Chapter 19
At seven o’clock that same Saturday morning, Hamilton Keyes, the courtly CIA careerist, had received a wake-up call summoning him to Langley for an emergency meeting at nine. When he arrived at 8:45, another caller informed him the meeting had been postponed until noon.
Keyes’s office phone rang again at 11:45 A.M., and yet a different caller told him, without apology or explanation, that the meeting wouldn’t be held until three that afternoon, or possibly even four. It was then that Keyes recognized the nearby sound of the woodman’s ax in the bureaucratic forest.
Just to make certain, Keyes made two brief phone calls and, once they were completed, began removing all personal effects from his 137-year-old rosewood desk and placing them in his own 105-year-old walnut wastebasket. With that done, he uncapped a fountain pen, wrote the date at the top of a sheet of personal stationery and began a letter of resignation.
The meeting finally took place at 4:07 P.M. just as the snow that had been falling on Berryville since before noon finally reached Washington and its suburbs. Keyes was confident that the forecast of six to seven inches of snow would not only shorten his meeting, but also ruin God knows how many carefully planned dinner parties, including the one his wife was giving.
The office Keyes entered was on the same floor as his own. But even though it was appreciably larger than his, it contained only a gray metal desk, a standard high-backed swivel chair, a telephone and a single visitor’s chair, which was armless. Keyes immediately understood the sparse furnishings were meant to alert him that he had indeed been summoned to the den of bad news.
A man in his late forties sat behind the desk, a telephone pressed to his left ear. As the man listened impassively to whatever the voice on the phone had to say, he flicked his eyes from Keyes to the lone visitor’s chair. Keyes took it as an invitation and sat down.
Although they had never met, Keyes knew the man’s background, reputation and, of course, his name, C. Robert Pall. He also remembered that the C. stood for Clair; that Pall held a doctorate in economics from Chicago and had served three terms as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania until being trounced in 1986. Before serving in Congress, Pall had taught at Stanford and the Wharton School; summered at a number of prosperous think tanks; written a couple of The-End-Is-Nigh books; and, less than two years ago, signed on with the Bush campaign as what Pall himself had called its “token troglodyte.”
The man with the phone to his ear had one of those curiously sweet round faces in which almost everything pointed up—his nose, the corners of his mouth, the outer ends of the dark thickets that were his eyebrows— everything except his backsliding chin that was poorly camouflaged by a short patchy beard the color of ginger.
After nearly thirty seconds of listening, Pall finally spoke into the phone and ended the one-sided conversation with, “Sorry, Larry, but there’s not one goddamn thing I can do about it.” After putting the phone down, he smiled at Keyes without displaying any teeth and said, “You must be Hamilton Keyes. I’m Bob Pall, the FNG.”
Although the acronym was hopelessly inappropriate and dated back at least twenty years to Vietnam and Laos, Keyes nodded politely and said, “The Fucking New Guy.”
Pall enlarged the smile to reveal a top row of light gray teeth. “You wanta beat around the bush awhile or what?”
Keyes looked at his watch. “Not really. I presume the White House sent you out to do the deed?”
Pall stopped smiling and nodded, serious now, even grave. “We’ve got a whole lot of past-due bills, political stuff, and we need your slot and some others to pay ’em off with. Nothing personal. Fact is, everybody I’ve talked to says you do one hell of a job.”
After acknowledging the compliment with a slight smile that vanished almost instantly, Keyes removed the sealed envelope that contained the letter he had written and placed it on the desk.
Frowning at the unexpected, Pall picked up the envelope, used a thumb to rip it open, fumbled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and read the letter with a glance. His frown disappeared. “Okay. Great. You’re talking early retirement.” He looked up from the letter. “But, hey, there’s no big rush. Next week, the week after, that’ll be soon enough.”
“I see no reason to prolong things.”
“What about the hand-over?”
“Everything my successor needs is in the files and he’ll probably be ecstatic that I’m no longer underfoot.”
Pall rose with a grin that displayed most of the light gray teeth. “After listening to sniffles all day from a bunch of crybabies, it’s a treat to run across a grown-up.” He held out his hand and added, “Anything else you’d like to mention?”
“I don’t believe so,” Keyes said, shook the offered hand, nodded a cordial good-bye, turned, headed for the door, then turned back. “There might be one thing not yet in the files.”
“What?”
“The Steady Haynes manuscript.”
Pall sat down slowly in the swivel chair and leaned back, his mouth now pursed, his small greenish eyes alert and wary. “Tell me,” he said.
It took the still standing Hamilton Keyes not quite three minutes to give a thumbnail sketch of the late Steadfast Haynes and tell of Isabelle Gelinet’s initial blackmail call; the burial at Arlington; Gelinet’s death; and of his own and someone else’s subsequent attempts to buy all rights to the Haynes manuscript from the dead man’s son.
“Sit down, fella,” Pall said.
Keyes resumed his seat in the armless chair.
“Okay,” Pall said. “Once again, nice and slow, step by step, from the beginning.”
Keyes led him through it again with a still precise but much more detailed summary that left Pall pink-faced,
