a woman's tape-recorded voice repeatedly telling me to please hold, the next available operator would take my call. Why bog down my important colleagues in the mundane details of my day?
A couple of my pals plopped themselves down around my desk and made small talk. Everyone was laughing and carrying on, and I felt on top again, one of them, where I belonged, not the victim of a tragedy, but a reporter doing his job, and doing it damn well, getting breaks, like I always have. Havlicek walked into the bureau and stood over a desk on the other side of the room, having just arrived on a red-eye from the West Coast. "About time you ended that vacation," he bellowed across the way. Everyone laughed. I gave him the finger, just letting it float toward the ceiling as I calmly looked the other way, carrying on a conversation. A few minutes later, I pulled myself to my feet, grimacing at my sore ribs, and walked across the room. We met halfway, and he gave me a soft half hug, patting me on the back and saying quietly, "Welcome back. Time to get to work."
Newsrooms are inherently cluttered places, and Washington bureaus, while certainly smaller and slightly more sterile, are not much different. In a world of Internet searches and CD-ROM'S, they are inexplicably filled with piles of newspapers, manila folders, and opened books strewn on chaotic desktops. The floors are lined with cardboard boxes holding files and stacks of photocopied documents. The men and women of the newsroom, the reporters and editors, have seen most of what life has to offer and look at everyone and everything with a healthy dose of skepticism. They're a tough lot to impress, tougher still to please. There is the constantly stale smell of overworked people. Phones are ringing every minute, with important-and self-important-professionals on the other end of the line. A bank of facsimile machines gives off an uninterrupted beep, and there is the omnipresent click of computer keyboards. And more than any of that, there is the mystique.
This place was all that and more. Located smack in the middle of downtown Washington, just a few blocks from the White House and, more importantly for my purposes, right next to Morton's of Chicago, the best steakhouse in town, the bureau was mostly one large open room, with about a dozen desks spread quiltwork, a healthy enough distance from each other that you could keep a conversation private if that's what you wanted. Off to one side was a large, plush conference room, and beside that was Martin's office. Both had walls of all glass, and both had vistas, beyond nearby office buildings, of Lafayette Park.
There were characters everywhere you looked. Erskine Berry was the Record's chief economics reporter. He had covered Washington since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and padded around the bureau in a pair of orthopedic shoes, always dressed in a tweed jacket of some sort and a brightly colored bow tie, looking as if he were just about to settle into his regular leather chair at the Metropolitan Club. There was our Capitol Hill reporter, Julie, she of the perfect physique. Michael Reston covered the Supreme Court, and over the two years he had done that job, he had acquired many of the mannerisms you might e
xpect from someone on the bench. He would cock his head. He would occasionally butt into a sentence, politely asking, "Don't you mean…?" He smoked a pipe. Down the hall, at the reception desk, Barbara ruled with an iron fist. She considered me a surrogate son and over the last couple of days had left several messages on my voice mail at home. When I didn't return the calls- I'm not sure why I didn't-she sent a messenger over with an envelope bearing explicit instructions on what I should do and eat to return to health.
The carnival finally gave way to another day at the office. Havlicek and I agreed to make a round of calls and talk over our angles in the early afternoon. First thing I did, after going through messages and flipping through a large stack of mail, was punch out a number on my phone that got me into the depths of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. A familiar voice answered on the first ring.
"Ron, Flynn here," I said in my typically warm way. "Still stuck with the weekend shift, huh?"
"As I live and breathe, if it isn't the star of the fucking city," said Ron Hancock, a veteran special agent of the FBI.
I interjected, "I tell you what, first thing tomorrow, I'm going to sign a few glossies for the wife and kids and send them on over."
"I tell you what, I'll lay them down in the cellar, and the dog will piss all over them."
Well now, isn't that sweet. Now that we had the niceties out of the way, I cut to the point, even though I wasn't sure what the point was, but you never show the pink part of your stomach to a federal agent, not when you want to use them as a source of information. For all their feigned disgust with reporters, they're actually a bit afraid of us, and a little information goes a long way, if you know how to use it right.
"That's real nice," I said. "Listen, one question that's been bothering me since I woke up in the hospital fortunate enough to be staring into her pretty face: what's the line on Samantha Stevens?
Good woman? Bad woman? Respected agent?"
Despite the threat to allow his dog to urinate on the likeness of my face, Hancock was a solid man, an even better agent, and a time-tested friend to the news media, or at least to me. He worked in the intelligence division of the FBI, mostly tracking terrorist activity in the country and outside, shaking down informants, keeping watch on suspected international criminals, plugging into networks of wiretapped information that the average citizen couldn't even fathom existed. I had met him a few years earlier, on a basic drug-smuggling case he worked in Boston. Bored with a pretty small-time investigation, he tossed me a few bones. I got things right and made him look good. We kept in touch ever since, and he was always willing to lend a hand.
Working intelligence, he was clued into avenues all over the country.
Perhaps more important, his natural curiosity made him something of an expert on the internal machinations of the FBI. If there was anything going on there, he knew about it, and his general sense of outrage usually spurred him to share what he knew.
He just kind of snickered. "I don't know a whole lot about Ms.
Stevens, aside from the fact that the male agents seem to really like her. The brass must too, if they put her on a case like this."
For the hell of it, I added, "And Kent Drinker?"
"Well, that one's a little trickier. You know his checkered background, yet his renaissance here has been something to behold, and those who have worked with him have few complaints."
I said, "Yeah, his history, to say the least, is complex."
I intentionally left a void of silence open, hoping he would fill it with some information he might not otherwise have felt inclined to offer. An old reporter's trick. But Hancock's too good for that, and probably uses the same trick himself. So instead we just had an awkward pause.
Finally I asked innocently, "You don't even want to know how I am?"
He laughed a hearty laugh. "Next time," he said. "Right now, I've got to run."
I held the phone in my hand for a moment after he had hung up. Then, for a sense of structure, I typed what I knew into my computer. First, there was a gunman who no one really knew anything about, although the FBI immediately, seemingly without any foundation, had reported he was a militia member. Second, there was the matter of this anonymous source, telling me this shooting was not what it seemed, whatever that meant. Third, the outcome of a presidential election hung in the balance, affected one uncertain way or another by this gunman's errant shot.
"What do you think of Idaho?"
That was Martin, bursting my concentration. I slowly, inconspicuously slipped a magazine over the typewritten note as I sprinted around the hallways of my mind, wondering what in God's name he meant by Idaho.
Shit, I realized, the militia leader.
"I don't know," I said. "I've just been trying to piece together the holes we have right now. There are a lot of them."
"No shit. All holes. No answers. We need a break on this, and we need it fast. You think you should just get on a plane, try to break some news on the militia front? If it ends up that these groups are disavowing any knowledge of this gunman, it raises a whole lot of questions. Here's two of them: Who the hell is this guy, and why were the feds so quick to blame the militias?"
Good points, all, stated in Martin's typically concise manner. By now, the bureau had risen fully to life. Phones were ringing. Barbara was calling out messages over the intercom. Reporters were standing at their desks, pacing around, trading insults. I drank it in appreciatively as I sat there weighing my options. I didn't want to jump on a plane for the backwoods of America, specifically the Idaho Panhandle, not now anyway, not with what I had going on. I was due in the Oval Office at noon and at the Newseum at five-thirty that afternoon, for a meeting with my anonymous source that could change the direction of this entire story. Not to be overly dramatic, but it could change my career. On the other hand, suppose my source had nothing new? Suppose he was just another crazy? By heading out to Idaho, I had the distinct possibility of learning something more concrete, and we now had Havlicek working angles here in Washington.
"Why don't we hold off on a definitive plan until we see what happens with Hutchins," I said, finding nice, neutral ground. "We'll see if he makes news, if he throws us in any direction. Then we'll decide if it's worth the trip west."
"That's good, very good," Martin said, satisfied. He turned around and walked away, saying to no one in particular, though I suspect it was meant for me, "Of course, that leaves us with nothing definitive in the works."
My meeting at the Newseum could fix that dilemma, but I wasn't quite ready to share that with him yet.
I quickly picked up the phone and, while poking through my electronic Rolodex, punched out a telephone number in Sand Falls, Idaho, specifically a ranch called Freedom Lake, headquarters for one of the most far-reaching militia groups in America. A young man, sounding no more than twenty years old, picked up on the second ring.
"Minutemen," he said.
I put on my sternest don't-fuck-with-me voice. "Daniel there?" I said, just about snapping the phone wires with my steely resolve.
"Who wants to know?" the kid said, sounding more punkish by the monosyllable.
"Jack Flynn from the Boston Record," I said. I had met with Daniel Nathaniel-yes, it's his real name, God bless his parents-the year before, and we had hit it off in an odd kind of way.
"I'll have Ben call you back when he has time. He handles all of our news media calls."
"No," I said, my voice growing even sharper. "You'll go in and tell Mr. Nathaniel that Jack Flynn is on the line, then you'll transfer the call in when he tells you."
The kid put me on hold without saying anything, and next thing I heard was a ringing sound, then the voice of Nathaniel saying, "Do you know how hard it is to keep good soldiers inspired in a revolution, Jack?
And you trying to scare my best receptionist right away."
"Sorry about that, old man," I said. "Here's the thing, though. I need some help, and I think you're in a position to g
ive it."
"Jesus H. Christ. A celebrity like you is still doing the pick-and-shovel work for that newspaper? After seeing you on the tube, I figured you'd have joined one of the networks by now and be making a million large a year-half of that stolen in the form of federal taxes." He paused and added, "Go ahead."
"I need to know what you're picking up on this Hutchins assassination attempt. Where'd this Harvey Oswald wannabe come from? He one of your boys? He come from another state?"
"What I have would surprise you," Nathaniel said. "But you know I'm not going to talk about it over the phone like this."
Of course not. Daniel Nathaniel, like every red-blooded militia revolutionary, believed that the federal government, in its role of Big Brother, was listening to every conversation of every citizen every day, even taking pictures of those talking on the telephone with a new technology in spy satellite photography that allowed the lens to penetrate things like walls and roofs. I would have to hotfoot it to Idaho after all.
"What if I pay a social call on you?" I asked.
"That's better. You do that, first beer's on me. Next twenty are on that liberal newspaper of yours."
"You going to be around for the next few days?"
"Where would I go?" he said. "I'm in God's country out here."
"And this information, is it worth the trip?"
"Maybe, maybe not. But the pleasure of my company will make it worthwhile."
"Let's go over some questions," Martin said, once again appearing at my desk out of seemingly thin air. "We have to chase him on this militia angle, find out what he knows, where this investigation is headed.
Would be nice to get him out there on the record on this stuff.
Everyone else, especially the Times, is driving this thing with anonymous sources. Hutchins has avoided the topic in his public events. This is big."
"It is strange," I said, "these investigators now backtracking on what they claimed was such a clear-cut motive. Maybe it's all nothing. But yeah, you're right, Hutchins might be our best avenue to breaking some new ground here."
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