The Multiple Man

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 President. 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.

Halliday’s long-term plan was to build new communities in the land the internees had reclaimed and let them settle there permanently. He insisted that returning a ghetto kid to the place where he had committed his crime was merely inviting him to commit more crimes. The psychologists were behind him on this, but a strange combination of urban political bosses, real estate manipulators, and civil libertarians had formed a coalition against the program.

They preferred to sit in their armed, walled-in enclaves and let the cities crumble. I paced back and forth across the department store’s main entrance, watching the shoppers hustle in kind out, their faces intent on buying and prices and what to do about dinner tonight. They went thinking ahead. They seldom did.

My mind had wandered so far afield that I nearly jumped out of my boots when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned to see a Secret Service security guard type, neatly dressed in a conservative suit that was probably bulging with armaments.

“The First Lady will see you on the roof of the store, sir,” he said quietly, automatically eyeing the shoppers passing by us, “near the helicopter pad.”

He quietly led me through the store. It wasn’t very crowded. Most of the Plaza housewives were on their way home now to prepare dinners for their husbands and kids. I wondered why the management maintained such a big, expensive store when anyone with a modern picture-phone and home computer could do all the shopping from bed. But then I guessed that the store was more of a showplace, a central meeting ground, an entertainment center, an excuse to get out of the house.

All this philosophizing, of course, was my feeble way of keeping me from getting all worked up about seeing Laura. Think about other things—an old Catholic remedy. But as I rode up three flights of escalators behind that Secret Service guard, I could feel my temperature rising. We went through an office area and up a flight of metal stairs, my pulse throbbing in my ears louder and louder with each step.

He opened a metal door and we stepped out onto the cement roof. A blue and white helicopter sat in the middle of the flat expanse, idle and empty. Smallish job; probably could hold no more than six. The rest of the roof was bare, unoccupied.

“Mrs. Halliday will be here in a few minutes,” the security man said. He shut the metal door, leaving me totally alone on the roof.

A decent breeze was blowing, and from up here I could see all the way across the sprawling rooftops of Greater Washington to the Monument’s spire sticking into the light blue springtime sky. Some high wispy cirrus were the only clouds, except for the contrails of jets.

I walked over to the edge of the roof, feeling like a duke standing atop a king’s palace, surveying his liege’s domain, about to have a private meeting with his queen. Dangerous business, I thought. Especially if the king doesn’t know about it.

It suddenly hit me that I was very vulnerable. Physically. Alone up here on the roof, I made an easy target for a sniper perched on any of the other rooftops around this building. I backed away from the edge. The thwap-thwap-thwap of a nearby helicopter startled me. They could get me from the air.

I could feel myself sinking into paranoid fears when the metal door opened again and three security men stepped through. I stood frozen, as if my shoes had been welded to the rooftop’s concrete. But they ignored me totally and fanned out across the roof to take up stations exactly 120 degrees apart. You didn’t need any measuring instruments to know how precise these guys were.

A half-minute passed; then the door opened again and Laura came through, followed immediately by two more guards. One stayed at the door and the other walked straight past me to the helicopter.

Laura came to where I stood, still rooted—but for another reason now. She smiled and held out her hand.

“Hello, Meric. It was good of you to come.”

This was the first time I’d seen her, close enough to talk to, to touch, since the Inauguration. And the first time I’d seen her without Halliday between us in nearly three years. She was stunning. You’ve seen her face on all the magazine covers and on television. You’ve heard beauty experts take her apart, claiming her eyes are a bit too large for the shape of her face, her cheekbones a shade too prominent, her lips thinner than they ought to be. Fuck ’em all. She was beautiful.

She gave the impression of being tall, although actually she was a head shorter than I am. (She looked taller with Halliday, for some reason.) Dark, dark hair, pulled straight back. And a slightly olive cast to her complexion that hinted of Mediterranean origins. The slim, almost boyish body of a ballet dancer. The first time we had made love, my first sight of her naked body had almost dismayed me, she looked so bony and stringy. But I quickly learned that she was soft enough. And wondrously supple.

It was awful. I felt like a kid who’d been caught jerking off in the bathroom. My throat was dry, my palms sweaty.

“Hello, Laura,” I managed to say. My voice sounded cracked and hoarse.

“You’ve put on a little weight,” she teased. “Washington life agrees with you.”

“Rubber chicken… the banquet circuit.”

She nodded and toyed with the shoulder strap of her handbag. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, very summery. No sunglasses. Her eyes were just as gray-green as ever.

“You wanted to talk to me,” I said.

She took a deliberate slow breath, like an athlete preparing herself for a supreme effort.

“Yes,” Laura said. “I know about what happened last night. And in Denver.”

“And?”

“And I know Jim has asked you to keep the entire matter hushed up.”

“We talked about it this morning, he and Wyatt and I.”

“Yes.” She looked up at me, searching my face. It was all I could do to keep my hands at my sides. “Meric… I’ve got to know where you stand on this. You might… well, it occurred to me that you might not want to keep the story quiet.”

I guess I blinked at her. “Why?”

She suddenly looked annoyed. “It’s a story that could ruin Jim. And you… the two of us before I met him…”

“Hold it,” I said. “You’re afraid that I’ll blow the story open to hurt him? Or you?”

“I know it’s wrong for me even to suggest it…”

“It sure as hell is!” I snapped. “Okay, so I’m still zonked-out over you. But what kind of a son of a bitch do you think I am? I work for The Man. I work for him.”

“I know, I know… it was stupid of me to ask. But I couldn’t help wondering… I had to hear it from you…”

“You never did understand me,” I grumbled. “You want me to swear a loyalty oath? You want to go down to a bookstore and find a stack of Bibles?”

“Don’t, Meric. That’s not fair.”

“The hell it isn’t! You had to hear it from me in person. Crap! Sounds like something His Holiness would do—him and his suspicious goddamned mind.”

Her expression changed. “I did speak with Robert about you…” She let her voice trail off.

“He put you up to this?”

She looked away from me. “I wouldn’t say it that way. But… well, I did begin to wonder about you… about how you’d react… after he spoke to me.”

“That gritty old bastard,” I fumed.

She put her hand on my arm and started making soothing sounds and offered me a ride back downtown in her chopper. I went along with her, probably wagging my tail like a puppy dog that’d just gotten a pat on its head from its mistress.

It wasn’t until I was safely back in my apartment, and the city outside had gone dark with night, that I realized Wyatt couldn’t possibly have talked with her before she called me. He and I had been together in the West Wing staff dining room when she had called.