Mounting Fears (24 page)

“I understand,” Bacon said.

“Mind you, Bacon, should you find him you must be certain of whom you’re dealing with. We don’t want some businessman from home to meet an untimely end and stir up a lot of trouble for us because of mistaken identity. You must be sure.”

“How am I to identify him?” Bacon asked.

“That will be the hardest part of all,” Owen replied, “but he will probably be alone, or possibly with a woman, in a bar or restaurant. He likes the bar at El Conquistador and a restaurant called El Parador, across the canal, though I doubt if he will return there any time soon. He may look older or younger than he is. He will almost certainly bewig himself. Anything looking like a toupee will give you an indication. You were trained to look at subjects with your peripheral vision most of the time. See that you do. He must not know he has attracted your attention.”

“Is that all you can tell me?”

“Look at the photograph, at the left ear, which is turned slightly toward the camera.”

Bacon did so.

“Do you see it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s a fold in the flesh, just above the earlobe, like a tiny gully.”

“Yes, I see it now.”

“We can’t tell if this is symmetrical, if the right ear is the same, because of the way his head is turned, but that little mark will be present on his left ear. Unless, of course, he has filled it with spirit gum and makeup. But it gives us just a chance to identify him.”

Bacon nodded. “May I keep the photograph?”

“No,” Owen replied. “Take one last look at it, and give it back to me.”

Bacon did so.

Owen returned the photo to his safe and removed a box with some gadgets in it. He removed two cell phones and handed Bacon one. “Memorize this number,” Owen said, repeating it twice. “If you believe you have found him, leave the location in a taxi, call me at that number, give me any pertinent information—a companion, say. Then give me a meeting place nearby and return to his location by a circuitous route. Watch the place where you saw him and wait for me to turn up. Do not, repeat,
not
speak to him or confront him. If he speaks to you, be polite, then excuse yourself.”

“Who is this man?” Bacon asked.

Owen sighed. “Whoever he says he is.”

45

WILL SAT ON A SOFA IN THE OVAL OFFICE AND GAZED AT HIS POLLSTER. “ALL RIGHT, Moss, let’s hear it.” His chief of staff, press secretary, campaign manager, and political consultant were very still.

Moss consulted his papers. “In the first poll since Henry King Johnson announced, he appears to have attracted about a quarter of the black vote.”

Will made a point of not showing a reaction. “Go on.”

“Bill Spanner, as you know, is doing much better than expected, and the combination of those two elements means that if the election were held today, you would lose to Spanner by around five points.”

Will turned to Tom Black. “Tom?”

“We have two commercials in the can showing you with civil rights leaders over the years. I want to punch up the voice-overs and rerecord, and we can have them on the air by the day after tomorrow.”

Moss spoke up again. “Mr. President, I think you should know that as Reverend Johnson starts to campaign and get press coverage, the bleeding off of black voters is likely to continue.”

“That’s depressing,” Will said.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t yet reached a point in this country when voters will ignore race. He’s going to get a lot of black votes simply because he’s black, just as you’re getting some white voters for the same reason.”

Sam Meriwether spoke up. “In addition to running Tom’s new commercials, we need to schedule more events with predominantly black audiences: schools, churches, wherever we can gather a crowd. Then we need to photograph those events and use them in advertising, particularly in southern states where black voters are a majority or nearly so.”

“We can’t just let the black vote slide to Johnson,” Kitty said. “We have to stop the bleeding and as quickly as possible.”

“Why is Henry doing this?” Will said. “I’ve always had a good relationship with him.”

Tim Coleman, Will’s chief of staff, said, “I’ve had word that Reverend Johnson has bought property adjacent to his church and plans to tear down the old building, which is in disrepair, and build a rather grandiose new church and an office building, most of which he will rent out to black-owned businesses. He’s counting on the press exposure he receives during the campaign to put him over the top in his fund-raising.”

“I’ve never heard of this plan,” Will said.

“He’s keeping it under wraps. He presented it to his board of deacons only a few days ago, and it will go unannounced until he feels the moment is right.”

Kitty said, “Maybe we need to find him a big contributor, who …”

“No.” Will cut her off. “The moment we do anything that smacks of bribing him to get out of the race, we’ll take a big hit among voters at large, and justifiably so.”

“I tend to agree,” Moss said.

“Anytime a reporter raises the name of Henry King Johnson, we will use the opportunity to welcome him to the race and say good things about him,” Will said. “If we criticize him, we show fear, and fear is contagious.”

“The other polls will have this in a day or two,” Moss said. “We’re going to have to face that.”

“I’ll face it by saying that I’ve been down in the polls before, but I haven’t lost an election so far, and I don’t intend to start now.”

“That’s exactly what you should say,” Tom Black agreed. “I want to talk to some of the black elected officials around the country and see if we can get them on record as supporting you.”

“Don’t go to anybody who hates Henry,” Will said. “The tenor of any such statements should be that he’s a fine fellow and an outstanding preacher but that he knows he isn’t going to win this race, so why is he running? Tim, we need to get the plans for Henry’s new church to a columnist who can break the story in a way so that it’s on every front page the next day, and we don’t want this traceable to us. Tom, you could let this slip when you’re talking to black elected officials and let them do the leaking. Somebody won’t be able to resist.”

“Good idea,” Tom replied.

“Ideally, the column would run on the day Henry announces his plans,” Tim said. “If we can make his running look like a fund-raising ploy, then that might slow down the money to the point where he may wonder why he bothered.”

“Maybe somebody could make it a church-and-state issue,” Kitty said.

Sam Meriwether winced. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said.

Will chuckled. “Kitty always wants to go for the jugular.”

“Yeah, Sam,” Kitty said, “you’re way too soft. I think running for president in order to raise money for a self-glorifying church is a legitimate thing to attack.”

“As long as the attack comes from just the right person,” Tim said. “Every big daily has a black columnist these days; those people might be a good place to get the word out.”

“Tom,” Will said, “any efforts we make, like the two new commercials, are going to have to be on top of anything else we already have planned. We have to deal with Bill Spanner, win the independents and the few remaining moderate Republicans from him and win by a margin big enough to overcome any votes lost to Henry Johnson. We need people on every Sunday political show talking about that and ignoring Henry, except to answer direct questions.”

“I’m doing two,” Kitty said, “and so is Sam. I think we can get the message out.”

“I haven’t heard anything yet,” Tim said, “but I’d be very surprised if the Reverend Johnson isn’t on
Meet the Press
this Sunday.”

“Then the day before would be an excellent time for the world to learn about Henry’s fund-raising plans,” Will said. “Russert would enjoy asking him about that. When should I do that program?”

“The week after Henry Johnson,” Tim replied.

“Mr. President,” Kitty said, looking at her watch, “your next appointment is camped outside the door right now.”

“Let’s break it up, then,” Will said. “You all go out through my study, so that you won’t bump into the Republican leadership. They want to talk about tax cuts again, so they can tell the press on their way out that I
still
won’t cut taxes, even though we’re running a nice surplus.”

Everybody laughed and filed out.

46

WILLIE GAYNES WATCHED THE REPORTER ENTER HIS OFFICE. HE WAS NELSON Pickett, whom Willie had recruited from a rival rag to replace Ned Partain.

“Did you listen to the recordings, Nelson?” Willie asked.

“Yeah, I did,” Pickett replied.

“Well?”

“The guy is certainly Martin Stanton, but in order to go with that, we’d need to know who the woman on the recordings is,” Pickett said.

“Tell me about it. Any candidates?”

“Three, sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

“I mean it could be one of the following: Jean Rodgers, with whom Stanton was alleged to have had a long-running affair when he was still practicing law in L.A. She is the wife of Elton Rodgers, a very big real estate developer in southern California, and the two of them were a presence on the charity-dinner circuit. She’s twenty years younger than Stanton, gorgeous, and has a reputation for liking lots of sex, some of it with more than one partner. Apparently, gender doesn’t matter.”

“That’s juicy.”

“Yeah, but we’d have to put half a dozen stringers on it, maybe for weeks, to nail it down.”

“Who else is on the list?”

“His traveling campaign manager, Elizabeth Wharton. I’ve talked to two people on his campaign plane who say they’ve caught them looking hungrily at each other. Nobody, however, has been able to put them in the sack together.”

“Okay, put on a stringer to shadow Stanton’s campaign schedule. I want staff bribed at every hotel they stay at. I want to know the location of their respective rooms and the room-service delivery schedule to those rooms. I want to know how many Stanton orders for.”

“Will do.” Pickett made a note.

“Who’s the third?”

“Barbara Ortega, who was Stanton’s chief of staff the last two years he was governor. This is not the hottest tip, it’s supposition based on proximity: she was there, so given Stanton’s reputation for libido, he must have fucked her.”

“That would be a legitimate basis on which to proceed,” Willie said, “if we had six more months to nail it down, but we don’t. Is this Ortega traveling with Stanton on the campaign? A threesome with Stanton and Wharton would be a nice thing.”

“No, she’s just been appointed head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department. She’s been living at the Ritz-Carlton for a couple of weeks, and she bought a house in Georgetown. They were seen together in Sacramento at the swearing-in ceremony for Mike Rivera, Stanton’s successor, but not before or after. They can’t be put together at any other time since Stanton got the vice-presidential nod.”

Gaynes sat back in his chair and gazed out his window toward the Potomac River. “Tell you what,” he said, “get recordings of the voices of all three women and have our guy compare them to the woman’s voice on the Stanton recordings.”

“Great idea!” Pickett said, sarcastically. “Any ideas on how I can manage that?”

“What do you think I’m paying you the big bucks for, Nelson? Do I have to do all the thinking around here? Now, get out and get on it! We’re short of time!”

TODD BACON SAT on a bar stool at El Conquistador and sipped his third margarita. It was his third evening on the hunt, and he was with a code clerk from the embassy, a dish named Rita. He’d had his eye on her for a while, and now he had a professional reason for taking her out.

“When are we going to get some dinner?” Rita asked plaintively. “I’m going to topple off this bar stool in a minute.”

“Just a sec,” Bacon said. An elderly man with longish white hair and a Vandyke beard had just entered the bar, and Bacon’s pulse was up at least ten points. The man was the right size and age, and the hair and beard were a good disguise. He rearranged himself on the bar stool so that Rita was between him and the mark. That way he could seem to be looking at Rita when he was actually looking past her.