The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America (23 page)

Major Connor Fitzpatrick was a short, stocky man with a round, swarthy face, thick black hair, and shrewd eyes. He peered about suspiciously as he entered the downstairs bar of E. J. O’Reilly’s Alley Pub and walked toward the rear. At first he didn’t see Colonel Baker, or perhaps didn’t recognize him in civilian clothes, so he strode up to the bar and ordered a draft beer.

Baker stayed quietly in his shadowed corner, nursing his scotch and water, and took this opportunity to observe Fitzpatrick, who had leaned back against the bar and was facing the door, obviously under the impression that the colonel hadn’t yet arrived.

On the surface, Connor Fitzpatrick was a calm, self-possessed man with the restrained air of command that the Army looks for—and so seldom finds—in its officers. Colonel Baker, who had spent years training himself to read below the surface, felt that a man revealed himself most clearly when he thought himself unobserved. So for five minutes he sat and watched Major Connor Fitzpatrick, commanding officer of the 404th Military Police Battalion, as he fidgeted, adjusted his tie, checked his watch, and worked at suppressing a growing impatience and irritation.

Major Fitzpatrick, Baker was pleased to observe, handled growing impatience well. One of the traits necessary to a good officer, or a good conspirator, is the ability to wait.

Just as Colonel Baker was beginning to think about attracting Major Fitzpatrick’s attention in some unobtrusive manner, the major spotted Baker at his corner table. For a second he wasn’t sure it was Baker. Then a look of annoyance passed over his face. He casually sat down.

“Glad you could make it,” Colonel Baker said. “Good to see you.”

“I could have made it a few minutes earlier,” Fitzpatrick pointed out, “if I’d known you were back here.”

Baker shrugged. “It gave me a chance to see whether anyone followed you in here,” he said.

The thought seemed to startle Major Fitzpatrick.

“People follow people these days,” Baker added. “It’s in the air.”

Fitzpatrick looked around. The bar had a few other patrons, but none close enough to catch the conversation, and none who seemed to be paying the least bit of attention to the corner table. “About what we were discussing the last time we met—I’d like you to be more specific.”

“Specific?”

“About my part, I mean. Just exactly what do you want me to do, and what will it accomplish?” He finished his beer and signaled the bartender for another one. “I’m the commander of a battalion of MPs. Three companies of men armed with sidearms. An armory full of carbines, except for a few M-1 rifles with their stocks painted white for parades. This isn’t exactly my idea of the invincible strike force in the coming revolution.”

Colonel Baker leaned forward, his arms on the table, and stared off somewhere to Fitzpatrick’s right, in the general direction of the front door. “You can be of great assistance,” he said in an intense, low voice, “take my word for that. But before I get into it in any greater detail, I’d like to know—we’d like to know—how you feel about the project.”

Fitzpatrick leaned back. “When asked by the judge whether he advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or violence,” he said in a conversational tone, “the little man admitted that he rather preferred force, if it was all the same to the judge.” He paused, brooding into an empty glass of beer, and appeared to be slightly startled when the waitress suddenly appeared and replaced it with a full one.

“I’m a career officer in the United States Army,” Fitzpatrick continued. “It’s all I ever wanted to be, and I’m satisfied with it. For the last eight years I was in Counterintelligence. It’s not a great, glamorous job—you know that—but I enjoyed the work and I was good at it. Very good. I speak eight languages. I knew more about the Soviet intelligence networks in Indochina than they did.”

Fitzpatrick made an indecipherable gesture involving both hands. “And here I am,” he said. “A spit-and-polish major in charge of a spit-and-polish MP battalion right in the middle of goddamn Washington goddamn D. of C. And all because I wrote a position paper—my job, you see, writing position papers—that said we ought to zig when the politicos really wanted to zag. So, as you might guess, we zagged and got our asses handed to us. This did not please the President. So I got pegged for disloyalty, relieved of my job, and shipped back to the States.”

“I see,” said Baker, who had heard the story before from another source.

“It’s not that I’m pissed about losing my job,” Fitzpatrick said, “although I am. I’m frightened of a man with ultimate power who fires anyone around him who tells him he’s wrong. By now I’m sure there isn’t anyone who works within a square mile of the White House who’s prepared to disagree with the President. I think this fellow should be stopped. But I’m not going to stand up there with you and try to stop him unless I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’d expect from me and my three companies of men in white gloves. If you have us scheduled to assault the Executive Office Building, or neutralize the Pentagon, we may have nothing further to discuss.”

“Can you control your men?” Baker asked.

“If I can control my officers,” Fitzpatrick said, “I can control my men. And I can handle the officers.”

Colonel Baker leaned forward. “If you had to create a traffic jam—a real monster of a traffic jam—do you think you could do it?”

“I haven’t been at this job for so very long, but some of my sergeants directed the Normandy landing—according to them. We’re trained to clear up traffic jams, of course, but if they can clear it up, I’m sure they can fuck it up.

“You might want to practice that a bit,” Colonel Baker said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I feel an unwilled speeding up of my pulse,” Major Fitzpatrick said. “We do live in exciting times.”

Vandermeer flew the helicopter himself. He had spent two hours an afternoon, three afternoons a week, for the past few months recapturing the necessary skills, and he was as proud as Hermann Goering at the stick of an ME-109. Ober and St. Yves were his passengers. St. Yves seemed to be enjoying himself, but Charlie Ober would clearly rather have been almost anywhere else. He sat rigidly in the fold-out back seat with his hands on his lap and refused to look anywhere but straight ahead.

“There it is, I think,” St. Yves said, pointing ahead of them and to the right. They were flying over low hills covered by a thin forest of evergreens. Yesterday’s mid-January snowfall had blanketed everything below, creating the illusion of picture-postcard clarity, but making it hard to pick out any detail.

Vandermeer expertly sideslipped the helicopter over to the right, a maneuver that made Ober stare even more rigidly straight ahead. “You’re right,” he said, “that’s the highway. Good. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of miles now. We wouldn’t want Colonel Hanes to get impatient.”

A few miles ahead of them Colonel Jonathan “Johnny-on-the Spot” Hanes, commanding officer of the Fifth Army Brigade, stood on top of a snow-covered hill in Fort Meade’s backwoods bivouac area and surveyed the surrounding neat rows and files of pup tents with satisfaction. Three days before, Colonel Hanes and his outfit, one of three “quick-response” brigades stationed on the East Coast, had been snug in their home barracks, in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The men were just buckling down to their rigorous training schedule after holiday leave. Then, two hours after receiving their movement orders, they were in their vehicles and rolling. And now the whole brigade—men, gear, food, ammunition, jeeps, trucks, APCs, artillery, and tanks—were on alert in Fort Meade, only seventeen miles north of Washington.

After satisfying himself as to the geometric precision of the matrix of pup tents, Colonel Hanes peered around, searching the sky for the first sign of Vandermeer’s helicopter. He checked his watch and then peered around again, his impatience growing with every ten seconds. It was already almost a full two minutes past the fourteen hundred hours that Vandermeer and his party were scheduled to land.

With still no sign of the executive helicopter. Colonel Hanes pulled off his right glove and reached inside his overcoat for his copy of the order that had brought him and his boys out into the snow. He read it over again, searching once more for whatever hidden meaning might lie between the lines of the formally phrased deployment order.

After spending several hours in the morning thinking it out while the men had breakfast from the spotlessly clean field kitchen, Hanes had reached a conclusion he didn’t even like thinking about. His instructions seemed to indicate that the President feared an armed insurrection in which other military units might play a part. But clearly the President didn’t doubt Hanes’s loyalty, or that of the men of the Fifth. And he would not waver if the call came. He wouldn’t like fighting his brother soldiers, but the President of the United States was the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and orders were to be obeyed.

The helicopter was in sight now, coming over the crest of the hill, and soon he would know what it was all about. Whatever must be done, Colonel Hanes resolved as the whirlybird settled onto the hastily-scraped-clear landing pad, would be done quickly, efficiently, and with distinction. The Fifth Army Brigade, and its commander, would not be dishonored.

After circling the block three times looking for a place to park, Representative Obediah Porfritt slammed his old Buick into a dollar-bill-sized space in front of a fire hydrant. The House of Representatives medallion on the rear license plate would save him from a ticket, and he would somehow live with the guilt.

A black Ford stopped about three car lengths back, and two men in gray suits got out and separated, one crossing the street and the other falling into step behind Porfritt. The third man, the driver, stayed with the car.

Obie, clutching a large paper bag to his stomach as though it contained all the world’s woes, scurried around the corner to J Street. Sticking out of the bag was the top of a brightly colored box, of the sort toys for small children come in.

The man behind Porfritt watched him enter a nondescript red-brick building and start climbing its worn wooden staircase. The man waited until his partner was in sight across the street and Porfritt was out of sight around the first landing, and then went in after him.

Obie climbed to the third floor. The only door on the landing was a steel fire door which had once been painted tan. A sign pointing to it read
b & j toy wholesalers—receiving
. After a moments hesitation, Obie pushed open the door and went in.

The gray man rounded the lower landing just in time to see the door closing on Porfritt’s back. He went on up the stairs, past the landing to the floor above, and then pulled a miniature transceiver from his belt and said a few brief words into it in a low monotone.

Behind the door was a small bare room suitable only for meditation. Across the room a wooden office door with an inset glass window provided the only light: a yellow glow that came through the frosted glass of the window. There was a small bell screwed into the side of the window, and, Scotch-taped to the glass, a hand-printed sign that advised: Ring Bell for Service.

Obie rang the bell. Nothing happened. He heard footsteps outside the fire door. They paused for a moment on the landing before continuing upstairs. Obie didn’t want to think about that. For some time now he had had the nagging feeling that someone was following him, and it was doing bad things to his digestion. Obie gave up on the bell and pounded on the glass. After a moment it slid up. A bulky woman with short gray hair and round steel-rimmed glasses stuck her face through the opening. “Whyn’t ch’a ring the bell?” she demanded.

“I did,” Obie said.

“What ch’a want?” she asked, not mollified.

Obie pulled the box halfway out of the paper bag so the woman could read the legend on the front, bild-a-man, the box said, with appropriate illustrations of the snap-together parts of a plastic body. “This is defective,” he said. “I got it for my son for Christmas, and it’s defective.”

“What’s a madder widdit?”

“I want to see Mr. Biddle,” Obie explained.

“Oh,” the woman said. “Why’n cha say so?” She slammed the window closed and, after a couple of preparatory clicks and thumps, pulled the door open. “Dat way,” she told him, pointing down a narrow corridor. “To de end and torn left. Name’s onna door.”

Obie scurried down the corridor like a man pursued by invisible demons. At its end he turned left, to find another corridor. The name Biddle was on the glass panel of the third door down, on the right.

Obie knocked.

“Come in!”

Obie entered. The room was filled with unboxed toys and games, and an undifferentiated rubble of thousands of toy and game parts. At the rear a small man crouched behind a large desk was assembling a three-foot plastic dinosaur. “Welcome,” the small man said without looking up. “What can I do for you?”

“My name is Porfritt,” Obie said. “I got a note; it said to ask for you.”

The small man looked up and examined Obie intently for a second. “Next door,” he said, turning back to his dinosaur. “One office down.” He carefully glued one saurian arm into place.

Obie backed out and closed the door. A feeling of annoyance was beginning to overtake his underlying feeling of fright. The two sat uncomfortably in his stomach. He took two chewable antacid tablets from his breast pocket and popped them into his mouth before knocking on the next, unmarked, door. A voice urged him to enter, which he did.

This room was small, and packed to the ceiling with banded cartons of posters that celebrated the toys of Christmas Past. There were two chairs in a narrow aisle between the stacked cartons. Aaron Adams sat in the first chair, with his feet up on the second. “Hi, Obie,” he said.

“Aaron!”

“Close the door, Obie,” Adams said, taking his feet off the chair. “Sit down.”

Obie closed the door and lowered himself into the folding chair. “Aaron,” he breathed, “do you know what you’ve just put me through?” He dropped the Bild-A-Man kit heavily onto the floor. “This kid slips a message to me in the goddamn men’s room: ‘Bring a toy to the B and J Toy Company. Destroy this note.’ What am I doing here, Aaron?”

“I have to talk to you,” Adams said,

“Sure,” Obie said. “But why the toy? Why the back room? Why all the secrecy? I feel like I’m in a grade C spy movie. Why the hell couldn’t you just come up to my office, Aaron, if you want to talk to me?”

“I didn’t think that would be wise, Obie. You and I are conspiring against the President of the United States, which is, to put it mildly, against the law. Treason is, I believe, a capital offense.”

Obie shook his head. “I feel like such an idiot. Why, I actually convinced myself that someone was following me around as I came up here. It’s enough to make me paranoid.”

“Don’t let it get to you, Obie,” Adams said, keeping his own voice calm and level. “You’re just not a born conspirator, that’s all. You’re going to have to be careful; take a few precautions. There’s nothing to worry about. From now on, we’re not going to have time to be worried.”

Porfritt simply stared at him.

“Jubilee,” Adams continued, “is called for the day after tomorrow.” He leaned back in his chair until it was balanced on the two back legs. “Two days, Obie. Can you hold out for two days?”

“Sunday?” Obie fell silent. Crossing his arms, he hugged them against his chest and stared at the gray wooden floor.

Adams watched Obie, but kept silent, leaving him alone with his thoughts. Obie deserved to spend his declining years in honorable retirement, with a small law practice in Ogallala, telling stories about the big bills that got away. Instead, by an accident of relationship and time, he was thrust into the middle of desperate events.

But there was no going back now. They must all, as Franklin had said at an earlier insurrection, hang together, or they would most assuredly, all hang—separately.

Obie looked up. He had come to a decision and the worry lines had disappeared from his face. “Its going to be hairy,” he said. “Congress is just back from Christmas recess. At least, I assume enough of my fellow congressmen are back to call a quorum. But Sunday—”

”How many of your comrades have you discussed this with?” Adams asked.

“A few,” Obie said. “But I wish you wouldn’t use the term ‘comrades.’ It has unfortunate connotations in my business.”

“You have a point,” Adams admitted. “Call them Sunday morning. Use a pay phone. I assume each of them is primed to call others.”

“Right,” Obie affirmed. “Each of my colleagues said he could contact at least five others, and the chain will grow from there, but I can’t promise that there will be any senators on it.”

“Let me worry about the Senate, Obie. Are you ready with the bill?”

“The bill of impeachment? I’ve been working on it as a labor of love for these past weeks. You should see the list of high crimes and misdemeanors in the statement of particulars. It’s a beaut!”

“Nothing petty, I hope?”

“There are a few minor, petty items on the list,” Obie said. “I had to put a few items in for my colleagues to knock out. Even at a time like this, you don’t think they’d pass a bill the way it was written without deletions or amendments, do you?”

“Okay,” Adams said. “You know your business.” He reached behind him and produced a box labeled tinker-tot with a picture on the cover of a four-year-old child standing next to a three-tower suspension bridge made entirely out of small snap-together plastic pieces. “Take this home with you,” he said. “Inside is a beefed-up CB radio with a strap so you can wear it over your shoulder. Keep it turned on and tuned to channel four. There’s a little earpiece, if you want to listen privately. Pick a code name. So I can call you something besides ‘Congressman Porfritt’ over the radio. Something that has a meaning to you, so you’ll be sure to catch it. Something short.”

“What about ‘Omaha’?”

“Fine,” Adams said. “Capital of Nebraska.”

“No, it isn’t,” Obie said. “It’s the largest city, but Lincoln’s the capital. I was thinking of Omaha Beach. On June sixth, nineteen hundred and forty-four, I was a corporal in a combat assault team. We hit the beach in the first wave. By the end of the day, I was the highest-ranking man still alive in my company. On June eighth I got a battlefield commission. Not because I was brave or clever, but because there were only two officers alive in the battalion. It was then I decided that, if I got out of that alive, I was going to go into politics.”

“Oh,” Adams said.

“I don’t follow it either,” Obie said, “not anymore. But it made perfect sense at the time. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the Normandy invasion, I wouldn’t be here today. So, if you don’t mind—Omaha.”

“Omaha it is, Obie,” Adams said. “When you hear ‘Omaha Go!’ over your little radio, you get that bill of impeachment passed by whoever you’ve got there—I don’t care if it’s only three of you—and over to the Senate. Any senator you can find will serve as ‘the Senate’ for our purposes. The regular channels of government aren’t exactly going to be in order, but I’ll have a couple of senators over in that hall waiting for you.”

“That’s good, Aaron.”

“Okay,” Adams said. “Take your new toy and go home.”

Obie stood up. “It’s going to be hard not to keep looking over my shoulder, but I’ll do my best.”

“Very good, Obie.” Adams rose and shook his hand. “Good luck.”

“A hell of a thing,” Obie said. He turned and left the office.

Adams stayed where he was for about ten minutes; then he left the building by an exit that led to an alley on the side street where he had parked his car. When he was halfway home he noticed that a black Ford with two men in it was staying a steady half-block behind him. Just to be sure, he stopped at a grocery store and a liquor store and made some unnecessary purchases. The car picked him up when he left and fell in behind him again.

Whistling softly to himself, Adams drove home.