Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

“So he’s going to start a second circus in the media?”

  “Let me continue, Mr. President,” said Clark. “What he plans to do is introduce a resolution vacating Congress’s certification of the election results. If it is adopted, the election will be null and void. In my opinion it will pass the Senate if it gets to the floor. Mallory’s party will have to vote for it right down the line. Busby and some of his friends will join them.”

  “Then it goes over to the House. Tucker?”

  “It’ll pass,” Attenborough said.

  “And the moment it does, I stop being President,” Lockwood said. “Is that it?”

  “Not exactly,” Attenborough said. “Like Sam said yesterday, what happens is that the United States of America ceases to have a President.”

  “That’s the objective,” Clark said. “Busby kept talking about a constitutional solution.”

  “Exact words?” Lockwood said.

  “He kept repeating them. ‘A pragmatic, constitutional way out. A new beginning in honor.’ ”

  “Did he say what he meant by that?”

  “He didn’t have to. He’s been working the phones to the media talking on background about how history is matching the man with the hour in the person of the Chief Justice.”

  “Did anyone press him?”

  “Amzi did. He said, ‘Senator, when you say all these admiring things about the ingenuity of the Founding Fathers, you wouldn’t happen to be talking about the nonqualification provisions of Article Two and the Twentieth Amendment, would you?’ Busby just went on repeating himself as if he hadn’t even heard the question.”

  “Amzi let it go at that?”

  Clark said, “I think Amzi figured he already had his answer. If the plan works, there’ll be no other way to go.”

  Lockwood said, “There’s something else. How healthy are you, Tucker?”

  “Not healthy enough to worry about,” Attenborough said. “But that’ll work out. Let Sam finish.”

  Clark said, “That was my next point. The Twenty-fifth Amendment never looked like a worse solution. They’ve set the whole thing up. First they did what they did to Tucker, with the idea of making him unthinkable as your successor. Nobody can imagine Otis running the country, fine old gentleman that he is. Busby’s next step will be to concede how right the media have been about this terrible dilemma, wrap himself in the flag, and cry, ‘There’s only one way to save America! Change the law!’ ”

  “This doesn’t sound much better for Franklin than it does for me or old Tucker here,” Lockwood said. “What’s Amzi really going to do?”

  “I don’t think he knows yet,” Clark replied. “He’s suspicious as hell. But if the validity of the election comes to a vote, his party has got to vote to invalidate. Otherwise they give up the ghost.”

  “What you all are saying is that they’re so damn smart they’ve got us coming and going, fifteen ways from Sunday.”

  “Not quite yet they haven’t,” Attenborough said. “Not as long as you’re the legal, sworn-in President. And for the moment that’s exactly what you are, no matter what happened in New York, Michigan, and California.”

  Lockwood said, “You’ve got a plan.”

  “I do,” Attenborough said.

  “Shoot,” Lockwood said.

  “I’ll tell you what you need to know but I’ll be damned if I’ll conspire,” Attenborough said. “All you need to know is this: If you want to save the country, you’ve got to resign. Probably today. It’s the only way.”

  “And make Franklin President?”

  “No. At least not right away.”

  “You think Franklin will buy that?”

  Attenborough sighed. “I hope he will,” he said. “I think he will.”

  “What makes you so hopeful, knowing Franklin?”

  “Same reason you’ll give it up, same reason I will.”

  “You don’t have it yet.”

  “Good point,” Attenborough said. “But let that dog lie. Franklin may be worth a couple of billion now, but he grew up just like you and me and Sam, poor as Job’s off ox on a hardscrabble farm in a place the Lord forgot. In his mind and gonads he’s a poor boy and he’ll never be anything else. He knows what it means when things go wrong and the well runs dry and there’s no way out.”

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “For now. I’m going to talk to Franklin. Then I’m going to talk to you again. Then I’m going to talk to one other person who’s the key to the whole thing. I’ll call you when I’m done. Then you can decide if you want to come along with the rest of us.”

  Lockwood examined Attenborough. The Speaker was having one of his coughing fits, yellow eyes staring, limbs jerking. Lockwood felt a tug at his heart. Poor little cuss looked like somebody had skinned him, tanned the hide, and then sewed him back up in it. He looked like he wanted to get the hell out of that poisoned body of his and was just barely resisting the temptation. Lockwood thought this but did not shout it out, one of the rare times in his life when he had resisted this particular temptation.

  “All right, Tucker,” the President said, when the Speaker’s coughing subsided. “You do what you’ve got to do. When you’ve done it, call me up here. I’m not going anywhere. Not right now, anyhow.”

  4

  When Sam Clark returned to his office he received a telephone call on his private line, the one he always answered himself. It was from Associate Justice Bobby M. Poole of the Supreme Court, a nice but remote man with whom he rarely spoke beyond routine social pleasantries because Poole was a deep-dyed conservative and Clark was not.

  Poole’s hesitant North Carolina voice said, “Your Committee on the Impeachment, Senator, is that, quote, the committee to receive evidence and take testimony, end quote, described in Rule Eleven of The Conduct of Impeachment Trials in the Senate?”

  Clark said, “Yes, Mr. Justice Poole, it is.”

  “Then I may have something for you. But first I must ask you for a clarification so as not to risk wasting your time.”

  “Go right ahead, sir.”

  Poole said, “In Mr. Olmedo’s cross-examination of the witness St. Clair yesterday, I was struck by a reference to a Mickey Finn, followed by a somewhat obscure reference to fly fishing. May I take it that the Mickey Finn referred to was a fishing fly?”

  “If I remember the supporting evidence correctly, yes, I believe so,” Clark said.

  “The Mickey Finn is a most unusual fly that went out of general use more than forty years ago, then made a comeback. As you may not know, I tie my own flies.”

  “I did know that, sir. I’m a fisherman too.”

  “Then we must go out together some weekend. I own two miles of an excellent private stream, stocked with brookies, only two hours away in Pennsylvania.”

  “I’d enjoy that.”

  “I tie flies here in my chambers while pondering cases that come before the Court,” Poole said. “My objective is to tie every fly ever known to fishermen, and thanks to the Court’s busy calendar I have finished a good many. I keep them on the credenza behind my desk, mounted in a row of albums rather like old-fashioned snapshot books except that the pages are faced with velvet with little windows in them just big enough for a fly. My wife makes these pages and mounts the specimens in alphabetical order, marked underneath with the earliest known date of use. Each has a beautifully written label. Calligraphy is one of Mrs. Poole’s hobbies.”

  “Very nice. And handy too, in case you want to look at them.”

  “Exactly. One of the flies I tied was the Mickey Finn. Now we come to the point of this call. After watching that cross-examination I got down my M-to-Z volume for streamers. As you undoubtedly know, the Mickey Finn is not a dry fly but a streamer. That particular fly was missing from its place between the Marabou Muddler and the Muddler Minnow. It had been torn out of the album. Roughly.” He said no more.

  Clark said, “I see.”

  “As I said,” Poole said, “it is not a co
mmon fly. The album it was in is part of the streamer collection.”

  “I’ve never seen one myself.”

  “The dominant color is yellow with admixtures of red and white,” Poole said.

  “I don’t suppose there’s ever been too much worry about petty theft in the Supreme Court.”

  “No,” Poole said. “But I have now taken the precaution of locking my albums in the safe in case you’d ever like to have a look at them. I have also impounded the surveillance camera tapes for a certain period of time, should your committee wish to examine them.”

  “Thank you for your call, sir. I may need to get back to you.”

  “Please don’t hesitate to do so, Mr. Majority Leader,” Poole said.

  5

  Inside the parked van, Lucy ran down the data base on Sturdi. It was extensive, even exhaustive. As in Lockwood’s earlier case, Sturdi’s athleticism had made everything possible for her: she was a working-class girl from Houston who would never have become the first member of her family to go to college if she had not been able to run faster and jump higher than most boys. She had attached herself early in her campus life to the belief system of the people who befriended her at Berkeley, and she collaborated eagerly thereafter in the process of transforming herself from an individual into a type.

  “The point is, she is a type,” Lucy said. “And types are predictable.”

  “You’re right,” Zarah said. “But remember, the computer can tell us who Sturdi knows, what Sturdi knows or ought to know, what the combination of traits and experience that make up Sturdi ought to produce. That may reinforce our suspicions. But it won’t tell us who the assassin is. The assassin, and only the assassin, can give us that information.”

  Lucy frowned in bewilderment. Why did Zarah keep turning them away from the obvious conclusions? What was her purpose? Suspicion of Zarah welled up in her again. She said, “So where do you suggest we go from here, Zarah?”

  “Let’s look at what we’ve got on the assassin,” Zarah said.

  “What point is there in watching Susan die again?” Lucy said. She was sickened by the prospect.

  “Not those pictures,” McGraw said. “The police data from the crime scene.”

  Lucy shrugged. At almost the same instant, the expression on her face changed, as if she had suddenly remembered something. “You’re going to have to excuse me for a minute,” she said. “I need some privacy.” She handed the control to Wiggins.

  With a look of female understanding, Zarah said, “Do you want me to go with you?”

  Lucy said, “No. Absolutely not. I don’t need to be here while you search. I’m already familiar with all the files.” She switched off the interior lights so that no one could see into the van as she got out of it, slid back the door, and stepped out.

  “All right,” Wiggins said. “There’s not much, just what was found in the killer’s room.” He projected images of the interior of the room: the religious graffiti on the walls in Arabic and English, the newspaper clippings pasted onto the Sheetrock, which apparently had been punched out by angry fists, the diary entries, the shabby prayer rug and well-thumbed Koran left behind. Printed data scrolled before their eyes: interviews with witnesses, inventories of the scene, forensic reports. “The only thing not mentioned here is Ross’s tidbit about the anabolic steroids in the urine,” Wiggins said. “We weren’t told about that.”

  “It seems to be significant,” Macalaster said.

  “No question,” Wiggins said. “That’s why the cops kept it quiet.”

  The diaries came up again, the ill-formed handwriting transcribed into type. Wiggins highlighted passages of special interest. “Presents self as father of frozen embryos about to be shipped into outer space as slave labor,” he said.

  Zarah said, “This person was obsessed with frozen embryos.”

  Wiggins nodded, but without agreeing. “That is the surface indication,” he said. “But we’ve been unsure how genuine it is.”

  “How do you mean?” Zarah asked.

  “Well, it’s crazy stuff,” Wiggins replied. “Almost a little too crazy.”

  McGraw said, “Excuse me, but let me tell you there’s no such thing as too crazy.”

  “Agreed,” Wiggins said. Zarah was watching him intently, waiting for him to explain. He said, “The history of assassins has been that they construct a narrative history of their own psychosis. The elements are always essentially the same—news clippings about the target, pictures of the target as a target with bull’s-eyes drawn over the face, prophetic writings on the wall, a diary that tells all.”

  “What the assassin is doing is making a case for the rectitude of his act,” Macalaster said.

  “Exactly, but that’s easy to fake,” Wiggins said. “Granted, a real psychopath would follow the pattern. But so would a calculating killer who wanted to be taken for a psychopath.”

  “So you think this whole body of evidence was faked to throw investigators off the trail by fulfilling their preconceptions?”

  “We don’t know that, but we haven’t dismissed the possibility.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing the physical evidence provided absolutely no clue to the killer’s real identity,” Wiggins said. “Not a fingerprint was found, not a handprint, not a fingernail clipping, no semen or fecal smear in the bed. Only that urine in the john, a strange oversight. It has seemed to us that the person who did this was highly intelligent, highly organized, following a detailed plan. All the diary entries and the graffiti, for example, seem to have been written with the left hand by a right-handed person.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Zarah asked.

  “Oops, a left-handed person using the right hand; sorry,” Wiggins said. “The fact remains that this was no dumbbell.”

  “You don’t have to be stupid to be crazy,” McGraw said. “But I agree it’s a little funny. Something else is funny: This assassin was highly trained. A lot of rehearsal went into that hit. Terrorists are slobs. They don’t usually have that kind of discipline outside of the movies.”

  “That’s right,” Wiggins said. “But let me finish my thought about the nature of the evidence. First, the so-called obsession. The idea that the frozen embryos of minority persons are going to be shipped to the moons of Jupiter and used as slave labor in mines that don’t even exist is just too delusional, too far out. Anyone who was going to kill Mallory would kill him for what he is, not for what he might do as Emperor of the Dark Side in some science-fiction scenario out of Counterculture Comics. At least that’s been our working hypothesis.”

  Zarah said, “It’s your thesis that the assassin did not really believe what the diary says was the reason for the killing?”

  “That’s right. It was an elaborate lie from start to finish. Also, of course, it was a nice potential insanity defense if the assassin got caught. Which was a high order of probability, considering the time and place and the presence of worldwide television, not to mention several hundred cops and agents.” Wiggins paused. “Including my wife and myself.”

  Wiggins’s phone rang. “Speaking of which, she’s back,” he said, switching off the lights and opening the door. When the lights came back on, they saw a change in Lucy. She was shaken, pale. Clearly she had been thinking a terrible thought.

  Zarah said, “Lucy, we were discussing the assassin’s obsession with frozen embryos. Wiggins doesn’t think it’s significant.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Wiggins said, his eyes fixed anxiously on Lucy’s stricken face. “What I wanted to convey was the thought that it was not a reason to kill Mallory, even for a psychopath.”

  Zarah said, “But it wasn’t Mallory who was killed. It was Susan Grant.”

  “We have worked on the assumption that this outcome was happenstance,” Wiggins said, “that Mallory was the primary target and shooting Susan was a mistake.”

  “Oh?” Zarah said. “Why, when the assassin made no other mistakes of any kind?”

  Lu
cy took several deep breaths, recovered her composure, and broke in. “Two reasons,” she said. “First, as we have all seen for ourselves, Susan stepped between Mallory and the assassin and took the bullets for him. And second—”

  Lucy broke off. Her eyes filled with tears. She looked desperately at Wiggins and her hand flew to her mouth.

  Gently he said, “And second what, Lucy?”

  Lucy said, “We thought that killing Susan could change nothing.”

  McGraw said, “But?”

  Lucy said, “But it could. Susan was pregnant.”

  Macalaster said, “Wait a minute! That didn’t show up in the autopsy, did it?”

  “No,” Lucy said. “It wouldn’t. She was only eight days pregnant. She’d taken the test, and she was going to go down to the Morning After Clinic that afternoon after the speech, to have the embryo recovered.”

  McGraw said, “And frozen?”

  “That’s right. It was the last day it could be done. She asked me to go with her—just me alone. Not as a security person, but as a woman who had been through it herself.”

  Zarah said, “You mean she made an appointment? In her own name?”

  “I made it for her. It was a secret. She was going to tell Mallory after he got the presidency back, then be reimplanted. She had to do it soon. Susan was thirty-seven, a little older than me. We talked about doing it together; Wiggins and I have a child in amniosis. Susan knew that; she and I talked about doing twins.”

  “ ‘Doing twins’?” Zarah asked.

  “The embryo can be divided in the lab before implantation,” Lucy explained. “It’s not a complicated procedure. You get identical twins.”

  McGraw said, “How many days before her death was the appointment made?”

  “Seven,” Lucy said. “She took the test the morning after unprotected intercourse. There’s a home test kit. One drop of blood on a patch and you know.”

  “And the killer rented the room six days before Susan was killed?” McGraw said. “One day after you called the Morning After Clinic. Is that right?”