“Have Yocke call me.”
Jack Yocke did call New York, and at four that afternoon, after he finished taping his show, he and Stu Metz sat down to watch it. At the same time, it was running in the executive suite in New York.
When the show finished, Metz and Yocke sat in silence, awaiting the verdict from on high. Yocke was nervous. Metz chewed a fingernail, then stuck a stick of gum into his mouth and munched that. Finally, the phone rang.
“Stu, Jack?”
“Yessir.”
“I just got off the phone with Harlan Westfall, who called just as the show ended. Was he infuriated! I can see why. That bastard is in big trouble. So is that senile nincompoop Mucci. Those two deserve each other.”
Silence. Then a chuckle came over the desk loudspeaker. The chuckle grew to a laugh.
“Yocke, you did a good job. Run that thing. Don’t change a word.”
The connection broke. Stu Metz reached for Yocke’s hand, shook it, and they went to dinner.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Saturday night Sarah and I ate with Armanti Hall and some of the guys in the hospital cafeteria. The food was wholesome and good, yet the prices were very low. Apparently, Band-Aid and iodine sales in the rooms upstairs were subsiding the food service.
I had finished installing audio and video recorders in Grafton’s hospital room earlier, so we sat across the hall and watched the nurse maneuver the bedpan. No one said a word. All of us have a bedpan in our future if we live long enough.
When we finished dinner, we lingered over coffee while Callie visited with her husband upstairs. No one had much to say. I thought I was the only one there who had an inkling about what Grafton planned, what he thought would happen, and I had been around long enough to know that keeping your mouth shut is usually the best policy.
We made our arrangements about who was going to be on watch tonight, then Sarah and I drove home. The rain had stopped and the night was just black and wet.
Sunday was a day of waiting. Sarah went back to Langley and brought Grafton another cardboard box full of intercept transcripts and another thumb drive that contained the raw audio. The hospital staff had Grafton sitting up in bed by then. The admiral and his wife dug into the box after lunch.
When Callie told him he had to take a nap, he grumped a bit, she lowered the top of the bed, and he dropped right off to sleep.
She came out in the hall to visit with Sarah and me.
There was a rapt audience in the hospital for the Jack Yocke show that Sunday evening. We sent out for pizza and ate it in the hour leading up to the show.
I had to hand it to him. Yocke knew how to do it. He started the story with the money flowing through the branch of the Bank of Scandinavia in Tallinn, Estonia, and went on from there. It was obvious to me that he had received a detailed brief from Jake Grafton, had paid attention, and taken notes. Then he got into the telephone conversations we had taped. I loved Westfall’s conversation with Cheney Kopp, the Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Life Network. I was tempted to call Senator Westfall to see if he was watching—after all, we knew his telephone number—but I refrained. He would be down for quite a while, so I didn’t have to rush to kick him.
I must say, Speaker Mucci sounded more shrill and elderly on the television than I remembered her. Perhaps Yocke tweeked the tweeter to give her a little more squeak at the high end of the register. Still, it was her, no doubt, even if she did sound like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Yocke made the point that the money was created by Russia and transferred so that the Democrats could slime their enemies with it. Westfall’s comment that the Russians had double-crossed them was brilliant.
Grafton had even given Yocke some audio of Yegan Korsev whaling the tar out of Anton Hunt, may he rest in peace. Still, I thought Yocke went kinda easy on Hunt, probably because corpses can no longer defend themselves. He had snippets of Westfall’s conversation with Michael Hunt, the scion of the Hunt clan, talking about the New World Order.
The best parts of the Yocke show, in my opinion, were Westfall’s conversations with the “squaw.” The conversation where she used the N-word made me break out in laughter. And I almost lost it when I heard Westfall refer to former presidential candidate Cynthia Hinton with the c-word.
When he signed off, Jack Yocke promised more next week.
We cheered and went into Grafton’s room and did a victory stomp. The admiral turned off the television. A nurse hustled in and told us to tone it down or leave. She was nice about it, but hospitals are like libraries.
After five minutes or so Grafton gave me the sign, so I suggested we let him get some sleep. The other guys left, and I sat down on the chair across the corridor from his room. Armanti Hall had decided to do this hospital gig up right, and was wearing blue surgical scrubs and pushing a room-cleaning cart with a shotgun in it. He stationed himself at the opposite end of the corridor from the nurses’ station. Sarah and Callie Grafton went into the old room where we had all our equipment, along with Doc Gordon. We settled down to wait.
I had argued that our guy might not come tonight. Grafton dismissed that statement with a wiggle of his finger. “He wants to know how much I know and how much I intend to spill. He’ll be here.”
I was too keyed up to sit, and walked up and down the corridor endlessly. I was standing beside the nurses’ station when I heard the elevator coming up. I grabbed a patient’s chart and busied myself over it while the nurse on duty, the guy I had called Clara Barton, frowned at me.
The elevator door opened and Vaughn Conyers, president of the United States, walked out with four Secret Service agents. The muscle looked me and the nurse over as the president marched down the corridor for Grafton’s room.
Conyers didn’t seem surprised to find that Grafton had moved across the hallway. Maybe he had forgotten which side he was on. The security man, Billy Franks, was sitting in the chair, and he smiled and pointed at the admiral’s room. The Secret Service dudes dropped off, and Conyers opened Grafton’s door, went in, and pulled it shut behind him.
I adjusted the ear piece in my right ear. “Good evening, Admiral.”
“Good evening, Mr. President.”
“Mind if I sit down?” The scraping of the chair legs on the linoleum, or whatever that floor covering was.
The Secret Service guys looked hyped. They were playing with their ear pieces, scrutinizing Billy and Armanti at the end of the corridor, no doubt picking spots where they could drill us both if we even twitched. One of them muttered into his lapel mike. “We’re here.” I heard it distinctly through my earpiece, so I suppose the frequency of their little radio system was close enough to ours for us to capture the bleed-through. The systems were no more than ten feet away.
One of the agents glanced at me and the male nurse at the nurses’ station from time to time. I put the chart back and took another to study.
“Admiral… May I call you Jake?”
“Please do, sir.”
“How are you getting along?”
“Better.”
“When are they going to let you out of here?”
“It’ll be a few weeks. I start hiking up and down the hall tomorrow, then physical therapy in a few days. That will take a few weeks, then maybe I can go home and do the therapy as an out-patient.”
“Sorry this happened to you,” Conyers said. No shit, I thought.
Two of the Secret Service guys had arranged themselves on either side of Billy Franks. The other two were strolling the corridor, one toward me and one toward Armanti.
“So am I,” Jake Grafton said.
“I watched the Jack Yocke show tonight. Reem passed to me the fact that you called and suggested we watch it.”
“Yocke did well with the material,” Grafton said.
“Obviously you leaked that information to him—”
“ ’Leak’ isn’t exactly the right word. I called Yocke and he came here, sat right where you’re sitting, and I briefed
him. Let him read the telephone transcripts, listen to raw audio, then asked him to put that show together. He agreed to do it.”
Conyers didn’t say anything for a moment. He seemed to be arranging his thoughts.
“How much more are you going to tell him?”
“I haven’t decided. I thought you and I could talk about that.”
“Why me?” the president said.
“Mr. President,” Grafton said, his voice soft. He was exhausted and using all the juice he had left to carry this conversation. “The Russians went to a lot of trouble to get this thing rolling along. Two hundred billion fake dollars, Monopoly money someone called it, tossed into the air like confetti, just so the Americans could humiliate themselves scrambling for it. And we did.
“Then they went to a lot more trouble to make sure all this was going to become public, that we couldn’t sweep it under the rug, that the whole stinking mess would see the light of day and the flies would swarm. That didn’t just happen; the Russians made it happen.”
A moment of silence. Maybe Conyers was nodding. The four bodyguards were in their relative positions, and one of them keyed his lapel radio. To my amazement, I again heard his transmission.
“We’re in place and ready.”
Jake Grafton was saying, “They set up Yegan Korjev, cast him to play the hero’s part. We kidnapped him, interrogated him, used drugs on him, all to get him to tell us the ‘truth,’ whatever in hell that is. The Russians had taken the trouble to hypnotize him to make sure his story stayed consistent under drugs. I doubt that at this point Yegan Korjev even knows what the truth is.”
Ready for what? I was only half listening to Grafton and staring at the four Secret Service dudes. They didn’t look as if they had submachine guns on them, but no doubt they were carrying pistols and were damn good with them.
“What is the truth?” The president asked that, and I thought it a good question. If I could figure that one out I could get a PhD in philosophy from any university in the country.
“Why don’t you tell me, Mr. President.”
I heard a faint snort.
One of the Secret Service agents was reaching under his jacket, fingering his pistol. I pulled mine out, took the safety off, and held it down under the counter.
“There’s going to be a lot of speculation by the Democrats and their media allies that you are the one who set this up with the Russians,” Jake Grafton told the president.
“You know I didn’t.”
“That isn’t the point. The point is that you will be accused, tried and convicted by the left-wing media. Those women on The View will savage you. Half the country will believe them.”
“If you know I didn’t do it, who do you think did?”
“Cynthia Hinton,” Jake Grafton said. “There’s no one else. Anton Hunt didn’t have the brains or stature for this caper. Cynthia even went to the Russians for a fake dossier on you that she could use to keep you from being elected. When that didn’t work, the Deep State had you investigated by a special prosecutor. Anything to make it more difficult to get your program through Congress. Anything to make it more difficult for you to get reelected.”
“We’re ready,” the Secret Service guy said again into his lapel mike. I almost peed my pants. What was he ready for? Our bugs must be picking up the bleed-over from his transmissions. I really didn’t consciously think about it—I just assumed it was so.
“She went to the Russians seven years ago,” Conyers said, “after Sotero made her Secretary of State. The Russians used funny money to make their donations to the Hinton Foundation after she approved their application to buy ten percent of America’s uranium production.”
“And she figured out the funny money scam,” Jake Grafton prompted.
“She did,” the president acknowledged. “She realized that she could screw her political enemies with dirty money. The name of her game is power.”
“And the Russians realized that they could screw both sides of the political divide with dirty money,” Grafton prompted.
“That’s it.”
“So why don’t you want this to come out?”
“We have to live on this planet with the Russians. Either live with them or kill them, and killing them isn’t a viable option. And regardless of what she’s done, Cynthia Hinton is an icon for a lot of Democrats, mostly women. She got the Democrat nomination and ran for president of the United States. And now we accuse her of treasonous acts that we can’t prove? Absolutely not. She’ll come out looking like a saint and we’ll look like evil trolls who live under a bridge and eat children.”
“Where do you want this investigation to go from here, Mr. President?”
“I don’t want you accusing Cynthia Hinton of anything,” Vaughn Conyers said. “I wish I could turn off Robert Levy, but you know I can’t. The FBI is going to blunder about in the china shop breaking dishes regardless of what we do. What they won’t do is find Cynthia Hinton’s fingerprints on anything they can get into court. Not even if they look under every rock from here to Moscow.”
Jake Grafton seemed to agree with that. In my mind’s eye I could see him nodding. Then he said, “What I think we can do is give Jack Yocke enough wiretap conversations to defuse some of this political madness. The politicians are in it to their eyes, and if the public sees that, this whole kerfuffle will die a natural death.”
“This impeachment thing might too,” the president said.
I heard the chair scrape. He must be rising.
“Do it,” somebody said over the Secret Service net.
The agent standing on Billy Franks’ left drew his pistol and shot Billy right in the neck. The sound reverberated down that corridor as if a cannon had been fired. Billy went sprawling over to his right. The agent pulled Billy’s pistol and went charging into the room that held the president and Jake Grafton.
Armanti and I opened fire at the same time—towards each other. We hadn’t thought this out very well. I hit the guy who was looking my way, he went down, and two blasts of Number Four buckshot swept the other two off their feet. Buckshot pattered around me like hail. Something smacked me in the left thigh, not too hard. I stayed upright and ran toward the hospital room as shots rang out, muffled. The bastard was in there gunning the president and Jake Grafton.
Two of the agents in the hallway were still thrashing around when Armanti and I reached them. Armanti blew one’s head apart with the shotgun and I put a .45 slug into the other’s chest.
Going through the door of Grafton’s room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The would-be assassin was lying on the floor motionless, still holding his gun in his hand. I kicked the gun away. His eyes were focused on infinity.
Jake Grafton had a gun in his hand and was half-turned in the bed, despite the IVs. The president was standing on the other side of the bed looking shocked. Armanti Hall came into the room behind me.
Jake Grafton handed Conyers the pistol. “Here,” he said, and the president took the weapon. “You are now the first American president to shoot an assassin.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The attempted assassination of the president of the United States was front-page news worldwide. Radio talk shows and television talking heads got the facts out quickly, helped by the audio and video recordings from the CIA director’s hospital room. Apparently the assassins weren’t aware of this equipment, which even captured the agents’ back and forth on their private radio network.
The fact that the agent who tried to shoot the president and Jake Grafton with the pistol he took from CIA security officer Billy Franks indicated, FBI Director Robert Levy said, that the conspirators intended to rig the scene so that the blame would fall on CIA personnel.
The identity and political leanings of the deceased assassin were hot items. His name was Vincent Matthews. His life was examined from birth to death: it included a failed marriage and a large influx of cash into his girlfriend’s bank account the week prior to his demise. The FBI said tha
t after Matthews shot officer Franks and took his pistol, he strode into the hospital room, and the president, alerted by the sound of gunshots in the hallway, grabbed a pistol from CIA director Jake Grafton’s bed and shot him. One shot, right through the heart, and that was it for Mr. Matthews. The entire sequence, captured on audio, from first shot to last took eight seconds. The pistol Conyers had used was the one Callie Grafton had brought to the hospital and tucked into the bed where her husband could reach it, if necessary.
Two of the other Secret Service officers died at the scene. The one survivor was critically wounded and would have permanent injuries. He wasn’t talking to law enforcement agents. The investigation in the weeks that followed found that all four men had received several million dollars each in untraceable funds. Russian money? No one knew.
The audio of the conversation between the president and CIA director before the assassin started shooting was immediately classified Top Secret and withheld from the press. The media squawked about it, but the president stood firm. The conversation stayed classified. The video, if there was one, was never produced.
Although Jack Yocke’s show was overshadowed by the assassination news, eventually the media got around to the political slant and remembered Yocke’s show the Sunday night before the assassination attempt. The following Sunday evening he put on another show using more wire-tapped conversations. Attorneys for the House Speaker and Senate Minority Leader went to court that week demanding injunctions to keep Yocke off the air with recordings he obtained illegally. They didn’t get them. Their remedy, the court said, was to sue whoever taped their conversations for damages. Of course, if a law had been violated, then the Justice Department could prosecute if it chose. But the media’s right to broadcast even stolen material was protected by the First Amendment. Of course, if the material the media used was untrue, a suit for damages would lie.
Two days after the second Yocke show aired, Judy Mucci resigned as Speaker of the House and announced she would not run for re-election to her house seat. Four days later Senator Harland Westfall was found sitting in his car in his garage, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. The automobile’s engine had died during the night, probably due to the lack of oxygen in the garage.
The Russia Account Page 29