The President s Assassin

by Brian Haig

  He summarized by saying, “Incidentally, I should mention another suspicion I’ve been toying with. Regarding the Merrill murder, the police investigators were of the opinion that a rifle was used to send his car out of control. I looked at that car—it was pretty banged up, and had caught on fire. Hard to say for sure, but I suspect an antitank weapon might’ve been used.”

  George was scoring big-time points with his boss, Director Townsend, who sat nodding and wide-eyed throughout.

  Mrs. Hooper stared with newfound awe and admiration at the deductive wunderkind.

  Gene Halderman leaned back in his chair, hands sweeping through his pompadour, no doubt thinking, “Wow. When I grow up...”

  Jennie shot me a bemused smile. I smiled back.

  That George. What can you do?

  George said, “In fact...I think...Well, this might be a new and very critical lead. How did these people get their hands on controlled and sophisticated military hardware?”

  Nobody had a ready answer to that question.

  After a moment Townsend asked, “Did you serve in the military, George?”

  “No...I entered the Bureau out of college.”

  “And your apparent familiarity with military munitions, how did you come by that?”

  “I try to stay up on things, sir. I recall reading about mine types. And as the doctor was describing the judge’s injuries, it struck me th—”

  “Were you aware I was a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam?”

  “Yes...I think I knew that.”

  “That I still carry shrapnel in my left hip? In fact, it might interest you to know the shrapnel came from the very device you’re trying to describe.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Is it painful?”

  Those unblinking eyes regarded George. “Bouncy Nancy? The proper nomenclature is a Bouncing Betty.”

  George glanced very briefly at Jennie Margold, who had become curiously occupied dislodging something from under a fingernail. Then he returned his boss’s stare. “I misspoke.” After a moment he added, “Of course I meant a Bouncing Betty.”

  “Of course you did.” Those dead-fish eyes turned to me. “Drummond, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You were at the crash site?”

  “I was.”

  “And you were briefed on Fineberg’s death?” The question was obviously rhetorical, and he offered, “Maybe you have other observations you’d care to share with us—that is, to share directly.”

  Phyllis’s eyebrows rose. I cleared my throat. “Well...actually, Agent Margold discovered another important connection.”

  Jennie looked up from her fingernails. Townsend replied, “Proceed.”

  So I did. “During our search of Jason Barnes’s townhouse, we discovered a small batch of military manuals on his bookshelves. I thought nothing of it, actually.”

  “Yes?”

  “But at the crash site, Agent Margold recalled that one was the Army field manual on the Light Antitank Weapon, or LAW.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Another was the field manual on military mines.”

  For a moment you could hear a pin drop. Actually, it was the sound of two tons of shit hitting the floor. Chuck Wardell lurched forward in his seat. “There could be a thousand perfectly innocent explanations for that.”

  Phyllis responded quickly, saying, “No doubt there could be. But shouldn’t we focus on the one that’s not at all innocent, Charles?”

  “I...I can’t believe this,” Wardell stammered. “Jason Barnes is a fine and loyal agent. He has no motive, and...and I...I won’t sit here...and...and let you people...let you lynch him...and...”

  His convoluted syntax aside, I actually admired Mr. Wardell’s effort to cover Barnes’s ass. In a ruminative moment it struck me that were it my gilded ass up in the air, I shared no tribal loyalties with anyone in this room, and nobody was going to rush to my defense. I glanced at Phyllis, but she appeared to be preoccupied staring down Mr. Wardell. I looked at Jennie, and she nodded and smiled. She was really nice. I smiled back.

  I really needed to make a few friends. If we didn’t start making progress, pronto, this thing would turn ugly, and I was the lowest-ranking person on this team. As a rule of thumb in Washington, it’s always lonelier at the bottom than the top.

  Anyway, before it turned really pissy, Director Townsend asserted himself and informed Mr. Wardell, “Nobody’s lynching Jason Barnes.” Everybody nodded—there were no hasty lynchers in this room.

  After a moment Townsend emphasized, “Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Everything I’ve heard is circumstantial.” Again, everybody nodded and a modicum of equanimity was restored. He then looked around and asked, without even a hint of irony, “Can anybody tell me what we know about this Jason Barnes?”

  Jennie-on-the-spot was apparently prepared for this pointed question and she swiftly and efficiently recounted the observations we had picked up at Jason’s home, his personal quirks and habits, and so forth. Wisely, she did not reveal or even imply that Jason was an exact match for the type of compulsive, organized killer we were looking for, mollifying Mr. Wardell, for the moment. She reached down to her briefcase and said, “I made copies of his Secret Service personnel file. Why don’t I distribute them?”

  She walked around the table, dropping folders, and everybody began leafing through the professional life and times of Jason Barnes. Mr. Wardell was nobody’s idiot and refused to retreat into a consent of silence, mumbling things like “steamroll” and “rush to judgment,” and whatever.

  Like prison records, apparently, the longer you serve, the thicker the book. With only two years in His Majesty’s Service, the info on Barnes was sparse, factual, and not all that illustrative, or even enlightening—Caucasian, male, age, academic degrees, height, weight, and so on. Also included inside the folder were the annual ratings from his boss, Mr. Kinney, which I took a moment to examine. They were, as he had indicated, universally exceptional.

  Interestingly, because of his Marine service and “remarkable potential,” Jason had bypassed the traditional initial stint of investigative duties and been assigned straight to protection details. He had twice won the highly coveted Agent of the Month award. Also there were commendatory letters from various administration personages complimenting the agent’s extraordinary work and diligence on a trip to California and another to some African country.

  On paper, this guy was so conscientious, professional, and shit-hot he didn’t even need a bulletproof vest.

  I took a moment to study his photo. Jason Barnes was fairly good-looking, actually—high cheekbones, smooth complexion, thin lips, and eyes that were deepset and light blue, or possibly gray. His hair was brown and short, with every strand in place, and I wondered if he had AstroTurf in his DNA. Even his eyebrows looked plucked and neatly combed.

  On the surface, this was a guy who could get his share of the ladies into the sack. But attractive bone structure aside, something about him didn’t sit right. He was too well-groomed, and as a result, a little strange-looking. In a well-lit room, women with less than five beers in them would look carefully at Jason Barnes and take a pass.

  Sounding surprised and distressed, it was Mrs. Hooper who broke the studious silence. She held Barnes’s photo aloft. “I know this guy. From Belknap’s house.” She unhappily added, “I’ve spoken to him a few times.”

  I mentioned, “And I hope he remembers them as warm and pleasant conversations.”

  She stared at me like I was weird.

  But seriously, I—actually, we all—needed to open our minds a bit. With only suggestive evidence, with no scintilla of anything substantive, we had slipped the noose around this poor schnook’s neck. The more circumstantial the case, the more somebody needs to tamp the breaks and sniff for the bullshit. I’m good at dubious.

  In truth, Jason Barnes had led an honorable, in fact an exemplary life—military college, three years as a Jarhead, S
ecret Service—all in all, a life dedicated to the trinity of God, country, and family. Also, crime originates in the mind, and what was missing here was the why—as in, why would this gilded paragon of red-blooded American goodness become a homicidal maniac?

  Or was there another side to Jason Barnes, a shred or shard burrowed so deeply that his supervisors, peers, and a shrink entirely missed it? Was he a split personality, half Mr. Goodbar and half Simon LaGreedy? As a member of the Secret Service, Jason had surely been apprised of the bounty on his boss’s head—all that cash, for whoever had big enough brass balls to collect it. Possibly. However, nothing in his life pattern suggested money was the flame that lit his wick.

  Of course, people change. Daily proximity to all that power and money can wear on the soul, the mind, and the spirit. The poor schlep gets up in the morning, drives his crapped-out Mazda to the manor house, and then squats in a cramped and dreary subterranean cell, through the cameras observing the Lord and Mistress upstairs entertaining the glitterati, gleaming Mercedeses stacked out front, people in tuxes and evening gowns guzzling the bubbly, trading political fixes, and plunking $50K checks into the coffers of the Grand Old Party.

  Or had Jason Barnes experienced some spastic metamorphosis? Some galvanizing revelation that sent him caterwauling into a homicidal rage?

  I mentally ran his life backward. His father was a judge, and had in all likelihood filled his son’s head and heart with lofty notions about equality and justice. He was raised in Richmond, a bastion of southern culture, largely bypassed by the carpetbaggers, which was both a good and a bad thing. Having once spent a few weeks in Richmond on a case, I recalled it as one of those cities with a quaint, almost small-town feel and insular, tight-knit neighborhoods. Being a prominent judge’s child could not have been easy for little Jason Barnes. Army bases have that same close-knit aura, and as a colonel’s kid, I remembered the way other kids and their parents looked at me when I did bad things. Boy, did I remember.

  Also, we knew for a fact that Jason was a pious man whose adulthood had been cloistered in monasteries to high ideals and patriotic virtues. We had uncovered his monkish lifestyle, and witnessed his quirky appetite for neatness and order, so the obvious question now seemed to be: How deep and how wide did that go?

  In the enlightened words of somebody, it’s not the cynics who ignite revolutions, it’s the disillusioned idealists. Perhaps Jason Barnes took a long and disquieting peek behind the curtain of the counterfeit reality, at the pulleys and levers behind the spin machine, at the money that greased the machinery, at the full hypocrisy of democracy, so to speak, and maybe...well, maybe Jason decided that somebody needed to clean up this mess. Maybe.

  Both motives sounded reasonable: greed, the oldest engine of dirty deeds; and rage, the nectar of history’s most appalling crimes. Yet neither rationalized the sheer extravaganza of killing. A pious man on a moral crusade doesn’t massacre innocents, and a greedy man has his own reasons to be circumspect in his actions. The contradictory extremes made no sense, unless we were missing some connecting line between the victims. And if Jason’s motive was money, why leave that leading note at Belknap’s home? And why put Fineberg and Benedict in the morgue?

  The catch with a bounty is you have to be alive, free, and clear to cash in. And it is drilled into the thick skull of every Marine infantry lieutenant in Tactics 101 that surprise is a decisive advantage, not to be wasted through error or careless judgment. It made no sense that Jason Barnes would identify his intention, his mission, and his target.

  And just as I was mulling those vexing issues, Director Townsend won the booby prize. He looked up and mentioned, “According to this form his father is Calhoun Barnes.” He looked around the table. “Judge Calhoun Barnes?”

  Jennie replied, “His supervisor mentioned his father’s a...a federal judge, I believe.”

  Director Townsend put down his folder and blinked a few times. “Doesn’t anybody here appreciate the monumental significance of that fact?”

  I looked at Jennie, but she had suddenly pushed back from the table and was whispering furtively into her cell phone.

  The other faces around the table were clueless.

  The name struck a bell with me for some reason that, unfortunately, I couldn’t put my finger on. Something.

  Townsend folded his hands in a temple and informed us, “Calhoun Barnes was on the President’s short list for the next Supreme Court opening. That fact was leaked to the press and widely disseminated.”

  All of a sudden it came back to me.

  The light apparently flipped on for Mrs. Hooper as well, who uttered, “Holy shit. This guy is Calhoun Barnes’s kid?”

  “It appears that he is,” Townsend replied, also sounding not overly pleased.

  But before we could probe more deeply into that dark revelation, Jennie punched off her cell phone and bent forward. She announced, “That was Roy Ellington from forensics.” She added, “During our search of Barnes’s townhouse, Sean and I forwarded his shoes to the lab for comparison with the foot molds taken from Belknap’s garden. We have a perfect match.”

  George had been quietly sulking and he came out of his funk. “Tell us about that.”

  “Jason Barnes’s running shoes correspond exactly to a set of prints found in the garden, and some partial dirt tracks located inside the house.”

  George asked the obvious. “Then Barnes was at the house this morning?”

  I asserted my lawyership, replying, “It means his shoes were at the house.”

  “Shoes don’t walk without feet in them,” George insisted.

  Jennie reported, “The lab also discovered traces of the mulch on his shoes. Apparently, afterward, he returned home and changed, before he disappeared.”

  Mr. Wardell commented, “Look, before everybody...well...the shoeprints...I mean, Barnes worked at that house, and—”

  “We considered that, Chuck,” Jennie informed him. “But Barnes made a mistake.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The Belknaps entertained last night. According to the security log, Mrs. Belknap had her yard service tidy up before the party. The grass was cut, the garden was raked, and a fresh layer of mulch was applied around 4:00 P.M.—three hours after Barnes’s shift ended.”

  “Yes, but...I...I know I sound...well, stubborn but—”

  “If he returned after his shift,” Jennie persisted, “to chat with a colleague, whatever...it’s not listed in the security log.”

  “Maybe they forgot to log him in.”

  Director Townsend said, “But it’s unresolvable, isn’t it? That whole shift is dead.”

  We all nodded at this unimpeachable truth.

  But what Wardell, in fact, what everybody, excluding Townsend, Mrs. Hooper, and I, failed to yet appreciate, was why—as in why Jason Barnes might feel impelled to murder the President, his spokesperson, and a Supreme Court justice.

  Mrs. Hooper had apparently heard enough. She announced, “It’s time to put out an advisory to all federal employees. They should vary their daily routines and their routes to and from work.” She paused and looked around the table at the security professionals. “Does anybody disagree?”

  Nobody disagreed.

  I pictured a bunch of federal employees the next morning kissing their wives, husbands, and kiddies good-bye, wondering if they should be kissing their own asses good-bye. Washington was not ready for this.

  Townsend turned to George and somewhat gruffly said, “You’ve got until morning to discover where these military munitions came from.”

  George nodded.

  Phyllis added, “And perhaps you can ascertain what other weapons or munitions they got their hands on.”

  Townsend acknowledged this sage advice with a nod and said, “That would allow us to assess what they could reasonably do, our risks, what we need to protect against.”

  We all thought about that a moment. If the killers had Stinger antiaircraft missiles, Mr. President better sti
ck with trains. If they had more antitank missiles, even the Oval Office was no longer safe. If they had anthrax or a suitcase nuke, we should all be thinking about an excuse to leave town.

  Townsend turned next to Jennie and ordered, “Send somebody to Richmond. I want Mrs. Calhoun Barnes interrogated tonight.” He added, very forcefully, “Our challenge is to match the speed of our investigation to the velocity of whatever the killers are planning. The federal government does not have a reputation for quickness. I challenge all of you to overcome that. Oh—and by morning I would like to have some idea who his co-conspirators are.”

  It was interesting that he said “his co-conspirators,” as though there were no longer any doubts or equivocations about what Jason Barnes had been up to that day. Inside this room Barnes was now The Man.

  I wasn’t so sure about that. In my view, the problem with the FBI is they spend all their time catching criminals, whereas I, a former defense counsel, spent a good part of my career getting them off. It’s all about mindset.

  As an old criminal law prof used to impress upon us, remember the fifty-fifty rule: Anytime you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, there’s a 90 percent probability you’ll get it wrong.

  Director Townsend looked in my general direction and said, “Drummond, you figure that one out.”

  Right.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ON THAT UNHAPPY NOTE, THE OFFICIAL PART OF THE MEETING ENDED, and everybody broke into small knots, tidying up loose ends and exchanging whatnots.

  Meany, I noticed, was buttonholed by his boss, Townsend, and the loose knot they were transparently tying was George’s ass. They stood in the far corner, George, stiff and erect, arms at his sides, occasionally recoiling as his boss spoke with his chin jutted forward, hands locked on his hips.