"No, I don't."
The government car went around Lafayette Square and approached the West Wing entrance from Seventeenth Street.
Charlie said, "Look, Keith, it's your decision. I did what I was asked to do. I got you here."
"They never asked you to sell the job to me?"
"No, they didn't. They thought you'd jump at it. But I knew differently."
"You were right."
"That's why this meeting could be a little awkward for me."
"I'll cover your ass."
"Thanks."
Keith glanced out the window. Directly across from the West Wing on Seventeenth Street was his former workplace, the Old Executive Office Building, a hundred-year-old pile of granite and cast iron, built in a style called French Second Empire. People either loved it or hated it. Keith was ambivalent. The recently restored interior was palatial enough to be embarrassing, especially if you had an upper-floor window that looked south toward the black ghettos.
The building was about four times the size of the White House itself and once housed the War Department, the State Department, and the Department of the Navy with room to spare. Now it couldn't even hold all the people who made up the White House staff and was limited to senior-level White House offices such as the National Security Council. The NSC was more or less an advisory group to the president, a clearinghouse for intelligence product that was produced by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, for whom Keith once worked, the National Security Agency, which dealt mostly with cryptography, State Department Intelligence, and the other spook outfits that abounded in and around the District of Columbia.
People who served on the actual Council included the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and such other highly placed people as the president might appoint. It was indeed an elite group, and in the days of the Cold War, the NSC was far more important than the Cabinet, though no one was supposed to know that.
Some years ago, Keith had been invited to leave his job with the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon and accept a staff position with the NSC, located in the Old Executive Office Building. There was less physical danger associated with the job compared to what he'd been doing around the world for the DIA, and the NSC office was closer to his Georgetown apartment, and he'd thought he might enjoy working with civilians. As it turned out, he missed the danger, and though it was a good career move to be working so close to the White House, it turned out to be not such a good move in other ways.
Among the people he'd met at the NSC was a Colonel Oliver North. Keith hadn't known the man well, but after Colonel North became famous, Colonel Landry became troubled. North, by all accounts, had been a good soldier, but working for the civilians had apparently been like working in a contagion ward for the young colonel, and he'd caught something bad. Keith could see that happening to himself, so he always wore a mask and washed his hands on the job.
And now they wanted him back, not in the old building, but apparently in the White House itself.
They drove up to the guard post on Seventeenth Street, and after a security check, they were waved through. The driver pulled up to the entrance, and they got out.
There were more security men at the entrance, but no check, just someone who opened the door for them. Inside the small lobby, there was a man at a sign-in desk who verified their names against an appointment list. Keith signed in, and under the heading "Organization and Title," he wrote, "Civilian, retired." The time was 11:05.
Keith had been in the West Wing of the White House a number or times, usually arriving via the little-known underground passage that ran beneath Seventeenth Street into the White House basement where the Situation Room was located, along with a few offices of the National Security Council. He'd been on the ground floor a few times whenever he'd had occasion to see the national security advisor in a previous administration.
After Charlie signed in, the appointments man at the desk said to them, "Gentlemen, if you'll take the elevator down, you can wait in the lounge. Someone will call you."
They took the small elevator to the basement, and another man met them and walked them to the lounge.
The lounge, a euphemism for the basement waiting room, was newly appointed with clubby-type furnishings and was pleasant enough. There was a television tuned to CNN, and a long buffet table against the wall where you could help yourself to anything from coffee to donuts, or fruit and yogurt for the health-conscious, or most any snack you wished, except alcohol and cyanide.
There were a dozen or so other people in the room, men and women, none of whom Keith recognized, but all of them throwing furtive glances toward the newcomers, trying to place their faces in the pantheon of Washington's gods and goddesses of the moment.
Charlie and Keith found two chairs at a coffee table and sat. Charlie asked, "You want coffee or anything?"
"No, thanks, boss."
Charlie smiled in acknowledgment of the changed situation. He said, "Hey, if you take this job, your immediate superior will be the president's national security advisor, not me."
"I thought I was going to be the national security advisor."
"No, you'll work directly for him."
"When can I be president?"
"Keith, I'm a little anxious about this meeting. Can you cut the shit?"
"Sure. Do some push-ups. Works for me."
"I'd like a cigarette, but I can't smoke here. What's this place coming to?"
Keith glanced around the room. Despite its nice decor, it was still a windowless basement room, and the atmosphere was the atmosphere of waiting rooms all over the world. There was that electric hum originating somewhere in the bowels of this building that forced in cool air or hot air, depending on the season, and after being away from that big-city, big-building hum for two months, he noticed it and didn't like it.
More to the point, there was a heightened sense of the surreal in this room, a feeling of almost impending doom, as if each man and woman in the place were awaiting his or her fate in one of those less pleasant subterranean rooms in countries where they shot you if your name was on that day's list.
Keith had had the opportunity to visit the prison basement of the Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, which had become sort of a tourist attraction for selected former enemies of the defunct Soviet state, such as himself. The cells were gone, replaced by clerical space, but Keith had imagined being in the old cells, hearing the screams of tortured men and women, the names being called out, the echoing gunshot at the end of the corridor, where his guide explained how prisoners were shot in the back of the head as they walked.
The waiting room of the West Wing of the White House was quite different, of course — yogurt and world news on TV — but the sense of waiting for the government to call your name was the same. It didn't matter what they were calling your name for, it only mattered that you had to wait for it to be called.
Keith decided then and there that he didn't ever again want to wait for the government to call his name. They'd called his name twenty-five years before, and he'd answered the call. They called his name yesterday, and he answered the call. They'd call his name today, but today was different: Today was the last time he'd answer.
The door opened, and an appointments man said, "Colonel Landry, Mr. Adair, will you come with me, please?"
They stood and followed the young man to the elevator. They rode up to the lobby and followed the man to the Cabinet Room at the east end of the wing. The man knocked on the door, then opened it, and they were shown in by the appointments man. Inside, another man, whom Keith recognized as Ted Stansfield, came forward to greet them. Charlie said, "Ted, you remember Keith."