Acts of Mercy

Fifteen

Maxwell Harper had been looking for the President for thirty minutes before he finally found him: strolling through the rose garden with his bodyguard, Justice, and humming one of those damned railroad folk songs.

Augustine stopped humming when Harper came up to them, squinted his eyes against the glare of the lateafternoon sun. It had been one of those sultry Washington false-summer days, temperature in the eighties, seventy percent humidity, and Augustine had loosened his tie and shed his suit jacket. His shirt was heat-rumpled and damp with patches of perspiration. There was a thin gleam of sweat on his forehead as well. His eyes and his mouth were solemn.

Harper said, “We have to talk, Mr. President.”

“All right, Maxwell. Go ahead.”

“In private.”

“We can talk in front of Christopher,” Augustine said. “He’s on our side, you know.”

“I think it would be best if we spoke alone.”

Justice moved his feet in a self-conscious way. Unlike the President, he still wore his jacket and his tie was crisply knotted. He said to Augustine, “I can wait for you inside, sir…”

“Nonsense. I prefer to have you here.”

Harper felt his hands clenching, an old habit when he was upset and one he hated in himself. But how could he be expected to maintain rigid control in the face of a crisis that, in spite of him, grew graver by the day? He wanted to say that this was hardly a matter to be discussed in front of a Secret Service bodyguard, of all people, but he curbed the impulse. There was no sense in arguing the point.

“Very well,” he said. “I suppose you know about the UPI story that broke a little while ago.”

“Yes,” Augustine said, “I know about it. I had a call from Senator Jackman just before I came out here.”

“How accurate was their quote?”

“Fairly accurate. They paraphrased, of course.”

“Then you really did say you would have urinated on those dissidents in Phoenix?”

“No, I said I would have pissed on them.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so shocked, Maxwell,” Augustine said. “I realize the word piss is still considered a little vulgar at Harvard and the Institute of Policy Studies, but it really isn’t, you know. It’s just a word. Besides, I was making a joke.”

“Joke?”

“Exactly. Isn’t that so, Christopher?”

“Yes sir,” Justice said.

Augustine nodded. “A harmless little joke.”

Harper stared at him. For an instant he felt as though he were standing there with a pair of ciphers instead of just one; that all of the President’s intellect had been abrogated, reducing him to a witless figurehead who prattled on about semantics and making jokes.

Trying to keep his tone reasonable, he said, “Mr. President, didn’t you realize the repercussions of a statement like that?”

“Belatedly,” Augustine said, but there was no apology in his tone. “Which is why I specifically stated that the comment was to be taken off the record.”

“Off the record? Then how did it leak out to UPI? Unless it was the Post reporter…”

“It wasn’t the Post reporter. I’ve known him for years and he can be a bastard at times, but he would never betray a direct Presidential request. Neither would the other two.”

“Then who was responsible?”

“There was only one other person present besides Christopher,” the President said. “I shouldn’t have asked him to sit in, I was a damned fool for doing it, but I thought it would be a psychological advantage to have him there, let him see how I was going to handle the media.”

“For God’s sake-Briggs?”

Augustine nodded. The sun burning against his face illuminated it so brightly that the lines on his cheeks and around his eyes appeared deep and sharply etched, like the scars of old wounds. “Briggs,” he said. “I didn’t expect he’d go this far, but I should have known he was capable of it.”

Harper’s hands had clenched again; he flattened them out against his hips. “I suppose we’ve all been guilty of underestimating people.”

“Yes. Well, Briggs is a dangerous man, there’s no question of that now. Something has to be done about him.”

“Granted. But what?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to decide, walking out here with Christopher.”

“And?”

“And-I don’t know; I just don’t know. I could fire him, that’s the obvious choice-”

“It’s also the worst thing you could do right now,” Harper said. “It would make a martyr out of him.”

“I know that, Maxwell. I’ve already discarded the idea.”

The collar of Harper’s shirt felt tight, sticky, but he did not lift a hand to loosen his tie. If Justice could stand the heat properly dressed, so could he. He felt Justice looking at him then, glanced at the man and saw his own frustration mirrored in the steady brown eyes; he put his gaze back on Augustine.

The President said, “There’s got to be another way.”

“I don’t envision it yet if there is. Beyond your being very careful, that is, not to make any more controversial remarks-no candid comments, no jokes, nothing that can be misinterpreted or deliberately taken out of context.”

“I have every intention of being careful,” Augustine said. “From now on I’ll exclude Briggs from press conferences and other public appearances; I’ve already informed him by memo that he is not to join us on the trip to The Hollows this weekend. But that won’t stop him. No, there has to be some sort of direct action. And someone has to find it damned soon.”

Harper was silent. The three of them stood in the hot sun, listening to the faint hum of a lawn mower somewhere on the grounds, the murmur of traffic and voices from the East Gate as the last of the White House tour groups left for the day. Listening to their own thoughts.

Augustine said finally, “Isn’t that so, Maxwell?”

“Yes,” Harper said. “Someone will have to find a way.”