Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

It was after midnight. My hotel suite was plush: bed big enough for half a dozen people, automated bar, comfortable sitting room for entertaining business guests. I plopped on the bed and called Vickie’s home number. The phone buzzed four times. I was about to click off when her voice answered, throaty and sleepy. The screen stayed a flickering gray. Then I realized it was after 1:00 A.M. in Washington.

“I woke you up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Meric?” Her voice brightened. “Hi. I must’ve just dozed off. I was sort of expecting you to call. Wait half a minute…”

The screen cleared and showed her, yellow hair tousled and eyes a little bleary. She had a green robe pulled up around her throat.

“How’d the speech go?” she asked.

“Good enough.”

“Count the applause?”

“No, let the computer analyze it when the tapes get to the office tomorrow.”

“You’re down.”

“It’s a down city,” I said.

But she was looking at me from the phone screen very intently. “No, you’ve been down for the past week or more. Whatever it is, it’s really got you bugged.”

“Never mind. I’ll live through it.”

“It started when she called you, didn’t it?”

“She?”

“The First Lady.” Somehow Vickie put an accent on the word “lady” that wasn’t entirely wholesome.

“Laura’s got nothing to do with it,” I said.

Vickie just shook her head. She wasn’t buying a word of it.

We just sat there for a silent moment or two, neither of us wanting to say anything, neither of us wanting to break the connection. I was totally alone except for this flickering electronic image of her.

“The convention’s not much fun?” Vickie asked at last.

“Bunch of bloodsuckers,” I grumbled. “I’m surrounded by the kinds of people I had to fight when I was a reporter. Fight them for raises. Fight to get the real news printed, the stuff they wanted to cover up to protect their friends. Now I’m a big-time political person. I’m supposed to smile at them and tell ’em we’re all in this together.”

She laughed, and the sound of it made me smile, too. “It’s a good thing you didn’t go into the State Department.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “maybe so.”

“Will you be able to stand it for another day? You’re scheduled for three network interviews tomorrow.”

“That’s okay. That’s with the working slobs. I get along fine with them.”

She tried to stifle a yawn.

“Hunter do okay with the daily briefing this morning?”

“Oh, yes,” Vickie said. “He was fine. No problems.” She yawned again.

“Aw, hell, I shouldn’t be keeping you up all night—”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“But I do. Go to bed. We both need some sleep.”

“Meric?”

“Yeah?”

“I wish I were there with you.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it. She said it straight out, no games, no tricks.

Without thinking about it for an instant, I decided to misunderstand her. “You’d be just as bored and sore at this bunch of self-righteous hypocrites as I am.”

Her face didn’t change expression. But her voice went fainter. “Yes. I guess so.”

“Good night, Vickie.”

“Good night.”

I touched the button on the tiny keyboard alongside the phone, and its screen went blank and dead.

Shit! Added to everything else, now I was sore at myself.

The phone chimed softly. I punched the response button. A woman’s face filled the screen: middle-aged, but well kept; expensive makeup and hair styling.

“Mr. Albano, are you retiring for the evening?” I had seen her before. Where? Behind the hotel service desk down in the lobby, when I had checked in that morning.

“Yes,” I said.

“Is there anything we can provide for you?”

I heard myself chuckle. “Sure. A fifth of Scotch, a bucket of ice, and a tall redhead.”

She didn’t even blink. “Any particular age?”

“On the Scotch?”

“That, too.”

“Make it the best Scotch you’ve got. And the lady should be in her twenties. I’ll settle for that.”

“Certainly, sir.”

Like the rest of the hotel’s services, my night-cap left a lot to be desired. The redhead was willing, even enthusiastic. She was young and well built, the kind that would go to fat in another five years. Big bouncy siliconed breasts. And a brain the size of a walnut. Most intellectual topic of discussion: the local hockey team. Apparently she and another girl were keeping the visiting teams so busy that they inevitably lost when they played in St. Louis. So she claimed. Showed me a purseful of still photos of herself, her friend, and the top stars of the hockey league. Offered to run a videotape cassette in the room’s TV, if I’d add twenty to her fee.

At least she didn’t talk with her mouth full.

I got through the interviews the next day with a buzzing head and a rasping conscience. While I was sitting there pontificating on freedom of the press and being congratulated for my forth-rightness by the interviewers (Why are they all so alike? Movie idol faces, leather jackets and flowered shirts that were “mod” years ago, fag-English accents) the inside of my head was shouting at me that I was just as big a hypocrite as anybody in the game. The President was in danger and I was playing it quiet.

The last interview that afternoon was conducted by a boy-girl team. It was a typical TV studio: one corner cluttered with the benches and phony ship’s deck of a kiddies’ show; across the way, the podium, clocks, maps for the evening news show. We were sitting under the lights on a comfortable pile of cushions arranged to look like a conversation pit in a Persian palace. Sure enough, the “boy” half of the interview team wore a rust suede jacket and a gold silk shirt. At least the “girl”—a sharp-eyed woman in her thirties—had the brains to wear a slacks and vest outfit, the kind that lots of women were wearing back on the East Coast.

Halfway through the interview she impatiently interrupted her teammate to ask me, “But what’s the President really like? I mean, in person? When the doors are closed and the cameras are off?”

I shifted mental gears and launched into my standard paean of praise about James J. Halliday, the man. Sure, we had worked out this spiel in the office, but most of it was from the heart. We didn’t have to labor very long or hard to come up with a good three minutes worth of glowing description about The Man. We all liked him.

But while my mouth was going through it’s motions, my brain decided that if I liked The Man so goddamned much I shouldn’t be sitting on these non-allergenic cushions talking about him. I ought to be helping him to find out who, or what, was trying to kill him.

I put in a call to McMurtrie right there in the studio as soon as the interview was over. It was late afternoon, nearly 4:00 P.M.

The White House operator told me that Mr. McMurtrie was out of town on a special assignment.

“Where?” I asked.

She looked like a chicken. Beady eyes, hooked little nose, pinched pasty-skinned face. She clucked impatiently once and answered, “We are not permitted to reveal that information.”

I reminded her of who I was and showed her my ID again. No go. I went over her head, to the Secret Service man in charge of White House security in McMurtrie’s absence. He was even stonier. Finally I had to get to Wyatt, and that took damned near half an hour.

His Holiness hemmed and grumbled but finally told me McMurtrie had gone out to some laboratory in Minnesota. Something to do with Dr. Klienerman and the investigation.

“What’s the name of the lab?” I asked. “Where in Minnesota?”