"By God, Mr. President, if I were sure this was a case of sedition, I'd use anything I could get my hands on."
The light on the President's telephone winked. It was Art Corwin with a report on Scott: The General had just arrived at the Pentagon, but had first gone from Fort Myer to the Dobney, picked up Senator Prentice and driven him to 14th and Constitution before letting him out. Prentice seemed upset, Corwin said, as he stood on the curb trying to flag down a taxi to take him on to Capitol Hill.
Esther Townsend had come in unnoticed. She closed the door behind her as silently as she had opened it.
"Mr. President, excuse me," she said. "I'm holding another call. It's Secretary Burton. He says he must talk to you."
Lyman raised his hand in a signal of protest.
"Esther, I can't talk to Tom right now. Make some excuse for me, will you?"
Todd grunted. "This is hardly the moment to burden your employer with the multifarious problems of health, education and welfare, Miss Townsend."
"Tom doesn't come running down here without a good reason, Chris," Lyman said, "but somebody else will have to handle him today. What's his problem?"
"He says time is running out on those Social Security amendments," Esther said. "You've only got two more days left to decide whether to sign the bill. He says he's got to talk to you about it. He says it's vital."
"Important, yes. Vital, no-not this week. I know how he feels about the bill already, and I'm not going to do anything until I get the report from Budget. He better talk to them."
Esther nodded and started to leave. Then, pausing at the door, she turned back. "Mr. President, Secretary Burton is only one of about two dozen calls I've got stacked up for you. I haven't bothered you with the others."
"I know, Esther, and thank you," Lyman said. "Now, be a good girl and think up something nice to tell Tom."
Todd got to his feet, tugging at his lapels to settle the collar of his jacket properly.
"It's time to hoist the storm warnings, Mr. President," he said. "I'm going back to the office and work out a plan. I've got a feeling you may have to move tonight."
"How?"
"That's what I'm going to figure out."
Lyman glowered at the stack of papers on the right-hand side of his desk-the clerical chores of the Presidency, untouched since Monday. There were commissions and several minor executive orders for his signature, policy papers from State to be read, and several recommendations from the Attorney General for judicial appointments. A pending judgeship in Chicago rested on top of the heap. The Attorney General recommended Benjamin Krakow, a member of the city's leading Democratic law firm. He had backed Lyman before the convention. The Bar Association had him on its list of three men it suggested for the vacancy.
The President wrote "O.K., Jordan Lyman" on the bottom of the sheet and put it over on the left side of his desk. He was reaching for the second paper when Esther came in again.
"It's Saul Lieberman," she said. "He said it's imperative he see you this morning. I didn't encourage him."
Lyman hesitated only a moment. "If Saul says it's imperative, it is. Tell him to come over right away. And, Esther, tell him to come in the front door, and tell Frank Simon to post the appointment in the pressroom. At least they won't think I'm dead."
Saul Lieberman was Director of Central Intelligence. If Lyman had required IQ tests for his appointees, Lieberman would have led the field with twenty points to spare. He had been an enlisted man in the Army Counterintelligence Corps during World War II, then went home to Detroit to found a retail credit agency that spread into half the states and made him rich. Two private missions behind the iron curtain and service on several presidential committees which weighed the shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency gained him a small reputation in the elite world of espionage, but Lyman surprised the world at large when he named him to head CIA.
Lieberman was almost aggressively uncouth. He wore his lack of civility as a badge of honor and enjoyed torturing Washington hostesses with the Ham-tramck slang of his boyhood. In eighteen months he had become a conversation piece in the capital; never had the Ivy-clad CIA known such a sidewalk product.
"How's the private eye of the cold war?" Lyman asked as Lieberman bustled in ten minutes later.
"Lousy, Mr. President. I was shocked to hear about Paul. Believe me, I wouldn't have bothered you today if this wasn't important."
"That's all right, Saul. I understand."
"After what else I learned this morning," Lieberman said, "I should be spending the day at the health club. Look at this."
He pulled a paper from his coat pocket and slid it across the President's desk. It was a plain outline map of Russia, the kind children use in geography classes for penciling in rivers and cities.
In one area of Siberia someone had marked a cross in red crayon.
"That's Yakutsk," Lieberman said, "and it's bad news. We have it so straight I don't argue with it. Feemerov is starting to assemble the Z-4 at Yakutsk."
Lyman stared at his intelligence chief without expression. The Z-4 was the Russian equivalent of the Olympus, America's neutron-warhead missile. The treaty did not call for scrapping of the missiles themselves, but it did require dismantling of the warheads, with inspection of existing plants to guarantee that no more would be made.
If Feemerov had built a new Z-4 plant in secret, where the treaty inspectors could not see it, the implications were staggering. It meant the Kremlin had decided to cheat on the treaty, taking a calculated risk of being discovered and denounced. It could mean the end of Lyman's meticulous plans and deepest hopes. Indeed-the thought struck him like a blow in the stomach-it might eventually mean the end of civilization.
And more immediately, it meant that General Scott's often-expressed doubts had been proved correct. In the way the mind skitters ahead under tension, playing like summer lightning on infinite possibilities, he could see the headlines:
LYMAN PATSY FOR REDS,
REPUBLICAN CHARGES
And if Scott were correct, what right had he, a President proved gullible, to oppose him now?
Lyman sagged in his swivel chair. His face, to Lieberman, seemed blank and colorless. The intelligence director spoke quickly, as though he were a fresh wind with power to lift a drooping flag.
"We got little bits and pieces of this beginning Monday, Mr. President. But they didn't add up. We knew a special alloy used in the Z-4 was being shipped to Yakutsk. Tuesday, three scientists who are the brains of Z-4 were flown out there from Moscow in a special plane. Then last night the watch officer at the NIC called me. He says, 'Saul, they're building the Z-4 at Yakutsk.' "
The NIC was the intelligence community's National Indications Center in a subbasement of the Pentagon. There specialists from all intelligence services, aided by banks of electronic computers, stood a 24-hour watch on everything that moved in the Communist world. Their mission: to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of Red movements-troops, machines, raw materials, political leaders, scientists, weapons-so as to anticipate any major venture that could threaten the United States.
Lyman said nothing. Lieberman went on with his story.
"I got over there about midnight, real skeptical. In this business I got to be shown. By three this morning I knew the boys were right. They got word on no less than twenty-five or twenty-six items, all exclusive with the Z-4 and all pouring into Yakutsk like rats toward a hanging side of beef."
Lieberman leaned across the desk and began marking the little map. From Moscow he drew a line with his penciclass="underline" the three scientists. From Novosibirsk, another line: a new black box for the missile's complex guidance system. From Volgograd, several delicate electronic components made only in one factory there, and used only in the Z-4. The lines multiplied and crisscrossed.