“Where you going?”
I tried to imitate Alex’s accent as best I could. “Gotta get Mr. Kent’s pree-scription.” And I made a booze- swilling motion that helped to hide my face.
He grinned and reached into the gate booth. The bar swung up and I drove out onto the avenue, very careful not to squeal the tires. I parked at the cab stand, left the cap and jacket on the front seat of the car, and took one of the cabs.
“You ain’t supposed to park there,” the cabbie said as I opened the rear door.
I ducked inside. “It’s a joke I’m playing on a friend,” I said.
His black face, staring back at me in the mirror, wasn’t at all amused. “Some joke,” he grunted.
The crowd around the Capitol was so huge that the traffic cops wouldn’t let us get within five blocks of the Hill. Or stop. They kept waving us on, until we were detoured down Virginia Avenue, halfway to the goddamned Navy Yard. The driver fumed and grumbled up front while I fumed and fretted in the darkness of the back seat.
He wormed through endless lines of parked buses up along Sixth Street Southeast and got as close as the Library of Congress Annex. The police had sawhorses and fire trucks blocking off the streets beyond there.
“Close as I can get,” the driver said.
I gave him a twenty. “It’ll do.” I felt a little annoyed that he didn’t even go through the pretense of trying to make change.
I walked through the soft night air past an empty fire truck, toward the library’s main building a couple of blocks away. There wasn’t much of a crowd down here, but there were lots of people milling around, clustered in little groups on the corners, sitting on the curbs. Young people mostly, kids, black and white mixed. Normally, in this particular neighborhood, the streets are abandoned after dark. Too dangerous. But not tonight. These out-of- towners were strong enough in numbers to provide their own safety.
Their older peers were out in front of the Capitol, peaceably assembled—as the First Amendment puts it—to seek redress of grievances. These kids had just come along for the ride. And to be thrown in the front lines by their elders if it looked like a clash with the police or Army was coming up.
But the President was taking the venom out of the throng. There’d be no bloody confrontation; he’d turned it into a question-and-answer session, air your gripes, come to me all ye who labor and are hard pressed. He was good at it. James John, that is. Back at the White House was that other one, the one who’d phoned me, the one who had Vickie and was going to try to kill Johnny. And me.
I got a couple of odd looks from the kids as I purposefully walked toward the library’s main building. I obviously wasn’t one of them. Wrong uniform: business slacks and shirtjac instead of glitterpants and vest. Wrong age. Wrong attitude. But they didn’t bother me.
The guard at the library’s side entrance did. He was in
“The building is closed, sir,” he said, very politely and steel hard.
I pulled rank. Dug out my ID and said, “I’ve got to get to the President, and the crowd’s too thick up front of the Capitol. Thought I’d go through the slideway tunnel.”
He bucked me upstairs. Called his sergeant on his helmet radio. The police sergeant came up and offered to provide me with an escort to get me through the crowd in front of the President. I declined. “Don’t want to make that much of a disturbance in front of The Man,” I said. Actually, I didn’t want to call that much attention to myself. I might be a clay pigeon, but there was no sense painting myself dayglo orange.
The sergeant called a captain who finally relented and personally escorted me into the library, down to the connecting tunnel and along the rubbery moving belt that slid us both to the Capitol building. Secret Service men were prowling around the slideway’s terminal area, and I had to show my ID again and go through a security arch to prove who—and how unarmed—I was.
The guy in charge of the security detail looked so much like McMurtrie that I wondered if they had cloned Secret Service men, too. He took me in tow and waved the police captain back to his post.
“The Capitol building is sealed shut against visitors,” he said as we rode the elevator up to the main rotunda.
“Good,” I said, wondering if this guy knew that there was a brigade of men just like him who were looking for me.
“The President didn’t inform us that he expected his press secretary to meet him here,” he said suspiciously.
“It’s a hectic evening. None of us has planned much of this in advance.”
He accepted that, although it was clear he didn’t like it. Unplanned events such as sudden decisions to address large crowds informally, and having visitors like the press secretary drop into a cleared area, made him unhappy. Good. That meant he wasn’t in on the plan to get me. I hoped.
We stepped out of the elevator into the vast, empty, echoing rotunda, our footsteps clicking hollowly on the floor. It was only partially lit; you could see your way across the floor all right, and up in the dome, Brumidi’s blasphemous painting—turning Washington into a small-time rococo Italian saint—was all too visible. But the galleries that ringed the dome, several tiers up, were darkened.
“I’ll have to ask you to stay in the rotunda area,” the security man told me. “We’ve sealed off the rest of the building. The President will come back here when he’s finished speaking to the crowd.”
I nodded, just as the crowd gave a cheering roar. It sounded almost like booming surf inside the rotunda.
Although the main expanse of the rotunda’s floor was empty, there were knots of well-tailored men and women at every corridor leading out. It felt a little eerie, having the whole damned place to myself, with no tourists clicking their cameras, no troops of Scouts goggle-eyeing their way around, nobody bumping into you, no tour guides talking about marble or historic events or the problems of painting the inside of the dome so that the picture showed proper perspective from the floor.
I glanced up at Old George. He looked kind of uncomfortable up there in rococo heaven. I felt damned uncomfortable down here on the modern earth. And exposed. This wasn’t what I had planned on at all.
And then I noticed that I wasn’t alone. Sitting on a bench near the bronze of crusty old Andy Jackson was General Halliday. Alone.
I went to him.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked, without preliminaries.
“Hiding.” I sat down beside him.
He gave me a sour look.
“One of your boys is out to get me.”
“You’ve got a hell of an imagination.”
“He phoned me this evening. Said they’ve taken my assistant prisoner. There was a goon squad waiting for me at my apartment building.”
The General shook his head disbelievingly.
“If you’re lucky,” I said, the heat rising in me, “you could get to see a real Western-style shootout right here in the rotunda. His goon squad against John’s security force. Maybe we ought to buy score cards…”
“Don’t be an idiot, Albano,” the General said. “If he wants to nail you, he won’t do it that way.”
“Whose side are you on?” I asked him.
He just looked at me.
“You know which of them is killing the others. Do you want to let him succeed or stop him? Or are you content to let ‘survival of the fittest’ be the rule, and go along with whoever’s left?”
His expression didn’t change or soften in the slightest. But his voice sank to a whisper. “I wish to hell I knew what to do.”
“If I make it through the night, I’m going to give the whole story to the press,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
“Then my guess is that you won’t make it through the night.”
“That’s why I want to stick close to John.”
“Why him?”
“He was talking with the crowd when his brother called me. So it can’t be him.”
