Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

The taxi dropped me off at the gate house, a solid stone, pitched roof, four-story building that could have held a couple of Swiss chalets and Fort Apache inside it. Actually, it quartered most of the General’s security staff. Many of the older men had been the scared young troopers who’d made a hero out of the General back in Denver. And there was enough new blood to take on the state police, it seemed to me.

A helicopter droned past as I crunched along the gravel walkway up to the guardhouse’s front door. The reception area was sliced into two spaces: a small lobby just inside the door, where visitors stand, and, on the other side of a transparent bulletproof screen, a much larger area staffed mostly by women sitting at desks, phone switchboards, and television monitoring devices.

The girl at the desk closest to the partition looked up as the door closed silently behind me.

“Yessir, can I help you?” She had a pleasant smile, the kind they teach you in those schools that specialize in getting ahead in the world.

I told her my name, and she recognized who I was almost instantly. The “almost” was a glance at the little computer screen on her desk. Fast computer, with deep personnel files.

It took only a few minutes for her to phone the main house, then smile up at me again and tell me that a car would pick me up outside in a few minutes. I thanked her and went outside to bask in the spring sunshine.

Snow was still banked deep around the building, but the sun was warm and birds were chirping cheerfully in the newly leafing trees. I walked across the cleared gravel-covered parking area to the lip of the trail. You could see the whole valley from up here, sparkling in the snow like a picture in a tourist brochure. The air was clear, and clean. I remembered nights up here when I had first started working for The Man, going out for long walks with him. We’d start out talking about R D policy and end up stargazing.

The car came and I was driven to the main house. The driver took me inside and ushered me into a library: dark woods; ceiling-high bookshelves covering three walls, except for a stone fireplace; windows on the fourth wall overlooking a pine forest. The fireplace was empty, although the room was comfortably warm. I paced between the easy chairs in front of the hearth and the couch alongside the windows.

The door opened, and Robert Wyatt stepped into the room. I felt my mouth open in surprise.

“I thought you were in Washington.”

He looked annoyed, thin lips pressed tight. “I could say the same for you.”

“I’m looking for McMurtrie. I told the woman at the gate house that he’s the one I want to see.”

“Too late,” His Holiness said.

My stomach clenched. “What do you mean?”

“He just ’coptered out of here, going back to Denver and then to Washington.”

For a few heartbeats we stood facing each other, me by the windows, His Holiness across the room, only three paces from the door. Between us was a Persian carpet, glowing red and gold where the sun streaked across it.

“What did you want with McMurtrie?” Wyatt asked me.

Good question. What could I answer? I wanted him to hold my hand and tell me everything’s going to be okay. I said, “I want to stay on top of this investigation. I decided to stick with him. This is too big…”

“How did you know he was here?”

“Dr. Peña told me.”

Wyatt’s head actually jerked back a few centimeters. The vein in his forehead pulsed. “You were at North Lake? When?”

“This morning…” Which reminded me. “Robert, I haven’t had anything to eat all damned day. How about a sandwich or something?”

He almost looked as if he were going to say no. Instead, “Wait here. I think the General will want to see you.”

So I waited. I sat at the desk near the door and phoned Vickie, told her where I was. She looked funny; not upset, really, but kind of tense.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “It’s you I’m worrying about. Hunter’s getting to enjoy talking with the President and briefing the press corps. He’ll probably want to move into your office by tomorrow morning.”

“Let him,” I said.

“Be serious.” She was. Her elfin face was as close to grimness as it could get. On anyone else it would look like the beginnings of a smile.

“Okay. Serious,” I said. “Get me a rundown on Dr. Alfonso Peña. College degrees, career, the whole curriculum vitae. And a rundown on North Lake Research Laboratories. I want to know where they get their money from.”

“You ended a sentence with a preposition,” she said.

“Arrant nonsense, up with which—”

“—I shall not put,” Vickie quoted with me. We laughed together.

“All right. I’ll be back in the office tomorrow. Have that information ready for me early. And tell Hunter to hold off on moving his office furniture.”

The door to the library opened and Wyatt came in, followed by a self-driven cart loaded with lunch.

“To hear is to obey,” Vickie was saying.

I glanced at the food, then back to the phone screen. “Hey,” I said to her, “you’re supposed to smile when you say that.”

She made a smile, but it didn’t look very convincing.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Call me if your plans change, will you?”

“Okay. Will do.”

I clicked off and turned to Wyatt. “The General still sets a good table.”

“There’s beer in the refrigerator section,” he said, “underneath the tablecloth on your side.”

“Terrific.”

We were halfway through our first sandwiches when the General strode into the library.

Morton J. Halliday looked as though he were in uniform even when he was wearing an old cordu-roy shirt and faded chinos, his costume at that moment. He was tall, with an imperious look to his eyes, a haughty nose, and an iron-gray mustache. His hair was clipped short, in time-honored military style, and nearly all white now. He didn’t show the least sign of baldness, something he teased Wyatt about on those rare occasions when he’d had enough to drink to let down his self-control a little.

He had the mien and style of an emperor, and some of his very oldest friends—like Wyatt—could recall when the General had first married and quietly proclaimed to his closest associates that he was going to father a President. He’d done exactly that, even though his wife had died while the son was an infant and he had raised James J. by himself.

Not exactly singlehanded, of course. But the General had never let James J. wander far from this mountain stronghold on Red Peak. Instead, he brought the world to the boy. The best scholars on the planet tutored James. Local gossip had it that there were more Nobel Prize laureates on Red Peak at any given moment during the boy’s schooling years than anywhere else on earth. The General bought the Aspen Institute and gave it to his son as a sixteenth birthday present. And when James did travel, it was with a security team as large and dedicated as the Secret Service guards for the President. It was like a small army traveling. He was born to be President, and he started living like one so far back in his childhood that he had taken to living in the White House as if it were his natural habitat.

There were always those who tried to find the strings that controlled James J. Halliday. The obvious link was from his father to the banking, mineral, and industrial interests that the General was tied to. I have to confess that my own first interest in Governor Halliday, the dark horse candidate for the Presidency, was exactly for that reason. I was going to find his feet of clay. I was going to expose his connections with the oil and banking and God-knows-what other big-money manipulators who were using him as a front man. I was going to knock him down. The son of a bitch had stolen Laura from me.