From across the room, Hutchins said to me, "How about a deal? How about I resign, Wednesday morning, win or lose. I'll send my resignation up to the Congress. I'll schedule a speech and tell the public I have some illness or something like that. We'll figure that part out. I'll give you an exclusive interview about it tomorrow night, after the results are in, for Wednesday's paper. You alone, on the details of my resignation. And you agree not to write anything about my past."
He paused and looked at me dejectedly, expectantly, seeking a reaction that he wouldn't get. In fact, it wasn't a bad deal under most circumstances, and would alleviate a lot of bullshit I was about to face, I'm sure, from Appleton and Martin. But there was one essential problem with it. It was another lie.
"I can't, sir," I said. "The public is entitled to the truth."
A flash of anger spread across his face. "The truth is," he said, in something just short of a yell, "the truth is that I've been a damned good president. That's the fucking truth. You want the truth, print that."
"I will, sir. Any story will note your policies, your successes. It will note your popularity. It will also inform voters of your past.
They can decide what they want to do with that information."
He collapsed into one of those pale yellow chairs where he was often pictured on television during photo opportunities with some visiting foreign leader. He rested his elbows on his knees and stared at the carpet in front of him, looking increasingly despondent. "I tried to save you," he said.
I assumed I must have heard him wrong, so I asked, politely, "Excuse me, sir?"
"I tried to save you, and I tried to save your cohort, Havlicek. And this is the payback I get."
I stared at him as he continued. "When you started asking around about Paul Stemple last month, Drinker just wanted to kill you. Just kill you, no questions asked. Put an end to our fears. I wouldn't allow it. I had another plan. I said I could hire you, give you the job as press secretary. You seemed talented enough to do the job. You'd be on our side, and the questions about me and Stemple would never be asked again. They'd go away forever. I had no idea he was going to try to kill you at Congressional that day."
I gulped hard at this matter-of-fact revelation. "So that wasn't an assassination attempt on you? That was really an attempt on my life?"
"It was, but believe me when I tell you I didn't sanction it. My intent was to hire you. That was the point of golf that day, not to kill you."
By now I had moved over to sit on one of the settees perpendicular to his chair. A single lamp lit this side of the room, leaving both our faces in virtual darkness as we talked, as if we were both sitting just off-stage, just out of the limelight.
I asked, "Why Drinker? What's his motivation?"
Hutchins flashed me a wry look. "Isn't self-motivation always the best motivation?" he asked. I stared at him but didn't answer. He said,
"He expected to be named the director of the FBI soon, by me, once I became elected, and his expectations were probably going to be fulfilled. He knows my goddamned secret. He was involved in the case way back when, and when I was about to become vice president, I had no choice but to call him up and make it in his own interest to keep my past the past."
You never know what people might say in times of triumph and tragedy, how much information they may divulge, the depths of their emotions, and this soul-bearing exercise in the Oval Office was certainly proof of that. In some odd way, Hutchins began to look relieved talking about his past and the efforts to conceal it, so I continued to press him, and perhaps my luck as well. "So it was Drinker who killed Havlicek?"
Hutchins nodded.
"Why?"
"You wouldn't take the press secretary's job. My plan failed. He also believed that Stemple began providing you with information after the Congressional shooting, and he couldn't find Stemple to kill him at first, try as he did, so he figured it was easier to kill you. And you guys wouldn't buy into our line that the dead assassin was a federally protected witness named Tony Clawson, which would have been embarrassing for the FBI, but would have assured that no one would ever associate me with Clawson for the rest of my life. I tried fending Drinker off by pushing and pushing you to take the job. You set yourself up by refusing to come aboard."
If I thought about that too hard, the calculation would sicken me.
With that logic, I had caused Havlicek's death a number of different ways. But right there and then, I refused to dwell.
It was after eight-thirty and heading toward nine, the deadline for our first edition. I assumed I had blown that already. I steadied myself on the couch and said, "Sir, I appreciate your help, but I have to leave. Is there anything else you want to make clear to me about your past, about the election, about your plans for the future? More to the point, if we run a story tomorrow, and we will run a story tomorrow, do you plan to resign in the light of these allegations, or will you remain in office for as long as you are able?"
He sat with his elbows on his knees and his head pointed straight down at the floor, as if in prayer. He looked up at me from the uncomfortable crouch and said, "I don't know. I just don't know right now."
I nodded. Why should he? I got up and started slowly, quietly for the door. When I got there, he said softly, "So no deal?"
"I have an obligation, sir."
"You know, you fulfill that obligation, it's the end of me. Have I really been that bad a person? Do I really deserve this?"
As I turned to walk out the door, he was still sitting in that chair by the fireplace, hunched over, looking nothing like the man I saw on the golf course on that brilliant October morning eleven days before. He said to me in a voice as plain as white paper, neither loud nor soft, angry nor sad, "You should believe in redemption. And if you do, you should honor that belief." I stopped walking while he talked, not wanting to be rude. He wasn't even looking my way anymore. When I began walking again, I heard him say, as if to himself, though perhaps to me, "You more than anyone else should understand my grief."
twenty-three
I gulped in the fresh night air as I stepped outside the West Wing and onto the North Lawn of the White House. Nearby, anchors for some of the cable stations, Moose Myers among them, did stand-ups for their preelection specials, all of them holding their microphones to their mouths, the glowing building as their backdrop, so completely, exquisitely oblivious to the news that was about to crash over the country.
I strode toward the northwest gate, looking out into the patch of black on the other side that was Lafayette Park. I stopped for a second on the White House drive. As soon as I stepped outside of that gate, I was fair game. Drinker could be sitting in that park right now, lurking, waiting, watching me, fingering a gun or a knife shoved into his overcoat pocket, his collar turned up against the breeze. He could be posing as a tourist with a windbreaker and a camera. He could be hiding in a doorway with a ski hat pulled down low over his forehead.
He could slash my throat as I walked on an otherwise barren street, grab my wallet, and leave me bleeding to death beneath a streetlamp on a littered city sidewalk. Isn't it ironic, the papers would point out, that a well-known reporter who had survived a shooting and a bombing was finally felled by what was probably a crazed drug addict in search of a few bucks, and isn't Washington, the nation's capital, a disgrace?
Time was my enemy here. Staring into the abyss of that park, I quickly turned around in the drive and began to trot toward the walkway that led to the adjacent Old Executive Office Building. Technically, it was off limits with my press pass, and at any juncture, the Secret Service uniformed officers could stop me, even detain me. But detention, I quickly calculated, was preferable to a violent death. At least I could probably make a phone call, most likely to Martin, and dictate what I had.
The guard shack between the White House and the ancient and ornate OEOB, which once housed the Department of War, was usually empty. I scurried down the stairs, across an alleyway, and into the loading ent
rance. I wended my way through a maze of wide, empty hallways, my wing tips clicking on the hard tile floors and echoing off the walls.
Every doorway seemed dangerous. Every turn seemed pivotal. It felt like I had walked a mile before I finally saw a red, illuminated Exit sign. I rounded a corner, saw three officers chatting at a station, summoned every ounce of calm that I could find, and casually walked toward the turnstyle. One of the agents matter-of-factly buzzed me out, and I was on my way.
Out on Seventeenth Street, the luck of the skilled came through once again, this time in the form of a taxicab happening by just as I hit the curb. The elderly, grizzled driver was aggravated when I directed him to my office just a few minutes away, so I said to him, trying to lighten the mood, "Who do you like in tomorrow's election?"
"Is there even a question?" he asked. "Hutchins, all the way. The stock market's up. The economy's so good that even I own stocks these days. And he's honest. Look at that other creep. He lies. They all lie, I guess, but Hutchins lies less."
Well, brace yourself, old man. Brace yourself.
In front of my office, I slipped him a fin for his time and opinion and made a dash for the front door, all, fortunately, within full view of a very friendly building security guard named Alan. I ran past him, boarded a waiting elevator, and ascended to my office, a place I had feared I would never see again.
The bureau, I was quite sure, was probably as safe a venue as any, and more comfortable than most. A writer likes familiarity. A reporter does as well. This was not a story I wanted to type from the small desk of my hotel room, nice as my hotel room might be.
By nine at night, my office was a shadowy shade of gray, with the hazy green glare of so many computer screens casting the only light across the vast room. I knew this bureau better than I knew anyplace else on Earth, yet it seemed somehow different now, eerie. Speaking out loud, I told myself I needed to calm my nerves, saying, "You have to relax."
Even the sound of my own voice made me jumpy, but not nearly as much as the sound I heard next, that of someone else speaking to me in the dark.
"Who are you talking to?"
The new voice made me just about leap through the ceiling. My eyes darted about the room until they came to rest on Peter Martin, sitting in the dark at a computer screen just across from mine, flipping through wire stories. "Jesus Christ," I said. "You're going to scare me to death."
"Actually, it's you who scared me. You should be at your hotel. I've been waiting here for you to call." He paused, then said, "Tell me what you have."
I sat down at my computer. He drew his chair up closer, and I slowly, carefully walked him through my session in the Oval Office. I read him some Hutchins quotes that I had furiously scribbled on a legal pad just after I had left the West Wing.
After my ten-minute monologue, Martin looked stricken, as if he might get sick right there on the newsroom rug. In the heavy silence, my telephone rang, the sound crashing into our thoughts. I suspected it might be Hutchins, trying to sweeten the deal for cooperation, but when I picked up the receiver, I heard only dead air, followed by the click of someone hanging up on the other end. It made my skin crawl, even if I didn't fully appreciate or understand why.
Martin, on the other hand, seemed not even to notice. Staring not so much at me but through me, he said finally, "You use tape?" he said.
"No."
"You took contemporaneous notes?"
"Well, right afterward, from memory, in the briefing room on my way out the door."
His questions made me question myself, but I had done the best I could.
I knew that much.
"Incredible," he said, softly. "This whole thing is incredible." As he spoke, he leaned over and picked up the telephone. Punching out a number, he added, "Appleton's not going to like the circumstances-your involvement when you were supposed to be sitting in your hotel, the lack of a tape recording-but I have no doubt you did exactly what you should have done."
He talked on the telephone for a few minutes with Appleton, hung up, and said to me, "Write something out. Appleton wants to see it before he figures out what to do. He says there are no guarantees."
No guarantees. I wasn't sure whether this proclamation was infuriating or hilarious. Here we had the president of the United States, dead to rights, in an absolute lie that defined his entire life. I had risked my life for this story. Havlicek had lost his. And we had some pencil-pusher of an editor in chief sitting in his million-dollar house in a wealthy suburb of Boston impatiently telling us that there were no guarantees he would run the most important story in the country. Screw him, and while we're at it, screw this entire newspaper business as well. But not before I write this story and get it into print. Call me a fool, but I'd rather like to inform the voting public that the guy they were about to elect as president is a former armored car robber.
So I settled in before my computer and began to write. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, what I immodestly consider one of the best stories I've ever put together under deadline pressure. My fingers danced like magic across the keyboard. My mind clicked on more cylinders than I knew I had. It was a complex story with a very simple core: The president of the United States is not who he said he was. I wrote of the Oval Office interview, of his belief that the FBI was behind the shooting, and how the intended target was me. As promised, I talked of his successes as president and the lofty approval ratings that came along with it. I explained the 1979 Wells Fargo heist, the deal that Curtis Black struck with the U.s. attorney, his disappearance from the program in 1988.
When I was done, I punched out the number to Martin's office, where he had wandered to watch television and pace nervously while I did my work. He came out to my desk, and for fifteen minutes he sat in front of my computer in absolute silence, his fingers not typing in a single change as he paged through the story. That silence was finally broken by my ringing telephone. Again, dead air on the other line, followed by a click. I didn't like that at all. I looked suspiciously across the expanse of the bureau, at the empty chairs and the dormant computers. It all looked like some sort of barren Broadway set after the actors had long ago gone home.
"Fucking brilliant," Martin said as I walked back to my desk. "If we don't run this story, I don't want to be a part of this company anymore. You have my word that I'll quit."
"Let's just all calm down," I said. "It's only the president and the future course of America at stake." Neither of us laughed. "Let me give it another quick read," I added.
Martin stood up, told me to hurry up, and nervously walked back and forth behind me. I sat down at the terminal and scanned the words. By now, concentration was difficult. The two telephone hang-ups nagged at the core of my brain. All around me, the silence wasn't so much deafening as frightening. Outside in the hallway, a buzzer began sounding, and my stomach knotted up, until I realized it was just the facsimile machine. Another phone rang in the far corner of the bureau.
At that exact moment, the oddly melodic sound of shattering glass spilled into the room from the hallway beyond. My skin tingled from the noise and what it likely meant. Martin and I looked at each other in silence, and without a signal or a spoken word, I started walking slowly, quietly, across the room toward the door. I don't know why I got up and he stayed with the story. Probably we were just further defining our lifetime roles.
As I got halfway toward the hallway, my body so tense my arms and legs may as well have been wooden boards, the murky figure of Kent Drinker appeared in the doorway, looking much as he did that night when he emerged from the dark while I threw a ball for my dog, only here I suspected he wanted to do something more conclusive than chat. As nervous as I may have been, the very sight of him in my newsroom, daring to invade a place I always considered a sanctuary in the self-important and even corrupt culture of official Washington, made me livid-not so much defensive as emboldened.
"What are you doing here?" I yelled. It wasn't an inquiry but a warning.
He
continued walking toward me, maybe fifty feet away, holding a gun in front of his chest with one hand, the barrel pointed at what I estimated to be my forehead.
"You don't fuck with me, and you don't fuck with the FBI," he said, answering my question, even if he hadn't actually tried.
"I want you the fuck out of this building," I replied.
That demand didn't seem to hold any sway. Drinker continued to walk toward me, around a clutter of desks. I stood frozen in the middle of the room. I'm not sure what Martin was doing behind me, because I didn't dare turn my back to look.
In the heat of the moment, I figured it was best to try to engage Drinker in any way possible. Conversation buys time. Time buys the opportunity to be creative. Creativity might help me get out of this situation with some semblance of my health, or at least life.
So I asked, "What is it you want?" Of course, I knew the answer to that already. Unfortunately for me, his intention was to make sure that I wasn't about to transmit a story to the Record that would include details of Hutchins's past life and suspicions that the FBI-SPECIFICALLY he-had killed Havlicek and tried to kill me in an attempt to block the truth from being known. Even less fortunately for me, he also wanted to make sure that I wouldn't live to tell anyone about what I knew. Of course, the reason he hadn't killed me in the prior twenty seconds was because he didn't yet know if I had sent the story yet.
"Fuck you," he said, maybe twenty feet away from me by now.
I was standing by Michael Reston's computer. I knew this because on his desk was a metal-framed photograph of Reston standing in front of the Supreme Court with the chief justice, both of them smiling as if they were soul mates. The picture spoke volumes about our favorable court coverage, but no need to get bogged down by such journalistic issues right now.
The Incumbent Page 35