“Yes,” Augustine said. “A search party.”
He went behind his desk, sank heavily into the chair. I hated Julius, he thought, I hated him for what he tried to do to me-but he was a friend for twenty years, I never wanted him dead. I never wanted Briggs dead either. Briggs. And now Wexford. One is bad enough, but two; two. No way to cover this one up, even if I wanted to. And Briggs will be found anytime now back in Washington.
Why did they have to die? Goddamn them, why did they have to do this to me?
Outside, the train’s air horn echoed loudly through the quiet morning. Augustine lifted his head, realized that the Presidential Special had slackened speed and that they were passing through the long limestone-walled cut into the narrow valley where The Hollows station was located. Less than five minutes now before arrival.
He also realized Justice was speaking to him. “… all right, sir?”
“What did you say?”
“I asked if you were all right, Mr. President.”
“Yes. A little shell-shocked, that’s all.”
“Do you want me to have Communications radio in a report to the FBI?”
“No,” Harper said.
Justice shifted his gaze. “Sir?”
“What’s happened is terrible enough without risking an immediate leak to the media. We can contact the FBI directly from The Hollows; a half-hour or so isn’t going to make any difference to Wexford. And there’ll be time to prepare an official announcement for when the body is found.” He looked at Augustine. “Don’t you agree, Mr. President?”
“Yes,” Augustine said.
“Then that’s how we’ll handle it.” And to Justice, “Not a word to anyone, do you understand?”
Justice seemed to want to say something; instead he nodded grimly, silently.
Augustine thought: Why couldn’t they all have been as strong and as loyal as Maxwell and Christopher? And Claire too… Claire. God, what will she say? I’ve got to tell her-but not right away, not until we get to The Hollows. I can’t face her with it until then.
“We’ll be at the station any minute,” Harper said. “Can you put up a front for the media, Nicholas?”
Augustine looked across at the liquor cabinet, then imme. diately pulled his eyes away from it again. “Don’t worry about the media,” he said.
The air horn sounded another time and the train lost more of its speed, coasting as they neared the station.
Augustine got slowly to his feet. “We’ve all got things to do before we disembark,” he said. “We’d better do them.”
Harper nodded. “Just the amenities at the station and straight to The Hollows. All right?”
“Yes. All right.”
When they were gone Augustine stood staring at the closed door. How can I beat them now that Wexford is dead too? he thought, and felt a coldness settle on the back of his neck.
How can I beat them now?
Eighteen
Justice finished repacking his suitcase and stood at his compartment door. The Presidential Special had already stopped, and outside the windows, on the station platform, there was a good deal of noise and activity. But he did not pay any attention to it. He might have been alone somewhere, standing in utter silence. He knew the name of the fear now that had been plaguing him since Thursday night, and the voice of it echoed in his mind and would not be shut away.
What if something far more ominous had happened to Briggs and Wexford, the voice kept saying, than death by freak and coincidental accident?
What if they were murdered?
What if someone close to the President was a homicidal psychopath?
PART THREE
One
Harper disembarked from the Presidential Special prior to Augustine and the First Lady, as was customary for the staff aides, and walked quickly through the mixed crowd of media people and security officers on permanent assignment to The Hollows. He kept his expression carefully blank, but it felt brittle, like something made of thin opaque glass. Inside him there was a kind of bitter hopelessness; he did not let himself dwell on it, kept it under rigid control, but it was there and he could not rid himself of it.
He stood alone at the far end of the station platform, segregated from the crowd by the stolid bodies of Secret Service personnel, and waited and watched his breath puff whitely on the cold morning air. The glare of sunlight reflecting off the metal surfaces of the train hurt his eyes and he wished vaguely that he had adopted the affectation of sunglasses-dark ones to dull not only the glare but his perception of the sharp edges of the valley.
Sharp edges. An accurate phrase, he thought with distaste. The pointed tops of pine and spruce and those overrated California monoliths, the redwoods. The jagged crowns of distant mountain peaks. The sawtooth tips of the valley slopes. The knifelike blades of the rail tracks, the axlike blades of the long limestone cut through which the tracks passed. The thin serrated-looking security fences that stretched away on both sides of the asphalt road beyond the station. The corkscrew line of the road up and across the eastern ridge toward the ranch complex in a second “hollow.” Even the station itself-an old wood-and-stone structure that had once been part of a logging railhead in the days before Philip Augustine had built The Hollows-with its alpine roof and its square stone chimneys and its sloping platform ceiling.
He hated this place, The Hollows. He was city-bred and city-oriented, an urbanite in every respect; the so-called great outdoors had always given him an unsettled feeling of inefficacy, as though these sharp open spaces somehow abrogated both his worth and his ability to maintain complete control. A mild form of agoraphobia, he supposed; but there was nothing to be done about it.
He drew the collar of his overcoat tighter around his neck. The morning seemed hushed despite the faint chuffing of the locomotive and the murmur of voices from the crowd. Nothing moved anywhere except here on the platform. On the far slopes thin waterfalls of melting snow, cascading down to the hidden Yurok River which ran through The Hollows, seemed motionless in perspective-white veins in the green tracery of trees. Even those high patches of mist which had not already burned off clung to pines and redwoods like giant gray spiderwebs.
The edge of the world, Harper thought-and Augustine and Claire finally appeared and started down the metal steps from the train.
The crowd stirred to attention. Harper moved closer, saw that Augustine wore his public face like a mummer’s mask and that he appeared to be in relatively good command of himself. The stress lines were visible enough, but not so apparent as to alert the reporters. At his side, wearing a black alpaca coat and a stylish cossack hat over her blonde hair, Claire smiled and waved with a kind of detached reserve. Her face was pale and her eyes looked huge and dark. Harper wondered if Augustine had told her yet about Wexford. He wondered what her reaction had been or would be. He wondered again if he would ever know-not that it seemed to matter any longer-what her motivations and her feelings truly were.
As they started across the platform, Augustine saying to the reporters, “No questions right now, ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry,” Harper saw Justice come down the stairs, the last of the Secret Service agents to leave the train. No public face on him, nor any of his usual stoicism; he looked far more troubled and worried than he had in Augustine’s office. His eyes, fixed straight ahead, had a remote quality, as if he were not wholly aware of externals.
Augustine led the way swiftly through the station and out to where a phalanx of automobiles-The Hollows’ limousine, a pair of sleek Cadillacs, a mixture of security cars and station wagons-waited bumper-to-bumper in a long straight line, like an unintentional parody of the Presidential Special. He helped Claire into the rear of the limousine, slid in beside her without turning to face the reporters again. Framed in profile behind the window glass, his face to Harper had the look of a bust inexpertly chiseled from old gray stone.