'No. In person. Meet me in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in twenty minutes. And just so you know, I've already written everything I know down and passed it on to my superiors. Don't fuck with me. It won't do anyone any good.'
Maybe it was rude to leave him hanging in a hotel lobby on the night before this historic election. But maybe it was ruder still to kill Havlicek in cold blood, and try to kill me. Screw him.
I paused and ran my fingers over a picture I had in my luggage of Katherine, eight months pregnant, sitting at our patio table, her chin resting on the palm of her right hand, smiling at me. 'This is it,' I whispered. Then I snuck out the back, through the kitchen.
It was after dusk, chilly. I scanned the parked cars, checking to see if any of them pulled out and followed me as I walked, but none did. I had the feeling that death waited around every corner. I headed down Sixteenth Street with a baseball cap pulled low over my head and flanked by the two gentlemen I had assigned to protect me. I ducked into the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. I sat at the bar, ordered a Coca-Cola, and wrote out the lead to my story dozens of times on the keyboard of my mind, glancing constantly at the door all the while.
About forty minutes later, out the tall windows, I could see Marine One descending from the sky and disappearing from view to land on the South Lawn. One more time, I pulled my cap low, and hurried straight across the park at a pace that was closer to a trot than a walk. At any minute, I felt, my life could end. I also felt as if my destiny was out of my hands.
I arrived at the northwest gate, where I flashed my badge to a Secret Service agent. I felt safe on the White House grounds, maybe wrongly.
The agent buzzed me in with a bored nod. An interview like never before.
Truth be known, I didn't have anything close to what I needed to get this story into print. Like I said, I had the word of two admitted felons, one of whom was dead. I don't think even the National Enquirer would go to bed with this one.
So what I needed here, like a good cop trying to create an airtight case, was a confession. And just as a good detective uses the power of the law to scare the bejesus out of suspects, I needed to use the power of the written word to intimidate a president on the verge of his own election. I needed him to think that his fate had already been decided, at least in terms of the coverage in the Boston Record. I needed him to think about the inevitable onslaught to come, the media maelstrom that would follow my story, the classic feeding frenzy from which there would be no escape. I needed him to believe that the best and perhaps only way out was an honest admission of fault.
When I was led into the Oval Office, Hutchins was sitting at his desk in shirtsleeves and a crisp red tie loosened at his neck, the top button undone. He was alone. Dozens and dozens of lawyers and dozens more political advisers and newly minted friends in every corner of official Washington, and he chose on this evening to handle this topic alone, just as I suspected he would. That, in itself, was interesting.
He held a heavy lowball glass in his hand, and the glass was filled with about three fingers' worth of what looked to be whisky and ice.
As I sat in a chair in front of his desk, he nervously slid the glass around, causing the cubes to smash softly against each other. He brought the glass up to his face and absently took a sip.
'You believe in redemption?' he asked me, his voice deep, animated, breaking the heavy silence like a clap of thunder.
I considered that question for a moment and replied, 'I do, sir.
There's something very human about it, something almost moral, and something uniquely American. We have the right to screw up. More important, we have the right to another chance, at least in most cases.'
He pondered that for a minute, shook the ice around in his glass again, and took another sip.
'It's election eve,' he said, looking me in the eye. 'My pollsters informed me this afternoon that I'm going to win. You care for a celebratory Scotch?'
Why not? Create a mood of confidence, two men exchanging secrets. 'If it's convenient, sir.'
He pressed a button on the side of his desk, and a dark-skinned steward, Indian-looking, came silently through a side door. 'Raj, get my friend a Johnnie Walker, please,' Hutchins said. To me, 'Rocks or no rocks?'
'No ice.'
'Neat,' he said to the steward, who turned and walked quietly out the door he came in. Hutchins called out after him, 'Make it a double, Raj. We're celebrating.'
After I got my drink, Hutchins bore into me with his eyes. 'I watched you guys go after my opponent early in the campaign. Christ, what did he do? Fudge some information on his mortgage application or something ten years ago, and you guys try taking him down, try ruining his political career. You were throwing around half-truths and nontruths and buying into anything you were fed. I thought it was sickening then, but it helped me, so I kept my mouth shut. The guy, he wins his party's nomination. He's sacrificing his time, his livelihood, his fucking reputation. He's on the doorstep of the White House, for God's sakes. He's campaigning all over the country twenty hours a day for something he believes in, even if that something is only himself.
Christ, he should be applauded. He's part of the elite. And you guys won't cut him a break.' He paused and laughed a breathy, bittersweet laugh to himself.
He looked down at his drink, took another sip, and continued. 'And now here I am. I'm on the verge of winning the election. I'm going to get my own four-year term. Things are going all right. We're getting a good team in place, even if you're not on it. The economy's doing well. Wall Street breaks a new record every other day. And you guys, you're bored. You're fucking bored. You need something else, something to get your teeth into. So you turn on me because that's just what you do. You can't help yourselves.'
He stared at me. Maybe glare is a more appropriate word. I stared back. That's easy to do when you're in the right. He eventually averted his eyes, giving me some small victory. He said, decisively,
'All right, tell me what you think you know.'
I took my own sip of Scotch. I don't particularly like whisky on the best of days, but the taste seemed especially harsh tonight, almost medicinal.
After grimacing, I showed him all my cards. It was coming up on 8:00
P.m. and I didn't have the time or the creativity to do anything cute.
'Sir,' I said, 'you are living under an alias. You were born Curtis Black. You were a convict in Massachusetts. You turned government's witness. You were relocated under the federal witness protection program under the name of Tony Clawson. After being in the program for eight or nine years, you switched names a second time, to Clayton Hutchins. Through a combination of luck, timing, and skill, you have risen to the top of the world.'
This time, he laughed a devilish laugh, then leaned back in his high-backed leather chair. 'I'm the fucking president of the United States, young man. President Clayton Hutchins. What you have is some cockamamy story that's probably been put out by my political opponents in a final, desperate attempt to defeat me. You're embarrassing yourself by even bringing it up.'
If that was true, what was he doing sitting here with me alone in the Oval Office on election eve drinking a Scotch whisky?
'Sir,' I said, always talking to him in that formal way, 'I have two men involved in the armored car heist on the record-'
'Bullshit,' he said harshly, leaning forward this time. 'Armored car heist? There's no fucking armored car heist. You've been set up, by my opponent or someone who is desperate to make sure I don't win.
Check my fucking biography. I was never involved in any fucking armored car heist.'
He was pursuing the precise strategy that I feared the most-a hard-and-fast denial, followed, no doubt, by complete inaccessibility, at least long enough to be elected president the next day. Basically, what he was doing was issuing a challenge, daring me to go with the information I had, which he realized was pretty damned flimsy. His arguments would be almost identical to the ones I would hear from the paper's editors, from Martin to Appleton, as they tried to protect the institution from libel and shame.
There are a lot of reporters, mind you, who are all too willing to stretch their information in stories, to make supposition appear as fact with a few careful twists of phrases and subtle caveats. I'm as willing as anyone to stretch my information, but I do it before I write the story, like now, as a device to achieve the truth.
'Sir,' I said, 'we have a source, someone familiar with your transition into the witness protection program,
