There had been an electrified charge in the air as the motorcade whisked the premier along Chicago’s Michigan Avenue amid signs that read: FISH AND GUESTS SMELL IN 3 DAYS! GO TO THE MOON, LEAVE US ALONE! and RUSSIAN ATROCITIES IN HUNGARY MUST BE ANSWERED! The lynch mob mood concerned Harrigan enough that he’d flown back to Washington that night to meet with his State Department boss, on whose shoulders rested the enormous responsibility of safeguarding Khrushchev.
For decades, the Secret Service had protected not only the president of the United States but any visiting dignitaries. Recently, however, a new security division had been formed in the State Department to handle the ever-increasing number of foreign guests; the world was growing smaller, it seemed, even as living on it grew more dangerous.
Many of these agents, Harrigan included, had been culled from the ranks of the Secret Service. Protecting Khrushchev was their first assignment. Harrigan wished they could have gotten their feet wet with a much smaller fish; but they were stuck instead with this big barracuda.
“I think we should cut the trip short,” Harrigan told Bill Larsen, his chief.
He and Larsen had known each other for over ten years, working the White House Detail together. They had both gone after the coveted top spot in the new division, but Bill — Harrigan’s senior officer by a few years — had landed the position, putting a strain on their friendship.
Seated behind the massive, cluttered mahogany desk in his executive office, Larsen — middle-aged, brown-haired, average, even undistinguished looking (always a plus in this work), wearing a rumpled Brooks Brothers suit and a twelve-hour stubble — gave Harrigan a hard stare.
A portrait of Eisenhower peered over the shoulder of Harrigan’s former colleague/new boss, as if Ike were curious to hear Harrigan’s thoughts, while an American flag stood at attention in the corner. A wall clock with the division seal read just after midnight.
“I say we go straight from Chicago,” Harrigan said, “to that photo-op farm in Iowa. Get our boy grinning with his fellow pigs and then put his big ass on his big-ass airplane and ship him back to Siberia or wherever-the-hell.”
Larsen thought about that for a moment. “Skip L.A. altogether, you mean.”
“Skip it. Why borrow trouble?”
Larsen thought some more; then he slowly shook his head. “Ike won’t like it.”
Harrigan sat forward, put a hand on the desk. “Fuck Ike,” he said, with a sneering nod at the portrait. “Would Ike like some more ugly incidents? Maybe he’d like a dead premier for supper, and atomic war for dessert?”
“Are you on amphetamines again, Jack?”
Harrigan sighed. “Bill — it’s getting hot out there… and I’m not talking about the goddamn weather.”
“I know… I know.” Larsen sat and brooded; then he pounded his desk with a fist. “Goddamn that fat little bastard! Why can’t he just keep his big mouth shut? Doesn’t he know anything about diplomacy? Can’t he just sit back and look at the scenery and shut the hell up?”
Harrigan sighed, shrugged, nodded. “Even his own people can’t control him. He’s like Al Capone or something.”
“Al Capone we could put in jail — this jerk we have to wine and dine.” Larsen let out a weary blast of air. “Maybe the president could broadcast an appeal…”
“For what?”
“Patience on the public’s part. To cut the guy some slack, the way you do some hick from the country who shows up at the family reunion with the manners of a billy goat.”
Harrigan smirked. “And how does that work, exactly? You think Nikita’s people won’t tell him what the prez is saying about him in the press?”
“Ike could simply imply that—”
“That the public should just ignore the commie dung being flung their way?”
A small shrug. “It could work.”
“Yeah, and if we all believe, really really believe, maybe Tinker Bell won’t fucking die.” Harrigan shifted in the chair. “Anyway, that’s not the real issue here, Bill. We have the most volatile man in the world heading into the most volatile city in the world… And I’m not getting the support I need from the mayor.”
Larsen’s eyes tightened as he sat forward. “What do you mean?”
“You know how many men Poulson’s giving me? How about a hundred?”
Larsen’s eyes ping-pong-balled. “Jesus Christ! We had three thousand agents in Washington — two thousand in New York!” The division chief leaned back in his chair, looking like he’d been poleaxed. “Why do I think that prick Poulson would just love to have Khrushchev take a bullet on his turf?”
“I don’t know. Because he would?”
Larsen stood, leaning forward, hands touching the desktop. “Jack, I’ll call Mayor Poulson personally — I’ll remind the S.O.B. which side of the bread the politics is buttered on.”
“Good. Thank you.” For that much, at least.
Larsen was saying, “You’ll have more men than a damn hundred, or I’ll have his honor’s head on a stick.”
“Either way that goes,” Harrigan said with a smile, and shook hands with his old friend, “sounds good to me.”
With the meeting over, Harrigan stopped at a water fountain to take a pill; then he spoke to another burning-the-midnight-oil agent in the hallway for a moment, just small talk between co-workers, and was heading down the shining tile corridor of the State Department building, when Larsen suddenly called him back to his office.
“Hey!”
Harrigan walked back and stood before Larsen, who was poised at the doorway.
“I just got word from Central Intelligence,” the chief said. He looked shaken, standing there rigidly. “One of their agents in Formosa is warning of an assassination attempt.”
Harrigan’s eyes narrowed. “Target K?”
“Target K,” Larsen said.
Well, it looked like Khrushchev’s speech to the United Nations had reached the ears of Nationalist China.
“That’s just great,” Harrigan said tersely, “that’s just swell — well, hell, why don’t I round up every Oriental in the greater Los Angeles area, and call it even!”
Larsen shook his head, ashen. “I’ll see that you get that manpower.”
“You’d better,” Harrigan said. “Or there could be a new man in your chair.”
“Maybe, Jack,” Larsen said, kidding on the square. “But it sure as hell won’t be you… Anything else I can do for you?”
“Sure, Bill.”
“Name it.”
“Pray.”
The Air Force 707, bearing Khrushchev and his entourage, rolled to a smooth stop in front of the hangar, and polished metal glistened in the California sunlight. Immediately, the ground crew pushed the heavy aluminum staircase-on-wheels to its door, which after another few minutes opened slowly, with theatrical melodrama.
First down the steps were three of Harrigan’s men from the State Department Security Division; on their heels were four of Khrushchev’s personal Okhrana guards, elite uniformed members of the KGB, the Russian spy agency. Then came the premier himself, wearing a lightweight tan suit; he was smiling, waving his homburg hat, apparently in a good mood. Thank God for small favors, Harrigan thought.
Close behind him was plump, pleasant Mrs. Nina Khrushchev, attired in a simple navy dress, being helped down the steps by her twenty-four-year-old blond, blue-eyed son, Sergei. An older son might have been on Nina’s other arm, if his plane hadn’t been shot down in flames back in World War II by the Germans.
Next were Khrushchev’s two daughters, Rada and Julia, both in their early thirties, one blonde, the other brunette, fetchingly framed in the jetliner’s exit doorway, debunking any notion that Russian women were strictly shotputting babushkaed beasts at the Olympics. The two sisters were downright pretty, Harrigan thought.