The President's Man Read online

  THE PRESIDENT’S MAN

  Prologue - DANCING WITH THE DEVIL

  He had been very careful.

  There wasn’t any choice. Yesterday afternoon, while buying a few sheets of brown paper and a box of mailing labels from the nice lady at the drugstore, he had happened to notice a couple of goons in a dark blue Chevy, slowing down for a look. They had already made one try and now, apparently, they were out in force; if they spotted him again they weren’t going to be at all shy about how they behaved, and it would be just too damn bad for the innocent bystanders. So he had been careful.

  He had the package in his coat pocket; it wasn’t much larger than a man’s billfold, so nobody would spot it. They didn’t know about the package. They didn’t know what they wanted, except to kill him as quickly as they could and then hope that their problems would go away on their own. But it didn’t matter whether they killed him or not—except maybe to him—because once Austen had his final clinching piece of the puzzle, then they could kill anybody they felt like and it wouldn’t do them any good.

  Except that Austen was in DC, all those thousands of miles away.

  He had thought about it all night, worked it all out for himself because it was impossible to sleep—it was hard even to close his eyes. He had just lain there, on his back on the load bed of a truck some farmer had left parked overnight behind a tiny, dilapidated adobe house—his girlfriend’s, apparently; at a quarter to two in the morning he could still hear her high-pitched laughter.

  His original idea had been to wait until the post office opened, but that wasn’t going to work. Lover Boy would want to be on his merry way well before eight-thirty in the morning. Even your ordinary corner letterbox might not be enough, not if the wrong parties saw you dropping something inside—after all, not everybody believed in the sanctity of the mails.

  Once it was done, well, he would just have to try and make a run for it. Maybe he could hotwire a car and find someplace to get himself lost. Maybe somehow he could get down to Sacramento and then catch a plane. . .

  But first he had to get rid of the package. Then he could feel at perfect liberty to worry about saving his neck.

  There was a bank across the street from his motel; he would settle for that. It had one of those twenty-four-hour card-operated gizmos where you could get a hundred dollars out or deposit your dividend checks anytime you felt like it, and, like most of them, it had a mail slot. Bank buildings were possessed of alarms—they weren’t going to try breaking in on the off-chance that he might have left something behind for the postal service.

  On the theory that there was no point in risking getting picked up as a vagrant, he waited until five-thirty before he crept out of the truck and started on his way. The sidewalks, of course, were perfectly deserted, and his footfalls seemed to smack down on the pavement with appalling violence. Once or twice a car came swishing by, but he was on the lookout and always managed to dodge out of sight well before the headlights could reach him. When he could, he kept to the alleyways, away from the streetlamps.

  It took him better than a half-hour to reach the rear wall of the bank building. The mail slot was right beside the front entrance. The bank was a corner building, and you couldn’t have slipped a playing card between it and the liquor store next door. There was nothing for it but to go around by the street side.

  Every step of the way he felt indecently exposed. There was a little border of lawn next to the curb; he tried walking on that for a few paces, hoping it would be quieter, but then he thought it just made him more conspicuous and went back to the sidewalk. At the corner the yellow traffic light was blinking—proceed with caution, as if he needed reminding. There didn’t seem to be a soul about, but somehow he had never been so scared in his life.

  When he reached the corner he almost ran to the mail slot, his hand in his pocket the whole way, gripping the slender little package. As silently as he could, he pushed back the metal cover and shot the package inside. Then he stepped over to the huge stainless-steel grid marked “All-Day, All-Night Banking” and, just for protective coloration, pretended to punch in a number.

  Now he was on his own. The bloody thing was off his hands, and he had nothing to look out for except his own precious hide. He heard the tires squeal behind him and caught himself turning to look. But there was no time for that, no time at all—it didn’t help him any to see the red smear of the traffic light reflecting on the front bumper, and the rear window rolling down. But he ran anyway and didn’t look back again. It was too late for that, too late for anything, and he didn’t want to have to watch it coming.

  . . . . .

  The wind was blowing due east. Even at the northwest entrance to the White House Frank Austen could feel the damp cold from the Potomac, more than a mile away, as he stepped out of his limousine. He whispered a word of thanks to the Marine sergeant who opened the door for him, smiling as the guy almost twisted his arm out of its socket saluting, and allowed himself a moment to straighten his legs.

  He disliked being driven; he had never adjusted very well to being a Washington mandarin, and it made him feel restless. The trip from Langley felt as if it had taken forever instead of slightly less than a quarter of an hour. He was too young to be spending his life on the back seat of a car; that sort of thing was for the dark side of forty, so by rights he should have been safe for three whole months.

  The weather had held off all week, but this was the coldest day he could remember so early in November. God—that wind! Standing against it, his hands jammed into the pockets of his black overcoat, he made a tall slender figure, a stranger in any landscape. His lean, ascetic, not-quite-brutal face would never have betrayed him, but one of Frank Austen’s best-kept secrets was that he hated cold weather. He could feel the tightness gathering around his eyes, eyes that even now seemed to laugh at the joke, and he knew that in another few minutes his sinuses would be killing him.

  Well, the secret would stay kept—he might be miserable, but he had been blessed in that respect. Fortunately, considering the line of work he had fallen into, he wasn’t the type to wear his heart on his sleeve. Life was a joker; he had learned that a long time ago.

  “I’ll buzz you when I’m ready, Jimmie,” he said, bending down for a word with his driver. Jimmie thrust his square blond head through the car window and nodded grimly, just as if he had received an order to pull out the .45 Colt automatic he kept clipped to the underside of the dashboard and use it to punch a nice, symmetrical hole through the Marine, whom he kept glancing at with apparent suspicion. Jimmie was young and took things very seriously. “Pick up Mr. Timmler at the airport and bring him with you. I expect I’ll be about an hour and a half—and, Jimmie, check your mail while you’re about it.”

  The limousine crept stealthily off, around the corner of the building and out of sight, and Frank Austen turned to look at the concrete steps that led up under a blue canvas awning to the business entrance to the West Wing.

  The huge double doors were as familiar to him as the weary expression he saw every morning in the mirror. They were the back way to power, the only real way, the way you came when it was no part of your object to be chased across the lawn by a crowd of television reporters hungry for a celebrity to put on the six o’clock news. They were the way you came when your business was with the President of the United States and no one else, and in the nearly four years that he had served this particular President they had never lost their power to make him have to wipe his hands dry. He braced himself and marched up the stairs like a man ascending the scaffold.

  Even before the guard at the cloakroom had disappeared with his coat, he discovered that Howard Diederich was upon him, the lines of his charcoal-gray suit standing out crisp
ly within the doorframe. He hadn’t heard Howard approach, but that was the way with the man—he had the happy knack of simply appearing, smiling his suave, I’m-in­perfect-control-of-the-situation smile, and holding out his hand for you to shake. When you took it, it responded with no discernible pressure; the fingers were lifeless in your grasp.

  No one observing these two men together—the ironic courtliness of the one matched against the clipped and gloomy self-restraint of the other—could have avoided the conclusion that they detested one another. Nevertheless, certain necessary fictions had to be maintained.

  Frank Austen forced himself to look a shade friendlier. “Morning, Howard,” he said, glancing furtively at the wall clock to make sure there were at least a few minutes left before noon. “You stay up all night watching the returns?”

  “Yes—it was a great triumph.” The chief of staff, conscious of himself as the principal architect of that triumph, smoothed his pale gray silk necktie with the flat of his hand and smiled again. It was a peculiarly sly, feline smile. “Most of the West, the entire Northeast, even Ohio. Almost a grand slam. We stayed up until nearly three, but it was all over except for the counting long before that. The President is unquestionably the most popular man in the western hemisphere this morning.”

  What was that, a threat? Under the circumstances it was undoubtedly just that. Howard Diederich, the politician’s politician, the confidant and first minister to our newly anointed king, was flexing his muscles ever so slightly. We hadn’t meant the Herr and the Frau and all the little Diederichs—Howard’s children were all grown up, and his ex-wife, about whom Austen had heard only rumors, had been happily married to a swimming pool contractor in Phoenix, Arizona for the last eleven years. No, we had been none other than Diederich and his lord and master, sitting in their shirtsleeves in the Oval Office, hunched in front of the television set while they passed the Crackerjacks back and forth and watched John Chancellor hand them another four-year option on the world.

  And if we wanted your ass, the implication was—even yours, Frank Austen—that meant that we could have it.

  But it was a peculiar kind of triumph, tasting of self-mockery and the most bitter of wisdoms. Somehow, by some inflection that Austen had never been able quite to pin down, Howard always managed to pronounce the words the President as if they were the answer to some private joke.

  “Well, then, I should find him in a good mood.” Austen arranged the muscles of his face into one of his carelessly unreadable smiles. “Maybe I should grab my chance and hit him up for a raise.”

  They exchanged a few breathless, unpleasant syllables of laughter, and then Howard—gently, as if the operation required the greatest possible tact—took the Director of Central Intelligence by the arm and escorted him down a short corridor and into the office that belonged to the President’s appointments secretary, who rose from behind his desk to grasp each of them in a fierce handshake.

  It was an interesting moment. Jerry Gorman was one of Howard’s little discoveries; taken on as an advance man during the first campaign, he had made enough of an impression to find himself, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, only a thin walnut door from the Holy of Holies. That suited Howard, because whatever Jerry found out at his little listening post he told Howard. It also suited Frank Austen, because, as it happened, Jerry was one of his snitches too.

  The interesting question was whether Howard knew.

  “That son of a bitch,” Jerry had whispered one night, resting his head against a grape arbor in the garden of a house rented by the Secretary of Defense while waiting for his own out in Colorado to sell—it was only the third month of the new administration. “That son of a bitch, he’d have me fitted for a studded collar if he could get one the right size from General Services. That smug bastard.”

  Jerry hadn’t been enjoying himself that evening. When you’re an appointments secretary you get invited to all the right parties, but nobody is much interested in talking to you. So he usually found himself with a lot of free time to drink too much and nurse the bruises that were collecting on his ego.

  On this particular night, while he waited in the dark for the cool freshness of the April breezes to work their cure, while he stared down at the Secretary’s grass, lacquered almost black in the thick yellow light of the ornamental gas lamps, Jerry had unburdened his heart to the Director of Central Intelligence, who he knew, even as early as those days, was Howard Diederich’s principal adversary. He was just drunk enough to be that careless.

  Frank Austen had listened, and the next morning he had set in motion some cautious inquiries about Jerry Gorman’s relationship with life. You moved slowly in these matters, since there were no guarantees that you weren’t being fed a plant, but by the first anniversary of Inauguration Day—a little private party the chief threw for his old stagers—the Director could look across the room to where Jerry seemed to be measuring a wastepaper basket to throw up in and know, as well as it was possible to know anything in such a case, that he had that nice boy in his pocket. Revenge and ambition, they were wonderful things, solid and dependable. The only constants in an unsettled world.

  But, of course, Howard Diederich knew all about revenge and ambition and—who could say?—might just conceivably know about Jerry Gorman as well. Anything was possible.

  Austen squinted nervously at his watch and then at the door that led to the Oval Office. It was still about a minute and a quarter shy of noon, but the President had a well-known obsession with punctuality and it wouldn’t have been at all out of character for him to be sitting behind his desk at that precise moment, counting off the seconds on the Seiko quartz watch he reset twice a month against an electronic time signal down in the code room. When Simon Faircliff said, “Come by around twelve and we’ll have lunch,” around was a term of enormous precision.

  “Is he in?” Austen asked, turning to Jerry. But Jerry never had a chance to answer, because suddenly the door opened and there he was, in a pair of light gray trousers, wearing a cardigan over his white shirt. He grinned as if by the most consummate stealth he had caught all three of them in some ludicrous act, and his eyes settled on the Director of Central Intelligence.

  “Frank—it’s wonderful to see you.” He held out his hand, and Frank Austen paced off the eight or ten feet that allowed him to take it.

  It was like approaching an idol. Simon Faircliff was a man of considerable physical presence—six three and built on a large scale; he reminded you of a wall. And there was more to it than that. The guy radiated power the way some women do sex appeal. It was like having a light directed into your eyes; he was simply dazzling.

  Without so much as a glance at the other two men, the President threw his huge arm across Frank Austen’s shoulders like a net, dragging him captive into the next room. When they had crossed the threshold, he pushed the door closed behind him with the flat of his free hand, and they were alone.

  “Let’s have a look at you, boy,” he growled with proprietary affection. “Come over here and sit down. We’ve got a little time to visit before lunch—you feel like a drink? What’d you think of the returns last night? Wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that more fun than a damned peep show?”

  The President dropped into his oversized padded leather desk chair, bracing his foot up on the edge of the desk as if he were about to push himself away and go rolling back into one of the four ceiling high windows that stood like sentinels in the curve of the rear wall. It was an attitude Frank Austen had watched him assume often enough over the dozen or so years he had worked for him; it was the Simon Faircliff equivalent of the crouch that precedes the spring. It meant, in that gestured code that communicates what words are so often meant merely to obscure, that His Lordship was feeling aggressive.

  Austen just smiled, nodding his head behind his folded hands, like a parish priest listening to the plans for the Easter pageant. “I switched it off as soon as CBS gave you the election. Even that much made me feel guilty—the C
IA isn’t supposed to be interested in partisan politics.”

  Simon Faircliff threw back his head and laughed at his director’s exquisite joke, crowing like a rooster—more in exaltation than anything else, because it hadn’t been that funny.

  The few seconds in which the President indulged his ecstasy provided a peculiar privacy. Frank Austen found himself, for all practical purposes, alone in the room, and he allowed his gaze to drift across the vast desk—really more of a library table with a few file drawers built under one side—that had ascended with its owner through a succession of House and Senate offices to the absolute focus of government. In another four years, so the plan went, it would be moved again, to the seaside house near Fort Ross in California, and from there, in another fifteen or twenty, to its final resting place in the inevitable Faircliff Memorial Library.

  Certainly it didn’t look like a museum piece; Faircliff, to his credit, had always cared little for the trappings of power. There were no miniature American flags in marble holders, no bronze medallions encased in plastic, none of that. Just a couple of telephones, a pencil holder, a copy of that morning’s Post, three disorderly piles of pale blue briefing books, and a color photograph in a stand-up frame of a pretty, blond, eighteen-year-old Vassar freshman, smiling her mystified smile as if wondering what all the fuss was about.

  “How is she, Frank?”

  The Director of Central Intelligence glanced up into the President’s face and smiled—their eyes had come inescapably to rest on the same object, almost making her a third. “She’s fine, Simon. She sends her love.”

  “Like shit she does.” The sentence was punctuated with a single muted explosion of something that bore only the remotest resemblance to laughter. “I haven’t even seen her in over a year—you two live right over the river in Alexandria, and she and I haven’t laid eyes on each other more than half a dozen times since I took office. Like shit she sends her love.”