Grand Master (14 page)

Bauman tried hard to remember. His eyes began
to move side to side, seeing in his mind what he had seen before,
the tables full of rich contributors and women dressed with
money.

“If she was, I don’t remember seeing her. She
might have been there, but if she was she must have gone somewhere
first to change. It was a formal affair, not the kind of clothes
she had with her.”

“So he must have known her before that night.
He must have-”

“Not necessarily,” interjected Bauman
reluctantly. “There were people, friends of his, who
sometimes….”

“Set him up with someone?” asked Hart.
Everyone had heard the stories about how helpful certain of the
President’s friends could be. Hart glanced toward Atwood, sitting
back in the recliner, his face again without expression. “And you
kept all this from his wife? Never told her what was going on?”

“It wasn’t our place to do that,” replied
Atwood, looking straight at him.

Was he lying, wondered Hart, searching
Atwood’s eyes for an answer they would not yield. Or was Atwood
telling the truth, and Madelaine Constable had been lying when she
told Hart that she was kept informed about anything Constable did
that might threaten his presidency? He had the feeling that neither
one of them had been entirely truthful; that she had been kept
informed, but not so often, nor so fully, as she had thought.
Whatever deal Atwood had made with Madelaine Constable, he would
have made another, better one with her husband.

Richard Bauman was a different story. As near
as Hart could tell, the agent had only wanted to do the right thing
and had not realized that doing that almost always got you in
trouble. He liked Bauman, liked him precisely for that reason:
Bauman would have done what he was sworn to do: protect the life of
the President at the cost of his own, and done it without a
moment’s hesitation. Atwood, on the other hand, was more likely
someone who instead of acting instantly, would think instead of how
he could act the hero’s part and live to gain the benefit.

“He was lucky to have you,” said Hart
suddenly, and for no apparent reason. “I know you feel responsible,
but you shouldn’t. But now, tell me about her, anything you can
remember.” He turned sharply to Atwood. “I assume that with agent
Bauman’s help you worked up a sketch of what she looks like and
that you’ve given it to the FBI. I’d like a copy of it as well, if
you wouldn’t mind.”

Atwood suggested that there was very little
chance it would do any good. “Twenty minutes after she left the
hotel, she probably didn’t look anything like the way she did. This
was not some amateur; she was a professional. Her hair will be
different; her eyes won’t be the same. She’ll look like a thousand
other people no one knows anything about. She was probably on a
plane out of the country later that same night. There really isn’t
any chance we’ll ever find her.”

“The real question,” said Hart as he got
ready to leave, “is whether we can find the people who hired
her.”

“Whoever they are, they aren’t taking any
credit for it. Which means it wasn’t some group out there that
hates America and wants to show what it can do.”

But Hart was not thinking about that. He
wanted to know something more about the girl. “Her manner, the way
she talked - anything, the way she moved; anything about her
clothes.”

Bauman thought about it, or rather tried to
think. He was exhausted, wracked with all the psychic pain of
endless self-recrimination; haunted by what he thought his failure
to recognize an assassin when she was standing right in front of
him.

“Nothing. She was great looking, and she
seemed scared; or I thought she was at first, but then - there was
something in her eyes - I thought she wasn’t. It all happened so
fast, and my first thought was - well, you know what I did. I
almost pushed her out of there, told her to get her things and get
out of the hotel. Unbelievable! But that’s what I did.”

“Was there anything about her, anything that
was different? Her voice - what did she sound like?”

Bauman sat bolt upright. His eyes grew larger
and almost frighteningly intense. “She had an accent! Not much of
one, but a little. Why did I forget that? She had an accent, maybe
British, or someone who went to school there.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As a member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Bobby Hart was in a better position than most people to
know what was going on in the world. Meeting behind closed doors,
he and a handful of senators were given regular briefings by the
various intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The committee was
not always told everything, however, and there had even been
occasions when what they were told was not the truth. When you were
trained in the arts of deception, taught how to mislead the enemy,
it was not that difficult to convince yourself that lying to
Congress about something you wanted to keep secret was not really
lying at all. Those who thought like this were mainly the ones who
had come later, part of the generation born after the war; the ones
who, because they had never been put to the test, never faced an
enemy in combat, did not understand what it was they were really
there to protect: the country and what it stood for, not the power
of some agency that thought it was bigger than the government.

“Some of these guys think they’re so tough,”
his father had said with contempt one day shortly before he died.
“They should have been with me at the Battle of the Bulge, freezing
their nuts off at Bastogne. That’s a little different than plotting
the overthrow of some two-bit dictator in the comfort of an
air-conditioned room.”

Bobby Hart liked to think of that, his
father’s gruff laughter, the straight, no-nonsense look in his eyes
when he talked about the way things had changed in the agency he
had once loved. There was always a difference, he had insisted,
between those who were there at the beginning of something and
those who came later. That was the lesson he had learned, the
lesson he wanted to pass on: you had to be there at the beginning
to know what it was about and what you were there to do. Things
changed, got all mixed up, and before you knew it the thing you
created became more important than what it had been created to
do.

“I’m not just talking about the agency, you
understand; it’s true of everything: things are always clearer at
the start.” And then he had looked at his son in a way Bobby never
forgot, with pride and hope, but more than that, a sense of trust,
the certain knowledge that Bobby would not disappoint the high
expectations he had for him.

“The first time you ran for office, that
first campaign for Congress - you weren’t thinking then what you
had to do to get re-elected; all you thought about were the things
you wanted to do, the changes you thought needed to be made. That’s
why you’re different from all the others, the ones who just want to
stay in office - you still think like that. The whole point is not
to stop.”

Though Bobby was certain that his father had
given him far too much credit, what his father had said became a
kind of second conscience, a constant reminder of the kind of man
he was supposed to be. It was surprising how often it had worked in
the early years after he was first elected; how often, when he was
tempted to go along with a majority opinion with which he
disagreed, he heard not just his father’s words, but his father’s
voice. It had become so much a part of him over the years, that
second, deeper judgment, that he seldom any longer had occasion to
remember where it came from and how it had started, but he
remembered it now, as he took his chair in the committee room and
looked across at the director of the CIA sitting with his hands
folded at the witness table. From somewhere in the shadows of his
mind, he heard his father’s voice, reminding him of his obligation,
as clear and distinct as the day he first heard him say it.

The Chairman of the committee, Wilson Breyer
of New Hampshire, gaveled the session to order. A former state
court judge, with a mind narrowed to the strict necessities of the
law, Breyer listened to the arguments of others but only seldom
expressed an opinion of his own. There were those on the committee
who suspected that it was because he did not have an opinion on
anything that mattered, and it was a fact that no one could
remember when he had voted on anything except with the majority.
Hart was more charitable. He was willing to take the Chairman at
his word when he insisted that it was the business of a chairman to
do what he could to get a consensus. Everyone agreed that Wilson
Breyer ran things on schedule. The meeting had been scheduled for
4:30, and by 4:32 he had already finished with the opening
preliminaries.

The Chairman’s scholarly face was set in an
attitude of interested attention, someone who would never take
sides and would make sure that everyone was treated fairly. His
hands were a different story. Kept out of sight, lest they betray
him, one of them was always moving in a strange, manic dance, the
nervous irritation he could never quite control.

“The committee has been called into session
to hear from the Director of the CIA, Louis Griswald, what the
agency has learned about the reaction to the death of President
Constable and his replacement by Vice-President Russell.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that
from his place two seats down, Bobby Hart had turned toward him.
His hand stopped moving; a nervous smile flashed briefly across his
mouth. Believing that the smile was for him, the Director smiled
back.

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There’s really not
much to report." Louis Griswald had never felt the need to hold
himself to the tight discipline Wilson Breyer had learned in court.
Broad shouldered and broad across the hip, he did everything with a
certain swagger. He did not sit with his feet planted on the floor,
looking straight ahead, but sideways in the chair like someone
sitting with friends on a Saturday afternoon, lying about his golf
game or what he had done on the athletic fields of Princeton thirty
years before.

“Not much to report?” inquired the Chairman
in a quiet, affable tone.

“Nothing that we would regard as serious,
radical elements in the Middle East claiming that the death of the
President was Allah’s act of vengeance for the ‘Great Satan,’
speculation in various capitols about what, if any, change of
policy might be expected from the Vice-President - I mean from the
Russell administration. In other words, nothing you wouldn’t expect
and nothing that could be construed as a new threat. There’s no
evidence that anyone views what happened as an opportunity to move
against us, either here or abroad.”

Shifting his bulky frame around, Griswald
placed his thick arms on the table and hunched forward. His eyes,
set beneath heavy lids, narrowed into a grim, almost brutal stare.
“That doesn’t mean they won’t; only that if they’re planning
something, we don’t yet know about it.”

Hart knew what was coming next; anyone who
had been on the committee more than a year knew what was coming
next.

“As I’ve told this committee time and time
again: we don’t have the assets - we don’t have the budget, we
don’t have the legal authority - to gather all the intelligence we
need.” The Director pushed back from the table, folded his arms
across his ample chest, and slowly looked from one member of the
committee to the next, daring them, as it seemed, to disagree.

Charlie Ryan laughed. “Isn’t it a simple rule
of mathematics, Mr. Griswald, that you multiply any number by zero
and you still get zero? We could double your budget - we did that,
remember, just two years ago - and you would still blame us when
you had nothing to report. It’s an old game, Mr. Griswald, and I
for one am getting a little damn tired of it!”

“We do what we can with what we have,” the
Director shot back. “But you’re right: I can’t guarantee results,
no matter how much money you might give us; all I can tell you is
that it would improve our chances. There are no guarantees in this
business. We do what we can with what we have,” he repeated with
all the blind assurance of a catechism.

Ryan started to say something, but thought
better of it, or, rather, just gave up. There was no arguing with
this kind of posturing. He glanced across to see if Hart had
anything to add.

“Director Griswald, I’m interested in the
intelligence you had before the President’s death."

The question caught the Director off guard.
He did not want to admit that he was not sure what the Senator
meant, and so he did not say anything.

“Before the President’s death,” repeated
Hart.

Griswald bent his head slightly to the side.
He still did not answer. The silence began to speak a language of
its own. Other members of the committee, reading over a document,
conferring quietly with an aide, stopped what they were doing.
Hart’s gaze stayed fixed on Griswald; the Director kept staring
back.

“The President’s death,” said Hart in a voice
that took on a new insistence, and a new authority, in the solemn
silence of the room.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,
Senator,” finally admitted Griswald.

“The President died in a hotel room,” said
Hart, choosing his words carefully. “Died of an apparent heart
attack. There have been rumors that he was not alone. If that is
true, if he wasn’t alone, then…well, you can see where I’m
going.”

The Director was not sure he did. The line
across the bridge of his nose deepened and became more pronounced,
as his eyes drew close together.

“If he wasn’t alone,” persisted Hart, “that
leads to the possibility that something may have happened, that he
didn’t….”

“Die of natural causes?” Now Griswald
understood. “I suppose it might; but you asked about any
intelligence we might have had before the President’s death. If you
mean, did we hear of a possible attempt on the President’s life,
then, no, we didn’t.” With a show of reluctance, Griswald added
that, like everyone else, he “had heard those same rumors - about
the President not being alone when he died; but for the rest of it,
that which had anything to do with his death, I haven’t heard
anything like it, and have no reason to think it’s true.”