He walked into his lavatory, splashed cold water on his face, and wiped it dry.
"Listen, Lyman," he said aloud, "there's life in the old bird yet. You'll bring this thing off. You've got to. You can't let the world down."
There you go again, he thought, talking to yourself, trying to sound like the big shot. Knock it off, Jordie, you're making an ass of yourself.
Lyman went back to his desk and began reading the intelligence reports left for him by his military aide. A stranger seeing him now might have taken him for a college professor. At fifty-two, his rather long face was less wrinkled than seamed. His curly hair was thinning back from the temples and was streaked with occasional strands of gray. Although he had it trimmed weekly and kept at it with a comb, the hair had a wiry quality that made it appear perpetually tousled. Colorless plastic frames held his glasses on a prominent nose. He was not a tall man, standing an inch under six feet, but oversized hands and extremely big feet, appended to a rather thin body, gave him a gangling appearance. No one would call him handsome, but he looked like a man who could be trusted-and no politician could ask more of his own physique.
The President read and signed the stack of mail his secretary had left for him, holding out a couple of letters that weren't quite right so that he could dictate new versions. He was well into another pile of mail when Esther Townsend came in. She had come to work for him as his personal secretary when he was attorney general of Ohio, moved into the governor's office with him and inevitably accompanied him to the White House. No one else on his staff knew Jordan Lyman as well as this tall, blonde girl with the light-brown eyes and the wisp of hair falling over her forehead. She knew him so well that she rarely had to ask what to do with a problem. He knew her so well that he never had to worry about her judgment.
"The Vice-President is here," she said. "Do you want some more time to yourself?"
"No, thanks, Esther," he said, "I've done all the thinking that a man can stand in one day. Tell the kitchen they can bring lunch over here."
Over that lunch the two leaders commiserated on the evident ebb in the administration's popularity.
"I haven't sold the treaty to the country, Vince," Lyman said. "I've been too busy selling it to the Senate. But by the time you come back from Italy I'll have a plan. We'll work out of this, don't worry. We can. We have to, because we're right."
"I'm not faulting you, Mr. President. So Gallup puts us down. So what? It's one of those things. A couple of months from now, you'll be a hero."
"You'll be the hero this week, Vince. Home-town boy makes good." Lyman blew him a kiss, bravissimo. "Say, where'd you dream up that weekend in your grandfather's village? That's a great idea."
Gianelli beamed, winked and waved his arms, never missing a beat as his fork propelled meat loaf into his mouth. Lyman could never quite get over Gianelli's appetite and the haste with which he appeased it. But as Vince had once said: You want Ivy League manners, you should have picked someone from Princeton to run with you-and lost, maybe.
"I should take credit, but you know who cooked that one up? Prentice, that's who, I had it worked out to stop Saturday in Corniglio, you know, just run up on the way from here to there, make a little speech. So last Friday Prentice comes up to me in the cloakroom and says what am I going to do in the old country? And I give him a rundown. All of a sudden he sticks that finger in my face, the way he does, and gives me a big song and dance about tradition and sentiment and the Italo vote. He should tell me about that. But he says why not give the home-town thing a little more moxie and spend a couple of nights there? It's a natural if I ever heard one, no matter who thinks it up, so I buy it quick and yesterday the boys leak it to the papers."
"Prentice is sharp, all right," Lyman conceded dryly. "He made enough trouble for us over the treaty."
"Ah, he'll be okay when this simmers down some. I know, I'll never trust the bastard either, but an idea's an idea. Right?"
"Right, Vince. You going up to what's-its-name has real charm."
"Moxie," Gianelli corrected.
"Okay, moxie," Lyman agreed with a grin. "And moxie we can use right now."
Their talk drifted into small political gossip. Gianelli frequented the Senate cloakroom and the Speaker's rooms over in the House and he regularly brought Lyman an assortment of useful, if not always particularly elevated, nuggets of information. The Vice-President stowed away a pineapple sundae, patted his stomach, and rose to go.
"Cheer up, chief. From now on, things will start looking up." He waved from the door. "Arrivederci, Mr. President."
After he left General Scott's office, Casey concerned himself with strictly military matters in the strictly routine way with which he began each day. While the chairman conferred with Sir Harry Lancaster, Casey read methodically through the pile of messages, inquiries and receipts for orders that had accumulated since his relief from duty the day before. Selecting those that required Scott's attention, he added them to the Sunday stack and presented himself at the E-ring office shortly after the British Chief of Staff had left.
Scott, puffing on his first cigar of the day, was in good humor. Casey could almost feel himself basking in the General's radiance, as though he were standing on a beach in the first full heat of the morning sun. It was a rare man who, once within range of Scott's personality, failed to feel better for it.
"You look pretty chipper, Jiggs, for a man who had the Sunday duty."
"Marge and I stepped out last night, General. Pretty good party at the Dillards'. I think you've met him. He's Union Instruments' man here."
"Anybody I know there?" Scott asked.
"Yes, sir. Paul Girard from the White House and Senator Prentice, I guess, were the ranking guests."
Scott examined the thin column of cigar smoke wavering in the uncertain eddies of the air-conditioning currents. He chuckled.
"With those two," he said, "I'll bet there was a small go-round over the treaty. Prentice uphold our side all right?"
"He was pretty candid, sir. Also quite complimentary about you." Now, why this line of questions? Casey wondered. Scott must have covered all this last night with Prentice at his quarters.
Unsure of his ground, Casey turned to business.
"Here's the message file, General. And I wondered if you wouldn't want to invite a couple of Congressional people to observe the All Red, sir? It might not hurt us on the Hill if the leaders saw just how smoothly we can work when we have to."
Scott pressed his palms hard against his desk, fingers spread, the nails white where he pushed them against the wood. Casey had long ago noted the General's unconscious habit of flexing his hand muscles, sometimes clenching the fist, sometimes pressing on an object, often simply pushing the heels of the hands against each other.
He looked at Casey for a moment, then studied the ceiling briefly before he answered his question.
"No, Jiggs. I want to test our security as well as our readiness," he said. "Right now, nobody in Congress has a hint of it, and I want to see if we can keep it that way."
Casey was on the verge of blurting an objection- that Senator Prentice already knew about the alert. But, again remembering the odd meeting at Fort Myer last night, he decided not to.
Scott looked at his watch. "Time for the tank. Walk over with me, and then wait awhile. We may have some questions you can help us on."
"The tank" was the big conference room used by the Joint Chiefs. The name memorialized the depressing effect it had had on several generations of occupants. Pentagon wags described the furniture as "dismal brown," the rug as "disappointed mustard," and the walls as "tired turquoise." Although it was on the outer side of the building, the Venetian blinds were usually closed, further emphasizing the room's cheerless atmosphere. Between the windows a cluster of flags provided the sole touch of bright color. There were nine of them: the personal flag of each service chief and the standard of each of the four services, plus the chairman's own flag-a blue-and-white rectangle divided diagonally with two stars in each half and an American eagle, wearing a shield and clutching three gold arrows, in the center.