The Machiavelli Covenant (4 page)

Today was President Harris's 369th day in office: exactly one year and four days since, as vice president of the United States, he had assumed office following the sudden death of President Charles Singleton Cabot; 153 days since he had been re-elected president in an extremely close election; 76 days since his inauguration.

As president, the former vice president and senator
from California had made it a campaign pledge to lessen the image of the U.S. as a pugnacious, aggressive superpower and make it more a partner in an increasingly complex global marketplace. His mission in Europe was to warm the still-chilly atmosphere created by America's near-unilateral decision to invade Iraq and the long and bloody aftermath following it. His meeting with the French president today was the first in a week-long series of face-to-face engagements with the heads of the European Union before they all met formally at a NATO summit this coming Monday, April 10, in Warsaw where he hoped to announce a newfound unity.

The trouble was, for all the outward signs of openness and the willingness of the heads of state to meet with him, there was the very real sense it wouldn't work. At least not with the two leaders of primary importance: French president Géroux and Anna Amalie Bohlen, the chancellor of Germany, with whom he would meet this evening in Berlin. What to do about it, especially now after his face-to-face closed-door session with Géroux, was something else and something he needed to weigh before discussing it with even his closest advisers. Thinking before talking had long been his habit, and everyone knew it. It was why he knew they would leave him alone on Air Force One when they made the comparatively short hop to Berlin.

Yet now, as he smiled and chatted with President Géroux as they approached a bank of microphones where they would address a larger gaggle of media, his thoughts were not so much on the state of international affairs but on the recent deaths of Congressman Mike Parsons and his son, and the heartbreaking passing of Mike's wife, Caroline.

John Henry Harris and Parsons had grown up within a
mile of each other in the dusty California farming town of Salinas. Fourteen years older, and first as a babysitter when he even changed his diapers, and later simply as a pal, Johnny Harris had been a surrogate older brother to Parsons from the time he had been in junior high school until he left for college on the East Coast. Years later he had been best man at Parsons's marriage to Caroline and then helped him in his run for a congressional seat. In return Parsons and Caroline had been hugely supportive of his own senatorial and presidential campaigns in California. And both had been exceedingly kind and supportive of himself and his wife, Lori, during a long and exhausting battle with the brain cancer that took her life just a week before the presidential election. That long personal history made Mike and Caroline Parsons, along with their son, Charlie, about as close to family as people could get and their tragic deaths at such a young age and so hurriedly following each other had staggered him. He had attended the funeral of Mike and Charlie and would have gone to Caroline's memorial service had not this vastly important European trip already been scheduled.

Now, as seemingly a thousand cameras clicked and whirred and he and President Géroux approached the microphones, he could not help but think of the tableau when he had entered Caroline's hospital room that final night to see her illness-ravaged body lying deathly still under the bedcovers and the young man at her bedside looking up at him.

"Please," he'd said softly, "give me a moment alone with her. . . . She's just . . . died."

The memory of it made him wonder just who this man was. In all the years he had known Mike and Caroline he had never met or even seen him until that moment. Yet he was clearly someone who knew Caroline
well enough to be the only person with her when she died and be moved enough to ask the president of the United States for the privacy to be alone with her for a few moments longer.

"Mr. President," French president Géroux guided him to the microphones, "this is Paris on a glorious day in April. Perhaps you have something to say to the people of France."

"Je vous remercie, M. le Président."
I do, Mr. President, thank you, Harris said in French, smiling comfortably as was his nature. It had all been rehearsed of course, as was the short speech he would give in French to the Gallic people about the long tradition of reliance, friendship, and trust between their nation and the United States. Still, as he stepped to the microphones, a part of him was thinking of the young man who had been with Caroline when she'd died, and he made a mental note to have someone find out who he was.

•
WASHINGTON, D.C., 11:15 A.M.

Nicholas Marten walked slowly through the wood-paneled study of the Parsons' modest home in suburban Maryland trying to do nothing more than look around. Trying not to feel the gaping hole of Caroline's absence, trying not to let himself think that nothing had happened and expect she would walk through the door at any moment.

Her touches were everywhere, especially in the abundance of house plants intermixed with carefully placed
brightly colored ceramic knickknacks: a tiny shoe from Italy, a glazed platter from New Mexico, two small pitchers from Holland sitting back to back, a brilliant yellow and green ceramic spoon holder from Spain. The effect was a cheeriness that was clearly Caroline. Yet for all of it, this was unmistakably her husband's room, his home office. His desk was a maze of books and papers. More books were crammed every which way into two large bookcases with the overflow stacked on the floor.

Everywhere were framed photographs: of Mike and Caroline and their son, Charlie, taken at various times over the years; of Caroline's older sister, Katy, who lived in Hawaii and took care of their mother who had Alzheimer's, and who had just been in Washington for Mike and Charlie's funeral and who might or might not be returning for Caroline's memorial service scheduled for tomorrow—he hadn't been in touch with her and so didn't know. There were pictures too of Mike in his professional role as a congressman: with the president, with various members of Congress, with prominent sports and entertainment figures. Many of these people were outspoken liberals, while Mike Parsons, like the president, had been strongly conservative. Marten smiled. Everybody had liked Mike Parsons and which side of the fence you sat on politically meant nothing at all, at least on a personal level. That was, as far as he knew.

Marten looked around once more. Past Mike Parsons's desk and through the open door to the living room he could see Richard Tyler, Caroline's attorney and executor of her estate, pacing back and forth talking on his cell phone. Tyler was the reason he was there. He had called him the first thing that morning and asked if, in light of Caroline's notarized letter giving him access to
her and her husband's papers, he might not spend a few hours in the Parsons' home going through some of their personal things. Tyler had conferred with colleagues in his office and then agreed, with the proviso that Tyler himself be present when he did. Tyler had even picked Marten up at his hotel and personally brought him to the house.

The drive through the suburbs had been genial enough but in it there had been something odd, or rather something not discussed, something Marten had purposely left for Tyler to bring up, and he hadn't. The same way no one else seemed to have brought it up either, because it wasn't in the papers or on television or the Internet—the suicide of Dr. Stephenson.

In her own way Lorraine Stephenson had been a celebrity. Not only had she been Caroline's doctor, but Mike's as well. She had also been personal physician to many prominent legislators, men and women, for more than two decades. Her suicide should have been fodder for any number of news outlets, local, national, even international. But it wasn't. Marten had seen nothing about it anywhere. One would have thought that as executor to Caroline's estate Tyler would have been one of the first to know because under the circumstances, where Caroline had given Marten the legal right to examine her medical records, Tyler most certainly would have brought it up. That was, if he knew. So maybe he didn't know. And maybe the media didn't know either. Maybe the police were keeping it quiet. But why? Notification of next of kin? Perhaps. It was as good a reason as any, or maybe there was some other angle the police were working on.

If Stephenson had played it the way she could have
and just told him she was sorry but she could not give him access to Caroline's medical records without a court order, he might very well have left it in Richard Tyler's hands and gone back to England. Troubled perhaps, but gone anyway, thinking Caroline had been very ill and in a terrible emotional state, and knowing there was little he could do until and unless Tyler got the court order. But she hadn't. Instead she had run from him and then committed suicide. Her last words about
the doctor
and
none of you,
had been said with icy resolve and were followed immediately by her horrifying final act.

What had Stephenson said to him just before she killed herself?
"You want to send me to the doctor. But you never will. None of you ever will. Never. Ever."

What
doctor?
Who had she been so afraid of that she'd take her own life to avoid being sent to?

And who or what was the group or organization she had apparently thought Marten belonged to? The
you
in
none of you?

Those blanks were enormous.

Marten stepped behind Parsons's desk and looked at the stack of working files on top of it. Most of it was legislative stuff. This bill, that bill, this appropriation, that. There were more files to the side, labeled
LETTERS FROM CONSTITUENTS TO BE ANSWERED PERSONALLY
. Another stack on a side table was labeled
COMMITTEE REPORTS AND MINUTES.
Taken together the material was mountainous. Marten had no idea where to start or what to look for once he had.

"Mr. Marten." Richard Tyler came into the room.

"Yes."

"I just received a call from my office. One of our senior partners has looked over Caroline's note to you and determined that the firm and myself could be open to major litigation by the Parsons family if we let you continue here without their approval and quite possibly the court's."

"I don't understand."

"You are to leave the premises right now."

"Mr. Tyler," Marten pushed back, "that letter is notarized. Caroline gave it to me for the purpose of—"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Marten."

Marten stared at him for a long moment, then finally nodded and started for the door. Why the message came now, after they were already there and under way meant one of two things. Either the senior partner was more protective of the firm than Tyler was, or somebody else had learned about Caroline's note and wanted Marten's investigation stopped. Marten had known Katy, Caroline's sister, but that had been years before, when he was LAPD detective John Barron, and as far as he knew neither Caroline nor Mike had told Katy what had happened since. That meant she would have no idea who Nicholas Marten was, and to try and explain, especially under the eye of Richard Tyler's attorneys, and/or the court's if it came to that, could reveal his past and make his situation as precarious as it might have been had he been confronted by the police over Dr. Stephenson's death.

Tyler opened the front door and Marten glanced around the house trying to remember it all. It was, he knew, probably the last time he would be in Caroline's home and in the presence of all she had left behind. Once again the reality of her death stabbed through him. It was awful and empty and hollow. They had
never spent enough time together. And they never would again.

"Mr. Marten." Tyler gestured toward the door, ushering him out. Tyler followed closely, then closed the door behind him and locked it and they left.

•
2:05 P.M.

Victor stood looking out the window of a rented corner office in the National Postal Museum just across from Union Station. From where he stood he could see taxis pulling into the station from Massachusetts Avenue to disperse or pick up passengers going to or coming from the Amtrak trains.

"Victor," a calm voice filtered through his earpiece.

"Yes, Richard," Victor said as calmly, speaking into the tiny microphone on the lapel of his suit jacket.

"It's time."

"I know."

Victor looked like a middle-aged everyman. Forty-seven and divorced, he was balding and a little thick around the waist and wore an inexpensive gray suit and equally inexpensive black wing-tip shoes. The surgical gloves he wore were cream colored and available in any drugstore.

He stared out the window a moment longer, then turned to the desk beside him. It was an everyday plain steel desk, its top bare, its drawers, like the bookcases and file cabinets across the room, empty. Only the wastebasket under it held anything, a round two-inch piece of glass he
had cut from the windowpane fifteen minutes earlier and the small cutting tool which he had used to do it.

"Two minutes, Victor." Richard's voice was the same steady calm.

"Acela Express number R2109. Left New York at eleven
A.M.,
due in to Union Station at one forty-seven
P.M.
R2109 is seven minutes late," Victor said into the microphone and stepped around the desk to where a large semi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight and sound suppressor sat on a tripod.