The Multiple Man Page 5

  I said nothing. Their minds were made up.

  “There are three possibilities,” the President said, hunching forward in his chair and ticking off the points on his fingers.

  “First, it might be a foreign plan to get rid of me and install an agent in my place. That sounds pretty wild to me. It just isn’t the way governments think or work.”

  “That doesn’t mean it can’t be real,” Wyatt said.

  Halliday shrugged lightly and went on. “Second, it might be a group inside the Government here, say, the military, who want to get me out and their own man in.”

  I said, “The Joint Chiefs don’t think too much of the way you’re handling this Kuwait trouble.”

  “I realize that. But it’s hard to think that nearly two and a quarter centuries of civilian control over the military is being threatened by the Joint Chiefs.”

  “You really think they’re that loyal to you?”

  “To the nation, yes. Unqualifiedly. And I haven’t really frightened them to the point where they think they’ve got to take over the Presidency to save the nation.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “It only takes a couple of paranoids.”

  “No,” the President insisted. “It takes a lot more than that to make exact duplicates and get them as close to me as the two dead bodies have gotten.”

  “What killed them?” I wondered aloud. The President ignored that and went on to his third point. “Finally, there’s the chance that some interest group within the United States, but not inside the Government, is behind it. Same reason: they want to get their own man into the White House.”

  “Who could it be?” I asked.

  Wyatt shouted, “Anybody! This Administration’s been straightening out a lot of overdue problems. And every time we try to help one group, at least one other group gets sore because they think we’re hurting them. I could give you a list as long as this room: every goddamned pressure group from the National Association of Cattlemen to the Boy Scouts.”

  “It’s not that bad,” the President murmured.

  “No? The auto manufacturers are sore because we’ve pushed them into upping pensions for the workers retired early by automation. The unions are sore because we’re backing automation and robots are taking more new jobs than people. The farmers. The truckers. Those damned fat cats on Wall Street. The blacks in the cities who’re madder’n hell at being forced to work for their welfare checks…” He ran out of breath.

  “You can’t change society without frightening people,” the President said. “Even those who yell the loudest for change are frightened when it comes.”

  “And what they’re scared of, they hate.”

  “And what they hate,” I finished, “they strike out against.”

  “Exactly,” said the President.

  “So you think it’s the third alternative? Some power group outside the Government?”

  “Yes. That’s my hunch.”

  “Some damned well-heeled pressure group,” Wyatt said. “This is no gaggle of ghetto kids making bombs in their lofts. It’s the big leaguers.”

  “But…” Something about that conclusion just didn’t hit me right. “But they have all sorts of other avenues to fight you. They’ve got Congressmen and Senators in their pockets. Money. Influence. The media. Why this?”

  Halliday leaned back in his chair again. “I’ve been asking myself the same question, Meric. And there’s only one possible answer. Some group in the United States has decided that the democratic process doesn’t work the way they want it to. They’re not content to let the people decide. They want to take over the Government. Of themselves. By themselves. For themselves.”

  For a few long moments I sat there saying nothing. The room was absolutely quiet. Sunlight streamed in through the ceiling-high windows. Outside, the rose garden was a picture of tranquility. I imagined I could hear bees droning as they went from bloom to bloom.

  Then I looked at Halliday. The President was watching me, appraising my reactions.

  “It scares the shit out of me,” I said.

  “I know. Me too.”

  “You really ought to be doing more than sending McMurtrie out to round up a team of investigators. A lot more.”

  “Like what?” His Holiness snapped. “Call out the Marines? Declare a national emergency?”

  It was so damned frustrating. “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  “I don’t think there’s much more we can do, at this stage,” the President said softly.

  “You can dig into those goddamned pressure groups,” Wyatt demanded.“ Use the FBI. And Internal Revenue. Stir up their nests! Force them into a wrong move. Take the initiative.”

  He cocked his head slightly to one side, the way he always does when he wants to give the impression he’s seriously considering something. But almost immediately he answered, “And we’ll be taking another step toward a police state. Those pressure groups are people, Robert. Most of them haven’t done anything at all that’s even vaguely illegal. We can’t go bursting in on them like a gang of storm troopers. That would do more harm than good.”

  Wyatt groused and pitched back and forth impatiently on the rocker. “All right. Most of those people are good citizens, although I’ll bet you can find a lot of dirt under their fingernails. But some of them are trying to kill you.”

  There it was. Out in the open.

  Halliday said simply, “Then we’d better find out which ones they are before they succeed, hadn’t we?”

  FOUR

  I had lunch with Wyatt in the tiny staff dining room in the West Wing. We talked over the possible problems of handling the press and the media, should any of this business leak out.

  Calling it a dining room was being overgenerous. It was a glorified cafeteria, down in the basement under the West Wing, barely big enough to hold a dozen people at one time. Completely automated food service, like coin machines except that these were free. Your tax dollars at work. Dead-white walls with no decorations outside of a TV screen that served as a bulletin board, constantly flashing news items, press releases, job descriptions, and other tidbits that no one paid any attention to. The furniture was a bit posh for a cafeteria: slim-legged teak tables and rope-weave chairs. Very comfortable. The only other people in the little room were a pair of security guards, both female, chatting about their coming evening. Wyatt and I sat as far from them as we could.

  In between bites of a sandwich that tasted like plastic on cardboard, I said, “Robert, there’s one absolutely essential point. I can’t cover for you if I don’t know what’s happening.”

  He gave me a hawkish look from across the narrow teak table. “Afraid of being caught in public with your pants down?”

  “I can stand the embarrassment,” I countered evenly, “but you can’t. And neither can the President. Once those news people get the impression that I’m not giving them the straight story, they’ll swarm all over us. We can’t afford that.”

  And a corner of my mind was saying,How easily you switch from being open, honest, and a responsible civil servant to being secretive, misleading, and plotting to keep the truth away from the people.

  Wyatt chewed on his salad thoughtfully for a few moments, then said, “Okay, we’ll keep you fully informed.”

  “How?”

  He almost smiled at me. “You’re learning, Meric. A few days ago and you would’ve accepted my word on it and not worried about how the agreement would be implemented.”

  “A few days agoI was young and innocent.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m scared. Somebody’s trying to steal this whole damned country from us, Robert!”

  He did smile this time. “Don’t get panicky. That won’t help.”

  “But how can you stay so calm?”

  His smile faded and his mouth went tight and hard. His eyes, the cold blue of polar ice, bored into me. “Because,” he whispered harshly, “we’re going to find whoever it is who’s trying to assassinate the Pres
ident. They are not going to succeed. We are going to find them and crush them.”

  And his frail, liver-spotted hands snapped the plastic fork he was holding. The pieces fell silently into his salad.

  He seemed embarrassed. “Excuse me.” He got to his feet and brushed at his slacks. “It’s time I got back to my office.”

  I got up and reached across the table to grasp his arm. “Robert. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Eh? Oh… you’ve got a direct wire to me. Use it. I’ll keep you up-to-the-minute.”

  “Not good enough,” I said.

  He pulled his arm loose and glared at me as I came around the table to stand in front of him. I’m not a very big guy, but I felt as if I were looming over him. He was so old and frail-looking.

  But made of steel. “Just what is it you want, Meric? Do I have to buy you off?”

  “Right on. I want to have full access to McMurtrie. If he’s heading this investigation, I want to be able to talk directly to him, go where he goes, know what he knows.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s my price,” I said, knowing that McMurtrie was not only doggedly loyal but as thoroughly honest as any man I’d ever met. If Wyatt told him he could answer any questions I asked. I’d be kept fully informed, and we both knew it.

  Wyatt’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have any ideas of playing detective yourself, do you? All you newsmen…”

  “Robert, all I want is to be kept informed. Honestly and completely.”

  He hesitated just a moment longer. Then, “I’ll speak to McMurtrie about it.”

  “Good.”

  “He won’t like it, you realize.”

  “He doesn’t have to.”

  Wyatt nodded once, just an abrupt snap of his head, and then turned and strode out of the dining room. I stood there and watched him. He should wear a sword, I thought.He’s got that kind of regal bearing.

  Just as I was heading out the door myself, the PA microphone in the tiled ceiling called in a soft female voice, “Mr. Albano, please dial four-six-six. Mr. Albano…”

  The wall phone was right beside the doors: an old no-picture, voice-only model. I picked up the receiver and punched the buttons.

  “Meric Albano here.”

  “One moment, please, sir.” The same operator’s voice. There was a hesitation just long enough for a computer to scan my voiceprint. Then, “Meric? Is that you?”

  The floor dropped away from under me. “Yes, it’s me. Laura.”

  “How are you?” Her voice told me that she didn’t really care, one way or the other.

  “What do you want?” I realized I was whispering into the phone’s mouthpiece.Like a god-damned kid snitching a date behind his best friend’s back.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Today. This afternoon.”

  “You know where my office…” That was ridiculous. The First Lady doesn’t drop in on the hired help. Especially the ones she used to live with. “I’m in the West Wing right now. I can come up and…”

  “No, not here,” she said. “I’m going shopping this afternoon. At the new Beltway Plaza.”

  “Why not make it the Lincoln Memorial? It’ll be less crowded.”

  She ignored my dripping satire. “Can you meet me at Woodies there? Four-thirty?”

  “It’s a big place.”

  “At the front entrance. I have to talk with you.” Like a patient who’s just decided to risk his second heart transplant, I said, “I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Meric.”

  Before I could say anything else she clicked off.

  * * *

  It was a swell afternoon. I growled at Greta when I got back to the office, slammed my door shut, and sat at my desk, staring out the window, trying to make the time go faster by sheer mental will power. Didn’t work. After sweating it out for an hour, I glanced at my desk clock; barely five minutes had passed.

  So I tried to work. I shuffled papers and answered a few phone calls. I didn’t make much sense, not even to myself. I told Greta to cancel the rest of the day’s appointments. She gave me her “you need some chicken soup” look, but went ahead and broke several hearts for me.

  Around three, somebody tapped on the door and came right in. I was staring out the window again, and swung around in my chair, starting to growl, “I gave specific instru—”

  It was Vickie, looking troubled. Immediately I felt like a louse. She had such a sunny face, normally. Hair the color of California gold, thick and short cropped.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to make it sound reasonably polite.

  She stood in the middle of the room, halfway between the chairs in front of the desk and the couch along the side wall.

  “The planning session for next week’s meeting of the National Association of News Media Managers,” Vickie said, a bit hesitantly. “Greta said you won’t be able to get together with us this afternoon. Should we cancel the session or…”

  “Oh, shit. I’ve got to give that speech in St. Louis next week, don’t I?”

  She came as far as the chair, looking a little like a wary faun. “You don’t want to let much more time go by without working out your speech. I’ve got all the background material for it, but…”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re right.” I felt a headache coming on and rubbed at my forehead.

  “Are you okay?” Vickie asked.

  “Yeah, fine… super.”

  “What happened last night?”

  I took a good look at her. She was concerned; it was written on her face. But she wasn’t frightened or shaken the way I was. She didn’t know anything more than I was showing her. Or did she?

  “What do you mean?”

  Vickie leaned slightly on the back of the chair. “We sat in the plane for more than two hours, waiting for you and McMurtrie. You were the last one aboard, and then the two of you huddled together like a couple of high school girls discussing your dates.”

  She probably used that metaphor to make me smile. I frowned.

  “Listen,” I said. “There are times when its our job to prevent stories from being written. Especially when the stories are nothing more than trumped-up rumors. That’s what I was doing last night.”

  “Oh? What hap—”

  “Nothing happened,” I snapped. “Nothing that I want to talk about. Nothing that I want you to talk about. To anyone. Understand?”

  Her perky little nose wrinkled. “Is that an order, boss?”

  “Damned right. And I know it violates the First Amendment, so don’t go judicial on me. Just forget that anything unusual happened last night.”

  She didn’t like it at all, but she said, “If you say so.”

  As Vickie left the office, I wondered how long she’d sit still about this. She was a bright and aggressive kid. No reporter, she was a researcher. She delighted in digging into things and pulling out hidden facts. And how many others were in that staff plane wondering about the same thing?

  * * *

  The Beltway Plaza is a city within the city. Once the Beltway was a circumferential highway, well out in the woods, built with the idea of helping Interstate highway motorists—and truckers—get past Washington without getting entangled in city traffic.

  It immediately became a circumferential focus for new housing developments, office complexes, light industry, shopping malls, helicopter pads, truckers’ restaurants, hotels, whorehouses, banks—all the conveniences and congestions of urban living. The Beltway itself still existed; it was even a double-decked roadway now. But it was almost always jammed with everything from heavy semis delivering the daily bread to little electric hatchbacks driven by young mothers out for their shopping, hairdressing, or what-have-you.

  By 4:15 I was pacing in front of the main entrance to the Woodward Lothrop department store at the Beltway Plaza. The shopping mall was built on the highest point of the complex, a small hill, but high enough so that the aluminum
and glass of the mall dominated the walled-in apartment buildings, swimming pools, school, and hotel of the Plaza community. It was like a palace in the center of a walled city. The community was walled in with electric fences and laser intruder alarms to protect the inhabitants from the barbarians of the old, decayed areas of Greater Washington. Protect them not only from attack, but from the sight of scrawny, scruffy ghetto dwellers. Out of sight, out of mind. Except for the welfare tax bills, which got bigger every year. And the occasional violence that was usually, but not always, confined to the ghettos.

  This was one of the major problems that the Halliday Administration had attacked. And one of the reasons why the President insisted on increasing productivity as a means of stabilizing inflation. With a typical Halliday combination of compassion and ruthlessness, he knew that the economy had to keep growing in order to bring prosperity to the poor. “Turn the welfare recipients into taxpayers,” he told us. It wasn’t easy.

  The Man was battling the objections of the unions and starting urban rebuilding projects within the city ghettos, using strictly local labor. The projects were actually combinations of training programs and pride-builders. They also sapped the power of the unions, something that Halliday openly deplored because the unions were wrong to ignore the needs of the minority ethnic groups, not because it made them less effective politically.

  Anyone—man, woman, or child—caught burglarizing, mugging, or otherwise trying to redress the difference between rich and poor through violence was shipped off to construction camps in the Far West. The Man’s opponents howled that this was unconstitutional and the camps were nothing more than concentration camps. Halliday produced a long string of ecologists and psychiatrists to show that: (a) the camp internees were making positive inroads in correcting the environmental damages done by earlier strip mining, river pollution, and other ravages of the land; and (b) the internees were adjusting to this useful outdoor life, gaining some sense of responsibility and self-esteem, and saving much of the cash they were paid for their work.