“Of course, darling.”
The door slammed. Grace sat pensively listening to the sound of her son’s footsteps running down the hall. Running out of my life, too, she thought.
How much time is left? Two, three years. Then he’ll be gone. Off to his own world, his own life. Instinctively, her hand dropped to her negligee. Did she detect a first faint swelling there? Of course not. That was ridiculous, she knew. There couldn’t possibly be a concrete manifestation yet of the life she carried inside her. She took a cigarette, struck a match, then stopped with the flame inches from its destination. If she was going to go through with it, she should stop smoking, shouldn’t she? That’s what all the doctors said. With a slow, uncertain movement, she shook out the match’s flame.
Red-eyed from lack of sleep, Jack Eastman wrestled with the first assignment the President had given him for the day: how to keep the crisis enveloping the White House a secret. No head of state in the world lived as public an existence as the President of the United States.
Brezhnev could spend two weeks in the hospital and not a word would appear anywhere. The President of France could drive to a regular appointment with a girl friend and get caught only because he was maladroit enough to bang into another car on the Champs-Elysees at four in the morning. Everywhere the American President went, however, he was dogged by his corps of journalists. When they were not being briefed, they lounged around the White House press room, their sensitive antennas always alert for the one off-key chord which would indicate that something unusual was going on.
“First thing,” Eastman told the key aides he had assembled around his desk.
“I don’t want any reporters sniffing around the West Wing. If anyone in here’s scheduled to see a reporter, tell them to take him down to the mess for coffee.”
He picked up the President’s schedule for the day from his desk. It was, as always, divided into two parts, the public program published every morning in The Washington Post and his private schedule circulated only to the White House staff. The public schedule for Monday, 14 December, listed four events.
9:00 A.M. National Security Briefing
10:00 A.M. Budget Meeting
11:00 A.M.Remarks commemorating the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
5:25 P.M. Depart for lighting National Christmas Tree, Ellipse
The first item was no problem. Eastman thought for a moment about the second, the budget meeting.
“Let’s get Charlie Schultz to sit in for the President,” he suggested.
Schultz was the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. “Tell him the President wants his opinion on the effect the budget cuts will have on the economy.”
“Should we tell him what’s going on?” someone asked.
“Hell, no. Why should he know about it?” Eastman turned to the press secretary. He had decided he would have to be informed of the crisis. “What about the Declaration and the Christmas-tree lighting?” Both were public events; both would have to be covered by the White House press corps. “Can we scrub them?”
“We’ll have a hell of a lot of explaining to do if we do. Those guys out there will be all over us.”
“Suppose we give him a cold?”
“Then they’ll want to talk to Dr. McIntyre. ‘Is he taking medication?
What’s his temperatureT Jack, you just can’t fool around with the President’s public appearances without an airtight cover story. And airtight cover stories arean’t easily come by in this town.”
“The Human Rights business I can see,” Eastman answered. “If the shit hits the fan while he’s in the Oval office we can probably get him out of there in a hurry without anybody catching on. But, Jesus Christ, if something happens while he’s down there lighting that Christmas tree, we’ll never be able to rush him out of there without the whole world knowing something’s going on.”
“Still, if you want to keep this a secret you’re going to have to take a chance and let him go.” The press secretary stretched his long legs toward Eastman’s desk. “The best way to keep this a secret is to keep up the front. That’s how JFK’s people played the Missile Crisis: people went out to dinners, stuff like that, to maintain a fagade. We’ll have to do the same thing.”
“How are we going to get people in and out of here all day without the press finding out something’s going on?” Eastman asked.
“Again,” his colleague replied, “I’d say look at what the Kennedy people did. They told people to use their own cars. Double up so that they didn’t have a parade of limousines coming in. They even had Rusk and McNamara come in sitting on the floor of their cars”
Eastman couldn’t resist laughing at the thought of Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy, crammed onto the floor of his car. At least some good, he thought, would come out of all this.
“O.K.,” he said. “Do it your way. Just make damn sure it doesn’t leak.”
The headquarters of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, are on the Boulevard Mortier behind Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement, a neighborhood so drab that even on the brightest of spring days it somehow seems as depressingly gray as a Utrillo winter scene. From the street, the building that houses the SDECE looks like an old army caserne, which it in fact is, its paint peeling away like dead skin flaking off a sunburned limb.
The decrepitude ends at the front door. Inside the headquarters, gleaming banks of computer consoles place all the wizardry of the electronic age at the disposition of a service traditionally known more for the Gallic panache of its operatives than for their technical skills. Years of Congressional probes and public outcries might have sanitized the SDECE’s friendly rivals at the CIA; General Bertrand’s service could still recruit the mercenary forces required to overthrow the odd African dictator, engage the services of Corsican gunmen whose normal pursuits involved the sale of a little white powder, or set up its Kuala Lumpur operative in a whorehouse.
Such places were, after all, traditional venues for the exchange of information, and the French were far too appreciative of the foibles of the flesh to abandon them entirely in favor of devices as sterile as satellite photos.
The SDECE director, General Henri Bertrand, was seated at his desk deeply absorbed in a study of Vietnamese penetration into the Golden Triangle opium trade in Burma when his deputy came in with a thick computer printout. It contained everything the SDECE had on the sale to Libya of the reactor from which the Americans suspected Qaddafi had obtained plutonium.
Bertrand was familiar with much of the material. Security in nuclear matters had been a very delicate point in the French capital since the day in April 1979 when an Israeli hit team had blown apart the inner core of an experimental reactor destined for Iraq only weeks before it was due to be delivered to Baghdad. He glanced at it quickly and then told his deputy, “Ask Cornedeau to join me, would you?”
Cornedeau was the agency’s nuclear scientist, a bald, intense young man who had graduated from the Polytechnique, France’s great center of scientific learning, a decade before.
“Sit down, Patrick,” Bertrand ordered. Swiftly, he reviewed for him what had happened.
Patrick Cornedeau smiled and took an unlit pipe from his pocket. He was trying to give up cigarettes and it was the security blanket he employed whenever he felt the urge for nicotine rising in him.
“Well, if Qaddafi is really after plutonium, he couldn’t have picked a tougher way to get it.”
“Perhaps, cher ami, it was the only one available to him.”