Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (66 page)

 
          
 
Burnham's mouth dropped open. He stared at the
guard. "I . . . beg . . . your . . . pardon?"

 
          
 
" 'Mine entrance.' Four letters."
The guard tapped his pencil on the crossword-puzzle book open on the desk.

 
          
 
Burnham felt little rivulets of sweat running
down the insides of his thighs. "Adit," he said, and he spelled the
word.

 
          
 
" 'Adit.' Great. Hey, thanks a lot."

 
          
 
Burnham's fingertips felt numb as he reached
for the door that led to the interior corridors of the West Wing. His underarms
were beginning to itch, he tasted a salty hint of blood in his saliva, and the
outer limits of his peripheral vision were slowly closing in.

 
          
 
He wasn't afraid—the symptoms of stress
overload were old acquaintances—and, thinking about them now, he was surprised
that they hadn't arrived sooner. Discovering that he was a spy, being chased by
federal agents through the alleys of
Georgetown
, facing the prospect of a life of penal
servitude— these were triggers that a month ago would have reduced him to a
drooling, suppurating, dysfunctional corpse. It was testament to the effect of
his relationship with Eva that he had gotten this far without collapsing.

 
          
 
Maybe we are what we eat, he thought, but we're
also what we love.

 
          
 
As soon as he got to his office, he reached
into the bottom drawer of his desk and found a box of Snickers bars. He ate one
in three bites, and his system, deprived of sugar for eight or ten hours, now
cried for more, so he ate another one. Then he lay on his couch and waited for
the glucose mellowness to wash over him.

 
          
 
Gradually, like water running out of a sink,
the itching and the bleeding and the numbness drained from him, and when he
opened his eyes his vision had returned to normal.

 
          
 
He grabbed the Gucci bag and walked down the
hall to Epstein's suite of offices. They were dark. Even Epstein had to sleep
sometime. He entered the outer office, turned on a desk lamp, shut the door and
looked around the room.

 
          
 
A bin, Dyanna had said. Where would you keep a
bin? The desks were clean of all but personal paraphernalia, the file cabinets
closed and locked. He tugged on one of the drawers in one of the desks. Looked.
The bin could be in a deep bottom drawer. How do you pick the lock in a desk?
With a paper clip?

 
          
 
There were two doors in the back of the room.
One led to Epstein's inner office. The other was a locked closet.

 
          
 
Screwed, Burnham thought. The best-laid plans
. . .

 
          
 
He was about to turn and go, to abandon
himself to life as a fugitive, to sleepless nights and spastic colitis and
cosmetic surgery, when he noticed that the hinges on the closet door faced out,
not in. The door couldn't be opened, but it could be removed.

 
          
 
He slipped off his belt and, with its brass buckle,
forced the hinge pins up to where he could grip them with his fingers and pull
them out. When the door was secured only by its own weight, Burnham tugged on
one of the hinges, and the wood slab fell off its mount and thumped onto the
carpet on its edge. Burnham supported the door and held his breath, praying
that the guard in the lobby would be too intent on finding a five-letter word
for an Indian potentate to pay heed to any single distant noise.

 
          
 
He pushed the door against the wall and looked
into the closet. It was full of office supplies: paper and paper clips,
pencils, rubber bands, tape, glue, stationery, stencils, typewriter ribbons and
a couple of folding umbrellas.

 
          
 
On the floor of the closet was a plastic bin
about the size of a liquor carton, half full of used audio cassettes and
micro-cassettes. He knelt down and opened the Gucci bag and culled the bin for
all the microcassettes. There were three or four dozen. Then, because room
remained in the Gucci bag, he filled it with regular cassettes.

 
          
 
Before he replaced the door—propping it on the
toe of his shoe so he could fit the sections of hinge together—he removed a
roll of Scotch tape from the closet.

 
          
 
He opened the door to Epstein's inner office.
He thought he remembered that Epstein's private bathroom was behind and to the
right of the massive mahogany desk.

 
          
 
When he was finished in the bathroom, he
backed slowly out through the suite of offices, looking left and right, trying
to focus on everything, wanting to have disturbed nothing.

 
          
 
He leaned down to turn off the lamp on the
last of the secretary's desks, and he noticed that the ashtray wasn't clean. It
was empty, but not clean, which meant that this secretary had worked later than
the cleaning staff and when she had finished for the night, she had dumped her
cigarette butts but hadn't bothered to wipe the ashtray.

 
          
 
On a whim, Burnham stepped behind the desk and
examined the secretary's IBM Display writer. He saw that she had left discs in
the toasterlike device beside the main machine. He turned the word processor
on, and when the letters IBM flashed on the screen to show that it was ready
for action, he removed the diskette, read its label, replaced it, armed the
toaster, pushed "request," typed in the name of the diskette, commanded
the machine to display its contents, and stood back as an army of green letters
advanced on the screen.

 
          
 
It was at the top of the list: "Burnham
memo."

 
          
 
Burnham told the machine he wanted to see the
Burnham memo, and, obediently, the machine showed it to him.

 
          
 
It was dated today,
eight a.m.
It would be printed and distributed in—Burnham
looked at his watch—three and a half hours.

 
          
 
It was addressed to the White House police,
and it instructed all gate officers to, on sight of Timothy Y. Burnham, apprehend
him, confiscate his pass, escort him to the West Basement and notify Mario
Epstein's office immediately.

 
          
 
Burnham told the IBM machine to erase the
memo. He typed a new one, substituting Epstein's name for his own, instructing
the police to notify the President as soon as Epstein was apprehended. Then he
ordered ten copies of the memo and, as each came off the printer, signed it
with a dramatic "W." He slid the copies into an interoffice envelope,
slugged it "Rush" and, on his way back to his office, dropped it in a
routing cart. The memo would greet every gate officer at the change of shift.

 
          
 
Mischief, Burnham admitted to himself, puerile
mischief. But it would provide a suitable beginning for Mario Epstein's
memorable day.

 
          
 
He sat at his desk and typed out the
Honduras
notes for the President. He knew it was a
reckless, probably dangerous gesture—he had already missed the hour mark with
Hal, and he would likely miss the hour-and-a-half mark, too—but he felt an
obligation to the President, to himself and (he was interested to discover that
he actually believed this) to the country. He might crash and bum, but he would
leave a little legacy.

 
          
 
The notes were six pages long. He clipped them
together, walked them into Evelyn Witt's office and placed them in the center
of her desk.

 
          
 
Back in his office, he removed from their
frames his signed photos of the President and, along with a folder of memos in
the President's handwriting, slipped them into the Gucci bag. Someday, perhaps,
they would mitigate his infamy in the eyes of his children.

 
          
 
He left a note for Dyanna, wishing her well
and offering to provide exculpatory testimony, should anyone attempt to tar her
with his brush, and apologizing for purloining her microcassette recorder,
which he took from her desk and put in his jacket pocket.

 
          
 
As he passed out through the West Gate, he
stopped and listed with the guard a name—the name of a visitor to be cleared
through to see Mario Epstein at
ten o'clock
that morning.

 
          
 
A TAPEWORM. That had to be it. Ivy decided. No
other way to explain an eighteen-year-old boy who never gets any more exercise
than going tippety-tappety, tippety-tappety on a computer keyboard all day long
eating a breakfast every day of almost a dozen fat, doughy pancakes and half a
pound of bacon and a pint of whole milk, and he stays as skinny as a lizard.

 
          
 
Ivy stood at the stove and flipped four more
pancakes. Jerome sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, eating as fast as his
mother cooked and watching a CBS Morning News interview with one of those
people whose daughter had just had a kidney transplant from a baboon. The
morning shows must keep a whole warehouse of such people available to be
trotted out on slow news days.

 
          
 
Jerome didn't care about kidney transplants or
baboons. If there was no news about supercomputers or computer piracy or
computer software, he wanted to watch about baseball: He didn't care about the
game, but he loved the statistics. They were graspable, quantifiable,
recordable. They represented order to Jerome. He kept a disc with the
statistics of every member of every team in the American League East, and he
updated it every day.

 
          
 
So he switched channels on his brand-new Sony
12-inch color TV. Maybe Good Morning,
America
would have something about baseball. After
all, David Hartman used to play ball.

 
          
 
The words were out of David Hartman's mouth
and vanishing in the ether before they imprinted on Ivy's mind. Something about
spies, he said. Something about the White House.

 
          
 
She went rigid. She stopped breathing and
aimed her hearing at the TV set. But whatever it was had gone.

 
          
 
"What'd he just say?"

 
          
 
"Nothing," said Jerome.

 
          
 
"Don't tell me 'nothing.' I heard him.
About the White House."

 
          
 
"Rumors. He said there's rumors about
someone leaking documents from the White House, and maybe there's spies
involved. They're working on the story. That's all."

 
          
 
Ivy flipped the pancakes. How serious could
this be? She flipped them again. What was she supposed to do? She flipped them
a third time. What could she do? Flipping pancakes wasn't helping at all. She
piled them on the spatula and dropped them on Jerome's plate. They weren't
done, they'd taste like mucilage, but Jerome wouldn't care. Bulk, that's what
he cared about, bulk and maple syrup.

 
          
 
She went into her bedroom and shut the door.
She tried to dial Mr. Pym's phone number, but her dialing finger shook so badly
that she punched the wrong buttons and got that annoying, mocking intercept
buzz from the phone. She grabbed her left index finger with her right fist
and—as carefully as a policeman fingerprinting a suspect—pressed the seven
numbers.

 
          
 
The phone rang five times before a man's voice
answered with a cheery, "Hello." It was a happy, singsong voice. It
sounded like honey would sound, if honey had a sound.