05.Under Siege v5 Page 4

  “We can always fire the U.S. attorney down there if he blows it,” Dorfman said blandly and smiled at Cohen.

  “Chano Aldana is going to be convicted,” Gideon Cohen stated forcefully. “A district jury convicted Rayful Edmonds.” Young Rayful had led a crime syndicate that distributed up to two hundred kilos of crack cocaine a week in the Washington area, an estimated thirty percent of the business. “A jury’ll convict Aldana. If it doesn’t happen, you can fire your attorney general.”

  Dorfman kept his eyes on Cohen and nodded solemnly. “May have to,” he muttered. “But what will a conviction get us? When Rayful went to jail the price of crack in the District didn’t jump a dime. The stuff just kept coming in. People aren’t stupid—they see that!”

  “This drug business is another tar baby,” the President said slowly, “like the damn abortion thing. It’s political dynamite. The further out front I get on this the more people expect to see tangible results. You and Bennett keep wanting me to take big risks for tiny gains, yet everyone keeps telling me the drug problem is getting worse, not better. All we’re doing is pissing on a forest fire.” He sent his eyebrows up and down. “Failure is very expensive in politics, Gid.”

  “I understand, Mr. President. We’ve discussed—”

  “What would we have to do to solve this drug mess, and I mean solve it?”

  Gideon Cohen took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Repeal the Fourth Amendment or legalize dope. Those are the choices.”

  Dorfman leaped from his chair. “For the love of—are you out of your mind?” he roared. “Jeez-us H.—”

  Bush waved his chief of staff into silence. “Will convicting Chano Aldana have any effect on the problem?”

  “A diplomatic effect, yes. A moral effect, I hope. But—”

  “Will convicting him have any direct effect at all on the amount of drugs that comes into the United States?” Dorfman demanded.

  “Hell, no,” Cohen shot back, relieved to have a target for his frustration. “Convicting a killer doesn’t prevent murder. But you have to try killers because a civilized society cannot condone murder. You have to punish it whenever and wherever you can.”

  “This war on drugs has all the earmarks of a windmill crusade,” Dorfman explained, back in his seat and now the soul of reason. “Repealing the Fourth Amendment, legalizing dope …” He shook his head slowly. “We have to take positive steps, that’s true enough, but the President cannot appear as an ineffectual bumbler, an incompetent. That’s a sin the voters won’t forgive. Remember Jimmy Carter?” His voice turned hard: “And he can’t advocate some crackpot solution. He’d be laughed out of office.”

  “I’m not asking for political hara-kiri,” Cohen said wearily. “I just want to get this dope kingpin up here where we can try him with enough security so that we don’t have any incidents. We need to ensure no one gets to the jurors. The jurors have to feel safe. We will get convictions.”

  “We’d better,” Dorfman said caustically.

  “Will, you’ve argued all along that what was needed here was more cops, more judges, and more prisons,” Cohen said, letting a little of his anger leak out. “ ‘Leave the rehab programs and drug-prevention seminars to the Democrats,’ you said. Okay, now we have to put Aldana in prison. This is where that policy road has taken us. We have no other options.”

  “I’m not suggesting we let him go,” Dorfman snarled, his aggressive instincts fully aroused. “I’m wondering if you’re the man to put him in the can.”

  The President waved his hands to cut them off and rose to his feet. “I don’t fancy having to apologize to this asshole and buy him a plane ticket back to Medellín. Bring Aldana to Washington. But announce this as your decision, Gid. I’ve got a plane to catch.” He paused at the door. “And Gid?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Don’t make any speeches about repealing the Fourth Amendment. Please.”

  Cohen nodded.

  “Everybody’s getting panicky. Ted Kennedy says cigarette smoking leads to drug abuse. That dingy congresswoman—Strader—wants to put a National Guardsman on every corner in Washington. Somebody else wants to put all the addicts in the army. A columnist out in Denver wants us to invade Colombia—I’m not kidding—as if Vietnam never happened.” Bush opened the door and held it. “Maybe we should put all the addicts in the army and send them to Colombia.”

  Dorfman tittered.

  “You’re a good attorney general, Gid. I need you to keep thinking. Don’t panic.”

  Cohen nodded again as the President went through the door and it closed behind him.

  Henry Charon took twenty minutes to circle the White House grounds. On the west side of the executive mansion he found himself across the street from a gray stone mausoleum that his map labeled the Executive Office Building.

  He was standing facing it with his hands in his pockets when he heard the sound of a helicopter. He turned. One was coming in from the southeast, lower and lower over the tops of the buildings, until it turned slightly and sank out of sight, hidden by the trees, on the grounds behind the White House.

  Henry Charon retraced his steps south along the sidewalk, looking for a gap in the trees and shrubs where the helicopter would be visible. He could find no such gap. Finally he stopped and waited, listening to the faint tone of the idling jet engines. The sound had that distinctive whop-whop-whop as the downwash of the rotors rhythmically pulsed it.

  The chopper had been on the ground for four and a half minutes by Charon’s watch when the engine noise rose in pitch and volume. In a few seconds the machine became visible above the trees. The nose pitched down and the helicopter began to move forward. Now it laid over on its side slightly and veered right as it continued to climb, its engines apparently at full power. The mirage distortions that marked the hot jet exhausts were plainly visible.

  The machine finished its turn to the southeast and continued to climb and accelerate. Finally it was hidden by one of the buildings over beyond the Treasury. Which one? Henry Charon consulted his map.

  With his hands in his pockets, Charon walked past the White House on Constitution Avenue and proceeded east.

  Six blocks north, in the Washington Post building on Fifteenth Street NW, Jack Yocke had asked to attend the afternoon story conference of editors. At the meeting an editor from each of the paper’s main divisions—metro, national, foreign, sports, style—briefed the lead stories that his staff wanted run in tomorrow’s paper. The Post’s executive or managing editor then picked the stories for the next day’s front page.

  Arranged on the table in front of every chair were stacks of legal-sized papers, “slug” sheets, containing brief paragraphs on each of the top stories for tomorrow’s paper. On weekdays the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, routinely attended Page One meetings. Weekends, Yocke knew, Bradlee would escape to his Maryland west shore hideaway unless his wife, Sally, was throwing a dinner or the Redskins were playing at home.

  Yocke took his seat and studied the slug sheets. The beltway killing yesterday afternoon was in there, as was last night’s “stoop murder.” Both stories had unusual twists. The beltway killing looked like a wire-service story from Los Angeles, the city of rage, yet it had happened here in Washington—Powerville U.S.A.—and the killer had used a rifle. The victim was one Walter P. Harrington, head cashier of Second Potomac Savings and Loan. The neighbors had told Yocke that Harrington was a prig, a martinet, married to an equally offensive wife, yet for all of that respected as an honest, hard-working citizen who kept to himself and never disturbed the neighborhood.

  The stoop murder appeared to be a garden-variety mob rubout, but the victim, Judson Lincoln, apparently had not been associated with the mob in any way. Yocke had spent two hours this morning working the phones and hadn’t heard a hint. Lincoln owned a string of ten check-cashing establishments scattered through the poorer sections of downtown D.C. He had been mentioned in stories in the Post at least seven times in the last twelve ye
ars, always as a prominent local businessman. Twice the Post had run his photo.

  How would one handle that in a news story? “Judson Lincoln, prominent District businessman who was not a member of any crime family, was professionally assassinated last night on the stoop of his mistress’s town house as the lady looked on.” Great lead!

  Black, honest, respected, sixty-two-year-old Judson Lincoln had enjoyed the company of young women with big tits. If that was his worst sin he was probably sitting on a cloud strumming a harp right now. Lincoln had just returned from the theater with one such woman when he was gunned down. Had his outraged wife arranged his murder?

  Jack Yocke was musing on these mysteries when the framed lead press plate mounted on the wall, the Post’s very own trophy, captured his attention. It was Bradlee’s favorite Post front page: NIXON RESIGNS.

  Yesterday’s news, Yocke sighed to himself as he surveyed the ranks of the fashionably disheveled men and women taking seats around the table. Most of them were young, in their late twenties or early thirties. These aggressive, mortgaged-to-the-hilt graduates of prestigious colleges had replaced the overweight cigar chompers of yesteryear for whom murders were bigger news than presidential pontifications. Whether the new journalism was better was debatable, but one thing was certain: trendy cost more, a lot more. The new-age journalists of The Washington Post—always three words with the definite article capitalized, intoned the style manual—were paid about twice the real wages of the shiny-pants reporters of the manual typewriter era.

  Some of this new breed dressed like fops—white collars atop striped shirts, with carefully uncoordinated padded coats and pleated trousers. How the old front page-style reporters would have hooted through their broken teeth at these dandies of the nineties!

  And here was their leader, the deputy managing editor, Joseph Yangella, making his entrance. He was nattily dressed, fashionably graying, socially concerned, a man you would never see half potted at a prizefight with a floozie on his arm. He nodded right and left and settled into his seat at the head of the conference table. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was loosened, as usual. Why did he wear a tie, anyway? He got right to business.

  “This Colombian doper—where is he going for trial? Ed?” Yangella looked over his glasses, which he habitually kept perched precariously on the end of his nose.

  The national editor said, “We’re getting all kinds of rumblings. Senator Cherry doesn’t want him tried in Florida and is throwing his weight around. Justice isn’t saying anything. The governor of Florida is having a fit. Nothing from the White House, although we hear the attorney general went over there about an hour ago.”

  “Any announcements coming?”

  “Maybe later today. Nothing for sure.”

  “What’s your lead right now?”

  “Cherry and the governor.”

  The editor nodded. He perused the slug sheet. “Another airliner bombing in Colombia?”

  “Yes,” the foreign editor told him. “Seventy-six people dead, five of them Americans. The Medellín cartel is taking credit. Retaliation for the extradition of Aldana. It’s the fifth or sixth one they’ve blown up in the last couple of years. They also blew up a bank yesterday and killed another judge. We’ve got some pictures.”

  The paper’s pollster spoke. “We’ve got a poll conducted by a newspaper in Miami coming in over the wires. Seventy-three percent of those polled don’t want Aldana tried in south Florida.”

  “Can we get a poll here in Washington?” Yangella asked him.

  “Take some time.”

  The conversation moved to international affairs; political events in Germany, Moscow, and Budapest, and a flood in Bangladesh. They spent a minute discussing the efforts to rescue a child trapped in an abandoned well in Texas, a story that the TV networks were feasting on. Forty-five seconds were devoted to a new study on the reasons high schools gave diplomas to functional illiterates.

  The managing editor didn’t say a word or ask a question about Jack Yocke’s murder stories. A murder is a murder is a murder, Yocke told himself. Unless you have the good fortune to be spectacularly butchered by a beautiful young woman from a filthy rich or politically prominent family, your demise is not going to make the front page of The Washington Post.

  Joseph Yangella was clearing his throat to announce his decisions when the door opened and a woman from national stuck her head in.

  “News conference at Justice in forty-five minutes. Rumor has it Cohen will announce that Aldana is being brought back to Washington for arraignment and trial.”

  Yangella nodded. The tousled head withdrew and the door closed softly.

  “All right then,” Yangella announced. “On the front page we’ll go with the doper to Washington.” He put a check mark beside each story as he announced it. “The poll in Miami, airliner bombing and violence in Colombia, flooding in Bangladesh, the kid in the well, illiterate graduates. Photos of the airliner bombing and the rescue team in Texas. Let’s do it.”

  Everyone rose and strode purposefully for the door.

  After dinner that evening Henry Charon bought copies of the Post and the Washington Times and took them to his room. It was after nine P.M. when he finished the papers. The assassin stood at the window a moment, looking at the lights of the city. He stretched, relieved himself in the bathroom, and put on a sweater and warm coat. The paper said the temperature might drop to forty tonight. He made sure the room door locked behind him on his way out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JACK Yocke and his date could hear the voices through the door. When he knocked the door was immediately opened by a black-haired, gawky colt of a girl, about twelve years old or so. She smiled, flashing her braces, as she stood aside to allow them to pass.

  “Hi,” said Jack.

  “Hi. I’m Amy. My folks are here somewhere. Drinks are in the kitchen.” She spoke quickly, the words tumbling over each other.

  “Jack Yocke.” He stuck out his hand solemnly. “This is Tish Samuels.”

  The youngster shook hands with her eyes averted, blushing slightly. “Pleased to meet you,” she murmured.

  They found their hostess in the kitchen talking with several other women. When she turned to them, Yocke said, “Mrs. Grafton, I’m Jack Yocke, one of your students. This is Tish Samuels.”

  “I remember you, Mr. Yocke. You had such a terrible time with your pronunciation.” She extended her hand to Tish. “Thanks for joining us. May I fix you a drink? Snacks are in the dining room.”

  “What a lovely apartment you have, Mrs. Grafton,” Tish said.

  “Call me Callie.”

  His duty done, Yocke left Tish to visit with the women and wandered into the dining area. He surveyed the crowd with a professional eye. His fellow students he knew, and their spouses and dates he quickly catalogued. But there were some other guests he didn’t know. He was greeting people and reminding them of his name when he saw the man he wanted to meet lounging against a wall, beer in hand, listening to a shorter man wearing a beard. Jack Yocke nodded and smiled his way through the crowd.

  The bearded man was monopolizing the conversation. Yocke caught snatches of it: “… The critical factor is that real communism has never been tried … commentators ignore … still viable as an ideal….”

  The trapped listener nodded occasionally, perfunctorily. Steel-rimmed glasses rode comfortably on a prominent nose set in a rather square face. His thinning, short hair was combed straight back. Just visible on his left temple was a jagged scar that had obviously been there for years. As his gaze swung across Yocke, who grinned politely, the reporter got a glimpse of gray eyes. Just now the man’s features registered polite interest, although when his eyes scanned the crowd, the expression faded.

  The reporter broke in, his hand out. “Jack Yocke.”

  “Jake Grafton.”

  Grafton was a trim six feet tall, with just the slightest hint of tummy sag. He looked to be in his early forties. According to the peop
le Yocke talked to, this man was destined for high command in the U.S. Navy, assuming, of course, that he didn’t stumble somewhere along the way. And Jack Yocke, future star journalist, needed access to those on their way to the high, windswept places.

  “Our host,” Yocke acknowledged, and turned to the other man.

  “Wilson Conroy.”

  “Ah yes, Professor Conroy, Georgetown University. You’re something of a celebrity.”

  The professor didn’t seem overjoyed at that comment. He grunted something and took a sip of his drink, something clear in a tall glass.

  “Political science, isn’t it?” Yocke knew that it was. Conroy was a card-carrying communist with tenure on the Georgetown faculty. A couple of years ago the paper had a reporter attend several of his classes, during which Conroy vigorously championed the Stalinist viewpoint in a one-sided debate with his students, few of whom could defend themselves from the professor’s carefully selected facts and acid tongue. The resulting story in the Sunday edition of the Post had ignited yet another public drive to have the professor fired. The encrusted layers had been thoroughly blasted from the pillars of academic freedom with columns, editorials, and a flood of letters to the editor, all of which sold a lot of newspapers but accomplished nothing else whatever. A half dozen congressmen had gotten into the act for the edification of the folks back home, on the off chance there might be a couple of votes lying around loose in their districts.

  Conroy had relished the villain’s role, reveled in the notoriety, right up until the fall of 1989, when communist governments in Eastern Europe had begun collapsing like houses of cards. Since then he had been keeping a low profile, refusing to grant interviews to the press.

  “Yes. Political science.” The academic’s eyes flicked nervously over the crowd of people, who were chattering in the usual cocktail-party hubbub.

  “Tell me, Professor, what do you make of the latest moves in the Soviet Politburo?”

  The professor turned to face Yocke squarely. As he did Jake Grafton lightly touched Yocke’s arm, then slid away from the wall and moved toward the snacks.