Everything seemed to fall in place in America. People knew what they wanted here; people got what they wanted.
She rose from the porch steps and knit her fingers in front of her. Judith, an assassin with a dozen successful operations in her portfolio, a walled compound in Cairo paid for by clients around the world, with hours-old blood on her hands, knew to get to her feet at this moment. This was what no assassin could be taught, not through any training of weapons or tactics, but only by instinct and experience: the sense when something perfect and improbable was about to be delivered, when the path inward opened. One stood for that, humble and thankful.
Mrs. P. asked again, “You want me to get you a job or not?”
Judith smiled, not at Mrs. P.
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * * *
CHAPTER SIX
January 12
Route 1, 5O miles north of Baltimore
AT MIDNIGHT, DAG PULLED in to an all-night convenience store for a Coca-Cola and a bag of salted peanuts. He bought Lammeck, who had no dollars yet, a Grape Nehi and a roll of Life Savers. Walking to the car, Lammeck watched Dag take a swig of cola, then pour the peanuts into the bottle. Dag chewed Coke and floating nuts with each tip of the bottle.
“What?” Dag asked, testy when Lammeck grimaced. “We’re headed south. This is how to eat peanuts in the South. You drive now.”
Lammeck got behind the wheel. On the passenger’s side, Dag covered himself with his wrinkled overcoat. Lammeck pulled out of the store’s parking lot into the road. Dag sprayed foam and nuts on the dash.
“Right lane! Right lane!”
Lammeck spun the steering wheel. No traffic had come close but Dag continued to grumble. “I got it,” Lammeck assured him. “Get some rest.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll try that with one eye open.”
Dag could not sleep. Before Baltimore, he took the driving back. Lammeck made no comment when he gave up the wheel. Driving on the right was nerve-wracking after five years of rolling on the left side of the road. He figured he’d get reacquainted with this part of America later.
Lammeck pulled Dag’s overcoat up to his chin. He could not snooze either; his internal clock still ticked on Scottish time, hours ahead. Instead, he flipped through the files in his brain, furiously separating the known in this case from the guessed at.
He found very little in the known column. Two dead Civil Defense wardens, both killed expertly; one suicide, done suspiciously. A knife that might date back to the age of Hasan-i-Sabah, but was at the very least directly inspired by the Ismai’li Assassins of Alamut. That blade was probably the murder weapon on the beach. An untraceable .32 revolver definitely used in the husband’s staged suicide. A kitchen knife that was definitely planted in the husband’s sink.
What else?
Lammeck’s next set of facts drifted away from certainty like a rowboat cut loose from a dock. The crowbar dropped in front of the truck’s headlamps. A strand of black hair found in Otto’s hand. Tire tracks in the sand. The matching gashes on Bonny’s forearms. The fatal bullet lodged low in Arnold’s wall, and the stab that didn’t stop Otto’s heart right away. Every one of these was just a hint. Not one sure bet in the bunch, but now he and Dag were playing all of these to win.
Next came the harebrained hunches. A sub. A woman. A Persian. FDR as the target, Washington the place.
Finally, he chewed on the revelation that he and Dag were the entire force committed to this case. Skepticism was probably too mild a word for how the Secret Service was approaching this snipe hunt.
Even so, with the dark southeastern seaboard skimming past the Packard’s cold window, Lammeck could not shake the same sensation that Dag had expressed. As thin a case as all this added up to, son of a bitch if it wasn’t exactly what was happening.
History had never shied from improbability. What were the odds that on the one wrong night in Ford’s Theater, Lincoln’s bodyguard would saunter off for a beer? That in 1835, both pistols of Richard Lawrence, the first man to attempt an assassination of an American president, would misfire on the Capitol rotunda, at point-blank range of Andrew Jackson? Who could have predicted last year that an explosive briefcase in Hitler’s bunker would be placed behind a table leg so thick it spared the Führer? Or that in ‘33, FDR himself would finish a speech in Miami from the backseat of his touring car, then lean forward to view a telegram at the exact second the little Italian anarchist Giuseppe Zangara—who believed killing Roosevelt would cure his stomach ailments—opened fire, hitting instead and eventually killing the mayor of Chicago?
Lammeck wondered about the patchwork assassin they were chasing. This—what? Persian woman? phantom?—was clearly not mad. History provided only two classic reasons for political murder. Madness and power.
The lion’s share of assassinations served this second purpose, power. Romulus killed his brother Remus, co-founder of Rome. That great city-state stood as the high-water mark in history for political slaughter. In a.d. 37, Emperor Tiberius had his rival Sejanus and his entire family murdered, including Sejanus’s fourteen-year-old daughter who, as a virgin, was exempt from execution. So, the girl was publicly raped by her executioner before being strangled. In a.d. 69, Rome celebrated four emperors in a single year: Galba succeeded Nero, then had his arms, legs, and lips cut off by his successor Otho, who committed suicide to avoid being slain by Vitellius, who was later pelted by dung from the crowds, dragged by a meat hook, and tossed in the Tiber by Vespasian, who died in bed a decade after.
Nor had history reserved the role of assassin solely for men. Agrippina poisoned husband Claudius to protect the Roman crown for son Britannicus against her other son Nero. After Caesar elevated both Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIV to co-rulership of Egypt, Cleopatra had Ptolemy murdered to assure that the son she shared with Caesar, named Caesarion, would succeed her. And so on.
Lammeck’s thoughts wobbled with the gentle swaying of the Packard. He shifted under Dag’s coat, letting his mind idle toward sleep. He considered what lay ahead, the search for a needle in an enormous haystack, an assassin embedded in the nation’s capital. If, in fact, this woman did exist and had been sent by another nation, she’d have ample funds and intelligence. She may or may not be working alone. She would not act carelessly; she’d plot, bide her time, and exploit. But exploit what? What would she spot in Roosevelt’s schedule or routine that would expose him to killing? Lammeck surmised from her skill and cunning—the disabling slits in Bonny’s forearms, faking Arnold’s suicide to cover her tracks— that she was not in the classic mold of a martyr, like Charlotte Corday or Trotsky’s ax-murderer Mercader. Was she a patriot killer, the kind to lie low for months, waiting for the opportunity to stand on a corner and blast away at the President’s car like Gabčik and Kubiš? Or would she insinuate her way in gently and slip away unnoticed, a professional with no desire to die in the act like the ancient disciples on Alamut with their tickets punched for Paradise?
Lammeck sat up with a snort, so suddenly that Dag cursed and the car jerked.
“What?” Dag barked. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“She had help, Dag. She had someone waiting in Newburyport. That’s why she landed there in the first place.”
“Professor, come on. I don’t think I can swallow one more theory. Let’s go get some hard facts, okay? Get some shut-eye.”
Lammeck whipped Dag’s rumpled coat off and into the backseat.
“Hey, easy with that,” Dag said.
“Bonny and Otto. Were they lovers?”
Behind the wheel, Dag shrugged. “That’s what the cops said. Everybody in town seemed to know about it except poor Arnold.”
Lammeck took a deep breath to awaken himself fully. “That’s right. Poor Arnold. Tell me something. How did someone who got dropped off by a submarine in the middle of the night, from Germany or Japan or wherever, know about Bonny and Otto? How did she know where Bonny’s husband lived? How did she get inside Arnold’s door
at three in the morning unless he saw someone on his front porch ringing his doorbell that he knew?”
“Aw, shit,” Dag said. The Secret Service agent hit the brakes and swung the car to the shoulder.
Lammeck asked, “What’re you doing?”
“We’ve got to go back, Professor. Why the hell didn’t I see that two weeks ago? Damn it, she had an accomplice. Fuck!” Dag smacked the wheel with the flat of his palm. “I never even asked myself why she would be in Newburyport. I just figured the place was remote, or there was some connection to Boston that’d come out later. Or... whatever. Shit, I don’t know. I got carried away with the crime scenes and that weird fucking knife, and then going to get you...”
Lammeck waved at the windshield. “Calm down, I missed it too ‘til now. Don’t turn around, let’s keep heading for D.C. I’ve got another idea.”
“Dumbass,” Dag continued to abuse himself.
“Don’t worry about it. This whole thing’s like a crossword puzzle. Every time we figure something out, two or three more clues open up. We’ve got no choice but to do it one guess at a time. Just stay flexible.”
Dag nodded, hardly pacified. Lammeck knew from training him that Dag wasn’t the flexible type, but a straight-ahead charger; he’d garroted three Germans and would have killed more or died to get out of captivity. His single-mindedness was probably how he’d overlooked the fact that the assassin had a confederate. As to why he didn’t figure it out earlier himself, Lammeck blamed fatigue and the distraction of being back in America, and let it go.
Dag accelerated again into the southbound lane of Route 1. The outskirts of Baltimore thickened in the darkness. Blacked-out garages and warehouses fled by in clouded moonlight. Lammeck rubbed through his beard, then launched into a flight of logic he accepted at the outset would be sketchy.
“What time were the murders on the beach? Two, two-thirty?”
“About that time, yeah.”
“Okay, stop me if this gets too thin to hold water. We’re assuming the assassin arrived on the shore, killed Bonny and Otto, then made her way into town. She found Arnold and did him. But she didn’t plan for any of that to happen; it was an emergency response to something that went wrong. If she arrived on the beach around two-thirty, how long would it take if things had gone according to plan?”
Dag calculated. “Let’s assume it was all done on foot. Five minutes to hit the sand and change clothes. Fifty minutes to walk to town. Call it an hour.”
“And from town, we’re figuring she headed straight for Washington.”
“Check,” Dag said glumly.
“What time was the first train out of Newburyport?”
“New Year’s morning? I’ll find out, but you can bet the farm it wasn’t before seven a.m.”
“Good. Now, Dag, follow me. If you were designing this mission for the SOE, if that was you swimming ashore, what time would you arrive on that beach if you were planning on making a seven o’clock train out of a small town? No attention, no suspicion, just get ashore, make the train, and head south?”
“Definitely not ‘til just before sunup. Four-thirty, maybe five. I’d try to hit the middle of town just at dawn, no sooner. Find the station, keep my head down, and wait for the train. New Year’s Day, figure there’s no one else out, so you wouldn’t want to be hanging around town with everything closed and nobody going to work. You’d stick out like a sore thumb. Someone would see you and remember you. Maybe a local cop would check you out. No, you wouldn’t risk showing up at two-thirty. Too early. Too much exposure.”
“Unless... ?” Lammeck waited for Dag to take the bit and run.
“Unless you had somewhere to cool your heels ‘til the train left.”
“Or...?”
“Or...” Dag mulled a moment, then lifted a hand off the wheel. “Or you weren’t taking the fucking train!”
Lammeck sat back with a sigh. “A kewpie doll for Agent Nabbit.”
* * * *
January 14
Washington, D.C.
THE PHONE RANG.
“Yes?”
“Dr. Lammeck? This is the front desk. There’s a Mr. Nabbit who says to tell you he’s out front waiting.”
“Tell him I’ll be down in a minute.”
“If I may, Doctor, Mr. Nabbit is sitting in his car. He’s been honking the horn.”
“I’ll hurry.”
“Thank you.”
Lammeck grabbed his coat and headed for the elevator. In the driveway of the Blackstone Hotel, Dag sat hunched in the idling Packard.
Lammeck climbed in. Dag pulled onto Seventeenth Street before he spoke.
“I asked you to be ready at ten to noon.”
“I was ready.”
“I meant in the lobby.”
“What’s the matter? You nervous?”
Dag snagged a manila envelope off the seat between them. He rattled it as if threatening Lammeck with it.
“This,” he said. “This is going to get me fired. I can’t believe the frigging report I had to write. It reads like a Raymond Chandler story. No. No. It doesn’t even make that much sense.”
Lammeck did not reach for the envelope.
“The worst that can happen to you, Professor, is a plane back to Scotland. Me? The worst they can do is put me on it with you.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be convincing.”
Dag dropped the folder and set his jaw. Lammeck was pleased to see the agent did not look like a hanky out of someone’s pocket this morning. He wore a pressed suit and tie. Aesthetics clearly mattered at the White House. Dag almost passed for handsome.
He drove to the West Gate and showed his ID to a guard, who checked Lammeck’s name against a list. They parked and entered the West Wing.
Marines in dress uniform held doors for them. Walking a long corridor lined with portraits, Dag explained the security blanket around the President.
“Washington, D.C., is Secret Service District 5, out of fifteen districts nationwide. The White House is its own district, number 16. There are seventy agents permanently assigned to District 16, and another hundred and thirty-five White House police. For the first years of the war, up until late ‘43, there were blackouts across the entire city, machine guns on the White House roof, and antiaircraft batteries on the grounds. Those are gone now. There are air raid shelters and vaults under the residence. To make a long story short, the President is not going to get hurt while he’s on the premises.”
Lammeck took long strides to keep up with Dag, whose pace betrayed his nerves.
“What about that guy back in 1930 who walked right up to President Hoover while he was having dinner here in the White House?”
“You know about that?”
Lammeck grinned. “It’s what I do, Dag.”
“Okay, that was fifteen years ago. Since then, Congress has put everybody protecting the Mansion, all the cops and agents, under the Secret Service. Coordination’s better now. Security’s airtight.”
“I should hope. Assuming you’re right, where do you think the President is most vulnerable?”
“Definitely when he travels. We don’t worry so much about when the Boss goes home to Hyde Park or down to the Little White House in Georgia. We’ve got those routes covered. But when he heads overseas or makes one of his political stops, you’d be amazed how much advance work gets done. Weeks before he gets to a destination, we check everything and everyone. Thousands of man-hours. But no question the toughest place to protect him is in a slow motorcade through a city for some big public event. We keep one car in front, another behind, and armed agents on the running boards of his limo. We’ve got agents in the crowd, agents on roofs, you name it.”
“Is the limo armored?”
Dag chuckled mirthlessly without slowing his gait.
“Yeah. Back in ‘40 the Service kinda borrowed Al Capone’s armored limo after it was confiscated. That was a little embarrassing, so the next year Henry Ford gave the Boss his own car. It’s like a
tank. And when he travels by train, five minutes after leaving the White House we can have him in his own specially built railcar at the underground siding in the Bureau of Engraving.”
“I assume the railcar is armored, too.”
“It can survive a four-story fall without a dent.”
“What about the rubber knife?”
The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01] Page 13