No Way to Treat a First Lady (28 page)

"It is a very general description of the agency's function," he replied.

"Does the code name Operation Log Cabin mean anything to you?"

Nothing so excites a Washington audience as introducing the term
code name
in a public setting. Invariably, what follows is evidence that the government has, once again, been up to something disastrously ill advised, or at least very, very naughty.

General Farquant stared unblinkingly at Beth, the court, the nation, the world beyond. The only sign that a white phosphorous grenade had just gone off in his stomach was a slight lateral twitch of the eyeballs.

"I'm not in a position to comment on that."

Boyce bellowed out loud with delight, startling the Secret Service agent in the driver's seat. Yes! The crew-cut SOB hadn't denied it outright!

"Was Operation Log Cabin put into effect some eighteen months ago?"

"I'm not in a position to comment."

"Of course. General Farquant, was Operation Log Cabin a covert surveillance program, mounted by the National Security Agency, whereby electronic eavesdropping devices were placed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House? So that your agency could monitor the conversations?"

A giant sucking sound could be heard in the courtroom.

"I am not in a position to comment on that." For all his sangfroid, General Farquant was beginning to resemble the frog placed in the pot of water that is slowly brought to a boil.

"Objection," said Sandy Clintick. "The witness has answered the question to the best of his ability."

"He most certainly has not," said Beth.

Judge Dutch thoughtfully tapped his cheek with a finger, "Overruled."

Beth continued. "Was the purpose of Operation Log Cabin—which presumably was so named after the fact that Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin—"

"Objection. Conjecture."

"Oh, honestly," Beth said.

"Sustained."

"Was the purpose of Operation Log Cabin to obtain information on persons who were guests of President MacMann and the First Lady?"

"I'm not in a position to comment."

"On the night of September twenty-eighth, year before last, Ms. Babette Van Anka, the actress and activist, was a guest in the Lincoln Bedroom. Was such a device implanted in her cell phone or other personal effects by an agent or agents working for NSA?"

"I'm not in a position to comment."

"Thank you, General Farquant," Beth said pleasantly. "You've been most forthcoming."

Boyce slammed his fist against the window and bellowed, "Yee-hah!"

"Sir," said the Secret Service agent in the front seat, "do you
mind?"

The President summoned his chief of staff.

"This Log Cabin thing, what the hell?"

"Do you want to know, sir?"

"No, I don't. But goddammit, Henderson."

"Yes, sir, I agree completely."

"Get me distance on this. I want miles of distance between this and me."

"I—we—all understand that, sir. We are at the moment working on that."

"When did it—no, I don't want to know. Get me—who's in charge of this, this bucket of night crawlers?"

"No one at NSA seems to be stepping forward to claim credit for it, sir. We're—"

"Heads. I want heads, Henderson. Heads lined up like golf balls, in the Rose Garden."

"Understood."

"I leave for Europe tomorrow. Sweet Jesus. I'm going to be with the heads of seven countries—plus the Queen. The Queen, Henderson! Of England! Did any of them stay in the Lincoln Bedroom during the MacBeth administration?"

"Heads of state typically stay in Blair House or the Queen's Bedroom, as you know, sir." Henderson cleared his throat. "However, the Queen of England did, in fact, stay in the Lincoln Bedroom on one occasion. She had expressed interest in it. Apparently she is a fan of Lincoln's. So the MacManns put her there. I have the date here...."

The President's face drained of color. "I'm spending the night at Windsor Castle. As her guest."

"Sir, I think we can make it clear that this Operation Log Cabin was in no way sanctioned by
this
White House. For all we know, it wasn't even sanctioned by the last White House."

"Well, let's get
that
message out and cranking, and fast."

"Yes, sir. Right away."

"Henderson."

"Sir?"

"What were they after, for God's sake?"

It was probably just as well that Babette Van Anka was not driving herself to the studio to record her annual message of peace for the coming Easter-Passover holidays or she might have driven off the road and into a royal palm. She had given up watching the trial weeks ago, on the grounds that it was not good for her skin. Now her cell phone rang, the first eight bars of the sound track from
Fabulous, Fabulous Me,
the movie that had cemented her status as a star. Before she managed to say hello, she heard the sound of Max, calling her a cow in every language that he and his ancestors had spoken, with a few Far Eastern languages thrown in for good measure. He then related the substance of that morning's testimony. And hung up.

Babette played the scene as she might in a movie. She rolled down the window and hurled her cell phone out of the car, in case it too was bugged. Fortunately, this being Los Angeles, there were no pedestrians to injure.

She told Massimo, her driver, to take her to LAX instead of the recording studio.

"Which airline, madame?"

"Any
airline! International!"

She cursed Max for swinishly not sending the plane to get her. He had brusquely informed her, between epithets, that he needed it himself to remove himself even farther from U.S. justice.

Money. She would need money. As a star, she rarely carried any, since other people paid. Her secretaries took care of the occasional pecuniary necessities, supplying her with ironed banknotes. She looked in her purse. There were a few crisp, folded one-hundred-dollar notes. More would be needed. But she could hardly present herself at the bank. She didn't even know which bank handled the Grab-Van Anka cash. Then she remembered the television commercials showing people inserting cards in machines and getting cash. Triumphantly, she produced a credit card from the purse and directed Massimo to stop at a machine.

She leapt out and inserted the card. After several minutes she raced back to the car.

"It keeps asking for a personal identification number," she shrieked at the hapless Massimo. "What the
fuck
is a personal identification number?"

Massimo explained, earning himself a cuff on his chest. "How am
I
supposed to know it? Call someone! No—don't! Into the car. Into the
car!
Drive! Just
drive!"

At the international departures terminal, she frantically scanned the names of the airlines and ordered Massimo to stop when she saw one that seemed more foreign than the others.

She hurried in after divesting Massimo of his pocket money. Heads turned at the spectacle of America's most notorious film star. The morning's trial testimony had played over all the television monitors at the airport, so everyone was up-to-date.

She went directly to the "Emperor Class" check-in counter. A businessman, presumably an emperor, was being assisted. Babette placed a peremptory elbow on the counter. The man turned to tell the pushy broad to cool her heels. When he saw who it was, his mouth gaped.

"I require a seat," she informed the check-in agent, a lovely young woman dressed in a silk sari from her native land. "I require the
entire
first class section. Here—" She dumped half a dozen credit cards on the counter.

"I'm afraid, Ms. Van Anka, that we are completely booked in emperor class."

"You'll have to move them to business class. I'll pay for their seats. I have a scene I have to rehearse, and I need absolute privacy."

"So charter a jet," said the man she'd elbowed aside.

"I regret very much, Ms. Van Anka, but I cannot move other passengers. But there is one seat available in business class."

Babette threw up her hands. "All right, all
right.
I was just trying to
help
you. Give me the seat."

"May I see your passport, please?"

"I don't
carry
a passport."

"You need a passport to enter the country."

"Don't be absurd," Babette said. She pointed to her face.
"This
is my passport."

Glances were exchanged behind check-in. A more senior agent was summoned, a quintessence of competence and courtesy in a blazer with numerous little medallions on his lapel betokening years of competent handling of crises small and large. But on the matter of a passport, he was gently unmovable.

It was at this point that Babette, who had, to be sure, been under a strain these many past months, finally and irretrievably lost it.

She stormed off to a series of first class check-in counters of international carriers, demanding a seat, if not the entire section. Alas, the passport requirement was the deal breaker at each one. Her remonstrations drew a crowd. Her choices of words eventually caused security to be alerted.

The famous photograph of her being half carried away—she had tried to bite the Wackenhut security man—by half a dozen personnel, like some Seattle protester, was soon over the wires and onto the front pages, accompanied by the news that Max was, apparently, well on his way into somewhat deeper exile in the Far East, aboard his own plane, the first class section of which was all his own.

As Babette was being subdued by Wackenhut and the LAPD, Beth was moving to subpoena the Log Cabin tapes. This was a complicated legal maneuver, inasmuch as the National Security Agency had not acknowledged that they existed.

Allowing the Wiley P. Sinclair affidavit had become a radioactive decision. Protesters now gathered outside the courthouse carrying signs calling for Judge Dutch's impeachment. The right wing was especially in dire need of mollification.

When the director of the FBI was observed one morning entering the judge's chambers, one of the television networks promptly reported that the judge was being arrested for treason and that the highest law enforcement officer in the land was personally doing the arresting. The FBI quickly issued a statement saying that the director had merely wanted to "confer" with Judge Umin.

Boyce made himself more available to the press than a politician running in the New Hampshire primary. However, since the latest polls showed that over 80 percent of the American people now viewed him not only as "loathsome" but also as "worse than a traitor" to his country for having colluded with the fugitive Wiley P. Sinclair, he did most of the interviews à la Deep Throat, in basement garages, parking lots, and public parks. Every day he had to move from motel to motel to avoid a stakeout by the media. His face was now so recognizable that if he presented himself in public, people snarled and hurled objects at him. He wore dark glasses inside buildings. He went to a disguise shop and bought himself a mustache. During one TV interview, he forgot to take off the mustache—the producer mischievously did not point it out—which got his face replastered across the next day's front pages with snide captions.

The theme of Boyce's media drumbeat was that the President of the United States must "come clean" with the American people about the bugging of the White House. If he did not act, then Congress must surely step in.

"How do you feel," ABC News asked Boyce as they stood in a remote section of Fort Marcy Park overlooking the Potomac River, "about the fact that the majority of the American people say they despise you?"

"So do the majority of my ex-wives," Boyce said. "But that doesn't change the matter that the government is in possession of evidence that will exonerate my client."

The President of the United States, Harold Farkley, spent his week in Europe being photographed with a series of unsmiling foreign heads of state. Buckingham Palace expressed its displeasure over the putative taping of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh during their White House stay by refusing to be photographed shaking hands with him. The President of France declared that he would never set foot in the White House again, "in the event there is a microphone in my soup." The Prime Minister of Japan suggested that the head of the NSA should cut off his little finger by way of apology. Foreign newspapers ran cartoons showing Abraham Lincoln hiding under a bed wearing headphones, listening in on the pillow chat above. In truth, President Harold Farkley's foreign tour could not have been called a success.

Meanwhile, the 672 other people whom the MacManns had over the years invited to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom by way of thanking them for having donated millions in "hard" money to their campaign and political party were enduring their own individual autos-da-fé at the hands of a gleeful media. They were all being tracked down and asked how they "felt" about having been bugged. The answer was generally, "Not great."

Assuming that they
had
been bugged. The National Security Agency was in high hunker-down mode, refusing all comment. This corporate muteness, however, was rapidly exhausting the national patience. The various congressional oversight committees were being forced by public opinion and a salivating media to
tsk-tsk
and demand—demand!—the truth. Moreover, protesters were beginning to show up at the agency's main gate in Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, with furious signage saying, RELEASE THE TAPES and FARQUANT IS BIG BROTHER. The pixel pundits generally agreed that government hadn't been this much fun since the early 1970s.

"Sir?"

"What, Henderson?"

"Frigby is outside, with the latest polls."

"I don't have time. What do they say?"

"I thought you might want to hear directly from Frigby, sir," said the chief of staff, who knew from experience never to be the bearer of bad tidings when you can let someone else do it.

Frigby, reluctantly granted access, gave it to the President straight. A majority of Americans blamed him personally for Operation Log Cabin, despite the fact that he had not authorized it or been president when it was put into effect.