“What if he decides that you might have been in it with the others and it just got fucked up?”
“There’s that,” Harrison Ronald said sourly. “But you didn’t have to say it, man.”
“There’s no telling,” Hooper insisted. “It could go down like that.”
“If it does, it’s been nice knowing you.”
“What about a wire? You could wear a wire. We could wait just a block away.”
“You gotta be shitting me!”
Hooper sat back down and watched Ford go down the steps and turn east to go around the front of the Memorial. It was too late for the subway so he had some walking to do. Maybe he would call Freeman from someplace.
Hooper felt cold. The steps were cold and the air was cold and he was cold. He pulled his coat tightly around him and sat looking at the lights of Arlington.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELEVEN DEAD IN DRUG CHASE, the morning headline screamed.
In the backseat of his limo on the way to his office, White House chief of staff William C. Dorfman read the story with a growing sense of horror. Six passengers on a bus had been killed and five injured — three critically — at ten-eighteen p.m. last night when a 1988 Pontiac Trans-Am slammed into a busload of Japanese museum directors and their families on the street near the National Collection of Fine Arts. The Japanese had just attended a reception at the museum and were returning to their hotel when the Pontiac smashed into the side of the bus. Witnesses estimated the car was traveling at seventy miles per hour just prior to impact. The two men in the automobile had died instantly. Two Uzi submachine guns were found in the wreckage.
A husband and wife from Silver Spring died five or six minutes earlier when the same vehicle, chasing an older four-door sedan, precipitated a head-on collision at an intersection on Bladensburg Road. The driver of a large truck belonging to a wholesale grocer had swerved to avoid the Pontiac and had struck the car driven by the Maryland couple.
Finally, if all that weren’t enough, the body of a black man in his midtwenties had been found in a bullet-riddled Chrysler abandoned on H Street, three blocks from the White House. Police believed this to be the car the Pontiac had chased. Ten pounds of cocaine and crack had been recovered from the car, which had also contained an Uzi submachine gun.
The story contained accounts by three or four witnesses who told of the passenger in the Pontiac blazing away with an automatic weapon at the Chrysler as it tore down Bladensburg Road and Maryland Avenue at speeds of up to ninety miles per hour. Eight vehicles had been reported with bullet damage and police expected to learn of more.
Two photos accompanied the story. One was of the Chrysler shot full of holes and the other was of a Japanese woman in a kimono drenched with blood being assisted toward an ambulance.
Before he finished the story, Dorfman snapped on the limo’s small television. The morning show on the channel that came up was running footage of the wrecked bus with the nearly unrecognizable remains of the Pontiac buried in its side. Shots of ambulance attendants leading away crying, bleeding victims followed.
Oh, my God! Why did that woman have to be wearing a kimono?
As if the savings-and-loan insider fraud debacle and the crises in the Baltic republics and Cuba weren’t enough! And to make life at the top truly perfect, George Bush had a press conference scheduled for this afternoon. God! The reporters would be in a feeding frenzy.
Dorfman turned down the sound on the television and dialed the car telephone.
“Why wasn’t I informed of this bus incident last night?” he roared at the hapless aide who answered. He ignored the aide’s spluttering. He knew the answer. Procedure dictated that the chief of staff be informed immediately of national security crises and international incidents, and a car-bus wreck had not fit neatly into either category. Still, he had to do something to blow off steam and the aide was an inviting target. The little wart never went beyond his instructions, never showed an ounce of initiative.
I’m going to have to get out of this fucking business before I have a heart attack, Dorfman told himself. I’m thirty pounds overweight and take those damn blood pressure pills and this shit is going to kill me. Sooner rather than later.
When he charged into his office, an aide started talking before Dorfman could open his mouth. “The Japanese ambassador wants an audience with the President. This morning.”
“Get the Mouth in here.” That was the White House press secretary. “And where’s that memo Gid Cohen sent over here last week? The one that lists all the antidrug initiatives he recommends?”
Thirty seconds later the memo from Cohen was on his desk. Let’s see, the AG wants to change the currency to make hoards worthless — we can do that. It’ll piss off the bankers and change-machine manufacturers and little ol’ ladies with mattresses full of the stuff, but … He wants special courts and more federal judges and prosecutors to handle drug cases: okay, bite the bullet and do it. He wants to fund a nationwide drug rehab program: we’ll need hard dollar info on that. He wants to fold the DEA in with the FBI and make one superagency. Christ, that will drive the Democrats bonkers.
A national ID card? Dorfman wrote no and underlined it. More prisons, mandatory sentencing for drug crimes, changes in the rules of criminal procedure, a revision of the bail laws, an increased role for the military in interdicting smuggling …
Dorfman kept reading, marking yes, no, and maybe. When he had originally received this memo he glanced at it and discarded it as yet another example of Cohen’s lack of sensitivity to political reality. Well, he told himself now, reality was changing fast.
When the press secretary came in, Dorfman didn’t bother to look up. “What’re you going to say about the bus deal?”
“That the President will have a statement at his news conference. The government offers its condolences on behalf of the American people to the citizens of Japan who lost relatives last night. A quote from the President that says this accident was a tragedy.”
“Let me see the quote.” Dorfman scanned the paper, then passed it back. “Okay. What is the President going to say at the news conference?”
“I’ve got two speechwriters working on it. Have something for you in about an hour.”
“Go. Do it.”
Two minutes later, with Cohen’s memo in hand, William C. Dorfman headed for the Oval Office to see the President.
The secretary in his outer office called after him: “The attorney general’s on the phone. He wants to come over and see the President. He has the director of the FBI with him.”
“Okay.”
Dorfman and Bush had framed a strategy to respond to the public relations crisis posed by the death of six Japanese VIPs and were fleshing it out when the attorney general and the director of the FBI were shown into the Oval Office fifteen minutes later.
“What do you have on this bus thing?” President Bush asked the FBI director.
“For public consumption, we’re working on it, following every lead. Doing autopsies on the people in the cars. When we know who they are, we’ll work backward. For you only, one of our undercover agents was driving the car being chased. He was delivering ten pounds of coke and crack for Freeman McNally’s drug syndicate when the people who were supposed to be guarding the shipment tried to rip him off. Those were the three men who died, two in the Pontiac and one in the Chrysler.”
Dorfman couldn’t believe his ears. He goggled. “Say again. The part about the undercover agent.”
“Our man was driving the Chrysler.”
“FBI?”