Deep Six (31 page)

He nodded at the briefcase clamped in her left hand. “Your crutch. You’d be lost without it.”

“I’ve noticed you never carry one.”

“Not the type.”

“Afraid you might be taken for a business executive?”

“This is Washington; you mean bureaucrat.”

“You are one, you know. The government pays your salary, same as me.”

Pitt laughed. “We all carry a curse.”

She set the briefcase on the ground and pressed her hands against his chest. “I’ll miss you.”

He circled his arms around her waist and gave a gentle squeeze. “Beware of dashing Russian officers, bugged staterooms and vodka hangovers.”

“I will,” she said, smiling. “You’ll be here when I return?”

“Your flight and arrival time are duly memorized.”

She tilted her head up and kissed him. He seemed to want to say something more, but finally he released her and stood back. She slowly entered the terminal through the automatic sliding glass doors. A few steps into the lobby she turned to wave, but the blue Talbot was pulling away.

On the President’s farm, thirty miles south of Raton, New Mexico, members of the White House press corps were spaced along a barbed-wire fence, their cameras trained on an adjoining field of alfalfa. It was seven in the morning, Mountain Daylight-Saving Time, and they were drinking black coffee and complaining about the early hour, the high-plains heat, the watery scrambled eggs and burned bacon catered by a highway truck stop, and any other discontents, real or imagined.

Presidential Press Secretary Jacob (Sonny) Thompson walked brightly through the dusty press camp prepping the bleary-eyed correspondents like a high school cheerleader and assuring them of great unrehearsed homespun pictures of the President working the soil.

The press secretary’s charm was artfully contrived—bright white teeth capped with precision, long sleek black hair, tinted gray at the temples, dark eyes with the tightened look of cosmetic surgery. No second chin. No visible sign of a potbelly. He moved and gestured with a bouncy enthusiasm that didn’t sit well with journalists, whose major physical activities consisted of pounding typewriters, punching word processors and lifting cigarettes.

The clothes didn’t hurt the image either. The tailored seersucker suit with the blue silk shirt and matching tie. Black Gucci moccasins coated lightly with New Mexico dust. A classy, breezy guy who was no dummy. He never showed anger, never let the correspondents’ needles slip under his fingernails. Bob Finkel of the Baltimore
Sun
slyly suggested that an undercover investigation revealed that Thompson had graduated with honors from the Joseph Goebbels School of Propaganda.

He stopped at the CNN television motor home. Curtis Mayo, the White House correspondent network newscaster, sagged in a director’s chair looking generally miserable.

“Got your crew set up, Curt?” Thompson asked jovially.

Mayo leaned back, pushed a baseball cap to the rear of a head forested with billowy silver hair and gazed up through orange-tinted glasses. “I don’t see anything worth capturing for posterity.”

Sarcasm ran off Thompson like rainwater down a spout. “In five minutes the President is going to step from his house, walk to the barn and start up a tractor.”

“Bravo,” Mayo grunted. “What does he do for an encore?”

Mayo’s voice had a resonance to it that made a symphonic kettledrum sound like a bongo: deep, booming, with every word enunciated with the sharpness of a bayonet.

“He is going to drive back and forth across the field with a mower and cut the grass.”

“That’s alfalfa, city slicker.”

“Whatever,” Thompson acknowledged with a good-natured shrug. “Anyway, I thought it would be a good chance to roll tape on him in the rural environment he loves best.”

Mayo leveled his gaze into Thompson’s eyes, searching for a flicker of deception. “What’s going down, Sonny?”

“Sorry?”

“Why the hide-and-seek? The President hasn’t put in an appearance for over a week.”

Thompson stared back, his nut-brown eyes unreadable. “He’s been extremely busy, catching up on his homework away from the pressures of Washington.”

Mayo wasn’t satisfied. “I’ve never known a President to go this long without facing the cameras.”

“Nothing devious about it,” said Thompson. “At the moment, he has nothing of national interest to say.”

“Has he been sick or something?”

“Far from it. He’s as fit as one of his champion bulls. You’ll see.”

Thompson saw through the verbal ambush and moved on along the fence, priming the other news people, slapping backs and shaking hands. Mayo watched him with interest for a few moments before he reluctantly rose out of the chair and assembled his crew.

Norm Mitchell, a loose, ambling scarecrow, set up his video camera on a tripod, aiming it toward the back porch of the President’s farmhouse, while the beefy sound man, whose name was Rocky Montrose, connected the recording equipment on a small folding table. Mayo stood with one booted foot on a strand of barbed wire, holding a microphone.

“Where do you want to stand for your commentary?” asked Mitchell.

“I’ll stay off camera,” answered Mayo. “How far do you make it to the house and barn?”

Mitchell sighted through a pocket range finder. “About a hundred and ten yards from here to the house. Maybe ninety to the barn.”

“How close can you bring him in?”

Mitchell leaned over the camera’s eyepiece and lengthened the zoom lens, using the rear screen door for a reference. “I can frame him with a couple of feet to spare.”

“I want a tight close-up.”

“That means a two-X converter to double the range.”

“Put it on.”

Mitchell gave him a questioning look. “I can’t promise you sharp detail. At that distance, we’ll be giving up resolution and depth of field.”

“No problem,” said Mayo. “We’re not going for air time.”

Montrose looked up from his audio gear. “Then you don’t need me.”

“Roll sound anyway and record my comments.”

Suddenly the battalion of news correspondents came alive as someone shouted, “Here he comes!”

Fifty cameras went into action as the screen door swung open and the President stepped onto the porch. He was dressed in cowboy boots and a cotton shirt tucked into a pair of faded Levi’s. Vice President Margolin followed him over the threshold, a large Stetson hat pulled low over his forehead. They paused for a minute in conversation, the President gesturing animatedly while Margolin appeared to listen thoughtfully.

“Go tight on the Vice President,” Mayo ordered.

“Have him,” Mitchell responded.

The sun was climbing toward the middle of the sky and the heat waves were rising over the reddish earth. The President’s farm swept away in all directions, mostly fields of hay and alfalfa, with a few pastures for his small herd of breeding cattle. The crops were a vivid green in contrast to the barren areas, and watered by huge circular sprinkling systems. Except for a string of cottonwoods bordering an irrigation ditch, the land unfolded in flat solitude.

How could a man who had spent most of his life in such desolation drive himself to influence billions of people? Mayo wondered. The more he saw of the strange egomania of politicians the more he came to despise them. He turned and spat at a colony of red ants, missing their tunnel entrance by only a few inches. Then he cleared his throat and began describing the scene into the microphone.

Margolin turned and went back into the house. The President, acting as though the press corps were still back in Washington, hiked to the barn without turning in their direction. The exhaust of a diesel engine was soon heard and he reappeared seated on a green John Deere tractor, Model 2640, that was hooked to a hay mower. There was a canopy and the President sat out in the open, a small transistor radio clipped to his belt and earphones clamped to his head. The correspondents began yelling questions at him, but it was obvious he couldn’t hear them above the rap of the exhaust and music from the local FM station.

He wrapped a red handkerchief over the lower part of his face, bandit style, to keep from breathing dust and exhaust fumes. Then he let down the mower’s sliding blades and started cutting the field, driving back and forth in long rows, working away from the people crowding the fence.

After about twenty minutes the correspondents slowly packed away their equipment and returned to the air-conditioned comfort of their trailers and motor homes.

“That’s it,” announced Mitchell. “No more tape, unless you want me to reload.”

“Forget it.” Mayo wrapped the cord around the microphone and handed it to Montrose. “Let’s get out of this heat and see what we’ve got.”

They tramped into the cool of the motor home. Mitchell removed the cassette holding the three-quarter-inch videotape from the camera, inserted it into the playback recorder and rewound it. When he was ready to roll from the beginning, Mayo pulled up a chair and parked himself less than two feet from the monitor.

“What are we looking for?” asked Montrose.

Mayo’s concentration didn’t waver from the images moving before his screen. “Would you say that’s the Vice President?”

“Of course,” said Mitchell. “Who else could it be?”

“You’re taking what you see for granted. Look closer.”

Mitchell leaned in. “The cowboy hat is covering his eyes, but the mouth and chin match. The build fits too. Looks like him to me.”

“Anything odd about his mannerisms?”

“The guy is standing there with his hands in his pockets,” said Montrose dumbly. “What are we supposed to read in that?”

“Nothing unusual about him at all?” Mayo persisted.

“Don’t notice a thing,” said Mitchell.

“All right, forget him,” said Mayo as Margolin turned and went back into the house. “Now look at the President.”

“If that ain’t him,” muttered Montrose acidly, “then he’s got an identical twin brother.”

Mayo brushed off the remark and sat quietly as the camera followed the President across the barnyard, revealing the slow, recognizable gait known to millions of television viewers. He disappeared into the dark of the barn, and two minutes later emerged on the tractor.

Mayo snapped erect. “Stop the tape!” he shouted.

Startled, Mitchell pressed a button on the recorder and the image froze.

“The hands!” Mayo said excitedly. “The hands on the steering wheel!”

“So he’s got ten fingers,” mumbled Mitchell, his expression sour. “So what?”

“The President wears only a wedding band. Look again. No ring on the middle finger of the left hand, but on the index finger you see a good-sized sparkler. And the pinkie on the right—”

“I see what you mean,” Montrose interrupted. “A flat blue stone in a silver setting, probably an amethyst.”

“Doesn’t the President usually sport a Timex watch with an Indian silver band inlaid with turquoise?” observed Mitchell, becoming swept along.

“I think you’re right,” Mayo recalled.

“The detail is fuzzy, but I’d say that’s one of those big Rolex chronometers on his wrist.”

Mayo pounded a fist on his knee. “That clinches it. The President is known never to buy or wear anything of foreign manufacture.”

“Hold on,” Montrose said slowly. “This is crazy. We’re talking about the President of the United States as if he wasn’t real.”

“Oh, he’s flesh and bone all right,” said Mayo, “but the body sitting on that tractor belongs to someone else.”

“If you’re right, you’ve got a live bomb in your hands,” said Montrose.

Mitchell’s enthusiasm began to dim. “We may be digging for clams in Kansas. Seems to me the evidence is damned shaky. You can’t go on the air, Curt, and claim some clown is impersonating the President unless you have documented proof.”

“Nobody knows that better than me,” Mayo admitted. “But I’m not about to let this story slip through my hands.”

“You’re launching a quiet investigation then?”

“I’d turn in my press card if I didn’t have the guts to see it through.” He looked at his watch. “If I leave now, I should be in Washington by noon.”

Montrose crouched in front of the TV screen. His face had the look of a child who found his tooth still in the glass of water the next morning. “It makes you wonder,” he said in a hurt tone, “how many times one of our Presidents used a double to fool the public.”

41

VLADIMIR POLEVOI GLANCED UP
from his desk as his chief deputy and number-two man of the world’s largest intelligence-gathering organization, Sergei Ira-nov, walked purposefully into the room. “You look as if you’ve got a hot stake up your ass this morning, Sergei.”

“He’s escaped,” Iranov said tersely.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Paul Suvorov. He’s managed to break out of Bougainville’s hidden laboratory.”

Sudden anger flushed Polevoi’s face. “Damn, not now!”

“He called our New York covert action center from a public telephone in Charleston, South Carolina, and asked for instructions.”

Polevoi rose and furiously paced the carpet. “Why didn’t he call the FBI and ask them for instructions too? Better yet, he could have taken out an advertisement in
USA Today.”