The President's Man Read online

  Faircliff lapsed into a moody silence; the lined unhappiness of his face reminded you that he really was, after all, sixty-three years old. He stared blindly from under his light brown eyebrows, not expecting a reply, listening to some inner voice telling him, again and again, that nothing in this life is an unqualified pleasure.

  “Over forty-seven million people voted for me yesterday,” he continued quietly, almost to himself. “I swept the party to the largest congressional majority since Johnson; there probably isn’t a more loved man in America at this precise moment; and my own kid can’t stand the sight of me. Why the hell does she hate me so much, Frank? What’s the big grievance? God, if anybody knows, you ought to.”

  Austen only shook his head—there was nothing else he could do, really. The truth would serve no one. The truth, in this case, was the last thing anyone would ever wish to hear. “I don’t have any idea, Simon.” He smiled wanly, shrugging his shoulders. “She doesn’t exactly take me into her confidence either, not anymore.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  Then Faircliff smiled his magic election-day smile, and Austen followed his line of sight to a small door that had opened at the other end of the office and turned around to see a solemn-faced black man in a white mess jacket standing there. It was time for lunch.

  They followed the melancholy figure into a small dining room, not much larger than one of the staff offices honeycombing that part of the building, where places had been set for them at the near corner of a table covered with a heavily starched white cloth. There was already a Bloody Mary waiting in the center of one of the plates; Austen sat down in front of the other and ordered a glass of ginger ale, just to be companionable.

  At first, the conversation tended to be halting and was conducted in murmurs. They talked over all the harmless topics of Washington life—the election results, the probable identity of the Senate minority leader’s new mistress, the prospects for any Supreme Court justices doing the decent thing and dropping dead. All the while it was fairly obvious to the trained observer that, even as Faircliff was describing with delicious comic elaboration his opponent’s concession statement, he was holding something in. He never glanced at the waiter, who moved back and forth from his serving cart to the table as anonymously as any machine, but he was clearly impatient.

  At last, when they were alone with their stuffed pork chops (the President was now officially abandoning his campaign-trail diet), Faircliff cut off a small piece, tasted it, and, without registering any reaction, put his fork down and turned to his Director of Central Intelligence exactly as if the meal were over.

  “In seven or eight months, I want you to move over to State, Frank. I can’t do it now without making it look like some sort of post-election purge, but Harry Towers wants to step down anyway; his wife’s sick and he’s eager to move her back to Michigan, where she can be near their children. You can name your own successor at Langley, someone you can keep under your thumb after you’ve made the jump, but I want you to start the briefings as soon as you can—I don’t suppose those lounge lizards know much that you don’t, but get on it early. Maybe we can make it six months.”

  “Mr. President, I don’t—”

  “Piss on it, Frank,” he said sharply, brushing the objection aside with an impatient sweep of his hand. “I want you at State, and State is where you go. It’ll look better—the public’s never really trusted the CIA.”

  In an instant he seemed to lose interest in everything except what was on the table in front of him. With wonderful deliberation, he cracked open the hard roll that had rested on its own little plate just above his napkin, tearing off a fragment and smearing it with butter. It was an astonishing performance; you might have supposed you were in the presence of some saintly, patient archaeologist scraping away the dust of millennia from a Hittite amulet.

  “Simon, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “What do you think, stupid?” Faircliff queried slyly, treating Austen to a curious sideways grin. “I’ve got responsibilities, haven’t I? I’ve got to think of the welfare of the country. We won big last night, kiddo—a rising tide raised all the boats, and those good party stalwarts who won with us, from the Senate right on down to the dogcatcher in Mankato, they all owe us, and they know it. All that loyalty and love, we can’t let it go to waste, now can we? I’m going to be the one to settle the destiny of this nation, and I’ll decide on my own successor. The people have seen to that. You just wait—when gradually it begins to dawn on everybody that you’re the heir apparent, they’ll fall all over themselves to smooth the way for you. Just you watch, boy—I’m going to raise you to glory. I’m going to make you the next President of the United States.”

  . . . . .

  Two hours later, when he emerged again into the gloomy mid afternoon sunlight, the first thing Frank Austen noticed was the black immensity of his limousine, which was waiting for him just beyond the shadow of the blue awning that was still flapping sulkily over his head. Another Marine, this time a corporal, held the rear door open for him as he slipped inside, where he shared the seat with the slight, gray, wistfully smiling form of his Deputy Director, George Timmler.

  “Did it come yet, Jimmie?”

  The blond head shook back and forth without turning around. “No, sir.”

  “Then take us back to Langley,” he snapped, touching a button that raised a smoked glass screen behind the driver’s seat, sealing the two compartments off from one another. George, whose hands were folded together in his lap, turned ever so slightly in the direction of his master, simultaneously raising his eyebrows perhaps a sixteenth of an inch.

  “You’re looking peevish today,” he said evenly. “What did the great man want?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “All right. “

  The limousine started up; you couldn’t really hear the engine, only feel a slight vibration that came up through the soles of your shoes; and the Marine corporal saluted. George Timmler looked straight ahead, as if the subject of Austen’s meeting had been dismissed from his mind. Perhaps it had—George had been on a plane from Los Angeles since the very crack of dawn; perhaps his mind was simply numb.

  “I’ve been nominated to be the crown prince. We go by easy stages, first Foggy Bottom, then the White House. He loves me like a son, so I get to inherit the family business.”

  George continued to stare through the glass partition at the dim outline of Jimmie’s head, as if not a word had registered, and then, very slowly, his lips pursed out and he emitted a low whistle.

  “I said you wouldn’t like it.”

  “The question is, do you like it? What are you going to do, take him at his word? I wouldn’t blame you a bit.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Austen allowed himself a pained smile. “I know you’ve never quite approved of me, George—no, save yourself the trouble. Personal considerations aside, you’ve never really thought of me as a certified Company man and you’ve been right. I’ve always been Simon Faircliff’s man, just another slimy opportunist. Slimier than most, probably. But not that slimy, George. Not quite slimy enough to go for this number.”

  George reached over and patted him lightly on the knee with a bony, fragile-looking hand. “I’ve always thought you were one of the nicer slimy opportunists. You see Howard Diederich’s fine hand in this, I take it.”

  Austen nodded. “It’s got his fingerprints all over it.”

  “But you didn’t tell him flat out that you weren’t buying.”

  “No. No, if I did anything like that the cat would really be out of the bag.”

  “Then you think Diederich suspects already?”

  The expression on Austen’s face revealed nothing whatsoever. Inside, he could feel his heart dissolving into a cold trickle that seemed to be collecting somewhere down around his bowels, but he tried to keep any of that from registering.

  “He’s no fool, you know—that’s what all this has been about. He’s trying to
buy us off before it’s too late.”

  II

  When Michael Starkman was shot down in front of the Oroville Bank and Trust, it happened that only two people, across the street at the International House of Pancakes, witnessed the murder. Six-fifteen was usually a little early for the breakfast trade. At that hour, as a general rule, there were just a few early risers from the motel next door, so the police had only the waitress who was working the tables along the front window and a farm implements salesman up from Los Angeles. The salesman had just sat down and hadn’t even had his coffee yet, a fact that seemed to weigh extraordinarily heavily with him, and the waitress, even three-quarters of an hour after the fact, still couldn’t quite be made to understand what had taken place.

  Actually, neither of them had had more than a quick glimpse; they had merely heard the screech of tires and looked up to see a man collapsing on the sidewalk. The assailants might have been creatures from Mars for all they knew, and they couldn’t agree on a description of the car. Really, they hadn’t seen anything much, except a guy bleeding all over the curbstone through the hole where his lower jaw had been.

  Officer Wagnells took it all down very carefully anyway. Oroville didn’t get a murder more than once every two or three years, and now there were two real corkers within twenty-four hours of each other, both involving strangers, so he was conscious of the need for more than routine thoroughness as he listened to the thin, quavering voice of the dealer in thresher blades and automatic seed drills.

  “He just seemed to come apart—just spun around, his arms flying and pieces of him going off every which way. There was so much blood in the air you would have thought they gunned him down with a paint sprayer.”

  At this point the waitress, who had been softly whimpering the whole time, found it necessary to hide behind her dish towel. She was a solid enough looking haystack blonde in her mid-forties, but apparently this sort of thing was just too much for her, and she trembled like tomato aspic. Officer Wagnells couldn’t blame her in the least.

  “Miss,” the salesman went on, his voice low and apologetic as he turned away from the policeman who was sitting across the table from him, making heavy penciled notes in the pages of a tiny memo book. “I think I’ll just pass on the blueberry waffles, if you don’t mind.”

  Outside, with his memo book stuffed into the pocket of his shirt, Wagnells could see that almost nothing had happened since he had arrived from headquarters. The county forensics man, who was still picking slugs out of the stucco wall, was the only person in sight who seemed to have any clear idea of what he should be doing. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing anyone was used to. The body still lay exactly where it had fallen, covered with a tarpaulin.

  Wagnells, whose wife, for the best reasons in the world, was always hounding him to go on a diet, squatted down awkwardly next to one corner of the tarp and picked it up for another look. He had been with the police for twenty-eight years, and not since his stint with the paratroopers, when he had done an eighteen-month tour of duty in Korea, had he ever seen a gunshot victim to compare with this one. He had to keep convincing himself that it was real—that it was even possible.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered to himself. A shadow fell across the sidewalk next to him, and he looked up into the disapproving eyes of his duty sergeant, who seemed to be regarding the corpse with something like resentment. Wagnells shook his head and looked down again. “What’d they use on the poor bastard, do you suppose? Get a load o’ that—it looks like somebody’s been tryin’ to dig holes in his face with an axe.”

  “Cover him up again, Charlie. We don’t want to frighten the tourists. You find out anything useful inside?”

  Charlie Wagnells stood up and hooked a thumb over his heavy woven-leather utility belt, still shaking his head. “Nah. They didn’t see nothin’. Maybe somebody oughta talk to ’em again when they settle down some, but I don’t think we’re gonna get anything we can use from those two.”

  The two men stared down at the lumpy but recognizably human outline covered by the pale tan tarpaulin.

  “Any idea who he is yet?”

  “Not a clue.” The sergeant, a thin, dissatisfied-looking man, kept plucking at the sleeve of his heavy leather jacket with a hand that reminded you unpleasantly of a hairy, agile spider. “He doesn’t have a thing on him, not even a set of car keys. There’s plenty of money in his wallet but nothing else; looks like the guy didn’t believe in credit cards.”

  “Look at this.”

  They turned to the county forensics man standing a little behind Officer Wagnells. In the palm of his hand were nestled eight or ten twisted little pieces of dully shining metal.

  “About nine millimeter, I figure—they must’ve drilled the points. No wonder his head’s nearly torn off.”

  The sergeant picked up one of the fragments of lead and held it up in front of his eye for a closer inspection. With every passing second his sense of personal affliction seemed to grow. “A nine-millimeter submachine gun using hollow-point bullets. This ain’t no jealous husband we got on our hands.”

  The men from the coroner’s office began the work of transferring the corpse to a body bag and then into the back of their wagon. They left behind a sizeable pool of blood that overran the patch of grass along the curb and trickled into the street; the fire department would have to send someone out to hose that away if they didn’t want the dogs getting at it. The sergeant gave the forensics man back his tiny piece of evidence and touched Charlie Wagnells on the arm.

  “First that guy in the elevator at the Ramada Inn, and now this,” he said, his voice almost toneless. “Let’s go back to the office; there’s nothing more we can do hanging around here.”

  As they walked toward their squad car, the sergeant jammed his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, and his gaze hunted morosely over the pavement. During the ride he was silent, staring at the few inches of carpeted car mat between his shoes. They eased into their parking space beside the rear entrance, and Officer Wagnells twisted around on his bulging waist and viewed his superior with perplexed concern.

  “What’s the matter, Sarge? You worried that it might take us a while to nail these guys?”

  “Charlie, we ain’t gonna nail anybody.” He smiled grimly and continued his close inspection of the floorboards. “We’re just a couple of small-town hick policemen, and we ain’t gonna get anywhere near an arrest. These guys were real pros—they’re probably a hundred miles away by now and still moving. I just keep wondering what made it worth their while to come all the way up here. I just keep wondering who our John Doe was and what he could have done to make anybody that mad at him.”

  . . . . .

  After his marriage, Frank Austen had purchased a house in Alexandria. In those days he was only a senatorial aide, drawing a salary that hovered just below eighteen thousand a year, but money hadn’t been a problem. The late Mrs. Faircliff, whom Austen had never met, had belonged to a cadet branch of one of the old California railroad families, and the Austens had found themselves able to manage quite comfortably with a three-bedroom colonial that backed onto the Potomac River. Dorothy Austen suffered from allergies, and a doctor had told her husband that being close to the water would be good for her, although she continued to spend about seven months of the year being forced to choose between, on the one hand, runny eyes and a constant buzzing sound in her head and, on the other, something like narcolepsy brought on by the antihistamines. The two extra bedrooms were supposed to have filled up with the children they were going to have, but that had been another disappointed expectation.

  Nevertheless, the house had a flagstone terrace overlooking a lawn that sloped down to the river’s edge, and on nice evenings you could sit out there with a drink in your hand and listen to the waves lapping against the shore line after the occasional speedboat went tearing by. And when the evenings weren’t so nice you could sit in your study behind the big picture window and watch the naked tree limbs, lik
e the gnarled, arthritic fingers of old women, as they answered with a kind of palsied spasm to the irregular wind. Frank Austen spent a great deal of his time in his study when he was home, much of it staring out through the picture window as he nursed a ginger ale and considered the complexities of public and private life and the difficulties, sometimes, of distinguishing between the two.

  He was alone at the moment. If he had ventured onto the minstrels’ gallery at the top of the stairway to the second floor and dropped a quarter down to the tiled floor of the entranceway, the whole house would have tinkled like a bell. His wife was gone.

  They slept in separate rooms, so she wouldn’t disturb him if she happened to return late; it was an arrangement he had grown so used to that he hardly resented it anymore. Besides, there were times when the perfect privacy afforded by his failed marriage had its compensations, when the public business virtually demanded it.

  Espionage was not a profession that allowed you to take work home from the office. Most of the files in the vaults at Langley couldn’t be removed from the premises, not even by the Director himself, and everyone was discouraged from leaving the wadded-up first drafts of reports and memos in their study wastepaper baskets, where they would be carted out with the trash and, doubtless, retrieved and read by whoever the poor slob was in the Russian embassy whose duties included pawing his way through official Washington’s garbage. So you worked within the semi-security of the CIA compound, and that way you didn’t have to worry about whether your cleaning woman or the wife of your bosom or your ten-year-old son qualified as an acceptable security risk. It made life simpler.

  But there were always exceptions. As everybody knew, Frank Austen was not merely, or even most importantly, the Director of Central Intelligence; he was also Simon Faircliff’s son-in-law and, in contravention of the Agency’s charter and even of normal administrative lines of command, a founding member of the Faircliff cabal, one of the inner voices to which the President always listened before making any significant political decision. Austen was the President’s fair-haired boy. He was trusted, so the story went, with things that lay well outside his official province. There was always work that was too sensitive even for Langley.