The Machiavelli Covenant

by Allan Folsom

  He turned to look at Lowe, one of his best friends and his closest political adviser, a man he had known for years when he first entered the Senate race in California. "What would you think, Jake? What would you think if you were one of them?"

  "I would probably—" Lowe's conversation was abruptly cut short when his BlackBerry alerted him to a voice message from Tom Curran, the president's chief of staff, waiting for them aboard Air Force One at Tegel Airport. "Yes, Tom," he said into his ever-present headset. "What? When? . . . see what more you can find out. We'll be on board in twenty minutes."

  "What is it?" the president said.

  "Caroline Parsons's personal physician, Lorraine Stephenson, was found murdered last night. The police have held back the news for investigative reasons."

  "Murdered?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good Lord." The president's eyes shifted away and he stared off. "Mike, his son, then Caroline, and now her doctor?" he said, then looked back to Jake Lowe. "All dead, just like that, and over so short a period of time. What's going on?"

  "It's a tragic coincidence, Mr. President."

  "Is it?"

  "What else would it be?"

  12

  • BERLIN. HOTEL BOULEVARD, KURFÜRSTENDAMM 12, 11:05 A.M.

  Victor."

  "Yes, Richard. I hear you."

  "Are you at the window?"

  "Yes, Richard."

  "What can you see?"

  "The street. All sorts of people lining it. A big church is across from me. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. At least that was what the porter called it when he showed me into the room. Why, Richard?"

  "I wanted to make certain the hotel didn't give you a different room, that's all."

  "No, they didn't. The room is exactly as I requested. I followed your instructions to the letter." Victor no longer wore the gray suit he had in Washington but instead was dressed in light brown slacks and a dark blue oversized cardigan sweater. He still looked like an everyman, but now his appearance was more academic. A middle-aged professor, perhaps, or a high school teacher. Someone unremarkable who would stand unnoticed in a crowd.

  "I knew you would, Victor. Now listen carefully. The presidential motorcade has turned onto the Kurfürstendamm. In—" Richard paused for the briefest moment, then went on; "forty seconds it will come into sight and pass beneath your window. The president is in the third presidential limousine. He's sitting on your side of the car, the rear seat next to the left window. You won't be able to see him through the tinted glass but he's there just the same. I want you to tell me how long it takes for the limousine to pass and if you would have time to get a clear shot at that window from where you are."

  "A presidential limousine has bulletproof glass."

  "I know, Victor. Don't worry about it. All I want you to tell me is how long it takes for the limousine to pass and if you would have time to get a clear shot from that angle."

  "Alright."

  President Harris stared out the limousine's window absently watching the crowds his motorcade was passing, his thoughts on his secretary of defense, Terrence Lang-don, in the south of France for a meeting of NATO defense ministers. Langdon was essentially delivering the same message that Secretary of State David Chaplin had a day earlier to his twenty-five NATO counterparts at a working lunch in Brussels: that the U.S. was signaling a new readiness to work more closely with its NATO allies, something the previous administration under President Charles Cabot had all but refused to do.

  In a speech to Congress before he left Washington Harris had promised that he would not make this extensive trip to meet European leaders and "come up empty," and no matter the disappointments in Paris and Berlin, he still had the same resolve. He wanted now to concentrate on the next leg of his trip: Rome and dinner tonight with Italian president Mario Tonti, a man whose position he knew was largely ceremonial but whose job it was to unify factions within Italian politics, which made him a strategically important ally.

  Harris considered Italy a friend and both the president and prime minister, Aldo Visconti, men he could rely on. But he also knew Tonti would know the meetings in Paris and Berlin had not achieved the results Harris had wanted. It was a failing that would add an element of awkwardness to their meeting because Italy was very much a part of the European Union, and the European Union's long-range goal was to become the United States of Europe and that was something that always had to be taken into consideration no matter the public deportment of its individual members. So how he would present himself to Tonti, what he would say and how he would say it should have been foremost in his mind. But it wasn't. Lay it to jet lag, to his failures yesterday and today, or to his own personal emotions, the thing foremost on his mind was what had happened to the Parsons family and so quickly afterward, the murder of Caroline Parsons's physician, Lorraine Stephenson. Abruptly he turned to Jake Lowe.

  "The fellow who was in Caroline Parsons's hospital room when she died. What did we find out about him?"

  Harris could see the crowds lining the street in front of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

  "Don't know. It wasn't a priority," Lowe punched some code into his BlackBerry then waited for the information to come up as text.

  The president looked to his left and saw they were passing crowds in front of the Hotel Boulevard.

  "His name is Nicholas Marten," Lowe read from the text. "He's an American expat living in Manchester, England, and working for a small landscape architectural firm there, Fitzsimmons and Justice." Lowe stopped and read something in silence, then looked to the president. "For some reason Mrs. Parsons signed a notarized letter giving him private access to her personal files and those of her husband."

  "Both of them?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I don't have an answer."

  "See if you can come up with one. This whole thing is increasingly disturbing."

  Victor turned from his perch in the hotel room window. "Richard?"

  "Yes, Victor."

  "The motorcade has passed. It took seven seconds. I saw the limousine window clearly. I would have had a clean shot for three seconds, maybe four."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes, Richard."

  "Enough time for a kill shot?"

  "With the right ammunition, yes."

  "Thank you, Victor."

  13

  • WASHINGTON, D.C., 7:10 A.M.

  Nicholas Marten had turned the television to the local news channel the moment he got out of bed nearly thirty minutes earlier, hoping to hear something about Dr. Stephenson's "murder." But so far there had been nothing. It made him more curious than ever why the police were still holding the information back, and amazed that some aggressive reporter hadn't discovered the story and broken it.

  He'd left the volume up, taken a quick shower, and begun to shave. Among the trivia, traffic, and weather reports he learned that the man shot down by a sniper at Union Station the day before had been a Colombian national in the country legally as a baseball player for the Trenton Thunder, a minor league team affiliated with the New York Yankees. An unnamed source revealed that investigators had recovered the murder weapon from a rented office in the National Postal Museum just across the street from the station. Purportedly it was an M14, a standard U.S. armed forces training rifle, manufactured in the hundreds of thousands by any number of firearms companies.

  It seemed like a rather peculiar murder—a minor league ballplayer "assassinated"—but no more than that and Marten went back to shaving, his thoughts on how he could devise a way to retrieve and examine Caroline's medical files. For no particular reason he thought of what she had said to him in the hospital when she'd taken hold of his hand and looked into his eyes and said in hesitant speech—

  "They . . . murdered my . . . husband and. . . son . . . and now they've . . . killed. . . me."

  "Who are you talking about?" he'd asked. "Who is 'they'?"

  "The . . . the . . . ca . . ." she'd
said. But it was the most she could do, and her strength gone, she'd fallen asleep. They had been the last words she'd uttered before she'd woken later and told him she loved him and then—died.

  Marten felt the emotion begin to creep up in him and he took a moment to collect himself before he finished shaving. Done, he went into the room to dress, determined to drag himself from his still-gaping sorrow and get on with the problem at hand.

  "The ca . . ." he said out loud. "What ca? What was she trying to tell me?"

  Immediately he thought of the brief time he'd had inside Caroline's home before her lawyer had asked him to leave. What was there? What could he have seen, if only for a moment, that might give him the answer to what she had been trying to tell him? Besides the shortlived walk-through, and apart from appreciating her homey touches, the only place he'd been where there had been anything definitive was her husband's office. The little time he'd spent there he'd seen what? Photographs of the Parsons family, of Mike Parsons with celebrities. Beyond that had been the stacks of working files that covered most of the congressman's desk with more still on a side table. Those, he remembered, had been clearly labeled in felt pen—COMMITTEE REPORTS AND MINUTES. That was it, nothing more.

  Frustrated, Marten pulled on his pants and then sat on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes. As he did, the thought hit and he sat bolt upright.

  "Committee reports and minutes," he said out loud. "Committee. How would a person begin to say the word 'committee' in everyday speech? Not 'com-mittee' but—'ca-mittee.'"

  Could Caroline have meant that someone on a committee Parsons was a member of was responsible for their deaths? But then she hadn't said someone, she'd used the plural they. So if he was right and she had been referring to a committee, had she meant several members of it or the entire group itself? But how could an entire congressional committee be involved in the complex murders of three people, not to mention the other innocents on board Parsons's chartered plane? The idea was crazy, but for now it was all he had.

  By his watch it was just a little after seven thirty in the morning. At two he was to attend Caroline's memorial service at the National Presbyterian Church. That gave him a little more than six hours to try and dig into the history of Mike Parsons's recent congressional service and maybe find some sort of answer, or at least the beginning of one.

  Marten opened his electronic notebook, clicked it on and brought up the Google search engine. In Search he typed "Representative Michael Parsons's then hit "Enter."

  On the screen popped Parsons's Congressional Web page. Marten breathed a sigh of relief; at least Parsons's name was still in the government database. At the top was "Congressman Michael Parsons, Serving the people of California's 17th District. Monterey, San Benito, Santa Cruz Counties."

  Parsons's office locations in Washington and California were listed farther down the page, followed by a place to find the committees he had served on. Marten clicked on that and up came the list.

  Committee on Agriculture

  Committee on Small Business

  Committee on Budget

  Committee on Appropriations

  Committee on Homeland Security

  Committee on Government Reform

  House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

  Within those were a number of subcommittees Parsons had also served on. One in particular caught Marten's eye, a subcommittee he was a member of at the time of his death.

  Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism

  Mike and his son had died on Friday, March 10. The subcommittee's last scheduled meeting had been at 2 P.M. on Tuesday, March 7. Its subject had been "Progress in Consolidating Terrorist Watch Lists" and had been held at the Rayburn House Office Building. Listed were the names of its members. Curiously, as opposed to other congressional committee meetings, this one gave no further information, such as lists of witnesses who were to appear before the committee. It was simply blank. Marten tried several different government Web sites and came up with no more information than he had on Parsons's home page. He was certain there was an answer as to why and blamed it on himself and his inability to understand and navigate the workings of the government Web. Still, the proximity to the date of Parsons's death and the fact that there was seemingly no information available about the meeting troubled him. He wanted to find out more, but he didn't know how.

  Richard Tyler, Caroline's lawyer, might have helped if someone in his office hadn't already stepped in and shut down Marten's access to the Parsons' personal information. It meant he would get no help there, and if he tried his attempt would be looked on with suspicion or even worse, especially if that same someone wanted his investigation completely stonewalled. If he pushed it he might very well risk physical danger from an unknown source or another visit from the police. Neither of which he wanted.

  There was a time element too. Fitzsimmons and Justice, his employer in England, had very graciously given him time off to come to the states to tend to Caroline's situation, but at the same time he was intimately involved in the design of a large landscape project called "The Banfield Job" for Ronaldo Banfield, a star soccer player for Manchester United, at Banfield's country estate northwest of the city. The project was already behind schedule and needed to be completed by the end of May so that the actual work—the ordering of materials, the grading, the installation of irrigation systems and finally the planting—could begin. It meant that whatever he had to do here in Washington had to be undertaken and completed quickly.

  Marten got up, thinking that if he went to the Capitol building he might begin to find some answers in the archives there. He was reaching for the phone to call the front desk for directions when he saw a copy of The Washington Post on his bedside table and remembered that several years earlier his close friend Dan Ford had worked for the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau—before he was transferred to Paris and subsequently murdered by the infamous Raymond Oliver Thorne. While in Washington Ford had become friends with a number of journalists from other papers. There had been one he'd come to know well but whose name Marten didn't recall. What he did remember was that he'd been a political writer for The Washington Post. Whether he was still there Marten didn't know but he thought that if he scanned the paper's bylines he just might see a name he would recognize.

  It didn't take long. The name was right there on page one, a byline to a story about President Harris's trip to Europe: "President on Rough Road Overseas." The writer was Peter Fadden.

  14

  "Peter Fadden." The voice on the other end of the line was abrupt and raspy like leather. Marten had expected to hear a younger man; Fadden sounded seventy or more but with the energy of someone who could beat a thirty-year-old to a pulp in an alley or match him drink for drink in any saloon in town. He also sounded like he had Washington in his blood, and had since the days of Eisenhower or maybe even before.

  "My name is Nicholas Marten, Mr. Fadden. I was a close friend of Dan Ford. I was also a friend of Caroline Parsons and her husband. I'd like to talk to you in person, if I might."

  "When?" Fadden snapped back. There was no "why?" just the gruff "when?"

  "As soon as possible. Today, now, this morning. I'm going to Caroline's memorial service this afternoon. Afterward would be okay too. I'll buy you a drink, dinner if you like."

  Now it came. "Why?"

  "I'm trying to find out what congressional business Mike Parsons was working on at the time of his death."

  "Look it up. It's in the public record."

  "Some of it is, some of it isn't. I need some help getting more information."

  "Rent yourself a high school teacher."

  "Mr. Fadden, there might be a story here for you. I'm not sure. I'll explain when we're alone. Please."

  There was a long silence and Marten was afraid Fadden was going to brush him off. Then the gruff voice snapped at him.

  "You said you were a friend of Dan Ford."

  "Yes."

 
"Good friend?"

  "His best friend. I was staying at his apartment in Paris when he was murdered."

  Again there was a silence and then Fadden simply said—"Okay."

  15

  • AIR FORCE ONE, ALOFT OVER SOUTHERN GERMANY. 2:15 P.M.

  The television interview with chief CNN European correspondent Gabriella Roche had long been planned and President Harris sat with her for the first thirty minutes of the flight from Berlin to Rome. The flight had been delayed for thirty-seven minutes because of what Berlin air controllers called heavy traffic at Berlin's Tegel Airport but what Jake Lowe had quietly told President Harris was really nothing more than German chancellor Anna Bohlen's way of "busting your balls a little more. Letting you know her true feelings."

  "I know her damn feelings, Jake, but we need her," Harris had said, "so I don't know what we can do about it but ignore it."

  "Mr. President," Lowe responded quickly, "what if we needed her right now?"

  "What do you mean, 'right now'?"

  Lowe started to reply but then his ever-mindful-of-schedule chief of staff, Tom Curran, interrupted, telling him it was time to do the CNN/Gabriella Roche interview.

  A half hour later the interview was over. Harris joked lightly with Roche and her camera crew then thanked them and went directly to his executive suite, where Jake Lowe was waiting. With him, in shirtsleeves, was the towering six-foot four-inch Dr. James Marshall, his national security adviser, who had flown into Berlin from Washington and joined them as they boarded the plane.

  Harris closed the door, then took off his jacket and looked to Lowe. "What did you mean when you said 'what if we needed Chancellor Bohlen right now'?" He spoke as if their brief exchange had just happened and there had not been a television interview in between.