The Machiavelli Covenant

by Allan Folsom

  "No, Richard."

  "You're certain?"

  "Yes, I'm certain."

  "Good, Victor. Very good."

  9

  • 3:40 P.M.

  Nicholas Marten was not a drinking man, at least not the kind who sat in the bar of his hotel in the middle of the afternoon drinking whiskey. Yet now, today, this afternoon, still emotionally devastated by Caroline's death, he simply felt like it. He was sitting alone at the far end of the bar working on his third Walker Red and soda and trying to get past the near-crippling wave of emotion that had washed over him the moment her attorney had ushered him out of her house and closed the door behind them.

  Marten took another pull at his drink and absently looked around. Halfway down the bar he could see the female bartender in the low-cut blouse chatting with a middle-aged man in a rumpled business suit, her only other customer. The half dozen leather-padded booths across the room were empty. So were the eight tables with accompanying leather chairs in between. The TV behind the bar was tuned to a live news broadcast from Union Station where a man had been shot and killed barely an hour earlier. Not just killed, the on-camera reporter said, but "assassinated," shot dead by a gunman from a window in a building across the street. As yet the authorities had revealed little about the victim other than to say he was thought to have been a passenger on an Acela train that had just arrived from New York City. Nor had there been speculation as to the motive for his killing. Other details were only beginning to trickle in, one suggesting the murder weapon had been left behind. It was a situation that made Marten think again about Dr. Stephenson, wonder again why there had still been no public announcement of her suicide, and made him wonder if somehow her body was still lying on the sidewalk and for some improbable reason had not been discovered. That hardly seemed likely. The only other explanations were what he had thought earlier, that her next of kin had yet to be notified or maybe that the police were working on something they didn't want made public.

  "Nicholas Marten?"

  A man's voice suddenly crackled behind him. Startled, Marten turned around. A man and a woman were halfway down the bar coming toward him. They were probably in their mid-forties, city-worn and intense and wearing dark off-the-rack suits. There was no question who they were. Detectives.

  "Yes," Marten said.

  "My name is Herbert, Metropolitan Police Department." He showed his I.D., then put it away. "This is Detective Monroe."

  Herbert had a medium build with a touch of belly and gray hair mixed in with natural brown. His eyes were very nearly the same color. Detective Monroe was maybe a year or two younger. Tall, with a square chin, her blond hair cut short and highlighted. She was pretty in a way but too tough and too weary to be attractive.

  "We'd like to talk to you," Herbert said.

  "What about?"

  "You know a Dr. Lorraine Stephenson?"

  "In a way. Why?"

  This was the thing Marten had dreaded, that someone had seen him outside of her house, maybe even seen him follow after her when she ran off down the street, perhaps even heard the gunshot, and then seen him leave and taken down the license number of his rental car as he drove away.

  "You made several calls to her office yesterday," Monroe said.

  "Yes." Calls? What is this? Marten wondered. This was a suicide and they'd gone over her telephone records? Well maybe. She knew a lot of important people. The whole thing could be more involved than he thought and have nothing to do with Caroline.

  "Persistent calls," Monroe said.

  "What did you want from her?" Herbert pressed him.

  "To talk to her about the death of one of her patients."

  "Who was that?"

  "Caroline Parsons."

  Herbert half smiled. "Mr. Marten, we'd like you to come down to police headquarters and talk to us."

  "Why?" Marten didn't understand. So far they'd said nothing about her suicide. Nothing to suggest they knew he had been anywhere near her residence.

  "Mr. Marten," Monroe said flatly, "Dr. Stephenson has been murdered."

  "Murdered?" Marten said in genuine surprise.

  "Yes."

  10

  • METROPOLITAN POLICE HEADQUARTERS,

  DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 4:10 P.M.

  Where were you between eight and nine o'clock last night?" Detective Monroe asked quietly.

  "In my rental car driving around the city," Marten said evenly, working to give them nothing. In a way it was the truth. Besides he had no other alibi.

  "Anybody with you?"

  "No."

  Herbert leaned forward across the institutional table in the small interrogation room where they sat facing each other. Detective Monroe stood back against the door they had come in. The only door in the room.

  "Where in the city?"

  "Just around. I don't know where exactly, I'm not familiar with the city. I live in England. Caroline Parsons was a close friend. Her death disturbed me a lot. I just needed to keep moving."

  "So you—drove around?"

  "Yes."

  "To Dr. Stephenson's home?"

  "I don't know where I went. I told you, I don't know the city."

  "But you found your way back to your hotel." Herbert kept working on him while Monroe remained silent, watching his reactions.

  "Eventually, yes."

  "About what time?"

  "Nine, nine thirty. I'm not sure."

  "You blamed Dr. Stephenson for Caroline Parsons's death, didn't you?"

  "No."

  Marten didn't get it. What were they doing? There was no homicide cop in the world who couldn't tell murder from suicide, at least not the way Lorraine Stephenson had done it. So what were they really going after, and why? Was it possible they too were onto the idea that Caroline might have been murdered? If so, had Stephenson been a suspect? If she had been, maybe it was the police who had been in the passing cars keeping an eye on her home. Maybe they had even seen him sitting in his car, then jump out to accost her as she stepped from the taxi and follow after as she ran off down the street. If that were the case, they might think he had been involved in Caroline's death. If they did, he wasn't going anywhere for some time and showing them the notarized letter she'd signed giving him access to her and her husband's private affairs could make things even worse by suggesting he had coerced her into writing it even though he hadn't even been in the country when she'd done it. Coerced her because he had something else in mind once she was dead, something in her estate or something political her husband had been involved with.

  He knew all too well that if the police had any reason to believe he had been involved with Caroline's death or the death of Dr. Stephenson, they would charge him as an accessory and book him. In the process he would be fingerprinted and his prints would be run through the local data bank, the AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System; and then the national FBI data bank, the IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. At the same time they would query Interpol. If they did they would find he was a former police officer because his prints would still be on file, and ID him under his real name, John Barron. After that it wouldn't be long before those on the LAPD still looking for him knew about it. To them he remained a "person of primary interest" on a Web site called Copperchatter.com—a chat room of cops talking to cops around the world, in cop vernacular, with cop humor, and cop vindictiveness—with his name freshly posted every Sunday night by someone using the moniker Gunslinger but who he knew was Gene VerMeer, a veteran LAPD homicide detective who despised him for what had happened in L.A. those few years earlier, and who had created the Web site just to find him. Find him, and then keep him under close surveillance until Gunslinger VerMeer or some of his cronies showed up to take care of him once and for all.

  "How did you know Caroline Parsons?"

  Now it was Detective Monroe's turn, and she moved from where she stood by the door to lean beside what appeared to be a large mirror mounted on the roo
m's back wall. It wasn't a mirror at all but rather a one-way glass with an unseen observation room behind it. Who, or how many, were behind it watching him Marten had no way to tell.

  "I'd met her a long time ago in Los Angeles," Marten said calmly, trying to stay as matter-of-fact as he could. "We became friends and stayed friends. I knew her husband as well."

  "You fuck her a lot?"

  Marten bit his tongue. He knew they were trying to get to him any way they could. That it came from a woman made no difference.

  "How many times?"

  "We did not have a sexual relationship."

  "No?" Monroe half smiled.

  "No."

  "What did you want to talk to Dr. Stephenson about?" Herbert took over again.

  "I told you before. The death of Caroline Parsons."

  "Why? What did you expect she could tell you?"

  "Mrs. Parsons had become seriously ill very quickly and nobody seemed to know exactly what it was. Her husband and son had just been killed in a plane crash and she was an emotional wreck. She called me in England and asked me to come. She died soon after I arrived."

  "Why did she ask you to come?"

  Marten glared at Herbert. "I told you, we were close friends. You have anyone who would call you like that? Somebody you'd want to be with in your last hours?"

  Marten wasn't playing tough guy, he just wanted them to see he was angry. Not just because of the questions and the way they were asking them but so they would see and hear and feel the depth of his relationship with Caroline, that it had been and still was, genuine.

  "And since Dr. Stephenson was her primary physician," Monroe came toward him, "you wanted to hear from her what had happened."

  "Yes."

  "So you called and called but you never got through to her. It made you mad. How mad?"

  "She finally did return my call."

  "And what did she tell you?"

  "That the things I wanted to talk about were privileged information between doctor and patient."

  "That was all?"

  "Yes."

  "And between eight and nine last evening you were just driving around the city?" Now it was Herbert again.

  "Yes."

  "Alone?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "I told you, I don't know."

  "Anybody see you?"

  "I don't know that either."

  "Did you kill her?" Monroe snapped suddenly.

  "No."

  Herbert kept the pressure on: "You're an American but you live and work in England."

  "I graduated from the University of Manchester with an advanced degree in landscape architecture. I liked it there and decided to stay. I work for a small firm, Fitzsimmons and Justice, where I design formal gardens and other landscape projects. I have a British passport and consider myself an expatriate."

  Herbert got up from the table. As he did, Marten saw him exchange the briefest glance with Monroe. What it told him was startling. They had not come after him because they thought Caroline had been murdered or because they thought he or Dr. Stephenson had been involved with it or because he had been seen chasing after Stephenson in the moments before she killed herself. No, they had picked him up simply because of the phone calls he'd made to her. It meant they were certain she had been murdered. But that was impossible because he had been right in front of her when she shot herself. So why did they believe what they did?

  The only possible explanation was that someone had gotten to her body very soon after he'd left and done something to it to make it appear she had been killed. Maybe taken her gun from the scene and then shot her in the face with a weapon of much larger caliber, destroying the evidence of the suicide and making it look like murder and giving the investigators and the coroner little reason to suspect anything else. But why? Unless the motive for the suicide of a woman of her prominence would have been far more carefully scrutinized than if she had simply been killed.

  Marten looked to the detectives. He wanted to press them for details about the state of Dr. Stephenson's body when they'd found it, but he didn't dare. Right now it seemed they were still pretty much in the dark about what had happened. Consequently they had nothing they could hold him on, so showing any curiosity at all would only pique their interest, make them wonder why he wanted to know and start in on him again. So best to get off it while he could.

  "I think I've answered your questions," he said respectfully. "If you don't mind, I would like to go."

  Herbert studied him for a long moment, as if he were looking for something he had missed. Marten held his breath, afraid that this might be when they would ask for his fingerprints just to make certain he wasn't wanted somewhere.

  "How long do you intend to stay in D.C., Mr. Marten?" he said, instead.

  "Caroline Parsons's memorial service is tomorrow. After that I don't know."

  Abruptly Herbert handed him his business card. "You check with me before you go anywhere outside the city. You understand?"

  "Yes, sir." Marten tried not to show his relief. For now, at least, they were letting him go.

  Monroe walked toward the door and pulled it open. "Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Marten. To your left and down the stairs."

  "Thanks," Marten said. "Sorry I couldn't help you more." He went out quickly. To his left and down the stairs.

  WEDNESDAY

  APRIL 5

  11

  • BERLIN, GERMANY, 10:45 A.M.

  The heavy armored doors of the presidential limousine swung closed. The Secret Service agent at the wheel nudged the machine into gear and the car carrying President of the United States John Henry Harris moved slowly away from the German Federal Chancellery, leaving Chancellor Anna Bohlen and a large gathering of the world media behind.

  President Harris and Bohlen had met the evening before; had attended a performance of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra; and then, this morning, accompanied by a handful of close advisers, had had a long, cordial breakfast where world issues and the longtime German-American alliance were discussed. Afterward they'd preened for the press, shaken hands and then he had left, the whole thing nearly a mirror copy of what had happened at the Elysée Palace in Paris twenty-four hours earlier. In both situations the president had hoped to start smoothing over the still volatile situation concerning both countries' earlier refusal to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the United Nations and their continuing concerns now.

  But for all the seeming goodwill and cordiality during both visits, little or nothing had been accomplished and the president was clearly upset. Jake Lowe, his portly fifty-seven-year-old longtime friend and chief political adviser sitting beside him and quietly reading text from a BlackBerry nestled into his palm, knew it.

  "None of us can afford this damned ongoing transatlantic rift," Harris said abruptly. "Publicly they agree, but in reality they won't move a quarter of an inch in our direction. Neither one of them."

  "It's a difficult path, Mr. President," Lowe responded quietly. The president might characteristically be introspective but anyone who was as close to him as Jake Lowe knew there were times he wanted to talk things through, usually when he had come to a dead end in his own reasoning. "And I'm not sure it has an end that will make everyone happy.

  "I've told you this before and I'll say it again now. It's a cruel fact of history that more than once the world has been provided with leaders who are the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the only thing that corrects it is a change of régime."

  "Well those régimes aren't about to change. And we don't have the luxury to wait for the next. We need everybody with us and right away if we're going to put this Middle East Humpty-Dumpty back together again. You know it. I know it. The world knows it."

  "Except the French and the Germans."

  President Harris leaned back in his seat, trying to relax. It didn't work. He was angry and frustrated and when he was like that and he talked, everything showed. "Those are tw
o steel-jawed, unbendable SOBs. They'll go along but just so far, and when we really get to it they'll pull back and let us dangle in the wind, all the while clapping their hands in glee. There's got to be a way to turn them, Jake, but the damn truth is I don't have a clue as to what it will take. And after yesterday and today, even how to approach it."

  Abruptly President Harris turned to look out the window as his motorcade moved through the Tiergarten, Berlin's dramatic two-mile-long city park, then continued along a widely announced route that would take them down the Kurfürstendamm, the main street of Berlin's fashionable shopping district.

  The motorcade itself was huge, led by thirty German motorcycle police with two massive polished black Secret Service SUVs traveling in front of three identical presidential limousines, preventing anyone from knowing in which car the president rode. Immediately behind were eight more Secret Service SUVs, an ambulance, and two large vans, one carrying the press pool, the other, the president's traveling staff. The rear was brought up by another thirty-strong contingent of German motorcycle police.

  Since they'd left the Chancellery every street and boulevard was massed with people, as if half of Berlin had turned out for a glimpse of this president. Some applauded and waved small American flags; others booed or whistled, shaking their fists and shouting in anger. Others held banners reading: U.S. OUT OF MIDDLE-EAST, HERR PRÄSIDENT, GEHEN NACH HAUSE, HARRIS GO HOME!, NO MORE BLOOD FOR OIL!—one banner read simply: JOHN, LET'S TALK PLEASE. Other people simply stood and watched as the giant motorcade bearing the leader of the world's lone superpower passed before them.

  "I wonder what I'd think if I were a German standing out there watching us go by," Harris said, watching the crowds. "What would I want from the United States? What would I think about her intentions?"