Debt of Honor

notation on that. 'Anyway, they came to stay. That's for damned sure,' he said, heading for the table and his Special K, wishing for three eggs up, bacon, white-bread toast with butter, hash-browns, and all the cholesterol that went with it. Damn turning fifty!

'What about me?' the engineer asked.'I seen you pass for a local. I sure as hell can't.'

'Pete, you're my charter, and I'm the captain, okay? I am responsible for your safety. That's the law of the sea, sir.'

'We're not at sea anymore,' Burroughs pointed out.

Oreza was annoyed by the truth of the observation. 'My daughter's the lawyer. I try to keep things simple. Eat your breakfast. I need some sleep, and you have to take over the forenoon watch.'

'What about me?' Mrs. Oreza asked.

'If you don't show up for work—'

'—somebody will wonder why.'

'It'll be nice to know if they told the truth about the cops who got shot,' her husband went on. 'I've been up all night, Izz. I haven't heard a single shot. Every crossroads seems to be manned, but they're not doing anything to anybody.' He paused. 'I don't like it either, honey. One way or another we have to deal with it.'

'Did you do it, Ed?' Durling asked bluntly, his eyes boring in on his Vice President. He cursed the man for forcing him to deal with one more problem among the multiple crises hanging over his presidency now. But the Post piece gave him no choice.

'Why are you hanging me out to dry? Why didn't you at least warn me of this?'

The President waved around the Oval Office. 'There are a lot of limits you can do in here and there are things you can't do. One of them is to interfere with a criminal investigation.'

'Don't give me that! A lot of people have—'

'Yeah, and they all paid a price for it, too.' It's not my ass that needs to be covered, Roger Durling didn't say. I'm not risking mine for yours. 'You didn't answer my question.'

'Look, Roger!' Ed Kealty snarled back. The President stopped him with a raised hand and a quiet voice.

'Ed, I have an economy in meltdown. I have dead sailors in the Pacific Ocean. I can't spare the energy for this. I can't spare the political capital. I can't spare the time. Answer my question,' Durling commanded.

The Vice President flushed, his head snapping to the right before he spoke. 'All right, I like women. I've never hidden that from anyone. My wife and I have an understanding.' His head came back. 'But I have never, NEVER molested, assaulted, raped, or forced myself on anybody in my whole fucking life. Never. I don't have to.'

'Lisa Beringer?' Durling said, consulting his notes for the name.

'She was a sweet thing, very bright, very sincere, and she begged me to—well, you can guess. I explained to her that I couldn't. I was up for re-election that year, and besides she was too young. She deserved somebody her age to marry and give her kids and a good life. She took it hard, started drinking—maybe something else, but I don't think so. Anyway, one night she headed off on the Beltway and lost it, Roger. I was there for the funeral. I still talk with her parents. Well,' Kealty said, 'not lately, I guess.'

'She left a note, a letter behind.'

'More than one.' Kealty reached into his coat pocket and handed two envelopes over. 'I'm surprised nobody noticed the date on the one the FBI has. Ten days before her death. This one is a week later, and this one is the day she was killed. My staff found them. I suppose Barbara Linders found the other one. None were ever mailed. I think you'll find some differences between them, all three, as a matter of fact.'

'The Linders girl says that you—'

'Drugged her?' Kealty shook his head. 'You know about my drinking problem, you knew it when you asked me in. Yeah, I'm an alcoholic, but I had my last drink two years ago.' A crooked smile. 'My sex life is even better now. Back to Barbara. She was sick that day, the flu. She went to the pharmacy on the Hill and got a prescription, and —'

'How do you know that?'

'Maybe I keep a diary. Maybe I just have a good memory. Either way, I know the date this happened. Maybe one of my staffers checked the records of the pharmacy, and maybe the medication she took had a label on the bottle, one that says don't drink while using these capsules. I didn't know that, Roger. When I have a cold—well, back then, anyway, I used brandy. Hell,' Kealty admitted, 'I used booze for a lot of things. So I gave some to her, and she became very cooperative. A little too cooperative, I suppose, but I was half in the bag myself, and I figured it was just my well-known charm.'

'So what are you telling me? You're not guilty?'

'You want to say I'm an alley cat, can't keep it zipped? Yeah, I guess so. I've been to priests, to doctors, to a clinic once—covering that up was some task. Finally I went to the head of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. They think there's a part of the brain that regulates our drives, just a theory, but a good one. It goes along with hyperactivity. I was a hyperactive child. I still don't ever sleep more than six hours a night. Roger, I am all those things, but I am not a rapist.'

So there it was, Durling thought. Not a lawyer himself, he had appointed, consulted, and heard enough of them to know what he'd been told. Kealty could defend himself on two grounds: that the evidence against him was more equivocal than the investigators imagined, and that it wasn't really his fault. The President wondered which of the defenses might be true. Neither? One? Both?

'So what are you going to do?' he asked the Vice President, using much the same voice he'd summoned a few hours earlier for the Ambassador from Japan. He was increasingly sympathetic with the man sitting across from him, in spite of himself. What if the guy really was telling the truth? How could he know —and that was what the jury would say, after all, if it got that far; and if a jury would think that, then what would the Judiciary hearings be like? Kealty still had a lot of markers out on the Hill.

'Somehow I just don't think anyone's going to print up DURLING/KEALTY bumper stickers this summer, right?' The question came with a smile of sorts.

'Not if I have anything to say about it,' the President confirmed, cold again. This wasn't a time for humor.

'I don't want to hurt you, Roger. I did two days ago. If you'd warned me, I could have told you these things sooner, saved everybody a lot of time and trouble. Including Barbara. I lost track of her. She's very good on civil- rights stuff, a good head on her, and a good heart. It was only that one time, you know. And she stayed in my office afterwards,' Kealty pointed out.

'We've covered that, Ed. Tell me what you want.'

'I'll go. I'll resign. I don't get prosecuted.'

'Not good enough,' Durling said in a neutral voice.

'Oh, I'll admit my weaknesses. I'll apologize to you, honorable public servant that you are, for any harm I might have done to your presidency. My lawyers will meet with their lawyers, and we'll negotiate compensation. I leave public life.'

'And if that's not good enough?'

'It will be,' Kealty said confidently. 'I can't be tried in a court until the constitutional issues are resolved. Months, Roger. All the way to summer, probably, maybe all the way to the convention. You can't afford that. I figure the worst-case scenario for you is, the Judiciary Committee sends the bill of impeachment to the floor of the House, but the House doesn't pass it, or maybe does, narrowly, and then the Senate trial ends up with a hung jury, so to speak. Do you have any idea how many favors I've done there, and in the Senate?' Kealty shook his head. 'It's not worth the political risk to you, and it distracts you and Congress from the business of government. You need all the time you have. Hell, you need more than that.' Kealty stood and headed toward the door to the President's right, the one that was so perfectly blended into the curved, eggshell-white walls and gold trim. He spoke his final words without turning. 'Anyway, it's up to you now.'

It angered President Roger Durling that, in the end, the easy way out might be the just way out, as well—but nobody would ever know. They would only know that his final action was politically expedient in a moment of history that demanded political expediency. An economy potentially in ruins, a war just started—he didn't have the time to fool with this. A young woman had died. Others claimed to have been molested. But what if the dead young girl had died for other reasons, and what if the others—God-damn it, he swore in his mind. That was something for a jury to