Trail of the Twisted Cros (4 page)

She looked at her husband as he sat rigidly on the edge of their bed, his face a study in duty and fright and outrage. He
was becoming a very old man, she feared. She worried about his heart. A man his age in any other line of work would be just
fine. But could her husband stand all these jolts to his system for much longer? How could he go on coming to the rescue of
every emergency situation? It was taking a toll on him.

But for now, she wouldn’t pester him about retirement, something all their friends were forever discussing in terms of leisurely
trips to exotic places around the world, or moving to some slower, gentler place, somewhere beyond the furor and the fray
of Washington. But not her Hamilton! When she brought up the subject, he was not defensive. Nor was he angered. He was confused.
He actually could not understand talk of retirement. And she knew why. It was because of that she couldn’t demand that he
delegate whatever crisis he was assigning himself now. Her husband was still the best man in the country at managing crises,
no matter the silly blather about it in the press of late as the contested province of either Al Haig or George Bush.

When it came down to it, Hamilton Winship was the man even Haig and Bush would want in command.

Edith Winship wiped away a tear she wouldn’t dream of allowing her husband to see. She supposed that somewhere along the line
during this latest terrible crisis she would see Ben Slayton again.

Slayton, her husband’s special Treasury agent, responsible to him alone, was usually in on these things at some point. She
hardly resented it. She and Hamilton, if truth be told, adored Ben Slayton as if he were their own son. Hamilton Winship stood
up, a familiar look of anxiety covering his face. He wiped his brow. He was sweating profusely now.

“All right,” Winship said into the telephone. “I’ll want the full complement of crisis contingency guard at the White House…
where’s Bush, anyway?”

When he was answered, Winship continued:

“Right. Beef it up around the Vice President, too. And for God’s sake, keep Al Haig nailed down to a chair.”

Winship paused again.

“And look, I’ll want a telephoto relay transmission of the message to Nixon in my office within ten minutes. Call over and
have the staff prepare to receive…”

Winship was about to hang up.

“Wait! You say Carter is secure? What’s being done about Jerry?”

PALM SPRINGS, California, 3:37:45 a.m. PST

He felt the tingling in his wrist, and awoke at once.

Twice before, he had been the target of an assassin, and now, though out of office and though most of his fellow Americans
didn’t know it, he feared a third attempt. Would a third attempt succeed?

Gerald Ford had thought for a time that he needed medical help for a paranoic condition. But like all former Presidents, he
received a daily top-secret briefing from intelligence sources in Washington, and he knew. Too much for a man out of the active
circle, perhaps—but he knew.

And despite the ridicule about his powers of intellect, or lack thereof, Jerry Ford could put two and two together. The fact
was, he wasn’t paranoid. The fact was, the briefings he received every day—the same as those received by his fellow has-beens,
Carter and Nixon—provided him ample reason to believe in gunmen with plots and causes, in addition to the garden-variety deranged
loner with thirty dollars for a Saturday-night special.

It was why he wore the special electronic attachment to his wrist watch, suggested to him by his old friend Hamilton Winship.
The pulsating device could take a radio signal from his Secret Service guard, and was to be activated only during extraordinary
emergency, which, in Ford’s case, had occurred twice before, courtesy of two armed California women with two separate missions
to kill then-President Ford. With the pulsator, Ford could receive an alert before the Secret Service agents came bursting
at him to “wrestle him to the ground,” as the newspapers used to describe it.

Now, as he lay in half-sleep, his wrist tingled as the pulsator alarm sounded. He glanced quickly to his right, to see Betty
slumbering peacefully at his side. Could she stand the shock of another assassination attempt? She’d been dry now for…

Four agents moved swiftly through the bedroom door. In the half-light that shone through a slit between door and wall, Ford
saw the bristling Uzi submachine guns. One of the agents, a man named Pete, whispered to Ford, “Mr. President, we’re on extra
alert now. There’s been a threat on Mr. Nixon’s life, not yours. We’re covering the bases.”

“Yes, I see,” Ford said.

“Sorry, but we’ll have to stay until further orders.”

“I understand.”

The agents crept around the Ford bed, circling it, standing guard in the dark as Betty slept.

Gerald Ford lay down. His head sank into the pillow and he tried to sleep. But sleep would come no more for him that day.
He resented the exquisite prison in which he lived.

MOUNT VERNON, Virginia, 6:35:00 a.m. EST

It was one of his father’s later acquisitions that was giving him all the trouble lately. He had a lot of work to do with
the old thing before the winter set in and made things infinitely more difficult, when it came to tinkering with antique automobiles.

That was why Ben Slayton had gotten such an early start this morning in the garage, a cinderblock affair he had constructed
on the farm, amidst a grove of hickories not far from the main house. Inside was his father’s collection of Hudsons, dating
from the 1924 convertible to a ’54 Hudson Hornet special sedan equipped with the then-revolutionary 308-cubi-inch V-6 engine
in the welded semiunit construction step-down design, one of the most popular cars of all time with stock car racers. Slayton,
himself a stock car racer for a few years after he returned home from service in the Vietnam war, often thought of refurbishing
the old Hudson Hornet special and bringing it out on the oval some day in exhibition.

But it was the ’47 Hudson Commodore convertible, a fire-engine red beauty, that was on the fritz. Slayton had labored for
weeks trying to locate the cause of the timing difficulty, to no avail. It would take him several more weeks, maybe, to find
the trouble. A few years ago, when his father was still living, the two of them would have spotted the problem in a day or
two.

Slayton sipped a cup of coffee he had carried with him from the house to the garage while he collected tools from the spotlessly
clean steel bench that lined one wall of his shop. He slipped a small ball peen hammer into his tool apron, which held an
assortment of wrenches and a timer.

He stopped in front of his newest purchase, the cream-yellow ’51 Packard 250 convertible. Slayton ran his hands lightly over
the Packard cormorant, symbol of the late lamented automobile’s quality and strength. He wiped a bit of oil from the upper
grille, a graceful chunk of chrome in the trademark archer’s bow shape.

To Slayton, this large collection of what he called his “dinosaur cars” were nearly as important as his collection of paintings
in the house. These cars were his “rolling sculpture,” evidence of an era of American industrial design that was deservedly
the standard of the world. He often wondered why the ailing American automobile industry couldn’t simply revive the old designs,
most especially those of the 1950s, instead of insisting that the pitifully weak offerings of “X” cars and “K” cars and cars
named after animals and insects that all looked to be cloned from one another were the best and brightest of Detroit.

Back when Ben Slayton was a kid, he had spent a lot of time hanging out in the back seat of his father’s 1950 Buick Roadmaster.
On long cross-country trips, when one could actually tell the difference between, say, Ohio and Tennessee, he would count
the differences between all the cars on the road. He would know immediately, for instance, when he saw a ’49 Ford, because
of the distinctive shaping of the tail lights; he would know the Pontiacs by the definite slope of the hood; Chevies had headlights
like no other car; and of course, the Cadillacs and Lincolns of those days, along with the eminent Packards, were the great
highway ships of the time.

Those dinosaurs, Slayton knew, were roomy and solid, and delivered twenty miles per gallon of gasoline or better. And so to
give himself solace from the puny insults to American technology now wheezing and chugging along the roadways, parts falling
off as if they had been taped and stapled into place at the factory, Ben Slayton continued his father’s collection of automobiles.

He spread a freshly laundered cotton drop-cloth over the front fender of the ailing ’47 Hudson, fixed an overhead light into
place on the underside of the open hood, and prepared to spend his early morning tinkering.

And he above all others, he reasoned, had earned the right to putter away a day or two. After all, Winship had put him through
all his paces, and then some, with that last assignment—the business with the
Star of Egypt
.

But no sooner had his head dipped into the engine cavity than the telephone started screaming from the far end of the garage,
putting an abrupt end, Slayton assumed, to his rest and recreation.

“Blast!” he cursed at the telephone, even as he trotted across the garage to answer it. It was the extension that Winship
had ordered installed in the garage, sending around a pair of men from the General Services Administration to make sure the
job was done.

“It’s a scramble,” Winship said from Washington. He didn’t have to identify himself. “How soon can you get into the District?”

Slayton glanced at his everyday car—which happened also to be his fastest—a 1952 Nash Healey two-seater, a beautiful piece
of precision machinery, all ivory and chrome and balloon tires, and astonishingly nimble on the road. He swiftly calculated
the hour, the fact that there would be virtually no traffic on the road from Mount Vernon into the District of Columbia, little
or no city traffic, and dry pavement, against the top speed of the Nash Healey.

“It so happens that I’m ready to roll, Ham. I should say nineteen minutes, twenty-one at top. Where do we meet?”

“My office at Treasury. Now step on it.”

Slayton ran to the Nash Healey, jumped over the driver’s side door, and fired the engine. He pressed a remote switch built
into the dash to activate the electronic garage door opener.

He then eased the Nash Healey out of the garage, letting the engine warm to the job it would have to do in service to the
country. Slayton gunned the Nash Healey once he was clear of the garage, activated the remote control again to close and automatically
lock the garage, then sank the gear shift into the lowest grade to torque quickly into a racing cruise.

The rear tires bit down hard into the asphalt-and-gravel drive leading from the Slayton farm to the freeway. The Nash Healey
jumped into high-speed action with an almost animal-like life. Slayton was able to run through all the gears before reaching
the end of his long drive; he down-shifted only once to take the hairpin turns preceding the smooth straight-away of the main
road.

Once headed toward Washington, the Nash Healey streaked along at 105 miles per hour with such evenness, due to the low gravity
center, that the coffee cup Slayton had absent-mindedly wedged into a corner between windshield and dashboard was almost ripple-free.

Slayton removed the cup, finished its contents, and wondered how in the world he would be risking his life this time.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 6:54:10 a.m. EST

Winship’s office was baroque, government-issue splendor in mahogany paneling and curved moldings, worthy of even the most
insistent demands for power. There was a view of the White House from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind Winship’s desk.

He stood at those windows now, hands clasped behind his back, as an armada of male and female secretaries swirled in and out
of his inner sanctum, leaving in their wake teletypes still warm from the transmission machine, stamped “Top Secret” in bold
red block letters.

President Reagan will have been awakened by now, he thought to himself, and probably briefed on the threat to Nixon’s life.
What will he make of it? More importantly, what will Haig make of it? Winship shook his head. Reagan he liked. He might even
want to go fishing with Ronald Reagan. Bush he could tolerate. But Haigl There was a man Winship would be chary about accompanying
on a fishing trip. Fishing, after all, necessitated sharp hooks and sharp knives.

His reverie was interrupted by the entrance of Ben Slayton.

“Okay, Hammy, what’s the hurry?”

Winship groaned. Why couldn’t Slayton make even the slightest bow to protocol?

“Sit down,” Winship said solemnly. He cast a suspicious glance at Slayton’s work clothes, started to say something in the
way of a sartorial objection, then changed his mind and proceeded to the emergency at hand:

“I want you to look at something,” he told Slayton, handing him a photo-transmission of the note slipped into Nixon’s newspaper
less than an hour ago in New York.

Slayton studied the message carefully after reading it for content quickly.

“Of course, we can’t be sure until we receive the original,” Slayton said, “but I’d say first off that it was written on a
Royal Manual Standard, typed from notes…”

“That’s hardly important now. We’ll let forensic do the scut work. What I want to know, Ben, is what you might know about
the Rogers case.”

“Johnny Lee Rogers, the Nazi?”

Winship nodded his head.

“Not too much, I’m afraid. But from what I see in the press, he’s something apart from the common herd of Nazi scum. He’s
above them, but not too far above them to be revered. Under the right circumstances, under the campaign of a rival as smart
as Rogers…”

“You think—”

“Yes. That this isn’t necessarily a threat endorsed by Rogers. He’s too slick for that.”

“All supposition, of course.”

“Of course,” Slayton agreed. “But tell me, did anyone up in New York see anything?”