The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “Fine. And maybe this time I’ll just keep my big mouth shut and they can remain our little secret.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Timmler said quietly, putting his hand on Austen’s arm for a moment. “It’s our duty to provide the President with intelligence; that’s what we’re there for. This isn’t your fault.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Austen stopped for a moment and stood looking off into the impenetrable darkness. The muscles in his face were working slightly, as if twisting under the strain. Even in the dark it was possible to see that the man was in torment.

  “Isn’t it?” he repeated, almost to himself. “This President wouldn’t even be there if it weren’t for me—that’s my accomplishment. Howard Diederich’s patron might still be just another senator with big ideas if I hadn’t worked quite so hard to further his rise in the world.”

  Timmler waited; finally, they started slowly down the driveway again. “Of course, we’ll have to be generous and feed them one every once in a while.”

  “Who?”

  “Diederich—the Russians.” Timmler looked down at the ground and scraped the sole of his shoe over the gravel yet once more, as if this were the most impersonal topic in the world. “We’ll have to give them a little offering every so often. That way they won’t be looking for the rest of our new sources; they’ll think they’ve already got them all.”

  “The poor little bastards; it’ll be like feeding live mice to an alligator.”

  “From now on this is a rough game, Frank. If we’re going to keep the whole thing from sliding away from us, we won’t have any choice.”

  “I know that.”

  They had reached the main gate by then. A sentry was on duty with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a Doberman pinscher about the size of a small horse pacing along at his side. The sentry recognized them and brought the first two fingers of his right hand up to his eyebrow in a kind of informal, embarrassed salute, as if he didn’t know what else to do. But the Doberman snarled, showing its teeth and snapping at the air. It seemed like a good idea to start back toward the house.

  “Then we can begin tapping on the walls, but it’ll take time.” Timmler glanced at the Director, raising his eyebrows as if to say, What did you expect, miracles? “If we could use a regular team for the analysis. . . But I’ll have to do all that myself; we can’t risk bringing anyone else into this. And we’ll have to be careful about everything, including the amount of computer time we log. It wouldn’t do even for people in our own shop to get the idea that anything special was up; we’re not gossip-proof, and we don’t want any rumors reaching the outside world.

  “And then we’ll have to figure out a way to pad the budget; extra agents have to be paid, and Diederich might be looking for something like that to show up in the accounts. Altogether, it’s a problem. But not an insoluble one—it can be done.”

  “But not quickly?”

  “No.”

  As they walked along, Austen kept his eyes to the ground as if he were trying to measure the length of every stride. All at once he stopped and stood examining the caps of his shoes, the muscles in his jaw still working as regularly as the ticking of a clock.

  “Then order a car in the morning and drive Storey back to New York,” he said, never lifting his eyes. “We don’t dare do anything else. If he disappears, Diederich is going to begin wondering what happened to him. This is the first direction he’ll think to look for an answer.”

  “Is that safe? You know how these jokers are—they start in with the confessions and they can’t stop. He’s likely to go straight to Diederich and spill his guts; he’s scared enough to do almost anything.”

  “I don’t think so. He knows his only chance is with us, so he might even be useful. Anyway, what choice do we have?”

  It was only a few minutes before dawn. The eastern sky was beginning to change from slate gray to pearl, and it was already possible to make out the shapes of trees as they stirred uneasily in the first of the land breezes. Somehow, at that time of the morning, you always had the impression that there couldn’t possibly be anything left to live for, that within the next hour it would probably start to rain, that the coming day would last into infinity. The two men continued on, each seemingly unconscious of the other’s existence, until once more they had stepped into the penumbra of light from the mansion windows.

  “I wish I were more of a social butterfly,” Austen said suddenly. It was just possible to imagine he was joking until you saw his face. “I’ve got to find a way to slow down this fucking treaty. It would be easier if my contacts were a little less obviously official, but I’ve never been a great one for the cocktail party circuit.”

  “Don’t worry. Whenever some big negotiation is going on, the DCI is always in great demand. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to sell your boss down the river.”

  “You think so?”

  Austen smiled wanly. The bruise on his face had darkened into an angry black crescent reaching from the left eye to the angle of his jaw. He seemed beaten and weary, and when he reached up to cover Timmler’s shoulder with his hand there was something in the gesture that spoke of an infinite, ineradicable self-contempt.

  “Nobody can live like this forever, George.” The words were little more than a whisper. “How long do you think it’ll take you to get us back to square one?”

  “With a few breaks, maybe by the next election.”

  “Well, at least we’ll have plenty of time to learn how to walk on broken glass.”

  . . . . .

  “You know, Frank, this job has aged you.”

  The President stared into Austen’s face, his massive hands resting on his knees as he leaned forward in his chair. He seemed to mean it. Austen merely smiled.

  “It’s all those sleepless nights I put in worrying about whether or not you’re going to blow up the world.”

  It was one of those weird moments—fortunately rare—when he was somehow drawn dangerously near to confessing the truth. He could feel himself preparing to speak the words and found it necessary simply to sit quietly and say nothing, waiting for the impulse to pass away. Sometimes he almost believed that Faircliff was waiting for him to speak, that he knew what he was about to say and was listening for it. It was possible, in that instant, to believe that he had somehow guessed the extent of his lieutenant’s defection.

  But that was probably just Austen’s imagination, nothing more than the voice of his troubled conscience.

  “But you really do look bad. I don’t think you’ve had a vacation since we assumed office, have you? Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off and go lie in the sun somewhere?”

  “Our lease is almost up, remember? After your reelection.”

  They were sitting—at least, the President was sitting—in the main room of Hemlock Lodge. It was seven-fifteen on a Saturday morning, late in April of the fourth year of the Faircliff administration, and the six months remaining until November had become the central fact of life.

  It had gotten to be almost a regular occurrence. Austen was summoned to Camp David for the weekend, on about two hours’ notice and without a word of explanation. The chief simply wanted to talk, and he strolled down before breakfast with a draft version of the new strategic arms limitations treaty tucked under his arm. It was resting on the coffee table now, almost unnoticed. There was no reason to look at it; Austen had already read it so many times that he was in a fair way of knowing it by heart.

  “So what do you think?” Faircliff asked, apparently having forgotten all about how tired his son-in-law looked. “In another couple of weeks all the technical language will have been worked out, and the goddamned thing should be ready for inking by the middle of next month. What now?”

  Austen smiled cautiously, wondering whether Faircliff really wanted his opinion or was asking merely for form’s sake, or for some underhanded reason that would only become clear later. He really was tired. For as long as he could remember, it
seemed, his life had been about nothing but lies.

  “Who are you asking—the Director of Central Intelligence, or the political hack?”

  “I’m surprised you bother to draw the distinction.”

  “Oh, I try to.”

  “Then give me both answers.”

  “All right.”

  Standing in front of the unlit fireplace, with the cold downdraft on the backs of his legs, Austen looked through the front windows, wondering whether there wasn’t something symbolic in the fact that he was always assigned to this same cabin when he had to spend the night. Hemlock backed right up against the woods, about two hundred yards from Aspen, farther up the mountain, where the President stayed. So he was always away by himself, but always directly under the President’s eyes.

  “I think it’s a good treaty,” he began, idly sliding his fingers into the pockets of his tan cardigan. “I’m surprised, frankly, that the Russians would be willing to give away that much; they must need to save the money pretty badly. We’re not likely to get a better deal in the foreseeable future—go ahead and sign it.”

  “And what does the political hack say?”

  Faircliff sat frowning, his arms folded across his chest, as quiet as a stone idol. For nearly twelve years Austen had been watching people quail in front of that look; it meant that Faircliff didn’t like the advice he was getting, that his instincts had been rubbed the wrong way, like the fur on a cat’s back. At this precise moment, however, the effect was strangely reassuring. The translation read, That’s what everybody says, but they don’t say how—or when. I’ve heard from all my pollsters and all the little creeps who hang around the West Wing, and how the hell am I supposed to trust those clowns? Tell me what I should do, Frank.

  And it was possible to believe that he meant it.

  “Pretty much the same thing.” Austen smiled again. “Around the first week in July would be a good time—close enough to the election to give you a boost but not close enough to come across as too blatantly political. Try to look presidential, like the fourth of November is the furthest thing from your mind. And you don’t want any comparison with the Carter fiasco, so stay away from Vienna.”

  “The Soviets want to sign in Moscow.”

  “Fine. The weather should be lovely.”

  “And you think July?”

  Austen nodded. “It’ll mean ratification will have to wait for the new Senate, and the voters will be spared all that nasty, divisive partisanship—it’s so demoralizing. Besides, after the election is safer.”

  “I wasn’t aware we had a problem there, Frank.” Faircliff cocked his head a little to one side, as if wondering whether he should take offense.

  “Come on, Chief. Maybe they don’t bay all night outside your bedroom window, but if I had a dollar for every time I’ve been approached by somebody who wanted help to put the skids under this treaty of yours I’d be able to retire. Of course we’ve got a problem, Simon; do you really want a public thrashing-out of the details of this treaty while you’ve got an election to fight?

  “You know how it is.” Austen shrugged his shoulders, staring at the pinewood floor. “We lost some ground in the off-year races—the party in power always does—and even our own people would be grateful for not having to explain why they voted for a deal with the Russians. Any deal. You’ll win in November, but it’s better if you win big, so there isn’t any reason not to play it cautious. You’ll still have four more years to be President in, and every incumbent’s power begins to trickle away the minute everybody knows he’s never going to run again. You want to start with as many of those suckers in your debt as you can manage.”

  Without moving so much as an eyelash, Faircliff managed to communicate that the force of the argument had made itself felt. Then he sighed deeply and sagged back into his chair.

  “I don’t know why everybody wants to make things so tough on me,” he said slowly; one had the sense of a real grievance. “It’s a good treaty, and you’d think from what you read in the newspapers that I was inviting the Russians to occupy New Jersey or something. We’ve had a very bad press with this one, Frank; it’s almost like someone’s been out there poisoning the wells on us.”

  There was a hard, suspicious look in his eye, an accusation directed not so much at Austen as at the world in general. Austen merely shook his head.

  “If you’ve got leaks, Simon, don’t ask me to plug them. I run the CIA, remember? It would be the biggest mistake you ever made to involve the Agency in domestic surveillance—people still remember Nixon and all that. Don’t cut your own throat just because you think some donkey’s been telling tales out of school.”

  The dark cloud was dispelled, and Faircliff smiled. He almost looked relieved.

  “Let’s go up to my place and get something to eat,” he said finally, rising out of his chair as if propelled from behind. Once on his feet he resumed an almost Oriental calm, giving the impression that this man was simply too dignified and too massive to be capable of any sudden movement—something you might have believed if you had never seen him when he was in a hurry.

  He was very spruce this morning in a pair of light gray trousers and a tweed jacket, his carefully combed gray hair looking about ten minutes away from the barber. Among the things for which it was possible to admire him were that he had never dyed his hair or yielded to the temptation to wander around Camp David in one of those silly dark blue windbreakers with the Presidential seal emblazoned just over the left tit.

  Austen wondered whether all this elegance was traceable to the upcoming election or to the fact that six months ago Sylvia Burgess had moved back to Washington.

  Faircliff clapped his hand over Austen’s shoulder, and they walked out onto the porch and started up the trail to Aspen Lodge. Austen felt rather like a dog being taken out on a leash.

  “I wonder how the voters would feel if I got married again.”

  “Is that purely an academic question, or have you finally worn the poor woman down?”

  Simon Faircliff laughed and released his grip, and as always on such occasions, Austen stepped circumspectly out of range; when the President was in one of his backslapping moods, he could be lethal.

  “It’s just possible she might see the light before long. Clay was a fine man, a hard act to follow, but—”

  “But Clay suffers under the immense disadvantage of being dead.”

  “You have a terrible, cynical way of putting the truth, Frank; I think it’s one of the main reasons I’ve always liked you so much.”

  . . . . .

  The following morning, when the Director of Central Intelligence came down from the mountain, George Timmler was there to meet his helicopter. It was a very pretty day at Langley, and the suction from the copter blades made the grass out by the little Company airport ripple like a green sea. All George noticed were the swirls of dust and the contracted expression on Frank Austen’s face.

  “Well? What did he have to say for himself?”

  “He wants to go to Moscow.” The tightness had gone out of everything except Austen’s eyes, which looked anxious and weary as he took his briefcase from the pilot. “George, are you sure now that it’s the treaty?”

  “Yes—just about.”

  “Then we’ve got until after the election. He’ll wait that long before he submits it to the Senate. Can you have everything in place by November?”

  “He could just lose, you know. We could arrange something that would blow it for him; that might be the simplest way.”

  “No.” Austen shook his head. “First of all, I don’t think we could get away with it—he’s too popular. I don’t think anything short of the economic collapse of the West would serve. Besides, even if we pulled it off he wouldn’t exactly be carted out with the next morning’s garbage, you know; losing incumbents become lame ducks, but they’re still incumbents. I don’t want to risk giving Howard Diederich and his playmates those last nine weeks with advance warning. No, we’ll wait until
after the election, when they’ll think they’ve got all the time in the world, and then we’ll make our play.”

  II

  “You could always just move back in, you know.” She stood a little way from him, hunched purposefully over the stovetop as she whipped up a batch of scrambled eggs. She seemed almost ashamed, as if what she said amounted to a confession of unpardonable weakness. “We could try it out for those couple of days; I get lonely too.”

  So maybe it was about to end, he thought to himself. After better than three years, their estrangement seemed at last to be crumbling under the pressure of its own weight.

  There had been lapses before, when whatever principle she thought she was defending seemed perhaps less important, but maybe now she was really ready to give it up. In that respect she was a closed book to him, so he would probably never get to know why.

  But perhaps that was what it had been about all this time, this hiatus in their marriage that had always refused to amount to a total rupture. There could be love and, at the same time, contempt—or bitterness, or disappointment, or anger, or whatever it had been—the two could exist side by side, seeming to cancel each other out, paralyzing everything. And now, apparently, for some reason hidden from him, love was once more in the ascendancy.

  “All right, then,” he said, trying not to sound as if he were making a great point of it. “I’ll invite him.”

  And that was how their tenuous reconciliation began, because Pete Freestone was coming to Washington to interview the President and Frank Austen wanted to put him up for his stay. So small a thing as that, and suddenly Dottie seemed willing to be his wife again.

  When he got home from work that night and went into the spare bedroom he had been using for the last three years, he found that the closets had been cleaned out and his shaving things taken out of the bathroom. Everything he needed, including his wife, was in the master suite waiting for him.

  “Don’t say anything,” she said as he came in and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Let’s not either one of us say anything at all.”