Дэвид Балдаччи - Absolute Power

The agents looked at each other. They had heard many sounds emanating from bedrooms where their boss happened to be. Some might be construed as violent, some not. But everybody had always come out okay before.

“Nothing unusual,” Burton replied. “Then we heard the President scream and we went in. That knife was maybe three inches from going into his chest. Only thing fast enough was a bullet.”

He stood as erect as he could and looked her right in the eye. He and Collin had done their job, and this woman wasn’t going to tell them otherwise. No blame would be put on his shoulders.

“There was a goddamned knife in the room?” She looked at Burton incredulously.

“If it was up to me, the President wouldn’t go out on these, these little excursions. Half the time he won’t let us check anything out beforehand. We didn’t get a chance to scope the room.” He looked at her. “He’s the President, ma’am,” he added, for good measure, as if that justified everything. And for Russell it usually did, a fact Burton was well aware of.

Russell looked around the room, taking in everything. She had been a tenured professor of political science at Stanford with a national reputation before answering the call in Alan Richmond’s quest for the presidency. He was such a powerful force, everybody wanted to jump on his bandwagon.

Currently Chief of Staff, with serious talk of becoming Secretary of State if Richmond won reelection, which everyone expected him to do with ease. Who knew? Maybe a Richmond-Russell ticket might be in the making. They made a brilliant combination. She was the strategist, he was the consummate campaigner. Their future grew brighter every day. But now? Now she had a corpse and a drunken President inside a home that was supposed to be vacant.

She felt the express train coming to a halt. Then her mind snapped back. Not over this little piece of human garbage. Not ever!

Burton stirred. “You want me to call the police now, ma’am?”

Russell looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Burton, let me remind you that our job is to protect the President’s interests at all times and nothing — absolutely nothing — takes precedence over that. Is that clear?”

“Ma’am, the lady’s dead. I think we—”

“That’s right. You and Collin shot the woman, and she’s dead.” After exploding from Russell’s mouth, the words hung in the air. Collin rubbed his fingers together; a hand went instinctively to his holstered weapon. He stared at the late Mrs. Sullivan as if he could will her back to life.

Burton flexed his burly shoulders, moved an inch closer to Russell so that the significant height difference was at its maximum.

“If we hadn’t fired, the President would be dead. That’s our job. To keep the President safe and sound.”

“Right again, Burton. And now that you have prevented his death, how do you intend to explain to the police and the President’s wife and your superiors, and the lawyers and the media and the Congress and the financial markets and the country and the rest of the goddamned world, why the President was here? What he was doing while he was here? And the circumstances that led up to you and Agent Collin having to shoot the wife of one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the United States? Because if you call the police, if you call anybody, that is exactly what you will have to do. Now if you are prepared to accept full responsibility for that undertaking, then pick up that phone over there and make that call.”

Burton’s face changed color. He backed up a step, his superior size useless to him now. Collin was frozen, watching the two square off. He had never seen anyone talk that way to Bill Burton. The big man could have snapped Russell’s neck with a lazy thrust of his arm.

Burton looked down at the corpse one more time. How could you explain that so that everybody came out all right? The answer was simple: you couldn’t.

Russell watched his face carefully. Burton looked back at her. His eyes twitched perceptibly; they would not meet hers now. She had won. She smiled benignly and nodded. The show was hers to run.

“Go make some coffee, a whole pot,” she ordered Burton, momentarily relishing this switching of roles. “And then stay by the front door just in case we get any late-night visitors.

“Collin, go to the van, and talk to Johnson and Varney. Don’t tell them anything about this. For now just tell them there was an accident, but that the President’s okay. That’s all. And that they’re to stay put. Understood? I’ll call when I want you. I need to think this out.”

Burton and Collin nodded and headed out. Neither had been trained to ignore orders so authoritatively given. And Burton didn’t want to be calling the shots on this one. They couldn’t pay him enough to do that.

Luther hadn’t moved since the shots had blown apart the woman’s head. He was afraid to. His feelings of shock had finally passed, but he found his eyes continually wandering to the floor and to what had once been a living, breathing human being. In all his years as a criminal he had only seen one other person killed. A thrice-convicted pedophile whose spinal cord had collided with a four-inch shiv wielded by an unsympathetic fellow inmate. The emotions sweeping over him now were totally different, as though he were the sole passenger on a ship that had sailed into a foreign harbor. Nothing looked or seemed familiar at all. Any sound now would do him no good, but he slowly sat back down before his trembling legs gave way.

He watched as Russell moved around the room, stooped next to the dead woman, but did not touch her. Next she picked up the letter opener, holding it by the end of the blade with a handkerchief she pulled from her pocket. She stared long and hard at the object that had almost ended her boss’s life and had played a major role in ending someone else’s. She carefully put the letter opener in her leather purse, which she had placed on the nightstand, and put the handkerchief back in her pocket. She glanced briefly at the contorted flesh that had recently been Christine Sullivan.

She had to admire the way Richmond accomplished his extracurricular activities. All his “companions” were women of wealth and social position, and all were married. This ensured that no exposé of his adulterous behavior would appear in any of the tabloids. The women he bedded had as much to lose if not more as he, and they understood that fact very well.

And the press. Russell smiled. In this day and age the President lived under a never-ending barrage of scrutiny. He couldn’t pee, smoke a cigar or belch without the public knowing all of the most intimate details. Or so the public thought. And that was based largely on the overestimation of the press and their abilities to nudge out every morsel of a story from its hiding place. What they failed to understand was that while the office of the President might have lost some of its enormous power over the years as the problems of a troubled globe soared beyond the ability of any one person to confront them on an equal basis, the President was surrounded by absolutely loyal and supremely capable people. People whose skill level at covert activities were in another league from the polished, cookie-cutter journalists whose idea of trailing down a tough story was asking puffball questions of a congressman who was more than willing to talk for the benefit of the evening news coverage. It was a fact that, if he so desired, President Alan Richmond could move about without fear that anyone would be successful in tracking his whereabouts. He could even disappear from public view for as long as he wished, although that was the antithesis of what a successful politician hoped to accomplish in a day’s work. And that privilege boiled down to one common denominator.