The Last President. Michael Kurland

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ fixed himself a bourbon and Saratoga. “Time,” he said. “Let’s get down to the serious business at hand, gentlemen.”

      Ian took a chilled ginger beer from the small bar refrigerator and poured it into a sloping glass. “Thank the Lord that’s over,” he said. “I think I’ll put in for a well-deserved vacation.”

      “Thank the Lord what’s over?” Baker asked.

      “That special I was doing on your presidential election,” Ian said. “You can’t conceive what it’s like to attempt to explain the American presidential process to the great British public.”

      “Say,” Obie said, settling down into his playing chair. “What’s the matter with our elections?”

      “You’ve got no complaints, Obie,” Grier said. “You picked up the biggest majority yet in this last one, didn’t you?”

      “Goddamn right. My constituents know when they’ve got a good thing going. That’s my motto: ‘You’ve got a good thing going in Obie Porfritt’.”

      The last three current members of TEPACS entered during this conversation. They were Rear Admiral David Bunt, son of Admiral David “Pigboat” Bunt of World War I fame, and currently Deputy Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence in the Pentagon; George Masters, Director of Training Aides for the FBI; and Sanderman Jones, who did this and that for the State Department. They fixed themselves drinks and then got down to the serious business of cutting for deal.

      Grier Laporte won the deal with a three of clubs. “A little stud, gentlemen,” he said, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

      “What was that about the election?” Sanderman asked Ian. “Your viewers don’t understand the process, or the result. Or what?”

      “Not particularly the last election,” Ian said. “But American presidential elections in general. In their wisdom, the electorate choose a majority from your Democratic Party. Then they turn around and, by an overwhelming landslide, elect a president from your Republican Party so he can veto all the laws your Democratic legislators enact. And thus does government come to a standstill while two of the coequal branches fight it out. Fortuitously, one of the branches is more equal than the other, so progress is made.”

      “You gonna play cards or lecture us on democratic institutions?” Grier demanded. “Come on, ante up!”

      They played in silence for a while, except for an occasional obligatory poker comment. Then Colonel Baker turned to Sanderman Jones. “Much reshuffling going on in State? Is it going to affect you?”

      Jones shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “There’s a lot of head-rolling going on, but it’s mostly in the more visible sections of the department. Intelligence hasn’t yet felt the ax.”

      “I heard about that,” Faulkes said. “It’s That Man, isn’t it? What does he think he’s doing? First the resignations, now this.”

      “He knows just what he’s doing,” George Masters said. “Our President is a man who demands complete loyalty to himself. Not to the country, or the job, but to himself personally. Some of the people in the Bureau who’ve crossed him in the last four years are getting the word now. It’s either early retirement or field work out in the boonies.”

      “Crossed him how?” Faulkes asked.

      Masters shook his head. “Sorry,” he said.

      “It is rumored,” Adams told Faulkes, “that the President asked his investigative and intelligence agencies to provide him with information regarding his domestic political enemies—among others. For the most part, that information was provided. Some, however, resisted this politicizing of the process of government. Those people are gradually being surgically excised.”

      “Is that right?” Faulkes asked Masters. “Have you any comment? Did anything like that happen at the Bureau? Has anything changed since Hoover died?”

      “No comment,” Masters said, “but I’ll tell you this: A lot of people have been throwing shit at J. Edgar Hoover for the past thirty years for the way he ran the Bureau, but if the facts ever come out, they’re going to eat their words. That man bowed to no political pressure. Everything he did was for what he considered the good of the country. And nobody, in any office, ever used him or the Bureau. And nobody tried more than once.”

      “Are you saying the FBI is being subverted?” Faulkes asked.

      “I’m not saying anything,” Masters said.

      “Could we shut up and play cards?” Obie Porfritt demanded.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Kit parked his car in the alley behind the building, but the back door was locked, so he had to walk around to the front. The plaque on the door, a two-foot brass square that jutted out about six inches, said:

      INSTITUTE FOR AN INFORMED AMERICA

      Founded 1973

      Kit rang the bell and after a while a woman came to answer it and let him in. It was Dianna Holroyd, whom he had first met in room sixteen. “Welcome,” she said. “Mr. St. Yves said you’d be coming over. We close at six, but I waited to let you in.”

      Kit checked his watch. It was ten after six. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

      “No problem,” she said. “Actually, I have to stay until you people leave, and close up after you. Woman’s work is never done. They’re upstairs, first door on your right.”

      Kit climbed the stairs and found St. Yves waiting for him on the landing. “Glad you’re here,” St. Yves greeted him.

      “Sorry to pull you into this at the last moment, but Mercer got an attack of—would you believe?—appendicitis, and is now lying in a bed in Doctor’s Hospital while they decide whether or not to cut him open. Come in and meet the crew.”

      The room was small and furnished with no more than a few folding chairs and a bridge table. Kit shook hands with the four men as St. Yves introduced them: Curtis, short and competent-looking; Peterson, blond and tall, with the fingers of a craftsman; Lowesson, who had the distinctive look of an ex-cop; and Berkey, small and skinny, with the equally distinctive look of an ex-con.

      Since his lunch meeting with St. Yves six months before, Kit had been blessed with an assistant and a larger office at the EOB. His title was the same, but most of the job was now done by the assistant, except for the morning ritual of carrying the bound Daily Intelligence Summary over to the White House and putting it on the President’s desk in the Oval Office. His primary job now was liaison between the traditional intelligence services and the “Plumbers,” as St. Yves called the covert group which was responsible, as Vandermeer put it, for “plugging the leaks.” The SIU had just moved this section into the Institute for an Informed America, which St. Yves was still gloating over as being the perfect cover. St. Yves and the planning staff stayed on at room sixteen, to keep immediate access to the President and Billy Vandermeer.

      “Okay, everybody,” St. Yves said, “just sit down and relax. Here’s the drill: it’s a surreptitious entry for the purpose of information-gathering in an apartment over on Twelfth and T.”

      “Great neighborhood,” Berkey commented.

      “Yours СКАЧАТЬ