Holtzman swirled his drink, watching the ice cubes circle around. 'Under different circumstances I might call it a conspiracy, but it's not. For a guy who says he's just trying to put things back together, Jack sure is doing a lot of new and crazy things.'
' 'Crazy' is a little strong, Bob.'
'Not for them, it isn't. Everybody's saying 'he isn't one of us, and they're reacting strongly to his initiatives. Even you have to admit that his tax ideas are a little way off the usual playing field, but that's the excuse for what's happening—one of the excuses, anyway. The game's the same one it always was. A couple of leaks, and the manner of their presentation, that's what determines how it's played.'
Arnie had to nod. It was like highway littering. If someone dumped all the trash in the proper barrel, then things were neat, and the task was done in a few seconds. If that same someone tossed it all out the window of a moving car, then you had to spend hours picking it all up. The other side was now dumping the trash haphazardly, and the President was having to use his limited time doing wasteful and unproductive things instead of the real work of driving down the road. The simile was ugly, but apt. Politics was so often less about doing constructive work than about spreading garbage around for others to clean up.
'Who leaked?'
The reporter shrugged. 'I can only guess. Somebody in the Agency, probably somebody who's being RIF'd. You have to admit that building up the spy side of the house looks kind of Neanderthal. How far are they cutting the Intelligence Directorate?'
'More than enough to compensate for the new field people. The idea is to save money overall, better information, more efficient overall performance, that sort of thing. I don't,' he added, 'tell the President how to do intelligence stuff. On that, he really is an expert.'
'I know that. I had my story almost ready to run. I was about to call you for an interview with him when the bubble broke.'
'Oh? And—'
'What was my angle? He's the most contradictory son of a bitch in this town. In some ways he's brilliant—but in others? Babe-in-the-woods is charitable.'
'Go on.'
'I like the guy,' Holtzman admitted. 'For damned sure, he's honest—not relatively honest, really honest. I was going to tell it pretty much the way it was. You want to know what has me pissed?' He paused for a sip of the bourbon, hesitated again before proceeding, and then spoke with unconcealed anger. 'Somebody at the Post leaked my story, probably to Ed Kealty. Then Kealty probably arranged a leak to Donner and Plumber.'
'And they used your story to hang him?'
'Pretty much,' Holtzman admitted.
Van Damm nearly laughed. He held it back for as long as he could, but it was too delicious to resist: 'Welcome to Washington, Bob.'
'You know, some of us really do take our professional ethics seriously,' the reporter shot back, rather lamely. 'It was a good story. I researched the hell out of it. I got my own source in CIA—well, I have several, but I got a new one for this, somebody who really knew the stuff. I took what he gave me, and I back-checked the hell out of it, verified everything I could, wrote the piece stating what I knew and what I thought—careful to explain the difference at all times,' he assured his host. 'And you know? Ryan comes out looking pretty good. Yeah, sure, sometimes he short-circuits the system, but the guy's never broken the rules far as I can tell. If we ever have a major crisis, that's the guy I want in the Oval Office. But some son of a bitch took my story, my information from my sources, and played with it, I don't like that, Arnie. 7 have a public trust, too, and so does my paper, and somebody fucked with that.' He set his drink down. 'Hey, I know what you think about me and my—'
'No, you don't,' van Damm interrupted.
'But you've always—'
'I'm the chief of staff, Bob. I have to be loyal to my boss, and so I have to play the game from my side, but if you think I don't respect the press, you're not as smart as you're supposed to be. We're not always friends. Sometimes we're enemies, but we need you as much as you need us. For Christ's sake, if I didn't respect you, why the hell are you drinking my booze?'
It was either an elegant roll or a truthful statement, Holtzman thought, and Arnie was too skillful a player for him to tell the difference right off. But the smart thing to do was finish the drink, which he did. A pity that his host preferred cheap booze to go along with his L. L. Bean shirts. Arnie didn't know how to dress, either. Or maybe that was a considered part of his mystique. The political game was so intricate as to be a cross between classical metaphysics and experimental science. You could never know it all, and finding out one part as often as not denied you the ability to find out another, equally important part. But that was why it was the best game in town.
'Okay, Arnie, I'll accept that.'
'Good of you.' Van Damm smiled, and refilled the glass. 'So why did you call me?'
'It's almost embarrassing.' Another pause. 'I will not participate in the public hanging of an innocent man.'
'You've done that before,' Arnie objected.
'Maybe so, but they were all politicians, and they all had it coming in one way or another. I don't know what— okay, how about I'm not into child abuse? Ryan deserves a fair chance.'
'And you're pissed about losing your story and the Pulitzer that—'
'I have two of them already,' Holtzman reminded him. Otherwise, he would have been taken off the story by his managing editor, but internal politics at the Washington Post were as vicious as those elsewhere in the city.
'So?'
'So, I need to know about Colombia. I need to know about Jimmy Cutter and how he died.'
'Jesus, Bob, you don't know what our ambassador went through down there today.'
'Great language for invective, Spanish.' A reporter's smile.
'The story can't be told, Bob. It just can't.'
'The story will be told. It's just a question of who tells it, and that will determine how it's told. Arnie, I know enough now to write something, okay?'
As so often happened in Washington at times like this, everyone was trapped by circumstance. Holtzman had a story to write. Doing it the right way would, perhaps, resurrect his original story, put him in the running for another Pulitzer—it was still important to him, previous denials notwithstanding, and Arnie knew it—and tell whoever had leaked his story to Ed Kealty that he or she had better leave the Post before Holtzman nailed that name down and wrecked his or her career with a few well-placed whispers and more than a few dead-end assignments. Arnie was trapped by his duty to protect his President, and the only way to do it was to violate the law and his President's trust. There had to be an easier way, the chief of staff thought, to earn a living. He could have made Holtzman wait for his decision, but that would have been mere theatrics, and both men were past that.
'No notes, no tape recorder.'
'Off the record. 'Senior official, not even 'senior administration official, ' Bob agreed.
'And I can tell you who to confirm it with.'
'They know it all?'
'Even more than I do,' van Damm told him. 'Hell, I just found out about the important part.'
A raised eyebrow. 'That's nice, and the same rules will apply to them. Who really knows about this?'
'Even the President doesn't know it all. I'm not sure if anybody knows it all.'
Holtzman took another sip. It would be his last. Like a doctor in an operating room, he didn't believe in mixing alcohol and work.
FLIGHT 534 TOUCH ED down at Istanbul at 2:55 A.M. local time, after a flight of 1,270 miles and three hours, fifteen minutes. The passengers were groggily awake, having been, roused by the cabin staff thirty minutes earlier and told to put their seat-backs to the upright position in a series of languages. The landing was smooth, and a few of them raised the plastic shades on the windows to see that they were indeed on the ground at one more anonymous piece of real estate with white runway lights and blue taxiway lights, just like those all over the world. Those getting out stood at the proper time to stumble off into the Turkish night. The rest pushed their seats back for another snooze during the forty-five-minute layover, before the aircraft left yet another gate at 3:40 A.M. for the
