By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  She slept in quiet repose, dressed in a pale blue blouse, khaki shorts, and well-weathered boating shoes, her slim, tanned legs crossed at the ankles. She was nearly Charley’s age, and her skin had bathed in too much sea and sun, but her face was still as gentle and childlike as when he had first met her. She had the most perfect and innocent eyes, now all the more innocent closed in slumber.

  His ardor for her had once been all-consuming, manifest in much foolishness. He recalled wading fully clothed out into the waves in the midst of an afternoon’s storm to raise a glass of wine to pounding sea and glowering sky to proclaim his love for her. If she had been impressed, it had done him little good.

  Tracy awoke as he stood looking at her. He adjusted his expression, then smiled. As she sat up, she looked at the sparkling ocean, and said, “You’re going to take me away from a lovely day.”

  “I really appreciate your doing this for me. I was afraid you would think I was crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy. You just never grew up. I’m very fond of little boys,” she said, but kindly, indulgently.

  “Tracy, this tape is important to me.”

  “To win a bet with Jim Ireland?”

  “To win a bet with television.”

  She gazed at him a long moment, her eyes less childlike, full of the bond between them. “Sometimes I don’t understand you, Charley.”

  “You’re the only one who ever does.”

  She smiled, but shook her head, then got nimbly to her feet. “At least it will be a pretty drive over the mountains.” The remark was very like her. She would indeed enjoy the drive, though it was one she took almost every day.

  It was an anomaly of television that the facilities in Santa Linda State’s School of Broadcast Journalism were much more elaborate and expensive than those of Channel Three, or any other commercial station in the Bay Area, including San Francisco’s. Commercial stations were in the business of making money. State colleges were in the business of spending it. The videotape editing machine Tracy went to was a top of the line Sony 800.

  Charley hesitated slightly before handing her the tape cassette. She had a deep-seated psychological aversion to any manifestation of death, dying, wounds, pain, injury, or any kind of suffering. Years before, while he was driving her home late one night, they had come upon a horrible accident involving two cars and a horse trailer. One horse was dead. The other, missing most of its two front legs, was thrashing and screaming. A policeman emptied his pistol at the poor animal but succeeded only in wounding it further, increasing its fury. Finally, another policeman managed to shoot it through the head, and it collapsed dead, but there was still screaming. It came from Tracy.

  She had spent all that night lying face up on her living room floor, fully awake and staring at the ceiling. There had been nothing at all gentle or childlike about her eyes then.

  “I’ve seen the tape, Charley,” she said, quietly. “Everyone in America has.”

  “Not the way they should have.”

  She turned to the console, inserted the tape, and, with the sureness of a cathedral organist, moved her fingers over the lighted buttons. In a moment President Hampton was on the screen, speaking, Gettysburg’s grave markers in the background. No words could be heard, however. Her finger flicked at a button marked “Audio, Ch. 1.” A network correspondent’s voice filled the room.

  Unlike film, videotape has two sound tracks. With another flick, she hit “Audio, Ch. 2.” The correspondent’s clipped, precise tones were replaced by the president’s practiced, sonorous ones.

  “Go forward to the first gunshots,” Dresden said.

  She did, the squeaky jabberwocky of accelerated speech produced by the racing tape on fast forward suddenly replaced by snapping pops. In an instant she had the tape reversed to the president standing by his car, then she let it run forward again at normal speed, and quickly froze it. The president had a quizzical look on his face, but neither of the two men with him seemed concerned.

  “Okay,” Charley said.

  Tracy switched to the slowest of forward speeds, the distorted sounds expanding and falling in groans. The first shot came as an audible mushroom. All three men on the screen reacted glacially, their facial muscles slowly contracting, the president’s in particular. He was by then about to get into his car, but no wound appeared on him.

  The second mushroom of sound produced a more pronounced facial contraction.

  “Stop.”

  There is a third track on videotape, carrying neither picture nor sound. Known as the control track, it consists of numbered editing pulses, one per frame. With film, because of the distance between the lens and sound drum of projectors, the sound track is eight frames ahead of the picture. With videotape, audio is in exact line with video, and both sound tracks and picture are edited at the same peak of each pulse.

  “Wait,” she said.

  Frame by frame, she moved the tape backward and forward, the slow groans of sound dragging in and out of new audible shapes. On the downside of one, she stopped the tape. She peered at the screen, studying the image carefully, then said, very quietly, “There’s your wound.”

  For a moment he couldn’t see it. He’d be needing glasses soon. Wiping his eyes, then blinking, he looked again. She pointed to a small spot on the president’s back, just to the right of the left shoulder joint, where the muscle climbs to the neck.

  “You’re sure it’s not an imperfection?”

  “I’ll punch it up on a larger unit. It’s the highest resolution monitor we have.”

  Her fingers moved to another section of the console, then, hitting the “Standby” button, she rose from her chair. She took him down a short hall to a viewing room with a large television screen inset in the wall. There was a female student with an obvious weight problem seated in one of the chairs, eating a cheeseburger as she read through some technical manual.

  “Please pardon us,” Tracy said. The student nodded.

  Tracy turned on the monitor. The president was now giant-sized and the spot was a well-defined circle, with puffs of cloth bits and other material visible in a vaguer circle around it. Tracy paused, swallowed, then pointed to a place on the screen in front of the president.

  “You see?” she said.

  He squinted. “No.”

  “Wait.” She adjusted the controls of the monitor, deliberately exaggerating the brightness and color tones. What had struck him as specks of dust on the screen turned to incandescent pink and grew threefold in size, glowing.

  She coughed. “That’s from the exit wound. That’s blood.” She turned away while he stared. Finally, he looked back to the woman student, whose widened eyes were fixed upon the screen.

  “Could you excuse us, please?” he said.

  “Please,” said Tracy.

  Uncertain, suspicious, obviously fascinated, and perhaps a trifle frightened, the student did as she was asked, hesitating at the door, then hurrying on.

  “Can you do all this again?” Dresden said when the student had gone. “With the next shot?”

  “From now on, track two is nothing but shots.”

  “The next one that hits him,” Charley said. “If one does.”

  She coughed and swallowed again. “All right. Sit down and wait. It may take awhile to get it right.”

  He did as bidden. The screen went blank. In less than five minutes it filled with video again. The president was being pushed into the limousine by a man who’d been identified as one of his Secret Service agents. With the monitor’s color tint control still set at maximum, a small but shimmering circle showed on the agent’s back. Three dots of exaggerated pink appeared in the air in front of the president. The agent looked to be directly behind the president’s body. The flying drops of blood were just inside the limousine. They could not have come from the agent. The bullet that produced them had quite definitely traveled through the bodies of both men, apparently emerging from just above the president’s stomach. It could not be a wound to e
njoy for long.

  Dresden leaned forward, staring, hand cradling jaw. When the screen faded to black and she rejoined him he said: “I am right. Absolutely right.”

  She put her hand on his arm, lightly. “Yes, Charley. Once again you’re right.”

  “Is there a way you can get me a print of all this?”

  “I’ll make you up a tape. Freeze frames. Both of the wounds. The full sequences.”

  “I love you, Tracy Bakersfield.”

  Her hand dropped. “I won’t be long. Then we can go home.”

  As they were walking out to his car she asked an obvious question. “Surely other people will be going over the tapes like this—the police, the FBI, the networks?”

  “Maybe. They certainly ought to be.”

  “Then why are you?”

  “Because they might not. Because someone should, if only me.”

  “But why wouldn’t they?”

  “People like to believe what they’re told. They really didn’t get into the Kennedy assassination like this until months after the fact.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  He opened the door for her. “I really appreciate your helping me. Everybody else has been treating me like a fool.”

  She sat staring forward, saying nothing. She remained silent all the way out of Santa Linda and over the mountains and down the coast road. He wondered whether she had become traumatized by the so minutely examined violence and gore on the tape or if she was just not in a mood to speak as loudly as riding in his open car required. He let her be. When they pulled up at her house he put the gearshift in neutral and left the engine running.

  She didn’t move, but continued to gaze ahead, to a view of sea beyond the end of the drive. It was now a darker, bluer hue. He took her hand.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. All that bloodshed.”

  “That’s not what’s bothering me, Charley. I’m worried about what you’re going to do with this tape. I don’t like it that people think you’re a fool. You’re not a fool, Charley. You’re the most intelligent man I’ve ever known. I don’t want them to laugh at you, to try to laugh you out of Santa Linda.”

  “They won’t. They can’t.”

  “Yes they can, Charley.”

  “Santa Linda, maybe. But not Tiburcio. I’ll go to work tending bar for Cooper, and write TV scripts on the side. No one’s going to make me leave.”

  “What are you going to do with the tape, Charley?” Her voice was very low, a monotone.

  “Bring it to the attention of the American people.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “I’ll find a way. You once told me I could do anything I wanted to do.”

  “I wish I hadn’t. And anyway, I said you could, not that you should.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  She was herself again, even a hint of smile at the corners of her mouth, though there was still sadness in her eyes. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed his.

  “Muchas gracias, mi hermana.”

  At the Spanish word for sister, her smile became sunshine. “Please take care of yourself, Charley. We love you. Don’t wait so long to call. Or come by.”

  And then she was gone. He was left with only a darkening sea and fading sun, and an old but well-remembered loneliness. Dresden gunned the engine and backed with squealing tires out of the drive. In a moment, he was flying along the coast road at seventy miles an hour. He had triumphed, had he not? He was right. He had proved beyond any doubt that he was absolutely, utterly, and supremely right, and that the whole world was wrong. The evidence was in the tape cassette that lay in the well behind his seat like a small chest of gold. But triumph was small remedy for this kind of loneliness. He wished to be in that small cliffside house, with that extraordinarily lovely person who had so charmed his life, to be with her for the full last of the sun upon the darkening water, and for more.

  Tracy had once told him he always wished for the wrong things. He did not. He wished wrongly for the right things. He roared the old MG through a yellow light and up a curving incline to the highway that crossed the mountains, passing cars in a blur and moving the roadster up to its top speed. His mind shifted to an old, unwanted thought. What if that wish had been fulfilled? What if that small house and its wonderfully endearing occupant were his for the rest of his days? He had never married. Freedom was life. At the least, it had always been his life. He had never really asked for more.

  He turned on the radio, hoping somehow for a song from the old days, “Memphis in June.” There was only the news. The president was alive and well, it said.

  The vice president had postponed their meeting until evening, leaving Walt Kreski with a block of time in which, if he chose, he had nothing to do. He so chose, using the time to drive about the crowded streets of Washington in the dark November rush hour, not a little cheered by the normality of automobile horns and slowly moving taillights. If the country was on the brink of governmental collapse, it had not yet been reflected in the car pool restrictions on Route 66 and other commuter highways.

  Kreski used this time not to collect his thoughts but to evade them. They would lead inevitably to an oppressive guilt—for what he had allowed to happen to the president, to Al Berger, to the people slain by Agent Schultz, and to Agent Schultz. It was doubly frustrating, because, though he felt it painfully, he could not yet prove his guilt to himself. His self-blame would not stick.

  He had dismissed his driver and taken the wheel of the unmarked black Oldsmobile himself. In a dereliction of duty he would not have countenanced in a subordinate, he turned off the two-way radio and the other radio monitors in the car and instead turned on the car’s AM receiver, tuning it to a station that played continuous elevator music and broadcast news only on the hour. With that, even putting from his mind the holstered revolver beneath his suit coat, he plunged into the downtown traffic, comforted by the familiarity of it all—the high-priced lawyer and lobbyist influence peddlers becoming mere motorists as they pulled out of the parking garages along K Street, the streetwalkers beginning their workday in what remained of the honky-tonk district around H Street and 14th, the clusters of clerks and secretaries waiting for the buses that still chugged and rattled along Pennsylvania Avenue, keeping schedule despite the supposed national crisis. It had been that way after the attempted assassinations of President Ford in the 1970s and after the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981. Life went on. Government went on. That was perhaps its only virtue.

  He proceeded south toward the Mall, which, in contrast to the crowded nearby avenues, was a place of dark and stillness, with only a few yellow squares of light visible in the facades of the giant museums that lined it. To the east, at the end of the Mall, the floodlit dome of the Capitol loomed over all, its marble and sandstone as chill as a gravemarker’s but still astir within with life and business. Kreski drove toward it as though beckoned, turning right at the security barricades at the foot of the hill onto a short road that led obliquely to Independence Avenue and the huge House office buildings beyond.

  This city was his beat. In his long tenure with the service, Kreski had walked alleys from Waterloo, Iowa, to Waterloo, Belgium; had prepared motorcade routes from Walla Walla to Singapore. But Washington, D.C., was Base One. Every major intersection and vantage point was a vivid image in his mind. He had memorized windows from the slums of northeast Washington to the top floor of the Metropolitan Club downtown. Like a beat cop, he had learned the rhythms of the city, knew instinctively what was normal and what was not. He had learned to itch when something not fully perceived by his senses was amiss.

  As he drove up the hill on Independence Avenue, he knew precisely where units of the U.S. Capitol police and his own agents were positioned in the shadows behind the newly strung barbed wire, parked dump trucks, and concrete barriers. He sensed the presence of the sniper and shoulder-held Stinger antiaircraft missile teams on the rooftops of the office building
s and the two wings of the Capitol. Passing the blockaded drive leading to the East Portico, he could imagine the radio conversations between those in the new command post established beneath the Capitol’s central stairs and the men out on the perimeter.

  He had produced this, working most of the night and for all of the day left after his morning meeting in Maryland with Bushy Ambrose. He had secured Capitol Hill, the White House, and a dozen other government buildings—excepting only the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, and FBI buildings, which insisted on providing their own security. In the manner of some bureaucratic god, he had drawn up a list of government officials and relatives who in his judgment merited protection and had pulled in agents from all over the country to provide it.

  He was exhausted, troubled that he had been able to devote so little time to the investigation of the assassination attempt itself, but otherwise he felt very satisfied. His praetorian guard might have failed the president at Gettysburg, but it would not fail again. The windows of the congressional office buildings he passed were mostly lighted. With the midterm election over, the staffs had returned to their labors, preparing battle plans for controversial legislation deferred because of the campaign, preparing as well for the even nastier fights over leadership positions and committee assignments that would come in a few days.

  He turned onto the street that led past the Capitol’s east face, passing also the Supreme Court building, which he had transformed into a fortress as well. Reaching Constitution Avenue, he found the Senate office buildings also well lit. He had blood on his hands from Gettysburg, but he was doing his job.

  Starting down the slope back toward Pennsylvania Avenue again, Kreski glanced along the Mall to the floodlit obelisk that was the Washington Monument, red aviation warning lights twinkling on the top. Armed National Park Police had cordoned it off. No one was going to blow up the Washington Monument, either.