On the eleventh day the congressman and his lady returned to Mesa Verde, where to their astonishment they found Emmanuel Weingrass, a small cylinder of oxygen strapped to his side in case of a respiratory emergency, overseeing an army of carpenters repairing the house. Manny’s pace was slower and he sat down a great deal, but his illness had no effect on his ever-present irascibility. It was a constant; the only time he lowered his voice even a decibel was when he spoke with Khalehla—his ‘lovely new daughter, worth much more than the bum who was always hanging around’.
On the fifteenth day Mitchell Payton, working with a young computer genius he had borrowed from Frank Swann at State, broke the codes of Grinell’s ledger, the bible according to the inner government. Working through the night with Gerald Bryce at the keyboard, the two men compiled a report for the President, Langford Jennings, who told them exactly how many printouts were to be made. One additional report rolled out of the word processor before the disk was destroyed, but MJ was not aware of it.
One by one the big cars arrived at night, not at a darkened estate on Chesapeake Bay but instead at the south portico of the White House. The passengers were escorted by marine guards to the Oval Office of the President of the United States. Langford Jennings sat behind his desk, his feet on a favourite ottoman to the left of his chair, acknowledging with a nod everyone who came—all but one. Vice President Orson Bollinger was simply stared at, no greeting extended, only contempt. The chairs were arranged in a semicircle in front of the desk and the awesome man behind it. Included in the entourage, each carrying a single manila envelope, were the majority and minority leaders of both Houses of Congress, the Acting Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, the directors of the Central Intelligence and the National Security agencies, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General, and Mitchell Jarvis Payton, Special Projects, CIA. All sat down and waited in silence. The waiting was not long.
‘We’re in a pile of deep shit,’ said the President of the United States. ‘How it happened I’ll be damned if I know, but I’d better get some answers tonight or I’ll see a number of people in this town spending twenty years on a rock pile. Do I make myself clear?’
There was a scattered nodding of heads but more than a few objected, angry faces and voices resenting the President’s implications.
‘Hold on!’ continued Jennings, quieting the dissenters. ‘I want the ground rules thoroughly understood. Each of you has received and presumably read the report prepared by Mr. Payton. You’ve all brought it with you and again presumably, as ordered, none of you has made copies. Are these statements accurate?… Please answer individually, starting on my left with the Attorney General.’
Each of the assembled group repeated the action and the words of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Each held up the manila envelope and said, ‘No copies, Mr. President.’
‘Good.’ Jennings removed his feet from the ottoman and leaned forward, his forearms on the desk. ‘The envelopes are numbered, gentlemen, and limited to the number of people in this room. Furthermore, they will remain in this room when you leave. Again, understood?’ The nods and the mutterings were affirmative. ‘Good… I don’t have to tell you that the information contained in these pages is as devastating as it is incredible. A network of thieves and killers and human garbage who hired killers and paid for the services of terrorists. Wholesale slaughter in Fairfax, in Colorado—and, oh my God—in Cyprus, where a man worth any five of you bastards was blown up with his whole delegation… It’s a litany of horrors; of boardrooms across the country in constant collusion, of setting prices for outrageous margins of profit, buying influence in all sectors of the government, turning the nation’s defence industry into a grab bag of riches. It’s also a litany of deceptions, of illegal transactions with arms merchants all over the world, lying to armaments control committees, buying licences for export, re-routing shipments where they’re disallowed. Christ, it’s a fucking mess!… And there’s not one of you here that isn’t touched by it. Now, did I hear a few objections?’
‘Mr. President—’
‘Mr. President—’
‘I’ve spent thirty years in the Corps and no one has ever dared—’
‘I dare!’ roared Jennings. ‘And who the hell are you to tell me I can’t? Anyone else?’
‘Yes, Mr. President,’ replied the Secretary of Defense. ‘To indulge in your language, I don’t know what the fuck you’re specifically alluding to and I object to your innuendos.’
‘Specifics? Innuendos? Screw you, Mac, read the figures! Three million dollars for a tank that’s estimated to cost roughly one million five to produce? Thirty million for a fighter aircraft that’s been so overloaded with Pentagon goodies it can’t perform, then goes back to the drawing board and another ten million per machine? Forget the toilet seats and the goddamned wrenches, you’ve got much bigger problems.’
‘They’re all minor expenditures compared to the totality, Mr. President.’
‘As a friend of mine said on television, tell that to the poor son of a bitch who has to balance a budget. Maybe you’re in the wrong job, Mr. Secretary. We keep telling the country that the Soviet economy is a shambles, its technology light years behind ours, and yet every year when you produce a budget, you tell us we’re up shit creek because Russia’s outperforming us economically and technologically. There’s a slight contradiction there, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You don’t understand the complexities—’
‘I don’t have to. I understand the contradictions… And what about you, you four glorious stalwarts from the House and Senate—members of my party and the loyal opposition? You never smelled anything?’
‘You’re an extremely popular President,’ said the leader of the opposition. ‘It’s politically difficult to oppose your positions.’
‘Even when the fish is rotten?’
‘Even when the fish is rotten, sir.’
‘Then you should get out, too… And our astute military elite, our Olympian Joint Chiefs of Staff. Who’s watching the goddamned store, or are you so rarefied you forgot the address of the Pentagon? Colonels, generals, admirals, marching in step out of Arlington into the ranks of defence contractors and selling the taxpayers down the drain.’
‘I object!’ shouted the chairman of the JCS, spitting through his capped teeth. ‘It’s not our job, Mr. President, to keep tabs on every officer’s employment in the private sector.’
‘Perhaps not, but your approval of recommendations makes damned sure who gets the rank that makes it possible… And how about the country’s super spies, the CIA and the NSA? Mr. Payton here excluded—and if any of you try to railroad him to Siberia, you’ll answer to me for the next five years—where the hell were you? Arms sent all over the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf—to ports the Congress and I said were off limits! You couldn’t trace the traffic? Who the hell was on the switch?’
‘In a number of cases, Mr. President,’ said the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, ‘when we had reason to question certain activities, we assumed they were being carried out with your authority, for they reflected your policy position. Where the laws were involved we believed you were being advised by the Attorney General, as is the accepted procedure.’
‘So you shut your eyes and said, “Let Joe Blow handle the pot of hot potatoes.” Very commendable for saving your ass, but why didn’t you check with me?’
‘Speaking for the NSA,’ broke in the director of the National Security Agency, ‘we spoke several times with both your chief of staff and your National Security adviser about several unorthodox developments that turned up on our desks. Your NSC adviser insisted that he knew nothing about what he termed “vicious rumours”, and Mr. Dennison claimed they were—and I quote him accurately, Mr. President—”a bunch of shit spread by ultra liberal wimps taking cheap shots at you”. Those were his words, sir.’
‘You’ll notice,’ remarked Jennings coldly, ‘that neither of those men is in this room. My NSC adviser has retired, and my chief of staff is on leave attending to personal business. In Herb Dennison’s defence, he may have run a tight, pretty autocratic ship, but his navigation wasn’t always accurate… Now we come to our chief law enforcement officer, the guardian of our nation’s legal system. Considering the laws that were broken, bent and circumvented, I have the idea that you went out to lunch three years ago and never came back. What are you running over at Justice? Bingo games or marbles? Why are we paying several hundred lawyers over there to look into criminal activities against the government and not one of the goddamned crimes listed in this report was ever uncovered?’
‘They were not in our purview, Mr. President. We’ve concentrated on—’