Like all respectable practitioners of the bookseller’s craft, Carrie knew that Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, also wrote mysteries under the pen name A. A. Fair. And so she had no difficulty at all in understanding Marjorie’s telegraphic notes:
Currere = To run
Curo = I run
Cucurri = I ran
v. = versus = contra
Gardner a/k/a = A. A. Fair
Cucurri v. Gardner a/k/a = I ran contra A. A. Fair
= Iran/Contra Affair.
Chapter Fourteen
Michaelson reminded himself that paranoia is generally unbecoming, particularly in someone old enough to know better. Him, for example. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling.
He had gotten to Cavalier Books just after four-thirty, to be met with Carrie’s announcement that Marjorie had departed in considerable haste, half an hour or so before. She hadn’t actually announced her destination, but Carrie and Marjorie had talked about Sharon Bedford before today. Putting two and two together, Carrie had concluded that Marjorie was headed back to Hayes & Barthelt, the main law firm for which Sharon Bedford had freelanced. She’d given every indication of thinking she was on to something, and the notes she’d left on her desk confirmed that inference.
It was at this point that Michaelson had sensed paranoia’s first seductive advances. What were the chances that Pilkington or Quentin had had him followed? Small but nontrivial, in foreign service jargon. He’d seen no sign of anything like that, but of course if the people who were doing it were good enough, he wouldn’t have. If he was being followed, what were the chances that he’d led the tail to Cavalier Books? A hundred percent. So was there a genuine risk that Marjorie was being followed as well? Should he rush after her, like Don Quixote in an aging Omni?
Of course not, he realized as he relaxed a bit. If he wasn’t being followed, he’d feel silly; and if he was, he’d only increase whatever risk Marjorie faced by joining her.
He settled for calling the law firm and verifying that Marjorie had indeed arrived and was now closeted with the head paralegal, Mr. Davidson. Did he wish to ring Mr. Davidson’s office?
He did not. He wished the receptionist to ask Marjorie to call him before leaving. The receptionist promised that she would.
***
“If you ask me how I came up with this question,” Marjorie was telling Davidson, “I’ll be too embarrassed to tell you. So please just humor me.”
“Trust me,” Davidson said. “I’ve been dealing with lawyers for twenty-seven years.”
“Okay. Are there such things as legal encyclopedias—attorneys’ equivalents of Britannica or Americana?”
“Sure. The two most popular are American Jurisprudence Second and Corpus Juris Secundum—AmJur and CJS to the initiated.”
“Do either of those have a volume titled ‘Highways to Indians’?”
“You’re right,” Davidson said, “that question is off the wall. One way to find out.”
Thumbing through compact discs in a plastic box beside his computer, he chose one and popped it into the machine. After forty-five seconds he took it out and turned back toward Marjorie.
“The answers in order are no and no,” he said.
Marjorie slumped a bit.
“I was hoping for different answers,” she confessed.
“That’s often the case with people who ask me questions,” Davidson said. “Like that guy who interrupted us yesterday. I’m sure he wanted a bright-line rule for choice of law, and I had to give him a five-factor balancing test.”
“And you didn’t take long to do it,” Marjorie said, brightening a bit. “You got a legal research assignment, and the first thing you did was pull out a comprehensive list of legal topics so that you could research the question on your computer.”
“Right.”
“The list put the topics in alphabetical order, didn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“May I see it?”
“Sure,” Davidson said. “In the off-the-wall competition, by the way, you’ve just rung the bell again.”
After rummaging a bit, Davidson handed over the page. Her fingers shaking just a bit from suppressed excitement as she turned it over, Marjorie scanned down the first closely printed column on the reverse side. For her purposes, the column began provocatively:
GUARANTY
GUARDIAN AND WARD
HABEAS CORPUS
HAWKERS AND PEDDLERS
HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT
HIGHWAYS
HOLIDAYS
HOMESTEAD
HOMICIDE
HOSPITALS
HUSBAND AND WIFE
ILLEGITIMATE CHILDREN
IMPLIED AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONTRACTS
IMPROVEMENTS
INCEST
INDEMNITY
INDIANS
“I remember you saying that, in the old days, people used to look for the law in books instead of computer databases,” she said.
“And some still do,” Davidson said, nodding.
“If you wanted to do the assignment you did yesterday by looking in a book, where would you look?”
“I’d start with the first half of the tenth series of the West Publishing Company’s Decennial Digest, covering the period 1986 to 1991. It’s basically sixty volumes of one-paragraph case notes, organized according to the topics on that list.”
“Can you show me?” Marjorie asked.
“Nothing to it.”
Crushing his cigarette and heaving himself from his chair, Davidson led Marjorie down a hall and up a small, winding staircase to the firm’s law library. He walked her to a massive set of shelves near an array of carrels and gestured grandly toward three-score massive tomes. They all said Tenth Decennial Digest. A subtitle added “Part 1 1986 to 1991.”
As Davidson’s description had indicated, the volumes were divided by topic ranges, like an encyclopedia set. Volume 22 was “Game to Homicide.” Volume 23 was “Homicide to Infants.” “Highways to Indians” didn’t appear.
Marjorie felt the acid bite of bitter disappointment, but she refused to accept the verdict. Conclusions reasoned to by implacable logic could be wrong, she felt; intuitive certainties couldn’t be. At least her intuitive certainties.
“If there’s a Tenth Decennial Digest, there must be a Ninth,” she said.
“In storage,” Davidson said. He pointed at closed cupboards just below ceiling level. “At sixty volumes a crack and three thousand pages a volume, those things eat up space, and lawyers won’t cite cases more than ten years old if they don’t have to. That’s one of the reasons West has them on-line now.”
“Might I take a look?”
“I don’t see why not. No crazier than anything else we’ve done in the last fifteen minutes.”
Davidson found a wheeled step stool and pulled it several shelf widths down the aisle. He offered Marjorie his hand. Kicking off her low heels, she stepped onto the small and, it seemed to her, none-too-steady platform. Trying to blot the vivid image of a broken ankle from her mind, she gritted her teeth and pried the cupboard door open.
The volumes were stacked on their sides. She had to turn her head slightly sideways and read laboriously up the third stack she could see. Volume 20: “Embezzlement to Executors and Administrators.” Volume 21: “Exemptions to Federal Civil Procedure.” Volume 22: “Federal Civil Procedure to Federal Courts.” Volume 23: “Fences to Health and Environment.” And then, on the spine of the fifth volume in the third stack, she found the precious words she was looking for:
NINTH DECENNIAL DIGEST
Part 2
1981 to 1986
HIGHWAYS TO INDIANS
Brownish-red binding dust erupted from the cupboard and mustily tickled her nose as she worked that tome out from between the books above and be
low it. It was about the length and width of a standard volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. Cradling it in the crook of her left arm, she let Davidson help her down from the step stool. She lugged the massive book over to the nearest carrel and laid it delicately on the desk.
“You may want to go over and get me volume twenty-four of the tenth digest while I’m glancing through here,” she said to Davidson.
“Why? Do you want to compare that one with this one?”
“No,” Marjorie said, looking directly at him. “But it’s quite likely that anything I find in here will have gotten Sharon Bedford killed, and it occurs to me that you might not want to know about it.”
“Suppose it implicates the firm in some way,” Davidson said.
“Then it probably wouldn’t be hidden in this library. But I’ll promise you that if it does reflect on the firm, you’ll get a heads-up before I show it to anyone else.”
“Fair enough,” Davidson said. “I’ll appreciate the signal. Most important, though, you make sure whoever killed Sharon gets nailed, and I’ll be happy.” He sidled away.
After a few seconds of frustrated riffling, Marjorie found what she was looking for taped to the volume’s inside back cover. It was a plain white business envelope, stamped but not postmarked, and addressed to Sharon Bedford.
The hiding place struck her as perfect. The book would probably never be used. Even if “Highways to Indians” was pulled down once in a blue moon, someone could read case digests in it for two hours without spotting the envelope. And if by some wild chance someone did come across it, they’d almost certainly just drop it in the mail to Bedford or at least contact her before they opened it. Bedford would have been justly confident that she could hide the envelope in this book as long as she needed to, and retrieve it whenever she wanted it.
Marjorie tucked the envelope in her purse.
“All clear?” Davidson asked from between two shelves a second or so later.
“Yes,” Marjorie said, finding to her astonishment that she was short of breath.
When she reached the reception area a few minutes later, her belly did a nauseating little flip. She noticed two men standing in the elevator lobby just beyond the massive glass doors that marked the main entrance to the firm. She told herself firmly that there was nothing intrinsically sinister about two men waiting for an elevator outside a law firm around quitting time. Her belly flipped again.
The men were wearing dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties. As Marjorie focused her full powers of concentration on the pair, she saw that they had beady, reptilian eyes, predatory curves to the thin, bloodless lips that defined their mouths, empty faces devoid of human warmth, and generally chilling demeanors.
It was then that the receptionist favored her with Michaelson’s message. Marjorie called the bookstore from a phone on a table behind the receptionist’s desk and quickly reached Michaelson.
“I hope I don’t sound too alarmist,” Michaelson said apologetically after he’d explained his concerns. “But I did think it possible that you’d have unwanted company by now.”
“You don’t sound at all alarmist to me,” Marjorie said. “In fact, there are two rather sinister-looking males loitering in the elevator lobby.”
“There’s no need to make fun of my caution, however excessive it appears,” Michaelson said.
“On the contrary, there is immense need to make fun of it, but as it happens, I’m speaking quite literally.”
“Why don’t you check with the receptionist and see if she recognizes them?” Michaelson suggested.
“Yes, I think so,” Marjorie said. Taking the phone from her ear and turning toward the receptionist’s back, she stage-whispered, “Excuse me, do you know who those two gentlemen standing out by the elevators are?”
“Those aren’t any gentlemen,” the receptionist said scornfully over her shoulder. “They’re personal-injury plaintiffs’ lawyers down here from New York for depositions that just finished up.”
Marjorie put the phone back to her ear.
“You can relax,” she told Michaelson. “Our fears were perfectly plausible but ultimately unfounded.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Somehow,” Marjorie said, “I thought that when I finally stumbled across a written document of immense importance, it would be a little less prosaic. You know, a palimpsest with an indictment of cruelty to bulls that was omitted by a printer’s error from the published version of The Sun Also Rises. Something along those lines.”
“This will do, believe me,” Michaelson said in a deeply preoccupied voice as he gestured briefly with the single page he held.
They were sitting in his Georgetown apartment, where the smell of mediocre pepperoni and decent Cabernet still lingered. It was just after seven o’clock.
The paper Michaelson held was high-quality, eighty-pound, watermarked bond. dinar, stamped in oversized red letters, was centered at the top. In the upper left-hand corner, a string of numerals sandwiched around a single letter appeared: 87-14159195A003. Each character in the sequence was formed by a series of pin-sized holes machine-cut into the page.
A pebbled, red-and-blue border framed the array. After the last numeral, the words raised printing do not photocopy appeared in small black typeface against the same pebbled, red-and-blue background. A thumb-rub over the words confirmed that they were embossed and not merely printed.
It took Michaelson less than thirty seconds to read and absorb the document’s text:
TO: GEN WP ARTEMUS MIL LIAISON OP WASH DC
GEN LR MECKSTROTH HQ/NATO BRUX
KR MCCRAFT NSC STAFF LIAISON WASH DC
GREETINGS
EFFECTIVE THIS DATE THROUGH NOON EST 1/20/89 THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES ORDERS REQUIRE SAY AGAIN REQUIRE APPROVAL STAT CHR NSC PRIOR SAY AGAIN PRIOR EXECUTION:
INITIATION CATEGORY 1 FORCES
ALTERATION RULES OF ENGAGEMENT US/FRIENDLY FORCES ETO
HOSTILE INITIATION SEA/LAND/AIR FORCES PRINCIPAL AREAS POTENTIAL ENGAGEMENT
EXCEPTIONS: NONE
COUNTERMAND: WCS ONLY.
The document was dated November 2, 1987. It bore a signature—or a purported signature—that Michaelson had seen many times.
“What does ‘DINAR’ mean?” Marjorie asked.
“It’s a security classification,” Michaelson said distractedly.
“Like ‘Top Secret’?”
“Like that, but considerably more restrictive. Literally thousands of people have top-secret security clearances. If a document is classified ‘Top Secret/Sensitive/Eyes Only for the President,’ about two hundred people would be cleared to see it. A document stamped ‘DINAR’ can legally be shown to only thirty-one human beings on earth. Technically, you and I have probably just committed espionage.”
“‘OP’ is Office of the President, presumably, since that’s where Artemus was at the time this was prepared,” Marjorie said. “‘Rules of engagement’ are when, how, and under what circumstances you can fight. Even I know that. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that two and three are talking about NATO and the Fifth and Seventh Fleets.”
“Not to mention the marines on Diego Garcia and two combat-ready divisions in South Korea.”
“What are category one forces?”
“Nuclear weapons.”
“Which ones?” Marjorie asked.
“All of them. ICBMs, Strategic Air Command, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, cruise missiles surface to surface or air to surface, and anything else that those clever engineers out in California cooked up before they lost their jobs.”
“And what does ‘WCS’ mean?”
“Literally it stands for ‘written, cut, and signed.’ In other words, this order could only be countermanded by an order that was in writing, was signed by an officer or official with adequate authority, and had an authenticatin
g confirmation number cut into it—just as this one did. More colloquially, because of the inflexibility that a designation like that implies, officers sometimes joke that ‘WCS’ stands for ‘worst case scenario.’”
“I shouldn’t ask because it only encourages you,” Marjorie said, “but I really do want to know. What does the ‘STAT C-H-R N-S-C’ business refer to?”
“The statutory chairman of the national security council,” Michaelson said. “Or in plain English, the vice president of the United States.”
“I find myself a little uncomfortable with the implications of this.”
“If it weren’t for the pose of blasé sophistication that I feel called upon to affect, I’d find myself appalled beyond imagination by its implications,” Michaelson said.
“Well,” Marjorie allowed after she’d drained her glass of wine, “in the genteel society in which I was raised, ‘appalled beyond imagination’ is pretty much what ‘a little uncomfortable’ means.”
“If this document is authentic,” Michaelson said, “this country underwent the first coup d’état in its history on November 2, 1987. The president of the United States was effectively relieved of his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Counting the addressees, there are seven—no, eight people who absolutely had to be in on it. At least one of those people is quite likely to be on the presidential ticket of a major party within three months. This piece of paper is the plainest documentary proof of treason since—since I don’t know when.”
“Since South Carolina’s ordinance of secession in 1860, presumably,” Marjorie said as her rich Southern accent deepened. Pausing thoughtfully, she refilled her wineglass and took another long sip. “Is it actually possible?” she asked then.
“Thinking back on things, it seems not only possible but stunningly plausible,” Michaelson said. “It certainly fits in with Artemus’ morose ruminations this afternoon. When Iran/Contra was at its absolute worst inside the Beltway, when it seemed that it had completely paralyzed the administration, I remember seeing a flurry of obviously planted stories in the Post and the Times suggesting that unnamed aides thought that President Reagan was under undue mental strain.”
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