Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

The sergeant called a captain who finally relented and personally escorted me into the library, down to the connecting tunnel and along the rubbery moving belt that slid us both to the Capitol building. Secret Service men were prowling around the slideway’s terminal area, and I had to show my ID again and go through a security arch to prove who—and how unarmed—I was.

The guy in charge of the security detail looked so much like McMurtrie that I wondered if they had cloned Secret Service men, too. He took me in tow and waved the police captain back to his post.

“The Capitol building is sealed shut against visitors,” he said as we rode the elevator up to the main rotunda.

“Good,” I said, wondering if this guy knew that there was a brigade of men just like him who were looking for me.

“The President didn’t inform us that he expected his press secretary to meet him here,” he said suspiciously.

“It’s a hectic evening. None of us has planned much of this in advance.”

He accepted that, although it was clear he didn’t like it. Unplanned events such as sudden decisions to address large crowds informally, and having visitors like the press secretary drop into a cleared area, made him unhappy. Good. That meant he wasn’t in on the plan to get me. I hoped.

We stepped out of the elevator into the vast, empty, echoing rotunda, our footsteps clicking hollowly on the floor. It was only partially lit; you could see your way across the floor all right, and up in the dome, Brumidi’s blasphemous painting—turning Washington into a small-time rococo Italian saint—was all too visible. But the galleries that ringed the dome, several tiers up, were darkened.

“I’ll have to ask you to stay in the rotunda area,” the security man told me. “We’ve sealed off the rest of the building. The President will come back here when he’s finished speaking to the crowd.”

I nodded, just as the crowd gave a cheering roar. It sounded almost like booming surf inside the rotunda.

Although the main expanse of the rotunda’s floor was empty, there were knots of well-tailored men and women at every corridor leading out. It felt a little eerie, having the whole damned place to myself, with no tourists clicking their cameras, no troops of Scouts goggle-eyeing their way around, nobody bumping into you, no tour guides talking about marble or historic events or the problems of painting the inside of the dome so that the picture showed proper perspective from the floor.

I glanced up at Old George. He looked kind of uncomfortable up there in rococo heaven. I felt damned uncomfortable down here on the modern earth. And exposed. This wasn’t what I had planned on at all.

And then I noticed that I wasn’t alone. Sitting on a bench near the bronze of crusty old Andy Jackson was General Halliday. Alone.

I went to him.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked, without preliminaries.

“Hiding.” I sat down beside him.

He gave me a sour look.

“One of your boys is out to get me.”

“You’ve got a hell of an imagination.”

“He phoned me this evening. Said they’ve taken my assistant prisoner. There was a goon squad waiting for me at my apartment building.”

The General shook his head disbelievingly.

“If you’re lucky,” I said, the heat rising in me, “you could get to see a real Western-style shootout right here in the rotunda. His goon squad against John’s security force. Maybe we ought to buy score cards…”

“Don’t be an idiot, Albano,” the General said. “If he wants to nail you, he won’t do it that way.”

“Whose side are you on?” I asked him.

He just looked at me.

“You know which of them is killing the others. Do you want to let him succeed or stop him? Or are you content to let ‘survival of the fittest’ be the rule, and go along with whoever’s left?”

His expression didn’t change or soften in the slightest. But his voice sank to a whisper. “I wish to hell I knew what to do.”

“If I make it through the night, I’m going to give the whole story to the press,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

“Then my guess is that you won’t make it through the night.”

“That’s why I want to stick close to John.”

“Why him?”

“He was talking with the crowd when his brother called me. So it can’t be him.”

General Halliday said nothing.

“And I don’t think it could be Joshua,” I went on. “He didn’t strike me as having the balls for this kind of thing. So it must be either Jeffrey or Jackson.”

“Brilliant deduction. But which one?”

“The one who phoned me earlier this evening.”

“How much earlier?”

I shrugged. “Let’s see…”

The General hunched forward on the wooden bench. “Jackson’s been here for the past two hours. He and I came together, right behind Johnny.”

“How the hell did you get past everybody?”

He grinned, and his face folded into a relief map of wrinkles. “A phony mustache and beard, pair of tinted glasses. We came in with my own security men. Those Secret Service kids never tumbled.”

“Where is he now?”

“Up in the galleries somewhere, watching his brother, I expect.”

My mind was racing. “And he’s been here two hours? All that time? Here? With you?”

The General nodded.

“Then if he’s been here with you, and John’s been outside talking with the crowd… and we agree that Joshua’s not the one… then it’s got to be Jeffrey. He’s the only one who could have phoned me from the White House.”

The General stared down at the floor, silent.

Jeffrey, I thought. The expert in defense policy. The one I flew back from Aspen with. He’s the murderer.

“You’re sure it’s Jackson you came here with?”

“I know my own boys,” the General said flatly.

I got up from the bench. “I want to see him. Now.”

The General pointed skyward. “He’s up there in one of the galleries.”

I strained my eyes, searching the darkened galleries that ringed the dome’s interior. Nothing… wait. A shadowy figure. A motion past one of the tall windows. I headed for the nearest staircase.

The stairs had been closed to the public for years. Too steep and narrow for large crowds of tourists. A century ago, visitors had become shitty enough to toss their garbage over the railings just to see who got splatted down on the floor. So the galleries were closed to visitors.

I was intercepted by the inevitable Secret Service agent, of course. A hard-faced woman this time. When I showed her who I was and told her I was going upstairs, and explained that it was impossible to leave the dome from those galleries, she relented. After a radio check with her boss.

The marble stairs are steep and strange in the dark. Half a flight, then a level stretch, then six more steps, then another flat, and then a long flight of narrow stairs, with your feet clacking and making weird, shifting echoes as you go along. The light from the dome was filtered by flimsy-looking metal railings in places, blocked out entirely by solid walls elsewhere, so the going was slow and groping.

I was puffing by the time I reached the first gallery. I thought that was where I’d seen Jackson, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Footsteps echoed somewhere; it was impossible to get a fix on the direction of sounds up here. The echoes floated ghostlike in the still air. I went to the marble balustrade and looked down. Couldn’t see the General from here. The floor of the rotunda looked empty and damned far away. A long way to fall.

I hustled all around the gallery, stopping every now and then to call out, “Jackson!” and get nothing in return except the goddamnedest syncopation of echoes you ever heard. Why the hell’s he playing hide and seek?