NOMINATION

There was a burned-out quality to summertime Washington that Elmer Jessup reveled in; it was the only time he actually felt at home in the place. For one thing, it was empty. Congress wasn't in session, which was always a plus for the commonwealth. For another, the Democrats were all down in New Orleans at their presidential convention busily knocking each other off. The Republicans were on the way to the coronation of President McKay in San Diego. The President himself was still on his ranch in Arizona, pulling strings and twisting arms and patting backs to be sure he was renominated by popular acclamation. Best of all, it was even too hot and muggy for the tourists. In August, Washington was for connoisseurs of the bleak and the blasted. Which was why Elmer Jessup, Director of Central Intelligence, did something entirely out of character for him. He had his driver stop at the Mayflower Hotel so he and his aide, Nye, could watch the roll call of the states in the cocktail lounge.

They didn't go in through the main hotel entrance; it was subtler to enter by the cocktail lounge's own door, which was the kind of calculation that Jessup did on automatic pilot. They entered the darkened room of brown wood and dark red leather chairs and couches and headed straight for inconspicuousness, a darkened nook with a good sight line to the television set.

Washington, D.C., capital of the world, blocks away from the White House, and they had the baseball game on. Jessup waited while Nye bribed the manager. After the roll call, they could switch it back to that opiate of the people, Boston vs. the New York Yankees.

There was a nice muted feel to the place. There were fluorescents, but they were blunted; they were installed behind thick stained-glass panels. The only other light was from dim spots recessed in the ceiling, which seemed to disperse it before it reached the dark rug. Best of all, the air was good; almost as good as the limousine's.

The room was two-thirds empty, and no one seemed to notice the difference between baseball and politics.

He took out his tally sheets. It was almost as though everything would go wrong if he personally didn't watch it, supervise it, stay with it every step of the way; this thing was too important to leave to chance. Nye came back and took his own tallies out, and they sat there contentedly sipping white wine spritzers as the roll call of the states got under way.

Jessup didn't like conventions, but then he didn't like elections. What? You went around asking Joe Doakes what to do about NATO? The Philippines? The bomb? But he was managing to enjoy this one anyway; it was the quadrennial meeting of the Democrat Suicide Club.

He looked at the names supered on the screen — Halliday, Lindstrom, Rottenburg, and Stonewell — and watched California go ecstatically for the governor of New York, Richard Halliday. He winked at Nye; they'd been worried about California.

Stonewell could conceivably make trouble in November. He had survived twelve years of the shoot-on-sight politics of North Carolina and, unlike most of the Democrats, had a following throughout the South and Southwest. He also had the best campaign organization of any of them. The last candidate Jessup wanted to see running against President McKay was Stonewell.

Rottenburg, a Texan, a solid budget-balancing conservative governor who was willing to spend like a drunken sailor on farm programs, might be a threat. Rottenburg had the second-best political organization among the Democrats as well as eight children, which took care of abortion and prayer in the schoolroom; it was entirely possible that he could pick up the fundamentalists, which McKay would badly need.

The problem was that McKay had too many problems. An even worse corruption record than Reagan, and he had managed to do it in only four years; a noticeable fraction of McKay's political cohort was sitting out the election year in various federal correctional facilities around the country. Plus his former Secretary of State had turned out to be gay. Plus the worst unemployment since the thirties depression. Plus an inflation rate that was running at 9.5 percent annually. Going up against a morally impeccable Rottenburg would be chancy.

Then there was Lindstrom. An imponderable. Lindstrom was a pussycat from Ohio who in eighteen years in the Senate hadn't made a single enemy; in a low-turnout election, he conceivably could squeak past McKay and win it. Only Halliday would be a sure loser in November, and according to Jessup's intelligence, it was going to go all the way to Wyoming before Halliday won the nomination by an eyelash. He sat there happily checking off states, his numbers, so far, correct to the last half-delegate. Jessup's sixty-five-year-old pulse was beginning to make itself felt. Twenty years of mayhem in the CIA had not blunted his ability to get excited, to be on tippy-toes when great affairs were hanging in the balance. In fact, getting excited was his genius. He thought of it as his ability to be revirgined, to be able to go into anything as though it had never happened before, quivering with anticipation spiced with a little dread.

"He'll be the biggest beauty since Adlai Stevenson," Jessup said to Nye. "He'll talk over everyone's head and he'll win three states."

Illinois went for Halliday.

"If I were religious," Nye replied, "I'd say, 'Thank the Lord.' Maybe I should anyway; it couldn't hurt."

"The Lord had nothing to do with it," Jessup said, having managed to bribe the key members of the Illinois delegation into supporting Halliday. At least theyd come cheap; he had gotten nine of them for under a hundred thousand dollars. It always astonished Jessup how cheaply the typical politician sold himself.

"I hate to admit it, but it's looking good," Jessup said, showing a narrow slit of teeth that wasn't so much a smile as a simulation of a smile, or maybe a rough draft of a smile, a tentative, exploratory stab at some kind of nonhostile muscular alignment in the general area of the mouth. Everything was going as predicted. He ordered a rare second drink, but as he looked toward the waiter he spotted Anatoly Malenki half a dozen tables away. Malenki was officially the Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy but was undoubtedly KGB. Jessup considered him to be the slimiest man in America. Malenki and another Russian had tally sheets out too. Malenki looked over and smiled weakly. Jessup nodded a tenth of an inch.

Malenki had only just finished bribing the manager to switch the TV to the Democratic Convention when he'd spotted the most evil man in Washington strolling into the lounge. One of his eyebrows had gone up, an uncharacteristic display of emotion for him. The one time in months when he'd decided to go out — because there was no one left in either Moscow or Washington who could make trouble for him — and the Director of Central Intelligence strolls in. Out on the town? Drinking? Elmer Jessup?

Malenki was an unusual Russian. He had been born in Kiev, but his parents had immigrated to Brooklyn when he was six months old. He was eighteen years old when they had emigrated back to the Soviet Union. It meant that Malenki could not only talk like an American, he could think like one.

Malenki tore his eyes away from the Director of Central Intelligence and went back to his tallies. There hadn't been any surprises, except maybe Illinois, which, some thought, might...