Nature of the Game (33 page)

He glanced around the edge of the door, down the corridor beyond the velvet rope: no one.

Quietly, one step at a time, he left the shadows, crossed toward the wall next to the door leading to the office of the President's personal secretary. His flashlight made no purple glow on the wall. He pushed the secret button in the molding. A panel in the Oval Office's wall slid open to reveal a safe whose existence was almost unknown. The light showed no powder on the safe.

Unlike the five men who were at that moment in the process of the third burglary of the Watergate complex sponsored by the President's team, Jud dared not wear surgeon's gloves. A surprise inspection of the White House guard detail that turned up surgical gloves in Jud's possession would spell his doom; the flashlight would pass any routine examination, and the lockpicks secreted in his ballpoint pen did not interfere with its writing. Jud covered his hand with his handkerchief to dial the combination that had taken him six separate nights of patient, fragmented effort to figure out.

His radio crackled: Guard Post 4, checking in.

The flashlight showed no purple glow from the contents of the safe.

Dozens of memos, most of which Jud had seen before, most of them from Kissinger to the President. Some dated back to the early days of the President's term, including
TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE
memos in which Kissinger bureaucratically knifed the secretary of state. One memo discussed the “madman” strategy of negotiation Kissinger was using with various communist powers. The strategy called for Kissinger to portray Nixon as maniacally out of control, which would theoretically make Kissinger's pleas for the communists to concede certain diplomatic issues more compelling. The “madman” theory of diplomacy was popularized by Hitler in the Munich era of conciliation before fighting erupted in World War II—and had been analyzed in 1959 for Kissinger at Harvard by then-cold warrior Daniel Ellsberg. On top of the pile, Jud found a three-page “Eyes Only” memo from Kissinger to the President outlining strategies for dealing with Premier Chou En-lai that Kissinger planned to follow in his visit to China the next week.

Infiltrate
, Jud's orders had been.
Monitor. Report
.

He closed but did not lock the safe, closed the secret panel. Getting into the personal secretary's office, photocopying the Chou En-lai memo, took three minutes. One more minute, and he was putting the original memo back in the Oval Office safe.

Jud unbuttoned his shirt.

Confuse to aid concealment. Provoke to develop intelligence opportunities
.

Such were his orders.
Reconnaissance by fire
, Jud had thought. A common military tactic. But
provocation
was a means to an end that Jud thought went beyond creating “intelligence opportunities.” He didn't know every motive that generated his orders, but the words gave him a license for his imagination.

Earlier that night he'd been down the hall, past the Roosevelt Room to the offices of Kissinger and Haldeman. Kissinger's locked files contained FBI reports about his staff and even an “Eyes Only” report from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on murdered Martin Luther King's sex life. White House Chief of Staff Haldeman was WATCHDOG. He had two safes: one sat by his desk. The other, a French safe, was hidden in the wall. It had taken Jud five weeks to fashion a duplicate key for the French safe.

From inside his shirt, Jud took an August 9, 1971, White House
MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD
concerning a meeting the President's “plumbers” had had at CIA headquarters. Jud had stolen the memo from Haldeman's French safe. The memo outlined the coordinated strategy between Nixon's men and the CIA.

The CIA liaison officer was named John Paisley. Six years after Jud stole that White House memo, when Paisley was serving on the CIA team analyzing the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, he disappeared while boating alone on Chesapeake Bay. Days later, a bloated body weighted down with two diving belts was found floating in the Bay and was identified as Paisley. The body was four inches shorter than Paisley's official height. No fingerprint or dental-record check was ever made. The corpse had a 9mm bullet wound behind the left ear. Paisley was right-handed. No gun or expended cartridge was found on his boat. The corpse was ruled a suicide and cremated at a CIA-approved funeral home without the family's having been allowed to see it.

That Friday night in the White House, Jud shuffled that “For the Record” memo in amidst the President's papers.

So, SEARCHLIGHT
, thought Jud, smiling,
will it wig you out to discover what's materialized in your private safe?

Jud buttoned the photocopied pages of the China memo from Nixon's safe inside his shirt. He closed and locked the safe, closed the panel. Turned toward the President's desk—

“What the hell are you doing!” yelled a man from the hallway.

Jud whirled, right hand locking on butt of his .357.

Empty hands
, the man silhouetted behind the velvet rope across the door had empty hands. White shirt and uniform pants. Gold bars on his shoulders.

The Roving Deputy Watch Commander.

With one hand, Jud beckoned for his superior officer to come closer; with the other hand, he held a finger to his lips.

“Your post is the hall!” hissed the RDWC as he joined Jud beside the President's desk. “What the hell—”

“I heard something!” whispered Jud, moving toward the curtained French doors.

“Why didn't you call it in?” The RDWC followed Jud, his eyes darting around the Oval Office, his hand on his own gun butt.

“There wasn't time!” snapped Jud. “Besides, last time I did, the Watch Commander chewed my ass! Said I was hearing ghosts. Said it was Abigail Adams taking in her fucking laundry! He reamed Peters a new asshole for calling in the baby crying.”

White House security logs are full of reports of unseen babies crying. Lincoln's son died during his father's first term.

The two Executive Protection Service officers stood in front of the windows, staring out at the South Lawn and the night-enshrouded Rose Garden.

“See anything?” whispered the RDWC.

“Just you.” Jud took a breath. “SEARCHLIGHT'S not around. We call a
nothing
in, it's paperwork city. Captain's Review.”

The two men's radios squawked: shift change in twenty-five minutes.

“Do you hear anything now?” asked the RDWC.

“Just my heart. You.”

“Fuck it,” said the RDWC. “Two years to my twenty, I don't need this shit. It's nothing, right?”

“Right.”

“I'll stick around till shift change,” said the RDWC. “Just in case. But we're okay here, aren't we?”

“We're fine,” said Jud, his heart slowing. “We're cool.”

“This is a weird place,” said the RDWC. “Plays tricks on you.”

“I know,” said Jud.

The RDWC shook his head, nodded toward the night outside the White House windows. “The shit that goes on out there.”

When his shift ended at midnight, Jud dawdled in the Security locker room, changing into his civilian clothes, joking with the men around him. His fellow officers were eager to get home or go on shift. When the locker room was almost empty, Jud carefully folded the purloined photocopied memo into an oversize birthday card, sealed the card in a stamped envelope. He invented a woman's name, addressed the envelope to her at a post office box in suburban Maryland.

A guard he didn't like was about to leave the locker room. The man didn't see Jud shed the pants he'd just put on.

“Hey, Jerry!” Jud called the man over. “Would you drop this in the bag for me on your way? I gotta hustle and get dressed and get out of here, or the woman outside'll skin me.”

The guard named Jerry looked at Jud in his underwear. Looked at the greeting-card envelope that bore the name of a woman. Recognized a smile of male conspiracy on Jud's face.

“Yeah, what the hell,” said Jerry, taking the envelope. “Bitches, right?”

“Right,” said Jud as Jerry left the locker room.

Jud quietly scurried to the door, peered around the corner in time to see Jerry drop the envelope in the outgoing-mail pouch by the Watch Sergeant's desk. The RWDC who'd surprised Jud in the Oval Office was chatting with the sergeant. The RWDC watched Jerry mail the card, watched him walk away. Said nothing. Didn't grab the card, didn't demand an inspection. If he had, it would have been Jerry's envelope, Jerry's word against Jud's.

White House guards use a side entrance to the fence surrounding the presidential grounds. By the time Jud dressed, packed his gear in his gym bag, walked through the iron gate, it was 1:31
A.M.
, Saturday, June 17.

Nancy was parked up the street in her father's old Chrysler. Even with all the windows rolled down, the car was full of cigarette smoke.

“You're fuckin' late!” she snapped as he settled in the front seat. “You think all I got to do with my life is sit in this shithole car and wait for your ass to get off work?”

Slumped behind the steering wheel, Nancy wore a T-shirt and no bra, baggy shorts. Her brown hair was razor cut in a shoulder-length shag. She had a round face and a squat body, but it was her eyes that marred her looks: she kept them narrow, hard.

“You want to leave,
leave!
” he growled. “I can walk.”

She blinked, licked her lips. “I'm … Look, it's just hot, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Jud. “I know.”

“You … You want to drive?”

He shook his head. She ground the car engine to life. Nancy was twenty-six years old, flunking out of her fifth year of part-time schooling at her third college. They'd met three months before, when she'd been blind drunk in a bar. Jud had pulled her out of the middle of a fight she'd incited between two conventioneers on the prowl. A week later, Jud gave her her first orgasm.

“I'm tired,” he told her as she pulled the car away from the curb. Every turn of the car's tires that took him farther away from the White House rolled a load off his back. “So damn tired.”

“You want to go to my place?”

He sighed, nodded.

“How come you're spending so much time in the gym, lifting weights and all that?” she said. “You were strong as hell, but now, you're getting … big. You're starting to look different.”

Nancy's car rolled into the lower end of Georgetown. Even at this late hour, slick women and well-dressed men prowled the sidewalks between bars. She stopped for a red light.

“I mean,” she added, “I'm not complaining, but …”

She trailed off, got no reply. The light changed to green. They drove on.

“What time is that party tomorrow night?” he asked.

“Why the …” She looked at him; changed her attitude. “After nine. It's no big deal. You don't want to go, do you?”

“You work with them, they invited you,” he told her.

“They only invited me because they had to. Because I got that damn stupid job. Because of my
fucking
father!” She pitched her voice to a whining mimic: “
It's a good opportunity! Interesting! Decent money!

“Stupid damn job,” she whispered. “Errand runner with a stupid damn name. They had to give it to his daughter!”

She put a cigarette in her mouth, punched in the lighter of the car that was once her father's. It didn't work.

“Stupid damn car!” she swore.

It was 1:47
A.M.

Jud snapped his lighter, lit her cigarette, one for himself. He blew smoke into the heat outside the open window.

“I want to go to the party,” he said. “We'll get there after my shift ends at midnight; it'll still be happening.”

“Why do
you
want to go? All it'll be is beer and wine and bad dope and a bunch of hot-shit, kiss-ass, and backstabbing reporters, few years out of college and hustling to get their name on top of some stupid damn story about shit nobody cares about. Wrap dead fish in the damn newspaper!”

Nancy's father was assistant in-house counsel for the
Washington Post
.

“Copy aide,” she murmured. “The old man's little girl. Oh, they
really
want me there tomorrow night.”

“Don't be late when you pick me up,” said Jud. “And don't be drunk. Look nice.”

“It's easy for you,” she said, driving toward the apartment her trust fund subsidized. “He isn't your damn father.”

Jud's voice was fire and ice: “Don't you
ever
mention my father!”

She blinked.

“
Ever!
”

“Okay, okay, baby!” She swallowed. She parked in the driveway of a Georgetown carriage house friends of her father's were letting her use. Tossed her cigarette out the window to where cockroaches scurried over the brick sidewalk. Her eyes were wide as she leaned across the seat toward Jud.

“I'm sorry,” she said. Her fingers brushed the gym bag holding his uniform. His gun. Handcuffs. Moved to his knee.

It was 1:52
A.M.,
Saturday, June 17, 1972. A mile away, an unmarked police car with three plainclothes officers responded to the police dispatcher's report of a burglary in progress at the Watergate complex.

Jud looked at the brown-haired woman leaning toward him across the front seat of her father's old car. Her eyes were narrow, her lips parted; the streetlight showed him her nipples were hard under her dirty cotton T-shirt.

“Just relax,” he told her. “Everything'll be fine if you just relax.”

Relax
.

Eighteen years and three thousand miles away from that muggy Washington night, Jud heard the distant echo of his own words; blinked, and it was 1990. Blinked again, and he was inside a bedroom. On his back in a bed. Naked. The sheets were damp, his skin sticky. The lamp on the bed table glowed. Outside, the desert was cool and dark. Midnight drifted across the packed sand.