House of Secrets - v4 (26 page)

Hoyt’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, can’t we just say I wanted to spend more time with my family?”

“If it means anything, Whitney, I feel you would have made a superb chief executive.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. President. That’s very kind of you. Not that I believe that’s how you really feel.” Hoyt gave his guest a measured smile. “And I hope you enjoy your time at the top. With the world the way it is now, I don’t know if I envy you or pity the living hell out of you.”

“If those are my choices, I’ll take the latter.” The president glanced down at his watch. “I’d love to spend the morning kissing each other’s tails, Whitney. But I really don’t have much time. We should move on to the business at hand.”

“Of course. You do have a country to run. My apologies.” Hoyt lifted the folder from his lap. “So. Our man Wyeth.”

“Horse trading.”

“Yes, sir.”

The president eyed the folder. “I take it Andy Foster is the other horse?”

“Best in the stable.”

“Better than John Bainbridge?”

Whitney Hoyt gave an overtly theatrical blink. “Bainbridge. Oh. Wait a minute.” He dropped the folder back onto his lap and reached over to the desk and picked up a second manila folder. “I’m sorry, John. It’s this one.
This
is the sad, silly story of your vice president. I’m so sorry. My mistake.”

He leaned forward in the rocker and handed the second folder to the president. “Chris was always a little
too
eager for his own good. Too eager to remember to cover his tracks. One of those fatal flaws, I’m afraid.”

Hyland despised this man. This was precisely the sort of politics that had been degrading the people’s regard for the governing process for decades. It was Hyland’s fervent hope that political dinosaurs like Whitney Hoyt would complete their damn extinction already and stop spawning new little dinosaurs. It was dispiriting.

“Okay, Governor. I have to say,
your
eagerness is not terrifically becoming. So what’s in the other folder?”

Hoyt was unmoved. “John Bainbridge would be a foolish choice, Mr. President. Read it and weep.” He picked the folder up off his lap and handed it to the president. Hyland immediately tossed it up onto the desk.

“I’m not even going to look at this.”

“Have it your way, Mr. President.”

“And my way is Andy Foster?”

Hoyt rocked backward in his chair. “That strikes me as a very inspired choice.”

Hyland held a steady gaze on his host, then stood up from his chair.

“Inspired.”

He put as much disgust into the word as he could. It was not nearly enough to faze his host.

“
T
here’s
Daddy
!”

Michelle dropped her half-eaten toast and practically leaped at the small television on the kitchen counter. Christine was scraping her spatula along the bottom of the pan; she gave the scrambled eggs one last stir and flipped off the flame.

Good Morning America
was showing a clip from Andy’s Earth Day speech the day before. Christine set down the spatula and turned to the television. “Oh, look at those sunglasses. Your daddy is such a dude sometimes.”

Michelle’s nose moved to within inches of the screen.
“Shhh. Listen!”

The little girl’s father was exhorting the Earth Day crowd: “Renew your sense of compassion and your kindness and your caring! Renew your respect and appreciation for this precious planet and for all the living beings on it!
We
are the renewable energy that can save our earth.
We
are the ones who can fix what we’ve broken. So let’s get together and renew!”

The picture cut to the chanting crowd —
“Vee! Pee! Vee! Pee!”
— then switched back to the studio and the unabashedly smitten expression worn by the morning show’s political reporter as she turned to the show’s co-host.

“It’s pretty clear they like him. They really,
really
like him.”

The story continued with footage of Andy signing books in a bookstore somewhere, the line of customers snaking off out of sight, and then several seconds of a campaign appearance Andy had made with Chris Wyeth in Cooperstown during the fall campaign. The voice-over put particular emphasis on Senator Foster’s ability “to really connect with the people.” The piece concluded with the studio reporter assuring the cohost that “the country could do much worse than to welcome Andy Foster as its next vice president should circumstances open such a door.”

“Turn that down, please,” Christine told Michelle as she divvied up the eggs onto two plates.

“Is Daddy going to be the next nice president?”

Christine eyed the girl warily. “Okay, are we just being cute here?”

“Is he?”

Christine decided that the malapropism was genuine; she’d have to remember to share it with Andy. “Nobody really knows that right now, honey,” Christine said. “A lot of things would have to come together in a certain way. I think the smartest thing right now is to focus on your breakfast.”

“Miss Brandstetter asked me yesterday if we were going to move to Washington.”

Christine wasn’t thrilled to hear that. “Tell you what. If anyone else asks you any questions like that, do what I do.”

“What’s that?”

Christine set her fork down and pressed her hands over her ears. “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…”

Michelle’s face lit up. She clamped her hands on her own ears. “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…”

Well, that’s fine
, Christine thought as she and her daughter made moony faces at each other.
La, la, la, la…

But how long is this really going to work?

A
ndy had his game face on.

There was no avoiding the scrum of reporters and cameras waiting to ambush him as he arrived at the Capitol building. He recalled his father-in-law’s advice: Give them everything and give them nothing.

Senator Foster gave them his attention, even suggesting with an amused smirk that he respected the badgering their job required them to do. A windup clown doll could have just as well tottered along the sidewalk and recited the nonsense that Andy offered, though the clown doll would have lacked the charm that Andy brought to the task. The senator even allowed a modicum of eagerness to bleed into his presentation. He winked and grinned and expressed authentic uncertainty about what was happening in the executive branch right now.

“You know, it’s just too early in the morning. Let me get my first cup of joe and I’ll get back to you on that.”

A handful of reporters stuck with him as he made his way inside the building and along the corridor toward his office, a Pied Piper scene played out time and time and time again in those fabled halls. The door to his offices beckoned, and it opened just as he and his gaggle reached them. An amused Jim Fergus stood there to welcome his boss.

Andy turned to the reporters and demurred in earnest. “Honestly, at this point I’m as much in the dark as all of you are. So right now, I’m just going to get on with the work of the people. That’s what I’m being paid for. Everything else, we’ll see what we see when we see it.”

And with that, his aide-de-camp ushered him into the office and closed the door.

“You know, there’s an easier way of saying that,” Fergus remarked.

“Let’s hear it.”

“‘Surely I shit you. I shit you not.’”

S
hortly after 11:30, Senator Foster excused himself from a tedious meeting of the Senate Ethics Oversight Committee and made his way by foot to the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Within several minutes of his arrival, Andy was shown into the office of William Pierce, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The two greeted each other and Pierce steered the senator to an anteroom just off his office.

Andy joked, “Is the lighting better in here for the hidden cameras?”

“You tell me what you consider your best side, Senator. We like our customers happy.”

The jesting notwithstanding, as Andy took his seat in one of the comfortable chairs, he took in the lamps and wall switches and various accoutrements in the room. Something in the room was recording the scene. Only a fool would think otherwise. Pierce launched right in.

“Your friend Chris is certainly pissing blood these days, isn’t he?”

Andy knew from experience that the director liked to swing heavy hammers. He floated a disarming smile across the room. “Why, I was saying just the same thing to the little lady the other day.”

Pierce did not return the smile. A shade over six feet, with a head full of thick hair now gone the color of steel and the sort of powerful features that could well have been carved from the granite mined in his native New Hampshire, William Pierce’s tenure as director of the Bureau now spanned three administrations. He was known to be fully at peace with the nickname that had been attached to him for most of his career: Iron Man. At sixty-seven, he remained in impressive physical condition, still working out strenuously on a daily basis and still keeping up with competitive rowing, a passion developed in his college days in New Haven. Andy had found occasion several times over the years to join the director for a round of golf. Pierce couldn’t putt to save his life. But his tee shot was a wonder to observe.

Pierce settled a hard look on his visitor. “In case you’re wondering, you’re good to go. At least from where I sit.”

“Good to go?”

“The veep job, Andy. Let’s not sit here pretending you don’t know you’re being vetted up the ass to replace Wyeth.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

Pierce didn’t seem to have heard him. “Also, just so you know. Screwing Spanish girls is not going to disqualify you for the office.” He paused, looking for a reaction. Andy gave him none. That is, unless one of the hidden instruments in the room was monitoring the pace of his heartbeats. Pierce continued. “Hell, we’ve all screwed a Spanish girl at some point. In a manner of speaking.”

“Rita Flores.”

“Here’s the thing. If you were actually running for the office and needed real votes, it’d be over. Married man? Nice pretty wife like you’ve got? But this is an appointment by the president. John Q. is not going to get to weigh in.”

Andy shifted in his chair. “Is it worth my asking how you know about that?”

“It is not.”

“Does Hyland know?”

“You’ll let me worry about that,” Pierce said flatly. “Like I said, nobody is squeaky-clean, Andy. So don’t
you
worry. You’re every bit as qualified as the president’s other choices.”

The FBI director was an old crony of Andy’s father-in-law. The two had come up together, both politically and socially. Andy recalled how Bill Pierce in particular had bolstered Whitney during the ugly months following his and Lillian’s return from London; he’d been fiercely loyal to his friend and cohort. Andy’s own relations with Pierce had always been cordial, if not exactly cuddly. The director brought out the natural wariness in a person. At least, if the person had any common sense.

“I need to ask you something,” Andy said. “Different topic. Though, thank you for that ringing endorsement.”

“Don’t mention it.” Pierce took a beat. “In fact,
don’t
mention it. So what is it you want to know?”

“First, I’d like to ask that there be no strings attached.”

“Strings?”

“I want you to promise me that you don’t open a file the moment I walk out of here. This is really nothing more than a fishing expedition on my part. It wouldn’t be good for this conversation to get around. Clearly I’m not going through channels. Those would be the AG’s office. I just don’t happen to have as open a listener over at Justice as I do here.”

“Okay. That’s the suck-up part,” Pierce said.

“Exactly.” Andy paused. He wanted to make sure he had his white lie in order. Especially if it was being recorded. “I’ve got a constituent, Bill. Up in the city. You’d know him if I named him, and I’m not going to name him. He’s got his fingers in pretty deeply with some import and export entities. All on the up and up. I’ve checked. Believe me, I wouldn’t be wasting either of our time if it were otherwise.”

“That’s a very wise disclaimer, Andy,” Pierce said.

The director didn’t sound as if he was wholly swallowing Andy’s tale, but Andy pressed on.

“The problem here is that it seems there have been some whisperings of late linking this individual with a man by the name of Aleksey Titov. You know about this Titov, don’t you, Bill?”

Pierce maintained his poker face. On his right ring finger he wore a large gold signet ring inset with a light blue stone. He had hold of the ring with his index finger and thumb and was rotating it in half-circles on his finger.

“Go on.”

Andy cleared his throat. “Ostensibly, this Titov runs his own import business. Actually, I shouldn’t say ostensibly. He does. He’s a businessman. He’s registered. But I’m sure you remember the dust that was kicking up around Christmastime about this? I wasn’t really paying it much attention myself, except that this Mr. Titov lives in New York and he seems to throw a lot of money around. So anything that might develop around a character like that is something my office would want to keep an eye on.”