Acts of Mercy (12 page)

And as he guided the Ford through the empty streets of Cleveland Park, there was fear in him. It was abrupt and insidious, different from the fear of discovery or the fear of error, different from any fear he had ever known.

Because it had no name.

Painted a gleaming red, white and blue, its big diesel locomotive rumbling steadily in the warm Los Angeles afternoon, the Presidential Special reminded Augustine, not for the first time, of a sleek faithful animal awaiting the arrival of its master. As he crossed the Union Station platform surrounded by aides and Secret Servicemen, Claire with her arm tucked around his, he gazed fondly at the ten cars in the string: baggage car, train staffs car, security personnel’s Pullman, specially outfitted communications car, the old SP parlor car which he had had converted into an office and conference room and private compartments for himself and Claire and which he had dubbed U.S. Car Number One, aides’ Pullman, dining car, club car, and finally the glass-roofed observation car with its open rear platform. And he felt the familiar stir of excitement that always came to him when he was about to embark on this train,
his
train.

His spirits had been at a low ebb since last night; even Justice’s report that the transference of Briggs’s body had been accomplished without incident had failed to ease his mind. But now that he was in California again, approaching the Presidential Special and soon to be at The Hollows, a sense of optimism had begun to return to him. He always seemed to feel more sanguine about things when he was away from the Washington milieu, the austere atmosphere of the White House. Truman had been right: no man in his right mind would ever enjoy living in that place. And that, of course, was why all the presidents in the past several decades had taken every opportunity to go elsewhere—Roosevelt to Warm Springs, Truman himself to Independence, Eisenhower to Camp David, Kennedy to the family home in Hyannisport, Johnson to his Texas ranch, Nixon to Key Biscayne and San Clemente and Camp David, Carter to his Georgia farm. Despite all the negativism in the press about his own California trips, Augustine thought, the simple truth was that a “Washington Presidency” was a figment of the Constitution. The country could be run just as effectively outside the Capital.

He smiled at Claire as they neared U.S. Car Number One, to let her know he felt cheered, but her answering smile was preoccupied and mechanical. Her mood had matched his in the past eighteen hours: withdrawn, silent, morose. Which was not like her at all, though understandable in the circumstances. Neither of them had mentioned Briggs since he had conveyed Justice’s report to her; and neither of them had slept much last night, nor on the flight from Washington this morning.

When they reached the portable metal steps Augustine turned briefly to wave at the gaggle of photographers and reporters that had followed onto the station platform. Flash. bulbs popped; television cameras whirred. From out at the front of the station he could hear the voices of the wellwishers who had gathered to greet him when his limousine arrived from the airport—a much smaller crowd than even on his last visit ten days ago. But that would change once he got his campaign into full swing. They would come in droves then, as they had four years ago; all over the country they would come out in droves when the Presidential Special came whistling in.

He noticed Justice standing a few feet away, looking as unobtrusive as always but with dark smudges under his eyes that said his night had also been mostly sleepless. They had exchanged but a few words this morning and none at all since leaving Washington; everything that needed to be said about Briggs had been spoken last night, and any further dialogue at this time would have been painful for both of them.

Augustine stood a moment longer, smiling impersonally for the cameras, sniffing the good oily machine odor of railroad stations everywhere. Then he turned and helped Claire up the steps, boarded after her and followed her into the corridor of U.S. Car Number One. At the door of her compartment she stopped and turned to him, putting her hand gently on his arm.

“I think I’ll lie down for a while, Nicholas,” she said.

“Don’t you feel well?”

“I’m just tired. You ought to rest too, dear.”

“I will, a little later.”

She nodded, turned as Elizabeth Miller came up and asked her something about a secretarial matter. Augustine left her with Elizabeth and went up the empty corridor to his office at the far end. Just as he reached it, someone—Maxwell Harper—called his name. He sighed softly, glanced back and waited for Harper to approach him.

Maxwell had tried to get him alone at Dulles and again on Air Force One—plainly, he had something on his mindbut Augustine had been in no mood to listen to one of Harper’s lectures. Nor was he now, for that matter. A brilliant man, Maxwell, but you could not interact with him on an emotional level; he thought only in terms of facts and figures, causes and effects, and dry intellectual syllogisms. It was exactly for that reason that Augustine could never tell him about the Briggs decision. Harper would be appalled by it because he would be unable to see past the act itself, would be incapable of understanding the emotions which had precipitated it.

Augustine said, “What is it, Maxwell?”

“I’d like a few minutes of your time,” Harper answered in his dry precise voice.

“Everyone wants a few minutes of my time. Can’t it wait?”

Harper frowned slightly. “I suppose it can, but—” “Good. Come see me in thirty minutes or so. After we’ve gotten underway.”

Augustine pivoted away from him, not giving him the opportunity to argue, and entered the office compartment. Facing inside, he drew the door shut behind him. When he heard Harper’s steps retreating in the corridor he crossed to his desk and sank into the wide leather chair behind it.

The office was cool and dark: the Presidential Special was air conditioned, and the shades were already drawn across the windows. He sat quietly for a time, looking at the mahogany-paneled walls with their colorful display of railroad timetables and handbills and chromolithograph posters, the tufted red-velvet settee which had originally graced a Pullman drawing room on the old Erie Railroad in the 1880s, the hand-crafted bar cabinet from the Central Pacific car that had once belonged to Leland Stanford, the six-foot mahogany conference table with its satin-damask-upholstered chairs. God, it’s good to be back here, he thought, and smiled to himself, and felt again the stir of excitement. There was something about trains that got into a man’s blood, filled him with a sense of joy and adventure, sharpened his awareness of externals and of himself. And as he had many times before, he felt a fleeting wistful sadness that he had not ignored his father’s wishes and had gone into railroading instead of politics. If he had gone into railroading, who was to say that he would not be a happier and more fulfilled man than he was today?

He began to hum “John Henry,” and as soon as he did that he had a vivid mental image of a huge black man swinging a ten-pound sheep-nose hammer in the heat and the smoky darkness of a mountain tunnel in West Virginia, the Big Bend tunnel on the C&O road more than a century ago. John Henry, driving drills into bare rock to make holes for the blasting charges, risking death from silicosis and suffocation and falling rock and cave-ins, finally dying not from any of these but from sheer exhaustion in an impossible confrontation with a steam drill. John Henry, steel-driving man.

Augustine sang a second verse, and in the middle of a third the Presidential Special’s air horn sounded to announce departure—sounded loud and harsh and toneless, nothing like those grand old whistles of yore. Humming again, he stood and went to the bar cabinet. He had wanted a drink badly last night, after Justice had first left the Oval Study, but he had restrained himself; the worst time to reach for alcohol was when you were in the middle of a crisis. But a drink or two now would not hurt. In fact, they were called for: a toast to railroading and to the memory of steel-driving men like John Henry.

While he was making himself a bourbon-and-soda, the train started to move—slowly, smoothly, the iron wheels creating small rhythmic sounds on the rails. Augustine raised his glass, drank from it, and then returned to his chair and lifted the shade on the nearest window. Outside, the network of tracks and strings of out-of-service cars slid by, shining in the hard glare of the sun; then they were gone and in their place were buildings and palm trees and the distant bluish shadows of hills and mountains.

He smiled again and sang:

The train picked up speed and the air horn echoed again, and Augustine experienced a familiar illusion of motionlessness, as if the Presidential Special were standing still and the world itself were rushing by. There was a curious sense of peace in that. He could imagine, at least for a while, that he had been relieved of the pressures of office, that the complexities of human society were under the influence of God alone.

He filled a pipe, settled back with it and with his drink. I wish I’d known you, John Henry, he thought. I think we’d have gotten along. Yes, by God, I think we’d have gotten along just fine.

Now, here on the train as it moves away from Union Station, an understanding comes to us: the execution of Briggs was our first act of mercy, but it must not be our last.

He was only part of the conspiracy, perhaps its leader but more probably, in retrospect, its point man. There are still others involved, in any case, and before the plot can be effectively neutralized these others, too, must be eliminated. You cannot nullify a cancer by killing one of its cells; you must kill them all, every last one.

But who are they? We are not quite sure yet; we can make educated guesses, but guesses are not enough—we must be absolutely certain. Peter Kineen is a major part of the conspiracy, of course; the President, however, recognizes him as an enemy, and he is not nearly so dangerous as those close to Augustine, such as Briggs, who are seeking to undermine and destroy him from within. Kineen must die, yes, but the others, the ones still hidden, must die first.

We will be even more vigilant and cunning from now on. And when we become sure of each of the remaining traitors, we will strike as we struck with Briggs. Swiftly, vengefully, and in the name of righteousness.

Oh yes, oh yes, our acts of mercy have only just begun.

Harper made his way awkwardly along the swaying corridors from the club car toward the aides’ Pullman. Trains, he thought with distaste. Great lumbering anachronisms totally devoid of dignity, with no effective function in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Lower-class conveyances like buses and streetcars. Playthings for men such as Augustine who had never quite outgrown the toys and fascinations of childhood. All in all, a preposterous mode of transportation for the President of the United States, and for a man like himself whose sensibilities were offended by their superfluous nature.

The motion of the train had given him a sour stomach, and the glass of plain soda he had consumed in the club car made him belch again, delicately. He had spent fifteen minutes in the club car, brooding at one of the tables and watching flickers of sunlight play stroboscopically on its surface, but then restlessness had brought him to his feet and sent him out of there, just as it had brought him into the car in the first place.

Why had Augustine moved up the date of their departure for The Hollows from the weekend to today? Was it because of the media reaction to his ill-timed joke about the Vice-President’s problems in the West? Because of the Indian crisis and his inability to cope with it? Or had something else happened, something of which Harper had not yet been made aware? The suddenness of this change in plans-Harper had learned about it only this morning, when he arrived at the White House—carried suspicious overtones. As did Augustine’s refusal to talk to him in Washington and on the plane. As did the President’s haggard, moody aspect. As did the First Lady’s uncharacteristic reticence today, the bluish lines of fatigue under her eyes that she had not quite been able to conceal with makeup.

There were more people in the corridors now—stewards (none of whom were black: a kind of reverse racism, Harper thought ironically), other aides, and Secret Servicemen who could not quite maintain either their regimentation or their inconspicuousness in these closed surroundings. He ignored them individually, still brooding. But when he neared his compartment, at the upper end of the aides’ Pullman adjacent to U.S. Car Number One, he saw through the connecting door glass that the First Lady was standing in the doorway of her private drawing room, talking to her confidential secretary, Elizabeth Miller. He hesitated, and then, on impulse, he walked through into Car Number One.