The Art of the Devil (14 page)

He studied the guard detail circling the farmhouse, the light burning in the window, the silo rearing up into the night. He could see why Isherwood, whose recommendation had gotten Zane out from behind the desk, had worried enough about that silo to make a point of mentioning it. Ish's instincts had always been good. During their brief stint working together, the man had already been on a downward spiral, nipping regularly from his flask and vocally resenting the bust back to counterfeit duty. But he had remained an effective agent, and his eyes had blazed with irrepressible dark humor. Zane had not been there to witness first-hand the day Ish, drunk on the job, had sealed his own fate by insulting the First Lady – mocking Bess Truman's aloofness, doing an impression of her awkward flat-footed stance, and mentioning her father's suicide, all while she stood just behind him – but the story had since entered into legend. Afterward, Ish had been placed on indefinite leave.

Zane covered a yawn. Even in the heart of the action, the job of a Secret Service agent was essentially voyeuristic: watch and wait, remaining awake and alert. But this was the price one paid for the honor of protecting America's chief executive. And he would not have traded it for the world.

As minutes crept past, he found his mind going to places he had previously deemed off-limits. If in fact a cabal
was
determined to remove Eisenhower, he wondered, what men might constitute its ranks? He could think of several – any one of whom, distressingly, wielded more than enough power to wipe young Philip Zane off the map like an inconvenient spill. Colonel Robert McCormick, the passionate and radically-isolationist publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, came promptly to mind. Influential and ruthless, McCormick had resented FDR and his ilk (which Eisenhower, in refusing to dismantle the New Deal, had proven himself to be despite his Republican affiliation) for dragging the country into a world war he'd still considered unnecessary years after the fact. Although McCormick had died on the April Fools' Day just past, he'd left behind a legacy of slavering followers who remained willing and able to implement his ideals, and perhaps also his unfulfilled plans.

And that was only the start. Eisenhower had not become the leader of the free world without making some powerful enemies. There were bankers and business magnates like Kohlberg and Dwyer and Mordaci and the Wulff brothers, and Texas oilmen like Murchison and Cullen, and various and sundry munitions dealers and industrialists, all of whom saw little difference between the New Dealers and the Bolsheviks, and who could justify taking out the knives because America's nuclear monopoly had ended. And of course there were the politicians these men kept in their pockets: Jenner and Welker, who had lobbied hard to reverse Joe McCarthy's official censure, and Bridges and Dirksen and Mundt and Bolin and Potter, and key White House adviser C.D. Jackson, and publisher Mrs Garvin Tankersley …

Zane stretched until his back popped. He unfolded his legs, refolded them the other way, and sighed. Already he missed his wife. But, of course, this was the job he had signed up for. Exhaling again, clearing his mind, he focused on the lighted window across the farm.

Watch and wait.

THE TREASURY BUILDING: NOVEMBER 18

C
hief Emil Spooner woke, following a short catnap at his desk, with throat aching and eyes grainy; an overflowing ashtray just inches from his face made his stomach execute a sickly roll.

As he straightened, trying to collect himself, the telephone rang. Lighting another Winston mechanically, he reached for the receiver. His replacement secretary was young and inexperienced and, perhaps hoping to impress the boss with his resiliency, failed to modulate his chipper tone. ‘Agent Isherwood to see you.'

Wincing, the Chief glanced at the clock on his desk. The time was four minutes past six a.m.

Isherwood looked as wrung-out as Spooner felt, but a spark in his eye suggested progress. ‘Found our man,' he confirmed, dropping a file onto the desk.

Before opening the folder, the Chief lit another cigarette, forgetting the one already burning in the ashtray. Turning back the cover, he found himself perusing a military personnel file. The subject, one Richard Thomas Hart, was pictured in a black-and-white photograph clipped to the first page. The Chief absorbed the image, trying to learn something from the face. The uniformed young man was photogenic, his face boyish and unlined. Frozen in time, his gaze was steady and phlegmatic.

Richard Hart had been born on September third, 1921, in Saint Clairsville, Ohio. Twenty years later, he had entered the United States Army at a recruiting station in the same small town. During the war he had served with distinction as a sergeant in Company B, Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, seeing action in Salerno and Lazio, and on the Anzio beachhead in Cisterna di Littoria. The Chief looked up. ‘How'd you manage this?'

‘I got a name from a janitor in Charlottesville. Then it was easy.'

‘Huh,' said Spooner.

‘Since the war he's apparently been drifting, mostly on the VA circuit. Worked an odd job here and there. But left precious little in the way of a paper trail. Never voted, or even registered, or owned any property. Never married, and hasn't paid taxes since 1945.'

Spooner flipped another page, to dental and fingerprint records. ‘We'll Belinograph these to AFIS and ICPC. Put out an all-points with the photo and the name, see if he pops up anywhere.'

Isherwood leaned forward, claiming the Chief's forgotten cigarette. ‘Anything from Max?'

‘They've been putting questions to him all night. So far, he denies everything.' Lifting the phone again, Spooner hesitated. ‘Ish: how long since you've gotten any shut-eye?'

Isherwood only shrugged.

‘Going on forty-eight hours, I figure. Go home. Get some sleep. Meet me back here at oh-nine-hundred.'

Isherwood let a moment fall away. Then he leaned back, favoring Spooner with a weary gaze, and nodded.

ANACOSTIA

Each time the bell over the front door chimed, Richard Hart twisted around in the tattered lime-green booth.

The diner's clientele was working-class and varied, of Italian and Jewish and Irish descent. Time and again Hart turned back to his newspaper without recognizing the customer and resumed searching in vain for mention of a body recovered near Denver.

A peroxide blonde topped off his coffee without asking. He smiled up at her, sipped gratefully. The night had been long. His arm prickled; his leg ached. Scrabbling against the back of his mind was a thought he didn't want to face: Perhaps the agent had forsaken a visit home, traveling instead straight back to Gettysburg. Behind the gates of the farm, Francis Isherwood would be all but unreachable …

The bell over the door chimed again.

Benny Lynch was dressed comfortably in gray slacks, white T-shirt, and scruffy green army jacket that had seen better days. He had snappish brown eyes and a narrow face that reminded Hart of a turtle. Five years ago, they had formed a brief partnership as pickpockets. Hart had been the less skilled member of the team, acting as steer and stall and duke man, while Lynch, quick and nimble, had handled the actual mechanics.

Lynch slid into the booth. Lighting a cigarillo with a cardboard match, he shrugged. ‘Not sure.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Man showed up. Right address. But wrong car.'

Frowning, Hart reached for his crutches. ‘Hold the fort.'

Two minutes later he was out on the street, moving carefully on the icy sidewalk. En route to the Isherwood address he passed another man he'd recruited from the waterfront the previous day – a union buster named Morgenthau. Sitting inside a Hudson Commodore parked outside a Queen Anne-style rowhouse, the man held a military-grade AN/PRC-6 walkie-talkie loosely in his lap. Stationed around the block, five other men sat in similar circumstances, awaiting Hart's order. Where subtlety had failed, brute force would succeed.

Drawing near to Isherwood's home, Hart slowed. If the target saw him, the element of surprise would be lost. But beneath the low, even light of dawn, he perceived no sign of his prey. A petite young woman walked a dog; a courtly gentleman moved on and off the balcony of his rowhouse, dabbing at his nose with a tissue, bringing plants inside before the cold front arrived. Otherwise, the block slept.

Parked directly in front of Isherwood's porch was a spiffy late-model Mayfair. Across the street sat Hart's own Buick, in which Lynch had spent the night. Warily, Hart positioned himself behind a telephone pole near the Buick. A light burned inside Isherwood's rowhouse: a side window.

Hart watched. For a few minutes, the only movement he saw was that of sunlight gradually moving across porch, where ice shone. But at last a figure appeared behind the side window: Isherwood, opening cans on a counter as cats wound eagerly around him.

Hart scowled. While the hunter was bruised and broken, needing to hire out his dirty work, the quarry appeared to have come through the ordeal without so much as a scratch – and driving a smart new car to boot. The rowhouse looked cozy and warm. Inside would be a clicking radiator, a wallpaper pattern of spray roses, an upright piano in the parlor with sheet music open on its stand. Not just a house, thought Hart bitterly, but a home.

For another instant he watched, frowning. Then, using the crutch, he worked his way halfway back to the diner. He paused, took out his walkie-talkie, depressed the send button, and gave the order.

GAITHERSBURG, MARYLAND

For as long as the oblivion lasted, Max Whitman felt almost content: floating through a landscape of featureless white, revisiting his memories of Betsy Martin.

Every once in a while, however, a hole poked through the soft nimbus of insensibility. Then he became aware of less pleasant phenomena: a moist, moldy cellar, and blue-tinted cigarette smoke, and a burning lamp, and men beating him with brass knuckles and baseball bats, and clips attached to his nipples and testicles, sending jolts of agonizing electricity coursing through his body at regular intervals.

But after the shocks and the beatings came more comforting oblivion, which he wrapped around himself like a blanket. In this hazy netherworld, he was always a teenager and Betsy Martin was always on his arm, nibbling on his ear, whispering sweet nothings only he could hear.
I love you,
she said, and:

We'll always be together
, and:

Who did you tell about your meetings with Agent Isherwood?
and:

I don't bite, slugger
, and she squeezed his biceps, which he flexed agreeably, grinning.

Then she whipped the back of his legs with piano wire and he cried out in agony; and the clips sent another thousand volts coursing through his body, making him jitter and jive; and Betsy lit a new cigarette and talked in low voices with the men surrounding her, coming up with new strategies to get him to tell what he knew. Sometimes he surfaced enough to realize that she existed only in his mind. In reality she was married to a haberdasher in Connecticut, and he was in the cellar of a safe house somewhere outside Washington, being interrogated – often enough he had picked up the phone to send others to this same fate.

Who's in on it, Max? What are they planning? You may as well tell us; the game is up.

But those voices were shunted aside easily enough. Ironically, it was the very methods used by the interrogators which opened the escape hatch. After enough pain, Max was learning, the body threw a sort of interior circuit breaker, drawing numb senselessness close on every side. The worst these men could do was kill him – but they could never rob him of his memories. The blue-and-white plaid rayon dress, the kohl pencil, and hair like a fall of autumn dusk …

How did you communicate with them? How do they make contact? Why did you do it, Max?

Let them do their worst. Even if the interrogators threatened to put a bullet through the heads of his little girls, Max would not break. Because Emil Spooner would never allow that to happen.

The clips sent more voltage churning through his ruined body; and his bladder released, and he vomited convulsively, resoaking a chest already sodden with blood and sputum; and in his mind's eye, Betsy beckoned him closer, a knowing smile on her lovely face.
Ignore these goons, Max. They don't get it. But we don't need them. It's just you and me now.

A blow rocked his head on his neck. He spat out a tooth. And despite everything, he grinned.

CIUDADELA, BUENOS AIRES

The Cessna 310 sailed from a turquoise sky onto a tiny runway at Aeropuerto Ciudadela.

Taxiing to a stop near a cluster of weather-worn Quonset huts, the plane discharged Senator John Bolin onto sun-kissed tarmac. Moments later a 1950 Chrysler Crown Imperial limousine rolled up. A back door opened, and Bolin climbed into air-conditioned shade. Two men sat across from him. One was about the senator's age: dark where Bolin was fair, smelling powerfully of Aqua Velva, wearing heavily-decorated military epaulets where Bolin wore his travel-rumpled white suit. The other was ten years younger, tall and fair and blond, wearing pale linen, dabbing regularly at his temple with a balled-up handkerchief.

‘Senator,' said the darker man formally. ‘It is my great honor to welcome you to Buenos Aires.'

The blond gave only a slight, cryptic smile, and again sopped perspiration from forehead with handkerchief.

They drove along poverty-stricken streets, past small mossy cottages. Heat shimmered in a faint milky cataract over low gray mountains. Looking through his window, Bolin impassively watched Argentina roll past: a pathetic garden, a rotting fence, an empty and filthy bird bath, children playing on an overgrown lawn. A set of wind chimes hanging from a peg gave a bitter-sweet jangle. Even through a miasma of cheap aftershave, the air inside the limousine smelled vibrantly of jacaranda and ficus.