Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  ALSO BY CHARLES MCCARRY

  Christopher’s Ghosts

  Old Boys

  Lucky Bastard

  Second Sight

  The Bride of the Wilderness

  The Last Supper

  The Better Angels

  The Secret Lovers

  The Tears of Autumn

  The Miernik Dossier

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States in 2010 by

  Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  New York & London

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  Overlook

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  Copyright © 1995 by Charles McCarry

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any

  form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any

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  ISBN 978-1-4683-0034-5

  Contents

  Also by Charles McCarry

  Copyright

  Principal Characters

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Epilogue

  To the Reader

  For La Famiglia

  Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  Adonais

  After the fire was kindled … more wine was poured over

  Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed

  during his life. This with the oil and salt made the

  yellow flames glisten and quiver. The corpse fell open

  and the heart was laid bare…. The brains literally seethed,

  bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very

  long time…. But what surprised us all, was that the heart

  remained entire. In snatching this relic from the

  fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt;

  and had any one seen me do the act

  I should have been put into quarantine.

  EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY

  Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  BEDFORD FORREST LOCKWOOD, incumbent President of the United States

  FRANKLIN MALLORY, his predecessor as President and his opponent for

  reelection

  ZARAH CHRISTOPHER, a young woman befriended by both Lockwood and

  Mallory

  ARCHIMEDES HAMMETT, Chief Justice of the United States

  R. TUCKER ATTENBOROUGH, Speaker of the House

  SAM CLARK, Majority Leader of the Senate

  JULIAN HUBBARD, President Lockwood’s chief of staff

  HORACE HUBBARD, Julian’s half brother, a former U. S. intelligence officer Ross

  MACALASTER, a journalist

  JACK PHILINDROS, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service

  NORMAN CARLISLE BLACKSTONE, counsel to President Lockwood

  ALFONSO OLMEDO C, a lawyer

  JOHN L. S. MCGRAW, an investigator

  BAXTER “BUZZER“ BUSBY, senator from California

  AMZI WHIPPLE, Minority Leader of the Senate

  ALBERT TYLER, Attenborough’s majordomo and confidant

  HENRY TYLER, M.D., Albert’s son

  SUSAN GRANT, Mallory’s lover

  EMILY HUBBARD, Julian Hubbard’s wife

  ROSE MACKENZIE, a computer expert, Horace Hubbard’s lover and former

  colleague

  SLIM AND STURDI EVE, lawyers, disciples of Chief Justice Hammett

  O. N. LASTER, friend and adviser to former President Mallory

  WIGGINS AND LUCY, bodyguards to Mallory

  BOBBY M. POOLE, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court

  PATRICK GRAHAM, a network anchorman

  1

  It had snowed the night before the Chief Justice’s funeral, paralyzing the city of Washington and closing down the government. Now, at midmorning, the sun shone brightly, transforming the brilliant white mantle that covered Mount St. Alban into slush. Snowmelt from the roof of the National Cathedral flowed from the mouths of gargoyles, drowning the hushed notes of the organ that played within. Franklin Mallory, a lover of music (“like other Huns before him,” as some opposition wit had written when he was President of the United States), recognized the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach’s D minor toccata and fugue. Mallory found this famous work untidy and illogical and annoyingly reminiscent of Buxtehude—but then, organ music in general made him impatient. Like the rhetoric of his political enemies, it was overwrought.

  He had just alighted from his car and entered the narthex, or western porch, of the great Gothic cathedral. The service was scheduled to begin in five minutes, and everyone else except the incumbent President, who would arrive last, had already been seated. The dean of the cathedral, skeletal and bald, a fiftyish man with an anxious face that bore no marks of life whatsoever, recoiled when he saw Mallory approaching. He had come outside to welcome the President himself, never expecting that he would run into his worst political enemy. The dean’s manner was perfunctory—a damp handshake, a muttered “Mr., uh, Mallory,” but no smile, no eye contact.

  For reasons of ideology, the dean could not bring himself to call Mallory “Mr. President.” At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he abided by the same powerful convictions and taboos he had embraced with hormonal fervor as a campus radical more than three decades before, still believing that the planet, the entire solar system, was in imminent danger of being destroyed by the appetites of imperialistic capitalism. He abominated Mallory, regarding him not merely as the leader of the political right, but as a bad man, an imperialist, a deceiver of the people. Mallory, on the other hand, thought that the dean and others who shared his apocalyptic views were victims of a collective dementia that rendered them incapable of seeing the world as it really was. In short, each believed that the other was an enemy of the people. Mallory, who saw some humor in this state of mutual paranoia, gave the dean a droll wink. The dean, to whom matters of religion were no laughing matter, stepped back from Mallory’s physical person with visible disgust. To an usher he said, “Geoffrey, will you kindly show this … gentleman to his place?”

  Mallory said, “Not just yet.”

  “But President Lockwood is expected at any moment.” Geoffrey made a gesture indicating men and women in sunglasses who had taken up positions in the narthex. “The Secret Service—”

  “That’s all right,” Mallory said. “They know me.”

  Eight years before, after a tumultuous election campaign, Mallory had defeated an inept and unpopular but liberal President by tactics that people like the dean regarded as kicking a man when he was down: he had pointedly ignored an appalling personal scandal that swirled round the incumbent and dwelled caustically on the man’s virtually unbroken string of disastrous policy mistakes. After one term, Mallory himself was defeated by Lockwood, and when he ran against Lockwood a second time, two months ago, he lost by the smallest marg
in of popular votes in history. After that, though he continued to loiter in the nightmares of those who deplored him, his image had vanished from the news media, reducing him overnight from the enormous dimensions of world repute to his original puny size and being, as if fame itself were a floppy disk that could be inserted into the collective consciousness or removed from it according to the whim of some Olympian computer operators.

  Now, encircled by his own security people, Mallory turned his back and took up a position deeper inside the porch, between the gateway and the inner door. It was January 19, the day before Inauguration Day. Mallory had been trying for days to reach Lockwood—”Frosty” Lockwood to the news media and to the whole nation—but the White House had not returned his calls. Now Mallory intended to waylay him as he entered the cathedral. He knew that there is no better place to have a private word with a President, who is never alone otherwise, than at a public event.

  Mallory was under no illusion that Lockwood would be glad to see him. During the campaign, to beat Mallory to the punch, Lockwood had gone on television to admit that his administration had condoned the assassination of an oil sheik to prevent him from providing terrorists with nuclear weapons. The man had been killed by his own son, who had subsequently been executed for the crime. As Lockwood explained the matter to the American people, he had been informed in advance that this murder was being plotted but had done nothing to prevent it from happening. The victim’s name was Ibn Awad, and though he was a virulent hater of Jews, he had been regarded as a harmless mystic before U.S. intelligence learned that he was planning to detonate nuclear bombs in Tel Aviv, and perhaps New York City. Mallory had called Ibn Awad’s death a clear case of homicide and promised to investigate American involvement in it “as the first order of business of my second presidency.”

  From his vantage point, Mallory could see into the vast nave of the cathedral. The coffin, covered by a pall, stood several hundred feet away, with the high altar glittering beyond it. Owing to the storm, which had stranded many in the suburbs, not more than half the pews were filled. Minutes passed. A bodyguard, listening to the Secret Service cellular net over an earpiece, informed Mallory that the President’s motorcade had just turned north onto Massachusetts Avenue at Twenty-third Street, about two miles away. Lockwood was famous for being late, and today, with the slippery streets as an added excuse, he was a full half hour behind schedule. Inside the cathedral, the organist changed from Bach to Elgar; Mallory, who liked a melody and did not mind the cold, listened happily to the music as the dean shivered in his vestments in the shadow of the cathedral.

  Lockwood was an enormously tall, gaunt, homely man who somewhat resembled Abraham Lincoln physically, and he had adopted a humble style to emphasize the similarity. He traveled in a convoy of unmarked cars, without sirens or motorcycle escort, stopping at red lights and obeying all other traffic laws. No flags flew from the fenders of the plain dark-blue Chevrolet that Lockwood used as a presidential limousine. The car wasn’t even marked with the presidential seal. It was armored, of course, and crammed with expensive communications equipment and secret defensive devices that would be quite useless against any but the most inept amateur assassin. The front passenger seat had been removed to make room for the President’s long legs—he was even taller than Lincoln—and the whole vehicle had probably cost about the same as the bulletproof Cadillac Mallory had used.

  Other costs were even higher. In the closing weeks of the last presidential campaign, after Lockwood’s broadcast about the assassination of Ibn Awad, a total of six terrorists from a mysterious organization called the Eye of Gaza had blown themselves up in public places. Only once had this happened in Lockwood’s presence, when a Secret Service agent was killed during a campaign speech in San Antonio by a hurtling thigh bone that pierced his chest. Lockwood, though soaked with gore, escaped injury, but in this and other incidents several innocent bystanders were killed or maimed. Now the President was protected by an unusually large and well-armed convoy of Secret Service vehicles and plainclothes agents, and a special quick-reaction military antiterrorist unit hovered overhead in helicopters.

  At last the motorcade arrived at the cathedral. The dean collected himself and stepped forward, smiling benignly, to greet the President. He halted suddenly as Lockwood, alighting from the car, slipped in the tread-marked slush, lost his balance, and staggered comically before being grabbed and righted by one of the several large agents whose job it was to stop with their own bodies any bullets aimed at him. Lockwood made a joke to the man who had prevented him from falling down. The agent and his fellows, staring at the little neighborhood crowd that had gathered behind a police barrier, smiled but did not relax as they marched him toward the gateway.

  The day was now extremely bright as the diagonal rays of the sun reflected from the film of unmelted snow that still stuck to the ground. Coming out of this dazzling eruption of light, Lockwood did not immediately spot Mallory at the back of the shadowy porch. But the Secret Service had forewarned him of Mallory’s presence, and pretending that he saw the other man, Lockwood raised his shaggy head in recognition and gave him a broad, friendly wink.

  The dean, who thought the wink was for him, grinned in unfeigned delight and held out his hand to Lockwood. “The Lord hath made his face to shine upon thee, sir!” he said, flinging his other hand upward to show that he was making a pleasantry about the sunshine, which was removing the snow that had threatened to interfere with the next day’s inaugural parade.

  “He hath also made my way slippery and difficult,” said Lockwood in his backwoods Kentucky accent, which grew more exaggerated with every year he spent away from his native state. “I damn near fell on my ass out there.”

  The dean smiled even more broadly at this mild vulgarism. He felt flattered, included among the good people, by Lockwood’s earthiness.

  The President grasped the other man’s limp, slippery hand in his great horny one and squeezed. At the same time he seized his shoulder with his left hand and bore down upon it with all his weight. Lockwood, who stood six foot seven in his socks and weighed two hundred fifty pounds, had been an All-American football player in college. As President he kept in shape not by running or playing tennis but by working for an hour every other day with a pick and shovel or an ax alongside the White House gardeners. Few men could prolong a conversation when the President leaned on them. After a few seconds, the dean’s knees buckled slightly inside his chasuble.

  Lockwood bore down harder and boomed, “I hope you’ve got a good send-off planned for the Chief Justice. He’s earned it.”

  “We’ll do our best, sir,” gasped the dean.

  “I know you will, Reverend,” said Lockwood, releasing him. No highfalutin’ Anglican titles for Frosty, thought Mallory, meeting the President’s eyes.

  Lockwood stepped around the dean and his retainers and walked straight to Mallory. He said, “Mr. President, my condolences.” The two men had known each other for twenty years, but Lockwood, though he prided himself on being down-to-earth, was rank-conscious and a stickler for honorifics. Mallory was not.

  “Thanks, Frosty,” he said. “Old Max almost outlived you.”

  “That’s right; the old fart always said he would. And by God he might have, except for New York and California.”

  Lockwood’s victory the previous November had come in three last-minute surges of votes in the poorest precincts of major cities in New York, California, and Michigan.

  “We’re going to have to talk about New York and California,” Mallory said. “Soon.”

  He took Lockwood’s arm in the European style and walked him toward the nave. The bodyguards, taking themselves out of earshot, made a wider circle around the two men.

  Mallory said, “There seems to be something wrong with the White House phones. I’ve been trying to reach you for a week.”

  Lockwood glowered. “Maybe they thought you were phoning to call me a murderer again,” he said. “Like you did on the Patri
ck Graham show last November.”

  “No.” Mallory paused for effect. “Something worse.”

  Lockwood scowled, then laughed. “Same old sore loser, Franklin.”

  Inside the cathedral, word of the President’s arrival was spreading. Heads turned toward the entrance and a whisper ran through the crowd. Lockwood and Mallory had been walking toward the great inner door, and now they were framed in it—mortal enemies glimpsed in a brief moment of truce.

  “Are we going to go in together,” Lockwood asked, “when they play ‘Here Comes the Bride’?”

  He was making jokes to prevent Mallory from saying whatever it was he had been waiting to say to him. Mallory, who knew Lockwood’s methods and had never hoped to get a word in edgewise, held out his hand as if to congratulate his opponent on his triumph and wish him well; this was the first time they had met since the election. When Lockwood gripped Mallory’s hand, the latter pressed a note into his callused palm. It was folded into a wad.

  “Read that,” Mallory said. “I’ll wait for your call.” He turned on his heel and walked into the nave.

  Behind him, Lockwood opened the note, an engraved calling card twice folded in half. It read, in Mallory’s clear, almost spinsterish script: “I must see you urgently and alone, well before you take the presidential oath tomorrow, to make you aware of documentary evidence of election fraud in California, Michigan, and New York that brings into question your legal right to assume office.”

  By now Mallory had reached his pew, where three other former Presidents of his own party were already seated; they turned as one and bowed to the newcomer.

  “You little prick,” Lockwood said aloud as the organist, forgetting protocol, struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the congregation rose to its feet in his honor.

  2

  As President, Franklin Mallory had regularly escaped from the White House for late suppers with a small circle of old friends. He had done this without detection by passing through the tunnel that led from the cellars of the executive mansion to the Treasury Building next door. A second tunnel took him under Pennsylvania Avenue to the Treasury Annex, and thence into the outside world through a little-used door opening onto an alley. Once through the door, he had been free to roam the city on foot and in the automobile he kept in a nearby garage. Unlike the outsize, nobly ugly Lockwood, he was a man of average height and build, with a run-of-the-mill American face. Because people were not expecting to see him, no one ever recognized him, and he passed among them dressed in casual clothes, wearing a cap to cover his famous silver hair.