Spencerville

time to think about it. Have you thought about it?”
    “I have.”
    “And?”
    “Well, I took a taxi around town last night and did some deep thinking. I went to the Lincoln Memorial and stood in front of the statue of the great man, and I asked him, ‘Abe, what should I do?’ And Mr. Lincoln spoke to me, Charlie. He said, ‘Keith, Washington sucks.’”
    “What did you expect him to say? He got shot here. You should have asked someone else.”
    “Like who? The fifty thousand guys whose names are on the black wall? You don’t want to hear what they have to say about Washington.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    The government car went around Lafayette Square and approached the West Wing entrance from Seventeenth Street.
    Charlie said, “Look, Keith, it’s your decision. I did what I was asked to do. I got you here.”
    “They never asked you to sell the job to me?”
    “No, they didn’t. They thought you’d jump at it. But I knew differently.”
    “You were right.”
    “That’s why this meeting could be a little awkward for me.”
    “I’ll cover your ass.”
    “Thanks.”
    Keith glanced out the window. Directly across from The West Wing on Seventeenth Street was his former workplace, the Old Executive Office Building, a hundred-year-old pile of granite and cast iron, built in a style called French Second Empire. People either loved it or hated it. Keith was ambivalent. The recently restored interior was palatial enough to be embarrassing, especially if you had an upper-floor window that looked south toward the black ghettos.
    The building was about four times the size of the White House itself and once housed the War Department, the State Department, and the Department of the Navy with room to spare. Now it couldn’t even hold all the people who made up the White House staff and was limited to senior-level White House offices such as the National Security Council. The NSC was more or less an advisory group to the president, a clearinghouse for intelligence product that was produced by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, for whom Keith once worked, the National Security Agency, which dealt mostly with cryptography, State Department Intelligence, and the other spook outfits that abounded in and around the District of Columbia.
    People who served on the actual Council included the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and such other highly placed people as the president might appoint. It was indeed an elite group, and in the days of the Cold War, the NSC was far more important than the Cabinet, though no one was supposed to know that.
    Some years ago, Keith had been invited to leave his job with the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon and accept a staff position with the NSC, located in the Old Executive Office Building. There was less physical danger associated with the job compared to what he’d been doing around the world for the DIA, and the NSC office was closer to his Georgetown apartment, and he’d thought he might enjoy working with civilians. As it turned out, he missed the danger, and though it was a good career move to be working so close to the White House, it turned out to be not such a good move in other ways.
    Among the people he’d met at the NSC was a Colonel Oliver North. Keith hadn’t known the man well, but after Colonel North became famous, Colonel Landry became troubled. North, by all accounts, had been a good soldier, but working for the civilians had apparently been like working in a contagion ward for the young colonel, and he’d caught something bad. Keith could see that happening to himself, so he always wore a mask and washed his hands on the job.
    And now they wanted him back, not in the old building, but apparently in the White House itself.
    They drove up to the guard post on Seventeenth Street, and after a security check, they were waved through. The driver pulled up to the entrance, and they got out.
    There were more security men at the entrance, but no check, just someone who opened the door for them. Inside the small lobby, there was a man at a sign-in desk who verified their names against an appointment list. Keith signed in, and under the heading “Organization and Title,” he wrote, “Civilian, retired.” The time was 11:05.
    Keith had been in the West Wing of the White House a number of times, usually arriving via the little-known underground passage that ran beneath