Watergate by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online Page B

the State Department cables and the pistol, stood the pile of cash, from which he now took another handful. Should he take the Browning as well? He’d brought it here a few months ago, not for his own protection but to reassure a couple of secretaries who were nervous about a rape that had occurred in the building across the street.
    No, he would leave the gun behind. What would be the point in carrying it? Would he really let himself become a fugitive, or resist arrest when the moment came? He wouldn’t. After all, on Friday night, once Gordon insisted they go ahead, hadn’t he himself told Bernie to make sure he had the White House number, to call him on it once he got home to Miami;
to put it in his book so he wouldn’t forget?
    He’d even watched him write it down.
    Moreover, hadn’t he given Bernie the key to room 214 before the boys went into the office building? And once the radio rasped—
They got us!
—hadn’t he, even while grabbing the antenna from the balcony and scooping up everything from the room, left behind on the dresser a check that was waiting to be mailed?
Pay to the Order of Lakewood Country Club
,
$6.36
,
E. Howard Hunt
.
    Now, back out in the EOB’s third-floor corridor, he walked toward the elevator and regarded the black squares hiding all the factional colors of his side. He wondered which part of his own mind was really paymaster to the other. There was a part that had wanted to abort the operation; was there another that had wanted to get caught?

Chapter Three

JUNE 19, 1972, 6 P.M.
APARTMENT OF MR. AND MRS. JOHN MITCHELL, WATERGATE EAST
    “Have one,” said John Mitchell. He waved the Mexican lady with the tray of canapés toward John Dean, who sat on a couch with Fred LaRue and Jeb Magruder.
    “I’d better not,” said Dean, whose stomach had yet to recover from some octopus and pigeon he’d eaten over the weekend in the Philippines. He’d gotten word of the burglary on his way home, while changing planes in San Francisco, and had barely managed to make it into the White House this morning.
    “No one should have to go through two Mondays in one week,” he told the room.
    Magruder’s handsome, youthful face showed puzzlement.
    “The international dateline,” Dean explained.
    Robert Mardian, sitting beside Mitchell, snorted over Magruder’s ignorance. A Nixon man since the vice-presidential days, he’d lost out on the campaign deputy directorship to this collegiate dope and had had to settle for the vaguely construed post of “political coordinator.”
    LaRue watched Mitchell light his first pipe of the evening. The two of them had returned from California, without Martha, only an hour ago, but the General—as they still liked to call him four months after he’d left Justice to run the Committee—had decided that the five of them ought to meet here in his curved living room without any delay.
    “Where can we stuff them?” he asked. “Liddy and Hunt both.”
    “Maybe with Howard Hughes? Is he still out in Vegas?” Dean suggested, provoking laughter from everyone but Mardian.
    “Fred,” asked Mitchell, “do you still own that hotel out there?”
    “The Castaways?” LaRue responded, lighting his own pipe. “No, sir. We unloaded that years ago—one hell of a flop. And one more reason I should be back out makin’ money instead of workin’ for you guys.”
    Mardian gave him a quizzical look; no one but Mitchell knew exactly what work LaRue did. Magruder patted him on the back. “Maybe we could stash them in one of those houses you own down in Jackson, Fred—the ‘Cornpone Compound.’ ”
    LaRue was so benign a figure that even the younger men had no worries teasing him. But he knew the laughter in the room wouldn’t last much longer; they’d all soon be looking as miserable as Mardian. For a moment he allowed himself to think of his five children in Jackson; it would probably be weeks before he went down there to see them and Joyce.
    Dean supplied the last