building. When a uniformed guard came over to object, O'Day just flashed his ID and kept on going. He stopped at the main security desk and did the same.
'I want your chief to meet me on the seventh floor in one minute,' he told the guard. 'I don't care what he's doing. Tell him to come up right now.' Then he and his team walked to the elevator bank.
'Uh, Pat, what the hell—' The other three had been picked more or less at random from the Bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility. That was the FBI's own internal-affairs department. All experienced investigators with supervisory rank, their job was to keep the Bureau clean. One of them had even investigated a former Director. OPR's charter was to respect nothing but the law, and the surprising thing was that, unlike similar organizations in city police forces, it retained, for the most part, the respect of the street agents.
The lobby guard had called ahead to the guard post on the top floor. It was George Armitage this morning, working a different shift from the previous week. 'FBI,' O'Day announced as the elevator door opened. 'Where's the Secretary's office?'
'This way, sir.' Armitage led them down the corridor.
'Who's been using the office?' the inspector asked.
'We're getting ready to move Mr. Adler in. We've just about got Mr. Harison's things out and—'
'So people have been going in and out?'
'Yes, sir.' O'Day hadn't expected that it would be much use bringing in the forensics team, but that would be done anyway. If there had ever been an investigation that had to go strictly by the book, this was the one.
'Okay, we need to talk to everyone who's been in or out of the office since the moment Secretary Hanson left it. Every single one, secretaries, janitors, everybody.'
'The secretarial staff won't be in for another half hour or so.'
'Okay. You want to unlock the door?' Armitage did so, letting them into the secretaries' room, and then through the next set of doors into the office itself. The FBI agents stopped cold there, the four of them just looking at first. Then one of them took post at the door to the main corridor.
'Thank you, Mr. Armitage,' O'Day said, reading the name tag. 'Okay, for the moment, we're treating this as a crime scene. Nobody in or out without our permission. We need a room where we can interview people. I'd like you to make a written list of everyone you know to have been in here, with date and time if that's possible.'
'Their secretaries will have that.'
'We want yours, too.' O'Day looked up the corridor and was annoyed. 'We asked for your department chief to join us. Where do you suppose he is?'
'He usually doesn't get in until eight or so.'
'Could you call him, please? We need to talk to him right now.'
'You got it, sir.' Armitage wondered what the hell this was all about. He hadn't seen the TV this morning, nor heard what was going on yet. In any case, he didn't care all that much. Fifty-five and looking forward to retirement after thirty-two years of government service, he just wanted to do his job and leave.
'GOOD MOVE, DAN,' Martin said into the phone. They were in the Oval Office now. 'Back to you.' The attorney hung up and turned.
'Murray sent one of his roving inspectors over, Pat O'Day. Good man, troubleshooter. He's being backed up by OPR guys' — Martin explained briefly what that meant— 'another smart move. They're apolitical. With that done, Murray has to back away from things.'
'Why?' Jack asked, still trying to catch up.
'You appointed him acting Director. I can't be involved much with this, either. You need to select someone to run the investigation. He has to be smart, clean, and not the least bit political. Probably a judge,' Martin thought. 'Like a Chief Judge of a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. There's lots of good ones.'
'Any ideas?' Arnie asked.
'You have to get that name from somebody else. I can't emphasize enough, this has to be clean in every possible respect. Gentlemen, we're talking about the Constitution of the United States here.' Martin paused. He had to explain things. 'That's like the Bible for me, okay? For you, too, sure, but I started off as an FBI agent. I worked mainly civil-rights stuff, all those sheet-heads in the South. Civil rights are important, I learned that looking at the bodies of people who died trying to secure those rights for other people they didn't even know. Okay, I left the Bureau, entered the bar, did a little private practice, but I guess I never stopped being a cop, and so I came back in. At Justice, I've worked OC, I've worked espionage, and now I just started running the Criminal Division. This is important stuff to me. You have to do it the right way.'
'We will,' Ryan told him. 'But it would be nice to know how.'
That evoked a snort. 'Damned if I know. On the substance of the issue, anyway. On the form, it has to appear totally clean, no questions at all. That's impossible, but you have to try anyway. That's the legal side. The political side I leave to you.'
'Okay. And the crash investigation?' Ryan was slightly amazed with himself. He'd actually turned away from the investigation to something else. Damn.
This time Martin smiled. 'That pissed me off, Mr. President. I don't like having people to tell me how to run a case. If Sato were alive, I could take him into court today. There won't be any surprises. The thing Kealty said about the JFK investigation was pretty disingenuous. You handle one of these cases by running a thorough investigation, not by turning it into a bureaucratic circus. I've been doing that my whole life. This case is pretty simple—big, but simple—and for all practical purposes it's already closed. The real help came from the Mounties. They did a nice job for us, a ton of corroborative evidence, time, place, fingerprints, catching people from the plane to interview. And the Japanese police—Christ, they're ready to eat nails, they're so angry about what happened. They're talking to all of the surviving conspirators. You, and we, don't want-to know their interrogation methods. But their due process is not our problem. I'm ready to defend what you said last night. I'm ready to walk through everything we know.'
'Do that, this afternoon,' van Damm told him. 'I'll make sure you get the press coverage.'
'Yes, sir.'
'So you can't be part of the Kealty thing?' Jack asked.
'No, sir. You cannot allow the process to be polluted in any way.'
'But you can advise me on it?' President Ryan went on. 'I need legal counsel of some sort.'
'That you do, and, yes, Mr. President, I can do that.'
'You know, Martin, at the end of this—'
Ryan cut his chief of staff off cold, even before the attorney could react. 'No, Arnie, none of that. God damn it! I will not play that game. Mr. Martin, I like your instincts. We play this one absolutely straight. We get professionals to run it, and we trust them to be pros. I am sick and fucking tired of special prosecutors and special this and special that. If you don't have people you can trust to do the job right, then what the hell are they doing there in the first place?'
Van Damm shifted in his seat. 'You're a naif, Jack.'
'Fine, Arnie, and we've been running the government with politically aware people since before I was born, and look where it's gotten us!' Ryan stood to pace around the room. It was a presidential prerogative. 'I'm tired of all this. What ever happened to honesty, Arnie? What ever happened to telling the goddamned truth? It's all a fucking game here, and the object of the game isn't to do the right thing, the object of the game is to stay here. It's not supposed to be that way! And I'll be damned if I'll perpetuate a game I don't like.' Jack turned to Pat Martin. 'Tell me about that FBI case.'
Martin blinked, not knowing why that had come up, but he told the story anyway. 'They even made a bad movie about it. Some civil-rights workers got popped by the local Klukkers. Two of them were local cops, too, and the case wasn't going anywhere, so the Bureau got involved under interstate commerce and civil rights statutes. Dan Murray and I were rookies back then. I was in Buffalo at the time. He was in Philly. They brought us down to work with Big Joe Fitzgerald. He was one of Hoover's roving inspectors. I was there when they found the bodies. Nasty,' Martin said, remembering the sight and the horrid smell. 'All they wanted to do was to get citizens registered to vote, and they got killed for it, and the local cops weren't doing anything about it. It's funny, but when you see that sort of thing, it isn't abstract anymore. It isn't a document or a case study or a form to fill out. It just gets real as hell when you look at bodies that've been in the ground for two weeks. Those Klukker bastards broke the law and killed fellow citizens who were doing something the Constitution says isn't just okay—it's a right. So, we got 'em, and put 'em all away.'
