Truth Like the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

stories about China getting its own bomb and the Birchers calling city hall’s fluoridation plan a Communist ploy until he finds a short piece inside the
P-I
about the note a Pioneer Square tavern owner posted in his window:
Thank you for your patronage for the past three years. This tavern has been forced to close because I refused to make further extortion payments to the racket whose enforcers are members of the city’s police force. I am willing to take a lie detector test, though I know the great white chief and the lord high mayor dare not
.
    There was nothing more from the bar owner, Charlie McDaniel, and little from the police other than a brief comment that his accusation lacked credibility.
    “The guy’s a crackpot,” Teddy says, reading over his shoulder. “A real nut job.”
    At the NASA conference that afternoon, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s opening speech is instantly forgettable, but that doesn’t matter. The place is overrun with reporters as attention swings from Glenn to unknown pilots and scientists, then back to the famous astronaut. People shout questions, drowning out reporters. “See any UFOs up there, John?”
    Afterward, amid a dizzying crush, the vice president and other politicos are served Olympia oysters and Dungeness crab legs atop the Needle. This is where Roger has most of his meals now, usually with out-of-town CEOs fishing for tax breaks and cheap properties. He softens them with his recruitment chatter, gets them drunk, finds out their needs and timelines, then watches their excitement build during the hour it takes the dining room to make a complete revolution. As the sun sinks behind the Olympics, he hears himself making promises he can’t keep, but it’s festive handshakes all around with everyone vowing to do their damnedest. Then he’s off to work on the grain exporters or the auto dealers or the aluminum manufacturers. But this is a political gathering, with LBJ’s presence attracting a senator, the mayor, a congressman and the local U.S. attorney. And the more festive it gets, the darker Roger’s mood becomes, his worries going well beyond the fair. It’s what wasn’t said at the conference that alarms him, such as Kennedy’s announcement this morning that atomic testing will resume and, almost as an aside, that the Pentagon is installing long-range missiles about a hundred miles southeast of Seattle.
    He studies Johnson’s furrowed face, his jowly mug a vault of secrets. His aides had cryptically hinted that he almost didn’t fly out at all. As if sensing the scrutiny, he suddenly focuses his hound-dog eyes on Roger. “Let’s pop outside and chew the fat.”
    They excuse themselves and head up to the observation deck, where LBJ sticks out a big hand, keeping his security boys out of earshot, then breaks wind noisily. Roger braces himself for whatever he intends to confide, desperately wanting the conversation to develop before someone interrupts them. Teddy’s right. Everything
is
starting to piece together. Kennedy’s oddly foreboding words at the opening ceremony. The jarheads insisting on a bomb shelter beneath the Science Pavilion as well as the sudden construction of an underground hideout on Sixty-fifth Street to house as many as two hundred people during an attack. It occurs to him in a hot flash that the word
Seattle
might come to mean something entirely different in the future, as
Hiroshima
would never again be just a Japanese city. He can’t resist asking, “Is there any reason to think, sir, that Seattle is a target?”
    LBJ looks away, smacking his lips. “Lots of mustaches in this town.”
    Roger counts to five, then says, “So, sir, is—”
    “I almost couldn’t fly out here, son,” he twangs, squinting at the anchored freighters bobbing like toys in Elliott Bay.
    Here we go
, Roger thinks, grabbing the railing. “Why’s that, sir?” he drawls, as if they hailed from the same sun-baked Texas county.
    “Got a swollen right testicle,”