something more involved. Something I couldn’t see. As yet.
I thought about calling Vickie to talk it over with her. But I decided against it. No sense getting her more involved than she was, either with the White House power struggle or with me, personally.
So I ate my aluminum-wrapped dinner alone, drank the better part of a liter of Argentinian red, and trundled off to sleep on crisp clean sheets. Slept damned well, too, for a change.
Monday morning I got to the office a little earlier than usual. The lobby of the Aztec Temple was still mostly empty; the big rush crowd was a half-hour behind me. I took my usual elevator. Just as the doors started to close, another man stepped in, slipping sideways to avoid the rubber-edged doors.
“Close call,” I said to him.
He nodded and mumbled something unintelligible.
I watched the numbers flicking by on the indicator lights. Halfway up to my floor, he said:
“You’re Mr. Albano, aren’t you? The Presidential press secretary?”
“That’s right… Have we met?”
He shook his head as he extended his hand. I thought he wanted to shake hands, but instead he put a scrap of paper into my palm. I stared down at it. Penciled on it was: “Hogate’s: 5:15 today.”
As I looked up at the man again, he was punching the button for a floor below mine. “What in hell is this?” I asked him.
The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.
“Be there,” he said as he stepped out.
The doors slid shut before I could say anything else. The elevator went on up to my floor. I got off, thinking to myself,
It was a busy morning. My picture-phone briefing with the President was spent going over the Kuwait situation and the upcoming reorganization of the State Department. So the press corps, when I gave them the morning rundown, spent damned near an hour asking about the Neo-Luddites and their impending march on Washington. Lazar’s peace mission to Detroit had flopped, and for the moment the Middle East was pushed into the background.
Right after that I hustled over to the Oval Office for a face-to-face planning session about the President’s upcoming press conference, which was due that Wednesday evening.
The Man was in his charming mood, relaxed, bantering with Wyatt and Frank Robinson, one of his speechwriters. We worked out an opening statement, dealing mainly with the new tax proposals he hoped to get through Congress before the summer recess. Since the package included cuts in personal income taxes, there were damned few Congressmen who’d take a strong stand against it. But since it also included selected increases in some corporate taxes, we knew they’d try to amend it to death. The President wanted to use his Wednesday press conference as a forum to forestall that kind of maneuvering.
“Go straight to the people,” The Man told us. “Tell them what you want to do, openly and honestly. They’ll recognize what’s good for them and lean on their Congress persons to get the job done. It’s the President’s task to get the people to think of the nation as a whole, instead of their own individual little interests. That’s what we’ve got to do with every public utterance we make.”
I glanced over at Wyatt.
I was late for my monthly lunch with the Washington press corps. It was at the Van Trayer Hotel, on the site of the old Griffith Stadium in the northeast section of the District. People had called it “Van Trayer’s Folly” when he built the hotel and shopping complex in the heart of the burned-out ghetto a dozen years earlier. But with Government help, that whole section of town was reborn and blossomed into an interracial, moderate-to-high- income community within the city. Very nice residential area now. The ghetto slums hadn’t disappeared, of course; they’d just moved downtown, to the old shopping and theater areas.
Len Ryan was at the luncheon, a guest of one of the Washington TV stations.
I had to introduce the main speaker, a florid-faced publisher from the West Coast who had started his meteoric rise to riches with the first three-dimensional girlie magazine and now was an outspoken champion of “freedom of the press” and the “right of free expression.” The Supreme Court was reviewing his case; the state of Utah had tried to lock him up for pornography.
Ryan and I shared my official car back to the office, laughing at the guy’s speech all the way. But once we got into my office and he unlimbered his tape recorder and Greta brought in a couple of frosty beers, Ryan got serious.
“I ought to be sore at you,” he said, making something of a youthful scowl.
“Why? What’d I do?”
“I went down to Camp David Saturday, on my way down here…”
“Oh, crap, I didn’t know. We alerted your paper’s local office…”
Ryan took a long pull of his beer, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, thumping the half empty mug on my desk. “The thing that bugs me is that you gave everybody the wrong poop.”
I blinked. “Say again?”
“You put out the word that the President was staying in the White House all weekend. But he was actually having a secret conference in Camp David with the top Pentagon brass.”
“Don’t kid me, son,” I said. But my stomach was starting to feel hollow. “You couldn’t get close enough to see him if he was there, and he wasn’t there in the first place.”
“Wrong on both counts.” Ryan leaned over and delved into the quarter-ton leather carrysack that he had brought with him. Out came a camera with a foot-long lens attachment.
“Electronic booster,” he said. “Japanese. I could get close-ups of guys walking on the moon with this.”
I tried to hide behind my beer mug.
“I figured something screwy was going on when the guards wouldn’t even let me turn off the road,” Ryan said, with a smug smile on his face. “They told me the President wasn’t there—”
“He wasn’t.”
“But the word before I’d left Boston was that he’d be at Camp David all weekend.”
“He changed his mind at the last minute.”
“Yeah? Well, driving up to the camp, I saw enough helicopters—Army, mostly—to make it look like the place was being invaded.”
My stomach lurched at that word.
Ryan was cheerfully oblivious to my distress. “Anyway, I figured something big was going on. So I drove a mile or so up the road, parked the car, and climbed a tree.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Couldn’t see much, but I got this one shot… He pulled a three-by-five photograph from his pocket. Black and white. Handed it to me.
It was fuzzy, but it showed four men duck-walking out from under an Army helicopter’s whirling rotors. Off to one side of the picture, three other men were standing waiting for them. The tallest one looked a helluva lot like James J. Halliday.
“Can’t really see his face,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “But you can see the stars on those generals’ shoulders. And when they came up to that man they saluted him, like he was the Commander-in-Chief.”
I shook my head, but without much enthusiasm. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
