“One of the last of the dinosaurs,” he often described himself to young colleagues with a deprecating chuckle, in his clipped, Groton-Harvard-hello, Berkeley Square accent. But he didn’t really believe it for one minute.

  Now he had tomorrow’s column well in mind. Obviously Sidi, whom he too regarded as “that old bastard,” though Sidi was ten years younger, was about to make trouble again. In what form or in what manner or with what resources—or when—Ray Stanley had, as always, been too tricky to disclose. But there was enough for a typical Jimmy Van column: suavely derogatory, smoothly denunciatory, grandly but stingingly disapproving of State and particularly a President who, for all his frequent hospitality, Jimmy regarded as both too belligerent and too hesitant, depending on which he perceived to be more politically advantageous at any particular moment.

  Jimmy would fax a copy of it off to the Oval Office in the morning as soon as he had finished it, he promised himself with satisfaction now. He expected the usual tart response, followed by the usual conciliatory invitation to “drop by and see me—call Jaime and have him set it up for next week sometime. We need to have a talk.”

  And possibly, either in the immediate response or in the talk later—which Jimmy fully intended to hold the President to—the wary chief executive would divulge the full story behind the Secretary’s little cat-and-mouse game at Dolly’s.

  * * *

  At the same moment, in her stylishly modern apartment in a stylishly modern building in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across Key Bridge from the District, which lay sparkling at her feet, Sally Holliwell was also turning in. She too had completed the same task as Jimmy Van and, in his comfortable old family house on Cathedral Avenue in northwest Washington, Able Montague.

  Sally was forty-three, “a tough lady,” as she was universally regarded in the world of Washington media, politics, and society, who had come up the hard way—“clawed her way up,” Able put it privately at the Press Club bar, from which it inevitably got back to her with the speed of light. But that didn’t bother her. She shook it off with the thick skin the successful develop in the fiercely competitive climate of television and the even fiercer climate of the Washington media as a whole. The customary response of the astute to insult or derogation—“It’s just jealousy. And anyway, I may need him (her) later”—concealed a wealth of personal affronts, disparaging remarks, outright feuds, and almost-but-not-quite burned bridges. Life went on roughshod over feelings that could not afford to be sensitive if one were to achieve the one great prize they all desired—power. Power meant success. And with it fortune and the exhilarating knowledge that one was Really on the Inside, In the Know, One of the People Who Really Make Things Happen in Your Nation’s Capital—and, by extension in this era of instant communication, the whole wide world. This was a satisfaction superior to none in many hundreds of shrewd, sharp, clever journalistic minds.

  Among whom, as even her enemies, who were many, had to concede, Sally Holliwell was indisputably and unchallengeably one.

  She had come to the capital a wide-eyed young reporter from the Los Angeles bureau of the Washington Post. In no time her quick news sense, dogged persistence, and slashing, biting style that fitted in so well with so many of the Post’s innumerable likes and dislikes, had moved her quickly to Washington and the national desk. From there it was a short hop (over several dead bodies, as wounded colleagues muttered later) to the congressional staff, and from there with the speed of light—“It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Super Sally!” as they also said—she had been offered a job by a major TV network, accepted, and in six months, developed, sold, and made as permanent as anything on TV could be, her lively, controversial, and justly famous show, Capitol Perspective.

  Now she appeared every Sunday before dazzled millions, surrounded by her corps of attendant news hawks, female and male—those of the former being those whose ambitions were either so well established that they were no real competition, or youngsters too new to Washington to be any threat to her. And always one or two guests, usually one from the Hill and one from “downtown,” where resided secretaries, assistant secretaries, and others permanently-in-the-news-for-four-years because of their administrative offices.

  By a stroke of what was known enviously as “Sally’s luck,” she had already lined up Joan Bourassa, thinking they might talk about the latest clashes in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian adjustments, and Willie Wilson, quite by impulse, at Dolly Munson’s. Their enigmatic sparring match with Ray Stanley had made her luck even better; when it became apparent that a new crisis might be brewing in the Middle East, her challenge to Willie had become suddenly an ideal situation. He had agreed to appear and she intended to confirm it with him first thing in the morning when he reached his office.

  He and Joanie would make an ideal combination this coming Sunday, particularly if by then the media had been able to smoke out what was really going on, or if the White House had decided to release it either through official statement or in one of the carefully contrived “leaks” that in recent years had supplanted so much of legitimate news digging. She also might—what the hell—call Johnny Jones and invite him to be on, too. And she knew she could get Jimmy Van and Able Montague; they were always glad to go on her show for the exposure and also because, as Able had recently broken down and admitted, “You’re always fun, Sally. You’re hell on wheels.”

  She enjoyed this rather mixed reputation. It would be a good show, and it might just light a fire under an administration that she regarded as incorrigibly tricky, devious, and crafty. Also, it would enable her and Able and Jimmy Van to make very clear their insistence that the United States not stumble headlong into another disastrous no-win muddle in the Middle East. She was, as she had told the Secretary, adamantly opposed to this, and she knew nine-tenths of the media were too. As she had told Ray Stanley, she just wouldn’t have it. She knew her colleagues wouldn’t either.

  Of course she realized her panel could be considered grossly one-sided, but she was comfortably aware from long experience with the American audience that very few of them were sophisticated and attentive enough to realize this. Anyway, it would, as usual, be concealed by the general liveliness of the conversation. And Joanie, though uncomfortable, would have to provide some semblance of balance by supporting the administration; and Willie would be somewhere in the middle; and Johnny Jones would be raving against the department, as always; and she and Jimmy Van and Able Montague would, by contrast, emerge as voices of sweet reason and cool objectivity.

  She loved the feeling of power she got from her show; they all loved their power. Satisfied, righteous, and content, mutually and self-congratulatory, they sailed untouchable through their days, never really challenged, never really held to account. “Always the judges, never the judged,” as Willie Wilson had once remarked. It was great and they adored it.

  She turned out the lights and took one last look at the night-bright city stretching away on the other side of the Potomac, the Lincoln Memorial seemingly almost at her feet, the Jefferson Memorial off to the right beside the Tidal Basin, the Washington Monument stark and straight beyond the Lincoln, the Capitol completing the panorama at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue atop the distant Hill. She, too, loved Washington, and unlike many of her fellow citizens, she did not despair of it. It was just a matter of keeping the government on the right track and giving it the infallible advice she and her colleagues were impelled, and superbly equipped, to provide. Like most of them, she took this responsibility very seriously. It was, after all, a great one.

  She closed the curtains and snuggled into her frilly but essentially austere and usually lonely bed. Very few men dared attempt a sortie against Sally Holliwell’s self-sufficient citadel. Virtually none, now, as the years advanced.

  She didn’t care.

  She had the power, and that was enough.

  It was impossible to overemphasize its comforts.

  * * *

  In much the same mood, a mile or so away across the river in his comfortable, big family home on Cathedral Avenue in the District, Kelly Able Montague was also completing notes, impressions, preliminary thoughts on what he would say in the morning when he taped another Washington Wrangle and WorldView. The first appeared on television Sunday mornings, the latter on radio starting at six PM. Saturday evenings and running at intermittent intervals on stations all over the country, all weekend. Both had large and faithful audiences, and both he enjoyed mightily.

  Washington Wrangle, in which he and a panel of four or five media colleagues shouted happily at one another for half an hour about major issues of the day, he described as “my version of throwing the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.”

  WorldView—its title always run together, never separated, never hyphenated—was “me and somebody famous playing Moses on the mountaintop,” one-on-one interviews with Cabinet officials, congressional leaders, and even, on several occasions in recent years, the President himself.

  It was about time to try for him again, Able thought now as he prepared to slip quietly in beside Claire, his placidly sleeping wife of thirty years. Particularly if Sidi was really about to go on the rampage again in the Middle East. This would make it extra hard to nail down the busy chief executive—or at least he claimed he was busy, Able thought skeptically. Like most of the media, he often wondered just how busy the President actually was. That they were never able to find out simply emphasized that the White House was still, for all the prying ways of today’s media, an impregnable retreat for a man who wished to use it that way. This one, annoyingly, did.

  Able had come to Washington in the zenith of the bright Kennedy sun whose dark side, turned away from the earth, concealed so many things. Subsequent unravelings of the myth had made him even more skeptical of those in political power than he had been before. In fact, his skepticism had a bitter edge because he had arrived in town a true believer. When that idol fell from its pedestal, it took the faith of a lot of innocents with it. None had been greater than that of Kelly Able Montague. None suffered a more devastating tumble.

  Able he had actually been in all of his professional life, though in earlier years people called him Kelly. Soon after coming to Washington in the bureau of the New York Times, however, he had assiduously begun to cultivate the use of his middle name. The excuse was the need to fit his often front-paged byline into the Times’s typography. The letter count in three names cumulatively as long as his was just too much, his employers thought. When he looked mildly displeased with Kelly Montague and suggested innocently that maybe Able wasn’t such a bad name for a Times correspondent, they had been amused and agreed. Very soon Able Montague, as he liked to recount with satisfaction to the journalism classes he occasionally taught at Georgetown University, became a moniker to reckon with.

  Having started as combined reporter and editor of a little mining town weekly in the Rocky Mountain West, he had gone from there to the Chicago Sun-Times, and from there to Newsday on Long Island, and from there in due course to the Times Albany bureau and from there to Washington. He was shrewd, sharp, tenacious, and, well—able. He had a round little figure and a round little face, always smiling, always friendly, “seemingly innocent as the day is long,” Ray Stanley had remarked after his first encounter with Able’s clever and often acrid tongue. “He’s all sorts of good things, but you have to watch him. He bites.”

  And so he did, prodding his contentious colleagues into the escalations of volume and disputatiousness that made Washington Wrangle such a highly popular show, leading his guests on WorldView into verbal traps from which they could not extricate themselves without all sorts of embarrassing political and personal contortions. It made him a justly famous national figure and a rightly feared interviewer. Ray Stanley had even gone so far as to paraphrase the old saw about Napoleon.

  “Able was I ere I saw Able,” the Secretary said. “En garde, all ye who enter there!”

  Able basked in this, as well he might. In addition to his own shows, he was a regular on several others; lectured from time to time at Georgetown to suitably awed and impressed young minds; maintained a profitable professional lecturing schedule ($12,000 a crack was his latest figure, and his agent promised even more next year); did an occasional op-ed piece for the Times or the Post, an occasional article for Atlantic or Harper’s, or even occasionally (just for the hell of it) the National Review.

  The pixyish smile and engaging wit that could slice a politician’s pretexts in two before he knew what hit him translated in all Able’s areas of endeavor into a most satisfying life. Everything was high-profile, high-profit, high-controversy—and fun.

  He did enjoy it, fully as much as Jimmy Van or Sally Holliwell or any other of the mighty panjandrums of the media who had been elevated to such staggering prominence and power in the age of over communication and perpetual hype. Words carried instantaneously to the ends of the earth—a raised eyebrow in Washington that could be seen simultaneously in Tbilisi—a skeptical expression in New York that sent its message on delivery to Cape Town and Buenos Aires—it was a fearsome impact and, as the best of them recognized and honored, a fearsome responsibility.

  Some took it as their birthright, earth’s rightful tribute to minds superior and all-knowing. Able was not so egocentric or arrogant. He had come up the hard way and gone through the chairs, as he liked to say, and he appreciated every day how fortunate he was to be where he was, and how necessary it was for him to be right. Like most of his colleagues, he never doubted that he was right, but in return there was never, behind the engaging grin and disarming personality, anything frivolous or irresponsible.

  “Able Montague is one of us,” the Secretary had also commented on a famous occasion; and by that he meant that Able, like himself, was one of that small conscientious fraternity of the bright and the educated who in essence sat on top of the world and ran it for the generally uninformed and unsophisticated billions who toiled along below. That they often disagreed among themselves accounted for most of the world’s ills and conflicts; but that was the price a not always grateful humanity paid for having their special minds and perceptions to guide it.

  So it was now with “Sidi’s latest fling,” as Able thought of it. The Secretary had obviously not given them the full details at Dolly’s, but Able expected they would come out soon. He intended to call the President and invite him to be his guest at the next taping of WorldView. The President might refuse, it was awfully short notice, but Able didn’t think he would.

  The bright and the educated would have to handle the new Sidi crisis, if there was one; they would also have to tell the masses below what to think about it. And that was where Able and his colleagues could be of inestimable assistance to the world. The President, well aware of Able’s audience, might well be pleased to take advantage of it.

  As for the thing itself, whatever it was Sidi was huffing and puffing about, Able was not impressed, just on the face of it. They had all been around the track with Sidi before. He was all bluff, and a bluff from weakness, at that. This was probably just one more bluff. Able did not feel half so annoyed with Sidi for bluffing as he did with his own country as he anticipated what he knew he would refer to as “overreacting.”

  If there was any one thing that had exasperated Able Montague in recent years, it was the American tendency to rush in with all flags flying and all guns blazing, at least rhetorically.

  It was true that the combined pressure of print and television influenced public opinion—and public opinion in turn influenced Congress—and various Presidents had in turn been influenced by Congress, in the long, winding chain of American responsibility and decision making. This had usually moderated the initial overreaction into something the media and “the sensible folks we hope to influence,” as Able liked to put it modestly, “could live with.” But it was sometimes nip and tuck, and on several occasions, the whole thing had gotten out of hand and the tensions had accelerated into unpleasant confrontations that could have meant real disaster if Presidents had not stepped back and thought better of it.

  Thus the first Gulf War—and the second—and now, who knew, maybe this new annoyance from Sidi would turn out to be another wild adventure.

  In spite of the media’s sound advice, public opinion might still run wild and stampede Congress, and get the White House wavering and waffling and drifting into that dangerously panicky and erratic mode where anything could happen. If they would just listen to us, he thought rather despairingly now; if everybody would just behave.

  He was as determined as Jimmy Van or Sally or anybody else he knew in the media that he would make sure that, this time, things did not get out of hand.

  Suddenly he was wide awake again. He had another source and he didn’t care if he woke him up. It would impress him with how gravely he, Able Montague, felt about any possible escalation of the situation. And he, Able, would make him realize that most of his colleagues felt the same way—so the White House had better pay attention.

  He slipped out of bed as carefully and quietly as he had slipped in. Claire, the thirty-year reporter’s wife, was so well trained that she didn’t even wake up, just mumbled something incoherent, turned over, and started gently snoring again. He put on his robe and slippers, went quietly down to his study, closed the door, found in the top desk drawer his little book of top-secret private numbers. Almost everybody’s top-secret private number in Washington was known to somebody in the media. Able’s list was one of the best.