Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

The man who had raised his son to be President, but got a President whom he didn’t agree with. The man who grew more paranoid and megalomaniacal each day. The closer he came to death, the more wild-eyed he got about “setting the country straight.” And if his son couldn’t do the job the way the General wanted it done, then the General would make a new son and put him in the White House.

It sounded crazy. But it fit. That’s why the President wouldn’t come out with all guns firing against his shadowy opponent. That’s Why McMurtrie was killed just after talking to the General. And Dr. Klienerman—he had probably recognized the symptoms right off.

The dramatic thing to have done would have been to phone the White House immediately and pledge my support to The Man wholeheartedly. Instead, I simply took a frozen dinner out of the refrigerator and popped it into the microwave cooker. There were three things wrong with my terrific piece of deduction.

First, if the President had wanted my help in fighting his father he would have asked for it.

Second, it’s always stupid to get involved in a family scrap. In this case, it could be fatally stupid. The President wasn’t a killer, I was certain. But there were those around him whose entire careers were based on killing.

And Wyatt—His Holiness: where did he stand? Which side was he on? Both? Neither? Wyatt could order a killing; I knew it in my bones. Under the proper circumstances he could commit murder himself.

Third, and most important, was the nagging doubt in my mind about the whole idea. If it was the General, why wouldn’t the President simply drop a battalion of troops into Aspen and cart the old man off to a well-guarded rest home? Why all the pussyfooting? Why let the plot go on, and let good men like McMurtrie die? There was something more involved. Something I couldn’t see. As yet.

I thought about calling Vickie to talk it over with her. But I decided against it. No sense getting her more involved than she was, either with the White House power struggle or with me, personally. Never confuse a hard-on with love, I warned myself. It was a motto that had saved me from many a pitfall. Ever since Laura.

So I ate my aluminum-wrapped dinner alone, drank the better part of a liter of Argentinian red, and trundled off to sleep on crisp clean sheets. Slept damned well, too, for a change.

Monday morning I got to the office a little earlier than usual. The lobby of the Aztec Temple was still mostly empty; the big rush crowd was a half-hour behind me. I took my usual elevator. Just as the doors started to close, another man stepped in, slipping sideways to avoid the rubber-edged doors.

“Close call,” I said to him.

He nodded and mumbled something unintelligible.

I watched the numbers flicking by on the indicator lights. Halfway up to my floor, he said:

“You’re Mr. Albano, aren’t you? The Presidential press secretary?”

“That’s right… Have we met?”

He shook his head as he extended his hand. I thought he wanted to shake hands, but instead he put a scrap of paper into my palm. I stared down at it. Penciled on it was: “Hogate’s: 5:15 today.”

As I looked up at the man again, he was punching the button for a floor below mine. “What in hell is this?” I asked him.

The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened.

“Be there,” he said as he stepped out.

The doors slid shut before I could say anything else. The elevator went on up to my floor. I got off, thinking to myself, Now we’re getting cloak-and-dagger dramatics. I wondered if I should eat the note; that would be in style. Instead, I stuffed it into my shirtjac pocket and strode off to my office.

It was a busy morning. My picture-phone briefing with the President was spent going over the Kuwait situation and the upcoming reorganization of the State Department. So the press corps, when I gave them the morning rundown, spent damned near an hour asking about the Neo-Luddites and their impending march on Washington. Lazar’s peace mission to Detroit had flopped, and for the moment the Middle East was pushed into the background.

Right after that I hustled over to the Oval Office for a face-to-face planning session about the President’s upcoming press conference, which was due that Wednesday evening.

The Man was in his charming mood, relaxed, bantering with Wyatt and Frank Robinson, one of his speechwriters. We worked out an opening statement, dealing mainly with the new tax proposals he hoped to get through Congress before the summer recess. Since the package included cuts in personal income taxes, there were damned few Congressmen who’d take a strong stand against it. But since it also included selected increases in some corporate taxes, we knew they’d try to amend it to death. The President wanted to use his Wednesday press conference as a forum to forestall that kind of maneuvering.

“Go straight to the people,” The Man told us. “Tell them what you want to do, openly and honestly. They’ll recognize what’s good for them and lean on their Congress persons to get the job done. It’s the President’s task to get the people to think of the nation as a whole, instead of their own individual little interests. That’s what we’ve got to do with every public utterance we make.”

I glanced over at Wyatt. Go straight to the people, I thought. But not about everything. His Holiness looked right through me. As usual.

I was late for my monthly lunch with the Washington press corps. It was at the Van Trayer Hotel, on the site of the old Griffith Stadium in the northeast section of the District. People had called it “Van Trayer’s Folly” when he built the hotel and shopping complex in the heart of the burned-out ghetto a dozen years earlier. But with Government help, that whole section of town was reborn and blossomed into an interracial, moderate-to-high-income community within the city. Very nice residential area now. The ghetto slums hadn’t disappeared, of course; they’d just moved downtown, to the old shopping and theater areas.

Len Ryan was at the luncheon, a guest of one of the Washington TV stations. He must be job hunting, I thought. I got a lot of good-natured twitting about not being able to keep track of my boss’s whereabouts, but most of the news people seemed happy enough that I was able to alert them, or their editors, about The Man’s last-minute switch in plans before they trekked out to the wilds of Maryland.

I had to introduce the main speaker, a florid-faced publisher from the West Coast who had started his meteoric rise to riches with the first three-dimensional girlie magazine and now was an outspoken champion of “freedom of the press” and the “right of free expression.” The Supreme Court was reviewing his case; the state of Utah had tried to lock him up for pornography.

Ryan and I shared my official car back to the office, laughing at the guy’s speech all the way. But once we got into my office and he unlimbered his tape recorder and Greta brought in a couple of frosty beers, Ryan got serious.

“I ought to be sore at you,” he said, making something of a youthful scowl.

“Why? What’d I do?”

“I went down to Camp David Saturday, on my way down here…”

“Oh, crap, I didn’t know. We alerted your paper’s local office…”

Ryan took a long pull of his beer, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, thumping the half empty mug on my desk. “The thing that bugs me is that you gave everybody the wrong poop.”

I blinked. “Say again?”

“You put out the word that the President was staying in the White House all weekend. But he was actually having a secret conference in Camp David with the top Pentagon brass.”