The Shadow Man (18 page)

“Had to be?”

Graham’s face remained devoid of decipherable expression. “Of course.”

Andrews rested his hands palms down on the table. He saw that the scratches and cuts on them were now vivid. “So that ends it,” he said.

“Not quite, Senator. Which is really why I needed to talk with you.”

Andrews could see the almost imperceptible signs on Graham’s features, sense the accelerated but harnessed tempo of his thinking. There was a humming power and competency in the man. With a politician’s instincts, Andrews got the distinct impression that Graham was about to propose a deal. The sight of the half-eaten pancakes in front of him suddenly nauseated Andrews. He averted his eyes and pushed the plate away.

“The two men on the mountain chose to be killed rather than surrender,” Graham told Andrews. “And you’ve killed Haller. Proof against the former President or any peripheral participants in the plot would be difficult if not impossible to obtain. The media would dig and sensationalize. There would be a colossal mess that would unjustifiably soil the reputation of the entire agency and impair our efficiency. Nothing positive would result from it.”

“You keep saying ‘would,’ ” Andrews said. “As if there were some sort of choice.” But he knew there was a choice. Always a choice. That was what Graham was offering. The operation here at Perith could be cleaned up, kept secret. The dead could be reported killed in other ways, in other places. Andrews waited for Graham to play his best, his most convincing cards.

“Naturally,” Graham went on, “once the media start they don’t stop until there’s nothing left but bones. And they don’t care whose bones. If any part of the story comes out, all of it inevitably will. And you have much to lose, Senator, from the revelation of your relationship with Miss Colombo.”

“Only a career,” Andrews said ironically.

“I notice you didn’t mention your marriage.”

“No,” Andrews said, “I didn’t.”

Graham studied him from across the table, as if considering telling him something more, then deciding against it. “You have an extremely bright future in this country’s politics, Senator,” Graham said. “We both know that. It would be tragic for something like this to thwart your desires. And I understand your desires better than you might think. A tempest would be provoked that would incriminate only the dead. What difference would it make? Of the living, only you can be harmed.”

“And the agency.”

“Us too, yes. I mentioned that. It’s in our best interest to keep a lid on the thing. Believe me, Senator, it’s a Pandora’s box; there’d be no going back.”

Andrews knew that from a practical point of view Graham was right. From a practical point of view. He also knew that he had a few cards of his own to play, but as yet he didn’t know how to play them.

“I’m going to take a short walk,” Andrews said. “To think. Will you be here when I return?”

“Right here,” Graham said. “Drinking another cup of coffee.”

As Andrews stood up, Graham added, “We don’t have very long to decide, Senator.”

Andrews returned to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes. He had walked the snow-cleared main street of Perith, then a short distance toward the mountain, among the quiet pines and snow that was unbroken but for his own black footprints. He’d made his decision.

“I keep thinking about justice,” he said, as he again slid into the booth across from Graham.

“Justice?”

“That’s what’s missing,” Andrews said, “but it doesn’t have to be. Not entirely.”

Graham smiled, the smile of a man who thought more about expediency than justice. “A condition?”

“Yes,” Andrews said. “I’ll be silent if a condition is agreed upon. Only one condition. And we both know that once I’ve kept my silence for even a short period of time, I’ll have to continue that silence.”

“I presume then, Senator, that once the condition is met, it also will be irreversible.”

“There’ll be no need to reverse it,” Andrews said. “I want Martin Karpp released. Officially pardoned.”

Graham appeared stunned. “They’ll say that he might kill again.”

“He would never have killed the first time if he hadn’t been driven to it by experts.”

“Imagine the public outcry.”

“Public outcries and puzzlement have arisen over previous, less deserved pardons,” Andrews said. “Things pass.”

Graham pursed his lips and bowed his head. “Justice ...” he muttered thoughtfully. As if in amazement, he stared up at Andrews and said, “Justice really is what you want.”

“I almost died yesterday,” Andrews told him. “I’m less concerned now with political considerations.”

“Then you actually would let your tenuous personal life be revealed in order to set the record straight and effect Karpp’s release?”

“If you don’t agree to do it the easy way.”

“Can we be assured of Miss Colombo’s silence? She’d be protecting you, of course, as well as herself and your relationship.”

“I can guarantee her silence,” Andrews said, “by seeing to it that for her own sake she never knows all of this.”

Graham drummed his manicured fingers once, loudly, on the table. “We have a bargain,” he said.

Andrews was surprised. “Just like that? Without relaying the request? Do you have the authority?”

Graham showed his thin smile. “I have the authority.” He stood up and shook hands with Andrews. “If you’ll excuse me, Senator, I have to supervise the delicate matter of dissemblance.”

“Is that agency jargon for covering your tracks?” Andrews asked, unable to resist putting an edge of contempt in his voice.

“Yes,” Graham admitted. “In politics it’s called redefining your position.”

He left Andrews then, moving with controlled briskness and purpose toward the door, in as much of a hurry as he probably ever got.

Andrews’ coffee cup from breakfast was still on the table. The waitress walked over and dutifully refilled it, commenting that it was nice that the snow had stopped. Andrews agreed. He sat and drank his coffee. When he was finished, he would go back to the room and awaken Pat. Then they would get in the Jeep that had been brought down from the mountain, and they would begin the long trip home.

Nels Graham stood and watched the Jeep carrying Andrews and Pat Colombo disappear around a soiled snowbank beyond the end of Perith’s main street. A low haze of exhaust fumes lay over the cindered pavement, then dissipated. Graham wanted to be positive that the senator had left, so that he could be sure of his silence. He needed to be sure.

Lighting a cigarette and dropping the match to hiss to extinction in an ice-flecked puddle, Graham turned to walk back to his car. He was satisfied. Knots had been tied in every loose end. Haller was dead. And Graham had seen to it that the two men up on the mountain also died. He had shot one of them himself, though the man was about to surrender. With the other agents along, Graham hadn’t had a choice. Just as he’d had no choice but to order the deaths in New York. As well as the deaths of Andrews’ wife and her lover. And Underwood’s death.

But it was over. The rest of the splinter group now were safe. Andrews would keep his silence, as would the dead. And Karpp would be released, of course. The media would be in a frenzy over Karpp. But what difference would that make? Graham flipped his cigarette away before getting into the car. What difference did any of it make now?

Breathing freely for the first time since he’d heard of Dr. Dana Larsen, he put the idling car in drive and headed up the mountain.

March 17, 1992

Martin Karpp moved inward from the edge of the crowd. He was wearing a policeman’s uniform and a policeman’s holstered revolver; Alan Hobson had obtained them for him. Martin Karpp didn’t know how or from where, and he chose not to think about the crusty brownish-red stain on the cuff of the right sleeve. He smiled at an attractive young woman holding her infant on her shoulders. Then he saw the dark-blue uniform cap of another policeman in his path, and he slightly altered his direction. Security was tight here. Martin Karpp was part of it. Or seemed to be.

On a raised wooden platform draped in red, white and blue stood former CIA director, former ambassador to France and adviser to the President, and now candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, Nelson Horatio Graham. Tall and gray, pugnacious and indignant about the plight of Middle America, Graham was grinding out his number one campaign speech with well-rehearsed passion. He was the favorite in tomorrow’s Illinois primary.

As soon as he’d come to national prominence and his image began to appear with regularity in newspapers and on TV, Karpp had remembered Graham. He had seen him once in Manhattan on Forty-seventh Street, the day before Jay Jefferson shot Governor Drake, talking to Paul Liggett. At the time, it hadn’t struck Karpp as impossible to see Liggett talking to a stranger, even though they were involved in what obviously was an argument. But Karpp remembered that moment because it was the only time he actually had seen Paul Liggett, or any of the others. When recently he’d discovered the identity of the man who’d been talking with Liggett, he had thought for a long time about things. Then he had reached a decision.

Karpp was within fifty feet of the raised platform now, on the inner edge of the crowd. A man in a dark business suit, standing behind and to the left of Graham, glanced at him, then saw the uniform and let his eyes slide away. Graham was on the subject of inflation now, building his speech to its climax. Oh, he was a skilled deceiver. Martin Karpp had heard the speech several times and knew.

When Nelson Graham thanked the crowd and raised both long arms high in the air in anticipation of victory, a bedlam of wild applause and cheering exploded from the crowd, prompted by professionals strategically planted by Graham’s campaign committee.

It was the moment.

Martin Karpp and no one else drew his revolver and flung his uniform cap aside. He had planned to scream whatever it was that John Wilkes Booth had shouted when he’d killed Lincoln, but at that instant he forgot the words he had so carefully rehearsed. There was too much noise to be heard anyway.

The vulnerable crowd around Martin Karpp caused a second’s hesitation in the Secret Service agents assigned to protect Nelson Graham. Karpp got one shot away, saw Graham’s astounded expression, saw him slump forward onto the lectern that collapsed beneath him.

Then came the blackness and pain. Martin Karpp had never felt such pain. Some detached part of him remembered disturbing a nest of wasps while scything weeds as a boy, the terrible stinging that wouldn’t stop. Only this was so much worse. This was like the countless mouths of the angry and starving, devouring him. Death had never been so welcome.

When presidential candidate Jerry Andrews, at Chicago’s Westbury Hotel, heard the news of Nelson Graham’s death, he immediately canceled his remaining Illinois campaign appearances. He was sickened. Saddened. During the course of the primaries he had come to respect Nelson Graham’s positions on the issues as well as his ability as a campaigner. Andrews made the appropriate comments to the media, and he meant them.

And he knew that, but for his efforts, Martin Karpp still would be locked harmlessly away in the Belmont sanitarium.

As far as Andrews knew, Karpp had never seen Nelson Graham in person. There was no way he could have discovered Graham’s role in his release so many years ago.

Andrews felt far away from that time, from events that he now seldom thought about other than fleetingly. And it had been a long time ago, and had involved a younger, different Jerry Andrews. Now he walked stiffly from the effects of the helicopter accident, and his hair was almost completely gray. He was developing a slight stomach paunch despite a stringent diet.

Different people in a different time, and yet Karpp had been driven by some vestige of that time to murder Nelson Graham. Andrews refused to believe that Karpp had chosen Graham as his victim by some bizarre coincidence.

Then why? What could he have known?

Though Andrews couldn’t quite capture it in his consciousness, he knew that with Karpp’s murder of Graham, some remote connection had been made in his mind.

Andrews’ campaign manager Jack Copperud knocked twice and then entered the suite. “We’ve wrapped up activities for the day, Senator,” he said, dropping the Chicago evening papers onto the sofa.

“Good. I don’t feel like talking about the latest polls.”

“They don’t mean anything now anyway,” Copperud said. “Tomorrow it’s a new campaign.” He lifted a weary arm and lowered it heavily. “Good night, Senator.”

Andrews told him good night and watched him leave. The suite was quiet. Copperud had looked exhausted, Andrews thought, and decided that he’d look that way himself tomorrow if he didn’t get to bed.

Beside his sleeping wife Pat, Andrews lay awake for hours. Until finally he was visited by understanding.

He remembered the lack of surprise on Graham’s face when he’d been told that Underwood was dead. And he remembered that same younger Graham standing over a dead skier on an icy mountainside, informing his agents with casual certainty that there were two more armed men up on the mountain. Two exactly. Though Andrews had been dazed at the time and the words hadn’t registered, he could recall them now as if Graham had spoken them here in this room only minutes ago. And now he realized their implication, what Graham at the time must have known. Subsequently the two men had been killed, not apprehended.

And somehow Martin Karpp had discovered what Andrews only now was surmising.

Andrews got out of bed and mixed himself a drink. Then he stood at the window, looking out at the myriad lights of Chicago that were like a bright extension of the galaxy above.

He was, and would remain, the only one who understood the true nature of Martin Karpp’s crime, the completion of the circle.