Shall We Tell the President? (7 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Archer

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“Fine, thanks, Marian. I don't think you've met Special Agent Andrews of the Washington Field Office.”
“No. Nice to meet you, Mr. Andrews.”
“Good evening, ma'am.”
“Will you be long, Halt?”
“No, I'll be back as soon as I've finished briefing Andrews.”
“Anything special?”
“No, nothing to worry about.”
The Director had obviously decided nobody was going to be told the story until he got to the bottom of it himself.
“Where was I?”
“You told me to return to the Washington Field Office, sir, and check on Stames and Calvert.”
“Yes.”
“And then to call the morgue, the hospitals, and the highway police.”
“Right.”
“And you told me to check on the Homicide officers, get their names.”
“Right. Take down the following: check the names of all hospital employees and visitors, as well as any other persons who can be identified as having been in the vicinity of Room 4308 between the time the two occupants were known to be alive and the time you found them dead. Check the names of the two dead men through NCIC and Bureau indexes for any background information we may have. Get fingerprints of
all persons on duty and all visitors and all others who can be identified as having been near Room 4308, as well as fingerprints of the two dead men. We will need all these prints both for elimination purposes and possible suspect identification. If you don't find Stames and Calvert, as I said, see me at 8:30 in my office tomorrow morning. If anything else arises tonight, you call me here or at home. Don't hesitate. If it's after 11:30, I'll be home. If you call me on the phone, use a code name—now let me think—Julius—let's hope it's not prophetic, and give me your number. Make sure you use a pay phone and I'll call you back immediately. Don't bother me before 7:15 in the morning, unless it's really important. Have you understood all that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. I think I'll get back to dinner.”
Mark stood up, ready to leave. The Director put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don't worry, young man. These things happen from time to time and you made the right decision. You showed a lot of self-possession in a lousy situation. Now get on with the job.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mark was relieved that someone else knew what he was going through; someone else with far bigger shoulders was there to share it.
On his way back to the FBI office, he picked up the car microphone. “WFO 180 in service. Any word from Mr. Stames?”
“Nothing yet, WFO 180, but I'll keep trying.”
Aspirin was still there when he arrived, unaware that Mark had just been talking with the Director of the FBI. Aspirin had met all four directors at cocktail parties, though none of them would have remembered his name.
“Emergency over, son?”
“Yes,” Mark said, lying. “Have we heard from Stames or Calvert?” He tried not to sound anxious.
“No, must have dropped in somewhere on the way home. Never you worry. The little sheep will find their way back without you to hold their tails.”
Mark did worry. He went to his office and picked up the phone. Polly had still heard nothing. Just a buzz that continued on Channel One. He called Norma Stames, still no news. Mrs. Stames asked if there might be anything to worry about.
“Nothing at all.” Another lie. Was he sounding too unconcerned? “We just can't find out which bar he's ended up in.”
She laughed, but she knew Nick never frequented bars.
Mark tried Calvert; still no reply from the bachelor apartment. He knew in his bones something was wrong. He just didn't know what. At least the Director was there, and the Director knew everything now. He glanced at his watch: 11:15. Where had the night gone? And where was it going? 11:15. What was he supposed to have done tonight? Hell. He had persuaded a beautiful girl to have dinner with him. Yet again, he picked up the
telephone. At least she would be safely at home, where she ought to be.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Elizabeth, it's Mark Andrews. I'm really sorry about not making it tonight. Something happened that got way out of my control.”
The tension in his voice was apparent.
“Don't worry,” she said lightly. “You warned me you were unreliable.”
“I hope you'll let me take a raincheck. Hopefully, in the morning, I can sort things out. I'll probably see you then.”
“In the morning?” she said. “If you're thinking of the hospital, I'm off duty tomorrow.”
Mark hesitated, thinking quickly of what he could prudently say. “Well, that may be best. I am afraid it's not good news. Casefikis and the other man in his room were brutally murdered tonight. The Met is following it up, but we have nothing to go on.”
“Murdered? Both of them? Why? Who? Casefikis wasn't killed without reason, was he?” The words came out in a torrent. “What's going on, for heaven's sake? No, don't answer that. You wouldn't tell me the truth in any case.”
“I wouldn't waste my time lying to you, Elizabeth. Look, I've had it for tonight, and I owe you a big steak for messing up your evening. Can I call you some time soon?”
“I'd like that. Murder isn't food for the appetite, though. I hope you catch the men responsible. We see
the results of a great deal of violence at Woodrow Wilson, but it isn't usually inflicted within our walls.”
“I know. I'm sorry it involves you. Good night, Elizabeth. Sleep well.”
“And you, Mark. If you can.”
Mark put the phone down, and immediately the burden of the day's events returned. What now? There was nothing practicable he could do before 8:30, except keep in touch on the radio phone until he was home. There was no point just sitting there looking out of the window, feeling helpless, sick, and alone. He went in to Aspirin, told him he was going home, and that he'd call in every fifteen minutes because he was still anxious to speak to Stames and Calvert. Aspirin didn't even look up.
“Fine,” he said, his mind fully occupied by the crossword puzzle. He had completed eleven clues, a sure sign it was a quiet evening.
Mark drove down Pennsylvania Avenue towards his apartment. At the first traffic circle, a tourist who didn't know he had the right of way was holding up traffic. Damn him, thought Mark. Visitors to Washington who hadn't mastered the knack of cutting out at the right turn-off could end up circling around and around many more times than originally planned. Eventually, Mark managed to get around the circle and back on Pennsylvania Avenue. He continued to drive slowly towards his home, at the Tiber Island Apartments, his thoughts heavy and anxious. He turned on the car radio for the midnight news; must take his mind off it somehow. There
were no big stories that night and the newscaster sounded rather bored; the President had held a press conference about the Gun Control bill, and the situation in South Africa seemed to be getting worse. Then the local news; there had been an automobile accident on the G.W. Parkway and it involved two cars, both of which were being hauled out of the river by cranes, under floodlights. One of the cars was a black Lincoln, the other a blue Ford sedan, according to eyewitnesses, a married couple from Jacksonville vacationing in the Washington area. No other details as yet.
A blue Ford sedan. Although he had not really been concentrating, it kept repeating itself in his brain—a blue Ford sedan? Oh no, God, please no. He veered right off 9th Street onto Maine Avenue, narrowly missing a fire hydrant, and raced back towards Memorial Bridge, where he had been only two hours before. The roads were clearer now and he was back in a few minutes. At the scene of the accident the Metropolitan Police were still thick on the ground and one lane of the G.W. was closed off by barriers. Mark parked the car on the grassy verge and ran up to the barrier. He showed his FBI credentials and was taken to the officer in charge; he explained that he feared one of the cars involved might have been driven by an agent from the FBI. Any details yet?
“Still haven't got them out,” the inspector replied. “We only have two witnesses to the accident, if it was an accident. Apparently there was some very funny
driving going on. They should be up in about thirty minutes. All you can do is wait.”
Mark went over to the side of the road to watch the vast cranes and tiny frogmen groping around in the river under vast klieg lights. The thirty minutes wasn't thirty minutes; he shivered in the cold, waiting and watching. It was forty minutes, it was fifty minutes, it was over an hour before the black Lincoln came out. Inside the car was one body. Cautious man, he was wearing a seat belt. The police moved in immediately. Mark went back to the officer in charge and asked how long before the second car.
“Not long. That Lincoln wasn't your car, then?”
“No,” said Mark.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, he saw the top of the second car, a dark blue car; he saw the side of the car, one of the windows fractionally opened; he saw the whole of the car. Two men were in it. He saw the license plate. For a second time that night, Mark felt sick. Almost crying, he ran back to the officer in charge and gave the names of the two men in the car, and then ran on to a pay phone at the side of the road. It was a long way. He dialed the number, checking his watch as he did so; it was nearly one o'clock. After one ring he heard a tired voice say, “Yes.”
Mark said, “Julius.”
The voice said, “What is your number?”
He gave it. Thirty seconds later, the telephone rang.
“Well, Andrews. It's one o'clock in the morning.”
“I know, sir, it's Stames and Calvert, they're dead.”
There was a moment's hesitation, the voice was awake now.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mark gave the details of the car crash, trying to keep the weariness and emotion out of his voice.
“Call your office immediately, Andrews,” Tyson said, “without releasing any of the details that you gave me this evening. Only tell them about the car crash—nothing more. Then get any further information about it you can from the police. See me in my office at 7:30, not 8:30; come through the wide entrance on the far side of the building; there will be a man waiting there for you. He'll be expecting you; don't be late. Go home now and try to get some sleep and keep yourself out of sight until tomorrow. Don't worry, Andrews. Two of us know, and I'll put agents on the routine checks that I gave you to do earlier.”
The phone clicked. Mark called Aspirin, what a night for him to have to be on duty, told him about Stames and Calvert, hanging up abruptly before Aspirin could ask any questions. He returned to his car and drove home slowly through the night. There was hardly another car on the streets and the early-morning mist gave everything an unearthly look.
At the entrance to his apartment garage he saw Simon, the young black attendant, who liked Mark and, even more, Mark's Mercedes. Mark had blown a small legacy from his aunt on the car just after graduating
from college, but never regretted his extravagance. Simon knew Mark had no assigned spot in the garage and always offered to park his car for him—anything for a chance to drive the magnificent silver Mercedes SLC 580. Mark usually exchanged a few bantering words with Simon; tonight he passed him the keys without even looking at him.
“I'll need it at seven in the morning,” he said, already walking away. “Okay, man,” came back the reply.
Mark heard Simon restart the car with a soft whoosh before the elevator door closed behind him. He arrived at his apartment; three rooms, all empty. He locked the door, and then bolted it, something he had never done before. He walked around the room slowly, undressed, throwing his sour-smelling shirt into the laundry hamper. He washed for the third time that night and then went to bed, to stare up at the white ceiling. He tried to make some sense out of the night's events; he tried to sleep. Six hours passed, and if he slept it was never for more than a few minutes.
Someone else who didn't sleep that night for more than a few minutes was tossing and turning in her bed at the White House.
Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon and Robert Kennedy. How many citizens distinguished and unknown needed to sacrifice their lives before the House would pass a bill to outlaw such self-destruction?
“Who else must die?” she remarked. “If I myself there is no hour so fit as …”
She turned over and looked at Edward whose expression left no doubt that such morbid thoughts were not on his mind.
4 March
6:27 A.M.
Eventually Mark could stand it no longer and at 6:30 A.M. he rose, showered, and put on a clean shirt and a fresh suit. From his apartment window, he looked out across the Washington Channel to East Potomac Park and went over in his mind all that had happened yesterday. In a few weeks the cherry trees would bloom. In a few weeks …
He closed the apartment door behind him, glad simply to be on the move again. Simon gave him the car keys; he had managed to find a space for the Mercedes in one of the private parking lots.
Mark drove the car slowly up 6th Street, turned left on G and right on 7th. No traffic at this time of morning except trucks. He passed the Hirshhorn Museum as he crossed into Independence Avenue. At the intersection of 7th and Pennsylvania, next to the National Archives, Mark came to a halt at a red light. He felt an eerie sense of nothing being out of the ordinary, as
though the previous day had been a bad dream. He would arrive at the office and Nick Stames and Barry Calvert would be there as usual. The vision evaporated as he looked to his left. At one end of the deserted avenue, he could see the White House grounds and patches of the white building through the trees. To his right, at the other end of the avenue, stood the Capitol, gleaming in the early morning sunshine. And between the two, between Caesar and Cassius, thought Mark, stood the FBI Building. Alone in the middle, he mused, the Director and himself, playing with destiny.
Mark drove the car down the ramp at the back of FBI Headquarters and parked. A young man in a dark blue blazer, gray flannels, dark shoes, and a smart blue tie, the regulation uniform of the Bureau, awaited him. An anonymous man, thought Mark, who looked far too neat to have just got up. Mark Andrews showed him his identification. The young man led him towards the elevator without saying a word; it took them to the seventh floor, where Mark was noiselessly escorted to a small room and asked to wait.
He sat in the reception room, next to the Director's office, with the inevitable out-of-date copies of
Time
and
Newsweek;
he might have been at the dentist's. It was the first time in his life that he would rather have been at his dentist's. He pondered the events of the last fourteen hours. He'd gone from being a man with no responsibility enjoying the second of five eventful years in the FBI to one who was staring into the jaws of a tiger. His only previous trip to the Bureau itself had
been for his interview; they hadn't told him that this could happen. They had talked of salaries, bonuses, holidays, a worthwhile and fulfilling job, serving the nation, nothing about immigrant Greeks and black postmen with their throats cut, nothing about friends being drowned in the Potomac. He paced around the room trying to compose his thoughts; yesterday should have been his day off, but he had decided he could do with the overtime pay. Perhaps another agent would have got back to the hospital more quickly and forestalled the double murder. Perhaps if he had driven the Ford sedan last night, it would have been he, not Stames and Calvert, in the Potomac. Perhaps … Mark closed his eyes and felt an involuntary shiver run down his spine. He made an effort to disregard the panicky fear that had kept him awake all night—perhaps it would be his turn next.
His eyes came to rest on a plaque on the wall, which stated that, in over sixty years of the FBI's history, only thirty-four people had been killed while on duty; on only one occasion had two officers died on the same day. Yesterday made that out-of-date. Mark's eyes continued moving around the wall and settled on a large picture of the Supreme Court; government and the law hand-in-hand. On his left were the five directors, Hoover, Gray, Ruckelshaus, Kelley, and now the redoubtable H. A. L. Tyson, known to everyone in the Bureau by the acronym Halt. Apparently, no one except his secretary, Mrs. McGregor, knew his first name. It had become a longstanding joke in the Bureau. When you joined the
FBI, you paid one dollar to Mrs. McGregor, who had served the Director for twenty-seven years, and told her what you thought the Director's first name was. If you got it right, you won the pool. The kitty had now reached $3,516. Mark had guessed Hector. Mrs. McGregor had laughed and the pool was one dollar the richer. If you wanted a second guess, that cost you another dollar, but if you got it wrong, you paid a tendollar fine. Quite a few people tried the second time and the kitty grew larger as each new victim arrived.
Mark had had what he thought was the bright idea of checking the Criminal Fingerprints File. The FBI fingerprints records fall into three categories—military, civil, and criminal, and all FBI agents have their prints in the criminal file. This insures that they are able to trace any FBI agent who turns criminal, or to eliminate an agent's prints at the scene of a crime; these records are very rarely used. Mark had considered himself very clever as he asked to see Tyson's card. The Director's card was handed to him by an assistant from the Fingerprints Department. It read—“Height: 6'1”; Weight: 1801bs; Hair: brown; Occupation: Director of FBI; Name: Tyson, H.A.L.” No forename given. The assistant, another anonymous man in a blue suit, had smiled sourly at Mark and had said, loud enough for Mark to hear, as he returned the card to its file, “One more sucker who thought he was going to make a quick three thousand bucks.”
Because the Bureau had become more political during the last decade the appointment of a professional
law enforcement officer was a figure whom Congress found very easy to endorse. Law enforcement was in Tyson's blood. His great-grandfather had been a Wells Fargo man, riding shotgun on the stage between San Francisco and Seattle in the other Washington. His grandfather had been mayor of Boston and its chief of police, a rare combination, and his father before his retirement had been a distinguished Massachusetts attorney. That the great-grandson had followed family tradition, and ended up as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, surprised no one. The anecdotes about him were legion and Mark wondered just how many of them were apocryphal.
There was no doubt that Tyson had scored the winning touchdown in his final Harvard–Yale game because it was there on record, as indeed was the fact that he was the only white man to box on the 1956 American Olympic team in Melbourne. Whether he had actually said to the late President Nixon that he would rather serve the devil than direct the FBI under his presidency, no one could be sure, but it was certainly a story the Kane camp made no effort to suppress.
His wife had died five years earlier of multiple sclerosis. He had nursed her for twenty years with a fierce loyalty.
He feared no man and his reputation for honesty and straight talking had raised him above most government employees in the eyes of the nation. After a period of malaise, following Hoover's death, Halt Tyson had restored the Bureau to the prestige it had enjoyed
in the 1930s and 1940s. Tyson was one of the reasons Mark had been happy to commit five years of his life to the FBI.
Mark began to fidget with the middle button of his jacket, as all FBI agents tend to do. It had been drummed into him in the fifteen-week course at Quantico that jacket buttons should always be undone, allowing access to the gun, on the hip holster, never on a shoulder strap. It annoyed Mark that the television series about the FBI always got that wrong. Whenever an FBI man sensed danger, he would fiddle with that middle button to make sure his coat was open. Mark sensed fear, fear of the unknown, fear of H.A.L. Tyson, fear which an accessible Smith and Wesson could not cure.
The anonymous young man with the vigilant look and the dark blue blazer returned.
“The Director will see you now.”
Mark rose, felt unsteady, braced himself, rubbed his hands against his trousers to remove the sweat from his palms and followed the anonymous man through the outer office and into the Director's inner sanctum. The Director glanced up, waved him to a chair, and waited for the anonymous man to leave the room and close the door. Even seated, the Director was a bull of a man with a large head placed squarely on massive shoulders. Bushy eyebrows matched his careless, wiry brown hair; it was so curly you might have thought it was a wig if it hadn't been H.A.L. Tyson. His big hands remained splayed on the surface as though the desk might try to get away. The delicate Queen Anne desk was quite subdued by the grip
of the Director. His cheeks were red, not the red of alcohol, but the red of good and bad weather. Slightly back from the Director's chair stood another man, muscular, clean-shaven, and silent, a policeman's policeman.
The Director spoke. “Andrews, this is Assistant Director Matthew Rogers. I have briefed him on the events following Casefikis's death: we will be putting several agents on the investigation with you.” The Director's gray eyes were piercing—piercing Mark. “I lost two of my best men yesterday, Andrews, and nothing—I repeat, nothing—will stop me from finding out who was responsible, even if it was the President herself, you understand.”
“Yes, sir,” Mark said very quietly.
“You will have gathered from the press releases we gave that the public is under the impression that what happened yesterday evening was just another automobile accident. No journalist has connected the murders in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center with the deaths of my agents. Why should they, with a murder every twenty-six minutes in America?”
A Metropolitan Police file marked “Chief of Metropolitan Police” was by his side; even they were under control.
“We, Mr. Andrews …”
It made Mark feel slightly royal.
“ … we are not going to disillusion them. I have been going over carefully what you told me last night. I'll summarize the situation as I see it. Please feel free to interrupt me whenever you want to.”
Under normal circumstances, Mark would have laughed.
The Director was looking at the file.
“The Greek immigrant wanted to see the head of the FBI,” he continued. “Perhaps I should have granted his request, had I known about it.” He looked up. “Still, the facts: Casefikis made an oral statement to you at Woodrow Wilson, and the gist of it was that he believed that there was a plot in motion to assassinate the President of the United States on 10 March; he overheard this information while waiting on a private lunch in a Georgetown hotel, at which he thought a U.S. senator was present. Is that correct so far, Andrews?”
“Yes, sir.”
Once more the Director looked down at the file.
“The police took prints of the dead man, and he hasn't shown up in our files or in the Metropolitan Police files. So for the moment we must act on the assumption, after last night's four killings, that everything the Greek immigrant told us was in good faith. He may not have got the story entirely accurately, but he certainly was on to something big enough to cause four murders in one night. I think we may also assume that whoever the people are behind these diabolical events, they believe they are now in the clear and that they have killed anyone who might have known of their plans. You may consider yourself lucky, young man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose it had crossed your mind that they thought it was you in the blue Ford sedan?”
Mark nodded. He had thought of little else for the past ten hours; he hoped Norma Stames would never think of it.
“I want these conspirators to think they are now in the clear and for that reason, I am going to allow the President's schedule for the week to continue as planned, at least for the moment.”
Mark ventured a question. “But, sir, won't that put her in grave danger?”
“Andrews, somebody, somewhere, and it may be a United States senator, is planning to assassinate the President; so far, he has been prepared to murder two of my best agents, a Greek who might have recognized him, and a deaf postman whose only connection with the matter was that he may have been able to identify Casefikis's killer. If we rush in now with the heavy artillery, then we will scare them off. We have almost nothing to go on; we would be unlikely to discover their identities. And if we did, we certainly wouldn't be able to nail them. Our only hope of catching them is to let the bastards think they are in the clear—right up to the last moment. That way, we just might get them. It's possible they have already been frightened off, but I think not. They have used such violent means to keep their intentions secret they must have some overriding reason for wanting the President out of the way within seven days. We must find out what the reason is.”
“Shall we tell the President?”
“No, no, not yet. God knows, over the past two years she's had enough problems with the Gun Control bill
without having to look over her shoulder trying to figure out which senator is Mark Antony and which is Brutus.”
“So what do we do for the next six days?”
“You and I will have to find Cassius. And he may not be the one with the lean and hungry look.”
“What if we don't find him?” asked Mark.
“God help America.”
“And if we do?”
“You may have to kill him.”
Mark thought for a moment. He'd never killed anybody in his life; come to think of it, he hadn't knowingly killed anything at all. He didn't like stepping on insects. And the thought that the first person he might kill could be a U.S. senator was, to say the least, daunting.

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