The Washington Decree

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Once they got to the passageway they would proceed as close to the wall as possible. Thomas would have Bud Curtis’s revolver in his jacket pocket, with Ben Kane walking directly in front of him. Then putting his hand inside his jacket, he would come up alongside Kane after O’Neill had been searched by the Secret Service for the final time and work the gun out of his pocket from behind the pocket lining inside the jacket. At that moment Kane would take the gun with a corner of his own jacket, make his way up to Toby O’Neill, and slip it into the man’s garish red jacket pocket. By that point the crowd’s attention would be focused on the imminent unveiling of the painting, so that part of the procedure would scarcely be the most difficult as long as Kane made sure he positioned himself properly.

  So that was how it had to be, if it had to be here and now.

  They called O’Neill over and made him understand the plan had been changed a bit, which didn’t seem to bother Toby at all. He was to let himself be body-searched as many times as the Secret Service wanted, and after that, things would be simple. When he could feel that Kane had put the gun in his pocket, he was to wait a couple of seconds, remove the weapon, and fire it straight at Jansen’s wife.

  What could be easier? They could see O’Neill tremble with anticipation at the mere thought. Sick in the head or not, he was their man—perfect for doing the job and then being done in himself.

  Or so they thought.

  The agreement, of course, was that he should kill only Mimi Jansen—no more, no less. So Kane passed Toby the revolver, and he shot his victim, but then the idiot decided to shoot again.

  “The bastard dies and that’s the way it’s gotta be!” snarled O’Neill and turned the gun on Jansen, throwing Sunderland into instant panic. Which was why Kane took out his own weapon and killed O’Neill on the spot, contrary to the original plan, which was that he’d let one of his own men or one of the Secret Service agents finish the job. The problem was that only Kane and Thomas were close enough at the time to hear what the imbecile said, so there was no choice. Kane had to shoot him because he couldn’t be sure the other agents would react in time. And the ensuing confusion and panic proved Kane right. Yes, he was a professional. If Jansen had been assassinated, Vice President Michael K. Lerner would have automatically become president, and Thomas would be out of the picture. All would have been lost.

  In the end, however, the result was the same. Jansen was alive, and Toby O’Neill was dead.

  * * *

  —

  From the moment he shot O’Neill, Kane had no choice but to begin improvising. First he plucked Curtis’s glass off the floor and shoved it in his own pocket. Next he disappeared for a few minutes to get rid of the glass, his weapon, and his jacket with the oil traces from Curtis’s gun inside the pocket. No one could tell Kane had changed jackets since he had several identical ones. And the agreement with chief prosecutor Mortimer Deloitte was to not deal with the question of who killed Toby O’Neill unless it was demanded by the defense.

  And they’d been very careful in making sure there were no such demands from that quarter. Thanks to Kane, palms were greased all around. Many incriminating clues were made to disappear, like the water glass and its image on cameraman Marvin Gallegos’s video, as well as any way of determining the nonexistence of the imaginary FBI agent Blake Wunderlich. Then fabricated evidence and false charges succeeded in convicting Curtis of masterminding the atrocity, and the stage was set for the unleashing of the Washington Decree in all its terrible glory. In the ensuing chaos it was also easy to facilitate the disappearance of key individuals who might have helped expose the trial as a monstrous miscarriage of justice and possibly even uncover the true culprits. There was no way Sunderland and Kane were going to let the truth sabotage Jansen’s presidency and their futures.

  * * *

  —

  By now Jansen had been president for a couple of weeks, and everything was going according to plan. The next stage involved destabilizing Jansen psychologically and forcing Vice President Lerner to quit. Lerner was an extremely competent and influential politician whose will did not bend easily and whom Sunderland saw as a wild card, a potential threat.

  The next step was getting rid of the president, and in this respect Jansen himself was a big help. One could begin to see how he was beginning to change even before he was sworn into office, and Thomas followed this development closely and with great pleasure. He observed how Jansen withdrew more and more into himself and didn’t sleep for days at a time. How he became easily irritated, was given to angry outbursts, and sowed confusion among his staff and in his Cabinet. How he sat, staring into space before his computer screen, seemingly grappling with a mental block. An unstable man with a murky soul, it would be like pushing a button when the time came, for Jansen was obviously consumed by grief and defenseless—this was Thomas’s honest analysis.

  So the shock effect was infinitely greater for him than anybody else the day—two weeks after the election—when Jansen presented his law-and-order scheme. Thomas had gone home that evening thoroughly shaken and spent most of the night in his lonely double bed reading the proposal over and over again. He analyzed it from every angle until he gradually began seeing how he could turn this pending cataclysm to his advantage.

  He realized he’d been wrong. Jansen had risen above his grief, and no matter how much he had suffered, he was by no means disabled or unable to perform the duties his office demanded. On the contrary, President Jansen was merely doing what many who held his position before him should have done.

  Thomas got out of bed that night in early February, poured himself a glass of whisky, and threw his legs up on his living room coffee table. The curtain was going up on a cruel and wonderful piece of theater. Upon closer examination, the possibilities actually looked better than before. Heads would roll, but heads were something there was plenty of.

  He turned on the TV and ascertained with satisfaction that a news bulletin about a shooting that afternoon at a school outside Washington was being repeated endlessly on all channels. It turned out that one of the victims was the son of House Majority Whip Peter Halliwell, and that two of the three others came from wealthy families. What could be better? This was news that was sure to send appalled citizens out on the streets to demonstrate.

  The Washington school shooting alternated with a news flash about the Killer on the Roof in New York, another scenario with all the right ingredients. It was almost like Thomas had written the script himself. Shots from crime scenes that zoomed in on spent cartridge casings with patches of blood on the sidewalk and short interviews with local inhabitants scanning the rooftops with frightened eyes. Panic was spreading, and people were saying it had all better end soon before the whole city was infected.

  As he watched, a smile began spreading across his face. This is good for Jansen, and it’s even better for me, he thought. One was almost tempted to believe it had all been staged in the White House, even by Jansen himself. He emptied his glass and shook his head. No, this wasn’t something the president could have concocted, even in his darkest moment. He began to laugh. Jansen couldn’t have instigated this, but his chief of staff could have—easily—if it hadn’t happened on its own.

  He poured himself another highball and thought the situation through again.

  Jansen hadn’t asked for Thomas’s advice when he chose his Cabinet members, as one might otherwise have expected, considering he was the White House’s incoming chief of staff and a longtime, trusted associate. Naturally, Thomas had been more than a little incensed at the time, but now he understood things better.

  Jansen had had a plan, he could see that now.

  Thomas had particularly disagreed with Jansen’s choice of Billy Johnson. Shouldn’t the president be more concerned about the fact that Johnson had spent time in a psychiatric ward after the killing of his son, Sunderland had asked at the time. Was this really the kind of man o
ne wanted to have running the Department of Homeland Security?

  Yet Jansen had been insistent—he remembered this very clearly. What had Thomas been thinking that day? Why was it only dawning on him now, what a good choice Billy Johnson had been?

  Yes, it was because Billy Johnson had lost a son, a tragedy that had affected him deeply, just as personal tragedy had affected Jansen. And Johnson hated firearms with a passion, just like Jansen. It was that simple. These were the kinds of people Jansen wanted working for him.

  * * *

  —

  Thomas set down his whisky glass and called Kane. It didn’t take too much orientation from Sunderland before Kane, too, began seeing the possibilities. After discussing what their next move should be, Thomas asked him to check out all the Cabinet members’ backgrounds. He wanted to know how many more of them had close relatives who had been victims of shootings or other violent acts.

  The answer he received shortly before dawn started his pulse racing with excitement. Kane’s investigation revealed that over half the families of the president’s staff and Cabinet had suffered violent episodes similar to Johnson’s. And if it were up to Thomas, the number of apparently random acts of violence would continue to increase, not least of all ones affecting Cabinet members. Then Thomas would do all he could to make Jansen’s draconian proposals reality, which in turn would intensify the situation immensely. The country needed to experience an unprecedented wave of violence to justify Jansen’s unleashing of the executive decrees, and Congress would have no choice but to acquiesce. There would be assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and other acts of terror until the country was declared in a state of national emergency, which would castrate Congress and transfer power to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In the midst of all this, the vice president was sure to resign in protest, and then there would be no one with the authority to oppose the president appointing his chief of staff to the job.

  In the meantime all Sunderland had to do was covertly maintain good relationships with the opposition and all the politicians who had abandoned Jansen. Because when the day came for Jansen to die—and that day wouldn’t be so far off—Thomas would need plenty of allies. This meant making sure the opposition was kept informed of his robust efforts to stop the madness.

  Then, with the president out of the picture, he would be the obvious choice to succeed him. Who else?

  The day after Jansen put forth his law-and-order proposal, Kane was already busy changing the mind of one of its less enthusiastic supporters, Attorney General Lovell. It had been no problem paying a couple of hoodlums to assault his mother and daughter; they even threw in raping Lovell’s mother at no extra charge. Nor had it been a problem for Kane to definitively eliminate the perpetrators the same night. Then they had the attorney general in the palm of their hand—or so Sunderland thought.

  But rumors were being whispered in the White House corridors that Attorney General Lovell and the chief justice of the Supreme Court were going to demand a congressional debate over the new law proposals. So once again, there was a situation for Ben Kane to take care of.

  Chief Justice Manning’s body was practically torn in two when the limousine carrying him and the attorney general was blown up on its way to Capitol Hill. Lovell was luckier, but the attempt on his life put an end to any qualms he had about Jansen’s “antiviolence” campaign and transformed him into a wholehearted Jansen supporter.

  Unfortunately, occasional small, improvised adjustments and corrections like these were unavoidable at times like this.

  The Killer on the Roof—who was found dead in his apartment after neighbors had begun noticing a funny smell—was a similar case.

  The apartment’s inhabitants turned out to be an old lady and her son, a previous FBI employee who had been taking out his revenge over being kicked out of the Bureau by personally reducing the population of New York, one by one. After eating a pâté infected with botulism, the mother and son had died a slow, stealthy death. A journalist from NBC, known as Miss B and renowned for her controversial and critical journalism, became interested in the case after a tip from Tom Jumper. However, since her phone was being tapped, Miss B unwittingly put Thomas and Kane on the trail of the sniper as well.

  Thus Kane and his men were the first to reach the malodorous apartment and secretly confiscate the high-powered rifle that had killed so many of New York’s citizens.

  Then Kane hired a hit man to carry on with the job, using the same weapon as the original “Killer.” The more panic, the more sympathy for Jansen’s agenda, said Kane. Thomas agreed. Kane could stop the new “Killer” when he’d served his purpose.

  Which is what he did.

  The contract killer lived in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and the inventive Kane arranged for census takers in a new, nationwide census to canvass precisely that neighborhood, seeing to it that the killer would arouse the suspicion of the census taker who knocked on his door. Kane was also behind the subsequent search of the culprit’s apartment and having him shadowed, and was responsible for putting the police on his trail and finally gunning him down.

  Later, Tom Jumper insinuated that the White House had been involved in the killings, but that didn’t matter much, as long as Thomas wasn’t left with the responsibility for them or the bomb threats Kane had instigated against Congress and other places.

  But these were matters he and Kane could work out.

  * * *

  —

  In the meantime the whole country slowed down with impotence and confusion, encouraging the militias to crawl out of their holes and perform hitherto unseen acts of violent insurrection. The White- Headed Eagles’ bombing of the Democratic headquarters, for example. It was a beauty, and Thomas couldn’t have engineered it better himself. He was on a roll.

  The worst hitch in Thomas’s master plan was that President Jansen had begun barricading himself in the Oval Office. His doctor pronounced it a kind of paranoia, but it was far more likely that Jansen was very aware of how vulnerable he was. The deaths of a couple of congressmen was the handwriting on the wall. Jansen knew he, too, might well be on somebody’s hit list, but he had no way of knowing that “somebody” was his own vice president.

  It was at about this point that the president asked Lance Burton to beef up surveillance in the White House. A wise decision, except if you asked Thomas Sunderland.

  * * *

  —

  Thomas then proceeded to wait for an opportunity to kill Jansen, and his first chance came a couple of weeks later as the result of two unrelated events.

  The first had to do with a minor incident where a Secret Service agent overheard a conversation between Sunderland and Kane. Kane felt uncomfortable about what the agent might have heard, so he slit the agent’s throat and left a note in his locker, threatening the president with the same fate. A dramatic and effective little number that made the proper impression. Thomas was quite satisfied.

  Then there was Donald Beglaubter, who appeared to be in agreement with Jansen’s decrees, but then began investigating the blowing up of the limousine with Chief Supreme Court Justice Manning and Attorney General Lovell. Beglaubter was a clever man—possibly the best brain in the White House—and Thomas was convinced there was a good chance that his investigation would eventually turn something up. Beglaubter had to go, preferably along with Jansen.

  So Kane tossed a hand grenade at the president as he and Donald Beglaubter were walking through the tunnel to the Treasury Department. He’d hidden in a little niche for two hours, waiting for the right moment, but succeeded in only half his mission. Beglaubter lost his head, but the king kept his.

  In the ensuing confusion, Kane rejoined the other bodyguards, and the following investigation predictably led nowhere. Kane, the master manipulator, turned the situation to his own advantage, accusing the Secret Service of cowardice and dereliction of duty and recommending
it be relieved of most of its duties in the West Wing.

  Jansen followed his advice. After all, a Secret Service agent had been blamed for not having searched Toby O’Neill properly on election night. Thus Kane and his men had attained the elbow room they needed.

  * * *

  —

  After this failed assassination attempt, the president totally entrenched himself in his office and was completely unapproachable. Plans for the next try would have to wait.

  But not for long. The British prime minister had succeeded in luring Jansen into the open, and now Kane and Sunderland saw their new chance during the joint press conference.

  There was a series of unexpected events earlier in the day, but nothing that altered their plan. After John Bugatti’s surprise appearance in the White House, his body was dumped unceremoniously in the West Wing basement; his boyfriend already lay strangled in their bed in Georgetown. Then Thomas successfully passed his “diary” to the British delegation. His pitch had worked; he had their total support. Both Lance Burton and Wesley were under close guard. Burton would soon meet his maker, while Wesley’s fate had not yet been decided. And the evening before, a rebel group of army officers had received their final instructions via one of Kane’s contacts. All the hardware was in place, and these men knew how to use it. Only their leader, “Sean,” was aware that their mission was being financed by a handful of captains of industry, and only a couple of these knew exactly what their investment was being used for and that ultimately Kane was working for Thomas. Always with an eye on his future, Thomas knew he had to ingratiate himself with the big finance boys, and this was a sure way to do it.

  Now two heads of state were to die. The pillars of the White House would wobble, the two mightiest western nations would reel, and the world would have its eyes opened. And by the time the dust had settled, Thomas would be president, busy reestablishing conditions as they were before Jansen took office. The entire Cabinet and all top officials would be fired. The dumbest of them would be prosecuted for treason, and the brightest would appear to have committed suicide, starting with Lance Burton and Billy Johnson.