I gulped in the fresh night air as I stepped outside the West Wing and onto the North Lawn of the White House. Nearby, anchors for some of the cable stations, Moose Myers among them, did stand-ups for their preelection specials, all of them holding their microphones to their mouths, the glowing building as their backdrop, so completely, exquisitely oblivious to the news that was about to crash over the country.
I strode toward the northwest gate, looking out into the patch of black on the other side that was Lafayette Park. I stopped for a second on the White House drive. As soon as I stepped outside of that gate, I was fair game. Drinker could be sitting in that park right now, lurking, waiting, watching me, fingering a gun or a knife shoved into his overcoat pocket, his collar turned up against the breeze. He could be posing as a tourist with a windbreaker and a camera. He could be hiding in a doorway with a ski hat pulled down low over his forehead.
He could slash my throat as I walked on an otherwise barren street, grab my wallet, and leave me bleeding to death beneath a streetlamp on a littered city sidewalk. Isn't it ironic, the papers would point out, that a well-known reporter who had survived a shooting and a bombing was finally felled by what was probably a crazed drug addict in search of a few bucks, and isn't Washington, the nation's capital, a disgrace?
Time was my enemy here. Staring into the abyss of that park, I quickly turned around in the drive and began to trot toward the walkway that led to the adjacent Old Executive Office Building. Technically, it was off limits with my press pass, and at any juncture, the Secret Service uniformed officers could stop me, even detain me. But detention, I quickly calculated, was preferable to a violent death. At least I could probably make a phone call, most likely to Martin, and dictate what I had.
The guard shack between the White House and the ancient and ornate OEOB, which once housed the Department of War, was usually empty. I scurried down the stairs, across an alleyway, and into the loading entrance. I wended my way through a maze of wide, empty hallways, my wing tips clicking on the hard tile floors and echoing off the walls.
Every doorway seemed dangerous. Every turn seemed pivotal. It felt like I had walked a mile before I finally saw a red, illuminated Exit sign. I rounded a corner, saw three officers chatting at a station, summoned every ounce of calm that I could find, and casually walked toward the turnstyle. One of the agents matter-of-factly buzzed me out, and I was on my way.
Out on Seventeenth Street, the luck of the skilled came through once again, this time in the form of a taxicab happening by just as I hit the curb. The elderly, grizzled driver was aggravated when I directed him to my office just a few minutes away, so I said to him, trying to lighten the mood, "Who do you like in tomorrow's election?"
"Is there even a question?" he asked. "Hutchins, all the way. The stock market's up. The economy's so good that even I own stocks these days. And he's honest. Look at that other creep. He lies. They all lie, I guess, but Hutchins lies less."
Well, brace yourself, old man. Brace yourself.
In front of my office, I slipped him a fin for his time and opinion and made a dash for the front door, all, fortunately, within full view of a very friendly building security guard named Alan. I ran past him, boarded a waiting elevator, and ascended to my office, a place I had feared I would never see again.
The bureau, I was quite sure, was probably as safe a venue as any, and more comfortable than most. A writer likes familiarity. A reporter does as well. This was not a story I wanted to type from the small desk of my hotel room, nice as my hotel room might be.
By nine at night, my office was a shadowy shade of gray, with the hazy green glare of so many computer screens casting the only light across the vast room. I knew this bureau better than I knew anyplace else on Earth, yet it seemed somehow different now, eerie. Speaking out loud, I told myself I needed to calm my nerves, saying, "You have to relax."
Even the sound of my own voice made me jumpy, but not nearly as much as the sound I heard next, that of someone else speaking to me in the dark.
"Who are you talking to?"
The new voice made me just about leap through the ceiling. My eyes darted about the room until they came to rest on Peter Martin, sitting in the dark at a computer screen just across from mine, flipping through wire stories. "Jesus Christ," I said. "You're going to scare me to death."
"Actually, it's you who scared me. You should be at your hotel. I've been waiting here for you to call." He paused, then said, "Tell me what you have."
I sat down at my computer. He drew his chair up closer, and I slowly, carefully walked him through my session in the Oval Office. I read him some Hutchins quotes that I had furiously scribbled on a legal pad just after I had left the West Wing.
After my ten-minute monologue, Martin looked stricken, as if he might get sick right there on the newsroom rug. In the heavy silence, my telephone rang, the sound crashing into our thoughts. I suspected it might be Hutchins, trying to sweeten the deal for cooperation, but when I picked up the receiver, I heard only dead air, followed by the click of someone hanging up on the other end. It made my skin crawl, even if I didn't fully appreciate or understand why.
Martin, on the other hand, seemed not even to notice. Staring not so much at me but through me, he said finally, "You use tape?" he said.
"No."
"You took contemporaneous notes?"
"Well, right afterward, from memory, in the briefing room on my way out the door."
His questions made me question myself, but I had done the best I could.
I knew that much.
"Incredible," he said, softly. "This whole thing is incredible." As he spoke, he leaned over and picked up the telephone. Punching out a number, he added, "Appleton's not going to like the circumstances-your involvement when you were supposed to be sitting in your hotel, the lack of a tape recording-but I have no doubt you did exactly what you should have done."
He talked on the telephone for a few minutes with Appleton, hung up, and said to me, "Write something out. Appleton wants to see it before he figures out what to do. He says there are no guarantees."
No guarantees. I wasn't sure whether this proclamation was infuriating or hilarious. Here we had the president of the United States, dead to rights, in an absolute lie that defined his entire life. I had risked my life for this story. Havlicek had lost his. And we had some pencil-pusher of an editor in chief sitting in his million-dollar house in a wealthy suburb of Boston impatiently telling us that there were no guarantees he would run the most important story in the country. Screw him, and while we're at it, screw this entire newspaper business as well. But not before I write this story and get it into print. Call me a fool, but I'd rather like to inform the voting public that the guy they were about to elect as president is a former armored car robber.
So I settled in before my computer and began to write. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, what I immodestly consider one of the best stories I've ever put together under deadline pressure. My fingers danced like magic across the keyboard. My mind clicked on more cylinders than I knew I had. It was a complex story with a very simple core: The president of the United States is not who he said he was. I wrote of the Oval Office interview, of his belief that the FBI was behind the shooting, and how the intended target was me. As promised, I talked of his successes as president and the lofty approval ratings that came along with it. I explained the 1979 Wells Fargo heist, the deal that Curtis Black struck with the U.s. attorney, his disappearance from the program in 1988.
When I was done, I punched out the number to Martin's office, where he had wandered to watch television and pace nervously while I did my work. He came out to my desk, and for fifteen minutes he sat in front of my computer in absolute silence, his fingers not typing in a single change as he paged through the story. That silence was finally broken by my ringing telephone. Again, dead air on the other line, followed by a click. I didn't like that at all. I looked suspiciously across the expanse of the bureau, at the empty chairs and the dormant computers. It all looked like some sort of barren Broadway set after the actors had long ago gone home.
"Fucking brilliant," Martin said as I walked back to my desk. "If we don't run this story, I don't want to be a part of this company anymore. You have my word that I'll quit."
"Let's just all calm down," I said. "It's only the president and the future course of America at stake." Neither of us laughed. "Let me give it another quick read," I added.
Martin stood up, told me to hurry up, and nervously walked back and forth behind me. I sat down at the terminal and scanned the words. By now, concentration was difficult. The two telephone hang-ups nagged at the core of my brain. All around me, the silence wasn't so much deafening as frightening. Outside in the hallway, a buzzer began sounding, and my stomach knotted up, until I realized it was just the facsimile machine. Another phone rang in the far corner of the bureau.
At that exact moment, the oddly melodic sound of shattering glass spilled into the room from the hallway beyond. My skin tingled from the noise and what it likely meant. Martin and I looked at each other in silence, and without a signal or a spoken word, I started walking slowly, quietly, across the room toward the door. I don't know why I got up and he stayed with the story. Probably we were just further defining our lifetime roles.
As I got halfway toward the hallway, my body so tense my arms and legs may as well have been wooden boards, the murky figure of Kent Drinker appeared in the doorway, looking much as he did that night when he emerged from the dark while I threw a ball for my dog, only here I suspected he wanted to do something more conclusive than chat. As nervous as I may have been, the very sight of him in my newsroom, daring to invade a place I always considered a sanctuary in the self-important and even corrupt culture of official Washington, made me livid-not so much defensive as emboldened.
"What are you doing here?" I yelled. It wasn't an inquiry but a warning.
He continued walking toward me, maybe fifty feet away, holding a gun in front of his chest with one hand, the barrel pointed at what I estimated to be my forehead.
"You don't fuck with me, and you don't fuck with the FBI," he said, answering my question, even if he hadn't actually tried.
"I want you the fuck out of this building," I replied.
That demand didn't seem to hold any sway. Drinker continued to walk toward me, around a clutter of desks. I stood frozen in the middle of the room. I'm not sure what Martin was doing behind me, because I didn't dare turn my back to look.
In the heat of the moment, I figured it was best to try to engage Drinker in any way possible. Conversation buys time. Time buys the opportunity to be creative. Creativity might help me get out of this situation with some semblance of my health, or at least life.
So I asked, "What is it you want?" Of course, I knew the answer to that already. Unfortunately for me, his intention was to make sure that I wasn't about to transmit a story to the Record that would include details of Hutchins's past life and suspicions that the FBI-SPECIFICALLY he-had killed Havlicek and tried to kill me in an attempt to block the truth from being known. Even less fortunately for me, he also wanted to make sure that I wouldn't live to tell anyone about what I knew. Of course, the reason he hadn't killed me in the prior twenty seconds was because he didn't yet know if I had sent the story yet.
"Fuck you," he said, maybe twenty feet away from me by now.
I was standing by Michael Reston's computer. I knew this because on his desk was a metal-framed photograph of Reston standing in front of the Supreme Court with the chief justice, both of them smiling as if they were soul mates. The picture spoke volumes about our favorable court coverage, but no need to get bogged down by such journalistic issues right now.
Drinker was circling desks in silence, still coming at me. He was hunched down, as if ready to do battle. I thought about picking up the photograph and flinging it at him, in expectation that he wouldn't shoot back because if I were dead, he would never know the damage I may have already done. Then I thought, if I ruined this photo, Reston would kill me anyway, so either way, I lose. My eyes quickly drifted over his desk, to a huge, hardcover legal volume, and then to his telephone. I could throw the book, which weighed more, but the fluttering paper might slow the velocity. I saw that on television once. The telephone was sleeker and harder. Of course, there was the general problem of the cord, which might slow down the throw, or even stop it in midair. I knew for a fact, though, that the cords on these phones stretched about a dozen feet, because I often liked to walk around my desk and talk at the same time.
Here goes. Drinker was but fifteen feet from me now, a free throw in the NBA. I waited another second for him to get within range, and in one quick swoop I picked up the phone and fired it at his head. Mind you, in Little League, back when I was twelve, I once pitched a no-hitter, and in the dog park in Georgetown, I am widely considered to have the best arm in the neighborhood, at least among those who are inclined to think about such things.
And I'll be damned if this throw didn't prove it. Drinker ducked, and the phone smashed into his wrist, causing the gun to fly out of his hand and slide underneath a nearby desk. He shook his wrist violently in pain, scanned the floor quickly for the weapon, then looked at me with a hatred I hope never to see again.
I was very temporarily elated, pleased at my decision to choose the phone over the picture frame or the book, and wondered if this was what the nice ad people at ATANDThat had in mind when they coined the slogan
"The right choice."
"You fucking cocksucker," Drinker said. And he started toward me at a faster pace, almost a run, but something more controlled, more determined. Tellingly enough, he seethed the words, "You should have been dead at Congressional."
Um, Peter, I thought to myself, anytime you want to help out here, please feel free. I shot a glance back and saw him at the computer keyboard, and I realized quickly that he was transmitting the story to the Record. Good to know where I stood in the scheme of things.
When I turned, Drinker saw what I was looking at, and that made him panic. He charged me with the force of a linebacker, smartly throwing his forearms into my sore ribs and lifting me up off the ground and onto Reston's desk.
As Drinker started to move past me, I collected myself and dove off the desk for his leg, bringing him down in a heap, the sound of him screaming as he fell on his bad wrist filling the room. I punched him once in the face before he even knew what had hit him. Problem was, that didn't seem to faze him much, or at least it didn't impede his ability to knee me in the ribs and cause a measure of pain that I hadn't thought possible.
As I saw stars, Drinker, free from my grip, raced across the room.
From my perch on the floor, I could see Martin back away from the computer and stand aside. I could see the story quite literally scrolling across the screen, as it does when it is transmitting. When it finally arrives at its destination, the computer beeps twice and the screen says, "File sent without errors." If we could see that now, it would read like poetry.
Drinker arrived at the computer with an absolute cognizance of what was happening. He started pressing keys immediately, hitting what was probably the escape button again and again and again. Still, the story continued to scroll.
Frantic and frustrated-never a good combination-he picked the keyboard up to rip it out of the terminal, in a last, desperate attempt to save himself. Standing now twenty feet or so behind him, I assumed he finally had us, that the force would cause such technological havoc that the whole computer would shut down or explode and the story of Hutchins's past would end up in some netherworld of information. And we, of course, would end up dead.
Martin must have thought the same thing, because at that second, the slightly built Washington bureau chief of the Boston Record lunged for Drinker and shoved a ballpoint pen deep into the side of his neck.
Drinker collapsed, his eyes bugged out. The keyboard tumbled out of his hands and dropped to the floor, and as it did, the monitor beeped twice and the words "File sent without errors" flashed across the screen. Drinker rolled around on the ground, moaning, the pen still protruding out of his neck. Martin leaned on a desk, disheveled, licking a cut on his finger. I stood back in something of a fog, taking it all in. You'll forgive my lack of restraint in thinking for a brief moment, as I looked at Drinker's neck, that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
Anyway, Martin casually picked up the telephone and called for an ambulance. I picked up Drinker's gun and told him, "You try to stand up, you're dead." As I stood guard, Martin made a second call, this one to Appleton.
"Yeah, you're right," I heard Martin say. "This really is a pain to have this story move so late at night."