The Devil's bed

chapter
twenty-eight

Late that evening, the president sat in a stuffed chair in his residence, sipping a cup of decaf mocha and trying to concentrate on revising the address he was to deliver at the Pan-American summit. The speech was weak. But his mind kept drifting to another subject, one far more threatening to him than the idea of delivering a less than perfect address.

His father.

Dixon put down his papers and thought about the only man who could anger him without speaking a word. What had shaped William Dixon, in what hellish forge his character had been hammered, Clay Dixon could only guess.

His father had been another man once, or so Clay Dixon’s mother claimed. When he was seventeen, he’d been a lean, long-boned young man with stiff, dusty hair and a cocky smile. He wore dirty jeans and scuffed boots and old western shirts. He’d been one of the hired hands on the Purgatoire River Ranch. And he’d been in love with the rancher’s daughter. He didn’t have a chance of marrying her in those days. The rancher was a tough, wealthy man, and he had no intention of giving his daughter’s hand to a cowboy who had nothing to offer her but an appealing face and more self-assurance than his circumstances merited.

Pearl Harbor changed everything. Billy Dixon, along with thousands of other young men, enlisted in the marines. He trained at San Diego and was among the last of the armed forces to reach the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines before the Japanese cut off the islands. He distinguished himself in the fighting that ensued over the next three months. When Bataan fell, he and seventy-five thousand other American and Filipino soldiers, most ill with malaria and weak from hunger and thirst, were marched along a sixty-five-mile stretch of jungle road on what would eventually be known as the Bataan Death March. He spent several months in the Cabanatuan prison camp before escaping with nine other men. They stole a small launch from a coastal town and, making their way by night, eventually reached Borneo and the Aussie forces there. But the war wasn’t over for Billy Dixon. He saw action at Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, earning himself two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star in the process. When he was discharged in the late summer of 1945, he came home to Las Animas County, Colorado, a bona fide hero.

Whenever she spoke of the war, Clay Dixon’s mother spoke of it sadly. Billy Dixon had gone away a cocky boy whom she couldn’t help loving. But the man who returned to a hero’s welcome and who was given her hand in marriage had become a stranger in many ways. Hard inside and distant. Although his mother never said as much, Clay Dixon believed that she’d married hoping she might somehow be able to resurrect the boy the war had killed. It never happened.

The ranch didn’t interest William Dixon. It wasn’t long before he ran for Congress and easily won. A few years later, he moved into a Senate seat.

Growing up, Clay Dixon seldom saw his father. He went to boarding school in Denver, St. Regis. Summers he spent on the Purgatoire River Ranch with his mother, who’d gone from being the quiet daughter of an overbearing father to the silent wife of an unattentive, powerful politician. She smiled little, drank much, and cried often, but always in the privacy of her home. Nothing was public then. She died young. Dixon never saw his father shed a tear of grief. He’d thought then that the senator had no soul. He believed something different now, that long ago in the body of a cocky cowboy his father had possessed a soul, but Senator William Dixon had readily exchanged it for the currency of power.

The president felt bile rising in his throat, and the anger that brought it up was not just at the senator but also at himself. Not long before, Kate had accused him of selling his own soul and that of the nation to the devil simply because he’d never made it to the Super Bowl. He was beginning to be afraid that maybe she’d been right.

The phone rang. It was Rich Thielman, head of the POTUS detail.

“Mr. President, the Technical Security Division has finished its sweep of the White House, as you requested.”

“And?”

“Nothing, sir. They found absolutely nothing. I checked the roster for the White House Communications Agency last night myself. The personnel on duty are impeccable in their credentials. There’s no evidence of a breach in the security of the communication line itself. I had Secret Service in Minnesota check the line at Wildwood. Nothing there either.”

“I see,” the president said.

“Sir, if you’d be willing to share the cause of your concern, I might be able to offer more assistance.”

“Thanks, Rich. I’ll think about it.”

Dixon called Bobby Lee at his home on the Potomac outside Alexandria.

“Thielman just reported on the security sweep. No bugs, Bobby.”

Lee hesitated before replying. “Which leaves us with the probability that someone talked.”

“And that brings me back to my original question. Who knew, Bobby?”

“Only Sherm, Megan, and Ned Shackleford. Our people. We were sure we could trust them.”

“Megan,” Dixon said, speaking of his congressional affairs adviser. “She’s good, but sometimes that Harvard mouth of hers moves way out ahead of her brain.”

Lee said, “If I had to guess, Clay, my vote would be Ned. He’s a little too ambitious for my taste.”

Dixon hated this. Skewering the people he trusted, wondering about his own judgment. “What do you think, Bobby?”

“I think we need to know what the senator is up to.”

“If we can figure that, maybe we’ll have an idea how he’s been getting his information.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Just keep an eye on him, Bobby. And make absolutely certain none of his people know you’re watching.” Dixon paused a moment, then said, “Jesus.”

“What is it?”

“Our people, his people. My God, how did I let my presidency come to this?”

“You can still fix things, Clay. It may be late in the game and we may be deep in our own territory, but hey, you’re Air Express. You’ve still got the arm.”

For the first time in days, Dixon allowed himself to smile.