«Why? Why do I lose?»
«Because I can’t help thinking that you—or someone like you—could have stopped it.»
«That’s not so.»
«Then maybe there’s nothing left. If you’re right.» Steven Trevayne looked down at his ash-black hands and rubbed them on his dungarees. «I’ve got to wash my hands… I’m sorry, Dad; I mean, I’m really sorry. I’m scared.»
The boy ran into the hallway; Trevayne could hear him descend the stairs toward the study and the terrace.
… maybe there’s nothing left.
No.
No, he couldn’t react like that. He couldn’t allow himself the indulgence others gave vent to. Even among his family; within his family.
Not now.
Now he had to make himself felt, where it counted. Before the continuity was irrevocably established.
He had to jolt them, all of them. Make them realize he was serious. They could not be allowed to forget he held—held firmly—the weapons to depose them all.
And he would use those weapons, for they did not deserve to run the country. The nation demanded more.
«… maybe there’s nothing left.»
But there was something. He would provide it.
Even if it meant using Genessee Industries. Using Genessee properly.
Properly.
Use it or destroy it once and for all.
He picked up the phone. He would stay on it until he reached Senator Mitchell Armbruster.
PART 5
54
The smoothly tarred surface of the road abruptly stopped and became dirt. At this point on the small peninsula the township’s responsibility ended and the private property began. Only now it was under the jurisdiction of the federal government as well; watched, guarded, isolated, as it had been for eighteen months now.
High Barnegat.
The Connecticut White House.
The row of five automobiles sped through the gates of the Greenwich toll station without stopping. The guards on duty saluted as the motorcade went by; a patrolman inside the first booth received a signal from a man standing outside and picked up a telephone. The normal flow of traffic could continue now. The President’s column had turned off onto the Shore Road exit, where the local police had cleared the area into the peninsula. The patrolman gave the release order to the Westchester station, waved to the man outside, who waved back, then climbed into a waiting automobile.
The 1600 Security men had dispersed throughout the property in teams of two. The Secret Service agent named Callahan had checked the beach area with his partner, and both men were walking up the steps to the terrace, their eyes professionally scanning the sloping woods as they did so.
Callahan had protected four presidents. Nearly twenty years of service; he was forty-six now. Still one of the best men 1600 had, and he knew it. No one could hold him responsible for the Darien business three years ago—that phone call from 1600 pulling him off duty at the hospital. Jesus! That’d been such a top-level fuck-up, he never did learn how it happened. How someone else had gotten the codes. He didn’t ask, either; not after he’d been taken off the hook. And he was nowhere near the White House when the assassination took place. Everyone on that detail was relieved. Strange: he’d been reassigned to Trevayne and wrote in his surveillance report that his subject had met with James Goddard a week before the killing of the President. No one paid much attention, and he never brought it up afterward. Weird that nobody else did, though.
People—acquaintances, the small circle of friends he and his wife had—kept asking him what he thought of whoever was President at the time. He always gave the same reply: sober approval bordering on reserved enthusiasm. Totally apolitical. It was the best way.
The only way; you never could tell.
But if the truth were told, Callahan didn’t like any of them very much. He had devised a kind of scale for himself in judging a president. It was the balance between the public man and the private man as he saw him. There would always be differences, he understood that, but Jesus, some of them had gone too far.
To the point where everything was an act; the scales really tipped out. Meaningless smiles at public nothings, followed by torrents of private anger; furious attempts to be something that wasn’t a person at all. An image.
Not trusting.
Worst of all, making a joke about it.
Perhaps that’s why Andrew Trevayne got the best marks; he kept the scale nearer in balance. Not that he didn’t have moments when his temper exploded over some goddamn thing or other that seemed inconsequential, but by and large the private man didn’t deny the public man as often as the other presidents had. He seemed … maybe more sure of himself; more sure he was right, and so he didn’t have to yell about it or keep convincing people.
Callahan liked the man better for that, but he still didn’t like him. Nobody who’d worked in the White House environment for any length of time could like a man who mounted such an assault for the Oval Office. A campaign that literally began within weeks after the assassination, within days after Trevayne had assumed the abandoned Senate seat from Connecticut. The sudden position papers, the cross-country tours that resulted in scores of dramatic press conferences and one television appearance after another. The man had a hunger, a driving, cold ambition that he mixed with a shyly ingratiating intelligence. A man with the answers, because he was a man of today. His supporters even coined a phrase, and it was used over and over again: «The Mark of Excellence.» A minion at 1600 couldn’t like a man like that. It was too obvious he wanted to move in.
Trevayne’s preconvention maneuvers had stunned the White House staff, still under the awesome weight of adjusting to the most terrible of power transfers, the unexpected, unwanted, unwarranted. No one was prepared, no one seemed to know how to stop the headstrong, authoritative, even charismatic Senator from Connecticut.
And at one point it occurred to Agent Callahan of 1600 Security, no one basically wanted to.
The motorcade streamed into the wide drive in front of the house; the doors of the first and third vehicles whipped open before the cars stopped, and men stood effortlessly half out of the automobiles, their arms gripping the interior frames, their feet ready to touch the pavement at the first reasonable instant.
Sam Vicarson leaned against the railing on the front steps. Sam wanted to be in evidence when Trevayne stepped out of the limousine. The President had come to expect that; expected him to be among the first of those who waited for him at any given destination. He told Sam that it gave him a sense of relief to know that there would be one person meeting him who’d give him the information he needed, not necessarily wanted.
Vicarson understood. It was one of the aspects of working in the White House that he found deplorable. No one wanted to displease the Man. If that meant burying unpleasant facts, or disguising them to fit a presidential judgment, that’s what generally happened. It wasn’t necessarily fear that provoked aides to behave this way. Often it was simply the knowledge that the Man had so damn many pressures on him that if a few could be lessened, why not?
But most of the time it was fear.
Even Sam had fallen into the trap. Both traps: the sympathy and the fear. He had shaped the précis of a trade report in such a way that upheld the President’s thinking when actually there was room for disagreement.
«If you ever do that again, Sam, you’re out!»