“About the Capitol this morning? Holy damn! I heard all right.”
“The National Guard. Quayle’s calling out the Guard.”
“Oh, that! Just to stand around at public buildings and stuff.”
The problem with Brody, McNally told himself, was that he had no understanding of how things worked. “That’s just the start,” he told the lawyer patiently. “You talk to our friends, Tee. This Guard shit ain’t good.”
“How heavy do you want me to get?”
“Lay the wood to ’em, man. This Guard shit is really bad. Those soldiers ain’t going to spend all their time shining their shoes and strutting around in front of the public library. Once they’re here, they’re going to try to shut down the business. I can feel it.”
“You want me to go all the way if I have to?”
“All the way.”
McNally hung up and went back to the television. In a little while he went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee.
When Billy Enright came in five minutes later and helped himself to an ice cream bar from the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, Freeman was sipping coffee at the table.
Freeman waited until Billy had unwrapped his ice cream and dropped into a chair at the table. “Y’know,” he said, “I think we got us a real window of opportunity here.”
“What do you mean?”
“If the soldiers show up tomorrow or the next day, what are they gonna be doin’?”
“Looking for terrorists and assassins. Gonna be everywhere. We’ll have to cool it for a while, maybe take vacations.”
McNally waved that away. “Think about it. For a week or two all these guys are going to do is search for these Colombians and this dude who tried to off Bush and Quayle. Now is the time to solve some of our little problems so when the Guard leaves we can get back in business. That’s what I mean. We’ve got a little time here to fix things up and believe me, anything the cops get just now will go right through the cracks. The Guards ain’t cops. They’re mechanics and shoe salesmen. The priority is going to be on catching these big Colombian terror dudes. Dig?”
“Yeah,” said Billy Enright, lapping at a gob of ice cream that was threatening to run down the stick onto his fingers. “I dig where you’re coming from.”
Special Agent Freddy Murray was busy trying to coordinate the search for the assassin’s trail when he got a call from one of his wiretap experts. “Just recorded a tape I want you to hear.”
“Who?”
“Freeman McNally. Conversation with his lawyer.”
“We can’t use that.”
“I know that. But you’d better listen to it. Pretty curious.”
“Bring it up.”
Murray got back to the task at hand. The FBI lab had identified the brand of tires on the vehicle the assassin had driven in and out of the picnic area on the Potomac that had been the site of the missile launching. Murray was assigning sectors in the Washington area, sending agents to interview every retail outlet for that brand of tire. If they had no success, he would expand the areas. And he expected no success.
This was classic police work, and given enough agents and enough time, would get results. The problem was that Murray had very little of either just now. Still, regardless of how loudly the politicians screamed and the deadlines they invented, the assassin would not be caught until he was caught. Sooner or later the elected ones would figure that out. Until they did, agents like Murray would have to just keep plugging.
He took three minutes to listen to the tape twice. Freeman McNally’s voice, all right. Freddy would know that growl anywhere.
“What’s that mean?” he asked the wiretap man. “ ‘All the way’?”
“I dunno. The bit about the friends is plain enough. I want to put a tail on this T. Jefferson Brody to find out who he thinks ‘our friends’ are.”
“We don’t have anybody.”
“One or two guys.”
“No! We don’t have anybody available. Log the tape and file it and let’s get back to work.”
“You’re the boss.”
The wiretap man was no sooner out of the room than the direct line rang. “Murray.”
“Harrison Ronald. What’s happening?”
“Turn on the TV,” Murray snapped. He had no time for this.
“I don’t mean that assassin shit! I mean the grand jury indictment, you twit.”
“It’s been put on hold.”
“Remember me? The juicy little black worm that dangled on the end of your hook? For ten fucking months?”
“Maybe next week. I’ll let you know.”
“You’ll call me. Ha! I’m supposed to just sit here with my thumb up my ass until you get around to locking these people up?”
“Harrison, I—”
“Just how far down your friggin’ list am I, anyway?”
“Harrison, I know where you’re coming from. But I don’t set the priorities around here. I’ll call—”
Freddy stopped when he realized Harrison Ford had hung up on him.
Congresswoman Samantha Strader was in her early fifties and wore her hair stylishly permed. Representing a congressional district carved from the core of her state’s capital city, she held one of the safest Democratic seats in the nation and, in effect, was in Congress for life. After twenty years in the Washington vortex, Sam Strader embodied the trendy prejudices of upper-middle-class white women. She was pro-choice, anti-military, fashionably leftist, and ardently feminist. She viciously attacked the professional hypocrisy of her colleagues in Congress because she was absolutely convinced that she herself was pure of heart and free of taint. Political cartoonists found her enchanting.
This woman, who was extraordinarily sensitive to the slightest whiff of male chauvinism, also possessed the chutzpah to tell the press, “I have a uterus and a brain and I use both.” On detecting a slight, fancied or otherwise, she didn’t cast aspersions — she hurled them, lobbed them like grenades, usually when reporters were around to hear the detonations. Her victims, most of whom possessed a brain and a penis but had never seen fit to brag about either, wisely kept their mouths shut and bided their time.
Still, Sam Strader had no trouble envisioning herself, acid tongue, uterus, and all, ensconced in the Oval Office as the first woman President of the United States. She campaigned more or less continuously to try to convince others to see her the same way. Seasoned political observers with a less-biased perspective thought she had no chance of becoming President unless the Republican party, in a suicidal frenzy, nominated Jim Bakker for the job.
One of the reasons Strader’s mouth often got her into trouble was that she had little tolerance for people she considered fools, a trait she had in common with William C. Dorfman, whom she also despised. High on her list of fools who goaded her beyond endurance was Vice-President Dan Quayle, whose own particular brand of foot-in-mouth disease was of a different strain from Strader’s but, if anything, more debilitating.
This was the man who had said, “I stand by all the misstatements.” There had been plenty of those, God knows. Once, when explaining why he would not be glad-handing around Latin America just then, he told reporters with a straight face, “I don’t speak Latin.” Quayle on the strategic significance of Hawaii: “It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.” He had spoken to the Samoans straight from the heart: “Happy campers you are. Happy campers you have been. And as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.”
Strader’s very favorite Quaylism was this gem, from an address to the United Negro College Fund: “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind — or not to have a mind. How true that is.” On hearing this, Strader had sneered at the first reporter she met: “That’s the voice of experience if I ever heard it.”