The Multiple Man

I was beginning to register normally again. Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in the chair and looked around the glareless white room. Four of McMurtrie’s men were standing around. They had nothing to do, but they looked alert and ready. One of them, closest to the door, had his pistol out and was minutely examining the action, clicking it back and forth. The ammo clip was tucked into his jacket’s breast pocket.

“Somebody’s made a double for the President,” I said to McMurtrie, with some strength in my voice now, “and your men killed him.”

He glared at me. “No such thing. We found this… man… in the alley. Just where you saw him. He was dead when those two cops stumbled over him. No identification. No marks of violence.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Just lying there stretched out in the alley.”

“The cops thought he was a drunk, except he was dressed too well. Then when they saw his face.

“No bullet wounds or needle marks or anything?”

McMurtrie said, “Go in there and examine him yourself, if you want to.”

“No, thanks.” But I found myself staring at the corpse in the misty cold chamber. He looked exactly like Halliday.

“Are you in good enough shape to walk?” McMurtrie asked me.

“I guess so.”

“And talk?”

It was my turn to glare at him. “What do you think I’m doing now?”

He grunted. It was what he did instead of laughing. “There’re a few reporters out at the front desk. The local police and two of my people are keeping them there. Somebody’s going to have to talk to them.”

I knew who somebody was. “What do I tell them? Disneyland made a copy of the President?”

“You don’t tell them a damned thing,” McMurtrie said. “But you send them home satisfied that they know why we’re here. Got it?”

I nodded. “Give’em the old Ziegler shuffle. Sure. I’ll walk on water, too. Just to impress them.”

He leaned over so that his face was close enough for me to smell his mouth freshener. “Listen to me. This is important. We cannot have the media finding out that there was an exact duplicate of the President running loose in Boston tonight.”

“He wasn’t exactly running loose,” I said.

“Not one word about it.”

“What’d he die of?”

He shrugged massively. “Don’t know. Our own medical people gave him a quick going over, but there’s no way to tell yet. We’re going to freeze him and ship him down to Klienerman at Walter Reed.”

“Before I talk to the reporters,” I said, “I want to check with The Man.”

McMurtrie grumbled just enough to stay in character, then let me use the phone. It took only a few moments to get through on the special code to the President in Air Force One. They were circling Andrews AFB, about to land. But one thing the President insists on is instant communications, wherever he is. He’s never farther away from any of his staff than the speed of light.

In the tiny screen of the desktop phone, he looked a little drawn. Not tired or worried so much as nettled, almost angry. I reviewed the situation with him very quickly.

“And McMurtrie thinks I ought to stonewall the reporters,” I concluded.

His public smile was gone. His mouth was tight. “What do you think?” he asked me.

One of Halliday’s tenets of faith had been total honesty with the press. He was damned fair to the working news people, which is one of the reasons I was attracted to him in the first place. Completely aside from Laura.

“I’m afraid he’s right, Mr. President,” I answered. “We can’t let this out… not right now.”

“Why not?”

It was a question he always asked. Working for him was a constant exercise in thinking clearly. “Because”—I thought as clearly and fast as I could—“a disclosure now would raise more questions than answers. Who is this… this double? How’d he get to look like you? And why? How did he die? And…” I hesitated.

He caught it. “And is it really James J. Halliday you’ve got cooling down in there, while I’m an imposter replacing him? Right?”

I had to agree. “That’s the biggie. And if you’re an imposter, who’re you working for?”

He grinned. “The Republicans.”

Seriously, he asked, “Meric… do you think I’m an imposter?”

“Not for a microsecond.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t be challenging me like this if you were. Besides, you’re behaving exactly the way you always behave.

He cocked his head to one side slightly, which is another of his personal little pieces of action. I had never paid much attention to it until that moment.

“All right,” he said at last. “I don’t like hiding things from the press unless there’s a damned vital reason for it.”

“This is very vital,” I said.

He agreed and then asked to speak with McMurtrie. I got up from the desk and stared again into the cold chamber. The team of green-gowned meditechs was starting to slide the corpse into the stainless-steel cylinder that would be his cryonic sarcophagus. Liquid nitrogen boil-off filled the chamber with whitish vapor. Each of the meditechs wore a face mask; I’d never be able to identify them again.

Then that one word struck me. Exactly. The man I had just spoken to on the picture-phone acted exactly like the James J. Halliday I’d known and worked for since he first started campaigning. The corpse they were sliding into that cold metal cylinder looked exactly like James J. Halliday. My knees got fluttery again.

McMurtrie came over beside me. I could see our two reflections in the glass that separated us from the cold chamber. He looked as grim as vengeance. I looked scared as shit.

“Okay, kid,” he told me. “You’re in the big leagues now. Put on a straight face and get those newsmen out of here while we ship the casket out the back way.”

One of his men walked with me up to the waiting room near the hospital’s main entrance. He was a typical McMurtrie trooper: neatly dressed, quiet and colorless to the point of invisibility. And perfectly capable of quietly, colorlessly, maybe even bloodlessly, killing a man. It was something to think about.

Len Ryan was among the news people in the waiting room. There were eleven of them, a modern baker’s dozen, sitting on the worn and tired-looking plastic chairs, talking and joking with one another when I walked in. Ryan was off in a corner by himself, writing in a thick notebook. He threw me a look that was halfway between suspicion and contempt.

“Don’t any of the news chicks in this town work late anymore?” I cracked, putting on my professional smile.

“They were all at the airport interviewing the First Lady,” said the guy nearest me. He was grossly overweight, not the type you’d expect to chase ambulances. I hadn’t known him when I’d worked for the Globe, but he looked older than I. New in town, I figured.

It was a small room. I stepped into it a few paces and they all stood up expectantly. The floor tiles had been patterned once, but now the colors were all but obliterated from years of people’s frightened, weary pacing. The lights were too bright. The heat was up too high. Through the two sealed windows I could see cars whizzing by on Storrow Drive, and the river beyond them, and MIT beyond the river. I wished I could be out there someplace, anyplace, away from here.

“What’s going on, Meric?” asked Max Freid of UPI. We used to call him “Hotdog Max,” because he was always shooting for the spectacular story. “Why all the hustle with the Secret Service? Who’s the stiff?”

“Take it easy,” I said, making slowdown motions with my hands. “Don’t get yourselves excited. Apparently some wino staggered into the alley behind Faneuil Hall tonight and keeled over from a heart attack.”McMurtrie can arrange with the local FBI office to slip a real wino who really died tonight into the Mass General files. “The police patrolling the area found him and alerted the President’s security team. They are very protective guys, as you may have noticed, and they had the body shipped here immediately.