by Noel Hynd
Lerrick grinned and appreciated the question. A chance to show off: "I was twenty-four hours ahead of you, Cochrane. Two mine sweepers covered the harbor this afternoon. They're also proceeding along the coastal waterway as far as Georgia. An advance escort in addition to the PT boats."
"And the sides of the Sequoia itself?" Cochrane asked.
"Six navy frogmen spent the afternoon going over every inch of it," Lerrick said. "There's not a barnacle on that boat's belly. They finished at four-thirty. Half an hour ago. And nothing, nothing, has come within two hundred, uh, yards of the boat since, Satisfied?"
Cochrane had to admit it. Yes, he was satisfied. Lerrick had done all the right things. The facts were the facts. Why then, did his instincts still rebel?
He thanked Frank Lerrick and departed.
His mood and suspicions simmered. He considered going for dinner, but wasn't hungry. He wound his way slowly through Washington traffic and discovered that he was heading, for no real reason, back toward the White House and his previous post across the street from the presidential residence.
Where would the attack come? He couldn't see it. He couldn't sense it. His intuition had left town. He began to wonder whether his common sense had, too.
Maybe, he postulated, it's all a conceit at this point. Siegfried knew he had lost and fled the country: he saved himself, just as I should now save myself.
Cochrane tried to place himself within Siegfried's twisted psyche. And when he did so, the sense of impending disaster remained. It was a sense he had developed involuntarily over the past five years. He knew when he was being tailed and he knew when he was close to his own quarry. His senses had never betrayed him. But tonight they were short-circuiting. He was getting messages, but did not know what they were.
Was he close to Siegfried, or was Siegfried close to him? Had Fowler flown the coop completely-he had to have had an escape route or two lined up-or was he still lurking somewhere in the capital, waiting for his shot at Roosevelt?
Cochrane sat in his car on Pennsylvania Avenue, parked by a fire hydrant. The flag flew above the White House, a yellow spotlight upon it.
He ran through everything again. The White House itself was secure from within. It had to be. Similarly, the White House grounds were clean. Cochrane had seen the Secret Service and Bureau people examining every inch that afternoon. They had even used dogs.
The presidential limousine had been under guard for two weeks. Secure, Cochrane thought, checking off a mental list.
What about the route to the yacht? Unpublished, Cochrane recalled, and the first blocks away from the White House were under guard by Secret Service, plainclothes D.C. police, Army, and F.B.I.. A cat couldn't slip in and out without being seen. That left the yacht, which had been searched and searched again from within. And the frogmen searched the outside at sunset.
So why did Cochrane sense disaster? Where, oh where, was the weak spot in security? He started his car, just for the exercise, and pulled into traffic. He circled the White House in its entirety, Pennsylvania Avenue, to Constitution, south, and back again. He had never seen such heavy security. He should have been reassured. But the feeling of doom was still upon him.
He parked again. The same spot. A brown sedan pulled from a parking area a hundred feet behind him, then cruised next to him and stopped.
They looked at him questioningly, a car full of hardnosed Secret Service faces. Cochrane kept his hands in full view on the top of the steering wheel. His window was already open.
"F.B.I.," he said. He flicked one palm open in plain sight and showed a shield. They shined a searchlight in his face.
"What are you sitting here for?" the driver asked.
"Security's a joint operation, isn't it?" he asked. They looked at him resentfully, then rolled up their car window. They parked fifty feet down the block in front of him. They settled in to wait, and so did Cochrane.
*
Earlier that afternoon, Stephen Fowler had selected his key landmark on the Virginia side of the Potomac. It was the spire of St. Thomas’church, the tallest point near the riverside in Alexandria. The spire would be easily visible at all hours from the water, which was what counted.
Siegfried left his car one block from the Lutheran church. The trunk of the car contained the spy's escape material: fake passports, tickets, money, and dry clothing. Then Fowler took a public bus into Washington. He would start in the Washington Channel, upstream from the Sequoia, and swim downstream with the current to his target. Then the current of the Potomac would guide him back across the Potomac to Alexandria. For a strong swimmer, it was fiendishly simple.
He had ready his Pirelli diving suit. He carried the bomb in a small suitcase. He went to East Potomac Park at dusk, staked out a bench near the Washington Channel, and waited. A thousand thoughts were upon him: his proximity to killing the President… his escape through Mexico… his eventual reception in Germany.
His spirits rose. He was a commando, wasn't he'? A bomb beneath his arm. A diving knife sheathed and strapped to his shin. A loaded pistol in a waterproofed canvas wrapping was taped to his chest within his wet suit.
He stared at the water. Nothing could stop him. Not the foolish English, not the amateurish Americans. Not even the muddle-headed women who occasionally got in his way. At eight o'clock, his eyes accustomed to the dimness of the park, he stood up and began to stroll. He could almost feel the small watch ticking in its case.
Four sticks of dynamite, he pondered. Enough to depose Franklin and Eleanor from the White House, but probably not enough to sink the Sequoia. Well, he reasoned, some details did not matter. He would be on the midnight flight to Mexico City by the time the blast detonated. And he would be on a German warship by 7 P.M. the next evening.
Siegfried stopped near a clump of trees. There was not a soul within sight. Quickly, he undressed. He checked the waterproofing around the bomb and the adhesives that would secure it to the ship. He tossed away the small suitcase.
He patted his knife and his pistol. He blackened his face with burnt cork. Then, at half-past eight, he entered the channel.
He carried his clothing and abandoned it a hundred feet into the river.
He took a few strokes and began his path downstream. The friendly current carried him. Even the weather cooperated. Dim moonlight masked by a November overcast. In the center of the river, or under the hull of the Sequoia, Siegfried would be invisible. His presence would be known only long after his flowers were planted, when explosion and death would shatter the night.
His strokes were firm now, long, smooth, and even. He felt like a sculler on the Charles or the Schuylkill. Genius propelled him, Siegfried decided. That and a sense of mission.
It would be a different America after Roosevelt died. A different world. The next American leadership would surely see the folly of war with the Third Reich. How Hitler would welcome him! How he would be a hero in the week or two it would take to arrive in Berlin!
*
At five minutes past nine, Cochrane recognized a tall, lean man in a top coat and bowler walking past the White House. The man walked in Cochrane's direction. On his arm was a very beautiful woman. not a soul within sight.
Peter Whiteside and Laura Worthington Fowler approached Cochrane's car. "Anything happening?" Whiteside asked.
"Sure," Cochrane answered. "There are so many security people within two square blocks that we're failing over each other."
"I noticed," Whiteside answered.
"American overkill? Is that it?" Laura asked with mock reproach.
"It sure isn't classic English understatement," Cochrane allowed. "Why don't you both get in?"
They did, Laura in front with Bill Cochrane, Whiteside in the back. Out of the corner of his eye, Cochrane saw Whiteside remove his pistol from his overcoat pocket, check the six cylinders, and click it shut again. For one terrible second a new horror seized him, and he was aware that he had his back to a man with a loaded weapon.
&nbs
p; Then Whiteside tucked his pistol away. Cochrane became more aware of his own Colt revolver, sitting loaded where it always was, beneath his left armpit.
"I can't figure it out," Cochrane said idly. "I know Siegfried is going to try something. But everything is secure. The White House. The grounds. The Naval Station. The yacht. The Potomac itself has U.S. Navy ships perched practically on top of the Sequoia. Couldn't slip a dingy past a pair of PT boats."
"What about the mouth of the river?" Whiteside asked. "Could a small ship be waiting there?"
"The Navy cleared the area," Cochrane said. "You know about Roosevelt and his Navy. Well, maybe you don't. But the President looks out for the Navy and the Navy looks out for-"
"Excuse me," Laura interrupted. "But what about a single man in the water?"
"What do you mean by ‘in the water’?"
"Stephen," she said without emotion. She recalled "Way back, when I first met him, he used to do length of the lake. He could swim for hours. Why-"
Cochrane turned the key in the Hudson's ignition. The auto roared to life. Cochrane cut a U-turn on Pennsylvania Avenue. He pointed the car toward the bridges that allowed vantage points over the Potomac and which led to Virginia.
*
At nine-fifteen, two minutes after Cochrane's car screeched its tires and headed toward Virginia, the yellow spotlight above the White House was extinguished. Two U.S. Marines appeared on the White House roof and hauled down the Star and Stripes. Congress had adjourned. Franklin Roosevelt was traveling.
On the ground-floor rear of the White House, the President's luggage was placed in the trunk of two customized Cadillac limousines. Six extra Secret Service agents were assigned to Roosevelt's car, an extra lead car was assigned, and six motorcycle escorts from the District police, instead of the usual two, were in place and ready to lead the motorcade to the Naval Station.
Roosevelt, in the churlish mood that he had been in recently, noted the extra security immediately. "What the hell is this?" he asked. "An official state visit to The Sequoia?"
"Just appropriate security, Mr. President," replied dark-eyed, bushy-haired Mike Reilly, the ranking Secret Service agent assigned to the White House.
Roosevelt eyed the extra men as they wheeled his rolling chair to the limousine. "I never knew there was so much Republican territory between the White House and the Potomac," he remarked, the smile returning for an instant.
His security people reacted with indulgent laughter. The White House detail was almost entirely Democrats. They helped him into the back seat of the customized presidential limousine. Two agents hopped along the running boards on each side of the automobile while Reilly strolled the short driveway that led from the White House garage to the exit gate.
He stared through, scanning to his left and right across the park behind the White House. He saw only Secret Service and F.B.I. details. He walked back to the presidential entourage and spoke to the men under his command.
"Not a German in sight," Reilly said. "But what can you expect from F.B.I. reports?"
His agents grinned.
"Let's move," he said.
Reilly hopped into the lead car. On command, the rear gate of the White House swung open and the motorcade was on its way.
FORTY-TWO
"A nation of sleepers and dreamers," thought Siegfried as he treaded water carefully past the first U.S. Navy vessel. There were sailors on the deck and obviously their mission was to guard the harbor. But none spotted the agent of the Third Reich as he slipped through the dark water fifty yards off the bow of their ship.
Siegfried reached The Sequoia after a swim of twenty-two minutes. The yacht was like a steel goliath when he reached it and touched the hull. The curve of the bow protected him from view from above. And the spy tingled with the same excitement as last time. Then he set to work.
He unbound his bomb from where it was strapped to his suit. He pressed adhesive cement to the aft starboard side of the vessel, then he pressed the metal-encased explosives firmly into the cement. He pressed hard for two minutes, treading water. The charge was just above the waterline, ten feet below the master cabin where the President and Mrs. Roosevelt usually slept.
The bomb was secure. Siegfried pushed off from the ship. He reached to the metal case around the bomb and he rapped it gently with his arm. It held. Waves and water would not remove it. Nothing would, until it detonated at 3 A.M.
He pushed off and slowly slipped away from the boat. Then he heard a commotion on the pier above him. Siegfried treaded the water and slowly moved at an angle to the Sequoia. He could see the pier. His heart almost stopped.
There was the presidential motorcade. Two long black Cadillac limousines. Siegfried did not see the leftist Mrs. Roosevelt. But as he stared from the shadowy surface of the Potomac, he did see the President.
Secret Service agents were lifting the invalid from the back of his car. Siegfried, ever conscious of details. could even see the ugly steel braces jutting upward within the President's trousers. The most powerful man in the world, some people called him, and he couldn't even walk. A prisoner of his own degenerative affliction. Siegfried almost laughed. How could Adolf Hitler even be compared with a cripple?
The spy watched a tired Roosevelt being wheeled up the gangplank and into the yacht. Then Siegfried turned in the water. The hardest work was done, he rejoiced. He treaded his way to a distance of a hundred yards from the yacht and continued smoothly through the water. He cut his speed as he successfully passed the second naval vessel.
He cut through the water purposefully now, with long, even, far-reaching strokes. He was giddy with excitement, proud of what he had done. He had affected the course of the twentieth century!
The shoreline of Alexandria, Virginia beckoned to him and grew larger as he swam toward it. The current carried him. Ten minutes after leaving the Sequoia, he spotted the illuminated spire of St. Thomas' Church.
That was his landmark. His beacon. He knew his car was a hundred feet from the church. He hurried his strokes. All that mattered now was his escape to Germany.
*
The shoreline on the Capitol side of the river, Cochrane reasoned, was impregnable. There was the United States Naval Station first, then Bolling Air Force Base due south. On the Virginia shore there was National Airport between Arlington and Alexandria. The most vulnerable part of the coastline, Cochrane then reasoned, had to be in Alexandria.
They stood on the Alexandria promenade on the west bank of the Potomac: Laura, Bill Cochrane, and Peter Whiteside. They looked at the dark river and they gazed upward to where the lights of Washington shone from a distance of two to four miles.
"Just tell me this, if you would," Whiteside said to Cochrane. "What exactly are we looking for?"
There was a lapse of several seconds before Cochrane could muster an answer.
"Anything," he said. "Anything in that river that isn't motorized has to come downstream. That means here."
Cochrane took two heavy flashlights from the trunk of his car and handed one each to Laura and Peter Whiteside. He kept a smaller flashlight for himself. "Why don't the two of you stay reasonably close," Cochrane suggested as they began to walk the promenade. He held in mind that of the two of them, only Whiteside was armed.
"I'll go on ahead," he said, starting to move southward along the bank. "We'll do two or three hundred yards at a time, then I'll move the car to keep it with us. By the way," he warned, "keep your eyes on the water."
"Pound to a penny we're wasting our time," Whiteside said.
"Have a better idea?" Cochrane asked.
No one did. Cochrane moved ahead. He scanned the surface of the water as he walked, squinting and trying to make the light from shore work for him. Why was the moon so dark tonight? Coincidence, or part of Siegfried's design?
A phrase came tumbling back to him out of the past. No, he thought, there were no coincidences. Fact: the water was the least guarded area. Conclusion: Siegfried was out there somewhe
re!
Cochrane cautiously walked twenty feet from the water. There was suddenly the sound of a male voice and Cochrane's hand was upon his pistol, drawing it, pointing it, and praying that Fowler did not have the drop on him already.
He shone his own small light in the direction of the noise and yelled, "Freeze! F.B.I.! Freeze or I'll shoot!" And the focal point of his body was his quaking finger on the trigger.
Then, stunned, he could barely react to what he saw. Two young men, one slighter than the other, their clothes askew, fresh from an embrace that Cochrane had interrupted, stood trembling and staring at him. One wore a woman's wig and an earring. It took Cochrane a full five seconds to comprehend and relax.
"Go on," he said, lowering the weapon. "Get out of here." He turned off his flashlight. Wordlessly, the two men fled, one whimpering in terror.
Can't be so nervous! Cochrane told himself, feeling his soaking palm against the black steel of his gun. Can't react that fast. I'll kill the wrong person. Cochrane replaced his pistol in its holster and continued to walk.
*
What were they doing with flashlights? Siegfried wondered. The man and the woman appeared to be looking for something. Siegfried was fifty feet off shore and intently watched Peter Whiteside and Laura. With a pair of long quiet strokes, he moved closer to them. Then he heard their voices and recognized them.
Siegfried was incensed! How dare these benighted amateurs endanger him again! This time they would both pay dearly.
Laura turned and shone her light across the water. Siegfried was imperceptible amid the choppy surface of the Potomac. Then the beam was gone.
He watched them. Their lights were like beacons and they were not far from Siegfried's car. In the water, he watched their lights move farther down the promenade. Then the Englishman walked ahead of her by several paces.
Siegfried studied the situation. A few seconds earlier he had thought he had seen a third, smaller beam farther down the shore. But when he looked for it again, he did not detect it. Must have been an odd car light, he reckoned. He waited several seconds more.