The Washington Decree

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  That was his plan.

  When the police caught up with him in Gilbert’s Corner, his father had already been institutionalized indefinitely at Marion Correctional Treatment Center, so the court case about who would take custody of him was not unproblematic. There was an uncle in Ohio who wanted him, but the uncle’s chances weren’t helped when he happened to mention how great it would be, having an extra hand in the tobacco fields. To make sure this wouldn’t happen, Junior employed his newly acquired talents of manipulation, picking out from among the court spectators a faded woman in her early forties who’d been eyeing him with a look that begged being taken advantage of, this time not so much in bed as in winning pity and compassion.

  Mrs. Sunderland, as the woman was named, soon talked her husband and the judge into adopting little Leo. Junior had made a good choice; he’d avoided further criminal charges and at the same time planted himself in a solid, traditional family with stock holdings that were soaring in value. Thus his next springboard towards the summit was in place. This, in fact, was already more like a seven-league jump towards his goal.

  * * *

  —

  There was much debate in the home on Main Street in Lexington as to the new son’s name. Junior wanted very much to be named Thomas, as in Thomas Jefferson—the greatest of all presidents.

  He was handed his new name certificate in a brown envelope on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, and thus was Leo Mulligan Jr. definitively history, while Thomas Sunderland—the land’s future vice president—became a budding reality.

  Young Thomas’s adoptive father, Colonel Wolfgang Sunderland, was immune to feelings, and at first their quarrels were drawn out and one-sided, but then they moved to a military base in Germany, and one day the situation was reversed. It happened the morning Thomas discovered his father in bed with a black man, enlisted as an aide-de-camp, who performed his officer’s servant duties with greater zeal than regulations prescribed. Commander Sunderland had hereby lost the war on the home front, and a fervent hatred between father and son became formalized and intensified.

  From that day on, Thomas could pretty much do as he pleased.

  The first to suffer at Ramstein Air Base were the officers’ daughters. These Thomas bedded one after another, and the ones he occasionally made pregnant he handed over to a shady abortionist. Next to suffer was the Sunderlands’s laboriously built—but sizable—family fortune.

  One could say Thomas’s discovery that morning on the base made his own personal declaration of independence a reality. From now on, it was merely a matter of planning. Nothing stood in his way.

  At least so he believed, until he had Sergeant Kane under his command in the invasion of Grenada.

  * * *

  —

  For Captain Thomas Sunderland, this mission to the warm climate of the Caribbean came as a refreshing break from tedious army-base life. He was young and ambitious and suddenly saw the chance for a chestful of medals. He had his battalion under control, and the men were in good spirits as they waded onto Grenada’s beach. No one could know that Sunderland and his troops were soon to run into a Cuban tank crew that lacked the appropriate awe at the sight of uniformed Americans with rolled-up sleeves, nor would anyone expect it would take only one round from the tank to pulverize the battalion.

  One dead and three seriously injured soldiers lay next to him when Thomas regained consciousness in a crater the size of a suburban swimming pool, and his men on the flanks were being shot at by snipers. He tried once to get his men’s attention, but their fear and confusion was contagious, so he curled up, knees to his chest and hands over his ears.

  It was left to the burly Sergeant Kane to pull the three wounded men out of the shell hole and bring them out of harm’s way, a good hundred yards back. And, being the cold-blooded devil he was, he then stormed back to the crater to see how his captain was doing, staying there until reinforcements subdued the snipers an hour later.

  “Well done, Kane,” said Thomas when it was all over, and clapped him on the back. “I can use a man like you when I become president one day.”

  Kane winked at him and laughed. “I’ll be looking forward to it, sir,” he said.

  Thomas looked up at the bright blue sky above them. “Yes, I can understand your laugh, Kane. But somehow, what happened today has brought me a step closer to the White House.”

  Kane’s smile tightened. “Okay, Captain, I can hear you have great goals, but what did you mean by this bringing you a step closer to the White House?”

  Sunderland looked at his young sergeant for a moment. He had never told anyone what he was about to say, but now was the time, he could feel it. So he told Kane about his dreams and his plan, and Kane understood—Thomas could tell that ahead of time. And yes, Kane admitted, it was probably true that participating in active war duty was very helpful. A patriotic temperament and demonstrated bravery were said to be keywords to winning votes.

  “Just think of Eisenhower and Kennedy,” Kane said. “You’re fortunate. You have the proper background, a fucking rich family, and no skeletons in the closet. That’s just what it takes to become president. It’s something I’m lacking, in any case.”

  That was the moment when the awful truth dawned on Thomas: He could never become president. People like Kane knew only part of his background. In reality he was the son of a murderer and had lived off having sex with married women and blackmailing them. If he hadn’t been underage at the time of his apprehension and the judge hadn’t been a softie, he would also have had a police record.

  No, Junior Mulligan was not made of the stuff of presidents, and one fine day the truth would surely be known. When the opposition became tough enough—not now or five years from now, but in the final phase where the throne was in reach—the truth would come out. That’s what better men than he had been forced to realize in the course of history. Perhaps Thomas Sunderland could become president one day, but not Leo Mulligan Jr. That wouldn’t be compatible with the American Dream.

  This, too, he told his young sergeant in the bottom of the shell crater.

  Kane fished around in his breast pocket after a little plastic bag. “Nope, it doesn’t look like you’ll ever become president,” he said, adding, “unless you sneak in the back door.”

  “The back door? What do you mean?”

  His subordinate thought a moment as he rolled a joint. “Yes, like the vice presidents. You know, Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Johnson, and . . . What the hell was the name of the one who succeeded Garfield? Right, Chester Arthur. Or what about Gerald Ford, for that matter?” He grinned. “They all wound up becoming president without being elected.”

  Sunderland shook his head, trying to get it all straight in his mind. First he would have to become vice president, surviving all the checks and investigations that entailed, and then the president would have to be gotten rid of. It wasn’t a very tenable plan.

  “But why do you want to be president?” Kane asked. “There are plenty of other ways to gain a hell of a lot of power. No, you become one of the president’s advisors, and you’ll see who really pulls the strings.”

  It was with these words that a new craving was fostered in Thomas’s brain. Ben Kane had cut the Gordian knot. If Thomas couldn’t achieve his dream of becoming president, at least he could come close. All he had to do was ingratiate himself with a strong candidate and make himself absolutely indispensable. It was that simple.

  He smiled; the project was under way.

  “Good, Kane,” he said. “Then I think we should begin by reporting that it was me—and not you—who brought the wounded to safety under fire. I promise you won’t regret it—trust me. The medal will eventually help both of us.”

  So they began planning together. Kane had no major demands. He came from a lower-middle-class family, where dreams were something one had at night after a good slew of spar
eribs. Yes, he’d help out. And when Sunderland swore an oath that he would fight just as hard for Ben Kane’s career as his own, and that Kane would be well rewarded economically when the time came, the pact was a reality.

  On this they shook hands.

  * * *

  —

  The years that followed were mainly spent studying politics and economics and finding the right presidential candidate to hook up with.

  And Thomas found his man when Bruce Jansen won the governorship of Virginia. Not because Thomas was a Democrat—if anything, he was more the opposite—but because he clearly sensed that this candidate was best at catching the fancy of female voters and making his opponents break out in a sweat. Yes, he had found the right man, no doubt about it.

  Then Thomas found himself a rather younger woman who looked good standing at his side—cool, subdued, and from a suitable family. She looked after her affairs, he after his, and they basically lived separate lives, as they both preferred. He still had his flings, only now he was very careful.

  It all went by the book: two children at boarding school, nothing to worry about, nothing to get in his way.

  * * *

  —

  Jansen got the most loyal and indispensable worker one could wish for when he hired Thomas Sunderland, and he soon became heavily dependent on his campaign manager and strategic sparring partner.

  Then, as fate would have it, Jansen’s first wife was murdered on a trip to China. Caroll Jansen was a disgusting bitch and considered by many to be a pain in the ass, so it wasn’t the murder itself that made an impression on Thomas, but rather what it did to Senator Jansen. If it hadn’t been for Thomas and a couple of other key staff members to whom Jansen could entrust the most vital decision-making, Thomas was convinced the senator would have stopped his political career right there. Jansen was engulfed by depression, corroded by doubt—a troubling development to be sure but also exciting in terms of the doors it opened.

  “If they had been married several years or if Senator Jansen had been older,” Jansen’s doctor stated some months later, “I’m afraid the grief would have driven him mad.”

  And Thomas’s dream became more intense, more real. Could it be he was already in possession of the key to the Oval Office? Jansen wasn’t invincible. Perhaps the presidency wasn’t that unthinkable after all, and maybe he could help matters along when the time came. It could just be that Ben Kane’s comment—about aiming for the vice presidency and then getting the president out of the picture—wasn’t so crazy. Sure, he could become president—why not? Just not by being elected. He would have himself appointed—that was the solution, and then his true past wouldn’t matter. The first step was to become chief of staff, then work to have the vice president deposed at some point and afterwards make sure it was he who was asked to fill the vacancy. And finally he would find a way to eliminate the president himself. This was how he could achieve his goal, thanks to the murder of Jansen’s wife. It would be a long and difficult road, but it could be done.

  It definitely could.

  * * *

  —

  Sunderland commenced to learn how to work with all kinds of people. Within the Democratic Party he built a reputation as a problem solver and someone to be trusted. A machine that never broke down. Even leading Republicans stated that, as long as Sunderland was a member of Jansen’s staff, there would always be someone to reason with. He was offered the chance to be a candidate in several constituencies, but said no every time, which ironically gained him respect as a modest soul who wasn’t trying to feather his own nest.

  As Jansen’s right-hand man he was given the opportunity of attending congressional hearings, lobbying, and sending flowers to the wives of important figures on their birthdays. The most important members of the Senate curried his favor; powerful men found him cooperative and offered him high positions.

  But Thomas declined. As far as he was concerned, there was no one in the country who was as obvious presidential material as Jansen, so why not stay where he was?

  If only they knew his real agenda and how much he despised them all. That Junior Mulligan was alive and well behind Thomas Sunderland’s polished facade, that he dug up all the dirt on his colleagues he possibly could, and that if he respected anyone, it was himself.

  Because it wasn’t Junior Mulligan’s plan to remain a lackey the rest of his life—on the contrary. The plan was to make the others his lackeys, come what may.

  * * *

  —

  In the meantime Ben Kane remained in the army, honing his talents as a martial artist. First he learned how to kill people quickly and silently, then he learned to master forgetting his deeds, and eventually he qualified for the elite Secret Service squad—the agents who looked after those who allegedly looked after everyone else.

  He resigned from the Secret Service after ten years of loyal service and established his own security firm. For a few years he gained experience by providing protection for greedy, unscrupulous executives who did business in Iraq, Liberia, and Colombia. There were usually casualties on both sides, but the money was good. Kane was a pro, and Thomas could clearly see how useful he could be.

  Some years later, when Thomas suggested to Jansen that they had use for a private security corps to supplement the Secret Service, the senator was skeptical at first. But Thomas was insistent, and when Jansen finally met Kane, the matter was quickly settled. Jansen liked the idea of controlling his own bodyguards and paying for them himself.

  Yes, Kane, the country boy, was definitely talented, and so was Thomas.

  * * *

  —

  Thomas cleared the next-to-last hurdle on his agenda a couple of years after Jansen lost his first wife in China. He introduced the senator to the intelligent and pretty Mimi Todd, and Jansen found her irresistible. Thus had Sunderland supplied his presidential candidate with a wife; now he just had to see to it that Jansen lost her, too.

  Kane and Thomas had planned it well. They had chosen election night as the best time to have Mimi Jansen murdered, they’d found the perfect setting, and everything had been worked out to the smallest detail. They had even found the world’s best string-puller in Bud Curtis. The situation could hardly have been more advantageous when Curtis offered to have Jansen hold election night at one of his hotels, especially when it turned out that Curtis had someone like Toby O’Neill working for him.

  O’Neill was the ideal scapegoat, the perfect Lee Harvey Oswald. A dim-witted, rabid little man, not bright enough to say no when they offered him the money they later withdrew from Curtis’s account. It apparently never occurred to him how he’d never have an opportunity to use the money. Another good reason for choosing him.

  So Toby O’Neill was to murder Mimi Jansen, but unlike the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy, this time, there was to be left no chance of speculation about a conspiracy or a motive. The man behind the killing—that is, Curtis—had to be conspicuous, found guilty of hatching the assassination plot, and severely punished. They had even found a pliant, pretentious state attorney to assure that the case proceeded according to plan and that they had successfully covered their tracks. Then that would be that.

  Still, things almost went badly wrong before they even began.

  Until now Jansen’s security had pretty much been in the hands of Ben Kane’s private agents, but in the days before election night the Secret Service began taking its job very seriously. Everything and everyone in the hotel was checked and double-checked, first by Kane’s men and then by the gray-clad Secret Service. If Thomas—and therefore also Jansen—hadn’t insisted they stay, the Secret Service would have asked Kane’s men to disappear altogether. But now the problem was that the allocation of duties was no longer in Kane’s hands. A situation that Kane meant to have rectified when Jansen was finally installed in the Oval Office.

  * * *

 
—

  According to their original plan, Kane himself was to inspect the hotel passageway before Toby O’Neill was in position. The gun with the fake fingerprints was supposed to have been lying behind the American flag, then picked up and used by O’Neill. Not easy to carry off but workable. That is, until the Secret Service took over, checking everything in the passageway and everywhere else a mere hour and a half before Jansen’s helicopter was due to land.

  How were they supposed to conceal the fucking weapon now, with these gray bloodhounds and their X-ray vision? Kane knew it was simply impossible.

  That was why Ben Kane, for once worried and uncertain, suddenly approached Thomas and signaled their need to talk in private.

  “I can’t have that thing on me, Thomas,” Kane said. “Those gray bastards will smell a rat if I try. They’ve got eyes in the back of their heads. You’re going to have to take it with you and give it to Toby. You’ve been cleared, no one will suspect you, and you won’t be frisked. Can you do it, Thomas? Otherwise we’ll have to call it all off.”

  For a moment Sunderland saw his bold, grand agenda in ruins. How was he supposed to deliver the gun to the shooter without leaving fingerprints? How was he ever going to do it with so many people vying for his attention? It wasn’t that he was afraid to do it; it just couldn’t be done.

  “It won’t work, Ben.” He shook his head. “I’m too much the center of attention, and I can’t suddenly be wearing gloves. It just won’t work,” he said.

  Ben Kane nodded. He could see it was true.

  So they discussed alternatives until they came up with a solution. Again, not ideal, but feasible. Then they rehearsed how to do it for a half hour until they could carry it out with their eyes closed.