Burdick sat on the bench, listening in the hush of evening to the vanished voice of Robert Constable, that raucous, roguish voice that had given him a boyish charm well past middle age; the voice that, after the first few times he had had the chance to ask a reporter’s question, he had learned it was never safe to trust.
“It’s about The Four Sisters, Mr. President,” he had replied to Constable’s invitation. “I’d like to talk to you about your involvement.”
He had tried to make it seem a fair warning, a preview of what the president could expect. It was of course both more, and less, than that. More, because if half of what he had learned was true, the presidency of Robert Constable would be destroyed; less, because in terms of hard evidence, the kind you needed for a story like this, he did not have a thing.
“I’ll be glad to talk to you about anything you want, but involvement-that wouldn’t be correct. I’ve heard of them, I’m not denying that. And last year, I think it was, I gave a speech at some conference in Switzerland, and, if I’m not mistaken, they were one of the sponsors. But other than that, I don’t know how much I can tell you.”
There was a long pause, and Burdick thought the president was waiting for him to say something-anything-that would give him an idea of how much Burdick knew. The silence became strained, uncomfortable, a confession that the president was worried and, more than that, alarmed.
“Why?” he had asked finally. “Have you heard something different?”
The Four Sisters, the name alone, the fact that he knew it, had put the president in a state of something close to panic. The story was bigger, far bigger, than Burdick had thought. If he had been able to talk to him, if Robert Constable had not died, he was almost certain he could have discovered the truth. Constable would have tried to put the best face on things he could, but Constable had been scared-Burdick was certain of that. He might have tried to make a deal, trade what he knew, or some of it, for the chance to minimize his own involvement. But now Constable was dead, and, depending on what happened tomorrow, the story might be dead as well.
Quentin Burdick sat on the beachside bench, listening in the cool night air to voices from the past, the different politicians he had known, some of them decent and honorable, determined to do the right thing, but, especially in recent years, more and more of them driven only by their own ambition, willing to do or say anything to get the next thing they wanted. There were still exceptions: Charlie Finnegan, for one. The junior senator from Michigan was always willing to talk openly and honestly about what was going on, and, if there was something he could not talk about, tell you that as well. Finnegan was as well informed as anyone in Washington. When he said he had not heard of The Four Sisters and did not know what it was, Burdick knew that the story he was after involved a closely guarded secret known only to an unknown few. The president had been one of them, and what Burdick had heard in his voice had told him that none of the others who knew about it were likely to talk, even if he found out who they were. Tomorrow was going to be the last chance he had.
The sun had disappeared. The oil drilling platforms far out at sea became smaller, less obtrusive, in the purple shadowed night. When Burdick got up and started back to the motel, the hillside above the city was alive with a thousand flickering lights. He remembered that somewhere up there, on a winding street with a view that took your breath away, Bobby Hart lived with his wife when the Senate was not in session and he could get away. He had not talked to Hart yet, but he intended to. The senator had sources no one else had: his father had been with the CIA and there were still people in the agency who told him things they told no one else. If anyone could find out about The Four Sisters, Hart could. Burdick shoved his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker and, suddenly hungry, headed down the street to a quiet-looking restaurant where he could get dinner.
A little before noon the next morning, Burdick was back on the road, heading north along the coast, past Santa Barbara, out onto a long flat stretch between the ocean and the empty sun-bleached hills. The road cut inland and a hard wind knocked the car sideways, forcing Burdick, who liked to drive fast when he had the chance, to slow down. A few miles later, he turned off the highway and, resuming speed, followed a county road through the coastal range, where the only signs of life among the spreading wind-bent oaks were a few weathered barns that had stood there for half a century or more. The sense of loneliness, of mystic solitude, made Burdick feel that he was living back before the age of highways and automobiles, when life moved at a slower pace and there was more time to think. He wanted to pull off to the side of the road, get out of the car, and look around at the endless skyline and the rugged terrain, but, glancing at the dashboard clock, he knew he had to hurry or be late.
He drove through a small coastal town, and ten minutes later passed a sign to Vandenberg Air Force Base and was on his way to the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. It did not look like most prisons. There was none of the stark sense of isolation you felt in a place like Alcatraz, that barren rock in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. There were none of the high fortress walls, none of the glass-enclosed guard towers, of Attica or San Quentin. It had more the aspect of a camp, a series of flat-top single-story wooden buildings that could have been the barracks for an army or the classrooms of a school. Clumps of eucalyptus trees towered along the side of the road, and, stretching out in the distance, large well-tilled fields in which some of the prison’s food was grown. Then Burdick saw it, a large blank building with scarcely any windows, surrounded by a cage of metal fencing with double rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire on top.
Burdick signed in at the visitors’ entrance. After he was searched and passed through a metal detector, he was taken, not, as he had expected, to a small narrow room where a visitor sat on one side of a plate of thick glass and the prisoner on the other, but to a large, empty cafeteria. The man he was there to see was waiting for him at a round table next to a window that, looking out onto an inner courtyard, let in the outside light.
“Quentin Burdick of the Times!” said the prisoner with a huge grin.
He lumbered to his feet, placed one large hand on Burdick’s shoulder, and looked him straight in the eye as they shook hands. For a moment, Burdick almost forgot they were in a federal prison and not back in the committee room of the House Ways and Means Committee.
“How are you, Congressman?” he asked with an unexpected catch in his throat.
Frank Morris had been one of his favorites, colorful, profane, with an almost perfect judgment about the strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues, and an equally sharp instinct for just how far he could push them when he was reaching for the kind of compromise by which, as chairman of the committee, he could craft a budget.
“It’s maybe not quite what I had in mind for my retirement,” replied Morris, as the heavy lines around his aging eyes wrinkled deeper. “But I shouldn’t complain. The food isn’t too bad and the nights are quiet, although you should have been here last week. Vandenberg is just a mile away. Three o’clock in the morning, they put up a rocket, and not just any rocket, a moon shot. You ever been that close to a launch? The goddamn place starts to rumble, you think you’re the one going up. Amazing, how much power those things have. I wonder if they know that the guy that made sure they always had the money they needed is living here, right next store.”
Morris had represented the same New York district for nearly forty years, and if he had become a master of Washington and its ways, he had lost none of his native city shrewdness. Heavyset, with broad shoulders and the hands of a mechanic, he had the garrulous manner of a seasoned, back-slapping politician. But even when he was regaling a small crowd of whiskey drinking cronies with some deal-making story, there was always something distant, a little held back, about the way he looked at you. Burdick had noticed it early on, one of the first times he had talked to the chairman in his spacious and ornate committee office, the way that whatever Morris was saying, he was always thinking something else; watching you, sizing you up, putting you in a category that would help him decide how far he could go, whether he could trust you, and, if he could, what use you could be to him.