“What would we have to do to solve this drug mess, and I mean solve it?”
Gideon Cohen took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Repeal the Fourth Amendment or legalize dope. Those are the choices.”
Dorfman leaped from his chair. “For the love of—are you out of your mind?” he roared. “Jeez-us H.—”
Bush waved his chief of staff into silence. “Will convicting Chano Aldana have any effect on the problem?”
“A diplomatic effect, yes. A moral effect, I hope. But—”
“Will convicting him have any direct effect at all on the amount of drugs that comes into the United States?” Dorfman demanded.
“Hell, no,” Cohen shot back, relieved to have a target for his frustration. “Convicting a killer doesn’t prevent murder. But you have to try killers because a civilized society cannot condone murder. You have to punish it whenever and wherever you can.”
“This war on drugs has all the earmarks of a windmill crusade,” Dorfman explained, back in his seat and now the soul of reason. “Repealing the Fourth Amendment, legalizing dope …” He shook his head slowly. “We have to take positive steps, that’s true enough, but the President cannot appear as an ineffectual bumbler, an incompetent. That’s a sin the voters won’t forgive. Remember Jimmy Carter?” His voice turned hard: “And he can’t advocate some crackpot solution. He’d be laughed out of office.”
“I’m not asking for political hara-kiri,” Cohen said wearily. “I just want to get this dope kingpin up here where we can try him with enough security so that we don’t have any incidents. We need to ensure no one gets to the jurors. The jurors have to feel safe. We will get convictions.”
“We’d better,” Dorfman said caustically.
“Will, you’ve argued all along that what was needed here was more cops, more judges, and more prisons,” Cohen said, letting a little of his anger leak out. “ ‘Leave the rehab programs and drug-prevention seminars to the Democrats,’ you said. Okay, now we have to put Aldana in prison. This is where that policy road has taken us. We have no other options.”
“I’m not suggesting we let him go,” Dorfman snarled, his aggressive instincts fully aroused. “I’m wondering if you’re the man to put him in the can.”
The President waved his hands to cut them off and rose to his feet. “I don’t fancy having to apologize to this asshole and buy him a plane ticket back to Medellín. Bring Aldana to Washington. But announce this as your decision, Gid. I’ve got a plane to catch.” He paused at the door. “And Gid?”
“Yessir.”
“Don’t make any speeches about repealing the Fourth Amendment. Please.”
Cohen nodded.
“Everybody’s getting panicky. Ted Kennedy says cigarette smoking leads to drug abuse. That dingy congresswoman — Strader — wants to put a National Guardsman on every corner in Washington. Somebody else wants to put all the addicts in the army. A columnist out in Denver wants us to invade Colombia — I’m not kidding — as if Vietnam never happened.” Bush opened the door and held it. “Maybe we should put all the addicts in the army and send them to Colombia.”
Dorfman tittered.
“You’re a good attorney general, Gid. I need you to keep thinking. Don’t panic.”
Cohen nodded again as the President went through the door and it closed behind him.
Henry Charon took twenty minutes to circle the White House grounds. On the west side of the executive mansion he found himself across the street from a gray stone mausoleum that his map labeled the Executive Office Building.
He was standing facing it with his hands in his pockets when he heard the sound of a helicopter. He turned. One was coming in from the southeast, lower and lower over the tops of the buildings, until it turned slightly and sank out of sight, hidden by the trees, on the grounds behind the White House.
Henry Charon retraced his steps south along the sidewalk, looking for a gap in the trees and shrubs where the helicopter would be visible. He could find no such gap. Finally he stopped and waited, listening to the faint tone of the idling jet engines. The sound had that distinctive whop-whop-whop as the downwash of the rotors rhythmically pulsed it.
The chopper had been on the ground for four and a half minutes by Charon’s watch when the engine noise rose in pitch and volume. In a few seconds the machine became visible above the trees. The nose pitched down and the helicopter began to move forward. Now it laid over on its side slightly and veered right as it continued to climb, its engines apparently at full power. The mirage distortions that marked the hot jet exhausts were plainly visible.
The machine finished its turn to the southeast and continued to climb and accelerate. Finally it was hidden by one of the buildings over beyond the Treasury. Which one? Henry Charon consulted his map.
With his hands in his pockets, Charon walked past the White House on Constitution Avenue and proceeded east.
Six blocks north, in the Washington Post building on Fifteenth Street NW, Jack Yocke had asked to attend the afternoon story conference of editors. At the meeting an editor from each of the paper’s main divisions — metro, national, foreign, sports, style — briefed the lead stories that his staff wanted run in tomorrow’s paper. The Post’s executive or managing editor then picked the stories for the next day’s front page.
Arranged on the table in front of every chair were stacks of legal-sized papers, “slug” sheets, containing brief paragraphs on each of the top stories for tomorrow’s paper. On weekdays the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, routinely attended Page One meetings. Weekends, Yocke knew, Bradlee would escape to his Maryland west shore hideaway unless his wife, Sally, was throwing a dinner or the Redskins were playing at home.
Yocke took his seat and studied the slug sheets. The beltway killing yesterday afternoon was in there, as was last night’s “stoop murder.” Both stories had unusual twists. The beltway killing looked like a wire-service story from Los Angeles, the city of rage, yet it had happened here in Washington — Powerville U.S.A. — and the killer had used a rifle. The victim was one Walter P. Harrington, head cashier of Second Potomac Savings and Loan. The neighbors had told Yocke that Harrington was a prig, a martinet, married to an equally offensive wife, yet for all of that respected as an honest, hard-working citizen who kept to himself and never disturbed the neighborhood.
The stoop murder appeared to be a garden-variety mob rubout, but the victim, Judson Lincoln, apparently had not been associated with the mob in any way. Yocke had spent two hours this morning working the phones and hadn’t heard a hint. Lincoln owned a string of ten check-cashing establishments scattered through the poorer sections of downtown D.C. He had been mentioned in stories in the Post at least seven times in the last twelve years, always as a prominent local businessman. Twice the Post had run his photo.
How would one handle that in a news story? “Judson Lincoln, prominent District businessman who was not a member of any crime family, was professionally assassinated last night on the stoop of his mistress’s town house as the lady looked on.” Great lead!
Black, honest, respected, sixty-two-year-old Judson Lincoln had enjoyed the company of young women with big tits. If that was his worst sin he was probably sitting on a cloud strumming a harp right now. Lincoln had just returned from the theater with one such woman when he was gunned down. Had his outraged wife arranged his murder?
Jack Yocke was musing on these mysteries when the framed lead press plate mounted on the wall, the Post’s very own trophy, captured his attention. It was Bradlee’s favorite Post front page: NIXON RESIGNS.