The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America (10 page)

“A cheap wristwatch makes a good timer.” He pulled one out of his pocket. “You remove the plastic crystal, then pull off the second and minute hands. Drill a hole in the plastic at the center, and one at twelve o’clock. Stick a couple of wires through the holes. You’ve got a twelve-hour timer. Up to twelve hours. Set it for the delay you want. Accurate to within a minute or two. Carry a short-tester with you to test the watch right before you hook it into the circuit. Anybody know any electronics?”

“I do,” a small young man with a large mustache volunteered.

“Good, come with me.” The two of them crossed the field to where a tall tree, about as thick around as a large man’s circling arms, grew by itself. Warren placed the charge on a low branch next to the trunk and fastened the watch-and-battery timing circuit to the two clips, after checking with his pocket short-tester. Then they came back to the group. “Let’s get back in that gully,” Warren said. “And bring the guns and the other charges.” They all scrambled down the side of a stream bank behind the tents.

The whole group huddled together, staring out between the two tents at the tree. “I set about a five-minute delay,” Warren said, “the shortest I feel safe with. Any time now.”

Then it blew. A sharp, clear sound, loud enough to cause brief pain, and followed promptly by the lesser echoes, as the wave reverberated off the snowy hills. The air was suddenly filled with snow and mist. The tree wavered. And then it fell straight down on itself, as though collapsing inward. And then it stopped. And then it slowly, slowly tilted against the sky. The tilting grew faster and the tree fell to earth with a shuddering crash.

“That’s it,” Warren said, as the group climbed back up the bank and brushed themselves off. There was a hole in one of the tents where a fireplace-sized log had burst through on its way to ground. “It’s not a toy.”

Zonya hefted one of the cigar boxes with respectful care. “We could sure off a few pigs with one of these,” she said.

“That’s just what we don’t want to do,” Middler said. “Not now. Not yet.”

“Why not?” Zonya demanded.

“Because we’re trying to build public support, not destroy it. We’ve got to use the bombs to destroy the countinghouses and guardhouses of the capitalist system—not to kill people. Not until stage three. And we’re not even in stage two yet.”

“He’s right,” Warren said. “I’ll leave you with these three explosive devices. If you want more, you’re going to have to show me more. I want the PRB to develop a bomb doctrine—and a command and priority doctrine, for that matter—and I and my people will support you. But you’ve go to be more military. And that includes such mundane details as posting guards on an operation.”

“Who are your people?” Jay demanded in a voice that fought hard not to sound surly.

“I am Carlos,” Warren said, “and you are all my people. Wherever I am needed, I will be. Come, walk with me, Middler.” He picked up the empty knapsack and started back the way he had come.

“I’ll be right back,” Middler called, and ran to catch up with Warren.

When they were out of earshot of the People’s Revolutionary Brigade, Middler said, “Well, what do you think?”

“See if you can take over—or at least become group planner.”

“No sweat,” Middler said. “Zonya’s holding the group together. And we’re, ah, getting very close.”

“Good luck,” Warren said. “Tell her how smart she is; that’s what she wants to hear.”

“Did you talk to your boss?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He agreed,” Warren said. “As of now, you’re not just an informant, you’re on the payroll.”

“Of the CIA? I’m a CIA agent?”

“That’s right.”

“Do I get to go to the CIA school?”

“Probably. After this assignment.” There was certainly no reason to tell Midler that he was really working for the SIU.

“I’d better get back.”

“Right. I’ll be in touch.”

Bill Heym got up from his desk in the
Washington Post
’s newsroom and crossed the bullpen to the glass-enclosed cubicle with
National Editor
in black on the frosted-glass door. Pushing the door open, he stuck his head in and said, “I’ve got something for you, Gerry.”

Gerry Poole, the national editor, wadded the yellow paper he was staring at and tossed it in the wastebasket by the door before looking up. “Knock,” he said. “After twelve years you could have at least learned one thing: knock. Please. Supposing I had a young lady in here?”

“She’d be a reporter,” Heym said, “and you’d be assigning a story.”

“All the more reason,” Poole said.

“I’ve got something for you,” Heym repeated. “Something hot.”

“How hot is hot?”

“It’s so hot I don’t want to think about it, that’s what.”

“Spill.”

“There’s a guy sitting at my desk. It’s his piece. If it’s true, it’s the hottest story of the year, and I hope to hell it’s not true. How do you like that?”

Poole nodded and took the remaining stack of yellow copy and put it aside. “Bring him in.”

Heym waved across the large room. “Hey, Coles!” he yelled. The thin man in the tweed jacket rose from the chair by Heym’s desk and came over. Heym ushered him into the office. “This is Gerry Poole, our national editor. I’d like you to start over for him. He’ll want it first hand from you. Gerry, this is Dr. Barry Coles, a professor of economics at Columbia University.”

Poole got up and shook hands with the intense not-quite-young man who was examining him with lively interest through large hornrimmed glasses. “Coles,” he said. “Barry Coles. I know the name. Wait a second”—he pointed a finger at Coles and shook it—“I know! You did an article for
Foreign Affairs
. Something about land management in the two halves of Vietnam.”

“I’m impressed,” Coles said. “That was two years ago.”

“Yeah. And then you went to work for the White House, and you were one of the ones kicked out after the last election.” Poole tapped the side of his head. “I’ve got that kind of a memory, I can’t help it.”

“This is something new,” Heym said. He carefully closed the office door and sat Coles down in the chair facing Poole across the desk, then sat himself in a corner. “Okay, Professor,” he said, “the floor is yours.”

“I’ve been doing research in the State Department files,” Coles said.

“I thought you went back to Columbia,” said Poole.

“I did. But it was between semesters and I was at loose ends. Then Dr. Greener of the Institute for an Informed America offered me a six-month grant, and I accepted.”

“What was the subject of the grant?”

“The Economic Influence of American Policy Intent and Reality in South Vietnam, nineteen-sixty to nineteen-seventy. I was to work with the actual documents. My clearance was still good for that.”

“Isn’t the IIA a little right-wing for you, Dr. Coles?”

“The paper is for general release, under the imprint of the IIA, and they’ll print what I give them,” Coles said. “There were no prior restrictions on the, ah, slant of my findings. I made that perfectly clear, and Dr. Greener had no quibble.”

“Fine,” Poole said. “So, what happened?”

“So—this is one of the files.” Coles opened his worn leather briefcase and extracted a thick manila folder. “In here is a Xerox of the Washington-Saigon State Department cable traffic for the month of November 1963. You’d better read it yourself. The effect is cumulative.”

Poole took the folder and started rapidly reading through the Xeroxed flimsies. When he neared the middle, he slowed. A couple of the sheets he read through twice. He didn’t say anything until he finished the entire folder. Then he closed it and put it down on his desk. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

“What do you think, Gerry?” Bill Heym asked.

“There’s not much question. None of the cables comes right out and says it, but if you put a couple of them together—well, there’s not much question. We’ll have to see the originals, of course.”

“There’s no way I can take them out of the building,” Coles said. “The Xeroxes are the best I can do.”

Gerry Poole leaned back in his chair and laced his hands under his chin. “Now look, Dr. Coles,” he said. “You come in here and hand us what purports to be a cable file that proves—that strongly suggests—that John Kennedy ordered the assassination of President Diem. Now my personal inclination would be to burn the file and forget that I ever saw it; but I can’t do that. First of all, I’m a newspaperman, and this is what my friend Mr. Heym here would call a hot story. And second of all, you’d only take it somewhere else. But it has to be authenticated. Neither this paper nor any other reputable news medium will touch this story until it’s been authenticated to hell and back.”

“We can do some work on the Xeroxes,” Heym suggested. “We could have Dr. What’s-his-name—White—go over them.”

“We’d need some others for comparison,” Poole said.

“I can get you more,” Coles told him.

“That’s no good. We need an independent source,” Poole said. “Can you get someone else in with you?”

“Probably,” Coles said. “I’ve never tried, but probably.”

“Okay. You figure a way to take Gerry in with you—as your assistant or something, and let him make some Xeroxes. Then we’ll have Dr. White, our document man, see if he can authenticate them.”

Barry Coles stood up. “It’s a hell of a thing,” he said. “I don’t know whether I hope he can or I hope he can’t.”

Dianna Holroyd, the executive secretary of SIU, was a tall, vital woman who ran room sixteen with calm efficiency. She looked barely forty, but her personnel file said fifty on her next birthday.

Kit Young was at her desk going over the CIA inventory file—the list of CIA material on loan to SIU—when she suggested that they have a drink together after work, “if you’re not afraid to be seen with an older woman.” She arched her eyebrows suggestively as she said it.

“Delighted,” Kit said. Rumor had it that Miss Holroyd liked younger men, but in any event, there was no better possible source of information about the inner world of SIU than its executive secretary.

“I’ll drive,” she said, meeting him in the west entrance lobby. “It relaxes me. I’ll drop you at your car later.”

And it did seem to relax her. The tense lines in her face eased as she pulled on her cotton-and-leather driving gloves and steered her big XK-150 coupe out of the underground garage. Once on the street, she swung west onto Pennsylvania Avenue and guided the heavy open car through the tight traffic with experienced skill and evident delight. She concentrated on driving the ancient Jaguar with an intensity that precluded conversation.

Turning onto the Whitehurst Freeway, she crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge and headed north on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It seemed quite a way to go for a drink, but Kit asked no questions.

She drove for about twenty minutes, and then took an exit and a twisting side road that ended on a cliff overlooking the Potomac. “There,” she said, turning the engine off. It was her first word since starting the car.

“You drive well,” Kit said.

She looked at him. “Just that?” she asked. “It’s usually ‘You drive well for a woman’.”

“You drive well for a woman,” Kit amended. “Or for a man, or for a trained seal.”

She smiled. “There’s a leather case behind your seat,” she said. “Can you reach it?”

“Sure,” Kit said. He reached behind and pulled the case out.

“That drink I promised you is in it,” she said, opening it carefully to reveal three bottles, four glasses, and a plastic ice bucket. “Scotch or vodka?”

“Scotch,” Kit said.

“Over? Water? I’m sorry, no soda in the case.”

“Over is fine.”

Dianna maneuvered ice into two glasses and jiggered scotch into one and vodka into the other. Then she closed the case and put it by her side. “Mud,” she said, passing Kit his glass and raising hers.

Kit sipped his drink and watched the reflection of the setting sun break into a thousand golden ripples in the Potomac in front of the car. “Okay,” he said. “What’s it all about?” He turned to look at her and found her staring through the windshield. She was a striking woman in profile, with the sort of late-maturing beauty that softens and deepens as the years pass. Twenty-five years ago she had probably been skinny, gaunt, and awkward, but the lines that age put in her face were lines of wisdom and trust and a certain feminine compassion.

“We haven’t talked much, you and I,” she said.

“That’s true,” Kit agreed.

“What makes you think this is ‘about’ anything? Maybe I just want to get to know you. We should work closely, you and I, we should know each other.”

“I would like,” Kit said, “to know you better.” He smiled. “As the real power behind SIU, you’re an important person to be friendly with. But”—he stared into his glass—“for some reason I don’t think you brought me here out of sudden admiration for my deep masculine voice or my triceps.”

Dianna leaned back and laughed from somewhere deep in her throat. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re very perceptive. But, you know, that’s what most of them are going to think.”

“Most of whom?”

“My fellow Plumbers. They think I’ve entered the menopausal age of lust. I chase young boys around to lure them into my bed. I can’t keep away from anything in pants.”

Kit said, “They think that.”

Dianna nodded. “And with good cause,” she added. “I—let us say I discovered sex late in life. I enjoy it, every messy minute of it. And you’d be surprised how many young men like older women. They want to be mothered, I suppose. And if what I’m doing is mothering, then I enjoy that, too. Older men don’t want to be mothered, they want to be married.”

She paused and stared at him. “And now you wonder why I’m telling you all this.”

“You believe in frank honesty as a, um, seductive technique?” Kit asked.

“Not at all,” Dianna said. “Although I do believe in brutal honesty, whenever possible. I don’t need seductive techniques. I don’t chase, despite what my associates think. I seem to attract this sort of young man without effort. Thank God. I’d be no good whatever at chasing. Besides, I know all about you and your Miriam.”

Kit stared at her. “You know what?” he demanded.

She shrugged. “It’s in your file.”

“They ran a check on me?”

“Of course,” she said. “You don’t think the SIU is going to trust CIA if it doesn’t have to, do you? We got your CIA backgrounder and then carried on from there.”

“I should have guessed,” Kit said. “I don’t even know why I’m either surprised or annoyed, but I am—both.”

Dianna nodded. “So I’m not here to seduce you,” she said. “But my known proclivity in that direction gives this meeting what you might call a natural cover.”

“Cover,” Kit said. “For what?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Young. Just between the two of us.”

Kit considered for a moment. “Fair enough,” he said.

Dianna shifted in her seat so she could look at him better, one arm wrapped around the steering wheel and one leg drawn under her Harris tweed skirt. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “We’d better put the top up.”

They got out of the car and Kit helped Dianna assemble and button down the frame and canvas top. Then they got back inside the Jag, and Dianna pushed the starter and slowly guided the car down the side road parallel to the river. “I want to talk to you,” she said, “about your investigation of the death of Ralph Schuster.”

Kit nodded. “Okay. What about it?”

“How did he die?”

“Just like you read in the papers,” Kit said. “Suicide.”

“You’re sure?”

“Come on, Dianna,” Kit said. “You must have read the reports I turned in.”

“I read them,” she said. “What I want to know is what you didn’t put in them.”

“Like what?”

She pulled the car off the road again and turned the engine off. “Like Suzanne,” she said.

“Schuster’s girl friend,” Kit said. “There was no reason to put her in the report. You know how damn hard it is to keep anything secret. Think of all the reasons why I shouldn’t mention her, and then tell me one why I should.”

“She was raped.”

“Yes, I know, about a month before Schuster committed suicide,” Kit said, wondering how Dianna knew anything about her. “I asked Schuster’s psychiatrist—you know he was a depressive? That he was seeing a shrink?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, well. I asked his shrink whether Mrs. Chartre’s experience could have caused Schuster enough stress to push him over the edge. The doctor didn’t think so.”

“He hadn’t seen Ralph for about six weeks,” Dianna said. “Since before the rape.”

“That’s right,” Kit said. This conversation was heading somewhere and Kit wasn’t leading. All sorts of interesting questions came to mind, but he suppressed them and waited.

Dianna took off her driving gloves and put her right hand on his shoulder. “I have a sense about people,” she said. “And, over the years, I’ve learned to trust it. And my sixth sense tells me you’re not one of them. I need to believe that. I need to tell you something. And then I need you to tell me something.”

“Not one of whom?” Kit asked.

She considered him. And then she reached behind her seat for her glass and poured it full of vodka. Without ice. She drank about half of it down in a gulp and stared at the wood-paneled dashboard. “The bastards,” she said. “The bastards that are all around us and won’t let us live.”

Kit nodded, wondering precisely who she meant.

“Suzanne was beat up pretty bad during the rape,” Dianna said. “She was put in the hospital. Naturally Ralph couldn’t go visit her, and it drove him crazy. I sat up with him for the better part of three nights while he ranted about what animals men are.”

“You knew him?”

“I was his source,” Dianna said. “It was my idea. There was—is—crap going on here that I can’t stomach. Not silently, anyway. Surely you figured that out by now?”

“I was approaching that conclusion,” Kit said.

“Going to turn me in?”

Kit paused for a second. “No,” he said.

“We started with a purely business relationship,” she said. “I’d sneak away in an unassigned motor-pool car and meet him after midnight in some parking lot.”

“Very dramatic,” Kit said.

“Very paranoid,” Dianna amended. “Paranoia has become endemic in the Executive Branch. Everyone is treading on eggs, with the vague feeling that they’re doing something illegal and are going to get caught. So someone who decides to snitch, like me, becomes doubly paranoid.”

“You passed information to Schuster? On what?”

“The various nasty and illegal things SIU was doing in the name of National Security, or Executive Privilege, or Power to the President, or whatever. Schuster was slowly building a story, documenting what I gave him where he could and printing just enough to keep his editors happy until he could get it all together.”

“And meanwhile the Plumbers are going crazy tapping each others’ phones and trying to trace the leak,” Kit said. “And you can avoid it all because all the orders go across your desk.”

Dianna shrugged. “Wrong. If they tapped my phone, the order wouldn’t cross my desk. So I had to assume they were. Schuster and I found a safe house and spent hours going over details. Gradually we became good friends. More. Partners in a love affair. Except that instead of loving each other, we both loved some sort of abstract goal we were aiming for. The idea that your President shouldn’t lie to you, that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and not Executive Whim.”

“Dangerous radical doctrine,” Kit said, “in these days of the Silent Majority.”

Dianna laughed. “Have you ever met the ‘Silent Majority’?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Thirty girls in a room in the White House basement. They call it ‘Plans and Schedules,’ I think. All day long they type letters in support of the President on some subject or other. About a thousand letters a day, shipped out to the Midwest on Air Force planes for mailing.”

“Son of a bitch,” Kit said.

“That’s what Ralph said.” Dianna pulled out a filter-tip cigarette and lit it with a large gold lighter. “Anyway, I spent three nights with Ralph while he waited for Suzanne to call. He was mad—furious—but not depressed. The third night she called. She wanted Ralph to tell her who the men were. She was calm—sedated, I suppose—but insistent. It took Ralph a while to get enough of the story out of her to figure out what had happened.”

“She wanted Schuster to tell her who the men who raped her—”

”That’s right. It seems that they kept telling her that Ralph would explain. That Ralph had sent them.”

“I see,” Kit said. And he did. “And she blamed Schuster?”

“No, not at all. She knew it was some sort of horrible mistake and Ralph would explain. She apologized to him.”

Kit felt ill. “That’s incredible.”

“That’s the last time I saw Ralph,” Dianna told him. “And I have to know whether he—whether he did it to himself or had help. I don’t think that if he had help they would have left that note. But I have to know. Either way, I’ll feel just as guilty, but I have to know which it was.”

“Suicide,” Kit said. “I’m no expert myself, but the police sergeant who handled the case is, and he explained the findings to me carefully. Schuster typed the note himself. The shot was heard, and people were on the stairs and in his room within a minute. And it’s not your fault.”

“I had just decided to quit and come into the open when I heard the news. I was going to call him that day and tell him.”

“And now?” Kit asked.

“Now I’ll keep boring from within. Gather the facts and try to find people on the outside who aren’t afraid to use them.”

“Be careful,” Kit said. “What you’re doing could be dangerous—even lethal.” As he said it he realized, for the first time, that it was only too true.

“Someone has to do something,” Dianna said.

“You can’t fight the whole executive branch,” Kit told her.

“Oh, you can fight them,” she said. “You just can’t win.”

Late that night Kit drove to Aaron Adams’ house, taking a roundabout way and doubling back several times to make sure he wasn’t followed. “I have to talk to you,” he told Adams.