The Multiple Man (7 page)

She came as far as the chair, looking a little like a wary faun. "You don't want to let much more time go by without working out your speech. I've got all the background material for it, but . . ."

"Yeah, I know. You're right." I felt a headache coming on and rubbed at my forehead.

"Are you okay?" Vickie asked.

"Yeah, fine . . . super."

"What happened last night?"

I took a good look at her. She was concerned; it was written on her face. But she wasn't frightened or shaken the way I was. She didn't know anything more than I was showing her. Or did she?

"What do you mean?"

Vickie leaned slightly on the back of the chair. "We sat in the plane for more than two hours, waiting for you and McMurtrie. You were the last one aboard, and then the two of you huddled together like a couple of high school girls discussing your dates."

She probably used that metaphor to make me smile. I frowned.

"Listen," I said. "There are times when it's our job to prevent stories from being written. Especially when the stories are nothing more than trumped-up rumors. That's what I was doing last night."

"Oh? What hap—"

"Nothing happened," I snapped. "Nothing that I want to talk about. Nothing that I want
you
to talk about. To anyone. Understand?"

Her perky little nose wrinkled. "Is that an order, boss?"

"Damned right. And I know it violates the First Amendment, so don't go judicial on me. Just forget that anything unusual happened last night."

She didn't like it at all, but she said, "If you say so."

As Vickie left the office, I wondered how long she'd sit still about this. She was a bright and aggressive kid. No reporter, she was a researcher. She delighted in digging into things and pulling out hidden facts. And how many others were in that staff plane wondering about the same thing?

The Beltway Plaza is a city within the city. Once the Beltway was a circumferential highway, well out in the woods, built with the idea of helping Interstate highway motorists—and truckers—get past Washington without getting entangled in city traffic.

It immediately became a circumferential focus for new housing developments, office complexes, light industry, shopping malls, helicopter pads, truckers' restaurants, hotels, whorehouses, banks—all the conveniences and congestions of urban living. The Beltway itself still existed; it was even a double-decked roadway now. But it was almost always jammed with everything from heavy semis delivering the daily bread to little electric hatchbacks driven by young mothers out for their shopping, hairdressing, or what-have-you.

By 4:15 I was pacing in front of the main entrance to the Woodward & Lothrop department store at the Beltway Plaza. The shopping mall was built on the highest point of the complex, a small hill, but high enough so that the aluminum and glass of the mall dominated the walled-in apartment buildings, swimming pools, school, and hotel of the Plaza community. It was like a palace in the center of a walled city. The community was walled in with electric fences and laser intruder alarms to protect the inhabitants from the barbarians of the old, decayed areas of Greater Washington. Protect them not only from attack, but from the sight of scrawny, scruffy ghetto dwellers. Out of sight, out of mind. Except for the welfare tax bills, which got bigger every year. And the occasional violence that was usually, but not always, confined to the ghettos.

This was one of the major problems that the Halliday Administration had attacked. And one of the reasons why the President insisted on increasing productivity as a means of stabilizing inflation. With a typical Halliday combination of compassion and ruthlessness, he knew that the economy had to keep growing in order to bring prosperity to the poor. "Turn the welfare recipients into taxpayers," he told us. It wasn't easy.

The Man was battling the objections of the unions and starting urban rebuilding projects within the city ghettos, using strictly local labor. The projects were actually combinations of training programs and pride-builders. They also sapped the power of the unions, something that Halliday openly deplored because the unions were wrong to ignore the needs of the minority ethnic groups, not because it made them less effective politically.

Anyone—man, woman, or child—caught burglarizing, mugging, or otherwise trying to redress the difference between rich and poor through violence was shipped off to construction camps in the Far West. The Man's opponents howled that this was unconstitutional and the camps were nothing more than concentration camps. Halliday produced a long string of ecologist's and psychiatrists to show that: (a) the camp internees were making positive inroads in correcting the environmental damages done by earlier strip mining, river pollution, and other ravages of the land; and (b) the internees were adjusting to this useful outdoor life, gaining some sense of responsibility and self-esteem, and saving much of the cash they were paid for their work.

Halliday's long-term plan was to build new communities in the land the internees had reclaimed and let them settle there permanently. He insisted that returning a ghetto kid to the place where he had committed his crime was merely inviting him to commit more crimes. The psychologists were behind him on this, but a strange combination of urban political bosses, real estate manipulators, and civil libertarians had formed a coalition against the program.

They preferred to sit in their armed, walled-in enclaves and let the cities crumble. I paced back and forth across the department store's main entrance, watching the shoppers hustle in and out, their faces intent on buying and prices and what to do about dinner tonight. They weren't thinking ahead. They seldom did.

My mind had wandered so far afield that I nearly jumped out of my boots when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned to see a Secret Service security guard type, neatly dressed in a conservative suit that was probably bulging with armaments.

"The First Lady will see you on the roof of the store, sir," he said quietly, automatically eyeing the shoppers passing by us, "near the helicopter pad."

He quietly led me through the store. It wasn't very crowded. Most of the Plaza housewives were on their way home now to prepare dinners for their husbands and kids. I wondered why the management maintained such a big, expensive store when anyone with a modern picture-phone and home computer could do all the shopping from bed. But then I guessed that the store was more of a showplace, a central meeting ground, an entertainment center, an excuse to get out of the house.

All this philosophizing, of course, was my feeble way of keeping me from getting all worked up about seeing Laura. Think about other things—an old Catholic remedy. But as I rode up three flights of escalators behind that Secret Service guard, I could feel my temperature rising. We went through an office area and up a flight of metal stairs, my pulse throbbing in my ears louder and louder with each step.

He opened a metal door and we stepped out onto the cement roof. A blue and white helicopter sat in the middle of the flat expanse, idle and empty. Smallish job; probably could hold no more than six. The rest of the roof was bare, unoccupied.

"Mrs. Halliday will be here in a few minutes," the security man said. He shut the metal door, leaving me totally alone on the roof.

A decent breeze was blowing, and from up here I could see all the way across the sprawling rooftops of Greater Washington to the Monument's spire sticking into the light blue springtime sky. Some high wispy cirrus were the only clouds, except for the contrails of jets.

I walked over to the edge of the roof, feeling like a duke standing atop a king's palace, surveying his liege's domain, about to have a private meeting with his queen.
Dangerous business
, I thought.
Especially if the king doesn't know about it.

It suddenly hit me that I was very vulnerable. Physically. Alone Up here on the roof, I made an easy target for a sniper perched on any of the other rooftops around this building. I backed away from the edge. The
thwap-thwap-thwap
of a nearby helicopter startled me. They could get me from the air.

I could feel myself sinking into paranoid fears when the metal door opened again and three security men stepped through. I stood frozen, as if my shoes had been welded to the rooftop's concrete. But they ignored me totally and fanned out across the roof to take up stations exactly 120 degrees apart. You didn't need any measuring instruments to know how precise these guys were.

A half-minute passed; then the door opened again and Laura came through, followed immediately by two more guards. One stayed at the door and the other walked straight past me to the helicopter.

Laura came to where I stood, still rooted—but for another reason now. She smiled and held out her hand.

"Hello, Meric. It was good of you to come."

This was the first time I'd seen her close enough to talk to, to touch, since the Inauguration. And the first time I'd seen her without Halliday between us in nearly three years. She was stunning. You've seen her face on all the magazine covers and on television. You've heard beauty experts take her apart, claiming her eyes are a bit too large for the shape of her face, her cheekbones a shade too prominent, her lips thinner than they ought to be. Fuck 'em all. She was beautiful.

She gave the impression of being tall, although actually she was a head shorter than I am. (She looked taller with Halliday, for some reason.) Dark, dark hair, pulled straight back. And a slightly olive cast to her complexion that hinted of Mediterranean origins. The slim, almost boyish body of a ballet dancer. The first time we had made love, my first sight of her naked body had almost dismayed me, she looked so bony and stringy. But I quickly learned that she was soft enough. And wondrously supple.

It was awful. I felt like a kid who'd been caught jerking off in the bathroom. My throat was dry, my palms sweaty.

"Hello, Laura," I managed to say. My voice sounded cracked and hoarse.

"You've put on a little weight," she teased. "Washington life agrees with you."

"Rubber chicken . . . the banquet circuit."

She nodded and toyed with the shoulder strap of her handbag. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, very summery. No sunglasses. Her eyes were just as gray-green as ever.

"You wanted to talk to me," I said.

She took a deliberate slow breath, like an athlete preparing herself for a supreme effort.

"Yes," Laura said. "I know about what happened last night. And in Denver."

"And?"

"And I know Jim has asked you to keep the entire matter hushed up."

"We talked about it this morning, he and Wyatt and I."

"Yes." She looked up at me, searching my face. It was all I could do to keep my hands at my sides. "Meric . . . I've got to know where you stand on this. You might . . . well, it occurred to me that you might not
want
to keep the story quiet."

I guess I blinked at her. "Why?"

She suddenly looked annoyed. "It's a story that could ruin Jim. And you . . . the two of us . . . before I met him . . ."

"Hold it," I said. "You're afraid that I'll blow the story open to hurt him? Or you?"

"I know it's wrong for me even to suggest it . . ."

"It sure as hell is!" I snapped. "Okay, so I'm still zonked-out over you. But what kind of a son of a bitch do you think I am? I
work
for The Man. I work
for
him."

"I know, I know . . . it was stupid of me to ask. But I couldn't help wondering . . . I had to hear it from you . . ."

"You never did understand me," I grumbled. "You want me to swear a loyalty oath? You want to go down to a bookstore and find a stack of Bibles?"

"Don't, Meric. That's not fair."

"The hell it isn't! You had to hear it from me in person. Crap! Sounds like something His Holiness would do—him and his suspicious goddamned mind."

Her expression changed. "I did speak with Robert about you. . ." She let her voice trail off.

"He put you up to this?"

She looked away from me. "I wouldn't say it that way. But. . . well, I did begin to wonder . . . about you . . . about how you'd react. . . after he spoke to me."

"That gritty old bastard," I fumed.

She put her hand on my arm and started making soothing sounds and offered me a ride back downtown in her chopper. I went along with her, probably wagging my tail like a puppy dog that'd just gotten a pat on its head from its mistress.

It wasn't until I was safely back in my apartment, and the city outside had gone dark with night, that I realized Wyatt couldn't possibly have talked with her before she called me. He and I had been together in the West Wing staff dining room when she had called.

CHAPTER FIVE

St. Louis is a dull town. The people are dull. The atmosphere is humid and oppressive. Old Man River is wide and sluggish and closed in on both banks by factories that keep the water rank and brown, despite a whole generation's steady work at cleaning up the pollution. The factory owners buy off the city fathers, who not only pocket the graft, but get extra money from Washington for pollution control, since they can show that their pollution problems are still serious. It was something that Halliday had his personal hounds sniffing at; the smell was easy to detect, but tracking it back to its source—with courtroom-tight proof—was another matter.

The hotel where I stayed was dull, too. The staff was downright sullen, as if they resented the idea of cash customers who asked them to rouse themselves and put out a little work. I got the feeling that the chambermaids would be perfectly happy to let me make my own bed. The bartender down in the lobby was no better. Even the lifeguard at the fenced-in pool acted as if his duty were to prevent anybody from disturbing the water. The pool was nearly deserted. The National Association of News Media Managers held their meeting in the hotel's main ballroom, which was beautifully decorated in Gay Nineties gilt and rococo: cherubs on the ceiling, bunches of gilded grapes adorning the window frames, heavy velvet drapes. I half-expected to see Mark Twain give the first evening's keynote address, instead of me. He would have done a lot better.