Fate of the Union

by Max Allan Collins

  Telling them it was strong.

  In Reeder’s ear, Nichols said, “You’d think there wouldn’t be so many people out in this cold.”

  Hardesy said, “Makes it harder.”

  “Keep looking,” Rogers said, then the radios went silent.

  These were good people. Rogers had done well; he was proud of her. Not one of them betrayed the pressure of knowing that if they failed on their desperate mission, none would get much closer to tomorrow.

  In complete Secret Service mode now, Reeder studied each passerby, looking for the wrong gesture at the wrong moment, the hand that went into a pocket at the wrong second, the eyes in an otherwise expressionless face that revealed tension or occasionally cold hatred. Such threats he noted easily, almost unconsciously.

  Striding north on First Street NE, Reeder kept his feet moving but also his eyes. Across the street, the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building looked particularly majestic to him, unaware of the looming threat to its seeming permanence. A few people passed in front, none fitting the blond’s build, all in danger and Reeder dared not risk a warning. This part of the block was not the likeliest spot for the bomber to be, but their little group must cover all the bases.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Minutes.

  A small ball of anxiety in his belly represented the full-blown fear he had learned so long ago to keep back. He managed his breathing, forced time to slow down. He saw a man with light-colored hair wearing a plaid jacket and earflap hat, moving on the other side of the street in Rogers’s direction. Reeder, resisting the urge to run after the guy, was about to key his mic to warn her when the guy hailed a passing taxi, got in, rode off into the night. Plaid-jacket, at least, would see tomorrow. Maybe the cabbie, too.

  Or had it been the blond?

  Had the merc made Reeder? Impossible. No, the man’s back had been to him. Let it go.

  Heading back south, Reeder strode toward Independence Avenue, the ball of anxiety burning. Down this way was a prime spot for the bomber, the kind of place Reeder himself would pick in the blond’s shoes: good vantage point and just a block’s walk to a metro station where, after making that fateful phone call, a bad guy could stroll away in easy view of flaming rubble, the smell of what he’d done scorching his nostrils, and disappear forever.

  With how much money? Reeder wondered.

  However big the fortune, the per-death payoff would be meager.

  Reeder had assigned this station to himself, knowing it was prime, hoping he’d guessed right. This was the most likely quadrant for the bomber to be in, and it gave him the best chance of saving all those lives.

  Of saving Amy’s life.

  The cold helped him keep the tears from his eyes and retain his focus. Wade’s car passed him, slow but not conspicuously so; but Reeder gave no sign of notice. Everyone looking, no one finding, radios painfully silent.

  At the corner, he turned east, crossing First Street SE. He considered walking a block to Second, on the off chance the blond might be up that way. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a puff of breath from the recessed doorway of the Cannon House Office Building to the south, as if someone had tucked in there for a smoke.

  Or was that smoke? Could be a tiny cloud of condensation, almost immediately disappearing.

  That could be him.

  Or a janitor who really was smoking, and was just between puffs.

  Reeder walked farther east, out of sight of the Cannon House doorway. It had to be him. The clock insisted. Using the Madison Building as cover, Reeder trotted back west toward the corner of First Street SE and Independence Avenue. No tourists at the moment, not here.

  At the corner, he peeked around the building and saw, halfway down the block, another puff of breath from the recessed doorway. Reeder checked his watch, the speech under way, not much time left . . .

  No telling how long the bomber would let the President talk before ending so many lives and making—and destroying—so much history with the tap of a fingertip on SEND.

  No leeway for fancy plans now.

  Reeder, SIG Sauer in hand at his side, stepped out around the corner and walked diagonally across the street, stopping on the sidewalk in front of the Cannon House door where he had seen the puff of breath. Someone was tucked in there, all right.

  The blond, bareheaded, cheeks red, face flecked with tiny scars, hands in the pockets of his thermal jacket, stepped out of the shadows. The bastard did something terrible: he grinned.

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” he said.

  Reeder said nothing.

  The blond, looking at the pistol trained on him, withdrew his hand from his jacket pocket. So that Reeder could see the cell phone detonator.

  “Let’s not get overly excited, Joe. Okay I call you Joe? I feel like we know each other now. We’ve been through a lot together, haven’t we?” He gestured casually with the phone-in-hand.

  “You want to talk?”

  “Why not? We understand each other, don’t we? Who knows, maybe you can reason with me.”

  Reeder shot him in the head.

  “Not interested,” he said, but the blond didn’t hear him.

  Reeder plucked the cell phone from dead fingers as the assassin crumpled empty-eyed toward the cement, scarlet trickling from the black hole in his forehead to drip down over his nose. A crimson mist sparkled in the air like dying fireworks.

  Rogers’s voice came on the comms system, distant in his ringing ears. “That was a shot! Everyone report.”

  Reeder said, “Clear. Blond is down and dead. I have the cell phone. Tell Fisk to get the bomb squad over to the Capitol.”

  “You’re okay?” Rogers asked, out of breath, on the run.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Rogers found him sitting on the sidewalk, back to the wall, ten or so feet from the fallen assassin. He was crying. She went down and checked on the dead man, came back quickly.

  Kneeling before him, she said, “You are okay?”

  “Amy’s okay,” he said, and swallowed, smiling, still crying. “That’s what matters. She’s okay.”

  “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

  Thomas Paine

  TWENTY-ONE

  Patti Rogers sat in first class next to Joe Reeder, who had paid for both their airfares. She was taking a personal day to fly with Joe to Toledo, Ohio, for reasons that remained somewhat obscure. They were on their way to talk to Adam Benjamin. That was all she knew.

  She had asked only one question: “What is this about?”

  “When we get there,” he said, “just follow my lead.”

  She knew Reeder well enough to know that was the end of that discussion.

  The immediate aftermath of Reeder taking down the blond assassin had been a media blackout as the federal government—by way of the Bureau, Homeland, NSA, and even the CIA—undertook a massive cover-up in the name of national security. Reeder appeared mildly outraged, but Rogers understood—public panic might ensue should it become known how close the nation had come to having every leader of its two parties killed, and the great symbol of the democracy—the Capitol Building itself—destroyed.

  Beyond that was the issue of Senkstone, a weapon of such frightening proportions that the ramifications of any wide knowledge of its existence could hardly be calculated. Reeder said that the Pentagon was no doubt trying to get its “grubby hands” on the stuff: “They must be giddy finding a new way to kill people, with no consideration of how any enemy might use it against us.”

  One thing could not be covered up: at the same time the blond was supposed to be blowing up the Capitol, three men thought to be the dead man’s comrades-in-arms assassinated Secretary of Agriculture Alexander Clarkson at a supposed safe house in Arlington, taking out a team of four Secret Service agents, including two Reeder had worked with.

  As the pundits speculated on the reason for such an obscure assassinatio
n—absent the context of the greater plot—Reeder said, “Makes perfect sense. The idea was to remove the government, and that meant taking out the remaining man in presidential succession, too.”

  Over the past two weeks, the task force had remained in place, putting the pieces together but very glad those pieces weren’t of a destroyed Capitol Building. Through the efforts of every team member—but of course especially Miggie—it had all come together.

  First, pictures of DeShawn Davis, aka Karma Sabich, had been found on Frank Elmore’s laptop.

  Next, a subsidiary of Barmore Holdings proved to have paid off the Constitution Hall shooter, Thomas Stanton, by way of the Cayman Island trust funds for Stanton’s children.

  Meanwhile, the hacker monitoring Miggie’s computer turned out to be a tech support woman just two floors down who’d been a Common Sense Movement true believer—in custody now.

  And finally came the dropped shoe everybody had been waiting for—the identification of the blond assassin.

  Fingerprints led to Evan Carpenter, a Michigan boy who’d done poorly in school but excelled in the military—US Army Special Forces, as the arm tattoo in the hotel video indicated.

  “We might have IDed him sooner,” Miggie said to Reeder, “if he hadn’t already been dead when you killed him.”

  She and Joe were pulled up at Miggie’s temporary workstation in the task force bullpen.

  “Explain,” Reeder said.

  “Remember that dustup with the Muslim extremists in the Philippines back in 2019? According to service records, Carpenter and his whole squad went missing in action, presumed dead—declared legally dead three years ago.”

  “How many men?”

  “Including Carpenter, eight.”

  “And none has ever turned up?”

  “Other than Carpenter, no.”

  Reeder’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not so sure. Three of them may have helped him remove Chris Bryson. And the same three may be behind the killings of Secretary Clarkson and his Secret Service team.”

  “They don’t have a leader now,” Rogers pointed out. “We’ll find them. Bohannon and Wade are working with the Secret Service on the investigation of Clarkson’s assassination. Anyway, I have a vested interest.”

  Miggie said, “You do?”

  But Reeder answered the question: “One of them took a few shots at Patti coming out of that diner—remember?”

  The next day Miggie had more for them: he’d managed to track down a string of the mercenary’s aliases, one of which led to a Swiss bank account where a money trail ended at another Barmore subsidiary.

  “That was the missing piece,” Reeder said. “Now we know.”

  “We do?” Rogers asked.

  “Unless, of course, Frank Elmore and Lynn Barr were suicidal.”

  “Why suicidal?”

  Reeder’s eyebrows went up. “Well, do you think they hired Carpenter to assassinate themselves?”

  Later that day, Reeder had announced he was heading back to ABC Security the first of next week.

  “Understood,” Rogers said. “You have a business to run.”

  “And media to duck. But there’s one thing left for us to do, if you’re up for it.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Call on Adam Benjamin.”

  Rogers drove the rental Chevy from Toledo to Defiance, where they had a two o’clock appointment with the small town’s favorite son. She had made the arrangements herself, getting through to Benjamin surprisingly fast, almost as if he expected her call. Maybe he had.

  At any rate, she’d merely said the FBI wanted to speak to him, off the record; essentially this would be an unofficial visit, and she’d appreciate it if he paid her that courtesy. He had readily agreed.

  Now she was driving along a quiet, snowy street in Defiance, Ohio, where Adam Benjamin lived in a two-story Prairie School–style house built around the turn of the twentieth century, the kind of home that had a lofty bearing without losing its middle-class flavor. The homes on either side, neither as imposing, were also owned by Benjamin—the 1920s bungalow to the right had been Frank Elmore’s, the 1950s crackerbox to the left was a bodyguard station.

  But just driving by, the notion that America’s richest man lived here was the last thing that would occur to you.

  They parked on the street in front of the house, the sloped lawn snowy but the sidewalks clear. Rogers had gone the dark suit/sensible shoes route, under her peacoat, no gun, and Reeder wore a Brooks Brothers number beneath his Burberry. No one was in sight, but by the time they were up the short flight of stairs to the covered porch, a bodyguard in a black suit emerged, flat-nosed, dead-eyed, with military-short hair as dark as his suit.

  She displayed her credentials. “Patti Rogers, FBI. This is my consultant, Joe Reeder. We’re expected.”

  The bodyguard frowned. The voice came thick, like he was tasting molasses. “You’re expected. He isn’t.”

  “Check with Mr. Benjamin, please.”

  The door closed on them, but reopened only thirty seconds or so later. The bodyguard gestured them in.

  Dark wood stairs rose before them, a living room to the right, decorated with vintage mission furnishings—they could be Frank Lloyd Wright originals for all she knew—and the floor was a gleaming parquet. Somebody well-off lived here. You might not guess billionaire, but no other home on this street would likely rival it.

  Adam Benjamin emerged from sliding double doors at left, smiling warmly. The silver hair, the dark-rimmed glasses, the kind, professorial manner, all of it was in full force, set off perfectly by a light-blue sweater over a yellow shirt and baggy tan trousers. Your favorite uncle.

  “Joe,” Benjamin said, offering his hand. “I was hoping you might come along. Pleasure to see you. Special Agent Rogers, a pleasure seeing you again, as well. Please, join me in my study. Anything to drink? Coffee, tea, something stronger?”

  “We’re fine,” Reeder said.

  Then they were seated before a big old pine desk that had seen a lot of years and plenty of use, probably dating back to Benjamin’s teaching days, and indeed the whole study had a warm folksiness suited to their host. The only sign of money was the wall of books whose famous titles, both fiction and nonfiction, went back not just decades, but in some cases centuries. One shelf was devoted to multiple copies of Benjamin’s own Common Sense for the Uncommon Man.

  The only clue that this wasn’t 1952 was the sixty-inch wall-mounted monitor to his left on the far wall, above a tufted leather couch on which his briefcase sat. But his desk lacked any sign of a computer setup, just some framed photos and the usual suspects, pen holder, stapler, IN and OUT box and so on.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” Rogers said. “And again, this is an informal, off-the-record chat.”

  Benjamin nodded, smiled. “Certainly . . . though I believe I know why you’re here.”

  “Probably you do. We’d like your thoughts on Frank Elmore, in particular, and possibly touch on Lynn Barr.”

  A sorrowful expression washed away the smile and he rocked back in his swivel chair. “Let’s start with a question. Why has there been nothing in the media about their actions? Other than the assumption that they were . . . what is the unfortunate phrase? ‘Collateral damage’ in the second attempt on my life?”

  Reeder said, “Well, that will come. The Bureau has been investigating, and a full in-depth report to the public is imminent.”

  Rogers kept her face blank—Reeder had taught her well—but of course what Joe had just told Benjamin was an outright lie.

  Their host rocked. “I’d be interested to know what’s in that report . . . if I’m not stepping into some kind of classified area.”

  Rogers said, “We’ll be glad to share at least some of what we’ve discovered, only . . . what’s your take on Frank Elmore and Lynn Barr?”

  But Reeder jumped in. “First, Adam, we should update you, specifically on those two. Seems Thomas Stanton, the would-be Constitution Hal
l assassin, was hired through a subsidiary of Barmore Holdings.”

  “Good heavens. How can you be sure of that, Joe?”

  “Stanton was dying of cancer. You’re a student of history—remember Zangara, who was hired to pretend to go after FDR, when Chicago Mayor Cermak was the intended target all along? Barmore set up one-hundred-grand trust funds for both of the dying man’s kids.”

  Benjamin’s expression was grave; he shook his head slowly. “That confirms my worst suspicions.”

  Rogers asked, “Which are?”

  “That you were right in advising me that Frank and Lynn betrayed my trust and feathered their own nests, in a scheme of widespread corporate embezzling. Starting companies I knew nothing of, and stuffing their own pockets with the results. Do their bank accounts indicate payments beyond their salaries?”

  “They do,” Rogers confirmed. “For the last three years. They were both millionaires several times over.”

  “But if I’d discovered their actions,” Benjamin said firmly, frowning, raising a fist, “they’d have had those funds seized, and gone to prison. I have no compassion for traitors.”

  Reeder said, “Their scheme was much more than monetary, Adam. What I’m about to tell you won’t come out until tomorrow. We need your word that you won’t share this with even your closest and most trusted inner circle . . . if any have survived.”

  “You have my word,” Benjamin said.

  Reeder told him that the plot to blow up the Capitol had been confirmed, indeed using the next-gen explosive perfected and stabilized in Barmore laboratories. He did not get into how the plot was foiled.

  “It’s fantastic,” Benjamin said, seemingly stunned. “But why is this being kept from the public?”

  “That’s just for now. Until the report is made public.”

  He was shaking his head, staring into nothing. “Then it may be possible that Frank and Lynn were well-meaning but misguided souls, who thought they were helping me. Who misunderstood and perverted my goals.”

  Reeder asked, “What do you think they were trying to accomplish?”