The house was huge, sprawling over several acres, more baronial castle than house. It fit the style of America’s richest man: mock-Tudor with formal gardens lining a driveway almost a mile long. We’d stopped at the gatehouse, and the guard checked his list against our names. We were expected.
Jock and I drove up to the circular brick driveway that abutted the front of the house. Jock had called the day before, talked to the great man’s secretary, and made the appointment. He’d told the aide that he was a government auditor and needed to talk to Mr. McKinley about the Confederated Bank Suisse. That was a pretty big hook, and it reeled in our fish. Or so we thought.
We were met at the door by man wearing a navy blazer, gray trousers, white shirt, and red tie, who introduced himself as Carl. He didn’t offer a last name. He was tall, six feet two or more, and the jacket didn’t hide the well-defined musculature of the weight lifter. Butler? Bodyguard? Maybe both.
The bruiser led us through a large foyer, its walls hung with paintings that looked to me to be originals by some of the old masters. We were shown to a large room in the back of the house, overlooking formal gardens. French doors opened to a patio that had lawn furniture stacked for the winter. Patches of snow covered the ground, and I could see a thin sheet of ice that had formed on the surface of a pond in the distance.
An elderly man stood to greet us. He was tall and spare, his face lined with age, gray hair parted sharply. His blue eyes reflected a keen intelligence. He was wearing a flannel shirt in a checkered pattern, chinos, and boat shoes.
“Come in, gentlemen,” he said. “Can Carl here get you anything to drink? Coffee, soda, something stronger?”
We declined, and were asked to sit. The butler left, but I suspected that he remained nearby. The room was informal, a departure from the formality we’d seen in the rest of the house as we’d passed through. There was an overstuffed sofa and two armchairs placed around a coffee table to create a conversation area. McKinley took the sofa, waving Jock and me to the chairs. He must have noticed my inspection of the room.
“I’m not much on formalities,” he said, chuckling. “My late wife liked the grandeur of an estate, but I preferred the simple things. We compromised. I got this room, and she got the rest of the house.”
“It’s a beautiful place,” I said.
“I’m glad you like it, Mr. Royal.”
Uh-oh. I suddenly felt like the mouse who’d just bitten into the cheese and realized too late that the trap was about to fall on his neck. I shrugged. “You didn’t buy the government auditor crap, huh?”
“Mr. Royal, I have a lot of resources, and you are a persistent man. I knew you’d come sooner or later. My sources told me there was no audit, so I figured you were on your way. Who’s your friend?”
Jock sat forward in his chair. “I’m Grant Ferguson.”
“I haven’t been able to get a handle on you, Mr. Ferguson. You must work for the government. CIA? FBI?”
Jock stared at McKinley, grinning, saying nothing.
McKinley stood, ill at ease with the malevolence implicit in Jock’s demeanor. “It doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, you won’t leave this house alive. But, I must say, I admire your perseverance. What I don’t know is why, Mr. Royal.”
“You ordered my friend Laurence Wyatt killed.”
“The group ordered it done. I act as the chairman, but it takes a unanimous vote to order someone’s death.”
“Why have him killed?”
“We thought it necessary. Why else are you here?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it? You’ve gone through all this because your friend was killed?”
“I owed him. The dead can’t take their revenge, but sometimes the survivors can.”
“Ah, so you’re here to avenge your friend’s death.”
“Yes.”
“Too bad it didn’t work out.”
“Tell me, Mr. McKinley,” I said, “why did you have Wyatt killed?”
“Simple. He and that other guy in Gainesville were closing in on me. I couldn’t let that happen. My son is going to be president of the United States. A scandal like that, even if not proven, would have wrecked his campaign.”
“How did you know about Wyatt?”
“We have trip wires set out. If someone seems to be getting close, we’re warned.”
“Like Hassan at the archives in Bonn.”
“Exactly. And we’ve got them in many places. If somebody stumbles onto our secret, we take certain, um, measures to ensure that there is no disclosure.”
“By ‘we,’ you mean Allawi and de Fresne.”
“Yes. Actually, de Fresne’s son and my son. De Fresne is a despicable person, and I thought he’d have been dead years ago, but he keeps on breathing. He pretty much dropped out of our group. He hasn’t taken part in our, um, deliberations in many years. So the three of us are running things, and after I die, my son will be in charge.”
“If de Fresne is such a jerk, why didn’t you just order his death like you did Wyatt’s?”
“Trip wires. We’ve each set up arrangements so that if one of us dies under suspicious circumstances, the information is released to the press and the government. We set this up early on as a mutually assured destruction pact. There are incriminating documents that are irrefutable. We call them the MAD documents. If one of us is killed, all of us go down.”
Jock spoke up. “Allawi is dead.”
The old man smirked. “I know. I had him killed. The pact works down through the generations. I’m afraid Allawi was talking to you, so he had to go. Of course, his line has ended. No children, if you know what I mean.” He winked.
“Because he’s gay?” I asked.
“Because he’s a goddamned queer. His father must be rolling over in his grave.”
What about the trip wires?” I asked. “Wouldn’t Allawi’s murder create some big problems for you?”
McKinley shook his head. “Not if the death is from natural causes. Allawi died of a heart attack.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Simple. He had a heart problem. I have people on his staff, and I’m sure he probably has people on mine. The meal prepared for him on his private jet for his flight to Riyadh was sprinkled with a drug that caused his heart to stop. It’s virtually undetectable. Besides, Muslims are buried within twenty-four hours of their deaths, and autopsies are frowned upon. Everybody assumed he had a heart attack.”
“Mustafa?”
“Yes. The playmate. He’s dead by now.”
“You saved me the trouble of killing Allawi,” I said.
McKinley laughed. “Glad I could help.”
Jock had sat quietly, listening, filing information in his prodigious brain. “Where is de Fresne?” he asked.
“So, you haven’t figured that one out.”
“Not yet,” said Jock.
“You’ve heard about the cat who was killed by curiosity?” His voice had hardened, the genial host no more. The stone-cold killer had come out. “Since you’ll be dead in a matter of minutes, I don’t guess it’d hurt to satisfy that fatal curiosity.” He laughed, a brittle cackle, cold, without humor.
McKinley looked directly at me. “You should know him. He lives on Casey Key, almost next door to your island.”
“LaPlante?” I asked.
“Ah, you get the blue ribbon. We first got onto you when you began asking too many questions about him.”
“So you blew up my car and killed a young man who had nothing to do with any of this. He had a wife and a small son.”
“Accidents will happen.” He chuckled.
“LaPlante is a Jew,” I said.
“Yes, he is, but he never took it seriously until he met that rabbi’s daughter. Then he went soft. He’s always been the weak link in our little group. But we kept a tight rein on him, and, Lord knows, he made a lot of money. His son is a piece of shit, but he understands the program. We’ll make him a secretary of some useless
agency or other and keep him happy.”
“Who is Robert Brasillach?”
“The queer French editor?”
“No. The one you sent to Banchori in Miami.”
He laughed, a sour and joyless sound escaping his throat. “Just some Russian immigrant kid with a vivid imagination and an alcohol problem. He was a history major at the local community college. I had Carl spin him a tale about being from ODESSA, and needing help in transferring some money. Poor boy died recently. They never have found his body.”
I was stalling for time. “Tell me, Mr. McKinley, how did a history professor become such an asshole?”
McKinley was pacing as he talked, never stopping, bleeding off nervous energy. He chuckled. “Have you ever been to war, Mr. Royal?”
“Yes. Vietnam.”
“Then you can understand. Killing is a dreary business. It eats at you until all the goodness is consumed, and you’re left with a block of ice where your soul used to be.”
“Not always. Only the twisted ones end up like you. You’re the ones who should’ve been on the other side. You’re no better than the Nazi’s you fought. At least, the Vietnamese I fought believed in a cause.”
“But we all killed people.”
“Yes we did. But we didn’t have a choice. We were soldiers doing a dirty job so that the people we protected could live their lives. That’s the way it’s been all through history.”
“Deep down, I’m a patriot.” He was agitated now, red in the face, his voice loud, words tumbling out in a torrent of anger.
I smiled at him. “Deep down,” I said, “you’re a twisted little motherfucker.”
McKinley stood stock still, glaring at me, his hands in the pockets of his chinos, mouth slightly open. I don’t think anybody had called him a motherfucker to his face in a long time. He must have had something in his pocket that would call his butler, because the man moved into the room, a .45 pistol in his hand. “Bruce, show these gentlemen out.” He grinned. “Good-bye Mr. Royal. Rot in Hell.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
A bullet flies too fast for the human eye to see. But on that day, standing in the study of America’s richest man, I think I saw it; a 7.65-millimeter round fired from an M-16 rifle. The world slowed almost to a halt, grinding along in extreme slow motion. Time had no meaning. I watched the bullet as it came through one of the panes of a French door, shattering the glass. It moved steadily, without wobble, into Bruce’s forehead. The back of his head exploded as the slug tore through his brain and out the other side. The crack of the rifle followed, the sound not able to keep pace with the speeding bullet.
McKinley turned from his butler, the sound of the rifle grabbing his attention. Another bullet broke another pane and plowed slowly into the temple of America’s richest man. His brains, that gray matter that had been put to such pernicious use, flew onto the sofa where he’d sat when we first entered the room.
I snapped back into reality. I saw Logan standing on the lawn near the patio. He was pumping his arm in the infantry signal to “follow me.” Jock was moving toward the French doors. I followed.
Logan said, “Hurry. I found a jeep in the garage with the keys in it.”
“We can’t leave the car,” I said.
Logan shook his head. “There’re security people on the grounds. If they heard the shots, they’re on their way here. We’ve got to go.”
“It’s okay,” said Jock. “We didn’t leave any fingerprints in the car and it’s rented in a name nobody will ever be able to trace.”
We followed Logan to the garage and climbed into an open jeep, not unlike those that McKinley had probably used during the war. Logan took us cross-country to the very back of the estate. We came to the wall that surrounded the property. It was higher than I would have guessed, ten feet at least. There was a slender dirt track running along the wall, a road built for jeeps.
“I think this is their security road,” said Logan. “They’ve got to have a way to patrol the wall.”
He turned onto it and drove at a fast clip. Soon I could see a wider dirt road coming out of the trees at a right angle to our track. It seemed to stop at the edge of the wall. As we got closer, I could see a wrought iron gate built into the wall. A chain held it together and a large padlock secured the chain.
“Now what?” I asked.
Logan brought the jeep to a stop and pulled the key from the ignition. It was on a small ring with four others. He held the keys up like a trophy, and started out of his seat. “I think I know how to get us the hell out of here.”
One of the keys fit the padlock on the gate. Logan opened it and drove through. I got out and relocked the gate. If McKinley’s security people came this way, they might not notice that we’d left through the-locked gate.
We found ourselves on another dirt track running through a thick forest. In a mile or so we came to a blacktop road, and Logan turned onto it.
“We’ve got to lose this jeep,” said Jock.
“Let’s drop it in Beverly,” I said. “That’s the closest town of any size. Jock can probably rent another car there.”
“No,” said Jock. “Head toward Salem. I think anybody looking for us would expect us to go to Beverly. It’s the closest.”
Logan headed south and turned west on Route 128. We found the Hertz agency on Canal Street in Salem. We drove past it and parked the jeep. We left the rifle under the backseat. The police would find it, but they’d have already figured out we took the jeep. The rifle wouldn’t add anything to their investigation. It was untraceable, having been stolen fifteen years before from a National Guard Armory in eastern Montana.
Jock walked back the two blocks and rented a car, using yet another bogus driver’s license. He told the clerk that he’d drop the car at Logan Airport. Logan and I walked in the opposite direction, wanting to put as much distance as possible between the jeep and us. We’d gone about ten blocks when Jock pulled to the curb in a four-door Chevrolet.
It had been a good plan, and it worked. Jock had gotten a rifle from his ubiquitous source and put it in the trunk of his rental. We had a layout of the McKinley house that Debbie had gotten when she hacked into the county building department’s computer. An expert in Jock’s agency office in Boston had overlain latitude and longitude quadrants on the diagram of the house. It was of such a large scale that the coordinates were in one thousandths of a minute, meaning that any object could be placed within about a six-foot radius. This was all fed into a handheld computer and given to Logan.
Jock and I both were equipped with transponders that would broadcast a signal every ten seconds. We’d taped them to the inside of our thighs, high up. Jock assured me that no male bodyguard would check closely enough to find them.
“What if it’s a female guard?” I asked.
“Enjoy the moment.”
“That’s a comfort.”
Logan’s handheld would pick up the signals we transmitted and translate them into GPS cordinates that showed him exactly where we were in the house.
When we let him out of the car, Logan used a grappling hook to scale the wall and then walked overland to the house. I knew we had to give him time to get into position, or Jock and I would end up dead. It was a calculated risk, but one we all agreed was workable. And we were right.
Jock dropped Logan and me at the train station in Boston and drove to the airport. He’d get a flight to Sarasota that evening. We caught the 6:45 for New York, and arrived shortly before eleven in the evening. We took a taxi to LaGuardia Airport and checked into a hotel. Our flight left the next morning. We were headed home, and it felt good.
On the way to the terminal the next day, I picked up a couple of newspapers. They both ran front-page stories on the death of America’s richest man, the father of the man who might be the next president. He and his butler had been murdered in the great man’s study at his home north of Boston. They’d been shot with a high-powered rifle, apparently from the backyard.
There
was a rental car in the driveway, and the gate guard said the people driving it had an appointment with McKinley. He thought the two men in the car were from the government. As it turned out, the renter’s name was probably false, and the car had been wiped clean of fingerprints.
A jeep had been taken from the garage next to the house and had been found in Salem near a rental car agency. A man had rented a car there at a time that would have been near enough to the murder to make the police believe that the renter was involved. However, the name on the contract was another phony. The car had been found at Logan Airport, but there was no record of anybody with that name flying out of the airport that day. The car had been wiped clean of fingerprints.
The police were at a dead end; no suspects, no motive, and no idea who the visitors were. They were, according to the police spokeswoman, leaving no stone unturned, no lead uninvestigated. They would find the killer or killers and bring them to justice.
Senator George McKinley was in seclusion, mourning the death of his father. He’d brought in more private security personnel in case the shooting in Massachusetts had anything to do with his campaign. There were some calls for the Secret Service to get involved, but since the election was two years away, and McKinley had not officially declared his candidacy, that was not possible.
We’d covered our tracks well. I didn’t think we had anything to worry about.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“We’ve got a problem,” Jock said.
We were sitting on my sunporch overlooking Sarasota Bay. The sun was low in the western sky, and its gold and burnt orange colors reflected off the clouds hanging over the mainland to our east. Logan was at Marie’s. I was tired from the three-hour flight that morning from New York. I hadn’t slept well the night before in the LaGuardia hotel, and I was looking forward to the first night in a long time in my own bed.
“Anything in particular?” I asked.
“We’ve got a United States senator who’s a viable candidate for the presidency. His security is being beefed up in the wake of his old man’s death, and we don’t have the documents that would put him out of business.”
Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery Page 20