Trail of the Twisted Cros (3 page)

The reporter and photographer pulled out their press credentials at the suggestion of the beady-eyed man, and the two bodyguards
were satisfied.

“Maybe you boys should have checked this through the office first,” the beady-eyed man suggested. He resumed walking toward
East 72nd Street. The two men from the
Daily News
fell into step with him.

“But in any case, sure, come on along. Do your story. Why not? I only have the Secret Service for company most mornings, you
know.”

One of the two Secret Service agents pulled the reporter aside and whispered into his ear: “Little friendly advice, Bub. No
questions on Watergate, and you won’t upset the boss, okay?”

The photographer was dancing around his subject.

The reporter told the Secret Service agent, “Yeah, yeah, okay. This is just a piece of fluff anyway.”

Up the avenue, the man in the Burberry coat was only a few steps away from the newsstand. He fished a quarter out of his pocket
and removed the piece of paper from his coat. He could resist it no longer. He looked behind him.

“What… ?”

He said it aloud, then hushed himself.

Of all times, he thought. How did the press find out? The same way he did, of course. They hung around the neighborhood watching
for patterns, and then caught the man one day. This might spoil everything.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. He didn’t want to betray his annoyance in front of the newsstand dealer. The dealer
might be blind, but he certainly could hear. He could probably hear quite a bit better than most people, which is why he had
to be careful with the piece of paper.

He looked back toward his quarry. The man with the beady eyes was talking animatedly with the reporter, but he was heading
right toward the newsstand, intending this sidewalk interview to be merely a moving diversion from the usual pattern of the
morning constitutional.

… Yeah, it just might work anyhow. Maybe better, with the press all over him. Oh, this would be rich!

“Morning, Robert,” he said to the newsstand dealer.

The dealer’s face turned in the general direction of the voice. Unseeing eyes, rheumy and pale, settled on him.

“Wet enough for you?” the bearded man asked. He handed the dealer a quarter and said, “For the
Times
.”

“Thank you,” the dealer said, a Cuban inflection in his voice. “It’s wet enough all right, you bet.”

As he spoke, the man in the Burberry coat slipped his piece of paper inside the top copy of the
New York Times
pile.

“Take care now, Robert,” he said.

Then he crossed the street, stepped into a telephone booth and deposited a dime into the machine. He dialed a number and waited
for an answer. While he waited, he watched as Richard Nixon, the two Secret Service agents, and the press approached Robert’s
newsstand.

“… so I like to see people,” Nixon said to the reporter from the
Daily News
. “I like to see them react, you know. Like… watch this.”

Nixon took a few steps away from the reporter and the others, to where a taxicab waited outside an apartment house entrance.
Inside the cab, a driver dozed. Nixon tapped on the driver’s window.

The startled driver sat up, the cigar clenched in his teeth falling from his mouth to his lap. Fortunately, it was not lit.
On the other hand, it was wet and gummy from several hours’ chewing.

“Hi there, buddy,” Nixon said.

The driver sputtered something, and then rolled down his window.

“Hey, you Nixon?” he asked.

“Yes sir. I just wanted to say good morning to you.”

“Well, what the fuck!”

“Have a great day,” Nixon said. Then he stepped back onto the sidewalk.

The cab driver’s head hung out the window and his eyes hung out of his head.

“See what I mean?” Nixon asked the reporter.

Nixon and entourage were now at Robert’s newsstand. They didn’t notice the man in the telephone booth across busy East 72nd
Street, a wide cross-town thoroughfare.

“Good morning, Robert,” Nixon said. “Let me have the usual.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

Robert picked off the
Times
, the
Daily News
, the
Washington Post
, and the
Wall Street Journal
from the piles spread out before him. He held out his hand for payment after giving the newspapers to one of the Secret Service
agents, who tucked them under an arm without looking at them.

“… Now here’s something interesting,” Nixon said to the reporter. “Robert here is blind, you know. But he comes to work every
morning, just like everybody else. He doesn’t sit at home on his butt.”

The reporter made a face for the benefit of his photographer colleague.

Before leaving the newsstand, Nixon noticed the coffee can Robert had set out this morning. A can with a sign on it which
read, “Help the Cuban refugees.”

Nixon placed a ten-dollar bill in the can.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Robert said, cocking his ear to hear the soft dropping sound as the bill went into the can.

“That’s okay, Robert, that’s perfectly okay.”

Across the street, the man in the telephone booth was speaking into the receiver:

“He’s got it. It’s the same as every day… now they’re heading across Third to the coffee shop. He’ll be yapping with the reporters
for a while, I suppose, then he’ll get it.”

He nodded his head in response to something said on the other end of the line, then hung up the phone.

As Nixon and the other men stepped through the doorway into Kasey’s coffee shop, he hailed a taxicab. In a few seconds, he
was gone, Airedale and all.

“… now I suppose I’ll have to treat—eh, boys?”

Nixon laughed at his own remarks and ordered coffee all around from a sleepy-eyed counterman, studiously unmoved by the presence
of a former President of the United States, or, one would suspect, the Second Coming of Christ.

“So, my social life revolves around baseball games at Yankee Stadium—did you know Stein-brenner lets me sit in his personal
box?—and Broadway shows. We saw Ginger Rogers, too, of course, at Radio City. And Pat and I entertain at home some; we’ve
had our neighbor—you know, David Rockefeller. Henry’s been over, too.

“I like to walk in Central Park if I get a chance. Usually early in the morning, like this, when I can talk these guys into
going over that way.” Nixon pointed to his Secret Service guards.

The reporter asked about his phlebitis.

“Oh, that’s gone, gone entirely away. My health is fine, tip-top. Walking like I do every morning is the best medicine of
all, don’t you know.”

He was asked about New York, how he liked his new city.

“Well, you know, Pat and I have lived here before, a couple of times. First time was right after the war. Yep, we had this
dandy little walk-up on the West Side, just down from Central Park. Cost us ninety dollars a month then, which was a lot,
let me tell you.

“But, we left New York for California. That’s home, I guess. I ran for Congress and the rest is history.

“Then, we came back here to New York after the sixty-two gubernatorial race back home in California. I practiced law and we
lived on Fifth Avenue, 810 Fifth Avenue.

“Course, in sixty-eight, we moved to Washington.”

Nixon laughed. The Secret Service agents laughed. The reporter checked his wrist watch.

“And now we’re back in Gotham,” Nixon said. He sipped his black coffee, noisily.

“I love New York, you know,” he said. “Any town that can be for the Mets can be for the underdog.”

The photographer now made a face for the reporter, who checked his wrist watch again.

“Yeah, New York is a wonderful town,” Nixon said. “There’s nowhere in the world like New York. I love it. I love the little
people who make this city great!”

The reporter asked a few more quick questions, the photographer snapped a couple of pictures of Nixon at the counter, his
elbows all over the place, and then the reporter said something about making deadline, and the press was gone.

Nixon slowly finished his coffee, ordered a refill, and then gestured to the Secret Service agent with the newspapers. The
papers were shoved across the counter to Nixon, who first checked the
Daily News
back page for the principal sports story of the day. He skimmed the two lead stories on page one of the
Wall Street Journal
, said something irreverent about the
Washington Post
as he glanced at the banner headline, then spread out the
New York Times
for a closer going-over.

When he had finished the front page, Nixon opened the paper and at first didn’t notice the sheet of white paper that fluttered
down from the counter to his lap.

“What’s that?” one of the Secret Service agents asked, pointing to the paper between Nixon’s legs.

Nixon mumbled, picked up the paper, and put it down on top of the newspaper. It was a letter, cleanly typed:

Dear Dick,

You have been selected as our messenger. You may in turn select whomever you deem appropriate to deliver the following information:

At precisely 7 a.m. tomorrow, the Lovebridge colliery at Fairmont, West Virginia, will explode.

If you wish to avoid this unfortunate event, you will follow our instructions in the release of our Führer, Johnny Lee Rogers.

Particulars as to the Führer’s release conditions and your good faith demonstrations should reach your home this date by post.

Meanwhile, know that we are able to kill you at will. And know, of course, that we will employ whatever means necessary to
accomplish our end.

Today’s Washington Star should make our threat—how shall we say it—perfectly clear.

Have a good day!

PLAINS, Georgia, 8 September, 6:33 a.m. EST

“Hatcher!”

His own name came to him in a loud crackle over the tiny radio receiver planted in his ear. He raised his right hand over
the offending bit of technology and winced. The action made the earphone tumble out of his lobe, which meant he had to replace
it, on the run. He got only the last four words of a longer message of some urgency:

“… the President right now?”

Hatcher stopped a moment and exhaled loudly, wiping his sweating brow as he did so. His heart pounded, as much from apprehension
at being summoned so insistently as from the jogging he had been doing along with the former President, Jimmy Carter.

He tried calling out to Carter to wait, but Hatcher couldn’t be heard above the wind of the early Georgia morning. He watched
Carter disappear around a bend in the road; he watched the figure of the former President vanish beyond a stand of Georgia
blue pine, a trim man on the upper side of middle age in a trancelike state when he jogged. Though Hatcher was some thirty
years younger than the former President, he had trouble keeping up with Carter’s brisk, even running pace. Now, as soon as
he made contact with DeSpain, his superior officer back at Secret Service control at the Carter estate, he would have to sprint
to catch up with the man he was bound by his life to protect.

Hatcher groped for the transmitter device clamped to the thin plastic line of the radio he wore at his waist, standard Secret
Service issue. He called in for a repeat of the message:

“Scramble,” DeSpain snapped. “The President is under threat…”

This was the moment for which all of Hatcher’s training as a Treasury Department Secret Service agent was meant. Absolute,
unquestioned, and unhesitant protection of the President, past or present.

“… cover him and radio location at once!”

Energized by his command, Hatcher sped down the gravel path and around the bend taken by Carter only seconds before. As he
ran, stones flying into his legs, cutting him, Hatcher reached behind his waist for the .38-caliber revolver strapped to the
back of the belt that also held his radio receiver-transmitter power pack. Quickly, he glanced behind him, seeing nothing.
His sweat-rimmed eyes searched laterally for any sign of threat to Jimmy Carter.

Hatcher didn’t bother calling out to Carter this time. Without a second’s hesitation, Hatcher dived at the former President
when he finally caught up with him.

Carter’s body flew forward, then sideways, as Hatcher skillfully took his man down to the softer grassy shoulder of the jogging
path. Wordlessly, Hatcher rolled his own body over that of the smaller Carter, covering Carter’s mouth with his hand, rolling
further off the path toward the cover of the pine grove.

By this time, Carter could see that it was Hatcher who had taken him down. Carter felt fire in his side, and was certain he’d
broken at least one rib. He thought of the recent attempt against President Reagan, and silently did whatever Hatcher directed
him to do.

When the men had stopped rolling, Hatcher shoved Carter face down on the ground, behind the largest of a clump of three pines.
Then he literally sprawled his own body over that of the former President, at the same time radioing his position to Secret
Service command.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 6:34:04 a.m. EST

“Hamilton, wake up,” Winship’s wife called out to him.

She needn’t have called out. Winship had heard the shrill wailing of the special security hotline almost before it went off.

“I’ve got it, Edith,” he said to her, as he bolted up in his bed and reached for the special telephone receiver.

He shook his head for a second before picking up the telephone. He would need to hear clearly. There would be no time for
repeating messages.

“Proceed,” he said into the telephone.

He listened intently, said only yes or no when absolutely necessary, and worked himself into his robe and slippers, with Edith’s
assistance. His wife was accustomed to Hamilton Winship’s sensitive role with the government, but she had never been as calm
as she would have liked during emergency calls such as this.

And as special deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton Winship frequently received such emergency communications. She knew
when: every time a President or some other high government official was in danger. Why was that so often, she wondered angrily.
Was the world mad with terrorist politics?