Department of War, was usually empty. I scurried down the stairs, across an alleyway, and into the loading entrance. I wended my way through a maze of wide, empty hallways, my wing tips clicking on the hard tile floors and echoing off the walls.
Every doorway seemed dangerous. Every turn seemed pivotal. It felt like I had walked a mile before I finally saw a red, illuminated Exit sign. I rounded a corner, saw three officers chatting at a station, summoned every ounce of calm that I could find, and casually walked toward the turnstyle. One of the agents matter-of-factly buzzed me out, and I was on my way.
Out on Seventeenth Street, the luck of the skilled came through once again, this time in the form of a taxicab happening by just as I hit the curb. The elderly, grizzled driver was aggravated when I directed him to my office just a few minutes away, so I said to him, trying to lighten the mood, 'Who do you like in tomorrow's election?'
'Is there even a question?' he asked. 'Hutchins, all the way. The stock market's up. The economy's so good that even I own stocks these days. And he's honest. Look at that other creep. He lies. They all lie, I guess, but Hutchins lies less.'
Well, brace yourself, old man. Brace yourself.
In front of my office, I slipped him a fin for his time and opinion and made a dash for the front door, all, fortunately, within full view of a very friendly building security guard named Alan. I ran past him, boarded a waiting elevator, and ascended to my office, a place I had feared I would never see again.
The bureau, I was quite sure, was probably as safe a venue as any, and more comfortable than most. A writer likes familiarity. A reporter does as well. This was not a story I wanted to type from the small desk of my hotel room, nice as my hotel room might be.
By nine at night, my office was a shadowy shade of gray, with the hazy green glare of so many computer screens casting the only light across the vast room. I knew this bureau better than I knew anyplace else on Earth, yet it seemed somehow different now, eerie. Speaking out loud, I told myself I needed to calm my nerves, saying, 'You have to relax.'
Even the sound of my own voice made me jumpy, but not nearly as much as the sound I heard next, that of someone else speaking to me in the dark.
'Who are you talking to?'
The new voice made me just about leap through the ceiling. My eyes darted about the room until they came to rest on Peter Martin, sitting in the dark at a computer screen just across from mine, flipping through wire stories. 'Jesus Christ,' I said. 'You're going to scare me to death.'
'Actually, it's you who scared me. You should be at your hotel. I've been waiting here for you to call.' He paused, then said, 'Tell me what you have.'
I sat down at my computer. He drew his chair up closer, and I slowly, carefully walked him through my session in the Oval Office. I read him some Hutchins quotes that I had furiously scribbled on a legal pad just after I had left the West Wing.
After my ten-minute monologue, Martin looked stricken, as if he might get sick right there on the newsroom rug. In the heavy silence, my telephone rang, the sound crashing into our thoughts. I suspected it might be Hutchins, trying to sweeten the deal for cooperation, but when I picked up the receiver, I heard only dead air, followed by the click of someone hanging up on the other end. It made my skin crawl, even if I didn't fully appreciate or understand why.
Martin, on the other hand, seemed not even to notice. Staring not so much at me but through me, he said finally, 'You use tape?' he said.
'No.'
'You took contemporaneous notes?'
'Well, right afterward, from memory, in the briefing room on my way out the door.'
His questions made me question myself, but I had done the best I could.
I knew that much.
'Incredible,' he said, softly. 'This whole thing is incredible.' As he spoke, he leaned over and picked up the telephone. Punching out a number, he added, 'Appleton's not going to like the circumstances-your involvement when you were supposed to be sitting in your hotel, the lack of a tape recording-but I have no doubt you did exactly what you should have done.'
He talked on the telephone for a few minutes with Appleton, hung up, and said to me, 'Write something out. Appleton wants to see it before he figures out what to do. He says there are no guarantees.'
No guarantees. I wasn't sure whether this proclamation was infuriating or hilarious. Here we had the president of the United States, dead to rights, in an absolute lie that defined his entire life. I had risked my life for this story. Havlicek had lost his. And we had some pencil-pusher of an editor in chief sitting in his million-dollar house in a wealthy suburb of Boston impatiently telling us that there were no guarantees he would run the most important story in the country. Screw him, and while we're at it, screw this entire newspaper business as well. But not before I write this story and get it into print. Call me a fool, but I'd rather like to inform the voting public that the guy they were about to elect as president is a former armored car robber.
So I settled in before my computer and began to write. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, what I immodestly consider one of the best stories I've ever put together under deadline pressure. My fingers danced like magic across the keyboard. My mind clicked on more cylinders than I knew I had. It was a complex story with a very simple core: The president of the United States is not who he said he was. I wrote of the Oval Office interview, of his belief that the FBI was behind the shooting, and how the intended target was me. As promised, I talked of his successes as president and the lofty approval ratings that came along with it. I explained the 1979 Wells Fargo heist, the deal that Curtis Black struck with the U.s. attorney, his disappearance from the program in 1988.
When I was done, I punched out the number to Martin's office, where he had wandered to watch television and pace nervously while I did my work. He came out to my desk, and for fifteen minutes he sat in front of my computer in absolute silence, his fingers not typing in a single change as he paged through the story. That silence was finally broken by my ringing telephone. Again, dead air on the other line, followed by a click. I didn't like that at all. I looked suspiciously across the expanse of the bureau, at the empty chairs and the dormant computers. It all looked like some sort of barren Broadway set after the actors had long ago gone home.
'Fucking brilliant,' Martin said as I walked back to my desk. 'If we don't run this story, I don't want to be a part of this company anymore. You have my word that I'll quit.'
'Let's just all calm down,' I said. 'It's only the president and the future course of America at stake.' Neither of us laughed. 'Let me give it another quick read,' I added.
Martin stood up, told me to hurry up, and nervously walked back and forth behind me. I sat down at the terminal and scanned the words. By now, concentration was difficult. The two telephone hang-ups nagged at the core of my brain. All around me, the silence wasn't so much deafening as frightening. Outside in the hallway, a buzzer began sounding, and my stomach knotted up, until I realized it was just the facsimile machine. Another phone rang in the far corner of the bureau.
At that exact moment, the oddly melodic sound of shattering glass spilled into the room from the hallway beyond. My skin tingled from the noise and what it likely meant. Martin and I looked at each other in silence, and without a signal or a spoken word, I started walking slowly, quietly, across the room toward the door. I don't know why I got up and he stayed with the story. Probably we were just further defining our lifetime roles.
As I got halfway toward the hallway, my body so tense my arms and legs may as well have been wooden boards, the murky figure of Kent Drinker appeared in the doorway, looking much as he did that night when he emerged from the dark while I threw a ball for my dog, only here I suspected he wanted to do something more conclusive than chat. As nervous as I may have been, the very sight of him in my newsroom, daring to invade a place I always considered a sanctuary in the self-important and even corrupt culture of official Washington, made me livid-not so much defensive as emboldened.
'What are you doing here?' I yelled. It wasn't an inquiry but a warning.
He continued walking toward me, maybe fifty feet away, holding a gun in front of his chest with one hand, the barrel pointed at what I estimated to be my forehead.
'You don't fuck with me, and you don't fuck with the FBI,' he said, answering my question, even if he hadn't
