Watergate by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online

operation—and needed something to show for his fat quarter-of-a-million-dollar budget—that was that. Bernie and the rest of the boys went in, as planned.
    Hunt showed his identification to the EOB guard and took an elevator to the third story, whose big black-and-white floor tiles suggested an infinitely extending chessboard, one whose alternating colors represented not the players’ pathways but the players themselves. He himself played for black. The opposition white was monolithic, totalitarian,fixed; but the black squares, his team, hid within themselves an abundance of different colors, all the shades of faction and party whose intramural conflicts could be as deadly as the larger battle. His world, the Free World, was seething with dissent and treachery; he needed to keep his eyes fixed on its black tiles, to detect and avoid all its obscure hues of sickness and appeasement, to steer clear of sinkholes and traps.
    He entered room 338, though it was room 214, the room at the Watergate Hotel, that remained on his mind. Saturday had become Sunday, and now Monday, and Bernie and the boys were still in the District jail. Hunt sighed as he lifted the telephone receiver and asked the White House operator to get Mrs. Hunt at her hotel in London. The phone here was more secure than the one at home, and there wasn’t much point in worrying about an overseas personal call showing up on the office’s monthly printout. He doubted he’d ever be returning to the EOB after today.
    Dorothy had just gotten back from an early dinner. She said she was going to stay in tonight: one could have too much theater, even in London. The two children she had with her would go out to a movie by themselves. “No, Howard, they won’t slip off to
Oh! Calcutta!
They could have done that in New York.”
    He tried to get on with what he had to tell her, but he couldn’t make himself get to the point. When he finally got near it, all he managed to say was “We had some trouble with the Watergate job.”
    “Wasn’t that a month ago?”
    With a deep breath, he launched into a concise, not-quite-complete explanation of how the listening devices they’d installed in May had malfunctioned and been yielding more or less useless information ever since. “So we had to go back in Friday night.” He didn’t tell Dorothy that they’d attached one of the bugs to the wrong phone. He also didn’t tell her that he’d been nervous the moment they arrived, returning to the scene of an inadequately committed crime.
    He could hear Dorothy managing her own breath, struggling not to interrupt, as he went through the story of the evening. He told her how McCord’s man, Baldwin, had waited and waited at the lookout-and-listening post across the street inside the Howard Johnson’s, untilhe was able to radio word to the Watergate Hotel that the lights had finally gone out in the Democrats’ offices. He explained how it was past midnight before the boys went into the office building next door. He and Gordon had stayed behind in the hotel, room 214, watching a late movie, waiting to hear Bernie come in over the radio and say that they’d finished.
    “Was Gordon arrested?” asked Dorothy.
    Hunt knew she was already worrying about Frances, Liddy’s wife, who was always so timid and baffled around her husband’s Horst-Wesseling hijinx.
    “No, neither one of us.” McCord had been the cops’ only white-collar capture. Yesterday’s
Post
had linked him to the CIA (retired); today’s edition had connected him to the Committee to Re-Elect, as its security consultant.
    “They got us!”
He imitated Bernie’s voice for Dorothy, explaining how the words had shocked him and Gordon to life once they came over the walkie-talkie. He and Liddy had managed to pack up the hotel room in less than a minute. The last thing he himself snatched up was the wire hanger, a supplementary antenna for the radio, taped to the balcony. He’d then raced across the street with it