Hutchins nodded.
"Why?"
"You wouldn't take the press secretary's job. My plan failed. He also believed that Stemple began providing you with information after the Congressional shooting, and he couldn't find Stemple to kill him at first, try as he did, so he figured it was easier to kill you. And you guys wouldn't buy into our line that the dead assassin was a federally protected witness named Tony Clawson, which would have been embarrassing for the FBI, but would have assured that no one would ever associate me with Clawson for the rest of my life. I tried fending Drinker off by pushing and pushing you to take the job. You set yourself up by refusing to come aboard."
If I thought about that too hard, the calculation would sicken me.
With that logic, I had caused Havlicek's death a number of different ways. But right there and then, I refused to dwell.
It was after eight-thirty and heading toward nine, the deadline for our first edition. I assumed I had blown that already. I steadied myself on the couch and said, "Sir, I appreciate your help, but I have to leave. Is there anything else you want to make clear to me about your past, about the election, about your plans for the future? More to the point, if we run a story tomorrow, and we will run a story tomorrow, do you plan to resign in the light of these allegations, or will you remain in office for as long as you are able?"
He sat with his elbows on his knees and his head pointed straight down at the floor, as if in prayer. He looked up at me from the uncomfortable crouch and said, "I don't know. I just don't know right now."
I nodded. Why should he? I got up and started slowly, quietly for the door. When I got there, he said softly, "So no deal?"
"I have an obligation, sir."
"You know, you fulfill that obligation, it's the end of me. Have I really been that bad a person? Do I really deserve this?"
As I turned to walk out the door, he was still sitting in that chair by the fireplace, hunched over, looking nothing like the man I saw on the golf course on that brilliant October morning eleven days before. He said to me in a voice as plain as white paper, neither loud nor soft, angry nor sad, "You should believe in redemption. And if you do, you should honor that belief." I stopped walking while he talked, not wanting to be rude. He wasn't even looking my way anymore. When I began walking again, I heard him say, as if to himself, though perhaps to me, "You more than anyone else should understand my grief."
twenty-three
I gulped in the fresh night air as I stepped outside the West Wing and onto the North Lawn of the White House. Nearby, anchors for some of the cable stations, Moose Myers among them, did stand-ups for their preelection specials, all of them holding their microphones to their mouths, the glowing building as their backdrop, so completely, exquisitely oblivious to the news that was about to crash over the country.
I strode toward the northwest gate, looking out into the patch of black on the other side that was Lafayette Park. I stopped for a second on the White House drive. As soon as I stepped outside of that gate, I was fair game. Drinker could be sitting in that park right now, lurking, waiting, watching me, fingering a gun or a knife shoved into his overcoat pocket, his collar turned up against the breeze. He could be posing as a tourist with a windbreaker and a camera. He could be hiding in a doorway with a ski hat pulled down low over his forehead.
He could slash my throat as I walked on an otherwise barren street, grab my wallet, and leave me bleeding to death beneath a streetlamp on a littered city sidewalk. Isn't it ironic, the papers would point out, that a well-known reporter who had survived a shooting and a bombing was finally felled by what was probably a crazed drug addict in search of a few bucks, and isn't Washington, the nation's capital, a disgrace?
Time was my enemy here. Staring into the abyss of that park, I quickly turned around in the drive and began to trot toward the walkway that led to the adjacent Old Executive Office Building. Technically, it was off limits with my press pass, and at any juncture, the Secret Service uniformed officers could stop me, even detain me. But detention, I quickly calculated, was preferable to a violent death. At least I could probably make a phone call, most likely to Martin, and dictate what I had.
The guard shack between the White House and the ancient and ornate OEOB, which once housed the Department of War, was usually empty. I scurried down the stairs, across an alleyway, and into the loading entrance. I wended my way through a maze of wide, empty hallways, my wing tips clicking on the hard tile floors and echoing off the walls.
Every doorway seemed dangerous. Every turn seemed pivotal. It felt like I had walked a mile before I finally saw a red, illuminated Exit sign. I rounded a corner, saw three officers chatting at a station, summoned every ounce of calm that I could find, and casually walked toward the turnstyle. One of the agents matter-of-factly buzzed me out, and I was on my way.
Out on Seventeenth Street, the luck of the skilled came through once again, this time in the form of a taxicab happening by just as I hit the curb. The elderly, grizzled driver was aggravated when I directed him to my office just a few minutes away, so I said to him, trying to lighten the mood, "Who do you like in tomorrow's election?"
"Is there even a question?" he asked. "Hutchins, all the way. The stock market's up. The economy's so good that even I own stocks these days. And he's honest. Look at that other creep. He lies. They all lie, I guess, but Hutchins lies less."
Well, brace yourself, old man. Brace yourself.
In front of my office, I slipped him a fin for his time and opinion and made a dash for the front door, all, fortunately, within full view of a very friendly building security guard named Alan. I ran past him, boarded a waiting elevator, and ascended to my office, a place I had feared I would never see again.
The bureau, I was quite sure, was probably as safe a venue as any, and more comfortable than most. A writer likes familiarity. A reporter does as well. This was not a story I wanted to type from the small desk of my hotel room, nice as my hotel room might be.
By nine at night, my office was a shadowy shade of gray, with the hazy green glare of so many computer screens casting the only light across the vast room. I knew this bureau better than I knew anyplace else on Earth, yet it seemed somehow different now, eerie. Speaking out loud, I told myself I needed to calm my nerves, saying, "You have to relax."
Even the sound of my own voice made me jumpy, but not nearly as much as the sound I heard next, that of someone else speaking to me in the dark.
"Who are you talking to?"
The new voice made me just about leap through the ceiling. My eyes darted about the room until they came to rest on Peter Martin, sitting in the dark at a computer screen just across from mine, flipping through wire stories. "Jesus Christ," I said. "You're going to scare me to death."
"Actually, it's you who scared me. You should be at your hotel. I've been waiting here for you to call." He paused, then said, "Tell me what you have."
I sat down at my computer. He drew his chair up closer, and I slowly, carefully walked him through my session in the Oval Office. I read him some Hutchins quotes that I had furiously scribbled on a legal pad just after I had left the West Wing.
After my ten-minute monologue, Martin looked stricken, as if he might get sick right there on the newsroom rug. In the heavy silence, my telephone rang, the sound crashing into our thoughts. I suspected it might be Hutchins, trying to sweeten the deal for cooperation, but when I picked up the receiver, I heard only dead air, followed by the click of someone hanging up on the other end. It made my skin crawl, even if I didn't fully appreciate or understand why.