Trail of the Twisted Cros (6 page)

BOOK: Trail of the Twisted Cros
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He grumbled as he lifted the District of Columbia telephone directory from a credenza behind his desk, spread it open before
him, and looked up the number of the
Washington Star
. An insolent city editor, groggy after an eight-hour shift on the night desk, provided him with the name of the classified
advertising manager, though he would not offer a home telephone number. Winship leafed wildly through the directory, located
the man, and dialed the number.

“This is Hamilton Winship, deputy director of the Department of the Treasury, Mr. Bailey. I’m calling you this morning on
a matter of national security, urgent national security.”

“That you, Hal?”

“What?”

“Hal?”

Winship was unaccustomed to being taken as a prankster.

“I am Hamilton Winship, deputy—”

“And I’m Archduke Ferdinand.”

“You are the classified advertising manager of the
Washington Star
, and I am calling on you to assist on a matter of urgent national security. I will give you a telephone number that will
connect you with the White House. Call it, and you will be switched to me. I have no time to respond to your suspicions, sir.
Please, in the name of national security, call this number.”

Winship gave him the White House switchboard number. Bailey, responding to the genuine sound of urgency in Winship’s voice,
obediently retelephoned.

“Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Winship, I—”

“Quiet. I do not require apologies. I do require you to get to your office immediately. There, you will be met by Mr. Benjamin
Slayton, one of our special T-men. He will be asking you for authorization to look at advance billing orders for today’s classified
advertisements—the personals, I should imagine. Please get moving.”

“Yes sir!” Bailey said, as Winship clicked off.

“Are you Mr. Slayton?” the short, balding fat man asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Bailey,” he whispered. Bailey, sweating, looked around him conspiratorially. “It’s all right. I was called by a Mr. Winship.”

“Yeah.”

Bailey wiped the sweat off his upper lip.

“I mean,” Bailey said, “what do we do?”


We
don’t do anything. I just want your billing orders, for today’s editions.”

“The personals, right? That’s what—”

“Fine, I’ll start with those.”

Bailey scurried off, unlocked a cabinet, and returned to the counter where Slayton waited. He spread out about a hundred pieces
of paper, upon which order takers had scrawled out a day’s worth of personal messages from the public, most of them having
to do with parents wanting to hear from missing children, husbands wanting to hear from vanished wives, travelers wanting
discount airline tickets, and birthday greetings.

Slayton ripped through the orders, not knowing exactly what to look for. But he found it in a matter of minutes. The message
and the treachery were unmistakable:

Dear Dick,

Surprise! We lied. It was 7 today! This is by no means all we have up our sleeves.

Chapter Five

ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH II,
    Atlantic Ocean, 8 September

Bejeweled and heavily powdered matrons alone and on the lookout for flashy young men they would prefer to think of as innocently
attracted to older women, at least for the duration of the crossing, lined the upper deck. They were arranged in sweeping
rows of
chaise longues
as if interested only in the strong sun and sea air, as if it were somehow necessary, in the privileged indolence that was
their lot in life, to seek peace and quiet from imagined business.

One deck below, the rope-enclosed volleyball court was an eye-catching swirl of harder and younger bodies leaping and stretching
to keep up the game that would give one and all a social bond useful to some quieter evening activity, though no less strenuous.
Watching this group, surreptitiously, was an embankment of potbellied, spindly-legged old men wrapped in terrycloth towelings,
men who sadly imagined themselves in the place of their younger counterparts, frolicking in some distant past with delightful
visions of leggy young women their various wives never were.

Along the narrow promenade decks strolled middle-aged lovers—married, though not necessarily to one another—the occasional
sharply uniformed officer wishing to be noticed by someone who could help him pass the time comfortably, and the rare child
in parental tow.

Practically no one was below at this mid-afternoon hour, not with the weather so fair and the romantic images so plentiful.
The exception was a bearded man who hadn’t yet ventured out of his stateroom.

He stood at a wash basin, dressed only in his trousers. His shirt lay on the floor, and his Burberry raincoat was left atop
his unopened luggage.

He had only a small grip open, and a toilet kit, from which he had removed a pair of scissors and shaving gear.

Carefully, he snipped away the bulk of his salt-and-pepper beard, collecting the whiskery refuse in the basin. He was meticulous
about washing the hairs down the drain, and out, eventually, to sea.

When he had completed the first stage, he lathered his face and set to work with a safety razor. It felt good to be clean-shaven
again. He ran his fingers across his newly bare cheeks, and marveled at how much younger he could look this way. He sprinkled
a few drops of Yardley cologne into the palms of his hands and rubbed the cooling solution into the skin of his face and neck,
enjoying the fresh bite of alcohol and the musk scent.

When he was finished, he removed the dark brown-tinted contact lenses he had worn on checking in. His natural eye color was
a pale blue, which he framed with clear steel-framed aviator glasses.

NEW YORK CITY

The dark green Ford stationwagon slipped into a spot at the curb in front of number 142 East 65th Street. It was expected.

Two men in conservative business suits emerged from the step-down street door of the townhouse and checked the credentials
of three other men who remained inside the station wagon. Then all five men began unloading the cargo brought to “The Residence,”
as the town-house was called by the Secret Service. A collection of bulky steel cases that might have contained musicians’
gear, by their appearance, were shuttled from the car to the ground floor security station—a small vestibule and a larger
sitting room leading to a second large room toward the rear of the house.

By this time, East 65th Street was in its customary form, a sedately bustling Upper East Side row of townhouses owned by Dick
and Pat Nixon; David Rockefeller, the retired banker and international financier; Otto Preminger, the film director; and others
of like wealth, but more private names. A Catholic girls’ school across the way from the Nixons emptied its doors of a few
hundred boisterous charges, and the unusually watchful eyes of Secret Service agents posted at the second-story windows of
The Residence recorded a normal dispersement at the end of the school day.

The usual daytime neighborhood passersby, those familiar to the T-men assigned to The Residence, detected nothing unusual
in the delivery of so many steel boxes at the Nixon home. They had more important things on their minds. The blasé quality
of life in New York, and especially that of Manhattan’s fabled Upper East Side, was the strongest factor in Richard Nixon’s
decision to leave California, where “La Casa Pacifica” had become an intolerable loneliness surrounded by rubber-necking tourists.
In Manhattan, Nixon could be in the midst of a crowded city and yet virtually ignored as a minor light in a community of more
genuine luminaries, or at least more lovable luminaries.

Occasionally, a group of wide-eyed out-of-towners, dressed in garments they assumed to bb fashionable in the better districts
of places like Omaha and Shreveport, would stop outside The Residence and point, shaking their heads in disbelief at the surprising
smallness of a New York townhouse. One of the group would remember the shocking $750,000 price tag announced in the press,
and they would cluck about that fact while grouped in front for an Instamatic photograph.

A group stopped now, performed the routine seen so often by the Secret Service agents, and then assembled for picture-taking.
This time, as the Instamatics clicked, so, too, did the larger, hidden cameras fitted through the slats of the yellow shutters
on the second-floor windows. Someone among the T-men remembered how John Hinckley had stopped for an Instamatic photo in front
of the White House only a few days before taking a shot at President Reagan.

One of the men who had arrived in the station wagon returned from the townhouse and locked up the car. He chatted briefly
with one of the Secret Service men permanently attached to The Residence duty, then went back inside, leaving the T-man to
watch the tourists.

FAIRMONT, West Virginia

Slayton could see the telltale line of smoke rising beyond the hills. He began his descent, knowing by long experience as
a flyer in Vietnam, that the smoke visibility was an able guide to altitude adjustments in preparation for landing in a troubled
spot.

He nosed the small U.S. Army helicopter he had managed to commandeer at Andrews Air Force Base toward the last ridge of blue-green
pines he would have to pass before reaching Fairmont. He was low enough now so that he could watch the shadow his craft made
on the forested hills; he could see the birds and the deer scampering down below at the dreaded sound of muffled rotor blades.

And then he saw the city of Fairmont—the source of the smoke that was his beacon.

Below him, the city was a barely controlled pandemonium of traffic congestion, arson, and angry, moving lines of people, some
moving against one another, some fleeing, some devouring commercial buildings and homes in the same way Slayton had seen Africa’s
terrifying army ants decimate a remote village by eating every living thing.

Even so, it appeared to Slayton, from his lofty vantage point, that the military would not have to be called in. Local police,
with state help, seemed to be managing. But what of the trauma to come after the fires were out and the ashes swept?

Slayton had seen this sort of public insanity before, in the uncivilized and so-called “civilized” world. Each time, townspeople
were left with the chilly realization that at any time of extraordinary circumstances there were those who would use the opportunity
for utter destruction, that there was no clue as to who they should watch.

What was that line from Menninger, Slayton wondered?

“We know that in the unconscious we are all mad, all capable of a madness which threatens constantly to emerge—sometimes does
emerge, only to be tucked away again out of sight, if possible…”

It was as good a description as he’d ever read to explain situations like the one he viewed below him. The unfortunate thing
for the people of Fairmont, of course, was that they would always know, from this day on, that once a collective madness was
exposed, perhaps it could never be tucked out of sight again.

He thought of Johnny Lee Rogers. That was the sort of man who was so talented at exploiting madness, whatever its root.

These days, these days of revolution by media, as in Iran, an exploiter like Johnny Lee Rogers would have no qualms about
using terrorists to bring about the innate madness of “law-abiding” citizens. Slayton was seeing the truth of that assumption
right now as he looped around the perimeters of the grazing riot on the ground, fixing his sights on the natural boundaries
of Fairmont, the landmarks and the traffic patterns. He spotted the mine easily enough. It was the fourth big smoking pile
to the north.

Plainly, Rogers’ supporters had now broken with their bully-boy rhetoric with this wanton sacrifice of human life. Was Rogers
himself directing it? Would he acknowledge the effort, if and when terrorists managed to spring him?

Would this new
Führer
acknowledge his own duplicity in violent tragedy?

After all, it was Hitler’s own squads of
Sturmabteilung
who entered the German parliament via underground tunnels which connected it to the presidential palace, and set the Reichstag
on fire.

On the day after the fire, the aged Hindenburg was prevailed upon to sign a decree “For the Protection of the People and the
State” designed as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the State.”

And now here was Johnny Lee Rogers with his exhortations against the civil rights of those who would not agree with him—Rogers,
like Hitler himself, always staying far beyond the fray. Johnny Lee Rogers, until this murder conspiracy conviction, had never
been known to burn a cross or march in a Nazi uniform or put his name to any document with defamatory descriptions of minorities.
In his time, too, Hitler never once spit at a Jew, kicked a black, or fired on a Communist. Others did all these things in
their names. Others were made to feel that their focus should be on an enemy of Rogers’ choosing—or Hitler’s.

Slayton knew that to get at the root of a problem he would always have to understand the players of the plot. He had to understand
Hitler, since Johnny Lee Rogers, presumably the guest of honor in absentia at this little holocaust in Fairmont, West Virginia,
was a student of Hitler’s. And Slayton would have to understand Hitler’s followers—and Rogers’.

The question in each case, it seemed to Slayton, involved the nature of the followers and the future course of the followers.
At this point, he could focus no more clearly than that.

He shook his head. This tiresome repetition of history, the failure of man to learn from his own abuses, made his brain ache—as
well as his heart. Would we ever come to an end in the trail of the twisted cross?

Slayton cut back on the rotor power and let the helicopter drop gently through the air, almost straight downward over a clearing
not far from the Lovebridge mine entrance.

What would he find down on the ground?

He let the few slim clues float through his mind, applying them against the sifting impressions of history. Once again, during
a national crisis, Ben Slayton knew only, at the outset, to put himself as close to the eye of the hurricane as possible,
and to trust to his deductive reasoning powers.

BOOK: Trail of the Twisted Cros
8.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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