Deep Cover

“Nothing to wait for, young friend. We’ve dealt with mavericks on the Hill before. It’s not your private ball park up here—you came into our ballgame, son, you play by our rules or else you get out of the park.”

“Receipt acknowledged, Senator.”

“You think about it, that’s all. I’ll get back to you after you’ve had time to mull it over. Take care now.”

Forrester depressed the cradle button and waited with the receiver in hand until it rang again as he knew it would. He was smiling a little. “Forrester here.”

It was Les Suffield. “I’m still at your office and the phones are jumping off the desks. What do I tell the ink-stained hacks?”

“You have nothing to add to what I said at the press conference. You’re not empowered to speculate on questions I didn’t cover.”

“Maybe. Christ, you didn’t half sling it all into the fan, did you?”

“If you pull punches you don’t get much coverage.”

“Too much coverage, Senator. Too much. You take the lid off the honey jar, you’re bound to get all the predators swarming around. Just what effect did you expect to get, breathing fire like that?”

“Not as much as I’d like. It will roll off the ones who want to stay indifferent, it’ll appear true to those who want to believe it, and it’ll be dismissed as a pack of lies by those who’ve committed themselves to their own pack of lies.”

“All right. So why did you do it?”

“Let’s just say it was a fiendish impulse.”

“Christ on a crutch. All right, you’re on the nine-o’clock flight in the morning out of National, tickets at the VIP lounge for you to pick up. If I were you I’d leave the phone off the hook, otherwise you won’t get any sleep.”

“Senator Guest has already been heard from. I’m unlisted so there won’t be too many more.”

“What did he say? As if I can’t guess.”

“I’ve been drummed out of the party and he’s about to bust my saber across his knee.”

Suffield laughed unpleasantly and hung up. Forrester put the phone down properly because there was one more call he had to take tonight and he would know it when it came. The instrument began to ring immediately but he ignored it after the third ring and went into the kitchen feeling aggressive and alive, up on his toes, full of anticipatory adrenalin. He made another drink and sorted through the refrigerator to find the makings of a supper; the phone kept ringing angrily but he shut it out and thought of Angie, half-wishing she could be here for this fight and half-angry with himself for wishing it because he was very close now to putting her all the way behind him, and he knew he had to cover the last sprint toward escape even though it made him feel as guilty as if he were abandoning her. He supposed another woman would make the escape easier but no casual one-night stand would do it and he was not ready for anything deeper than that yet.

He let his free associations ramble and so he was presently thinking about Top Spode because Top was one of those easygoing philandering grasshoppers who never stored up winter food and went through life regarding women the way most men regarded good cigars, as something to be treasured briefly and discarded when they had served their purpose. Actually he was thinking about Top because he was expecting Top’s call. He kept listening for it but it didn’t come until after he had finished scraping the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. Then he heard it, two rings and a pause, then two rings and another pause, and he headed toward it when it began to ring again.

“What have you got, Top?”

“A bad case of ring-around-the-rosy. Subject does not have the nitty-gritty. The job’s been subcontracted out.”

“Subject” was Congressman Webb Breckenyear, and “nitty-gritty” meant the specifications and budgetary breakdown on the Phaeton Three program. Breckenyear had farmed the assignment out.

“Why the hell would he do a thing like that?”

“I’ve only been on the job a few hours. What do you want out of me?”

“You’d better come out here. We’ll have to talk.”

“I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

Forrester made a face. “All right, if you think it’s necessary.”

“Color me paranoid but let’s don’t take chances.”

Forrester jiggled the button until he got a dial tone, left the receiver off the hook, and went up to the bedroom to get his overshoes and coat. He went right past the framed photo of Angie on the chest of drawers and then abruptly turned back, took the photograph down and put it away face-down in the top drawer. It made him feel as if he had just made an important decision. He shouldered into the coat and went out the front door, working his gloves on while he took long slow breaths of the cold night air. It had stopped snowing and the fresh lie looked puffy and clean on the sloping lawns and roofs. He left overshoe spoor behind in the thin white crust on the brick walkway when he went out to the curb and stood waiting in the wind, enjoying the crisp bite of it.

The reflected glow of headlights appeared at the road crest and the sleigh-bell chitter of tire chains reached his ears. Coming over the hill the lights seemed to bounce wildly before they settled down, stabbing him. Spode drew in at the curb and leaned across the front seat to open the door.

Forrester got in. Spode switched off the lights and engine; the windows immediately began to steam up. Forrester said, “I don’t see why your car’s any safer than my basement.”

“I go over it every other morning for bugs. Can you say the same thing for your basement?”

“I suppose not, but it’s pretty far-fetched to think—”

“I don’t think,” Top said mildly, “I just assume.”

“All right, then. What’s this about Breckenyear farming it out? Farming it out to whom?”

“That information wasn’t included in the price of my ticket. But I could make a pretty good guess, and so could you.”

It took a while for Forrester to work it out but in the end he said, “Ross Trumble.”

“Got to be.”

It fit. Trumble was a sophomore Congressman—Representative from the Second Congressional District of Arizona, which included Tucson and the southern counties, not excluding the defense plants, Davis Monthan Air Force Base, Fort Huachuca missile-test range and CBW laboratories, and the Tucson wing of ICBM and ABM silos. In his freshman term on the hill Trumble had made friends with Webb Breckenyear because Breckenyear chaired House Military Appropriations and Trumble was the property of the Arizona military-hardware manufacturers who had financed his campaigns. Now in his second term Trumble was a junior member of Breckenyear’s committee and since it looked as if the Phaeton contracts, once let, would go to Arizona corporations, Trumble was the obvious man to draw up the bill.

Webb Breckenyear was a Democrat and it would help show his bipartisan altruism to let Trumble handle the chore. Trumble was a Republican, somewhere to the right of Senior Senator Woodrow Guest; he had received Guest’s support in the election and no doubt would continue to receive it: Guest knew that if you demanded loyalty up, you had to show loyalty down, even when you didn’t like some of the players you had to root for. Besides, in less than four years on the Hill, backed by Breckenyear’s Southern Democrats and Guest’s centrist Republican wing, Trumble had insinuated himself powerfully. If there was another right-wing surge within the party like the ones that had taken off in 1964 and 1970, it was not beyond belief that Ross Trumble could wrest the Arizona Republican machine out of the Senior Senator’s grasp, and Guest was not going to make it easier for Trumble to try by backing Forrester’s leftish move. As far as Woody Guest was concerned, everybody except himself was expendable, but Senator Forrester was more expendable than Congressman Trumble. Forrester was in the fight all by himself and whatever support he was likely to get would come not from his own party but from the opposition, and in this election year even that would be muted. In traditional political terms Forrester’s move was suicidal, but politics was no longer as traditional as it had been. Of course his odds were still rotten but that was what made it an interesting fight.