Spencerville

Keith straightened his tie in the mirror and brushed the jacket of his dark blue Italian silk suit. If he didn't count putting on a sport jacket and tie for Sunday service at St. James, this was the first suit he'd had on since his retirement party almost two months before, and he didn't like the way he looked in it. "You look like a city slicker, Landry." He left the room and took the elevator down.

Charlie greeted him with some wariness, trying to judge his mood, but Keith said to him, "You're right, it's not your fault."

"Good insight. Let's go."

"The ticket."

"Oh, right..." Charlie found the airline ticket in his jacket and gave it to Keith. "I booked you to Columbus on USAir, nonstop. There's a rental car reservation slip, too."

Keith examined the ticket and saw he was leaving National Airport at 7:35 and arriving at 9:05. He asked, "Couldn't you get something earlier?"

"That was the next available nonstop in first class."

"I don't care about nonstop or first class. Anything earlier to Toledo or Dayton?"

"Dayton? Where's that? Look, the White House travel office booked it. I don't think there are a lot of flights going out there, buddy. Just be happy it's Columbus, Ohio, and not Columbus, Georgia. See the travel office later if you want."

"This is okay. Let's roll."

They walked out the front door to where a Lincoln sat waiting. It was raining, and the driver walked them to the car, holding an umbrella over their heads.

In the backseat, Charlie said, "I spoke to the secretary's aide, Ted Stansfield, last night, and he was delighted you could come."

"What were my choices?"

"That's the way they talk. Mock humbleness. The secretary of defense will say to you, 'Keith, I'm delighted you could come. I hope we haven't inconvenienced you."

"Is that when I tell him to fuck off?"

"I don't think so. He's prepared to welcome you back on the team, so if he says, 'Good to have you back,' you say, 'Good to be back in Washington,' like you didn't quite catch his meaning. Then you go shake hands with the president. If they've briefed him that you're wavering, he'll say, 'Colonel, I hope you give this offer your full consideration and that you'll accept it.' Then you say, 'I will, sir,' meaning you'll give it your full consideration and not meaning you'll accept it. Get it?"

"Charlie, I was a master of the equivocal phrase, an expert at the meaningless sentence, a scholar of the ambiguous word. That's why I don't want to come back. I'm relearning plain English."

"That's very disturbing."

Keith added, "I assume you didn't tell Ted Stansfield that I didn't want the job."

"I didn't, because I wanted you to have some 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.