by Buck Sanders
Surprise! We lied. It was 7 today! This is by no means all we have up our sleeves.
Chapter Five
ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH II,
Atlantic Ocean, 8 September
Bejeweled and heavily powdered matrons alone and on the lookout for flashy young men they would prefer to think of as innocently attracted to older women, at least for the duration of the crossing, lined the upper deck. They were arranged in sweeping rows of chaise longues as if interested only in the strong sun and sea air, as if it were somehow necessary, in the privileged indolence that was their lot in life, to seek peace and quiet from imagined business.
One deck below, the rope-enclosed volleyball court was an eye-catching swirl of harder and younger bodies leaping and stretching to keep up the game that would give one and all a social bond useful to some quieter evening activity, though no less strenuous. Watching this group, surreptitiously, was an embankment of potbellied, spindly-legged old men wrapped in terrycloth towelings, men who sadly imagined themselves in the place of their younger counterparts, frolicking in some distant past with delightful visions of leggy young women their various wives never were.
Along the narrow promenade decks strolled middle-aged lovers—married, though not necessarily to one another—the occasional sharply uniformed officer wishing to be noticed by someone who could help him pass the time comfortably, and the rare child in parental tow.
Practically no one was below at this mid-afternoon hour, not with the weather so fair and the romantic images so plentiful. The exception was a bearded man who hadn’t yet ventured out of his stateroom.
He stood at a wash basin, dressed only in his trousers. His shirt lay on the floor, and his Burberry raincoat was left atop his unopened luggage.
He had only a small grip open, and a toilet kit, from which he had removed a pair of scissors and shaving gear.
Carefully, he snipped away the bulk of his salt-and-pepper beard, collecting the whiskery refuse in the basin. He was meticulous about washing the hairs down the drain, and out, eventually, to sea.
When he had completed the first stage, he lathered his face and set to work with a safety razor. It felt good to be clean-shaven again. He ran his fingers across his newly bare cheeks, and marveled at how much younger he could look this way. He sprinkled a few drops of Yardley cologne into the palms of his hands and rubbed the cooling solution into the skin of his face and neck, enjoying the fresh bite of alcohol and the musk scent.
When he was finished, he removed the dark brown-tinted contact lenses he had worn on checking in. His natural eye color was a pale blue, which he framed with clear steel-framed aviator glasses.
NEW YORK CITY
The dark green Ford stationwagon slipped into a spot at the curb in front of number 142 East 65th Street. It was expected.
Two men in conservative business suits emerged from the step-down street door of the townhouse and checked the credentials of three other men who remained inside the station wagon. Then all five men began unloading the cargo brought to “The Residence,” as the town-house was called by the Secret Service. A collection of bulky steel cases that might have contained musicians’ gear, by their appearance, were shuttled from the car to the ground floor security station—a small vestibule and a larger sitting room leading to a second large room toward the rear of the house.
By this time, East 65th Street was in its customary form, a sedately bustling Upper East Side row of townhouses owned by Dick and Pat Nixon; David Rockefeller, the retired banker and international financier; Otto Preminger, the film director; and others of like wealth, but more private names. A Catholic girls’ school across the way from the Nixons emptied its doors of a few hundred boisterous charges, and the unusually watchful eyes of Secret Service agents posted at the second-story windows of The Residence recorded a normal dispersement at the end of the school day.
The usual daytime neighborhood passersby, those familiar to the T-men assigned to The Residence, detected nothing unusual in the delivery of so many steel boxes at the Nixon home. They had more important things on their minds. The blasé quality of life in New York, and especially that of Manhattan’s fabled Upper East Side, was the strongest factor in Richard Nixon’s decision to leave California, where “La Casa Pacifica” had become an intolerable loneliness surrounded by rubber-necking tourists. In Manhattan, Nixon could be in the midst of a crowded city and yet virtually ignored as a minor light in a community of more genuine luminaries, or at least more lovable luminaries.
Occasionally, a group of wide-eyed out-of-towners, dressed in garments they assumed to bb fashionable in the better districts of places like Omaha and Shreveport, would stop outside The Residence and point, shaking their heads in disbelief at the surprising smallness of a New York townhouse. One of the group would remember the shocking $750,000 price tag announced in the press, and they would cluck about that fact while grouped in front for an Instamatic photograph.
A group stopped now, performed the routine seen so often by the Secret Service agents, and then assembled for picture-taking. This time, as the Instamatics clicked, so, too, did the larger, hidden cameras fitted through the slats of the yellow shutters on the second-floor windows. Someone among the T-men remembered how John Hinckley had stopped for an Instamatic photo in front of the White House only a few days before taking a shot at President Reagan.
One of the men who had arrived in the station wagon returned from the townhouse and locked up the car. He chatted briefly with one of the Secret Service men permanently attached to The Residence duty, then went back inside, leaving the T-man to watch the tourists.
FAIRMONT, West Virginia
Slayton could see the telltale line of smoke rising beyond the hills. He began his descent, knowing by long experience as a flyer in Vietnam, that the smoke visibility was an able guide to altitude adjustments in preparation for landing in a troubled spot.
He nosed the small U.S. Army helicopter he had managed to commandeer at Andrews Air Force Base toward the last ridge of blue-green pines he would have to pass before reaching Fairmont. He was low enough now so that he could watch the shadow his craft made on the forested hills; he could see the birds and the deer scampering down below at the dreaded sound of muffled rotor blades.
And then he saw the city of Fairmont—the source of the smoke that was his beacon.
Below him, the city was a barely controlled pandemonium of traffic congestion, arson, and angry, moving lines of people, some moving against one another, some fleeing, some devouring commercial buildings and homes in the same way Slayton had seen Africa’s terrifying army ants decimate a remote village by eating every living thing.
Even so, it appeared to Slayton, from his lofty vantage point, that the military would not have to be called in. Local police, with state help, seemed to be managing. But what of the trauma to come after the fires were out and the ashes swept?
Slayton had seen this sort of public insanity before, in the uncivilized and so-called “civilized” world. Each time, townspeople were left with the chilly realization that at any time of extraordinary circumstances there were those who would use the opportunity for utter destruction, that there was no clue as to who they should watch.
What was that line from Menninger, Slayton wondered?
“We know that in the unconscious we are all mad, all capable of a madness which threatens constantly to emerge—sometimes does emerge, only to be tucked away again out of sight, if possible…”
It was as good a description as he’d ever read to explain situations like the one he viewed below him. The unfortunate thing for the people of Fairmont, of course, was that they would always know, from this day on, that once a collective madness was exposed, perhaps it could never be tucked out of sight again.
He thought of Johnny Lee Rogers. That was the sort of man who was so talented at exploiting madness, whatever its root.
These days, these days of revolution by media, as in Iran, an exploiter like Johnny Lee R
ogers would have no qualms about using terrorists to bring about the innate madness of “law-abiding” citizens. Slayton was seeing the truth of that assumption right now as he looped around the perimeters of the grazing riot on the ground, fixing his sights on the natural boundaries of Fairmont, the landmarks and the traffic patterns. He spotted the mine easily enough. It was the fourth big smoking pile to the north.
Plainly, Rogers’ supporters had now broken with their bully-boy rhetoric with this wanton sacrifice of human life. Was Rogers himself directing it? Would he acknowledge the effort, if and when terrorists managed to spring him?
Would this new Führer acknowledge his own duplicity in violent tragedy?
After all, it was Hitler’s own squads of Sturmabteilung who entered the German parliament via underground tunnels which connected it to the presidential palace, and set the Reichstag on fire.
On the day after the fire, the aged Hindenburg was prevailed upon to sign a decree “For the Protection of the People and the State” designed as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the State.”
And now here was Johnny Lee Rogers with his exhortations against the civil rights of those who would not agree with him—Rogers, like Hitler himself, always staying far beyond the fray. Johnny Lee Rogers, until this murder conspiracy conviction, had never been known to burn a cross or march in a Nazi uniform or put his name to any document with defamatory descriptions of minorities. In his time, too, Hitler never once spit at a Jew, kicked a black, or fired on a Communist. Others did all these things in their names. Others were made to feel that their focus should be on an enemy of Rogers’ choosing—or Hitler’s.
Slayton knew that to get at the root of a problem he would always have to understand the players of the plot. He had to understand Hitler, since Johnny Lee Rogers, presumably the guest of honor in absentia at this little holocaust in Fairmont, West Virginia, was a student of Hitler’s. And Slayton would have to understand Hitler’s followers—and Rogers’.
The question in each case, it seemed to Slayton, involved the nature of the followers and the future course of the followers. At this point, he could focus no more clearly than that.
He shook his head. This tiresome repetition of history, the failure of man to learn from his own abuses, made his brain ache—as well as his heart. Would we ever come to an end in the trail of the twisted cross?
Slayton cut back on the rotor power and let the helicopter drop gently through the air, almost straight downward over a clearing not far from the Lovebridge mine entrance.
What would he find down on the ground?
He let the few slim clues float through his mind, applying them against the sifting impressions of history. Once again, during a national crisis, Ben Slayton knew only, at the outset, to put himself as close to the eye of the hurricane as possible, and to trust to his deductive reasoning powers.
The helicopter made its final hovering approach. In a swirl of dust, Slayton set down. A few local cops and men he assumed were from the nearest FBI Field Office in Wheeling, stood in a line just beyond the concentric circles of dust made by the helicopter blades. Why the FBI at this stage?
Before he was out of the cockpit, something clicked in Slayton’s mind.
Scapegoats!
Unlike Hitler, Johnny Lee Rogers was a cool Führer. They were shepherds of madness in two different eras. Hitler needed to be hot, as his appeal had to be made in the beer halls and in the great rotundas, in person. Rogers was a product of television, the cool medium.
Hitler’s scapegoats had to be obvious. Rogers would have to be more subtle.
Adolf Hitler surrounded himself with layers of protection, his own personal SS, his own changing command. He failed to learn the lesson he himself taught, that to remove the rights of any part of a society was to remove everyone’s rights. In other words, everyone would have to be a scapegoat for all the ills that the Führer and the Führer alone could solve.
The burning of the Reichstag, and before that, the night of the long knives; Adolf Hitler’s own duplicity in acts of sabotage against his nation…
Slayton’s thoughts came rapidly now. If he was correct, Johnny Lee Rogers might provide the world with an even greater malignancy than that of Hitler.
Chapter Six
NEW YORK CITY
The Secret Service agent left standing outside the street after the unloading of the station wagon spotted the mailman as he turned from Lexington Avenue east onto 65th Street.
The mailman was a short, somewhat pudgy man, dressed in summer-issue shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and the customary U.S. Postal Service safari hat. He pushed a cart bulging with letters and parcels.
The Secret Service agent would not move on the mailman immediately. There was to be no sign of alarm, no activity out of the ordinary at The Residence.
In a few minutes, the mailman was making his way to the Nixon house, an arm filled with mail he was going over.
The T-man wouldn’t let him pass.
“I’ll take those,” he said to the mailman.
The mailman was confused, then suspicious. He gathered up his full height—all five feet, six inches—and said to the man in a business suit and sunglasses:
“S’posed to take ‘em right into that door, mac. I can only deliver these to… wait, you can’t take ‘em—”
The agent had grabbed six envelopes from the mailman’s hands. Then he removed his billfold from a breast coat pocket and waved his Secret Service credentials in the mailman’s face. “Now let go,” he said, as the mailman made a futile grab for the mail he’d lost.
The mailman removed his safari hat, scratched his perspiring head, and whined, “I don’t know, I guess it’s okay.”
The agent turned on his heel and walked through the door of the first-floor command post of The Residence. When he had reached the second large room, he laid out the six envelopes on the table. The men who had earlier arrived with the steel cases were waiting.
“Okay, what do we got?” the one who seemed to be in charge said.
“Wait,” his partner said. “Look at those envelopes. See something missing?”
Five of the envelopes were stamped “Clear, U.S. Postal Service Special Investigations Unit.” All mail sent to former Presidents, whether they live in Palm Springs or Plains or New York, has to go through the special detection procedures necessary to clear up any question of letter bomb or poison processing.
The sixth letter was not so stamped.
“How the hell did this get through?” the man in charge asked. “We’re not set up for this.”
He was speaking of bomb and poison detection techniques. The steel cases contained all manner of forensic examination materiel—fingerprint dusting powder in the event of latent prints, ultraviolet light lamps to indicate areas of skin oil or perspiration deposits on envelope or letterhead paper, microscopes to help in the determination of handwriting analysis characteristics, electronic calipers to record the thickness of bond used, and thereby to break down into categorical possibilities the purchase point of the stationery, a variety of chemicals for determining ink categories, a chart to group general handwriting styles into general personality types, and all manner of close-up photographic lenses and reproductive mechanisms to preserve the original appearance of whatever letter would be the one promising to dictate further information regarding the demanded release of Johnny Lee Rogers.
“We don’t know if we’ve got a fucking bomb on our hands or not!” the man in charge screamed. He looked malevolently at the agent who had brought the mail in the first place.
“Let’s let the idiot here open up this one,” he suggested. “Stand back, boys.”
The red-faced agent stared at the uncleared letter, then looked up.
“God, I’d better go after him!” he said.
“You figured that out all by yourself, did you?” the forensic examiner in charge said. “You bet your ass you’d better haul him back here.
“And if the old man upstairs,” he added, pointing up toward the Nixon living quarters overhead, “if he ever finds out…”
The agent ran out the door into the street. He looked frantically eastward, toward Third Avenue. The mailman couldn’t possibly have completed his rounds on this block, not as far from Third as Nixon’s house was. But where was he? He couldn’t be seen.
The mailman couldn’t be seen because he had removed the leather bag from its cart and had hopped a Third Avenue bus heading uptown. The agent came across the cart at the corner.
Meanwhile, the mailman had gotten off the bus at a corner in the seventies, and entered a restaurant. Inside the restaurant, he used the men’s room, but not to relieve himself of anything but his postal uniform.
Inside his mail bag was a change of clothing, jeans, and a T-shirt. Left behind in the men’s room stall were his mail bag, the letters and parcels of several celebrated persons on the Upper East Side, and Postal Service-issue summer uniform and safari hat. The “mailman” had exited the restaurant through the men’s room window.
The agent radioed back to the command post at The Residence. Before he walked back to the Nixon house, he paused in front of a row of rubbish cans and vomited.
FAIRMONT, West Virginia
“Of course, we can’t at this time guess the cause of the blast,” a mine safety crewman told Slayton. “But I guess that doesn’t matter all that much.”
Slayton watched as rescue operators tried desperately to crack passages between huge slabs of fallen rock and tree, to form a life-saving tunnel to the trapped men, fighting time and flames that still licked up from below.
“No guesses?” Slayton asked, feebly.
“Only that this was sabotage.”
“How can you tell?”
“By our procedures, which I know for sure were fully in effect before this blast,” the safety crewman said.
“Ain’t no way even an accidental flash could set off that kind of fire. There ain’t any levels of combustible gas to such a point. Whatever set this off must have been a torch, and flammable gas to boot—something to prime the pump, as it were.”