Jeffrey Archer

by Shall We Tell The President (lit)

  'Right,' said the Director. 'So this is how we'll proceed, Andrews. There are one hundred senators. One of them provides our only link with the conspirators. It's going to be your task to pinpoint that man. The Assistant Director will have a couple of junior men follow up the few other leads that we have. No need for them to know the details, Matt. To start with, check out the Golden Duck Restaurant.'

  'And every hotel in Georgetown, to see which one put on a private luncheon party on 24 February,' said Rogers. 'And the hospital. Maybe someone saw suspicious characters hanging around the parking lot or the corridors; the assassins must have seen our Ford there while Calvert and you, Andrews, were interviewing Casefikis. I think that's about all we can do for the

  moment.'

  'I agree,' said the Director. 'Okay, thanks, Matt, I won't take up any more of your time. Please let me have anything you turn up immediately.'

  'Sure,' said the Assistant Director. He nodded at Mark and left the room.

  Mark had sat silently, impressed by the clarity with which the Director had grasped the details of the case; his mind must be like a filing cabinet.

  The Director pressed a button on his intercom.

  'Coffee for two, please, Mrs McGregor.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Now, Andrews, you come into the Bureau at seven o'clock every morning and report to me. Should any emergency arise, call me, using the code name Julius. I will use the same code name when calling you. When you hear the word "Julius", break off whatever you are doing. Do you understand?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Now, a most important point. If, in any circumstances, I die or disappear, you brief only the Attorney General, and Rogers will take care of the rest. If you die, young man, you can leave the decision to me.'

  He smiled for the first time - it was not Mark's idea of a joke. 'I see from the files that you're entitled to two weeks' leave. Well, take it, starting at noon today. I don't want you to exist officially for at least a week Grant Nanna has already been briefed that you have been seconded to me,' continued the Director. 'You may have to tolerate me night and day for six days, young man, and no one other than my late wife has had that problem before.'

  'And you me, sir,' was Mark's quick and unthinking reply. He waited for his head to be bitten off; instead the Director smiled again.

  Mrs McGregor appeared with the coffee, served them, and left. The Director drank his coffee in one swallow and began to pace around the room as if it were a cage; Mark did not move, though his eyes never left Tyson. His massive frame and great shoulders heaved up and down, his large head with its bushy hair rocking from side to side. He was going through what the boys called the thought process.

  'The first thing you're to do, Andrews, is find out which senators were in Washington on 24 February. As it was near the weekend, most of those dummies would have been floating all over the country, making speeches or vacationing with their pampered children.'

  What endeared the Director to everyone was not that he said it behind their backs but that he said it even more explicitly to their faces. Mark smiled and began to relax.

  'When we have that list, we'll try and figure out what they have in common. Separate the Republicans from the Democrats, and then put them under party headings as to interests, public and private. After that, we have to find out which ones have any connection with President Kane, past or present, friendly or unfriendly. Your report will cover all these details and be ready for our meeting tomorrow morning. Understood?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Now there's something else I want you to understand, Andrews. As I am sure you know, for the past decade, the FBI has been in a very sensitive political position. Those watchdogs in Congress are just waiting for us to exceed our legitimate authority. If we in any way cast suspicion upon a member of Congress, without indisputable evidence of his guilt, they will hang, draw and quarter the Bureau. And rightly so, in my opinion. Police agencies in a democracy must prove that they can be trusted not to subvert the political process. Purer than Caesar's wife. Understood?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'From today we have six days, from tomorrow five, and I want to catch this man and his friends red-handed. So neither of us will be on statutory overtime.'

  'No, sir.'

  The Director returned to his desk and summoned Mrs McGregor.

  'Mrs McGregor, this is Special Agent Andrews, who'll be working closely with me on an extremely sensitive investigation for the next six days. Whenever he wants to see me, let him come right in; if I'm with anybody but Mr Rogers, notify me immediately – no red tape, no waiting.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'And I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention this to anybody else.'

  'Of course not, Mr Tyson.'

  The Director turned to Mark. 'Now you go back to the WFO and start working. I'll see you in this office at seven o'clock tomorrow morning.'

  Mark stood up. He didn't finish his coffee; perhaps by the sixth day he would feel free to say so. He shook hands with the Director and headed towards the door. Just as he reached it, the Director added: 'Andrews, I hope you'll be very careful. Keep looking over both shoulders at once.'

  Mark shivered and moved quickly out of the room down the corridor, keeping his back firmly to the wall when he reached the elevator, and walking along the sides of the passage on the ground floor, where he ran into a group of tourists who were studying pictures of the Ten Most Wanted Criminals in America. Next week, would one of them be a senator?

  When he reached the street, he dodged the traffic until he arrived at the Washington Field Office, on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue

  . It wouldn't quite be like home this morning. Two men were missing, and they weren't going to be able to replace them with a training manual. The flag on top of the FBI Building and the flag on top of the Old Post Office Building were at half-mast; two of their agents were dead.

  Mark went straight into Grant Nanna's office; he had aged ten years overnight. For him, two friends had died, one who worked under him and one who worked above him.

  'Sit down, Mark.'

  'Thank you, sir.'

  'The Director has already spoken to me this morning. I didn't ask any questions. I understand you're taking a two-week leave as of noon today, and that you are writing me a memorandum on what happened at the hospital. I have to pass it on to higher authorities and that will be the end of it as far as the WFO is concerned, because Homicide will take over. They are also trying to tell me Nick and Barry died in a car accident.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Mark.

  'I don't believe a goddamn word of it,' said Nanna. 'Now you're in the middle of this, somehow, and maybe you can nail the bastards who did it. When you find them, grind their balls into powder and then call me so that I can come help you, because if I lay my hands on those bastards .. .'

  Mark looked at Grant Nanna, and then tactfully away again, waiting until his superior had regained control of his face and voice.

  'Now, you're not allowed to contact me once you leave this office, but if I can help at any time, just call me. Don't let the Director know, he'd kill us both if

  he found out. Get going, Mark.'

  Mark left quickly and went to his office. He sat down and wrote out his report exactly as the Director had instructed, bland and brief. He took it back to Nanna, who flicked through it and tossed it into the out-box. 'Neat little whitewash job you've done there, Mark.'

  Mark didn't speak. He signed out of the Washington Field Office, the one place in which he felt secure. He'd be on his own for six days. Ambitious men always wanted to see a few years ahead, to know the shape of their careers; Mark would have settled for a week.

  The Director pressed a button. The anonymous man in the dark blue blazer and light grey trousers entered the room, 'Yes, sir.'

  'I want a full surveillance on Andrews, night and day; six men on three shifts reporting to me every morning. I want detailed background on him, his education, girlfriends, associate
s, habits, hobbies, religion, organisational affiliations, everything by tomorrow morning, 6:45. Understood?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  Aware that Senate staff members would be suspicious of an FBI agent who asked for information about their employers, Mark began his research at the Library of Congress. As he climbed the long flight of steps, he remembered a scene from All the President's Men, in which Woodward and Bernstein had spent innumerable fruitless hours searching for a few slips of paper in the bowels of the building. They had been trying to find proof that E. Howard Hunt had checked out materials on Edward M. Kennedy. And for an FBI agent on the trail of a killer, just as for the investigative reporters, it would be tedious research, not glamorous assignments, that would make the difference between success and failure.

  Mark opened the door marked 'Readers Only' and strolled into the Main Reading Room, a huge, circular, domed room decorated in muted tones of gold, beige, rust, and bronze. The ground floor was filled with rows of dark, curved wooden desks, arranged in concentric circles around the reference area in the centre of the room. On the second floor, visible from the reading area through graceful arches, were thousands of books. Mark approached the reference desk and, in the hushed tones appropriate to all libraries, asked the Clerk where he could find current issues of the Congressional Record.

  'Room 244. Law Library Reading Room.'

  'How do I get there?'

  'Go back past the card catalogue to the other side of the building and take an elevator to the second floor.'

  Mark managed to find the Law Library, a white rectangular room with three tiers of bookshelves on the left-hand side. After questioning another clerk

  he located the Congressional Record on one of the dark brown reference shelves along the right-hand wall. He carried the unbound volume marked 24 February, to a long, deserted table and began the tedious weeding-out process.

  After leafing through the digest of Senate business for half an hour, Mark realised that he was in luck. Many senators had apparently left Washington for the weekend, because a check of the roll calls on 24 February revealed that, of the one hundred senators, the number present on the floor never exceeded sixty. And the bills which were voted on were sufficiently important to command the presence of those senators who might have been hiding in the nooks and crannies of the Senate or the city. When he had eliminated those senators who were listed by the Whips of each party as 'absent because of illness' or 'necessarily absent', and added those who were merely 'detained on official business', Mark was left with sixty-two senators who were definitely in Washington on 24 February. He then double-checked the other thirty-eight senators, one by one, a long and tiresome task. All of them had for some reason been out of Washington that day.

  He glanced at his watch: 12:15. He couldn’t afford to take time off for lunch.

  Friday afternoon, 4 March

  12:30 pm

  Three men had arrived. None of them liked one another; only the common bond of financial reward could have got them into the same room. The first went by the name of Tony; he'd had so many names that nobody could be sure what his real name was, except perhaps his mother, and she hadn't seen him in the twenty years since he had left Sicily to join his father, her husband, in the States. Her husband had left twenty years before that; the cycle repeated itself.

  Tony's FBI criminal file described him as five-feet-eight, a hundred and forty-six pounds; medium build, black hair, straight nose, brown eyes, no distinguishing features, arrested and charged once in connection with a bank robbery; first offence, two-year jail sentence. What the rap sheet did not reveal was that Tony was a brilliant driver; he had proved that yesterday and if that fool of a German had kept his head, there would have been four people in the room now instead of three. He had told the boss, 'If you're going to employ a German, have him build the damn car, never let him drive it.' The boss hadn't listened and the German had been dragged out of the bottom of the Potomac. Next time they'd use Tony's cousin Mario. At least then there would be another human on the team; you couldn't count the ex-cop and the little Jap who never said a word.

  Tony glanced at Xan Tho Hue, who only spoke when asked a direct question. He was actually Vietnamese, but he had finally escaped to Japan in 1979. Everyone would have known his name if he had ruined the Los Angeles Olympics, because nobody could have stopped him from getting the gold medal for rifle shooting, but Xan had decided, with his chosen career in mind, he had better keep a low profile and withdraw from the Japanese Olympic trials. His coach tried to get him to change his mind, but without success. To Tony, Xan remained a goddamn Jap, though he grudgingly admitted to himself he knew no other man who could fire ten shots into a three-inch square at eight hundred yards. The size of Florentyna Kane's forehead.

  The Nip sat staring at him, motionless. Xan's appearance helped him in his work. No one expected that the slight frame, only about five-feet-two and a hundred and ten pounds, was that of a superlative marksman. Most people still associated marksmanship with hulking cowboys and lantern-jawed Caucasians. If you had been told this man was a ruthless killer, you would have assumed he worked with his hands, with a garrotte or nunchaki, or even with poison. Among the three, Xan was the only one who carried a personal grudge. As a child he had seen his parents butchered by the Americans in Vietnam. They had spoken warmly of the Yanks and had supported them until the bullets tore into their bodies. They had left him for dead. A target almost too small to hit. From that moment he had vowed in silent torment to avenge his loss. He escaped to Japan and there, for two years after the fall of Saigon, he had lain low getting a job in a Chinese restaurant, and participating in the US Government Program for Vietnamese refugees. Then he had gone with the offer of practical assistance to some of his old contacts in the Vietnamese intelligence community. With the US presence so scaled down in Asia, and the Communists needing fewer killers, and more lawyers, they had been sorry but they had no work for him. So Xan had begun freelancing in Japan. In 1981, he obtained Japanese citizenship, a passport, and started his new career.

  Unlike Tony, Xan did not resent the others he was working with. He simply didn't think about them. He had been hired, willingly, to perform a professional task, a task for which he would be well paid and that would at last avenge, at least in part, the outraged bodies of his parents. The others had limited roles to play in support of his operation. Provided they played

  them with a minimum of foolish error, he would perform his part flawlessly, and within a few days, he would be back in the Orient. Bangkok or Manila, perhaps, Singapore. Xan hadn't decided yet. When this one was over, he would need - and would be able to afford- a long rest.

  The third man in the room, Ralph Matson, was perhaps the most dangerous of the three. Six-feet-two tall and broad, with a big nose and heavy chin, he was the most dangerous because he was highly intelligent. After five years as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he found an easy way out after Hoover's death; loyalty to the Chief and all that garbage. By then, he had learned enough to take advantage of everything the Bureau had taught him about criminology. He had started with a little blackmail, men who had not wanted their FBI records made public, but now he had moved on to bigger things. He trusted no man - the Bureau had also taught him that - certainly not the stupid wop, who under pressure might drive backward rather than lot ward, or the silent slant-eyed yellow hit man.

  Still nobody spoke.

  The door swung open. Three heads turned, three heads that were used to danger and did not care for surprises; they relaxed again immediately when they saw the two men enter.

  The younger of the two was smoking. He took the seat at the head of the table as befits a chairman; the other man sat down next to Matson, keeping the Chairman on his right. They nodded acknowledgment, no more. The younger man, Peter Nicholson on his voter-registration card, Pyotr Nicolaivich by birth certificate, looked for all the world like the reputable head of a successful cosmetics company. His suit revealed
that he went to Chester Barrie. His shoes were Loeb's. His tie Ted Lapidus. His criminal record revealed nothing. That was why he was at the head of the table. He didn't look upon himself as a criminal; he looked upon himself as a man who wished to maintain the status quo.

  He was one of a small group of Southern millionaires who had made their money in the small-arm trade. Theirs was a giant business: it was the right of every American citizen under Amendment Two of the Constitution to bear arms, and one in every four American males exercised that right. A regular pistol or revolver could be had for as little as $100 but the fancy shotguns and rifles that were a status symbol to many patriots could fetch as much as $10,000. The Chairman and his ilk sold handguns by the millions and shotguns by the tens of thousands. It had not been hard to persuade Ronald Reagan to leave the arms trade alone, but they knew they were never going to convince Florentyna Kane. The Gun Control bill had already squeaked through the House, and unless some drastic action were taken, there was undoubtedly going to be the same result in the Senate. To preserve the status quo, therefore, the Chairman sat at the head of their table.