"You do?"
"Well, maybe not all the lurid details that your surmises would add up to. That's what we're trying to find out. But the climate's right for something like this, Jiggs, just as the President said yesterday. I've felt it in my stomach for a long time.
"You know, Girard and I stayed behind with the President last night. He needed us. After all, we were the only two politicians in the room besides him. You and Art and Todd are great guys to have in a thing like this, but it takes a professional to kind of weigh what's possible and what isn't."
"What do you think he can do, the President?" Casey asked. "I take it he won't consider a public showdown."
"That's impossible," Clark answered quickly. "Scott would deny it all and his friends would hint that the President had had a mental breakdown-or worse. They might call him insane. He could be impeached, but even if he wasn't, the real power would pass to Scott, and from then on civilian authority wouldn't be worth a nickel."
"So?"
"So the President gets open-and-shut evidence in his hands and then ..." Clark stopped. Casey looked at him. The Georgian's face had gone hard. "... And then he breaks him fast. Forces him to resign. Anything goes at that point."
Casey lit a cigarette. Clark must have been a pretty tough one himself in combat, for all his easy surface manner.
"And what if he can't make the evidence stick?" he asked.
"I've thought some about that," Clark said, "but I don't think the President has. He's too confident that point will never be reached. He's hoping that it's all a dream. One way, of course, would be to fire Scott out of hand without warning, install some guy like Rutkowski as chairman, call off the alert and order Rutkowski to break up ECOMCON-if it's really there."
"You'd have to do that by Friday night," Casey pointed out, "before they start flying troops all over the country."
"I know, I know. But does Jordie ... does the President know? Jiggs, before we're out of this we may need some professional advice from you. We might reach the point where we'd need to know the exact place to cut the communications and the command chain, so that it belongs to us, not to Scott."
They fell silent. Casey felt small and a bit helpless in the half-light just before sunrise. Six men fumbling with a huge military machine-and no manual to guide them. The great apparatus of the Pentagon stood there, ready to respond automatically to a word from Scott: three million men, guns, ships, planes, missiles. Casey felt as if he'd lost his bearings. Where were the powers of the Presidency, about which he'd heard all his life and for which he himself had jumped on occasion?
"In our system," Clark said, as though reading his thoughts, "a politician without the people isn't much, no matter where he sits."
As they drove into the airport parking lot, Casey copied Mutt Henderson's El Paso phone number out of his address book onto a slip of paper and gave it to Clark.
"Thanks, Jiggs," Clark said, "but I think I better have a look at that base myself. If I don't, we won't be any better off than we are now."
The two men shook hands and parted in the terminal lobby. The sun glowed large and red on the horizon when Casey boarded his shuttle plane to New York. A few minutes later, in the first full daylight, Clark rode the mobile lounge out to the morning jet flight to Dallas and El Paso.
President Lyman's first order of business this morning was an 8:30 call to his wife Doris at their daughter's home in Louisville. Lyman knew that a soft word would keep Doris happy for hours, and he thought wryly that he should be grateful for at least one situation in which a mere expression of approval on his part sufficed to put things right. After chatting with Mrs. Lyman, he called Liz at the hospital, heard her whisper "Grandpa" for the first time and blew her a loud kiss over the phone.
His mood was so cheerful when Secretary Todd telephoned a few minutes later that it earned him a rebuke.
"Good God, Mr. President," Todd said. "The way you sound, Scott must have given up and died."
"No. As a matter of fact, I was just about to call you about that. Can you come over right away?"
By the time Todd arrived from his Treasury office across the street, Lyman had finished two morning papers, informed his protesting press secretary that there would be no formal appointments that day, checked with Esther Townsend to make sure his three emissaries were safely on their way, and finished reading Corwin's notes on his night with Scott.
Todd fingered his watch chain as he read through the Corwin report, handed to him without comment by the President. Lyman removed his glasses, held them lightly in his big hands, and studied them as though inspecting the lenses for flaws.
"I must say that nothing in here tends to undercut Colonel Casey's story," Todd said. "Imagine two grown men sneaking up a freight elevator in the middle of the night to meet with a fringe mental case like MacPherson."
"Incidentally," Lyman said, "we can be pretty sure that it was Prentice's apartment. Esther checked our phone list this morning and Prentice is the only member of Congress of any standing who lives at the Dobney."
"Well, I can understand why Scott would be friendly with Prentice," Todd said. "After all, he's chairman of the Armed Services Committee, even if it was a bit late to call on him. But I can't see him mixing with that MacPherson."
Lyman leaned across his desk. "Look, Chris, if there is something up along the lines Casey suggested, it makes pretty good sense to me. MacPherson has eight or ten million listeners in his audience every night, and they apparently take everything he says as gospel truth. If Scott is planning something, he'll need someone to sell it to the country. And the way MacPherson talks, he'd be willing to do it. What I can't figure out is Prentice's part in this."
Now it was Todd's turn to be slightly patronizing.
"Mr. President, if there's something going on- and I'm still not ready to admit there is-it's quite obvious to me why Senator Prentice might be involved. He has a vested interest in the military not only because of his chairmanship but because of the state he represents. Think of all the defense contracts in California. Almost all our missiles and planes are made there. And it's not just big industry, it's the unions too. You turn on disarmament full steam and there'd be ghost towns all around Los Angeles for a while."
"Prentice is a bigger man than that," Lyman protested. "He throws his weight around, and he fought me on the treaty. But I've always respected him, really."
"I think it could be reflex action, pure and simple. He's no deep thinker. That treaty is a threat to his way of life, that's all." Todd brought the conversation back to specifics. "What about Rutkowski?"
"We talked for about an hour last night," Lyman said. "I found it a little hard to keep my hand hidden. I put it pretty much on the basis of being worried about what the military commanders were doing on the treaty, that kind of thing. Anyhow, Barney agreed to sound out Admiral Palmer this morning."
"Did he-"
The President interrupted. "Yes, there's something else. Barney said he got a call about three weeks ago from Colonel Murdock, asking him to come to Washington for a talk with Scott. Murdock made it plain it wasn't an order, just an invitation to discuss the political situation. Barney told him politics wasn't in his line, but that he'd drop in next time he came here.
Murdock got kind of vague then and said 'Yes, do that,' or something like that."
"I don't think Rutkowski should 'drop in' on Scott now," Todd said. "Scott might suspect something."
"I agree," Lyman said. "But I think I ought to call Scott right now, and tell him I'm going to skip the alert and go to Maine for the weekend instead."
Todd nodded. "We want to try him out, and that ought to get a reaction. And the sooner the better."