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  At precisely two o’clock in the morning of what was supposed to be Lockwood’s Inauguration Day, former President Mallory presented himself at the alley door at the rear of the Treasury Annex. He had walked there, alone, from his house on Kalorama Circle; this had taken about half an hour, and the exercise had made him feel good. The temperature had dropped into the twenties, and he wore a black knitted watch cap and a heavy sailing sweater under a waterproof parka. Inside the nimbus of lamplight that enclosed the city, the streets shone with melted snow, and in the alley, where there had been little traffic, the pavement was icy. Mallory pounded on the door. As it was opened from within, a large rat scrabbled across the toes of his walking shoes—he could feel the grip of the animal’s muscular little feet through the soft leather—and darted inside. Lockwood’s chief of staff, Julian Hubbard, who had let the rat in, leaped backward with a grunt of surprise, letting go of the heavy door.

  Mallory caught it before it swung shut and stepped inside. “Hello, Julian,” he said. “One more feeder at the public trough. They’re all over this town—always have been. One Sunday I decided to walk over to church at St. John’s. A big fat rat followed me all the way across Lafayette Square. It even waited next to me for the WALK sign at H Street. As the rat and I stood there while the light changed, an old bag lady who lived on one of the park benches jumped up and yelled, ‘There goes Mr. Nixon!’ I figured she was a Democrat, so I wasn’t sure which one of us she meant.”

  Julian—no one in Washington, not even people who had never met him, ever called him by any name but his first one—listened to this story without the slightest flicker of interest. He belonged to a political generation, the one that came of age during the war in Vietnam, that regarded humor as an opiate of the people unless it came from someone who had the right to be funny because he was one of the people, like Lockwood.

  Still silent, Julian set off with long, rapid strides through the warren of the Treasury cellars. He was as tall as Lockwood, and even though there seemed to be plenty of clearance, even for a man his size, he ducked his head repeatedly as he passed beneath the larger drains and pipes that hung from the ceiling. Although he knew the way better than his guide, who kept making wrong turns, Mallory followed without demur.

  At length—the whole underground walk took at least fifteen minutes, even at a brisk pace—they emerged into a narrow moatlike space formed by the west wall of the Treasury Building and a concrete wall opposite, blank except for a thick steel door equipped with television cameras and a keypad security lock. Normally this area, used in daytime as a parking lot for high officials, was brightly floodlit, but now it was dark, and they groped their way among battered vehicles belonging to the night cleaning staff. The sun had not penetrated here, so there were patches of unmelted snow underfoot. Its sterile odor mingled with the metallic smell of rust from the dented cars.

  Julian punched in the code that opened the door in the wall. They walked through it into a well-lighted tunnel that led to the cellars of the East Wing of the White House. It debouched into a bunker, still furnished with obsolete military radios with dead batteries, army cots, crates of rations, and sealed jeroboams of fifty-year-old drinking water, all covered with dust. In this makeshift command post, Presidents of the Cold War era would theoretically have taken shelter in case of nuclear attack. Eisenhower and Kennedy were said to have come down here during air raid drills, knowing that they would have been incinerated along with everyone else in the District of Columbia and its suburbs in a real attack by even the most primitive H-bomb. What would they have done if the Russians had launched their missiles? Mallory knew what he would have done: launched the counterstrike, then taken someone he loved by the hand and waited in the Rose Garden, ground zero, to be vaporized.

  An elevator brought them to the ground floor, near the kitchens. The East Wing was silent, deserted, dimly lit and barely heated, in conformity with Lockwood’s policy of conserving natural resources and protecting the environment. Julian stayed with Mallory until they passed by the library and arrived at another elevator, near the main staircase, that gave access to the family quarters upstairs.

  “The President is waiting for you in the Lincoln sitting room,” Julian said, speaking for the first time but gazing with the same absence of expression as before into Mallory’s face. “I think you know the way.” Then, without so much as a nod, he strode down a corridor toward his office in the West Wing.

  Mallory was quite alone. He had not been inside the President’s house for four years. Now that he was, he felt no tug of sentiment. Even when he lived in it, the White House had always seemed to him impersonal, just another other public building.

  The elevator door opened. Mallory got in. The cabin, summoned from above, rose with an electrical whine that was louder than he remembered. When the door opened again he found Lockwood waiting for him in the hallway. He was in shirtsleeves, necktie pulled loose, half-moon reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. His eyes were tired, bloodshot. His clothes were rumpled; they always were. It was part of the image.

  “Hold the door,” Lockwood said. Jean McHenry, a brusque woman who had been Lockwood’s secretary since the beginning of his career, hurried down the corridor, grasping a sheaf of scribbled-over manuscript pages and a stenographic pad. “Just type that sucker up one last time. Jeannie, then go on home,” Lockwood said to her.

  Jean got onto the elevator with Mallory, who had remained inside with his finger on the OPEN DOOR button, and though she had known him for many years, she waited with an empty stare for him to get off. Mallory admired her behavior; Julian’s, too. Lockwood had good people around him, fiercely loyal people, and each and every one of them hated Franklin Mallory with a passion. Lockwood and Mallory, on the other hand, had always liked and understood each other. Both had grown up in poverty, one in Massachusetts and the other in Kentucky, and each thought that the other had a natural right to his politics that no person of the upper middle class (“That’s what you get when you send white trash to college,” said Lockwood) could possibly claim.

  “Working on your speech for tomorrow?” Mallory asked.

  “If you thought it was tough the first time,” Lockwood answered, “let me tell you it ain’t no easier the second, with the damn speechwriters trying to turn you into Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Ted Sorensen rolled up in one. Come on down the hall.”

  He led the way between walls hung with sentimental nineteenth-century paintings from the national collections—Mississippi steamboats, the Rocky Mountains, farmers making hay in some New England clearing while a thunderstorm formed in the west and wild-eyed horses hitched to the hayrick got ready to run away. Dear dead days beyond recall: Lock-wood’s specialty.

  The Lincoln sitting room, where Lockwood habitually worked at night, was littered with papers and books. In his day, Mallory had never brought work upstairs. He hated clutter; he had routinely fired untidy people or those who worked late when there was no need to do so. Lockwood cleared off an easy chair for him, dropping the stack of documents and looseleaf briefing books onto the floor with a thump. Mallory, still in his parka, sat down. A fire of sputtering apple logs burned on the hearth, but even so there was a chill in the air. Lockwood didn’t seem to feel it.

  “You changed the furniture,” Mallory said.

  “Polly did, right after we moved in. It’s two-thirty in the morning, Franklin. What do you want?” Slumped in his chair with his lanky legs stretched out before him, Lockwood was cold-eyed, deathly still, aggravated. At the moment he looked more like Tiberius about to pronounce a death sentence, Mallory thought, than the homely, joke-cracking rail-splitter of his media image. Clearly he had been stewing all day about Mallory’s note. “What’s this horse manure about election fraud?” he said.

  “It’s all in here,” Mallory said, handing over a thick manila envelope.

  “What’s in here?”

  “Hard evidence of vote stealing. The lawyers say they’ve never see
n such an open-and-shut case.”

  “What lawyers?”

  “Mine, and the three former attorneys general of the United States I retained to review the file.”

  “Only three?” Lockwood said. “What’s the matter, are all the other ones dead?”

  Mallory nodded without expression, as if no wisecrack had been uttered; this was his way of being witty, and Lockwood recognized it.

  Snorting, Lockwood dropped the unopened envelope into his lap. He pressed a button on the telephone beside his chair. “Julian,” he said into the instrument, “come on up.” To Mallory he said, “I don’t want to read your lawyers’ homework papers. Just tell me what you think you’ve got. Spit it out.”

  Julian must have been nearby, because he appeared in the doorway before Mallory could answer. Lockwood handed him the envelope. “Have this looked at—you and Norman, nobody else—and come back ready to talk about it in fifteen minutes,” he said. Julian vanished.

  Lockwood turned his hooded eyes on Mallory again. “Shoot.”

  “All right,” Mallory said calmly. “We should have discussed this days ago, but you didn’t return my calls. I have incontrovertible evidence, including copies of every computer keystroke, every telephone connection, videotape with audio recordings of the guilty parties working the computers, plus sworn eyewitness testimony, that U.S. government computers belonging to the Foreign Intelligence Service—these are located under that bank in New York City—were used on the night of last November seventh to alter the vote in more than a thousand precincts in California, and in several hundred others in cities in upstate New York and in Detroit. Whoever did this stole the election.”

  “Stole the election,” Lockwood repeated. His voice was toneless.

  “That’s right,” Mallory said. “You weren’t elected President of the United States by the voters last fall. I was.”

  “The lefties are right,” Lockwood said. “You’re crazy as a loon. No son of a bitch, especially not you, is going to come in here the night before I’m inaugurated and tell me I stole an election. I’ve earned every vote I ever got.”

  Mallory remained seated. “I haven’t said you stole the election,” he said without emotion. “And I never will say that to you or anyone else, because it isn’t true. I know you’re incapable of such an act. So does everybody else in the world. What I am telling you, whether you like it or not, is that your people stole it for you behind your back.”

  “You mean I’m so damn dumb I wouldn’t know. If you’re so goddamn smart, Franklin, suppose you tell me why anybody who worked for me would do such a thing.”

  “Well, you had a lot more than the election to lose. So did they.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ibn Awad.”

  Lockwood glared. “The fact that you sank low enough to call me a murderer in front of the people doesn’t make me one. I haven’t got a thing to fear from you or any damn investigation you or your friends on the Hill can put together, and I don’t believe a word, not a word, of this crap you’re dumping on me.”

  A moment passed before Mallory said, “You’d better believe it, my friend. Because I want what the voters gave me, and you have no choice but to give me what’s mine. None. Ask Julian.”

  3

  As the grandfather clock down the hall whirred and then struck the quarter before the hour, the phone rang. Lockwood picked it up. From a distance of three feet, Mallory could hear Julian’s overbred voice coming out of the earpiece—the cocksure tone, not the words.

  “Yes, damnit,” Lockwood said. “Bring Blackstone with you.”

  Mallory stood up, as if to leave.

  “Stay,” Lockwood said. “We’ve got more talking to do.”

  The President’s bony fists were clenched, his breath rapid; the ruptured veins in his face and in his misshapen nose, many times broken on the football field, were engorged with blood. Mallory knew that Lockwood was really a somewhat less cartoonish version of the good and sympathetic person the news media made him out to be. He also knew that he had the violent temper of a child. In days gone by, he had seen him shatter chairs against a wall when angry, or throw typewriters through closed windows. The physical signs he was exhibiting suggested he was not far from doing something like that now.

  Julian Hubbard entered, accompanied by the presidential counsel, a former Wall Street lawyer named Norman Carlisle Blackstone. He too was tall, but unathletic, with thick rimless glasses, stooped shoulders, and a sunken chest above a small paunch spanned by a gold watch chain. In the newspapers, Carlisle Blackstone—he was called by his middle name—had been cast as the Beau Brummell of the Lockwood administration. Tonight he wore a flawlessly tailored pin-striped suit of a pattern—four-button single-breasted jacket, waistcoat with lapels, high-waisted trousers with the suspender buttons sewn to the outside of the waistband—that had last been in fashion during the Wilson administration. Mallory had never before met him, and when no one introduced them, he held out his hand.

  “Franklin Mallory,” he said, as if Blackstone might not be able to place him. “You have the best name for a lawyer I’ve ever heard, outside of Dickens.”

  Mallory flashed the thin, quick humorless smile Blackstone had seen so often on television.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Lockwood said. “Have you read Franklin’s billy-doo?”

  “We’ve scanned it,” Julian said. “It appears that I’m a member of the cast in this … comedy, or at least related to one of the so-called actors, so Carlisle here will do the talking, if that’s all right with you, Mr. President.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t want to spoil the surprise,” Julian said. “The twists and turns of the plot will emerge.”

  He stared at Mallory, who gave him a thin smile. Blackstone glanced at Mallory too, as if wondering how much more to say in his presence.

  “Go ahead,” Lockwood said. “As you just found out, nobody has any secrets from Franklin—even if he has to hire every living ex-attorney general to make them up.”

  Blackstone cleared his throat and began to summarize in a dry, emotionless voice. Reading from notes on a yellow legal pad, he confirmed that the file presented by Mallory contained a collection of documents and other exhibits purporting to prove that a senior official of the U.S. intelligence service named Horace Hubbard, aided and abetted by an FIS computer expert named Rose MacKenzie, had used the Foreign Intelligence Service computers in New York to give Lockwood a plurality of the popular vote in all three states.

  “This is Julian’s brother we’re talking about?” Lockwood asked.

  “Half brother,” Blackstone replied. “Both these people are longtime FIS employees. Horace Hubbard is a senior officer, the chief of Middle East operations.”

  Lockwood, expressionless for once, avoided all eyes but gestured impatiently for Blackstone to continue.

  Blackstone said, “In any case, the number of votes allegedly transferred from other candidates to you, Mr. President, was precisely enough to win the election for you, according to this scenario.”

  “How many votes would that represent?” Lockwood asked.

  Blackstone consulted his notes. “Surprisingly few. About twenty-five thousand out of eleven million or so in California, roughly the same number in New York, and less than five thousand in Michigan.” There was a note of excitement in Blackstone’s voice; clearly he was intrigued by the numbers and by the audacity of the operation.

  Lockwood said, “Is what they charge true? Did this stuff really happen?”

  There was a silence. Mallory spoke. “I’d be interested in Julian’s opinion.”

  Julian said nothing. Lockwood did not instruct him to speak up. After another brief hush, Blackstone responded. “Well, sir, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? It’s impossible to say without running an investigation of our own that would examine the allegations. Obviously this cannot be done in the secrecy from which Mr. Mallory has s
o far benefited as a private citizen. Making the contents of this file public would touch off an epidemic of investigations by Congress, by a special prosecutor, by the courts. This file”—he tapped it sharply—”is a blueprint for—well, I don’t know what to call it.”

  Lockwood said, “How about pandemonium?”

  “Worse, Mr. President—another Watergate. With all due respect to our distinguished visitor, think who’d be on the other side this time. There’d be no mercy.”

  “There wasn’t a hell of a lot of that the first time around,” Lockwood said. “Give me the details. What have they got exactly, besides this theory of fraud? Is this coming out of left field, or will it stand up in court?”

  “On the face of it, they have everything they need except confessions—what purport to be television pictures of the culprits in the act of committing their crimes, voice recordings, duplicate files of everything the computer did.”

  “Purport to be or are, damnit?”

  “I can’t say from my own knowledge. It has the odor of fact. But of course it’s cleverly designed to smell that way. However, the bottom line is that it’s one hundred percent circumstantial. Obviously it would be a mistake to take at face value evidence submitted by a man who has the presidency to gain if he is believed.”

  “But the pictures are there, the words are there, all this stuff exists?”