Mike Randolph had been a good Governor of Virginia and would be more popular with people and party than Grainer had ever been. He was the first Vice-President in generations who had been allowed to keep a high enough profile to become well-known to voters outside his home state. The refusal to allow another near the throne was a characteristic which most previous American Presidents had shared with the Ottoman Caliphs, the Soviet Secretaries, and the Chinese Chairmen. Grainer had broken with that custom and encouraged Randolph to display his talents. Amiable and intelligent, he got along well with Congress because, unlike his Chief, he believed in the sharing of power and government by consensus.
He was also a true Virginian in that he placed loyalty to his friends above almost every other virtue, and among his friends were the leaders of his party. It would be some time after his almost certain election in November before the electorate realized that characteristics which were virtues in a Governor could be disasters in a President.
Mike Randolph was looking sad and worried. Many of those around him were trying to look sad but were definitely not worried. The cameras panned across the faces of the Cabinet and rested on Gerald Futrell, the Attorney General, a man whom Grainer had admired and mistrusted—the man who controlled the service in which I served. The shock and grief on his face was totally convincing and completely false.
Every assassination generates conspiracy theories. We hate to think that our futures can be drastically changed by some fanatic with a gun. Yet that is what happens with most assassinations, even when the killers are a small group aiming for anarchy. Madman or idiots, killing the wrong man for the wrong reason. We prefer to imagine complicated conspiracies for we would rather be struck by rational evil than buffeted by blind chance. The universe must be deterministic. The good God does not play at dice.
I knew this human tendency, as strong in myself as in anybody else, and I had been suppressing suspicions of conspiracy from the moment I had killed the assassin. The sight of Futrell’s face on the television screen made my vague suspicion concrete. And triggered a memory of Helga saying something important—I couldn’t remember what. All I could think of was hatred. For there stood a man whose ambitions were great and whose ethics were insignificant.
Professional killers value life highly—their own as well as their victims. That assassin had thought himself safe; he would have been had I not noticed the curtain move. So how had he got into that off-limits room? Why had Sline and Sherry acted in unison to expose the President to a second shot? Why had his armored vest not stopped the first? Why had I been separated from him minutes before it was fired? And had Humboldt been horrified by what he had seen on the tape or by the fact that the tape existed? Those were the questions gnawing at my mind when the telephone rang. And, as I feared, it was Sherry.
Apart from exchanges necessary in shared duties we had not spoken to each other since our last bitter row. So why was she calling me, only hours after the man we had both sworn to protect had been murdered?
“Gavin—I need you! I can’t get through the night! I failed so miserably. For God’s sake come and talk to me. You were always able to drive out my devils!”
Whatever else was false, that last was true. I had to give the woman who could still wring my heart the benefit of every hope. “Sherry—I’m on my way.”
“You’ve still got a magcard for my building?”
“I’ve still got it. I’ll let myself in.”
“Then please, Gavin—please come at once!”
Every apartment building in the wealthier parts of Washington was now protected by coded interlocks. I found the magcard for Sherry’s under a pile of shirts and, as I collected it, I came across my old Walthers .38 PPK, my back-up gun when I had been clandestine. As an afterthought—or forethought—I slipped it into my pocket.
She was waiting for me in a nightdress. “I only collected enough courage to ring you after I’d spent an hour struggling to go to sleep,” she explained as she fixed me a bourbon and water, before dropping onto the sofa we had shared so often.
She had evidently tried to go to sleep in the nightdress I had always found the most exciting. I took my drink and sat stiffly in the chair facing her while she arranged herself in a position to match her gown. Madam Recamier in nylon! Even while I hated what I suspected she had done I could not ignore her beauty. Nor refrain from pitying her self-confidence. They had trained her in duplicity so well that she thought she could con a man who had learned the tricks of our despicable trade while she was still in grade school.
“What went wrong this afternoon, Gavin? How could we make such a terrible mistake?”
“Which particular mistake?”
“Missing that gunman behind the curtains. They’ve identified him, did you know?”
I shook my head.
“He was a hired gun. Who could have hired him?”
I shrugged.
“You killed him, didn’t you? I heard you were brilliant Gavin, you’re so damned good at this job! You make the rest of us look like amateurs.”
That, essentially, was what they were. Vicious amateurs who didn’t play by the rules which govern professionals. “I’ve been at it a long time, Sherry. I’m one of the old originals. Remember?”
She gave a brittle laugh. “I remember only too well. I wish to God I’d had the sense to value what I had when I had you.”
“We had a lot from each other. Some of the best moments of my life.”
“Mine too!” She sipped her old-fashioned, then put her glass down. “You were with that gunman when he died. Did he say anything?”
“Yes.”
She could keep the tension from her face, but not from her body. The old interrogators stripped their victims for questioning, while hiding their own bodies in cloaks and hoods. “Body-language” is more than a pop phrase. “What did he say?”
“I’ll report what he said at the inquiry.”
Her guilt was becoming more and more obvious to me who knew her; perhaps it would not be obvious to whoever judged her. It was not for me to make that judgment; that was what commissions and law courts were for. But whatever she had done, was done. It would be merciful to warn her.
She had been trained not to press critical questions against reluctance and switched the conversation to Arnold Grainer. She and I had fought over him so often; argued bitterly in this same room, on that same couch. As far as I believed in anyone outside the Special Strike Force and the old Secret Service, I had believed in Arnold Grainer. I had believed he was the savior of our country. Sherry had insisted he would be its first Dictator. Now she was trying to hide her relief at his death, but her tone when she spoke of him told me that she still held the same opinion.
When she had finished summarizing his virtues I said, “Sherry—you can stop worrying that Grainer was going to wax the Union. He’s as dead as Julius Gaius!”
“Gavin—his death has rescued his reputation. He’ll be remembered for the good he did. But if he’d won another term he’d have destroyed democracy in America, perhaps in the world.” She had leaned toward me, speaking with genuine conviction, showing me her beautiful breasts but for once without ulterior motive. She wanted to convince me. She wanted terribly to convince me.
She wanted to convince me because she wanted to justify to herself whatever she had done. That if she had betrayed her President it was to save her country. She was trying to believe herself a Brutus. And all I now wanted was to help her escape some Philippi.