He’s playing me like a violin.
“Follow-up, Mr. President?” Roscoe asked.
“Roscoe,” the President said in a gently chiding tone, “we’ve known one another more than long enough for you to know that I always say what I mean and always mean what I say. I said ‘one last question’ and that’s what I meant.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken, the presidential press secretary, said. President Clendennen disappeared for a moment as he stepped off the stool behind the podium and then reappeared a moment later marching purposefully out of the room.
Mr. Hoboken was new on the job. His predecessor, Press Secretary Clemens McCarthy, had died in a spectacular explosion. The White House Yukon sport utility vehicle in which he was riding had collided as it approached Andrews Air Force Base with a huge tank of butane mounted on a sixteen-wheeler tractor trailer. The resultant fireball had incinerated McCarthy and Secret Service Agent Mark Douglas, and closed down the Beltway for two days.
Roscoe had heard a story that it was no tragic accident, that both men had been agents of the SVR and disposed of by a CIA dinosaur. The story would have been incredible on its face except that Roscoe had very good reason to believe the same CIA dinosaur had disposed of a treasonous CIA agent by sticking an ice pick in his ear in the CIA parking lot in Langley, Virginia, and also that Miss Eleanor Dillworth believed deep in her soul that the same dinosaur had expressed his displeasure with her and the Russian SVR rezident in Vienna by leaving the garroted corpse of the latter sitting in a taxi outside the U.S. embassy in Vienna with her official calling card on his chest.
Robin Hoboken was a pleasant, Ivy League — type young man who didn’t look like he could be an SVR agent, but neither had Clemens McCarthy or Mark Douglas. For that matter, the dinosaur in question didn’t look like someone who had more notches on his gun, figuratively speaking, for disposing of SVR agents than Clint Eastwood ever had in the bloodiest of his spaghetti western motion pictures.
Roscoe believed, however, that Mr. Hoboken couldn’t help but be carrying the weight of an odd family. What kind of people would name an innocent baby boy Robin? That was even worse than Mr. Cash trying to hang “Sue” on his son Johnny.
Roscoe went to the front of the room and patiently waited for his turn at the ear of Mr. Hoboken. Finally, it came:
“Is that all you’ve got for me on this ‘out of the box’ thinking the President mentioned?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Mr. Danton.”
“Did the leader of the free world give you anything else about his out-of-the-box thinking about his unrelenting wars against the drug trade and piracy, to be slipped to me when no one else was looking?”
“Of course not!” Robin Hoboken said. “Anything else, Mr. Danton?”
“Does the term ‘dinosaur’ have any meaning for you?”
Robin thought it over, then shook his head and said, “No. It doesn’t. Should it?”
“I heard a story that some dinosaurs are still alive,” Roscoe said.
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Check into it for me, will you, and send me an e-mail?”
“All right.”
You and I both know, Robin, that you’re going to “forget to do that” the moment you leave this room.
Pity. If you asked around you might have learned that within the intelligence community, dinosaurs are those politically incorrect clandestine service old-timers who believe that the only good Communist is a dead Communist.
That would have given you something to worry about: “Why did that pissant Danton ask me about dinosaurs?”
“Thanks, Robin.”
Then they went their separate ways, which in the case of Mr. Danton meant that he walked back to the Old Ebbitt Grill, checked to make sure Miss Dillworth was no longer there, and then went in for his breakfast Bloody Mary.
[TWO]
The Cabinet Room, which is off the Oval Office, looked practically deserted when the President, following Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan, walked in. Everyone in it could have easily been seated comfortably in the Oval Office.
President Clendennen preferred to hold meetings of the type he was about to convene in the Cabinet Room, even if there were just a few — say, four or five — people involved.
This afternoon, there were nine senior officers sitting at the long mahogany table — a gift of former President Richard Nixon, although this was rarely mentioned — waiting for the President. They were Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, who was in a chair to the right of the President’s chair. The chair on the right of that was empty. Vice President Charles W. Montvale sat next to the empty chair, which most of the people at the table thought of as “Belinda-Sue’s throne.”
Sitting across the table from them were Frederick P. Palmer, United States attorney general, Director of National Intelligence Truman C. Ellsworth, CIA Director A. Franklin Lammelle, Secretary of Defense Frederick K. Beiderman, FBI Director Mark Schmidt, and General Allan B. Naylor, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command.
They were a diverse group of very intelligent — one might even say brilliant — and powerful people who really agreed on only one thing vis-à-vis President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen.
Secretary Cohen — she was of course a diplomat — had admitted in a very private conversation with the CIA director that she had been forced to the conclusion that the President had “some mental problems.” CIA Director Lammelle, who was not a diplomat, had replied that he had concluded, based on the same criteria, that the Commander in Chief was “absolutely bonkers, as mad as the legendary March hare.”
The opinions of the others were somewhere between these two extremes, but all were agreed the President’s mental health was a serious problem.
There is, of course, provision in the law for the removal from office of a President who is physically incapable of performing his duties, and this is understood to include mental illness, although those words do not appear. No one likes to admit that a President might become, to use Mr. Lammelle’s phraseology, absolutely bonkers.
Each of the people in the Cabinet Room was familiar with previous problems of Presidents who left, or should have left, office before their successor was sworn in on Inauguration Day. Obviously, these included Richard M. Nixon, who ultimately resigned, and William Jefferson Clinton, who had to face an impeachment trial in the Senate but managed to hold on to his job.
And there were other cases of Presidents whose physical condition raised serious questions about their ability to properly discharge their duties.
Woodrow Wilson, for example, was one of these. Many people believed that after suffering a massive debilitating stroke in 1919 he should have resigned and allowed the Vice President to assume his duties. Instead, he stayed on in the White House and allowed his wife, the former Edith Bolling Galt, to determine which visitors he saw, and which he did not, and which papers were presented to him for his approval, and which were not, leading his detractors to refer to his wife as the “first unelected President.”
Whenever anyone at the Cabinet table thought of biting the bullet and getting rid of Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen by making his psychological problems public, the face of First Lady Mrs. Belinda-Sue Clendennen popped into their minds.