Atropos (3 page)

There, he thought. I should videotape these things. Let the Congressman and all the Agency doctors see he wasn’t dodging his rehabilitation. Trotter had even been given to understand that the President himself had been asking after him.

This is what I get, he thought, for going tame.

Trotter sat up, pulling the sweatband off his head as he did so. As always, he held it out at arm’s length and squeezed. Liquid oozed from the top of his hand and between his fingers, fat drops of sweat that spatted loudly on the floor. He threw the sweatband across the basement of his new two-bedroom ranch, making a basket in the open top of the washer. He missed maybe one day out of six. He didn’t bother to retrieve the ones that went behind the washer.

Trotter said, “Ah,” as he stood up. He always said “Ah” when he stood up these days. When the doctors felt like being particularly honest with him, they told him he probably always would make some kind of noise. When they were being brutal about it, they told him he’d probably be in some “discomfort” every waking hour for the rest of his life. Even a doctor being brutal doesn’t like to use the word “pain.”

“After all,” they’d tell him, as if he’d been looking for an argument, “you were hurt very badly.”

Yeah, Trotter thought. I remember. I was there. Thirty feet, from the catwalk to the concrete floor of the Hudson Group’s press room. Fractured skull. Ten smashed ribs. Broken hip. Three bones broken in his legs. Punctured lung. He knew all about it. That’s what he was rehabilitating himself from.

It was even working. He hardly limped at all, now, and he had stopped using the cane weeks ago.

He limped after these goddam workouts, though. He limped now over to the laundry area. Trotter kicked off his sneakers, slid out of his sweatpants and jock, pulled off his shirt. He threw everything but the sneakers into the washer, added soap and softener, and started the machine. When they’d first let him out of the hospital, he used to take a rueful inventory of his surgery scars every time he found himself naked; now he didn’t bother. Rehabilitating the mind, too. Trotter said, “Ah,” bent down and pulled a towel out of the dryer. He wrapped it around himself and headed upstairs.

Going upstairs was no problem. Trotter had been surprised to discover that. It was going
downstairs
that was the killer, the forcing of muscles and joints to give in to gravity, but only just enough. The only times he missed the cane were when he found himself at the top of a steep flight of stairs.

Trotter padded across the kitchen floor to the cabinet next to the refrigerator. He took out a bottle of Advil, carefully counted out six of them. Then he opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Gatorade and a jelly doughnut. He swallowed the pills, washing them down with the Gatorade.

Forget cocaine, he thought. Ibuprofen was the new drug of choice. This dose every six hours kept the “discomfort” to a level he could manage. He could get a prescription for Motrin, which was the same stuff in bigger doses, but why bother? Hell, with his connections, he could get codeine, morphine, Demerol, stuff that would make him forget there was a thing
called
pain.

Trotter didn’t want them. It wasn’t that he liked the pain. It was that he worried about what
else
the stuff would make him forget. Too many lives depended on the functioning of Trotter’s brain for him to mess around with it lightly. That knowledge was with him every waking moment, too. He was beginning to appreciate what the Congressman had gone through all these years.

He caught himself thinking that, and laughed around a mouthful of doughnut. He had spent nearly half his life making vows to himself to die rather than to be like the old man, and now look at him. Things had changed.

A
lot
of things had changed. For instance, he was through as a field agent. Certainly he was done with foreign work. It was very difficult slipping inconspicuously into a country when you had enough pins and plates in your body to set off every metal detector in every airport in the world. The only way he’d been able to get back to Kirkester when he’d left the hospital in Washington was with a note from his doctor and a copy of his X-rays for the benefit of airport security.

But it wasn’t only that. There were a lot of things he’d once been able to do that he couldn’t do anymore. He couldn’t run, for one thing, or climb ropes. He had enough strength and stamina to lift that goddam weight with his legs a hundred times. A hundred and one, rather. But that was all he had. As soon as he finished, he needed pills and Gatorade and jelly doughnuts and a nice hot shower before he even felt like something worth burying.

Trotter trudged to the bathroom. He dropped the towel, started the shower. He looked at himself in the mirror, leaning close to it, so he could see what he looked like without his glasses. He still looked gaunt, older than he ought to be. Bash kept telling him he looked fine, but Trotter wished he could fill out a little. Maybe he’d up it to two jelly doughnuts.

Trotter tested the water, increased the heat a little, and stepped into the shower. He stood there letting the water hit him for a while before he reached for the soap.

Of course, not all the changes had been for the worse. For the first time in his life he had a home, a place he was not likely to have to leave secretly in the middle of the night. He had a job.
Two
jobs. There was his bullshit cover job—Consultant to the Executive Editor of
Worldwatch
magazine, which was just an excuse for him to put the resources of the Hudson Group to work for him—and there was his real job—running the Agency while the Congressman completed his own rehabilitation.

Considering the years he’d spent running
from
the Agency as he would a demon from hell, the job hadn’t turned out too badly. So far. Of course, that could change at any moment. He was now a top executive in the dirtiest business humans had come up with yet. The fact that the opposition had been fairly benign over the last couple of months hadn’t led him to forget that. Sooner or later, unless the Congressman recovered quickly enough to take back the reins, Trotter knew he was going to face a situation where he’d either have to do something morally repulsive, or put the country in danger. The genius, the benefactor of humanity, who could figure out a way to remove that burden from the backs of those who chose (or were forced) to shoulder it, had yet to publish his findings.

To hell with it, Trotter thought. It was a beautiful winter’s day, and the pills and the hot water had drawn a lot of the pain away. He had a home now, and he’d stuck with one name and one face longer than he had for any other period of his adult life. He hadn’t had to kill anyone or order anyone killed in over a year. And he was in love.

He’d never been so happy in his life.

R
EGINA HUDSON LOOKED AT
the numerous items still unticked on her agenda, and sent mental thanks to her mother for having hired such good people over the years. Where was Mother today? Seattle, for the Single Parents Federation Convention? No. That was last week. Today, Petra Hudson would be in Hollywood, conferring with the producer who had bought the film rights to
Living It Over,
Mother’s best-selling autobiography. The critics had all called the book “a fantastic story.” She wondered what they would have said if they’d known the
whole
story, Allan’s part in it, and the clergyman-assassin and the rest.

Anyway, Mother’s book had contained enough of the truth to fix it so that no one’s life would ever be the same again. My own, for instance, she thought. Regina Hudson, twenty-six, was now Publisher and Chairman of the Board of one of America’s most powerful media combines. She owned it. She and her brother did, anyway. Mother had signed it over to them right after she’d gone public with her story. Jimmy, however, had never been very interested in the family business, and the ordeal they’d gone through over the Azrael affair had soured him on it for good. He was living in the Rockies somewhere under an assumed name, brooding, probably. Regina had never been one to brood.

On the other hand, she’d never been much of a big-shot executive, either; though she’d spent her childhood watching her mother wield power, Regina sometimes found herself a little arm-weary when she tried to heft it herself.

Still, here she was, at the head of the big oak table in the publisher’s conference room, presiding over ten grizzled journalism veterans at the latest campaign-coverage strategy session.

“Now,” Sam Weicker said, “we got papers in all but one of the primary states. I think we ought to coordinate the magazine correspondents with the local papers until the field thins out a little.” Weicker was the chief accountant. He was very good at his job)—he was doing his job, now, trying to save the company money—but Regina had trouble taking him seriously. He was big and fat and loud and vulgar, and slightly greasy. Regina had a fantasy that when Sam was starting out, he had decided to fulfill a stereotype to the ultimate degree—but had somehow pulled the wrong file, and made himself into the caricature of a sportswriter rather than an accountant.

“I’ve already had a preliminary talk with the people in Keokuk—”

“No,” Regina heard herself say. “Absolutely not.”

Ten sets of eyes were leveled at her. She saw resentment in some of them, amusement in others. Surprise in all.

She looked to Sean Murphy for help. Sean was Executive Editor of the Hudson Group, recently promoted from Director of Operations. What all that meant, aside from the pay raise, was that he basically ran the show while he showed Regina the ropes. A lot of people in any business—grizzled veterans, especially—might have used that kind of setup to build an empire, to reduce the young owner, damp behind the ears and a female at that, to a figurehead.

It never crossed Murphy’s mind. He was the one who looked like the accountant, bespectacled and slight, with hair edging from gray to white. He was just short of fifty, but his perpetually worried look made him seem older. He was quiet, and seemed shy, except on those rare occasions he took a drink. Then he had the filthiest mouth in the newspaper business.

So the legend said, anyway. Regina had never seen him that way. She’d asked him about it once; he’d simply said he was a lot more serious about being Irish when he was younger.

These days, he was serious about helping Regina learn her job. Now, for instance. Her glance at him had been a request to expand on her refusal to Weicker. Murphy’s response was a small smile, and a slight gesture with his hand that said, “No, no, dear lady, after you.”

“Sam,” she said, “this meeting is about how
Worldwatch
is going to cover the election. The local papers have nothing to do with it. You get back to the people in Keokuk and tell them to forget it.”

“Regina,” Sam said. “Miss Hudson, I mean.”

“Regina is okay,” she said, then wondered if it was. What the hell, she decided. He’d known her since she was a little girl. Besides, she’d called him “Sam.”

“Regina, we could save millions using those people. It’s a big advantage we’ve got.
Time
and
U.S. News
don’t have any papers to help them, and
Newsweek’s
got a lot fewer than we do.”

“One of them is the
Washington Post,”
someone pointed out.

“Since when is there an important primary in Washington?” Sam retorted.

“That’s not the point, Sam,” Regina said. She caught herself fiddling with her pencil. She made herself stop and look Sam in the eye. “The Hudson Group is committed to the independent operation of all the local papers. If they serve their communities and make a profit, the people stay on, period. I’m not about to pre-empt or co-opt any of these people. We promised them independence when we hired them, and we’re not about to go messing with it.”

“Regina,” Sam said wearily, “when you’ve had as much experience as I have, you’ll find out you’ve got to make the occasional compromise on things like this.”

It was true she didn’t have all that much experience. Before becoming Publisher and Chairman of the Board, she’d been the editor of the Kirkester
Chronicle,
a job her mother had given her the way a carpenter would give his kid a piece of wood to play with. But she’d made the job real, the way she’d make this one real. Also, she hated Sam’s goddam patronizing attitude.

“That’s bullshit, Sam. You’re acting as if the company’s on the verge of bankruptcy. Unless you’re fudging the books you snowed me a couple of weeks ago, we’re making record profits.”

“There’s never so much money around you couldn’t piss it away by being careless.”

“I’m not being careless, I’m sticking with the practices that led us to the record profits in the first place.”

“Part of the record profits—forgive me, here, Regina—come from the fact that your mother turned out to be a Russian spy.”

Sean Murphy spoke for the first time. “That’s really unfair, Sam,” he said quietly.

“I’ll handle it, Sean,” Regina said. Her hands were fists on the table now; she was leaning out over them as though ready to spring.

“Yes,” she said. “My mother came to this country as a spy, to infiltrate my father’s business and run it to make the Kremlin happy. I won’t forget that. Don’t you forget that she found herself so in love with this country and this business that when the Russians called on her, she risked her life rather than compromise the Hudson Group.”

Sam shrank back. “All right, all right. Don’t get so excited.”

“I’m sorry,” Regina said. She supposed she was, too, but not much. She sat back and took a breath. “Okay,” she said. “I know you’re doing your job. I also know you tried this local-paper—
Worldwatch
tie-in business on my mother like clockwork every Presidential election since 1964. It didn’t work with her, and it’s not going to work with me.”

She turned to Murphy. “Sean, why don’t you take up manpower allocation?”

There, she thought, half-amused and half-proud. Now that I’ve shown my authority, I can delegate some. Anyway, the small details of manpower allocation bored her silly. The important thing was that the allocation should be made in accordance with their reading of the way the campaign was going to shape up, something she’d already been through in detail with Murphy and her senior people, as well as with independent analysts and pollsters.