“The fault goes farther back than that. There wouldn’t have been any need to do what I did, clean up after him, if we had made it plain in the beginning, when we first started guarding him, that there were some things we wouldn’t do.”
Atwood could not argue the point; Hart did not try.
“Tell me everything that happened. How did the girl get there?”
“We’re not sure. He had this arrangement-whenever he stayed in the city. There was always a second room connected to the suite. He kept the key himself and gave it to whomever he chose. There was always someone.”
“But there was Secret Service protection all around him,” objected Hart.
Bauman exchanged a glance with Atwood.
“Go ahead. It’s all right. You can tell him.”
“We learned to look the other way. A woman-a good-looking woman-gets off the elevator. We all understood.”
“But this woman-where did she come from? Did Constable meet her somewhere that night? Where was he earlier that evening? What had he been doing?”
“He gave a speech at a fundraising dinner at the Plaza Hotel. It finished up around ten-thirty, but we did not get him out of there for another half hour. He never wanted to leave anywhere if there was someone left to talk to, another hand to shake. It’s funny, but now that I think about it, I don’t remember him ever saying even once that he wanted to be alone.”
“The girl-how old was she, anyway?”
“Late twenties, early thirties, the way most of them were.”
“Was she there, at the dinner? Is that where he met her?”
Bauman tried hard to remember. His eyes began to move side to side, seeing in his mind what he had seen before, the tables full of rich contributors and women dressed with money.
“If she was, I don’t remember seeing her. She might have been there, but if she was she must have gone somewhere first to change. It was a formal affair, not the kind of clothes she had with her.”
“So he must have known her before that night. He must have-”
“Not necessarily,” interjected Bauman reluctantly. “There were people, friends of his, who sometimes…”
“Set him up with someone?” asked Hart. Everyone had heard the stories about how helpful certain of the president’s friends could be. Hart glanced toward Atwood, sitting back in the recliner, his face again without expression.
“And you kept all this from his wife? Never told her what was going on?”
“It wasn’t our place to do that,” replied Atwood, looking straight at him.
Was he lying? wondered Hart, searching Atwood’s eyes for an answer they would not yield. Or was Atwood telling the truth, and Hillary Constable had been lying when she told Hart that she was kept informed about anything Constable did that might threaten his presidency? He had the feeling that neither one of them had been entirely truthful; that she had been kept informed, but not so often, nor so fully, as she had thought. Whatever deal Atwood had made with Hillary Constable, he would have made another, better one with her husband.
Richard Bauman was a different story. As near as Hart could tell, the agent had only wanted to do the right thing and had not realized that doing that almost always got you in trouble. He liked Bauman, liked him precisely for that reason. Bauman would have done what he was sworn to do: protect the life of the president at the cost of his own, and done it without a moment’s hesitation. Atwood, on the other hand, was more likely someone who instead of acting instantly, would think instead of how he could act the hero’s part and live to gain the benefit.
“He was lucky to have you,” said Hart suddenly, and for no apparent reason. “I know you feel responsible, but you shouldn’t. But now, tell me about her, anything you can remember.” He turned sharply to Atwood. “I assume that with Agent Bauman’s help you worked up a sketch of what she looks like and that you’ve given it to the FBI. I’d like a copy of it as well, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Atwood suggested that there was very little chance it would do any good.
“Twenty minutes after she left the hotel, she probably didn’t look anything like the way she did. This was not some amateur; she was a professional. Her hair will be different; her eyes won’t be the same. She’ll look like a thousand other people no one knows anything about. She was probably on a plane out of the country later that same night. There really isn’t any chance we’ll ever find her.”
“The real question,” said Hart as he got ready to leave, “is whether we can find the people who hired her.”
“Whoever they are, they aren’t taking any credit for it. Which means it wasn’t some group out there that hates America and wants to show what it can do.”
But Hart was not thinking about that. He wanted to know something more about the girl.
“Her manner, the way she talked-anything, the way she moved, anything about her clothes.”
Bauman thought about it, or rather tried to think. He was exhausted, wracked with all the psychic pain of endless self-recrimination; haunted by what he thought was his failure to recognize an assassin when she was standing right in front of him.
“Nothing. She was great looking, and she seemed scared, or I thought she was at first, but then-there was something in her eyes-I thought she wasn’t. It all happened so fast, and my first thought was-well, you know what I did. I almost pushed her out of there, told her to get her things and get out of the hotel. Unbelievable! But that’s what I did.”
“Was there anything about her, anything that was different? Her voice-what did she sound like?”
Bauman sat bolt upright. His eyes grew larger and almost frighteningly intense.
“She had an accent! Not much of one, but a little. Why did I forget that? She had an accent, maybe British, or someone who went to school there.”
Chapter Eleven
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bobby Hart was in a better position than most people to know what was going on in the world. Meeting behind closed doors, he and a handful of senators were given regular briefings by the various intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The committee was not always told everything, however, and there had even been occasions when what they were told was not the truth. When you were trained in the arts of deception, taught how to mislead the enemy, it was not that difficult to convince yourself that lying to Congress about something you wanted to keep secret was not really lying at all. Those who thought like this were mainly the ones who had come later, part of the generation born after the war; the ones who, because they had never been put to the test, never faced an enemy in combat, did not understand what it was they were really there to protect: the country and what it stood for, not the power of some agency that thought it was bigger than the government.
“Some of these guys think they’re so tough,” his father had said with contempt one day shortly before he died. “They should have been with me at the Battle of the Bulge, freezing their nuts off at Bastogne. That’s a little different than plotting the overthrow of some two-bit dictator in the comfort of an air-conditioned room.”
Bobby Hart liked to think of that, his father’s gruff laughter, the straight, no-nonsense look in his eyes when he talked about the way things had changed in the agency he had once loved. There was always a difference, he had insisted, between those who were there at the beginning of something and those who came later. That was the lesson he had learned, the lesson he wanted to pass on: you had to be there at the beginning to know what it was about and what you were there to do. Things changed, got all mixed up, and before you knew it the thing you created became more important than what it had been created to do.
“I’m not just talking about the agency, you understand. It’s true of everything: things are always clearer at the start.”