Which seems like a bad joke, at first, but when he gets back to Washington and drops by the White House to see his old buddy, he senses that something is wrong. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman are in the Oval Office with Nixon; the president greets him with a nervous smile but the other two say nothing. The air reeks of tension. What the hell is going on here? Mitchell starts to sit down on the couch and call for a drink but Nixon cuts him off: “We're working on something, John. I'll call you at home later on, from a pay phone.”

Mitchell stares at him, then picks up his briefcase and quickly says goodbye. Jesus Christ! What is this? On the way out to the limousine in the White House driveway, he sees Steve Bull's secretary reading a late edition of The Washington Star-News and idly snatches it out of her hands as he walks by. . . Moments later, as the big Cadillac rolls out into traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue, he glances at the front page and is startled by a large photo of his wife; she is packing a suitcase in the bedroom of their Watergate apartment. And next to the photo is a headline saying something like “Martha on the Rampage Again, Denounces 'Dirty Business' at White House.”

“Good God!” he mutters. The Secret Service man in the front seat glances back at him for a moment, then looks away. Mitchell scans the story on Martha: She has freaked out again. Where does she keep getting that goddamn speed? he wonders; her eyes in the photo are the size of marbles. According to the story, she called UPI reporter Helen Thomas at four in the morning, cursing incoherently about “Mister President” and saying she has to get out of Washington at once, go back to the apartment in New York for a few days of rest.

Wonderful, Mitchell thinks. The last thing I need right now is to have her screaming around the apartment all night with a head full of booze and speed. Mitchell hates speed. In the good old days, Martha would just drink herself into a stupor and pass out. . . But when they moved down to Washington she began gobbling a pill here and there, just to stay awake at parties, and that's when the trouble started. . .

Then his eyes shift up to the lead story and he suddenly feels his balls contract violently, crawling straight up into his belly. “ WATERGATE BURGLARY CONNECTED TO WHITE HOUSE ,” says the headline, and in the first graph of the story he sees the name of E. Howard Hunt, which he recognizes instantly -- and a few graphs lower, goddamnit, is Gordon Liddy's name.