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The following morning, the phone rang in Keith's room, and he answered it.

Charlie Adair said, "I'm downstairs. Whenever you're ready."

Keith resisted several sarcastic replies. At some point in the middle of the night, he'd come to agree that none of this was Charlie's fault. He said, "Five minutes."

Keith straightened his tie in the mirror and brushed the jacket of his dark blue Italian silk suit. If he didn't count putting on a sport jacket and tie for Sunday service at St. James, this was the first suit he'd had on since his retirement party almost two months before, and he didn't like the way he looked in it. "You look like a city slicker, Landry." He left the room and took the elevator down.

Charlie greeted him with some wariness, trying to judge his mood, but Keith said to him, "You're right, it's not your fault."

"Good insight. Let's go."

"The ticket."

"Oh, right..." Charlie found the airline ticket in his jacket and gave it to Keith. "I booked you to Columbus on USAir, nonstop. There's a rental car reservation slip, too."

Keith examined the ticket and saw he was leaving National Airport at 7:35 and arriving at 9:05. He asked, "Couldn't you get something earlier?"

"That was the next available nonstop in first class."

"I don't care about nonstop or first class. Anything earlier to Toledo or Dayton?"

"Dayton? Where's that? Look, the White House travel office booked it. I don't think there are a lot of flights going out there, buddy. Just be happy it's Columbus, Ohio, and not Columbus, Georgia. See the travel office later if you want."

"This is okay. Let's roll."

They walked out the front door to where a Lincoln sat waiting. It was raining, and the driver walked them to the car, holding an umbrella over their heads.

In the backseat, Charlie said, "I spoke to the secretary's aide, Ted Stansfield, last night, and he was delighted you could come."

"What were my choices?"

"That's the way they talk. Mock humbleness. The secretary of defense will say to you, 'Keith, I'm delighted you could come. I hope we haven't inconvenienced you."

"Is that when I tell him to fuck off?"

"I don't think so. He's prepared to welcome you back on the team, so if he says, 'Good to have you back,' you say, 'Good to be back in Washington,' like you didn't quite catch his meaning. Then you go shake hands with the president. If they've briefed him that you're wavering, he'll say, 'Colonel, I hope you give this offer your full consideration and that you'll accept it.' Then you say, 'I will, sir,' meaning you'll give it your full consideration and not meaning you'll accept it. Get it?"

"Charlie, I was a master of the equivocal phrase, an expert at the meaningless sentence, a scholar of the ambiguous word. That's why I don't want to come back. I'm relearning plain English."

"That's very disturbing."

Keith added, "I assume you didn't tell Ted Stansfield that I didn't want the job."

"I didn't, because I wanted you to have some time to think about it. Have you thought about it?"

"I have."

"And?"

"Well, I took a taxi around town last night and did some deep thinking. I went to the Lincoln Memorial and stood in front of the statue of the great man, and I asked him, 'Abe, what should I do?' And Mr. Lincoln spoke to me, Charlie. He said, 'Keith, Washington sucks.' "

"What did you expect him to say? He got shot here. You should have asked someone else."

"Like who? The fifty thousand guys whose names are on the black wall? You don't want to hear what they have to say about Washington."

"No, I don't."

The government car went around Lafayette Square and approached the West Wing entrance from Seventeenth Street.

Charlie said, "Look, Keith, it's your decision. I did what I was asked to do. I got you here."

"They never asked you to sell the job to me?"

"No, they didn't. They thought you'd jump at it. But I knew differently."

"You were right."

"That's why this meeting could be a little awkward for me."

"I'll cover your ass."

"Thanks."

Keith glanced out the window. Directly across from the West Wing on Seventeenth Street was his former workplace, the Old Executive Office Building, a hundred-year-old pile of granite and cast iron, built in a style called French Second Empire. People either loved it or hated it. Keith was ambivalent. The recently restored interior was palatial enough to be embarrassing, especially if you had an upper-floor window that looked south toward the black ghettos.

The building was about four times the size of the White House itself and once housed the War Department, the State Department, and the Department of the Navy with room to spare. Now it couldn't even hold all the people who made up the White House staff and was limited to senior-level White House offices such as the National Security Council. The NSC was more or less an advisory group to the president, a clearinghouse for intelligence product that was produced by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, for whom Keith once worked, the National Security Agency, which dealt mostly with cryptography, State Department Intelligence, and the other spook outfits that abounded in and around the District of Columbia.

People who served on the actual Council included the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and such other highly placed people as the president might appoint. It was indeed an elite group, and in the days of the Cold War, the NSC was far more important than the Cabinet, though no one was supposed to know that.

Some years ago, Keith had been invited to leave his job with the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon and accept a staff position with the NSC, located in the Old Executive Office Building. There was less physical danger associated with the job compared to what he'd been doing around the world for the DIA, and the NSC office was closer to his Georgetown apartment, and he'd thought he might enjoy working with civilians. As it turned out, he missed the danger, and though it was a good career move to be working so close to the White House, it turned out to be not such a good move in other ways.

Among the people he'd met at the NSC was a Colonel Oliver North. Keith hadn't known the man well, but after Colonel North became famous, Colonel Landry became troubled. North, by all accounts, had been a good soldier, but working for the civilians had apparently been like working in a contagion ward for the young colonel, and he'd caught something bad. Keith could see that happening to himself, so he always wore a mask and washed his hands on the job.

And now they wanted him back, not in the old building, but apparently in the White House itself.

They drove up to the guard post on Seventeenth Street, and after a security check, they were waved through. The driver pulled up to the entrance, and they got out.

There were more security men at the entrance, but no check, just someone who opened the door for them. Inside the small lobby, there was a man at a sign-in desk who verified their names against an appointment list. Keith signed in, and under the heading "Organization and Title," he wrote, "Civilian, retired." The time was 11:05.

Keith had been in the West Wing of the White House a number or times, usually arriving via the little-known underground passage that ran beneath Seventeenth Street into the White House basement where the Situation Room was located, along with a few offices of the National Security Council. He'd been on the ground floor a few times whenever he'd had occasion to see the national security advisor in a previous administration.

After Charlie signed in, the appointments man at the desk said to them, "Gentlemen, if you'll take the elevator down, you can wait in the lounge. Someone will call you."

They took the small elevator to the basement, and another man met them and walked them to the lounge.

The lounge, a euphemism for the basement waiting room, was newly appointed with clubby-type furnishings and was pleasant enough. There was a television tuned to CNN, and a long buffet table against the wall where you could help yourself to anything from coffee to donuts, or fruit and yogurt for the health-conscious, or most any snack you wished, except alcohol and cyanide.

There were a dozen or so other people in the room, men and women, none of whom Keith recognized, but all of them throwing furtive glances toward the newcomers, trying to place their faces in the pantheon of Washington's gods and goddesses of the moment.

Charlie and Keith found two chairs at a coffee table and sat. Charlie asked, "You want coffee or anything?"

"No, thanks, boss."

Charlie smiled in acknowledgment of the changed situation. He said, "Hey, if you take this job, your immediate superior will be the president's national security advisor, not me."

"I thought I was going to be the national security advisor."

"No, you'll work directly for him."

"When can I be president?"

"Keith, I'm a little anxious about this meeting. Can you cut the shit?"

"Sure. Do some push-ups. Works for me."

"I'd like a cigarette, but I can't smoke here. What's this place coming to?"

Keith glanced around the room. Despite its nice decor, it was still a windowless basement room, and the atmosphere was the atmosphere of waiting rooms all over the world. There was that electric hum originating somewhere in the bowels of this building that forced in cool air or hot air, depending on the season, and after being away from that big-city, big-building hum for two months, he noticed it and didn't like it.

More to the point, there was a heightened sense of the surreal in this room, a feeling of almost impending doom, as if each man and woman in the place were awaiting his or her fate in one of those less pleasant subterranean rooms in countries where they shot you if your name was on that day's list.

Keith had had the opportunity to visit the prison basement of the Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, which had become sort of a tourist attraction for selected former enemies of the defunct Soviet state, such as himself. The cells were gone, replaced by clerical space, but Keith had imagined being in the old cells, hearing the screams of tortured men and women, the names being called out, the echoing gunshot at the end of the corridor, where his guide explained how prisoners were shot in the back of the head as they walked.

The waiting room of the West Wing of the White House was quite different, of course — yogurt and world news on TV — but the sense of waiting for the government to call your name was the same. It didn't matter what they were calling your name for, it only mattered that you had to wait for it to be called.

Keith decided then and there that he didn't ever again want to wait for the government to call his name. They'd called his name twenty-five years before, and he'd answered the call. They called his name yesterday, and he answered the call. They'd call his name today, but today was different: Today was the last time he'd answer.

The door opened, and an appointments man said, "Colonel Landry, Mr. Adair, will you come with me, please?"

They stood and followed the young man to the elevator. They rode up to the lobby and followed the man to the Cabinet Room at the east end of the wing. The man knocked on the door, then opened it, and they were shown in by the appointments man. Inside, another man, whom Keith recognized as Ted Stansfield, came forward to greet them. Charlie said, "Ted, you remember Keith."

"Indeed I do." They shook hands, and Stansfield said, "Delighted you could come."

"Delighted to be invited."

"Come, have a seat." He indicated two chairs at the long dark wooden table where the Cabinet met.

The Cabinet Room, Keith knew, was used for all types of meetings, large or small, when the Cabinet was not meeting. In fact, it was a tightly scheduled conference room, used by various people to impress and/or to intimidate. Colonel Keith Landry might have once been impressed, but never intimidated. Now he was slightly bored and restless.

He looked at Stansfield, a man of about forty, polished and smooth, a man who was truly delighted, mostly with himself.

Stansfield informed them, "The secretary is running a bit late." He said to Keith, "Your old boss, General Watkins, will also join us, as will Colonel Chandler, who is the current aide to the national security advisor."

"And will Mr. Yadzinski also join us?" Keith inquired, using the name of the national security advisor, though in official Washington, the very highest people were referred to by their title, such as "the president," "the secretary of defense," and so forth, as if these people had been transformed from mortals into deities, as in, "The God of War will join us shortly." Then again, the very lowest-ranking people were also referred to by their title, such as "the janitor."

Ted Stansfield replied, "The security advisor will try to join us if he can."

"They're all running a bit late?"

"Well, yes, I suppose they are. Can I get you anything?"

"No, thank you."

The three men waited, making small talk as was customary so as not to touch upon anything that would require someone saying something like, "Before you arrived, sir, Mr. Landry and I discussed that, and he informed me," and so forth.

Stansfield inquired, "So, did you enjoy your brief retirement?" Rather than correct the man's use of the past tense and queer the whole charade for Charlie, Keith replied, "I did."

"How were you spending your time?"

"I went back to my hometown and looked up my old girlfriend."

Stansfield smiled. "Did you? And did you rekindle the old flame?"

"Yes, we did."

"Well, that's very interesting, Keith. Do you have any plans?"

"We do. In fact, I'm bringing her to Washington tomorrow."

"How delightful. Why didn't you bring her with you today?"

"Her husband won't be out of town until tomorrow."

Keith felt Charlie kick his foot at the same time Stansfield's idiotic smile dropped. Keith informed Ted Stansfield, "Charlie said it wouldn't be a problem."