me.”
“I will,” I snapped at him. “I sure as hell will!”
THREE
It should have seemed like a bad dream the next morning. I awoke with the sunlight streaming through my bedroom window. Rock Creek Park was green and leafy out there. In Washington, April is almost summertime. The cherry trees were in bloom along the Tidal Basin and up Fourteenth Street. The sky was clear and bright blue.
But I still felt lousy. Not just from having only a few hours’ sleep. I was scared.
None of the staff had offices in the White House anymore. Even though Halliday kept a very small staff, compared to any President since Truman, he still insisted on keeping the White House exclusively to himself. Why he and Laura needed the entire executive mansion was the object of a lot of snide talk in Washington. It had been a source of smutty jokes during the first few months of Halliday’s Administration. But then he began hitting his stride as President and started giving people the best damned government they’d had in a generation. The jokes died away. As the stock market climbed, inflation leveled off, and some headway was made even on the stubborn unemployment figures, jokes about Halliday went from nasty to nice. He was beloved by all.
But he still wouldn’t let any of us set up shop in the White House. Security was the unspoken byword. Thinking back on all the Presidents and candidates who’d been shot over the years, who could blame him? It seemed to be his only quirk; he was damned tight about his personal security. And privacy.
Every morning, for example, I went through our daily press briefing on the phone with The Man. I sat in my office and we reviewed the day’s news over the picture-phone. Then I’d go down and give the morning briefing to the Washington press corps. I hardly ever went to the White House. None of us did. We talked with the President through the picture-phones. Some days he was light and jovial. Some days he was tense and critical. Once or twice he was downright bitchy at us, especially when we had to face bad economic news. But it was a very rare day when he asked one of us to the White House for a face-to-face discussion. “We all work for the phone company,” was a common song in our offices.
The staff was housed in offices in the buildingsright around the White House. Mine was in the Aztec Temple. We called it that because it was heated and cooled entirely by solar energy, a demonstration project of the Department of Energy. It was shaped like a stepped-back pyramid, to make as many sun-catching surfaces as possible. And it worked pretty well, too, except that the place got chillier than hell in deep winter. And the slightest covering of snow shut down the solar panels completely. We got more snow holidays than the local school kids did.
My office was cool and dry when I got into it; the air conditioning was working fine. But I barely noticed. While Greta brought me my morning coffee and situation reports, and made her usual motherly noises about the bags under my eyes and getting the sleep I need, I punched the phone keyboard.
It takes a few minutes to go up the White House ladder, even for the President’s press secretary. I leaned back in my desk chair, flicked on the network channels on five of the TV screens that made the far wall of my office look like an insect’s eye, and took a cautious sip of the steaming black coffee.
Sure enough, I burned my tongue. All five of the morning news programs were talking about things other than last night’s excitement in Boston. I had the sound off, of course. Some of the electronics smart boys had rigged the screens with printouts that spelled out what the people on the screens were mouthing. I often thought that if everybody’s home TV worked that way, without the noise, we’d all be a lot saner.
The newscasters were showing the latest fighting in Kuwait, complete with sky-high pillars of oily black smoke making a damned expensive background for a squad of Iranian air-cushion armored personnel carriers. Then they all switched to the President’s speech in Boston. But not one word about the body in the alley.
Robert H. H. Wyatt appeared on my phone screen.
“Good morning, Meric. How are you today?”
“Rotten,” I told him. “I’ve got to see The Man. Now. If not sooner.”
Nothing ever surprised or ruffled old Robert. He sat there for a moment, and the only thing happening to convince you he wasn’t a wax statue was the barely detectable throbbing of a bluish vein in his gleaming bald head.
“You’ll have your regular news review at…”
“Robert,” I snapped, “turn your scrambler on, please.”
He blinked once, and I saw his shoulders move. His hands were out of the screen’s view. I flicked on the scrambler at my end, and the little phone screen flickered briefly. Then the picture steadied again.
Before His Holiness could say anything, I popped, “Robert, you know what happened last night.”
“Last night?”
To hell with it. I knew he knew. I was certain of it. He’s closer to the President than McMurtrie or me or any of his staffers. He’s the President’s surrogate father, for Christ’s sake.
“A body was found in the alley behind Faneuil Hall. It looked exactly like James J. Halliday. I mean
His face went dead white. Wyatt had never seemed too strong; he was frail and slow-moving and he always had a pale, waxy look to him. But the last hint of color drained from his face. His left eye ticked uncontrollably, several times.
“Last night, you say?” His voice was barely audible.
“You didn’t know about it?”
“Not this one.”
“I’ve got to see the President,” I said again. “This is too big to keep out of the news indefinitely. If there’s a plot to slip a double into his place… or if they’ve already…”
“They?” The strength flowed back into him. He frowned at me. “What do you mean
“How the hell do I know? The Russians. The Chinese. The Saudis. Somebody’s trying to get a man who looks exactly like the President into places where the President is. Who and why?”
He said firmly, “That’s a matter for the internal security people, not the press secretary.”
I made my voice as stubborn as his. “Robert, sooner or later I’m going to have to either tell what I know to the press, or try to hide this from them. I won’t act in the dark; I’m not going to be a trained parrot. I want to see The Man this morning. I want to make sure that he’s the same man I agreed to work for.”
His mouth opened, but no words came out. Not for several seconds. Finally he glanced down for a moment, then looked back at me and said, “Eleven forty-five. The Vice-President will be in with him, too, but I suppose it’s a matter that you should participate in with them. And then you can stay for a few minutes after the Vice-President leaves.”
I nodded. “Oval Office?”
“Yes.”
Visitors to the White House go in through the East Wing and are guided past the showy open rooms on the ground and first floors: the library, the diplomatic reception room, the East Room, the Green Room, that stuff. The President’s Oval Office is on the other side of the mansion, in the West Wing, overlooking the Rose Garden. No tourists.
There was the predictable line of tourists winding all the way around the block and disappearing behind the tree-shaded curve of South Executive Avenue. I could see them from my office window. Somehow, even this early in the day, they looked worn and bedraggled, kids whining, heat making their tempers short. They looked like a line of refugees whose only sacred possessions were cameras and souvenir balloons.
I took the underground slideway to the White House. It saved time and aggravation. There was a uniformed Marine Corps guard at the basement entrance to the slideway in my building; a half-dozen or more of them in
