By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

Dresden hung up slowly. It shouldn’t really matter that this had failed. If he was right, and he knew he was absolutely right, it would all come out. The world would learn sooner or later. One simply can’t hide the president of the United States, alive or dead.

  But that was not the point. Charley wanted the world to know that he was right before the fact.

  Tracy Bakersfield had called him a little boy. Paul Bremmer was probably thinking of him in even less kindly terms. Zack was close to laughing at him, and not indulgently. But he was not acting out of childish compulsion, not anymore. This was one occasion when he had made a carefully considered judgment, and, once certain of something, Charley Dresden would not be turned back. Certainly not by himself.

  He sat quietly for a while, then abruptly got up and went into the bathroom to shower. He was engaged in a game with the rest of the world, and he had to keep in mind that the rules were all his opponent’s.

  His secretary, Isabel, was startled to see him. There was no excess of work to justify her own presence in the office that early. He knew she took on typing jobs on the side and presumed the material on her desk amounted to one of them. He paid it no mind. Her paydays were much too irregular for him to complain.

  “You didn’t come back yesterday,” she said.

  “I went to the seashore.”

  “For the amusement park account?”

  “No, to Villa Beach. Private business.”

  “Jim Ireland called. He said if you don’t return that tape today he’ll have a warrant sworn out for your arrest for theft.”

  Dresden laughed, and went into his office. While he waited for Paul Bremmer’s call, he would actually do some work. With suit coat still on, an old eastern habit of his, he sat down at his desk and began to rough out some visuals of a roller coaster. He would have it roar into a tunnel, and then would fade to black and segue to the interior of the park’s funhouse. He wondered if the amusement park had a funhouse. He had forgotten to ask.

  Bremmer didn’t call until midmorning.

  “Sorry to take so long, Charley, old buddy. I was tied up having my fanny munched by the editor.”

  “What for?”

  “It seems I exceeded the bounds of good taste in a recent column.”

  “You mean the one with me?”

  “I’m afraid so. The night editor stopped the presses and had the item yanked. You made all of seventeen hundred copies. They were part of the run that goes up to the Bay Area. If you want to browse the newsstands up in San Jose or Palo Alto, you might find one.”

  “That wasn’t the idea.”

  “I know, old buddy.”

  “I’m appreciative, Paul. I really am.”

  “I’d say ‘anytime,’ but I won’t. Anyway, Charley, for whatever it’s worth, I think you’re on to something here.”

  “You’re a friend, Paul.”

  After hanging up, he stared unhappily at the phone, having lost all interest in roller coasters and clients. Finally, he dragged his desk chair out onto the balcony outside his office, tilted back against the stucco wall, and contemplated the tops of the palm trees.

  His friends believed him, or said they did. Two people in all the world. How many friends did he have? How many who could be of any use?

  He snapped forward in the chair. He had at least one more friend. In San Francisco.

  When he got off the telephone this time it was as a happier man. He had another move to make in this game.

  “Isabelita. I’ll be gone for the rest of the day.”

  “Don’t leave the chair out there.”

  “I won’t. Stand up, m’dear.”

  She made a face, then grinned, and did so. Gently, he patted her bottom. It had nothing to do with sex. It was for luck, an old ritual of theirs, when he needed a lot of it.

  “Con mucho gusto, Charley. Buena suerte. Too bad this won’t bring us any money.”

  Though an ostensibly full-blown meeting was in session, the Cabinet Room looked absurdly empty. President Hampton’s faction was still absent. Those members present, including Vice President Atherton, had taken their regular seats in their red leather chairs with brass nameplates on the back, and this scattered them around the huge table. Atherton was reminded of the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland, an impression reinforced by the secretary of commerce as she gave a report on the progress of talks on the new trade agreement with Italy. Nothing could have been more irrelevant to Atherton’s mind. What had Nixon said at the height of the Watergate scandal? “I don’t give a shit about the lira.” Precisely.

  When she was done Atherton thanked her, and then nodded to the attorney general, who gave a brief summary of the latest report on crime statistics. This was another irrelevancy. There was only one crime any of them cared about.

  After that, they fell into silence. Atherton drummed on the table, wondering whether to adjourn the session, which had lasted slightly less than forty minutes. He was about to, when restrained by the discreet, patrician cough of Secretary of State Crosby.

  “I’ve come into possession of a communication from the government of Nicaragua,” he said, taking a single sheet of paper from the folder in front of him. “It was intended for the secretary of defense, but in the present confusion, it was mistakenly routed to me. I chafe at using the word ‘mistakenly,’ as the content seems more diplomatic than military.”

  “I think this sounds more properly a subject for the National Security Council meeting,” Atherton said.

  “I’d be inclined to agree, were it not for the fact that this matter has never once come up at any of our National Security Council meetings,” Crosby said. “I thought there was an understanding that we would have no direct communication with the Nicaraguan government until it withdraws its people from Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica.”

  “It’s more than an understanding,” Atherton said. “It’s policy. There was a directive.”

  “Indeed,” said Crosby, putting on the half glasses he used for reading. “Yet this Nicaraguan telex is a response. To an earlier message and to the present circumstance. It asks if the Cuernavaca telegram is still valid.”

  “What is the Cuernavaca telegram?” asked the secretary of commerce.

  “It is a direct communication with the government of Nicaragua from the president of the United States,” said Atherton. “Mr. Hampton has a friend in Cuernavaca who has friends in Managua. They talk.”

  “I knew nothing about this,” Crosby said. “No one with a top-secret clearance in our embassy in Mexico City does either.”

  “This smells of secret deal,” the attorney general said. “Just like Kissinger and Haig selling us out in China while General Abrams and Admiral Moorer were trying to beat back the North Vietnamese. We’ve lost more than one hundred and fifty American lives in Central America. He shouldn’t be playing games with that kind of investment.”

  “There are rumors of a trade. They pull out and leave us Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica free and clear. They get El Salvador free and clear and the Soviets take a walk. But those are just rumors. As I said. This is a subject for the National Security Council, presuming the chairman of the council wishes to bring it up.”

  “That’s the president,” said the commerce secretary.

  “Precisely.”

  “What am I to do with this message?” Crosby asked.

  “Shred all the copies I presume you’ve made,” Atherton said, “and send the original on to the secretary of defense, with an explanation of how it accidentally came to hand. What happens next will be up to Henry Hampton, depending on his condition.”

  Atherton adjourned the meeting, noting that the next would be in the smaller Roosevelt Room, where their paltry numbers wouldn’t look so ridiculous. As he went out the door, his aide Shawcross drew him aside.

  “Steve Copley called. Philadelphia police, along with his agents, have found the place where Huerta was staying. And Walt Kreski seems to be onto something in Gettysburg.”

  “
Where’s Steve now?”

  “En route to Philadelphia.”

  “I want to speak with him as soon as possible. And with Walt Kreski. And get Neil Howard. I think there’s a strong possibility we’re going to be holding a news conference soon.”

  At that moment Kreski was walking through the Gettysburg woods with his clipboard, a bent stem briar clenched in his teeth, his two-way radio affixed to his belt and turned on. Several dozen FBI and Secret Service agents and as many policemen had fanned out to either side of him. It was a manhunt, only two days too late.

  There was another battlefield tower here, an older, smaller structure situated on Culp’s Hill. It possessed a view of the cemetery and the Slocum statue and there had been an agent assigned to it, Calvin Perkins. He should have easily been able to see anyone fleeing from the statue, but in his report he stated that he noticed nothing except the gunfire at the cemetery. He said that, once the shooting had started, he had descended the smaller tower and approached the scene of action through the woods, but had seen no one or nothing until reaching Slocum Drive.

  Kreski motioned to Special Agent Gibby, who, like Hammond, was staying close by.

  “You say you searched the entire area surrounding the cemetery?”

  “Sir. We searched the entire town.”

  “But around the Slocum statue?”

  “Yes, all around there.”

  “But you didn’t go into the woods?”

  “Sir, we went as far as the longest conceivable rifle shot.”

  “And you made nothing of those footprints around the base of the statue.”

  “No, sir. There were a couple thousand people here. All over the place.”

  “But you will get me impressions of those footprints.”

  “Yes, sir. At once, sir.”

  Kreski nodded, and moved away, muttering to himself. There were times when he wished he were back working with the street cops of his youth. They had had none of these young agents’ sophisticated training and superior education. As a consequence, they had been compelled to rely on mere thought.

  He chided himself for the unfairness of that. Al Berger and Dick Hammond had never been street cops. And Berger had told him only a week before that he felt something was wrong, that something was going to happen. Berger had always been right.

  Kreski was walking these woods in his best shoes, having presumed he’d have to appear before the president, or at least the vice president. Now they were soiled. The ground was hard, rocklike in places, yet somehow his shoes had become muddied and dusty. He walked on.

  They were following the line of a creek that led north to a ridge identified on his map as Benner’s Hill. The Hanover Road cut through the ridge and across the creek. He could see the highway as a thin gray slash just ahead. If his skirmish line of searchers reached it without finding any evidence of a sniper’s escape, his theory was effectively destroyed.

  His radio crackled. Hammond got to his first. He talked briefly, then looked over at Kreski.

  “Pribble didn’t make it,” he said.

  They stood for a moment, all of them, statues in the grass, only the wind and crackling static from the two-ways filling the silence. Pribble had been a man obsessed with firearms. Someone had told Kreski that he owned an original or copy of every sidearm used in World War II. If it had not been written somewhere, it should be: Beware first irony.

  Ten dead now, with those who had expired during the night. How many yet to come?

  Kreski relighted his pipe, then waved his arm. They moved on. They were all the way to the road when the word finally came.

  “Director, this is Major Henderson, with the Pennsylvania State Police.”

  Kreski snatched up his radio. “Yes, Major?”

  “I’ve got it, sir. Two tire tracks, leading from a small hollow out to the road. The car turned east.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just past the bridge over Rock Creek. It’s on your map. Over by the Lincoln school.”

  “We’ll be right there. Don’t let anyone walk over those tire tracks.” Kreski knocked the ashes from his pipe in a windblown scatter over the road and then began trotting along the shoulder toward the Rock Creek bridge.

  The tire marks were good, made by expensive radials from the look of them. The driver had not spun his wheels in panic but had driven out of his hiding place with care and deliberation. Kreski, bent over, walked slowly along them, finding three places where there was a perfect imprint of tread. He stood up straight.

  “I know,” said Gibby. “You want full impressions.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to work as a detective.”

  “Director, you know what it’s been like here. We’ve tried to deal with first things first.”

  “‘The first shall be last.’”

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Shall I call for cars to take us back?”

  “No. We’ll walk.”

  “Why?”

  “We might see something else.”

  They did not. But when they broke out of the trees back by the Slocum statue, they were confronted with another discovery. As an FBI agent who rushed up to Gibby explained, a check of the museum rooftop had been made, and a piece of torn cloth had been found caught on a shingle. He handed it to Gibby, who gave it to Kreski. It was a triangular remnant, yellow and white in color, emblazoned with what appeared to be the word “no” at one side. There was, however, a Spanish accent above the n.

  “It’s their flag,” said Gibby. “It’s La Puño.”

  Kreski studied the roof, then slowly turned, his gaze following the tops of the trees. The small tower by Culp’s Hill was just barely visible.

  “Dick,” he said to Hammond. “I want to talk to Agent Perkins.”

  “He’s on the vice president’s detail. I think he’s with Mrs. Atherton. She went down to Williamsburg for a few days to get away from it all.”

  “I envy Mrs. Atherton. When they get back I want to talk to Perkins.”

  Charley Dresden drove his old MG at top speed over the mountains and up the Bayshore Freeway to San Francisco without two things happening: the car did not break down and he was not stopped by police. One or the other occurred with such frequency on his journeys to the city that he had come almost to expect them.

  He pulled into a parking garage on the side of Nob Hill, admonishing the car parker not to flood the engine or rely on the hand brake, then started on the two-block walk to the studios of San Francisco’s Channel Six. Though there had been bright sunshine along the peninsula, an afternoon fog was settling on the city, obscuring some of its high-rise towers.

  Charley was gladdened by it. When he had first come to California, at a time when there were still municipal fears of earthquakes and strict building height restrictions, San Francisco had been an Italianate city of hills and great vistas. The huge towers had rendered it just another Pittsburgh, with the lovely house-hugged hilltops that had been visible from Madeleine Anderson’s apartment now just a wall of high-rises. He wished for fog every time he set upon the Bayshore.

  He disliked San Francisco now for another reason. He and Maddy used to take early morning walks in a woodland park just down the street from the old mansion that had been divided into hers and other apartments. He had returned to that park out of nostalgic curiosity years after, on a hot day. The bushes beside the path were aquiver with naked, coupling men. Two of them had come after him. He had run, from his and Madeleine Anderson’s sacred bower.

  He only came to San Francisco now when business made it absolutely necessary, or when some new woman insisted upon it for an evening’s entertainment. His business with Bill Jenks, editorial director of Channel Six, was absolutely necessary. It was his last good chance.

  Jenks was Dresden’s oldest friend in California. He had been a news reporter at Santa Linda’s Channel Three when Dresden had first come there from New York. They had been companions of youth, drinking,
gambling, chasing women, adventuring in the wilds, almost always together, sometimes in one of the station’s mobile news units. Jenks had taken up with Tracy Bakersfield after Dresden’s pursuit of her had so involuntarilly ended. Jenks had, in fact, been engaged to her for nearly a year. It was in that period that he and Dresden briefly ceased being amigos.

  “The three of us cannot abide together,” he had told Dresden in a somber conversation in a neighborhood bar. Yet Tracy could not bring herself to fully let go of her dear adopted brother Charley, just as she could not bring herself to fully cling to the brooding Jenks. If Dresden was too much the little boy, Jenks was too much the opposite. She had waited until Jenks had taken a job as a widely traveling network correspondent, then broke the engagement by telephone when he was off on assignment covering a mass murder in Arizona. Like Charley, Jenks had never really understood.

  Jenks’ real name was Harrison William Jenkins, but one of the news directors he had worked for had ordered him to shorten it to something crisp and punchy. He had become a news director himself, after his few years as a network regional reporter, first at Channel Three in Santa Linda and then here at Channel Six. He had instituted nightly editorials at the end of the eleven o’clock newscast, writing and delivering them himself. He still gave the editorials, but was no longer news director. In television, one goes up or one goes down, but one never stays in the same place. Jenks’ predecessor was now a vice president of CBS News in New York. Bill Jenks just wanted to stay where he was. So had Charley.

  His office as a mere editorial writer was small, affording room for only one visitor’s chair. Dresden sat in it uncomfortably. The door opened directly onto a main corridor, and secretaries and other station staff kept passing by.

  Jenks sighed. It was how he began all his conversations. He was balding now, and had grown a very British-looking moustache. Such a somber, distinguished mien was an asset in Jenks’ present job, but it made his friends wonder if he was unhappy with them.

  “The story of the millennium, you said.”

  “Right here,” said Dresden, patting his briefcase. A young woman with a clipboard came in and took some papers from Jenks’ desk.