By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “More than that, as a matter of fact. Having been out of the country, you couldn’t possibly know about all the evidence we’ve been able to produce against Peter Ashley Brookes. You’re aware, I’m sure, that Juan Jalisco did work for Brookes’s guerrilla outfit in Central America. We’ve come up with actual correspondence between the two.”

  “Doubtless with little yellow La Puño flags on the letterhead.”

  “Something like that. The judge was quite impressed. Brookes’s bond was set at one million dollars. He made it, of course, but it shows how seriously the courts are taking our case. I haven’t the slightest doubt we’ll get a conviction.”

  “Steven, I’ve just come from Mexico.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “My itinerary included Tabasco, Tampico, and Veracruz. I have Jalisco’s complete employment record. I know everything there is to know about the companies, including the family that owns them, and the family’s most illustrious member.” He tapped his briefcase. “It’s all in here.”

  “So I presumed.”

  They had been following the exit road around the shore of a mirrorlike lagoon. Abruptly, Copley steered the car onto a long drive that led around to the airline services area of the airport. There was a wide expanse of parking lot, most of it completely empty. The FBI director pulled to a stop at the edge, at least a football field from the nearest vehicle.

  “Don’t get strange ideas, Walt. Your door is securely locked and I’m holding a PK Walther on you. It will ruin a rather nice Brooks Brothers jacket, but I’ll pull the trigger at the slightest move. You’ll lose much of your digestive system in the process. Not that you’re going to be much in the mood for food.”

  “I don’t understand how you think you can get away with shooting me in the middle of Dulles Airport in broad daylight.”

  “Simple. I’m going to shoot you in the line of duty. You’re a key part of the Brookes assassination conspiracy, Walter. I met you at the airport to question and detain you if necessary. You, unfortunately, pulled a gun on me—a standard Secret Service–issue revolver. I have it under my seat. I also have some interesting correspondence between you and Brookes and a La Puño artifact or two. Combined with the indisputable fact of your travels and activities in Honduras, agent Perkins involvement, and the large cash sum you accepted from Brookes, it ought to be enough to convince any jury—or investigating committee—of your treason and deep involvement in the murder plot. How about that?”

  He killed the car’s engine and turned in his seat to face Kreski, pulling the Walther out from under his coat as he did so.

  “What’s ironic,” he continued, “is that we never intended for things to get this far. All it was supposed to take was a single, well-placed rifle shot. Just one shot, Walt.”

  “In the manner of Sarajevo.”

  “As far as Central America is concerned, yes. But all that’s happened in this country since the assassination, none of it was planned. That bloodbath in the press pool at Gettysburg was your people’s doing.”

  “I accepted the responsibility for it. I had nothing to do with blowing up Mrs. Atherton’s car, or gunning down those people in Tegucigalpa, or all those other endless murders.”

  “Yes, you did, Walt. You wouldn’t give up. You kept at it, day after day, week after week, on and on, ever the good cop. You gave us no damn choice, Walt, for anything we did. In the end, nothing we did worked. You were never put off the trail, but as I say, there’s an irony here. Our cover-up didn’t fool you, but it developed the existence of a La Puño in the public mind as nothing else could. And that’s made everything we have to do now very easy.”

  “You owe me something.”

  “And how is that?”

  “You’re an honorable man.”

  Copley laughed, shaking his head. “You’re the honorable man, Walt. That’s what got you into so much trouble.”

  “I just want to know how far this conspiracy goes, how many people are involved.”

  “All told, in one way or another, I suppose it involved hundreds. But most of those people were just doing their jobs, doing their duty as they saw it, doing what they were told. Unquestioning patriots. Only a very, very few had any idea of what was really going on. It’s amazing how government bureaucracies work that way.”

  “Perkins knew what was going on.”

  “Yes, sir, he surely did.”

  “How did you acquire him?”

  “That asset was bought and paid for. The neat and tidy sum of five hundred thousand dollars. He was quite the cynic, your Mr. Perkins. He had no compunctions except those having to do with his own welfare. He had no objection to the killing. I suppose you should expect that from a former army sniper.”

  An airline truck drove slowly by. The driver glanced once in their direction, but continued on.

  “Who else were you able to turn?” Kreski said. “Just how dirty did you get my agency?”

  “There was no one else. Except for Perkins, the Secret Service was squeaky clean, especially the White House detail. You chose your people well.”

  “You were able to shoot the president of the United States by bribing just one agent?”

  “It’s amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. Now Walt, it’s getting late.”

  “Just one more thing. You said only a very, very few knew what was really going on. How many was that?”

  “Very, very few.”

  “How many were in on everything?”

  “Everything? Why, just the vice president and myself. As I said, this was supposed to have been a neat, simple, garden-variety presidential assassination. The kind they have in the Third World all the time.”

  “The evidence concerning his mother’s family, the Hidalgos, is overwhelming. But I still can’t believe he was involved in this—not this far.”

  “Why not? He had more reason for wanting to see Hampton shot than anyone did the Kennedys, unless you’re prepared to think that Lyndon Johnson was behind those.”

  Kreski was beginning to itch again, but for all the wrong reasons. The end of his life could be just a few words away.

  “But it’s hard to think of Atherton being that homicidal. The casualties in this have been horrible. My God, he blew up his own wife.”

  “He didn’t do that. We agreed to have Perkins eliminated, but it was supposed to happen after she was taken home. The car bomb’s timing was off.”

  “Steven. It wasn’t off. That bomb was detonated by remote control. You had a car in Rock Creek Drive.”

  “All right. That’s true. Taking out Mrs. Atherton was my idea. He knew nothing about it. I thought it would throw suspicion the other way—shut the investigation down as far as our side was concerned.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “Those will have to serve as your last words, Walt. I don’t want to miss the State of the Union.”

  The gunshot reached Kreski’s ears as a shattering roar.

  The British had unearthed Maddy’s yellow Mercedes from its embassy hiding place and, nervous, she was driving it rather erratically down Massachusetts Avenue toward the Capitol, Dresden at her side and Graham Thompson in the rear. Dresden shared her anxiety. Released from their confinement at last, he found himself experiencing less a feeling of freedom than dread. Thompson had assured them that the car following so closely behind was also from the embassy, but Charley sensed menace in all the headlights around them. The image kept returning to his mind of their being cut down by government bullets before they even reached the Capitol. He kept seeing Maddy lying stricken in his arms, as on that rainy Delaware beach.

  He had come very close to flatly turning the ambassador down. He had already accomplished what he had set out to do, and paid a terrible price. Maddy had suffered similar deprivation. They had disclosed all they knew, turned over all their evidence, fulfilled all their obligations. However grateful he was to the British for their succor, he did not feel they had thereby incurred any new obligation. Nothin
g warranted their being sacrificed as pawns in a very British form of end game. Dresden had not turned coward, but he could not tolerate the powerlessness of his position. If he was again to put his and her life at risk, it should be on his own terms, by his own rules, in a game of his own choosing.

  But Maddy gave him no choice. She wanted out of this situation, wanted escape, and she had accepted the British’s terms. For all the excesses of her driving, her eyes were hard and steady on the road ahead, the goal ahead. Her grip on the steering wheel was just as hard, and her features were locked into a fierce expression. She was no less the beauty—if anything, her allure was all the more compelling. But she was so strange, so foreign to him. She was no longer someone he knew. In all those years of separation she had changed not at all, but in the space of a few weeks she had been transformed utterly. She was completely beyond his control.

  She had lived a life absolutely free of violence and unexpected trouble, but for two months she had been assaulted daily by little else. She had been painfully wounded and almost killed. She had seen so many others, indeed, so many long-established institutions of her nation, treated with similar brutality.

  The ambassador had explained the international concerns at issue that night in only the vaguest terms. He said there was intense military activity on both sides of the borders that joined Honduras to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Soviet ships were swarming all over the Caribbean, even as more American vessels poured in. At the same time, there was an ongoing secret if highly volatile and ill-tempered diplomatic exchange taking place in Mexico—conducted by unknown Latin American parties and the American Defense Department, not the Department of State. Hyde-Milne said he need not discuss these matters any more deeply as there was little, if anything, they or the British government could do about it.

  Left unsaid was how unfamiliar with the subject Dresden was anyway. He might be able to quote exhaustively from the works of Poe and the philosophical self-dialogues of Albert Camus, but in the matter of his country’s foreign problems he was as untutored as any bus driver or fast-food waitress. As with millions of Americans, his knowledge of these matters came only from what he occasionally saw on the network news. If there was to be a major war, he would be just as confused as they as to what it was all about.

  If the British ambassador was correct, however, that war’s opening battle would be in Washington that night, beneath the floodlit dome of the Capitol that now beckoned as they turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue. It could be decisive, the ambassador had said, and Dresden and Maddy were to have a major role in it.

  Charley the pawn. He took a deep breath to calm his unhappy nerves. It was one thing to stalk his enemies from the sanctuary of seedy bus stations and nondescript hotel rooms, even to confront them unexpectedly in their homes. It was quite another to stride into their collective midst and stand before them, vulnerable to their wrathful retaliation—indeed, demanding it.

  Hyde-Milne had promised all manner of protection. Though without explanation, he guaranteed the presence of British operatives and agents, and the help of those from two or three other NATO countries’ embassies. Graham Thompson had foreseen no difficulty in their gaining admittance to the House chambers. Maddy still had the ticket to the upper gallery she had been entitled to as Senator Calendiari’s wife. The British had quietly fetched it for her along with some fresh clothing from her locked and deserted house in McLean. For Dresden, they had produced a forged congressional press pass, the laminated plastic card bearing his photograph but issued in the fictitious name of Ian McLennan, identified as a correspondent with Thompson’s broadcast service. He had also been given the ticket numerically assigned to Thompson for a seat in the press gallery above and behind the House speaker’s rostrum. Dresden was to explain that Thompson had been sent on another assignment and he was a last-minute substitute. He had to somehow pass himself off as British. They had tried to assure him that the difficulty would be minimal. Though there would be some Secret Service and FBI agents about, the security would be handled principally by the Capitol police force, a notoriously unprofessional organization whose ranks were in large part filled with congressional patronage workers.

  Dresden was little mollified. The whole purpose of their getting past the Capitol’s security checkpoints was to expose themselves to people far more dangerous than political minions in badges.

  For all her nervousness, Maddy was showing no signs of fear. She reminded Dresden uncomfortably of some radical underground member preparing a clandestine bombing attack. He wished desperately that she might just once reach and take his hand, or share an intimate glance, or even say some kind word. But there had been no real gesture of affection from her for days.

  Coming to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue near the foot of the hill beneath the Capitol, Maddy turned left into Constitution Avenue, heading toward the ascending file of Senate office buildings that lined the thoroughfare on the left.

  “Just drive right in,” said Thompson. “There’s a major gap in the security defenses of this complex, and its bloody name is garage.”

  It was true. Those in charge of Capitol security had not exactly been far-sighted or swift thinkers. According to Maddy, they had responded to one attempted bombing by installing speed bumps at the entrances to the House and Senate office building garages, to foil terrorists in speeding cars. They had put the obstructions only in the entrance lanes, however, leaving the exit lanes clear, as though presuming terrorists obeyed all Capitol Hill traffic regulations. Now they had speed bumps in place in the exit lanes as well, but they still required only a cursory look at a congressional pass or windshield sticker to allow a car to enter, no matter what it might be carrying. Once inside one of the garages, a person had access to nearly all of the Capitol complex.

  Maddy’s pass and car sticker were valid until the end of next month. The two guards at the entrance door recognized her, in fact, and offered condolences for her husband’s passing. She thanked them sadly, but sweetly, then introduced Dresden and Thompson as security men assigned to her for her protection that night. The guards nodded and waved her on, half saluting.

  “That was uncalled for,” Thompson said, as she drove into the garage’s vast interior. “We’re both newsmen with valid credentials, may I remind you. If one of those miscreants had asked to examine them and noticed the discrepancy with your story, you might have blown the whole show.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the sweetness gone from her voice. “I wasn’t thinking. It won’t happen again.”

  “Please. Everything has to be all tickety-boo.”

  She pulled into Calendiari’s official parking space, between a Cadillac Fleetwood with Arizona plates and a Toyota from Connecticut with a teddy bear in the rear window. After turning off the engine, she took a deep breath, and then just sat there.

  “Second thoughts, Maddy?” Thompson asked.

  “No,” she said, decisively, and snapped open the door.

  “Just remember,” Thompson said, after he had gotten out. “When this is over go to the fountain at the bottom of the hill. Look for a British car with the lights off and the engine running. I don’t know what make or model it will be or who will be in it, but go to the British car. If there’s any trouble and you’re able to run for it, go directly to the fountain. Remember the British car.”

  “I think we get the idea, Mr. Thompson,” Dresden said.

  “I’m not trying to patronize you. This will be your only means of escape. We’ve deployed everyone we have available in Washington, but the other side has thousands.”

  “We understand,” said Maddy.

  With her leading, they passed through some doors and a short corridor, emerging at one of the platforms of the little subway line that connected the office buildings with the Capitol building proper. Maddy was expensively dressed in a Valentino beige coat and a bright, light blue Dior sheath that matched her eyes. She was quite definitely recognizable as a senator’s wife. Both Thompson
and Dresden were wearing dark, vested suits and passed for important officials themselves.

  The subway cars were open and seated just twelve people. Waiting their turn, they took three seats together in the rear of one, trying to look as disinterested as possible.

  “We’re going to be early,” said Thompson somewhat loudly, looking at his watch with a frown.

  “Yes,” said Dresden. He could think of nothing else to say.

  Reversing its electrical motor, the motorman urged the car back into the curving tunnel from which it had come, its rubber tires gliding it along with a gentle whoosh. As the tunnel straightened, disclosing the lights of their destination in the far distance, a terrible realization came over Dresden. He put his hand inside his coat, and swore.

  “Damn it all,” he said, whispering to Maddy beside him. “I stupidly brought along my gun.”

  “Drop it over the side,” she replied, not looking at him.

  “It might go off.”

  “Get rid of it!” she hissed. “They have metal detectors in there.”

  Glancing at their fellow passengers opposite, who were talking excitedly among themselves, Charley turned halfway around in his seat and cleared his throat as though to spit, counting on that to induce people to look away. He did spit, noisily, and then coughed loudly, dropping the pistol butt-first between the rails as he did so. The sound was detectable, but no one seemed to notice. As he turned back around, he coughed again.

  “I must do something about this throat,” he said with raised voice.

  “You certainly must,” she said with some disgust. He presumed little of it was feigned, but then she did something unexpected. She took his hand, and held it tightly against her leg, not far, as it happened, from where the bullet had struck her. They were rapidly approaching the platform at the other end.

  “We’re actually going to do it,” she said, her voice returned to a whisper. “Right now.”

  “Yes,” said Charley, “there’s no getting out of it.”

  But there was. Thompson would not be with them in the House chambers. He would have no ticket and would have to wait in the corridors outside. At any time they wished, they could find another exit and flee the building. The elaborate security was for people seeking entry, not escape. They could make their way out into the night to some future other than that the British had designed for them—if the British intended them to have a future at all.