"What do you think about it, Art?"
"I think I'd better double the detail, with the men I know best," Corwin replied quickly.
"No, no, I don't mean that. What do you think about the whole thing, the idea? Does it make any sense to you?"
Corwin smiled for the first time, and Lyman thought he could read something like affection for him in the agent's face.
"Mr. President," he said, "my predecessor on this job and I get together every once in a while. You'd be surprised how we think of Presidents. As far as we're concerned, in our work, you're all part babe in the woods and part fool.
"Somebody is always trying to knock off the President, in one way or another. We shortstop a hundred letters a year from screwballs who want to cut your throat or poison you or drill you with a rifle."
Lyman smiled ruefully. "And Dr. Gallup must have talked to every one of them last week."
Corwin smiled politely, but was not to be diverted.
"But with all of that, Presidents do the damnedest things. Remember when Truman stuck his head out the window in Blair House, right in the middle of that Puerto Rican thing, to see what all the shooting was about? And Kennedy swimming all by himself fifty yards off his boat in cold water forty feet deep- and him with a bad back? Or Eisenhower playing golf at Burning Tree? Why, the woods are so thick along some of those fairways that a dozen nuts could have a shot out of the trees before the detail could even see them."
Lyman raised a big hand to protest. "But this is different, Art. If it's ... if it's true, this could be an operation to take over the Presidency, the office itself."
"It's all the same to us, Mr. President," Corwin answered. "We don't trust anybody. Maybe you'll laugh, but I find myself running an eye over some of your top people, even the Cabinet, looking for a bulge under their jackets."
"We're not on the same wave length, Art," Lyman insisted. "There isn't any danger, physical danger, to me in this. What this may be is a threat to the office I happen to hold. And, therefore, to the Constitution."
"It comes down to the same thing, sir. If anybody wants to take over the government, they have to get rid of you first somehow, or at least put you away- say in a back room underground at Mount Thunder."
Lyman could see he was wasting time. Corwin refused to follow him into the realm of political philosophy. But did it really matter? Corwin was chained to one task: the protection of the physical person of the President. Well, it might come down to that. And if the thing turned out to be an elaborate tissue of nothing, and Lyman became the laughing-stock of the country, at least Corwin wouldn't join the merriment. Or gossip, either.
"Well, Art. We're all going to meet this afternoon, at two, in the solarium, and I want you there. In the meantime, what would you think about trailing General Scott to see what he's up to?"
Corwin grinned again. "Who says we're not on the same wave length? I was just going to suggest that. And you've got the right man for it. I used to get plenty of practice when I was chasing those funny-money artists."
Esther came in as Corwin was leaving to say that Secretary Todd was waiting, but Lyman asked first for Frank Simon. The thin, wiry young press secretary, looking like a pinched owl behind his hornrimmed glasses, hurried into the office. He was the best public relations technician in the business, but the mere sight of him always made Lyman feel a little jumpy, as though somebody had just scraped his nerve ends.
"Frank," he said, "I'll have to scrub that eleven o'clock appointment with Donahue of the Fed. There are a lot of loose ends on the implementation of the treaty that some of us have to work out. But don't tell the reporters that. Just say it's been postponed because I'm working on legislative matters. All right?"
Simon twitched his shoulders. "We'll draw some snotty stories if you cancel your only appointment today, after that poll yesterday."
"I can't help that, Frank. If the first stage of this disarmament doesn't come off exactly as we agreed, all of us will be below zero in the next poll."
"All right, Mr. President." Simon's shoulders hunched again. "It's a lot easier to handle these things, though, if you can give me a little advance notice. I don't do my best work in the dark."
If you only knew how dark, Lyman answered silently.
Christopher Todd strode in, carrying his ever-present portfolio. An aura of assurance moved with him: Nothing was ever out of place in Chris Todd's world. At sixty, he had been Wall Street's ranking corporate lawyer when Lyman called him to the Treasury.
A ruddy, leathery tan bespoke his weekends as a yachtsman, formerly on the Sound, now on Chesapeake Bay. He wore a gray suit whose perfect tailoring was as elegantly inconspicuous as its discreet pattern. A darker gray tie was totally plain except for a tiny blue anchor in its center. His black shoes, bench made in England, were impeccably polished but not quite shiny. The gold watch chain across his vest had to be a legacy from his grandfather. The Phi Beta Kappa key which reposed out of sight in a pocket at one end of the chain was his own.
The press sketched Todd as "sharp," "cold," "cultivated," "sardonic." He was all that, and more.
Lyman rose to greet him, then took from a desk drawer the box of fine panatela cigars that he kept there especially for Todd. The President opened his own tobacco pouch and filled his pipe as Todd inspected a cigar, clipped it, and lit it with a kitchen match from a box in his coat pocket. Then Lyman told the story again.
As he recounted it, this time in infinite detail, he could see Todd's eyes brighten. The lawyer sat stiff in his chair, watching Lyman steadily except when he studied the end of his cigar. Lyman knew he was timing the ash. A good cigar, Todd believed (and frequently proclaimed), must go at least fifteen minutes before it needed an ashtray. Lyman finished his recital with a simple question.
"Well, what's the verdict, Chris?"
Todd's gray eyebrows arched upward. Foes of the Secretary found this habit of his particularly annoying, believing it indicated-as it usually did-disdain or reproof. Lyman, however, was merely amused, as he was by many of Todd's calculated traits.
"If I went into court as Scott's counsel against that kind of nonsense," said Todd, "I'd move to quash the indictment and we'd be out of the courthouse in ten minutes."
"I didn't offer it as evidence," Lyman replied gently, "but as a presumption of evidence. You're not the only lawyer in the room, Chris."
Todd's blue eyes snapped. "Mr. President, there are no lawyers in Ohio. Only apprentices in the law. When they become lawyers, they move to New York."
"Or Washington," the President said. He laughed as he relit his cold pipe.
"Let's look at this squarely," Todd began. "You obviously set great store by this ECOMCON business. Nobody has heard of it before. Not you, not Girard, not Fullerton, not this Colonel Casey. Well, then, what makes you think it does in fact exist? We have only the colonel's conjecture. He obviously has no facts."
"And the Hardesty note?" asked Lyman. "That refers to it, and to a Site Y, the designation that Casey's friend uses for his post near El Paso."
"That could easily mean another place. The proliferation of these secret bases has always seemed foolish to me. We confuse ourselves more than we do the Soviets."
"Well, we may have an answer to that this afternoon," Lyman said. "Girard is checking out the location and designation of every classified installation."
"And as for flying troops to big cities in an alert, that seems to me not only logical but prudent." Todd was pressing his case. "Obviously, if the Russians struck, we'd need disciplined troops in the metropolitan areas to keep order and prevent complete breakdown. And, if I may say so, the conversion of a wagering pool on the Preakness into a code for some sinister plot to seize the government seems to me to have no foundation whatsoever. It's sheer guesswork. Everybody knows General Scott loves horse races, and everyone who loves horse races bets on them. Colonel Casey's deductive powers are lurid, to say the least."