Conspiracy (45 page)

“Ball may know who it is,” said Gallo.

“Yes,” said Rubens. “Unfortunately, we're going to have to find Chief Ball before we can find out.”

 

“
WHAT DO YOU
think, Jimmy Fingers? Can we blow off Paley?”

“Sure, if you'd like to kiss off about $350,000 worth of donations. That's what he'll be worth in general.”

“All right,” said McSweeney wearily. “All right. And who's after the Paleys?”

“That would be Mr. and Mrs. Davis. They gave a lot of money to the last campaign. They're going to try talking you out of going to the Getty tomorrow.”

“Why would they care? No, wait, that's fine. I don't really need to know. Tell me again what movies Paley has produced.”

 

LIA HAD JUST
turned into the parking lot at LaGuardia Airport in New York City when her sat phone rang. It was Sandy Chafetz, confirming that they had reserved her flight to Baltimore / Washington International Airport. A car would meet her there and take her back to Crypto City to be debriefed. Rubens hadn't decided whether she should join the search for Ball—or, if she did, what she would do.

“Great,” said Lia. “I'll talk to you after I clear security.”

“There's one other thing I think you'd like to know,” said Chafetz. “Gerald Forester's divorce attorney got a letter from him a few days after he died. The attorney had it authenticated before contacting the Service and sending a copy to his ex-wife. It's an apology—a suicide note. He explained that he just couldn't go on.”

Lia fought back an urge to argue. Instead, she pushed the button on her phone to kill the transmission, and felt a tear run down the side of her cheek. Wondering why she felt so bad about Forester's death, she locked the rental car and walked into the terminal to find her flight.

 

SHADOWING THE PRESIDENT
was a revelation for Dean. He'd never imagined that so many people would want—
need
—to talk to Marcke in the course of an hour, let alone twenty-four. Aides constantly vied for attention. There were phone calls and e-mail messages, forwarded BlackBerry alerts. Briefing papers piled up; summaries and reports were passed from assistant to assistant. Ted Cohen, the chief of staff, had two telephones constantly pressed to his ear, and more often than not was speaking to someone nearby as well.

Marcke seemed unfazed by it all. He seemed to give whomever he was speaking to at the moment his undivided attention, and it was only after they had moved on that Dean realized the President must have been thinking about a dozen other things. If anything, Marcke seemed to want
more
to do: in his few moments of peace he fidgeted, habitually bending paper clips with his fingers and spinning them into knots and odd shapes. He ordered the car stopped several times, and, to the visible discomfort of the Secret Service detail, insisted on shaking the hands of some of whatever bystanders happened to be there.

Every so often, President Marcke glanced over and found Dean. Marcke smirked at him, as if they were co-conspirators on a private joke.

“So, Mr. Dean, enjoying yourself?” asked the President as they rode to his next stop, a new biology lab four miles south of the city.

“It's interesting.”

“Boring as hell, huh?” Marcke smiled at him. “George Hadash used to call these sorts of swings ‘orchestrated time chewers.' He hated traveling with me, but he did have a way with words.”

“Yup.”

“You never took one of his classes, did you?”

“No, sir.” Dean had met Hadash in Vietnam when he'd been detailed to give the then-congressional aide a “ground–level” view of Vietnam. Hadash had impressed him not so much because he insisted on going into the field—plenty of civilian suits from the States did that—but because he actually listened to what Dean said.

“He was a good teacher. And a friend. I miss him.” The President paused. “He was working on a new theory of the Vietnam War when he died, you know. He was writing a book. He thought the war was due a reevaluation. He was going to call the book
A Necessary War
.”

“Really?” Dean had never heard anyone say that Vietnam was anything but a waste.

“He thought if it hadn't been for Vietnam, the rapprochement with China would have been delayed at least ten years. And he believed there would have been another armed clash between the Soviets and ourselves, perhaps in the Middle East. We might never have become involved in helping the Afghan rebels, which at least indirectly led to the end of the Soviet Union. I doubt I'm doing his ideas justice,” added the President. “They were quite extensive.”

Dean nodded.

“What do you think, Mr. Dean?”

“A lot of good people died,” said Dean.

“True. It's a difficult thing, sending people to die. But that's not really the question.”

“Vietnam shaped my life,” said Dean. It was a statement he wouldn't have made before going back, as true as it was, because he hadn't realized it.

“It shaped mine as well,” said Marcke. “But again, that wasn't the question.”

The car stopped. The Secret Service agents began to swarm outside.

“I think it was an important event,” said Dean. “But I don't know if it was necessary. Most things that happen, we don't have the luxury of knowing if they're necessary or not. Even for ourselves.”

“Well put, Mr. Dean,” said the President, pulling himself out of the car.

 

THERE WERE MANY
more Secret Service agents at the Paley house than Chief Ball thought there would be. They were a humorless bunch, for the most part not given to chitchat, but that was just as well—Ball worried that saying too much to the wrong person might inadvertently give him away. He spent most of his time sitting in the den with one of the liaisons to the federal marshal detail—brought in for extra coverage and mostly assigned to the grounds—watching a soccer match on television. Ball had no interest in soccer, but the marshal was far and away the most amiable of the feds inside the house.

An agent stuck his head through the door.

“Hey, emergency Services briefings. Let's go.”

Chief Ball got up, then fell in behind the marshal as they walked to the kitchen. Two ambulances from a local company had been retained to provide coverage if any guests or staff members got sick. The Service itself would handle getting the senator to the hospital if necessary, using a special SUV and following a pre-scouted route.

“Who's Stevens?” asked a pug-nosed, light-skinned black Secret Service agent, entering the room at full gallop.

“That would be me,” said Ball.

The agent looked at him as if he'd just ruined his day. “Call your office. Now.”

“All right.” Ball started toward the nearby wall phone.

“Not on that line,” hissed the man.

A titter of barely suppressed laughter ran through the room.

Ball went outside and found a sympathetic sheriff's deputy to lend him a phone.

“I'm supposed to call in,” he told the woman who answered at campaign headquarters.

“Bruce Chazin wants to talk to you.”

Chazin was O'Rourke's nominal supervisor.

“This is Stevens,” said Ball when he came on the line. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Where the hell is O'Rourke?”

“Uh, I don't know. I kind of assumed he was there.”

“When did you last talk to him?”

“Well, he called around noon to check on me,” said Ball. “Sounded like he was having lunch.”

He answered the rest of Chazin's questions as vaguely as possible. The deputy campaign manager needed someone to review the arrangements at the next day's events.

“I'd be glad to do that for you, but they have us in a lockdown situation here,” said Ball. “Can't go in or out.”

“I don't want you. I want O'Rourke. I need someone at the meeting.”

Chazin fumed some more, and seemed on the verge of ordering Ball to check on O'Rourke's hotel—and the bar in the lobby. But finally Chazin just hung up.

Ball realized as he went back into the kitchen that being yelled at had transformed his status. Before, everyone had stared at him, trying to figure out who he was. Now, they smirked.

That was a lot better. Having a role to play—even as the butt of everyone's jokes—meant he belonged. He took a bottle of water from the cooler on the floor, opened it, and leaned against the sink.

The nearby clock said it was ten minutes past five. Guests wouldn't be arriving until seven; the senator was expected around nine.

Just a few hours to go, Ball told himself, taking a long slug from the bottle.

 

THERE WAS A
perceptible uptick in the energy level of the President's aides as Marcke entered the back of the banquet hall where he was to give the keynote address to a group of entertainment executives. The number of BlackBerries being consulted at any one moment doubled; men and women tilted their heads forward ever so slightly as they walked. The chief of staff veered to the side of the bubble to take a phone call.

The President, though he couldn't have helped but notice, continued into the reception area, shaking hands and smiling as he greeted the guests. Dean glanced at the Secret Service agents fanned out around Marcke. They watched the crowd warily, eyes sweeping indiscriminately, checking and rechecking. A few of the guests pulled back under their stare, but the President seemed not to notice his bodyguards or their concerns, plunging deeper into the crowd.

“Hard to watch what's going on in a place like this,” Dean said to a Secret Service agent he'd been introduced to earlier. The man, concentrating on a nearby doorway, grunted.

As the President reached the entrance to the main reception hall, his chief of staff, Ted Cohen, approached from his left and touched his elbow. Marcke bent toward Cohen, listened to a whisper, and then nodded before continuing into the hall. Dean followed along, now at the back edge of the bubble. The buzz in the room grew louder. All eyes except the Secret Service agents' either were on the President or
were trying to get there. There was wonder and awe in people's faces; Dean realized he must have looked that way, too, when he first met Marcke.

“Charlie, we're going to go back to Washington after this,” said Cohen, sidling up next to him. “The President has a problem to deal with. Are you coming with us or staying here?”

“I don't know,” said Dean. “I'll have to check in and find out.”

“There's food in the room there for staff,” Cohen added. “The President wants you to stay close. Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

Dean found a quiet spot in the hallway. Pretending to use his sat phone, he turned his com system on.

“This is Dean.”

“Hey, Charlie, how's it going?” said Rockman in the Art Room.

“I'm all right. The President is cutting short his trip and flying back to D.C. tonight. What am I supposed to do?”

“Stand by.”

Dean glanced down the hall. Beside the Secret Service agents, there were men from the LA Police Department and two federal marshals who'd been called in for extra protection.

“Charlie, this is Chris Farlekas. How are you?”

“I'm fine, Chris.”

“If the President doesn't need you, we'd like you to stay in LA and help look for Ball. We're pretty sure he's in Los Angeles. We're supposed to get an update from the research people and the FBI people at ten p.m. Ambassador Jackson will be on the conference call. A Secret Service agent named John Mandarin will be in charge. He's traveling with the McSweeney campaign but will be back at the local office by then. We'll plug you into the circuit.”

“The President still may want to talk to me,” said Dean.

“Why?”

“He didn't say.”

“He's the boss,” said Farlekas. “Let us know when you're free.”

THE APPLAUSE THAT
greeted the end of the President's speech was polite but not particularly enthusiastic. The President had told the movie and television moguls how important their industry was to the country and in the course noted several times how profitable it was. They—rightly—interpreted that to mean they weren't getting the production tax breaks they'd been lobbying for. He could have suggested government censorship and received a more enthusiastic response.

One of the chief of staff's aides gave Dean the heads-up, and Dean went with her to the presidential limo.

“Mr. Dean, I hope you had a good meal,” said the President when Dean reached the car. “Ted got me a doggie bag. Come on and ride with me. We're going to visit Senator McSweeney.”

Dean realized he must have looked surprised, because the President laughed.

“I hope he's as surprised as you are,” said Marcke. “I planned on doing this tomorrow, but this is even better. I want to see if what he tells me is any different from what he told you.”