“I’ll bite,” Marjorie said. “What?”
“Her suspicion, or her certain knowledge, that in Jerry Marciniak’s quest for power he had worked with Quentin before. The identities of women who undergo abortions are highly confidential. For Quentin’s congressional campaign ploy to work, he had to get the names from somewhere. The director of the National Medical Records Compilation, Data Collection and Privacy Concerns Bureau—which is what Marciniak happened to be at a critical point—is a distinctly plausible source.”
“Definitely speculation,” Marjorie said.
“Artemus was already out long before ’ninety-three. There was no reason to start going after him again. But we know that as the prospect of Quentin reaching power loomed, Deborah Moodie launched a desperate effort to revive a charge that might derail Marciniak’s career. She must have known that her attempt would almost certainly prove futile. If she went ahead, it had to be because she believed that Marciniak was evil, that allowing him to get the kind of power he could hope for with Quentin’s patronage was unacceptable, and that morally she simply had to try to stop him.”
“In early 1993,” Marjorie said thoughtfully, “half this town would have given you five-to-three odds that within eighteen months a federal bureaucrat would be running the entire U.S. health-care system.”
“And Deborah Moodie could plausibly have feared that that bureaucrat would be Jerry Marciniak,” Michaelson said.
“You keep saying ‘could have,’” Gallagher said. “I guess that’s why you called it a theory.”
“Well, there are a couple more things we know,” Michaelson said. “We know Ms. Moodie did try to revive the issue. We know that she got squashed. We know that Scott Pilkington knew why she got squashed. And we know that Pilkington’s working with Quentin. That much is more than theory.”
“We know another fact, too,” Gallagher said wearily. “We know that the bad guys have the written order now.”
“They, ah, don’t, actually,” Michaelson said, with what in anyone else would have been a suggestion of embarrassment at having kept Gallagher in the dark about part of his plans.
“Where is it, then?”
“It’s on the back of the writing table over there, in the same envelope as my electric bill.”
“You mean you never put the written order in the safe?” Gallagher demanded.
“Oh, I put it in there initially,” Michaelson assured him. “But once I was sure they were coming after the thing, it seemed silly to leave it in the first place they’d look. So I took it out.”
“So after breaking into your apartment and rifling that lock-box, those jokers have nothing but air to show for it?” Gallagher asked, chortling.
“Not quite nothing,” Michaelson said. “After removing the original order, I stocked the safe with a photocopy, inside a white envelope, and annotated with a brief message.”
“The point of all that being what?” Gallagher asked.
“To find out who killed Sharon Bedford. That’s the part of this I actually care about. All this talk about treason is quite soul-stirring, but as Talleyrand pointed out, treason is generally just a question of dates. Sharon Bedford was a human being.”
A few moments of thoughtful silence followed. Then Gallagher spoke.
“I’m slow,” he said quietly. “I’m not quite following how writing a note on a copy of the order gets us to Sharon’s killer. Can you sorta run your thinking past me at submedium speed?”
“Sharon Bedford’s murder was a Washington crime,” Michaelson said. “It was committed by a Washington killer for a reason that only makes sense in Washington terms. Businessmen and loan sharks kill to conceal crimes, stockbrokers and union officers kill for useful information, husbands and wives and street thugs kill for money. But Sharon Bedford couldn’t have been killed by anyone like that, for any of those reasons. If we want to find her killer, we have to focus on Washington players following Washington rules.”
The phone rang. Without getting out of his chair, Michaelson reached back, unhooked the receiver, and brought it to his ear.
“Very funny,” the voice at the other end barked.
“Why, Scott,” Michaelson said. “We were just talking about you.”
Chapter Twenty
Michaelson told Pilkington that they couldn’t meet until two o’clock that afternoon. The excuse he offered was that, having politely given Pilkington’s burglars until the small hours of the morning to get their work done, he now intended to sleep late, and any conferences would have to be scheduled around his body’s demand for rest. While there was something to this, the more important reason for the delay was that before talking to Pilkington, Michaelson and Marjorie each needed to make a phone call.
***
Michaelson’s call went to the Moodies’ residence. He made it at 7:45 a.m., before either Alex or Deborah would have left for work. They both got on the line, Alex in the kitchen and Deborah in the den.
“Marian Littlecross sends her regards, figuratively speaking,” Michaelson began.
“Thanks, figuratively speaking,” Deborah said. “How did you find her?”
“I found her by having someone read the newspapers. I discovered her connection with you by accident.”
“So?” Deborah said then, after a pause. The syllable was tentative and defensive rather than challenging.
Michaelson explained the part of his theory linking Deborah’s revival of the Artemus favoritism issue to a suspicion on her part that Marciniak had helped Quentin and fear of what that might mean once Quentin acquired real power. This took about a minute. Neither of the Moodies interrupted him or asked any questions.
“It’s a theory,” he said, “and a rather speculative theory at that. I’m talking to Scott Pilkington in about six hours and I need you to confirm the theory, if it’s right, before I do.”
A heavy silence lasting ten to fifteen painful seconds followed. Finally Deborah Moodie spoke.
“I don’t feel I can discuss this with you,” she said, her voice distant and her words a trifle clipped.
“I understand,” Michaelson said, having just received the confirmation he needed. “Then perhaps you can tell me something a bit more specific about bufotenine than Pilkington shared with me when he discussed the results of Ms. Bedford’s autopsy.”
The tone of Deborah’s voice as she answered suggested that it was a vast relief to have the conversation shift from a personal to a professional plane.
“I’m not an expert or anything, but I can give you a broad outline,” she said. “It’s a fairly well-known poison, derived from frog-gland secretions or something like that.”
“Fatal if ingested orally, even if it doesn’t get into the bloodstream?” Michaelson asked.
“Should be. I think it can be absorbed in fatal dosages even through mucous membranes, without being swallowed at all.”
“Thank you,” Michaelson said. Again.
***
Marjorie’s call went to Hilda Ashley, a career civil servant who had recently found a niche as administrative assistant to the deputy head of the State Department’s Management Information Services Bureau, or MIS. A relatively new office, MIS had yet to win even grudging respect from veteran foreign service officers. Some crusty FSOs had acquired the habit of summoning MIS operatives by telling their secretaries to “call Nerd Central and tell them to send up a propeller-head.”
Hilda Ashley was quite ambitious by civil service standards, had thin skin and a long memory, and spent just under a thousand dollars a year on books. Marjorie called her a few minutes after 10:30 a.m., when she was sure that Ashley would be back from her morning coffee break.
“Hilda,” she said, “I’m calling because I have one last autographed copy of Ties That Bind by Warren Adler left, and it might sell at any moment.”
“Thank you, but I’ve alr
eady read it.”
“I remember selling you your copy,” Marjorie said. “I wanted to let you know about this autographed one because a mischievous soul who swore me to secrecy suggested that the MIS Bureau might want to give a copy as a gift to one or more deserving FSOs.”
This was a lie but a safe one, given the interest of MIS in general and Hilda Ashley in particular in subtly embarrassing any number of foreign service officers. Would one or two of those gents, to Ashley’s knowledge, find it disconcertingly suggestive to be presented with a mystery novel set in Washington, featuring a woman who acts out sadomasochistic fantasies with a high-government official? That was one of the world’s safer bets.
“The idea does have a certain appeal, at that,” Ashley said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Actually,” Marjorie said, “Richard is popping over to see Scott Pilkington this afternoon around two, and I’m meeting him there so that we can go on to a late lunch afterward. If you like, I could leave the book with you on sort of a consignment basis. If you and your chums at MIS like the idea, you can pass the hat and send me a check when you get around to it. If you don’t think it’s worth the trouble, I’ll just pick the book back up the next time I’m in the neighborhood.”
“I don’t see how I can turn that down,” Ashley said. “I’ll see you when you get here.”
***
Marjorie and Michaelson reached the State Department several minutes early. Getting beyond the ground-floor guard station at the State Department requires a pass for a specific location. Visitors don’t wander the halls seeking chance acquaintances and familiar faces. Accordingly, Marjorie waited with Michaelson in a comfortable secretarial area outside Pilkington’s office. Pilkington’s secretary left word with Ashley’s that Marjorie was there, on the off chance that Ashley might want to drop by.
She did. Before she did, Kenneth Lytton Denzell passed through the area and spoke for a few moments with Pilkington’s secretary.
Marjorie suspected that this wasn’t happenstance. Kenneth Lytton Denzell was Assistant Secretary of State for International Policy Issues. He was a political appointee, with a tenure at the State Department directly proportional to the residence of the current incumbent at the White House. Marjorie had expected Denzell to hear from Hilda Ashley who Pilkington’s visitors this afternoon would be, and apparently he had. She now expected Jeffrey Quentin to hear the same thing from Denzell.
Denzell had been gone about two minutes when Pilkington emerged from his office, shook hands warmly with Michaelson and Marjorie, graciously invited Michaelson into his office, and pointedly did not include Marjorie in the invitation. Marjorie sat back down in the waiting area and opened a book—not, as it happened, Ties That Bind, which she’d already read.
***
“So,” Pilkington said, “you have it.”
“Obviously. And the next time someone tries to take it away from me, it’s going straight to the Washington Post.”
“Any doubt about its authenticity?”
“None.”
“Name your price,” Pilkington said, a frown of distaste at the uncharacteristically direct words spoiling his face for a moment.
“The head of Sharon Bedford’s murderer, on a silver platter. Let me hasten to add that I’m speaking metaphorically.”
“I’ll interpret your metaphor as comprehending something consistent with due process of law. The fact remains that I don’t know who Sharon Bedford’s murderer is.”
“Neither do I,” Michaelson said.
“Then how am I supposed to deliver?”
“I’ve given that matter considerable thought,” Michaelson said. “I’ve come up with an easy way and a hard way.”
“I suppose the easy way involves bugging the telephones and eavesdropping electronically on the offices of one or more government officials,” Pilkington sighed.
“Yes.”
“That would be a felony.”
“You view that as a decisive objection, I take it?” Michaelson asked.
“I do.”
“I suppose I should be a bit miffed that quibbles like that didn’t prove so inhibiting when the issue was a black-bag operation targeting my apartment.”
“That was not a black-bag operation,” Pilkington interjected quickly. “That was a one-hundred-percent legal search carried out pursuant to a warrant based on duly attested probable cause to believe that evidence of violation of federal statutes governing dissemination of classified documents would be discovered.”
“I don’t suppose the magistrate who signed that warrant has formed the impression that he has a direct shot at the next Supreme Court vacancy, has he?”
“Not my department,” Pilkington said. “I handle the policy end of things.”
“At any rate,” Michaelson said, “that leaves the hard way.”
“Describe it to me.”
Michaelson did.
“I hate it,” Pilkington said when Michaelson had finished.
“I’m not crazy about it myself.”
“I can’t go along with it. The risks are too great. The game isn’t worth the candle.”
“You don’t have any choice but to go along with it,” Michaelson said. “If you slam the door in my face, leaks, hints, winks, and nudges about the coup d’état order start forty-five minutes after I leave your office.”
“Regrettable but, bottom line, I can live with that,” Pilkington said.
“Please don’t interrupt me in the middle of my threat,” Michaelson said. “You see, while Marjorie Randolph and I were cooling our heels outside your office, Kenneth Denzell passed through.”
“What a stunning coincidence,” Pilkington said. He looked as if he’d just sipped from a glass of Mouton Cadet ’83 with which some perverse sommelier had mixed Diet Coke.
“Quentin will get Denzell’s report, and when the leaks start, Quentin will conclude that you’re putting the information out, using me as a cat’s paw. He’ll assume that instead of trying to get the document from me, as you’ve been truthfully telling him you’re doing, you in fact passed the document to me, using Marjorie as a cutout—you know, left a photocopy on your secretary’s desk where Marjorie could see it while you and I were in here chatting, that kind of thing.”
“I am familiar with the term ‘cutout,’” Pilkington said frostily.
“Anyhow,” Michaelson concluded with an eloquent shrug, “you’ve been running for him all this time because he looked like the best bet you had, but all your efforts go down the drain if I decide to go to the scribblers. The only way to keep Quentin from thinking that you’re double-crossing him is to double-cross him.”
Wrapping his right hand around his chin, Pilkington studied the lower left quadrant of his desk intently for nearly a minute. Then he looked back up and met Michaelson’s gaze.
“I dislike this intensely,” he said.
“Yes. Well, it’s a filthy job, but someone has to do it, don’t they?”
Chapter Twenty-one
Michaelson’s proposal to Pilkington had three parts. Michaelson and Gallagher began the first one late that afternoon.
They returned to Sharon Bedford’s apartment, arriving just before five p.m. Gallagher turned the alarm off and they went inside. They stayed inside for forty-five minutes, more than long enough to install a SafeHome LokBox in the cabinet above her refrigerator. They left the lockbox open and the cabinet door ajar.
Michaelson returned to Gallagher’s Cadillac. After he was sure that Michaelson had had time to get back to the car, Gallagher turned the apartment alarm back on, exited the apartment, closed the door, and locked it. He waited one more minute. Then, without turning the alarm off, he unlocked the door, pushed it open, and walked away.
Forty-five seconds later a siren began screaming from the apartment. Gallagher by this time had reached the sidewalk.
He continued along it without haste for another ten seconds, slipped into the front seat of his car beside Michaelson, and drove off.
Four minutes and five seconds later a Montgomery County Police Department patrol car pulled up outside the town-house complex. Two and a half hours or so after that, Patrolman Steph Richardson submitted a written report detailing his discovery of a concealed but open and empty safe in Bedford’s apartment, and his failure to find any other indication of mischief on the part of whoever had triggered the alarm.
Although the following morning was a Saturday, a copy of Richardson’s report, summarized and annotated by Pilkington, landed on Quentin’s desk at eleven a.m.
The second phase was a bit more complicated. Evidence of it didn’t surface until ten days later.
That evidence took the form of three paragraphs in a Washington Post article on the future of American intelligence agencies in the post–Cold War world. Starting at the top of the article’s second column, the first of the three paragraphs noted that a proposal to establish a “permanent task force” on coordination of intelligence-gathering activities had suddenly advanced from something everyone had had at the back of his credenza for five years to something that was about to happen in a big hurry.
The next paragraph opined that, particularly in light of the Aldrich Ames/Soviet mole fiasco, this embryonic task force had all the earmarks of an outfit intended to gather all intelligence responsibility under a single new directorate, leaving the CIA with Operations and Hardware Maintenance.
The final paragraph, amid references to “senior officials” and other allusions to deep background chats, mentioned four candidates for the task force chairmanship: two who were clearly impossible, one who would have accepted a caustic enema before taking an appointment from the incumbent president, and Richard Michaelson.
“‘Permanent task force.’ There’s a nice Washington touch,” the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency said when he saw the story. The CIA has heard the permanent task force rumor roughly once every eighteen months for forty years and no longer pays much attention to it.
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