Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [21]
Tired and tense, I stretched out on a couch, but as soon as I lay down I felt something hard sticking into my back. Reaching between the cushions, searching for the source of my discomfort, I pulled out a gun. A black nine-millimeter Browning semiautomatic. It was loaded.
Hurriedly, I stuffed the pistol back between the cushions, sat upright at the other end of the couch, then realized that my fingerprints were all over that gun. Alarmed by the thought, I wiped the gun clean with my shirttail and again shoved it back where I had found it, all my senses now on full alert.
At that instant, I heard the door open. In walked the Pro. He had been parked out front all along, waiting to see if I had been tailed. He said he was going to take me to see the papers.
We drove quite a distance, and while I wasn’t familiar with the area, it seemed that he doubled back several times, always with an eye on the rearview mirror. Finally, we made a few quick turns, drove through a shopping center, and pulled into a motel. The room was empty. No secret papers. We stayed there an hour or so, watching TV, then left.
“You didn’t really think I was going to give them to you, did you?” asked the Pro as we got back into his car. I just looked at him, full of anger. He laughed.
“Well, I am,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I am. Either you’re the most sincere guy I ever met or the best con man in the world. Anyway, I’m gonna give them to you. I wouldn’t if Hughes was still alive. If you had come while he was alive, I wouldn’t of even talked to you. I wouldn’t of talked to Colby or Hoover. I wouldn’t of talked to Nixon. Only Hughes.”
We drove for a while in silence and finally pulled into another cheap motel out in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we walked in the door, I saw three padlocked steamer trunks.
The Pro opened them without ceremony. It was the end of his adventure, and the beginning of mine, his escape from the hold that Hughes had kept over him for more than two years, and my heedless rush into that same harrowing embrace.
Two of the trunks were crammed with white typewritten documents, and the third was filled with thousands of yellow legal-pad pages, handwritten memos signed “Howard.” It was Hughes’s “in” box and “out” box for an entire era, virtually everything his henchmen had sent him, virtually everything Hughes himself had ever dared to put down in his own hand, a complete documentary record of his dealings stolen from his fortress and then sealed in a wall, unseen and untouched by any outsider except the Pro, until now.
All that night, all through the next day, and all through the next night I sat up in that motel room reading those documents, at first afraid to stop, not knowing whether I’d ever get to see them again, then unable to stop, completely drawn into the stark power of the story revealed in these strange secret papers.
It was “political dynamite,” all right. But hardly what the FBI or the CIA could have feared or even imagined. The memos were at once a cold-blooded tale of an entire nation’s corruption and an intimate journal of one man’s descent into madness. The great secret that Howard Hughes had kept hidden was not this or that scandal, not this payoff or that shady deal, but something far more sweeping and far more frightening—the true nature of power in America.
*Eventually, after two trials and two deadlocked juries, all charges against Woolbright were dismissed. No one else has ever been charged with any aspect of the burglary.
1 Mr. Big
Remote control.
There was no need to venture out, not even to stand up. The little silver-gray box had invisible power, and its four oblong buttons controlled everything. At the slightest touch it sent out a special high-frequency signal, silent to the human ear, but capable of activating an immense circuitry that reached almost everywhere.
Howard Hughes gripped the rectangular instrument.
Alone in the darkened bedroom of his Las Vegas penthouse hideaway, lying naked on a double bed, propped up by two pillows, and