"If you think this is a joke, that was the punch line. You are the CIA's candidate for president, and they know how to run a hell of a winning campaign. Ask the Chileans."
Something, perhaps an image of himself sitting in the Oval Office, must have flashed across his mind, because he suddenly paled, and his breathing became rapid and shallow. "But I don't understand. It isn't my time yet to be president. My advisors all tell me-"
"The company doesn't give a shit what your advisors say," I interrupted, "any more than they care about what you want or the electorate wants. They're apolitical. They only care about what they want, and they want you in the White House. Right now there are some very strange things going on outside these hallowed halls, and what they all add up to is that the CIA is trying to engineer the assassinations of the president and vice president. Voila, President William P. Kranes."
Kranes's eyes went wide, and he glanced nervously at the two dark-suited men standing perhaps fifteen yards away, at the head of the corridor. "The two of you are crazy," he said in a sibilant whisper. " 'Assassination' isn't a word one tosses around lightly up here."
"Oh, that toss was too light for you? I guess I'll have to try my curve, slider, and fastball. You obviously haven't been paying attention to what Garth and I have been telling you."
"Leave me alone," he said, actually shying away. "If you think there's a plot to assassinate the president, it's the Secret Service you should be talking to, not me."
"I've already told the FBI, and I have to assume they've briefed the Secret Service. I can assure you that the FBI is taking this very seriously; check with them yourself if you think Garth and I are telling you some fairy tale. All that can be done is being done, you can be sure. There's nothing the Secret Service can do at the moment but take their usual defensive posture. That's one reason-but not the only reason-we're here talking to you."
"Why me?"
"Because you're in the best position to stop it."
"What on earth-"
"You and I had a deal," I said, stepping closer to him. "It turns out you didn't break it, and neither have I-so far. Our deal is the reason I haven't mentioned the plagiarism matter to any of the authorities, and I've been talking to a hell of a lot of them. But your connection to Thomas Dickens is going to surface eventually. There could be a lot of history written on what's happened, and what's about to happen. Some people may even charge Garth and me with culpability in the assassinations of a president and vice president because we withheld certain details explicitly linking you to Thomas Dickens and CIA-run killers. It's going to come out, Kranes, especially if the president and vice president end up dead-because then we'll have to disclose it. It's better that you do it, now, if you want the history books to be kind to you. Then you'll work with the Secret Service. Like I said, you're the person in the best position to put a stop to their plan, or at least slow it down."
Kranes eyed me suspiciously. "How could the poetry incident possibly have anything to do with this supposed assassination plot you're telling me about, and what would discussing the incident accomplish except possibly destroying my career? Maybe that's what this is really about. You said you talked to the FBI, but why aren't the two of you working with the Secret Service?"
"Because we don't have anything else to contribute-except you-and we have bigger fish to fry."
The jowly man shook his head and laughed nervously. "This is absolutely preposterous! You are trying to destroy my career! Either that, or you're both insane. You say there's a plot to assassinate the president and vice president, but you don't have time to work with the Secret Service because you have bigger fish to fry. What fish would those be?"
"Finding the murderers of a certain poet, you fat shithead," Garth said, his tone soft as a knife slicing through silk as he abruptly reached out and grabbed Kranes's tie close to the knot, lifting the startled and suddenly choking Speaker of the House up on his toes. "You think that's funny? You make me sick. Every time I hear one of you loudmouthed bigots talk about the need for a 'color-blind society,' I want to puke. Where was your mouth back in the sixties? Your family probably owned slaves."
"Uh, Garth," I said, touching my brother's arm as both Secret Service agents started running toward us, reaching inside their suit jackets. "Perhaps it might be a good idea to leave the extraneous political discourse for another time."
The men were almost on us when Kranes, still up on his toes and red-faced, raised his right hand and desperately signaled for the agents to stop. They stopped, but their hands remained inside their suit jackets, on their guns. Finally Garth released his grip on the man's tie. The two agents backed away, but not as far as they had been.
Kranes, wide-eyed, turned toward me. "What's he talking about? What poet?"
"Thomas Dickens is dead, Mr. Kranes," I replied. "He was savagely murdered in the same manner as possible witnesses in our Haitian investigation were murdered, which is one reason we know for a fact that the CIA was behind it. The only reason they could have had for doing it was to save you possible embarrassment before or after your swearing-in. They don't want any distractions or questions about your character. Now, if I didn't say anything to anybody, and you didn't say anything to anybody, and Thomas Dickens didn't even know your real name, it led us to deduce that the CIA must have your offices here and in Huntsville bugged. Get it?"
"My God," Kranes whispered hoarsely. He was beginning to look frightened. "But why. . how. .?"
"You're third in the line of succession, Mr. Speaker. Remember?"
"But I don't want to be president," he replied absently. "At least not yet."
"Irrelevant. With the president and vice president dead, you're it. There's no election to wait out."
Kranes shook his head stubbornly. "But the next election is only a few months away. ."
"I think they may have plans for the next election, and we'll get to that. In the meantime, three months is enough time for you to go through a whole laundry list of executive actions, appointments, and proposed pieces of legislation that would sail right through the Congress that your party controls. The first one or two hundred things you'd want to do as president are totally predictable; they're only interested in two of them."
"This is insane. You're slandering-"
"The men who founded OSS, and later the CIA, were idealists as well as cowboys. They were our great white knights, our Paladins, during the Cold War. A lot of good men and women sacrificed their lives to protect this country's secrets and steal the enemies'. Members of the Operations Directorate rode into hell to save Western civilization."
"Are you being sarcastic, Frederickson?"
"I am not. It's the simple truth. But it's also the truth that when they rode out again they had begun to look to some of us just like the KGB. By the end of the Cold War, they'd only gotten uglier. The Russian KGB is, at the most, operating at very low voltage in their Federal Security Service over there. Ours is still sparking away, and these people are very dangerous."
"I don't agree at all with that characterization of the CIA," Kranes said stiffly.
"I understand that, Mr. Speaker. I also understand that, even if you did agree with it, you'd argue that it's necessary to have such an organization working clandestinely, even occasionally beyond the law, because we still live in a dangerous world, and we have to be prepared to fight fire with fire. Even if our guys have turned ugly, the enemies they're up against are even uglier. You'd say we have no choice but to trust our own people."
"That is exactly right."