“The Spencer carbines gave his troopers the technical edge,” Hamm announced. “People overlook that factor.”
“Choosing the best ground didn’t hurt, and the Spencers helped, but what he did best was to remember his mission,” Eddington replied.
“As opposed to Stuart. Jeb definitely had a bad day. I suppose he was due for one.” Hamm opened the car door for his colleague. It would be a few hours before they had to prepare for the next exercise, and Hamm was a serious student of history, especially of the cavalry. This would be an interesting breakfast: beer, eggs, and the Civil War.
THEY BUMPED INTO each other in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, which was doing a great business in coffee and donuts at the moment.
“Hi, John,” Holtzman said, looking at the crime scene from across the street.
“Bob,” Plumber acknowledged with a nod. The area was alive with cameras, TV and still, recording the scene for history.
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“You’re up early for a Saturday–TV guy, too,” the Post reporter noted with a friendly smile. “What do you make of it?”
“This really is a terrible thing.” Plumber was himself a grandfather many times over. “Was it Ma’alot, the one in Israel, back–what? 1975, something like that?” They all seemed to blend together, these terrorist incidents.
Holtzman wasn’t sure, either. “I think so. I have somebody checking it back at the office.”
“Terrorists make for good stories, but, dear God, we’d be better off without them.”
The crime scene was almost pristine. The bodies were gone. The autopsies were complete by now, they both imagined. But everything else was intact, or nearly so. The cars were there, and as the reporters watched, ballistics experts were running strings to simulate shots at mannequins brought in from a local department store, trying to re-create every detail of the event. The black guy in the Secret Service windbreaker was Norman Jeffers, one of the heroes of the day, now demonstrating how he’d come down from the house across the street. Inside was Inspector Patrick O’Day. Some agents were simulating the movements of the terrorists. One man lay on the ground by the front door, aiming a red plastic “play gun” around. In criminal investigations, the dress rehearsals always came after the play.
“His name was Don Russell?” Plumber asked.
“One of the oldest guys in the Service,” Holtzman confirmed.
“Damn.” Plumber shook his head. “Horatius at the bridge, like something from a movie. ‘Heroic’ isn’t a word we use often, is it?”
“No, that isn’t something we’re supposed to believe in anymore, is it? We know better. Everybody’s got an angle, right?” Holtzman finished off his coffee and dumped the cup in the trash bin. “Imagine, giving up your life to protect other people’s kids.”
Some reports talked about it in Western terms. “Gun-fight at the Kiddy Corral” some local TV reporter had tried out, winning the low-taste award for last night, and earning his station a few hundred negative calls, confirm-
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ing to the station manager that his outlet had a solid nighttime viewership. None had been more irate about that than Plumber, Bob Holtzman noted. He still thought it was supposed to mean something, this news business they both shared.
“Any word on Ryan?” Bob asked.
“Just a press release. Callie Weston wrote it, and Arnie delivered it. I can’t blame him for taking the family away. He deserves a break from somebody, John.”
“Bob, I seem to remember when–”
“Yeah, I know. I got snookered. Elizabeth Elliot fed me a story on Ryan back when he was Deputy at CIA.” He turned to look at his older colleague. “It was all a lie. I apologized to him personally. You know what it was really all about?”
“No,” Plumber admitted.
“The Colombian mission. He was there, all right. Along the way, some people got killed. One of them was an Air Force sergeant. Ryan looks after the family. He’s putting them all through college, all on his own.”
“You never printed that,” the TV reporter objected.
“No, I didn’t. The family–well, they’re not public figures, are they? By the time I found out, it was old news. I just didn’t think it was newsworthy.” That last word was one of the keys to their profession. It was news personnel who decided what got before the public eye and what did not, and in choosing what got out and what didn’t, it was they who controlled the news, and decided what, exactly, the public had a right to know. And in so choosing, they could make or break everyone, because not every story started off big enough to notice, especially the political ones.
“Maybe you were wrong.”
Holtzman shrugged. “Maybe I was, but I didn’t expect Ryan to become President any more than he did. He did an honorable thing–hell, a lot more than honorable. John, there are things about the Colombian story that can’t ever see the light of day. I think I know it all now, but I can’t write it. It would hurt the country and it wouldn’t help anybody at all.”
“What did Ryan do, Bob?”
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“He prevented an international incident. He saw that the guilty got punished one way or another–”
“Jim Cutter?” Plumber asked, still wondering what Ryan was capable of.
“No, that really was a suicide. Inspector O’Day, the FBI guy who was right there across the street?”
“What about him?”
“He was following Cutter, watched him jump in front of the bus.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“As sure as I’ve ever been. Ryan doesn’t know that I’m into all this. I have a couple of good sources, and everything matches up with the known facts. Either it’s all the truth or it’s the cleverest lie I’ve ever run into. You know what we have in the White House, John?”
“What’s that?”
“An honest man. Not ‘relatively honest,’ not ‘hasn’t been caught yet.’ Honest. I don’t think he’s ever done a crooked thing in his life.”
“He’s still a babe in the woods,” Plumber replied. It was almost bluster, if not disbelief, because his conscience was starting to make noise.
“Maybe he is. But who ever said we were wolves? No, that’s not right. We’re supposed to chase after the crooks, but we’ve been doing it so long and so well that we forgot that there are some people in government who aren’t.” He looked over at his colleague again. “And so then we play one off against another to get our stories–and along the way we got corrupted, too. What do we do about that, John?”
“I know what you’re asking. The answer is no.”
“In an age of relative values, nice to find an absolute, Mr. Plumber. Even if it is the wrong one,” Holtzman added, getting the reaction he’d hoped for.
“Bob, you’re good. Very good, in fact, but you can’t roll me, okay?” The commentator managed a smile, though. It was an expert attempt, and he had to admire that. Holtzman was a throwback to the days Plumber remembered so fondly.
“What if I can prove I’m right?”
“Then why didn’t you write the story?” Plumber de-
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manded. No real reporter could turn away from this one.
“I didn’t print it. I never said I didn’t write it,” Bob corrected his friend.
“Your editor would fire you for–”
“So? Aren’t there things you never did, even after you had everything you needed?”
Plumber dodged that one: “You talked about proof.”
“Thirty minutes away. But this story can’t ever get out.”
“How can I trust you on that?”
“How can I trust you, John? What do we put first? Getting the story out, right? What about the country, what about the people? Where does professional responsibility end and public responsibility begin? I didn’t run this one because a family lost a father. He left a pregnant wife behind. The government couldn’t acknowledge what happened, and so Jack Ryan stepped in himself to make things right. He did it with his own money. He never expected people to find out. So what was I supposed to do? Expose the family? For what, John? To break a story that hurts the country–no, that hurts one family that doesn’t need any more hurt. It could jeopardize the kids’ educations. There’s plenty of news we can cover without that. But I’m telling you this, John: You’ve hurt an innocent man, and your friend with the big smile lied to the public to do it. We’re supposed to care about that.”
“So why don’t you write that?”
Holtzman made him wait a few seconds for the answer. “I’m willing to give you the chance to set things right. That’s why. You were there, too. But I have to have your word, John. I’ll take yours.”
There was more to it than that. There had to be. For Plumber, it was a matter of two professional insults. First, that he’d been steamrolled by his younger associate at NEC, one of the new generation who thought journalism was how you looked in front of a camera. Second, that he’d also been rolled by Ed Kealty–used … to hurt an innocent man? If nothing else, he had to find out. He had to, otherwise he’d be spending a lot of time looking in mirrors.