Shall We Tell the President?

by Jeffrey Archer

  His eyes came to rest on a plaque on the wall, which stated that, in over sixty years of the FBI’s history, only thirty-four people had been killed while on duty; on only one occasion had two officers died on the same day. Yesterday made that out-of-date. Mark’s eyes continued moving around the wall and settled on a large picture of the Supreme Court; government and the law hand-in-hand. On his left were the five directors, Hoover, Gray, Ruckelshaus, Kelley, and now the redoubtable H. A. L. Tyson, known to everyone in the Bureau by the acronym Halt. Apparently, no one except his secretary, Mrs. McGregor, knew his first name. It had become a longstanding joke in the Bureau. When you joined the FBI, you paid one dollar to Mrs. McGregor, who had served the Director for twenty-seven years, and told her what you thought the Director’s first name was. If you got it right, you won the pool. The kitty had now reached $3,516. Mark had guessed Hector. Mrs. McGregor had laughed and the pool was one dollar the richer. If you wanted a second guess, that cost you another dollar, but if you got it wrong, you paid a tendollar fine. Quite a few people tried the second time and the kitty grew larger as each new victim arrived.

  Mark had had what he thought was the bright idea of checking the Criminal Fingerprints File. The FBI fingerprints records fall into three categories—military, civil, and criminal, and all FBI agents have their prints in the criminal file. This insures that they are able to trace any FBI agent who turns criminal, or to eliminate an agent’s prints at the scene of a crime; these records are very rarely used. Mark had considered himself very clever as he asked to see Tyson’s card. The Director’s card was handed to him by an assistant from the Fingerprints Department. It read—“Height: 6’1”; Weight: 1801bs; Hair: brown; Occupation: Director of FBI; Name: Tyson, H.A.L.” No forename given. The assistant, another anonymous man in a blue suit, had smiled sourly at Mark and had said, loud enough for Mark to hear, as he returned the card to its file, “One more sucker who thought he was going to make a quick three thousand bucks.”

  Because the Bureau had become more political during the last decade the appointment of a professional law enforcement officer was a figure whom Congress found very easy to endorse. Law enforcement was in Tyson’s blood. His great-grandfather had been a Wells Fargo man, riding shotgun on the stage between San Francisco and Seattle in the other Washington. His grandfather had been mayor of Boston and its chief of police, a rare combination, and his father before his retirement had been a distinguished Massachusetts attorney. That the great-grandson had followed family tradition, and ended up as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, surprised no one. The anecdotes about him were legion and Mark wondered just how many of them were apocryphal.

  There was no doubt that Tyson had scored the winning touchdown in his final Harvard–Yale game because it was there on record, as indeed was the fact that he was the only white man to box on the 1956 American Olympic team in Melbourne. Whether he had actually said to the late President Nixon that he would rather serve the devil than direct the FBI under his presidency, no one could be sure, but it was certainly a story the Kane camp made no effort to suppress.

  His wife had died five years earlier of multiple sclerosis. He had nursed her for twenty years with a fierce loyalty.

  He feared no man and his reputation for honesty and straight talking had raised him above most government employees in the eyes of the nation. After a period of malaise, following Hoover’s death, Halt Tyson had restored the Bureau to the prestige it had enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s. Tyson was one of the reasons Mark had been happy to commit five years of his life to the FBI.

  Mark began to fidget with the middle button of his jacket, as all FBI agents tend to do. It had been drummed into him in the fifteen-week course at Quantico that jacket buttons should always be undone, allowing access to the gun, on the hip holster, never on a shoulder strap. It annoyed Mark that the television series about the FBI always got that wrong. Whenever an FBI man sensed danger, he would fiddle with that middle button to make sure his coat was open. Mark sensed fear, fear of the unknown, fear of H.A.L. Tyson, fear which an accessible Smith and Wesson could not cure.

  The anonymous young man with the vigilant look and the dark blue blazer returned.

  “The Director will see you now.”

  Mark rose, felt unsteady, braced himself, rubbed his hands against his trousers to remove the sweat from his palms and followed the anonymous man through the outer office and into the Director’s inner sanctum. The Director glanced up, waved him to a chair, and waited for the anonymous man to leave the room and close the door. Even seated, the Director was a bull of a man with a large head placed squarely on massive shoulders. Bushy eyebrows matched his careless, wiry brown hair; it was so curly you might have thought it was a wig if it hadn’t been H.A.L. Tyson. His big hands remained splayed on the surface as though the desk might try to get away. The delicate Queen Anne desk was quite subdued by the grip of the Director. His cheeks were red, not the red of alcohol, but the red of good and bad weather. Slightly back from the Director’s chair stood another man, muscular, clean-shaven, and silent, a policeman’s policeman.

  The Director spoke. “Andrews, this is Assistant Director Matthew Rogers. I have briefed him on the events following Casefikis’s death: we will be putting several agents on the investigation with you.” The Director’s gray eyes were piercing—piercing Mark. “I lost two of my best men yesterday, Andrews, and nothing—I repeat, nothing—will stop me from finding out who was responsible, even if it was the President herself, you understand.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mark said very quietly.

  “You will have gathered from the press releases we gave that the public is under the impression that what happened yesterday evening was just another automobile accident. No journalist has connected the murders in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center with the deaths of my agents. Why should they, with a murder every twenty-six minutes in America?”

  A Metropolitan Police file marked “Chief of Metropolitan Police” was by his side; even they were under control.

  “We, Mr. Andrews …”

  It made Mark feel slightly royal.

  “ … we are not going to disillusion them. I have been going over carefully what you told me last night. I’ll summarize the situation as I see it. Please feel free to interrupt me whenever you want to.”

  Under normal circumstances, Mark would have laughed.

  The Director was looking at the file.

  “The Greek immigrant wanted to see the head of the FBI,” he continued. “Perhaps I should have granted his request, had I known about it.” He looked up. “Still, the facts: Casefikis made an oral statement to you at Woodrow Wilson, and the gist of it was that he believed that there was a plot in motion to assassinate the President of the United States on 10 March; he overheard this information while waiting on a private lunch in a Georgetown hotel, at which he thought a U.S. senator was present. Is that correct so far, Andrews?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Once more the Director looked down at the file.

  “The police took prints of the dead man, and he hasn’t shown up in our files or in the Metropolitan Police files. So for the moment we must act on the assumption, after last night’s four killings, that everything the Greek immigrant told us was in good faith. He may not have got the story entirely accurately, but he certainly was on to something big enough to cause four murders in one night. I think we may also assume that whoever the people are behind these diabolical events, they believe they are now in the clear and that they have killed anyone who might have known of their plans. You may consider yourself lucky, young man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I suppose it had crossed your mind that they thought it was you in the blue Ford sedan?”

  Mark nodded. He had thought of little else for the past ten hours; he hoped Norma Stames would never think of it.

  “I want these conspirators to think they are now in the clear and for that reason, I am going to allow the President’s schedu
le for the week to continue as planned, at least for the moment.”

  Mark ventured a question. “But, sir, won’t that put her in grave danger?”

  “Andrews, somebody, somewhere, and it may be a United States senator, is planning to assassinate the President; so far, he has been prepared to murder two of my best agents, a Greek who might have recognized him, and a deaf postman whose only connection with the matter was that he may have been able to identify Casefikis’s killer. If we rush in now with the heavy artillery, then we will scare them off. We have almost nothing to go on; we would be unlikely to discover their identities. And if we did, we certainly wouldn’t be able to nail them. Our only hope of catching them is to let the bastards think they are in the clear—right up to the last moment. That way, we just might get them. It’s possible they have already been frightened off, but I think not. They have used such violent means to keep their intentions secret they must have some overriding reason for wanting the President out of the way within seven days. We must find out what the reason is.”

  “Shall we tell the President?”

  “No, no, not yet. God knows, over the past two years she’s had enough problems with the Gun Control bill without having to look over her shoulder trying to figure out which senator is Mark Antony and which is Brutus.”

  “So what do we do for the next six days?”

  “You and I will have to find Cassius. And he may not be the one with the lean and hungry look.”

  “What if we don’t find him?” asked Mark.

  “God help America.”

  “And if we do?”

  “You may have to kill him.”

  Mark thought for a moment. He’d never killed anybody in his life; come to think of it, he hadn’t knowingly killed anything at all. He didn’t like stepping on insects. And the thought that the first person he might kill could be a U.S. senator was, to say the least, daunting.

  “Don’t look so worried, Andrews. It probably won’t come to that. Now let me tell you exactly what I intend to do. I’m going to brief Stuart Knight, the head of the Secret Service, that two of my officers were investigating a man claiming that the President of the United States was going to be assassinated some time within the next month. However, I have no intention of letting him know that a senator may be involved; and I won’t tell him that two of our men died because of it; that’s not his problem. It may actually have nothing to do with a senator, and I’m not having a whole bunch of people staring at their elected representatives wondering which one of them is a criminal.”

  The Assistant Director cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “Some of us think that anyway.”

  The Director continued unswervingly. “This morning, Andrews, you will write a report on Casefikis’s information and the circumstances of his murder, and you will hand it in to Grant Nanna. Do not include the subsequent murders of Stames and Calvert: no one must connect these two events. Report the threat on the President’s life but not the possibility that a senator is involved. Is that how you would play it, Matt?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rogers. “If we voice our suspicions to people who don’t need to know them, we will run the risk of provoking a security operation that will make the assassins run for cover; then we would simply have to pick up our marbles and start over—if we were lucky enough to get a second chance.”

  “Right,” said the Director. “So this is how we’ll proceed, Andrews. There are one hundred senators. One of them provides our only link with the conspirators. It’s going to be your task to pinpoint that man. The Assistant Director will have a couple of junior men follow up the few other leads that we have. No need for them to know the details, Matt. To start with, check out the Golden Duck Restaurant.”

  “And every hotel in Georgetown, to see which one put on a private luncheon party on 24 February,” said Rogers. “And the hospital. Maybe someone saw suspicious characters hanging around the parking lot or the corridors; the assassins must have seen our Ford there while Calvert and you, Andrews, were interviewing Casefikis. I think that’s about all we can do for the moment.”

  “I agree,” said the Director. “Okay, thanks, Matt, I won’t take up any more of your time. Please let me have anything you turn up immediately.”

  “Sure,” said the Assistant Director. He nodded at Mark and left the room.

  Mark had sat silently, impressed by the clarity with which the Director had grasped the details of the case; his mind must be like a filing cabinet.

  The Director pressed a button on his intercom.

  “Coffee for two, please, Mrs. McGregor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, Andrews, you come into the Bureau at seven o’clock every morning and report to me. Should any emergency arise, call me, using the code name Julius. I will use the same code name when calling you. When you hear the word ‘Julius,’ break off whatever you are doing. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, a most important point. If, in any circumstances, I die or disappear, you brief only the Attorney General, and Rogers will take care of the rest. If you die, young man, you can leave the decision to me.” He smiled for the first time—it was not Mark’s idea of a joke. “I see from the files that you’re entitled to two weeks’ leave. Well take it, starting at noon today. I don’t want you to exist officially for at least a week. Grant Nanna has already been briefed that you have been seconded to me,” continued the Director. “You may have to tolerate me night and day for six days, young man, and no one other than my late wife has had that problem before.”

  “And you me, sir,” was Mark’s quick and unthinking reply.

  He waited for his head to be bitten off; instead the Director smiled again.

  Mrs. McGregor appeared with the coffee, served them, and left. The Director drank his coffee in one swallow and began to pace around the room as if it were a cage; Mark did not move, though his eyes never left Tyson. His massive frame and great shoulders heaved up and down, his large head with its bushy hair rocking from side to side. He was going through what the boys called the thought process.

  “The first thing you’re to do, Andrews, is find out which senators were in Washington on 24 February. As it was near the weekend, most of those dummies would have been floating all over the country, making speeches or vacationing with their pampered children.”

  What endeared the Director to everyone was not that he said it behind their backs but that he said it even more explicitly to their faces. Mark smiled and began to relax.

  “When we have that list, we’ll try and figure out what they have in common. Separate the Republicans from the Democrats, and then put them under party headings as to interests, public and private. After that, we have to find out which ones have any connection with President Kane, past or present, friendly or unfriendly. Your report will cover all these details and be ready for our meeting tomorrow morning. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now there’s something else I want you to understand, Andrews. As I am sure you know, for the past decade, the FBI has been in a very sensitive political position. Those watchdogs in Congress are just waiting for us to exceed our legitimate authority. If we in any way cast suspicion upon a member of Congress, without indisputable evidence of his guilt, they will hang, draw and quarter the Bureau. And rightly so, in my opinion. Police agencies in a democracy must prove that they can be trusted not to subvert the political process. Purer than Caesar’s wife. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “From today we have six days, from tomorrow five, and I want to catch this man and his friends red-handed. So neither of us will be on statutory overtime.”

  “No, sir.”

  The Director returned to his desk and summoned Mrs. McGregor.

  “Mrs. McGregor, this is Special Agent Andrews, who’ll be working closely with me on an extremely sensitive investigation for the next six days. Whenever he wants to see me, let him come right in; if I’m with anybo
dy but Mr. Rogers, notify me immediately—no red tape, no waiting.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anybody else.”

  “Of course not, Mr. Tyson.”

  The Director turned to Mark. “Now you go back to the WFO and start working. I’ll see you in this office at seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Mark stood up. He didn’t finish his coffee; perhaps by the sixth day he would feel free to say so. He shook hands with the Director and headed towards the door. Just as he reached it, the Director added: “Andrews, I hope you’ll be very careful. Keep looking over both shoulders at once.”

  Mark shivered and moved quickly out of the room, down the corridor, keeping his back firmly to the wall when he reached the elevator, and walking along the sides of the passage on the ground floor, where he ran into a group of tourists who were studying pictures of the Ten Most Wanted Criminals in America. Next week, would one of them be a senator?

  When he reached the street, he dodged the traffic until he arrived at the Washington Field Office, on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue. It wouldn’t quite be like home this morning. Two men were missing, and they weren’t going to be able to replace them with a training manual. The flag on top of the FBI Building and the flag on top of the Old Post Office Building were at half-mast; two of their agents were dead.

  Mark went straight into Grant Nanna’s office; he had aged ten years overnight. For him, two friends had died, one who worked under him and one who worked above him.

  “Sit down, Mark.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “The Director has already spoken to me this morning. I didn’t ask any questions. I understand you’re taking a two-week leave as of noon today, and that you are writing me a memorandum on what happened at the hospital. I have to pass it on to higher authorities and that will be the end of it as far as the WFO is concerned, because Homicide will take over. They are also trying to tell me Nick and Barry died in a car accident.”