“Lucky,” I said.
Wyatt grumbled, “With a little more luck like that we can all go down the chute.”
I must have been staring at the President, because he gave me his slow, personal smile and said, “It’s okay, Meric. It’s really me.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… I, hell, I’m scared of this.”
“That’s a healthy reaction.”
“But don’t you think you ought to be digging into this harder? Deeper? I mean, McMurtrie’s a bodyguard, not a detective. You’ve got the entire apparatus of the Government at your disposal…”
He stopped me with an upraised hand. “Meric… Meric. Think a minute. I’m not Premier Blagdanoff, much less Chairman Chao. It’s not my Government. I don’t own it, and I can’t use it to suit my whim.”
“But the intelligence people… the Justice Department…”
“Might be in on it,” Wyatt snapped.
“ What!”
“How do we know who we can trust? Somebody’s doing this… somebody damned close to the White House. Maybe somebody in the White House.” The blue vein in the old man’s forehead throbbed angrily.
Halliday fixed him with a gaze. “Robert, this is no time to go paranoid.”
“I know, I know…”
“That’s another reason why this investigation must be kept as small and quiet as possible. We could unleash a witch hunt that would make the McCarthy craze in the fifties and Alonzo’s purge of the eighties look like kindergarten games. We’ve got to keep things under control.” And his hands pressed flat on the desk top, a gesture I had seen him use in moments of stress a hundred times.
“But McMurtrie can’t handle it,” I insisted. “He isn’t the right man for the job.”
It was my turn to get stared at. “He’s the man I assigned to handle it,” the President said. His voice was calm, quiet, and iron hard.
I guess I still didn’t look convinced, because he went on, “He’ll have access to anyone in the Executive branch of Government that he wants. He can pick out the best team of investigators that the nation can produce. But it will be a small team, working directly for McMurtrie, on leave from the regular departments.”
“And reporting to me,” Wyatt said, “instead of some agency director who’s worried more about his bureaucracy than the life of the President.”
I said nothing. Their minds were made up.
“There are three possibilities,” the President said, hunching forward in his chair and ticking off the points on his fingers.
“First, it might be a foreign plan to get rid of me and install an agent in my place. That sounds pretty wild to me. It just isn’t the way governments think or work.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t be real,” Wyatt said.
Halliday shrugged lightly and went on. “Second, it might be a group inside the Government here, say, the military, who want to get me out and their own man in.”
I said, “The Joint Chiefs don’t think too much of the way you’re handling this Kuwait trouble.”
“I realize that. But it’s hard to think that nearly two and a quarter centuries of civilian control over the military is being threatened by the Joint Chiefs.”
“You really think they’re that loyal to you?”
“To the nation, yes. Unqualifiedly. And I haven’t really frightened them to the point where they think they’ve got to take over the Presidency to save the nation.”
Wyatt shook his head. “It only takes a couple of paranoids.”
“No,” the President insisted. “It takes a lot more than that to make exact duplicates and get them as close to me as the two dead bodies have gotten.”
“What killed them?” I wondered aloud. The President ignored that and went on to his third point. “Finally, there’s the chance that some interest group within the United States, but not inside the Government, is behind it. Same reason: they want to get their own man into the White House.”
“Who could it be?” I asked.
Wyatt shouted, “Anybody! This Administration’s been straightening out a lot of overdue problems. And every time we try to help one group, at least one other group gets sore because they think we’re hurting them. I could give you a list as long as this room: every goddamned pressure group from the National Association of Cattlemen to the Boy Scouts.”
“It’s not that bad,” the President murmured.
“No? The auto manufacturers are sore because we’ve pushed them into upping pensions for the workers retired early by automation. The unions are sore because we’re backing automation and robots are taking more new jobs than people. The farmers. The truckers. Those damned fat cats on Wall Street. The blacks in the cities who’re madder’n hell at being forced to work for their welfare checks…” He ran out of breath.
“You can’t change society without frightening people,” the President said. “Even those who yell the loudest for change are frightened when it comes.”
“And what they’re scared of, they hate.”
“And what they hate,” I finished, “they strike out against.”
“Exactly,” said the President.
“So you think it’s the third alternative? Some power group outside the Government?”
“Yes. That’s my hunch.”
“Some damned well-heeled pressure group,” Wyatt said. “This is no gaggle of ghetto kids making bombs in their lofts. It’s the big leaguers.”
“But…” Something about that conclusion just didn’t hit me right. “But they have all sorts of other avenues to fight you. They’ve got Congressmen and Senators in their pockets. Money. Influence. The media. Why this?”
Halliday leaned back in his chair again. “I’ve been asking myself the same question, Meric. And there’s only one possible answer. Some group in the United States has decided that the democratic process doesn’t work the way they want it to. They’re not content to let the people decide. They want to take over the Government. Of themselves. By themselves. For themselves.”
For a few long moments I sat there saying nothing. The room was absolutely quiet. Sunlight streamed in through the ceiling-high windows. Outside, the rose garden was a picture of tranquility. I imagined I could hear bees droning as they went from bloom to bloom.
Then I looked at Halliday. The President was watching me, appraising my reactions.
“It scares the shit out of me,” I said.
“I know. Me too.”
“You really ought to be doing more than sending McMurtrie out to round up a team of investigators. A lot more.”
“Like what?” His Holiness snapped. “Call out the Marines? Declare a national emergency?”
It was so damned frustrating. “If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“I don’t think there’s much more we can do, at this stage,” the President said softly.
“You can dig into those goddamned pressure groups,” Wyatt demanded.“ Use the FBI. And Internal Revenue. Stir up their nests! Force them into a wrong move. Take the initiative.”
He cocked his head slightly to one side, the way he always does when he wants to give the impression he’s seriously considering something. But almost immediately he answered, “And we’ll be taking another step toward a police state. Those pressure groups are people, Robert. Most of them haven’t done anything at all that’s even vaguely illegal. We can’t go bursting in on them like a gang of storm troopers. That would do more harm than good.”
Wyatt groused and pitched back and forth impatiently on the rocker. “All right. Most of those people are good citizens, although I’ll bet you can find a lot of dirt under their fingernails. But some of them are trying to kill you.”