“I sent her home. I promised I'd just sit in my wheelchair and read until you got here.”
“This is a hell of a trick.”
She struggled to the end of the bars and collapsed into his arms. “Walking? Not much of a trick. Billions of people do it every day. I used to do it all the time — and I will again.”
“You know what I mean,” he said, holding her close, holding her on her feet. “What if you'd fallen when there wasn't anyone here to pick you up?”
“I'd have taken a nap on the floor.” She cast an impish grin up at him.
He couldn't stay angry with her. He lifted her and carried her around to her wheelchair at the other end of the parallel bars.
“How'd it go?” she asked.
“Just like West.”
“Marvelous. You're a good man at your trade.”
“Is it starting to bother you — what I'm doing?”
“No,” she said. “It would bother me if you weren't doing it. If you weren't getting rid of them, I'd wonder if anyone was — and I wouldn't sleep nights.”
He knew exactly what she meant.
Andrew Rice was on time for the meeting in the Oval Office, but the President and Bob McAlister were already there. He shook hands with McAlister and said good morning to the President. As he sat down, the chair squeaked under him.
“Cold as the devil out there,” McAlister said.
Rice said, “Damned early in the season for snow flurries in Washington.”
Boring in his left ear with an index finger, the President said, “Shall we get on with it?”
McAlister turned to Rice and said, “Andy, you're as fat as a house.”
Andrew Rice's eyes glazed over; he stared through McAlister. His mouth sagged. He waited.
Clearing his throat, the President said, “Andy, when Senator Konlick died in that automobile accident the week before last — well, that took care of the list of Committee leaders you provided us with a couple of months ago. Now, we feel certain that there are men in this thing that you didn't know about back then, men whose connections to it were all but invisible so long as West, Hennings, Konlick, and the others were there to run the show. Now, with The Committee's leadership gap, one of these silent partners must have come forth.”
“Yes,” Rice said dully. “I was contacted by Cabot Addingdon.”
“The real-estate millionaire from Massachusetts who ran for the governorship a few years back.”
“That's right,” Rice said.
For the next half-hour McAlister and the President pumped him for information. Then McAlister brought him out of the trance, and they sat around talking about trade agreements so that Rice would not suspect the real nature of the meeting.
Later, when Rice had gone to perform a series of make-work tasks for the President, McAlister said, “I'll pass on Addingdon's name to David Canning.”
The President wiped a speck of ear wax from his fingertip onto his suit jacket. “Bob, I believe you're looking worse by the day.”
“I was going to ask for three weeks off in December.”
“By all means.”
“I'll fly down to the Caribbean and just relax. That's all I need. Just some rest in the sun.”
That was not all he needed. He also needed to regain some of his self-respect, although he knew that he would never regain all of it. He had beaten The Committee by adopting its methods; he had sacrificed morality for expediency. How could he live with that? Even if it was the only thing he could have done, how could he live with it? He needed to find a way to carry the burden of his guilt without collapsing under it. He needed to come to terms with the man he had become and didn't want to be.
“Are you still having trouble sleeping?” the President asked.
“Yes. And you?”
“I'm using sleeping tablets. I'll have the White House physician prescribe some for you.”
“Thank you, sir.” McAlister hesitated. Then: “I have this recurring nightmare.”
“Oh?”
“I keep dreaming that The Committee knows that we've made a zombie out of Rice. I keep dreaming that they've implanted a second set of subliminal keys in him, deeper than ours — and at any time they are going to use him against us.”
The President sat up straight in his chair. “God, that is something to think about.”
“I've been thinking about a lot of things, too many things,” McAlister said wearily. “That's why I can't sleep well.”
“The Caribbean will put your mind at ease.”
“I'm sure it will,” McAlister said, forcing a smile.
But as he had considered the necessity of adopting The Committee's methods in order to destroy it, he had recalled something that William Pitt had said in the House of Commons in 1783, a quote which McAlister had often used in speeches: Necessity is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. He knew he was no tyrant, and he was fairly sure he could say as much for the President. But they had established a dangerous precedent here. What of the men who came into office after them? Would they be decent men? Or would they be tyrants who, if they discovered this precedent, would point to it and declare themselves driven by necessity and institute a wider policy of government violence in order to stifle all disagreement with their policies? It was something to lie awake and think about at night. It scared the hell out of him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.R. Dwyer (a pen name) was born in 1945 in Everett, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Bedford. He is a graduate of Shippensburg State College and worked for a time as a tutor for underprivileged children with the Appalachian Poverty Program. His books (under his own name and pen names) have been published in more than a dozen languages and have sold over four million copies.