Trail of the Twisted Cros (10 page)

“Virginia, by way of Michigan.”

“So, I should think you’d know enough to listen to a body, even if they didn’t go to goddam Harvard or someplace like that.
Now, I told you, boy, I don’t know what the goddam Sam Hill my Colin done… I just know, like everybody else in this goddam
town does now, that he’s been gone two days in disappearance, and the mine blew and Colin was some sort of Nazi lover or somethin,
and the papers is full of stories about how Colin blew up the mine for Johnny Lee Rogers—and that’s why my brother and me
has got to shoot folks off the place. We been gettin some mighty weird callers, you know.

“The thing of it is, my Colin isn’t any more able to plant a bomb than he is a potato bud. Look around this place; you see
any evidence of a crafty man livin here?”

She took a breath, then continued.

“I tell you what, I think Colin was used by these goons in the suits. I think they wanted somebody to blame all this on, and
they picked Colin because he’s about as big and dumb as a man comes.

“Least, that’s what it sounded like to me when he ran off at the mouth about it couple nights before it all came down. The
explosion, I mean.”

Slayton nodded.

“Did he say anything specific about the plans, about the request for his special services?” Slayton asked.

“No, it was just the way he acted. He got real drunk, and he was pissin and moanin about gettin in too deep maybe with all
this Rogers crowd and… yeah, I remember one thing, but it prob’ly don’t mean nothin.”

“What do you remember?”

“He kept on fussin about his goddam Thermos, that it had to be set to go for him and not to let him forget. We had a fight
about it. I wondered why the goddam Sam Hill he was so goddam worked up about this goddam Thermos for all of a sudden, and
he belts me across the mouth and—”

“Mrs. Hays,” Slayton interrupted, “let me just ask you something very important now. Did he come back home with that Thermos?”

She thought for several long moments.

“I don’t honestly recall whether he did or didn’t. Don’t think so. Don’t care much, either.”

NASSAU, The Bahamas

“This is the worst part of the job,” he complained to the young lieutenant sitting opposite him, filling him in on the detail
at the Emerald.

“I can imagine.”

“You have the number?” he asked, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear.

The lieutenant spread the appropriate page of his report open for the police chief.

The chief dialed direct, waited for the clicks to fall into place, and then heard the sound of a woman’s voice.

“Mrs. Colin Hays?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m truly sorry to have to tell you this, but it’s about your husband. I am chief of police in Nassau, the Bahamas. My name
is Delroy. Your husband…”

DANBURY, Connecticut, 11 September

“Technically speaking,” the warden was saying to Slayton, “he’s not supposed to have any visitors. That’s not his decision
or mine, you understand. It’s, in fact, an order from your own Treasury Department.”

“You have that order countermanded by my superior, Hamilton Winship. What more do you want? Someone made the decision for
you, now let’s see if you can make a decision to follow someone else’s decision.”

“Mr. Slayton, you are a contemptuous man, you—”

“Save it. Right now, I am an impatient man. We have here a matter of national emergency, and you’re picking nits. Now get
me in there to see this half-baked Schickelgruber. You have your orders.”

Red-faced, the warden rose from his chair and summoned a pair of guards.

“Take this man into seclusion, let him talk to Rogers for”—the warden consulted his wrist watch—“fifteen minutes, and then
march him the hell off this penitentiary.”

Slayton was taken to Rogers’ room immediately. Rogers, who seemed to know everything that happened at the penitentiary before
it happened, was expectant.

“Benjamin Justin Slayton, correct?” he asked.

“True enough. I have some questions for you, Rogers.”

Rogers sat back down in the chair at his desk. He had been writing in a tablet.

“The new
Mein Kamf
there, as long as you’re in prison?” Slayton asked.

Rogers smiled.

“The world already has one,” he said. “I couldn’t have said it any better myself.”

“What’s your game, Rogers?”

“My game?”

“Is there an echo in here?”

“I do not play games, Mr. Slayton. My business is leading a political movement. My movement claims all white Christians. We
are for the strengthening of American institutions.”

“Tall order.”

“I have just told you the same goals claimed by, say, the Republican Party.”

Slayton blinked, incredulously.

“How many times have you read in the newspapers about how the Republican Party is writing off the black vote? How many times
have you read about the Republican Party writing off the Jewish vote?” Rogers grinned widely, warming to his task.

“And every time you read that, do you see the newspapers calling Republicans a bunch of dirty Nazis?”

“Look—”

“No, you don’t. We say the same things, and somehow we’re extremists. Racists. Well, call us what you will.”

“I’m not here to listen to your political drivel, mac.”

“You asked about my game.”

“I want to know how in the world you think you can get away with the deaths of all those men down at the Loveridge mine, how
you can read about the destruction of an entire city and sit here laughing. God, man, you’re in here for murder already—”

“Oh, not for long, sir, I assure you.”

“So you expect your goons to spring you? You expect you’ll be released with a million bucks worth of gold to Algeria? What
do you think you’re dealing with here?”

“Stranger things have happened. The Shah said jump, and we jumped, for all those years. The Ayatollah now.”

“That ended, as you may recall from the newspapers.”

“It ended for a time. We have a new President in office now, and we will test his mettle. They all come in strong, and they
leave weakened. That’s because we have a basically weak system.”

“Is that what your brown-shirted friends are doing?”

“I have many friends. Some of my friends wear uniforms; others, like me, wear suits and ties. You might be surprised to know
some of my friends who wear suits and ties.”

“You’re called the
Führer
.”

“Yes.”

“Any particular reason?”

“People call me what they will. I have no control over such a thing.”

“How do you live?”

“People give me things.”

“What do you call yourself?”

“A visionary, a patriot, an American, a soldier in the great battle for the survival of the fittest.”

“You’re a scumbag, Rogers, that’s what you are.”

Rogers stood up again, stalked toward Slayton, and knew at once that he spoke to a sworn enemy.

“There will come a day, and soon, when you will regret those words, Mr. Slayton.”

“Spoken like a true fascist. I seem to remember Eva Peron having the same sentiments when she was faced up to by people who
knew that a pig is a pig is a pig.”

Slayton had the information he was looking for, though he knew Rogers was unaware he had given it. He stood up, preparing
to leave.

“Stinks in here,” Slayton said. “I’m going to leave the source of the odor.”

He went to the door of the room to call for a guard to come release him. Rogers followed him, raised an arm, and brought a
steel-shanked sap down over Slayton’s head. Only a corner of Slayton’s forehead was hit, however, with the biggest part of
the blow catching him in the shoulder.

Slayton pitched down to the floor, dizzied by the suddenness of the assault. He didn’t rise to a defense, expecting that the
guards would burst into the room any instant.

But they didn’t. And Rogers stood over him, his mouth twisted into an evil grin, ready to bring down the sap again. Slayton
jerked his body out of the path of the weapon, angered more by the slowness of the guards than by Rogers’ attack.

With enough time out of range of Rogers’ stick, Slayton cleared his head. He leaped to his feet and took a jujitsu stance.
In a single blinding strike, Slayton disarmed Rogers by striking the Nazi’s forearm sharply with the edge of his hard hand.

Still, the guards were nowhere.

Angered to the point of frenzy now, Slayton moved in on the hapless Rogers, stunned by his would-be victim’s ability to fend
for himself in hand-to-hand combat. Slayton kicked him sharply in the shins and hips, sending Rogers sprawling to the floor
of his room.

Then Slayton picked him up by locking his fingers around the tender part of Rogers’ collarbone. He threw him across the room,
slamming Rogers into a wall.

As Rogers slid into a heap in one corner, Slayton called out again to the guards.

This time, they shuffled toward the door, opened it, and expressed surprise at what had occurred inside.

“You let this happen,” Slayton said. He was breathing hard, but not from the exertion. He was angered. “You don’t know who
you’re dealing with, you dumb screws. You’ll be eating your balls for breakfast.”

As he left Danbury, Slayton knew he was the loser. All he had accomplished was to beat a man, humiliate the type of men who
could be his followers in some new order, and raise his own blood pressure.

NEW YORK CITY

As he rode by taxicab from LaGuardia Airport, Slayton tried to figure some central thread to the events thus far: the assassination
threat to Richard Nixon, the demand for the release of the jailed Johnny Lee Rogers, and the Love-ridge explosion.

The only answer he had thus far was that somewhere, deep down in the events of the last few days, someone was running a charade.

“Tunnel all right?” the taxi driver asked, disturbing Slayton’s thoughts.

“Fine, take it.”

He tried to turn off his mind for a while. His head hurt. He read advertising on billboards as his taxi left Queens and dipped
into the midtown tunnel. He settled back into the seat, wondering if by some stroke of luck he would have some brilliant flash
of resolution by the time he reached the light at the end of the tunnel.

He had no such luck.

“What’s your address again?” the driver asked. They were at a light at First Avenue, and the driver was scrawling something
into a log book.

Slayton gave him the Nixon address. The driver whistled.

“Inconclusive,” the man in charge of the mobile forensic unit kept saying over and over to Slayton. Inconclusive testing for
paper samples, ink samples, fingerprints. The works. Not a single lead.

Slayton then insisted on going over all the samples collected, and analyzed them himself. He, too, found nothing of note.
A telephone rang somewhere, and as one of the regular Secret Service agents answered it, Slayton was reminded of the call
to the Associated Press office in New York. Remind me to speak to Winship about media attention now, he told himself.

The telephone, it turned out, was for him.

“Ben, there’s a homicide, being handled by city police.” The voice was Winship’s.

“Are you here in town?”

“Yes. The St. Regis. I’ll want to see you there in about two hours. Look for me in the lobby. Meanwhile, let me give you some
particulars.”

Winship gave Slayton the name of the investigating officer in charge, and the location, not too far from the Nixon house.
Slayton hung up, said nothing to the others, and left The Residence for the corner of York Avenue and East 66th Street, a
district of Manhattan popular with airline personnel because of its proximity to the East Side Airline Terminal bus transport
to and from New York’s LaGuardia and Kennedy Airports. “The Stewardess Gulag,” as it was sometimes known.

Behind a railroad tenement building, Slayton found a group of New York City detectives gathered around a body. The body was
wrapped in a large oilcloth and had been dumped in the small garden area adjacent to someone’s apartment. That someone, Slayton
was informed, was a stewardess who discovered the dead man, and was now being treated for shock at Bellevue Hospital.

“Who is it?” Slayton asked, after showing a startled chief investigating officer his Department identification.

“Oh, I suppose since he’s a mailman that you’re interested? Federal boy and all?” the officer asked. He was trying to be helpful.

A mailman!

Slayton knelt over the body. An average-looking man. Nothing distinguishing about him. Neck had been snapped—expertly, Slayton
guessed.

Slayton entered a few particulars in his own notebook. The mailman’s name, approximate time of death, and so on—but his was
not the job to pick over dead bones.

He thanked the New York police, and stepped outside the garden around the tenement building, on the way to the street. And
there he saw it. It was pure luck. Or was it? If he hadn’t been down to the Lovebridge mine to investigate personally that
end of this matter, he never would have recognized the piece of square brass.

He leaned over and picked it up. Stamped into the metal were the words “St. John’s Colliery” and the number 290.

“We have no strategy,” Winship said. “These bastards know what they’re doing. We cannot allow another Lovebridge, can we?”

“No, of course not,” Slayton said. “But we’ve got, what… five or six days before the deadline, when we have to go along and
release that scumbag?”

Slayton fingered the tag from St. John’s Colliery, which he had popped into his coat pocket.

“I think it would be easy enough for you to let word filter back to Rogers that the government plans to go along with the
demands?”

“Easy enough, sure,” Winship said. “What do you have in mind?”

“Also, you’ll want to arrange for a nationwide alert at mines. No Thermos bottles or like objects are to be permitted down
in the pits. That’s how the Lovebridge was blown, by the way. A remote-controlled or time device activated a cordite bomb.”

“Used by the British in the war,” Winship mused.