Watergate by Thomas Mallon Page A

pause, he added, casually, “I’ve told Dean to deep-six the briefcase.”
    “Briefcase?”
    “The one that was in Hunt’s safe.”
    Neither of them worried about Rose’s hearing this exchange. Theyboth knew that when it came to things like this—and there were
always
things like this—her instincts were more ruthless than theirs.
    She looked at both their collars, appraisingly, and thought: If someone ever told
them
they had less than twelve months to live, they’d crumble.

Chapter Six

JULY 12, 1972, 4:30 P.M.
HOME OF MR. AND MRS. E. HOWARD HUNT, POTOMAC, MARYLAND
    Hunt heard Dorothy’s car pull into the driveway. He got up from his desk, covered the half-composed letter in his typewriter, and went downstairs to greet his wife, who had just returned from the Potomac Village Shopping Center.
    Her dark complexion could not hide a flush, and she was slightly out of breath, as if she were carrying grocery bags instead of just her black patent-leather purse.
    “Well,” she said, “I’ve talked to ‘Mr. Rivers.’ ”
    Her husband nodded, welcoming this pseudonymous newcomer to the company of cutouts and code names with whom he’d transacted so much of his life.
    “What’s he like?” Hunt asked Dorothy, knowing she had made the man’s acquaintance only over the shopping-center pay phone that Mr. Rivers had said he would call.
    “He’s like one of the Dead End Kids.”
    “Was he faking the voice? ‘Dese, dem, and dose’?”
    “No,” said Dorothy. “The accent was too real, and it never varied. He’s a genuine meatball.”
    Hunt nodded.
    “I agreed to be the conduit,” she said.
    Her husband looked at her admiringly, aware of the pressures she would now be under.
    “I’ve got to get a pad and pencil,” said Dorothy, walking toward the kitchen counter. “I’m going to draw up a budget. For us; for Bernie and Clarita; for everybody else.”
    “I’ll get Bernie on board,” said Hunt, as if offering to wash the dishes while she dried. “And he can figure out the numbers for the boys.”
    “If you call him from Potomac Village, try to find a differentphone booth from the one I used near Montgomery Ward. It’s got no door.”
    She went off to the kitchen to start calculating the Hunts’ share of the payments. Her husband continued looking at her for a few moments, trying to decide whether she was newly energized or ready to crack.
    Back upstairs, he resumed drafting the letter he intended to send Chuck Colson, recounting all that had happened in the three weeks since his own name had first appeared in the
Post
, a paper he never read regularly. He would try to avoid any allusions to
The Odyssey
(he doubted Chuck had done as well as he had in classics at Brown), but he’d been peripatetic to say the least.
    After leaving Washington on June 19, he’d spent a single night in New York before heading to Los Angeles, where he lay low at the house of his old war buddy, Anthony Jackson. But his presence soon made Jackson nervous, and as the days passed with no word about money or legal representation, Hunt himself had started feeling hopeless. Then, unexpectedly, Liddy—who even
now
wasn’t publicly connected to the break-in—had arrived, with cheering assurances that John Mitchell would take care of everyone, even though the administration appeared to be going along with the police investigation. In fact, Hunt could not get over the degree of their cooperation: in more than twenty years, the only element of the government ever to acknowledge his connection to the CIA had turned out to be the White House.
    Before June was over, he’d flown to Miami, hoping to see Bernie, who was at last out on bail. But the vans and cameras of the local news stations were all around the Barkers’ house, so he’d given up and gotten the next plane back to L.A. As July Fourth approached, weary of imposing on Jackson, he’d gone to Chicago to stay with Dorothy’s cousins. It was from there that he’d finally