We Are Holding the President Hostage

by Warren Adler

  “I think you’re entitled to go, Salvatore. I’ve thought about it a great deal. But I think your presence might complicate matters, maybe raise the stakes for her and Joey. No need to add a new dimension.”

  The Padre was not sure he agreed totally, but nodded consent.

  Mrs. Santos gave Robert Maria’s old room upstairs and made them both dinner. They sat in the dining room saying little as they picked at their food.

  “No gas in the tank. No gas in the head,” Mrs. Santos said, tapping her skull, but it made little difference. Neither of them had any appetite. After dinner they sat in the front parlor. Despite their common problem, the awkwardness between them remained.

  “So damned unfair,” Robert said suddenly.

  “He’ll say nothing of value,” the Padre said.

  “Smile and fob us off.”

  The Padre shook his head in agreement.

  “I could write tomorrow’s script,” Robert said. “He’ll explain, once again, ad infinitum, the government policy of never negotiating with terrorists, never giving in to their demands. And it’s going to sound perfectly logical. Except to our little group.”

  Robert sighed and was silent for a long time. “And how can the rest of the country dispute the logic that if you give in to terrorists you give them a blank check to take hostages again and again? He’s probably right about that. I might do the same thing if I was him. But it’s not his loved ones that are being victimized.”

  Robert banged a fist into the palm of the other hand. “But the worst part is the inability to do something. To act.”

  He looked toward the Padre, who shook his head. But the look began to linger, extend itself, fasten onto the Padre’s face. The Padre turned to meet his gaze. It confused him at first, until he realized that the look carried a fervent appeal.

  “I’ve not been idle, Robert.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?”

  The Padre shrugged.

  “There is no knowing who to deal with. And our connections in Egypt are not good. But I’m waiting. Maybe someone will have an idea.”

  “You people are supposed to be more powerful than governments,” Robert blurted. He checked himself, as if he had overstepped. “I know what I’m saying, Salvatore.”

  His voice faltered and he cleared his throat. “I just want them back, Salvatore. That’s all I want. And I don’t care how it’s done.”

  He stood up and moved toward his father-in-law. “If anyone can figure out a way, it’s you, Salvatore. Please. She and Joey are all we have.” He knelt beside the older man and reached out a hand. The Padre took it.

  “I can’t make miracles, Robert,” he whispered.

  “Yes you can, Padre. Yes you can.”

  6

  THE PRESIDENT and Harkins leaned back against the wooden slatted bench. They toweled the sweat from their faces. The President liked playing tennis in the heat, despite the warnings of his doctor. He caught the eye of one of the Secret Service people who stood watching them and smiling through the grating of the metal fence. He winked acknowledgment. He had just beaten the pants off his CIA Director.

  “You were lean and mean today, Mr. President,” Harkins said.

  “As always, you were a worthy opponent.”

  Amy, with her infallible instincts, had once said that his secret weapon was his passion to win and, yet, to appear indifferent. Only she knew how defeat twisted his guts inside. She had dubbed him a much better actor than Reagan. He would always be the one who got the girl.

  Jack Harkins, too, loved to win, which made their matches memorable. His game revealed a great deal about the man. He had a kind of feinting junk shot. His arm would arc back for a long-angled swing, then he would cut it short, abruptly reduce its power, and send a soft floater that barely cleared the net.

  Devious bastard, the President knew. But a good man to have on your side, he supposed, especially in this job. Hadn’t he wanted an aggressive CIA Director? He had gotten more than he had bargained for. The intelligence boys were always tempted to make policy.

  “Maybe the win will get you up for that meeting later,” Harkins said.

  “Trying to say you took a fall,” the President responded with a touch of mock sarcasm. But the mention of the meeting took the edge off the satisfaction.

  “What the hell am I going to tell those poor bastards?”

  “You’ve got the pictures. And the letters.”

  Through his sources Harkins had managed to acquire photographs of some of the hostages taken in captivity and a handful of letters. Of course the letters had been carefully screened and resealed. The President hadn’t liked the idea, but it was better than going in empty-handed.

  “Shows that we’re in touch with them,” Harkins had argued.

  “How the hell do I explain how I got them?”

  “Say it will harm them if you revealed the source.”

  “Will it?”

  “No more than they’re already harmed.”

  “And do I say the others were shy and had writer’s cramp?”

  “Tell them it wasn’t easy getting these,” Harkins said.

  Harkins’ earlier explanation on how he had acquired the letters and photographs was, as always, laced with the copious use of the term “assets,” the ultimate code word for his covert operation.

  “The point is, Mr. President, that it suits their purpose to get these pictures and letters out. Keeps the pot boiling.”

  “Why don’t they just pop them into the nearest mailbox?” the President asked.

  “Because they know that by doing it this way, making you the mailman, gives them the biggest echo in the media.”

  “That again.”

  “Name of the game,” Harkins said, pausing. As always, the President knew, the man would wait for just the right moment to bring up his covert solution.

  “Nothing wrong with dispensing hope, I suppose,” the President sighed.

  To make this latest decision on meeting with the families of the hostages, he had assembled his secretaries of Defense and State, Ned Foreman, his National Security Advisor, Harkins, and two of his closest old friends and loyalists, Lou Shore, a counselor, and Bob Nickels, his Chief of Staff, along with Steve Potter, his press secretary.

  It was, the President had known from the beginning, a deliberate exercise in futility. He had listened patiently to their various points of view. They were all good men, intelligent with the right instincts. An adequate military response was impossible. Above all, it could not be small. It had to be massive, specific, devastating. The Secretary of Defense had outlined the option.

  But on whom would this devastation be directed? The concept of a surgical strike had pretty well been discredited a few years back by the Reagan-ordered bombing of Libya. It hadn’t really helped stop the problem and it had killed an unacceptable number of civilians. The press secretary had suggested giving in to their demands by some subterfuge. Foreman got his dander up over that one. Can’t do that, his National Security Advisor had interjected. Not even surreptitiously. Buckling under only encouraged more of the same. The old story. Round and round.

  Harkins, as usual, got in his pitch for covert action, eliciting the usual rebuttals. No guarantees. Too vulnerable to legalities and moral strictures. And, of course, the dreaded Congressional Oversight Committee.

  “We blow it, they’ll be the first to scream foul,” Foreman had said. Harkins had retreated. Only temporarily, the President knew.

  “What about the Egyptians?” the President had asked the group. “Have they any leads as yet on the bastards that took the woman and her child?”

  “They’re working on it,” Foreman had responded. “I wouldn’t rule that out.” Foreman had come from academia and his comments always seemed to come out in a superior, world-weary tone. He also looked the part, brown hair, spiky and dry, partless, his skin pallid, his eyes squinty with tension above satchel bags of fatigue.

  “I would,” Harkins had countered,
his words clipped and cocksure. They were always biting at each other. As always, his pale blue eyes were clear behind his thin horn-rims. His face was all sharp planes, his steel-gray hair side-parted with perfect symmetry, as if it had been done with a T-square.

  “We giving them support?” the President asked.

  “Some,” Harkins had replied. “Unfortunately, they’ve got a pride problem.” He had paused and looked at the men’s faces around the room. “And you know what pride goeth before.”

  Eventually they got around to the public relations aspects of the situation. Just thinking about it sometimes made the President want to puke.

  “You’ve got to look upbeat and appear to be doing something about this,” Bob Nickels had said. His Chief of Staff was a former PR man from Minneapolis. It was then that someone had come up with the mailman ploy.

  “Better than ignoring it,” Potter had pointed out. “Besides, some of the relatives are beginning to make odd noises in the press.”

  “Can you blame them?”

  “That’s not the issue, Mr. President.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Four years or eight,” Nickels had reminded him. On that note the meeting had broken up.

  Cooled down, he and Harkins got up from the bench and headed across the White House lawn to the south entrance.

  “God, I dread that meeting,” the President said.

  “Might be better to tell them the truth and be done with it,” Harkins said. The President stopped and faced him.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That there’s not a damned thing we can do for them.”

  7

  AMY BERNARD TAPPED HER TEETH with the earpiece of her half-glasses. She was mulling over the neatly typed memo that the caterers had presented to her suggesting the menu for the state dinner for the King and Queen of Spain. Her social secretary, Millicent Hartford, stood behind her, looking over her shoulder.

  “Vol-au-vent Maryland, gigot d’agneau aux flageolet, épinard à la crème, mousse aux concombre,” Amy read aloud. “But it’s for the King of Spain, my dear.” For obvious reasons, Miss Hartford inspired in her these little antique pirouettes of language.

  “The King adores French food,” Miss Hartford said. “And the Queen’s favorite color is yellow.” Which explained the choice of yellow roses, yellow tablecloths and napkins, and the use of the dinnerware with the yellow trim.

  “Will she wear a yellow ribbon?” Amy asked, knowing she would not get a smile from the impassive Miss Hartford, the quintessential snob, which was exactly why she hired her when Paul was elected. And she had bagged the real thing. Miss Hartford had, as they say, impeccable breeding. Even Amy’s smart-ass needling had no apparent effect on Miss Hartford. The woman was impervious, also extremely knowledgeable and efficient, shouldering a burden that had devastated many of her predecessors.

  Earlier, Amy had suggested a main dish of chicken à la king as appropriate thematically. Miss Hartford had ignored her remark completely. She made a mental note to convey the story of her suggestion to Paul, complete with Miss Hartford’s grand duchess expression.

  Even after three years, Amy dreaded preparations for a state dinner. The pomp and formality were just too incompatible with her Middle West pass-the-plate, meat-and-potatoes upbringing.

  “And here is the seating list,” Miss Hartford said, providing a white board with eighteen tables of ten simulating their placement in the State Dining Room and including a five-table spillover into the Red Room. It was Amy, over Miss Hartford’s and the White House chef’s objections, who had insisted that more than the usual 128 be invited. When neither of them would back down, she simply ordered all state dinners to be prepared by an outside caterer.

  She knew the significance of symbols to a politician. An additional forty at a state dinner meant, somehow, that the Bernards were more open and democratic. Indeed, the very act of insistence gave her a rare sense of victory over Miss Hartford’s obnoxious surety. As for the White House chef, he was quickly replaced.

  From each of the circles indicating tables, rays of penciled names emanated. Amy contemplated the names, impeccably placed by Miss Hartford with an eye for protocol and a commonality of interest. Having won the main issue, she felt she could surrender with dignity to all the others and she demurred to the superior social knowledge of Miss Hartford. In her heart, she knew, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Miss Hartford was invariably correct.

  The guests, despite the claim that they came from all walks of life, were, unquestionably, the elite superachievers of America, most of whom knew their manners, which seemed to matter most to Miss Hartford.

  “You seem to have thought of everything, Miss Hartford,” Amy said, mentally going through her closets, waiting for the last detail to be “suggested” by her nibs.

  “I do believe the white dress with the yellow sash would go well with the flower arrangements, which will have white accents.”

  “The one with the open back?”

  “That one.”

  Although it did not exactly plunge, it showed just enough flesh to expose her to the judgment of that brooding man whose eyes would peer down at her from over the mantel in the State Dining Room. How could she explain to anyone, especially Miss Hartford, that Mr. Lincoln’s somber gaze made her uncomfortable? She heard a sound, wondering if it was her own groan of concern.

  “Yes?” Miss Hartford asked.

  “Why can’t. . .” she began, groping for a thought that had been nagging at her. “Why can’t we throw open the doors like old Andy Jackson and greet anyone who wants to come, give them a hunk of cheese and be done with it?” She was certain she had said this many times before, the kind of statement that becomes a tradition.

  Miss Hartford offered a tight smile, tilting her head as if she wore a pince-nez and was sniffing at something in the ceiling.

  “Yes,” she said, “President Jackson and the cheese.”

  Another bit of one-upmanship, Amy thought, with more amusement than contempt. Of course Miss Hartford was an expert on White House lore. Old Hickory had been given a giant wheel of cheese, which he offered to all who wished to have a chunk. Crowds arrived at the White House en masse and tore the cheese apart. It took days to scrape it off the rugs, floors, and woodwork. At times, Amy believed, if you sniffed around, you could actually still pick up the residue. Comes of living with ghosts, she had decided, and catching them doing their number was a form of private entertainment.

  She and Miss Hartford were working in a little office just down the hall from her bedroom. She heard noises outside in the corridor and recognized the footfalls. She terminated the conference with Miss Hartford and went into her husband’s dressing room. He was emerging from the shower.

  “Win?”

  “Beat his ass.”

  She looked at him archly. He did not reflect the win.

  “So why so grim?”

  “Damn meeting with those relatives,” he muttered. The hostage problem was becoming a constant irritation, but he was managing it as he dealt with most problems. He had the ability to tuck things away in compartments, close their doors. Only this door refused to stay shut.

  “Just be a good soldier,” she said.

  “That’s the problem. A soldier fights.” He slipped into a T-shirt and pulled it over his chest with an angry gesture. Then he slid into his pants and pulled his belt tight around his waist.

  “They’re looking for it,” he said. “Maybe Harkins is right after all. Hell, he brags about his covert assets. Why not go in and secretly wack ’em. Nice clean surgery.” He stepped into his shoes. “All this crap about violence begetting violence. Morality bullshit.”

  “Hate to think of what you might dub immorality,” she said with a lilt, hoping to calm him.

  “Point is, we let them get away with it, no one’s safe. Especially us.” He turned to study her face. “You think we’re really safe and snug in this place with all those Secret Service guys climbing in our soup
?” He waved his arms. “And those cement barricades and walk-through detectors. A determined bastard would find a way.”

  Alluding to that possibility genuinely alarmed her. She turned from his gaze, deliberately hiding her fear from him. Under the circumstances, she had tried to follow a routine as normal as possible. But the idea of danger was never far from her thoughts.

  When Paul was a senator and they lived on Capitol Hill, he had bought her a little silver-plated .22-caliber pistol, which she had kept in a drawer next to her bed. She was alone a great deal and, although she detested the idea of it, she had not removed the gun from the house. Just in case, he had said. God forbid, she had thought. But she had kept it in its place. Worse, she had brought the pistol with her to the White House, where it had remained in the drawer next to her side of the bed, hardly a weapon to match the Secret Service battery of Uzi machine guns that surrounded them.

  “Times like this you almost wish you could be a dictator,” Paul said as he pulled up the knot of his tie. She knew he was trying to prepare himself mentally.

  “So what would you do differently?” she asked.

  “I’d blast the hell out of everyone that aids and abets these bastards. Government, clans, financial supporters, families. Everyone.”

  She remained silent, letting him vent himself.

  “Nixon wasn’t so dumb,” he mumbled.

  “Nixon?”

  “Remember the Watergate tapes. He used to wish he were like the Mafia. They know how to get things done.”

  He kissed her perfunctorily on the forehead and stormed out of the room.

  8

  THE PRESIDENT STOPPED by the Oval Office to pick up the mail that was to be delivered to the relatives and to review the statement he would make. He looked at his watch. Nearly three. The relatives, he knew, were already gathered in the East Room. The television cameras were set up, all the geegaws of a presidential appearance in place.

  His immortal words would go out to the four corners of the world. America is a wimp, he thought, mocking himself. Sorry, folks, we’ve lost our cojones. Go on. Take a piece of our ass. It’s up for grabs.