He was dressed a little more circumspectly than was his custom in Washington—a nondescript brown summer suit, an actual tie, brown loafers. Coming west along the big department stores fronting Rideau Street, pausing to look in the windows, he appeared much the same as all the other pedestrians, as Kodakov almost always appeared.
It was only about a mile and a half between the Rideau River and the canal that bore the same name. Crossing the bridge by the Château Laurier, a castlelike hotel that was the most elegant in the city, he turned south, walking the canal bank past the Arts Centre, pausing here and there on the park-like promenade to admire the yachts and trees and buildings, and make certain of the strollers around him. Ahead he saw something that made him smile. Pedal boats. In winter, the canal had ice skaters, some of whom skated to work. In summer, there were the pedal boats. Kodakov hurried over to the concessionaire, a large ball-point pen falling from his coat pocket as he pulled out his wallet. The ticket seller retrieved it for him before Kodakov could reach it, making for a dangerous moment. If the man had pushed the pocket clip the wrong way, with the tapered end aimed at his wrist like that, he would have been dead in thirty seconds.
He failed to press the clip, sparing his life, and sparing Kodakov considerable inconvenience. The Russian thanked him and, smiling, clambered onto the seat of the nearest pedal craft. In a minute, leaning back and letting his arms fall slack, he had the silly little vessel underway downstream, back toward the Château Laurier and the Ottawa River beyond. Two pedal boats approached from the other direction. What a wonderful arrangement for a rendezvous.
Kodakov had no rendezvous to make, of course. Not yet. But when he did, this would make for great fun. It reminded him of a contact he had made with a turned double agent on a roller coaster at Busch Gardens.
When Harry York came out of his shower, his gloomy-faced butler was standing there with a message on a ridiculous silver tray. York pulled his terrycloth robe tighter around him, and took it. After the man had gone, he crumpled it and dropped it in the wastebasket. There were only two people in Canada who could possibly know what it meant.
When he was certain of the voice on the other end, he spoke. “This line is safe. Be quick.”
“We should meet,” said Sebastien.
“No time now. I have to be in Parliament. I just finished shaving.”
“I have interesting news.”
“Tell me now. Be quick.”
“The British MI-Six major, Hotchkiss, was murdered.”
“I read that interesting news in the uninteresting newspaper.”
“We didn’t do it.”
“I’m gratified.”
“The RCMP are working it as a robbery-homicide. Your regular intelligence service had a dossier on Hotchkiss and have been alerted.”
“It’s their job.”
“Do you want me to find out who took him out?”
“Don’t let it interfere with your more pressing duties. We are concerned with the fate of Canada, eh? Let the Brits look out for their own.”
18
Porique had the fire going, though it was well into morning and the sun was high. He had kept the fire going all night, replenishing it as he had his brandy, consuming it at a steady rate, as he consumed the wisdom of Edmund Burke.
Before we take from our establishment the natural, human means of estimation, and give it up to contempt, as you have done, and in doing it have incurred the penalties you well deserve to suffer, we desire that some other way be presented to us in the place of it. We shall then form our judgment. On these ideas, instead of quarreling with establishments, as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them. We are resolved to keep an established church, and established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.
Each in the degree it exists.
This principle ought even to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty, than upon those of single princes. Without instruments, these princes can do nothing. Whoever uses instruments, in finding helps, finds also impediments. Their power is therefore by no means complete; nor are they safe in extreme abuse.
Another log on the fire. Another page.
The deliberations of calamity are rarely wise … the resources of public folly are soon exhausted.… To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind. This I do not find in those who take the lead in the National Assembly.
The deliberations of calamity are rarely wise.
He had heard her stirring with the morning, but put and kept the sounds from his mind as he continued his reading. When she came out from the bedroom and stood before him, she was beautifully dressed in a tan skirt, white blouse, and blue blazer, clothes he’d not seen her in before.
“And where is Manon Lescaut?” he asked. “Who is this New England college girl?”
“Scarsdale matron is more appropriate. There was a time when I thought that’s what I’d be someday.”
She smiled, as though at herself, hesitantly. Seating herself at the other end of the chesterfield, she glanced at his book. “The existentialist again?”
“No. It’s something you gave me. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
“Philosophy and history. Do they help?”
“Philosophy, history, love, brandy, the wilderness. They all help. They help me want to stay.”
“I have to go now, Ric. I need you to drive me to Notre Dame du Laus, to catch the bus. Can you drive?”
Porique rose stiffly, and stretched. “I’m sober,” he said. “I tried, God knows, but I’m sober.”
He went to the fire, rubbing his hands together, then bent and shifted a log with the poker.
“Our idyll has been very brief.”
“Say the word, Ric, and I’ll stay. I’ll have these clothes off in an instant.”
“I wish I knew the word. I’ve been looking for it.”
Both stared at the flames, not speaking.
“All right,” she said, rising. “C’est bien. I must go. I’ll do it. I’ll do what you want, Ric.”
“It’s simple enough. You visit the Parliament Building. You leave what I need. You go back and wait. I join you when I can.”
“If you can.”
“I’m a clever man, as you’ve said.”
“Can we come back here?” she asked, smiling again, somewhat sadly. “Would it be safe?”
“Sure. It would be a good place to come to.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps we should go to the States.”
“We’ll see.”
“How will I know what you’ve decided?”
“If I decide to do it, if I think it can be done, you will not see me or hear from me until it’s time. Without word from me, you must simply do what we’ve arranged. If it’s all off, I will come for you beforehand.”
“I’m bloody scared, Ric.”
“I know. You’re very brave.”
“Kiss me, and then let’s go.”
He did, very gently, then held her for a long time, rejoicing in the soft cleanliness of her hair, of her skin. There was moisture on her cheek. Tears.
“Please,” she said. “Whatever you decide, before you do anything, try to reach Dennis Showers. We’re going to need help.”
“I tried. Last night. Several times. There was no answer.”
This meeting in the prime minister’s office was not so crowded. York had called in only generals and RCMP and security officials, and also his solicitor general, in case anyone suggested an action that mig
ht be unconstitutional. At least two of the generals did. A third merely proposed recourse to the War Measures Act.
“That would make for a lovely picnic,” York said. “I presume everyone in this room recalls 1970. All those troops in the streets. The suspension of habeas corpus. Mad Pierre having people dragged from their homes and thrown into jail. Panic everywhere. I tell you, that colossal blunder of Trudeau’s made Rene Levesque. It made the separatists. Made the present situation inevitable.”
Everyone in the room nodded but the generals.
“The situation now is more serious than then,” said one of them.
York raised a hand and brought it down on his desk top again with a thud.
“I know it’s serious! Goddamn serious! Though I wish they’d stay the flaming hell out of our sovereign business, I accept the CIA reports. I believe them. We face the prospect of armed insurrections, sabotage, the breakdown of civil authority; death, famine, and pestilence, too. It’s worse than you think. He waved a typewritten report at them. “Explosive are coming in from Quebec. There are all sorts of little Francophone Guy Fawkes running around.”
“What’s that?” asked the intelligence chief. “We have nothing on that.”
“I got this from other sources.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew you’d have nothing on it.”
The damned libertarians should never have been allowed to separate intelligence from the RCMP. It lobotomized the RCMP while limiting intelligence. One of York’s early priorities had been to recombine the two services, but his parliamentary efforts to do so had come to nothing.
“Deploy the army,” said the solicitor general, in his quiet voice. “Deploy the RCMP. Postpone the constitutional debate. And let everyone calm down.”
“Too right,” said one of the generals.
“Too late,” said York. “If I cancel the debate, Alberta will go right off. Okay, tensions are high, but if we wait they’ll only get worse. We have to keep control of this. We have to move quickly, get the debate over and done with. End it. If this is going to work, it must be done now.”
He looked at each of them in turn, in quick glances, his brows raised in question, his expression otherwise grim.
“I want reinforcements for the pipeline,” said the head of the RCMP.
“They’re yours,” said York. “What can you give him, general?”
“Two battalions.”
“Plus helicopters.”
“Helicopters, too,” said York. “Any other requests short of a declaration of war?”
Whatever they wanted, they didn’t ask for it. They stared back at him, glumly, waiting for him to end the meeting. He rose.
“That’s it. I’d like you all back here tomorrow morning at nine.”
“What about security here in Ottawa?” said the chief of intelligence.
“It’s fine,” York said. “Are you getting frightened?”
“Those ‘Guy Fawkes.’”
“The much-belittled Papineau Fils. Don’t worry. We’re attending to them.”
York hurried down the steps from the Parliament Building and climbed into his waiting Oldsmobile. At his request, the RCMP had augmented his chase car with a lead vehicle, and, put his armed detectives in it.
“Just around to Elgin Street and the Sparks Street Mall,” York said to the driver. “I want to do some quick shopping.”
“I’ll be happy to do that for you, sir.”
“Thank you, no. A man buys his own pipes.”
York picked up one of the afternoon papers that had been left for him on the seat. It was full of news and commentary on the constitutional question. Except for the sports and women’s sections, there wasn’t a page without something about it. Though nothing useful.
The drive was very short. York had not yet reached the editorial page when his driver pulled to the curb and hurried around to open his door. His driver was also an RCMP detective, armed with a .38 special police revolver, as much as that mattered with him standing there, one hand on the door, his back to the crowd of office workers and shoppers, looking at York instead of what ought better concern him.
York stepped out of the car, standing straight.
“I won’t be but fifteen or twenty minutes,” he said.
The assassin was upon them as quick as some creature from the wild, a predator revealing his menace only at the last moment. The driver was struck twice in the back by bullets and fell. York dove for the sidewalk. The man fired once more, hitting the prime minister in the upper thigh, then fled. There was shouting, two more gun shots, and a woman’s screams. And heard above all else, Harry York’s bellowed curses.
With Showers and Alixe in the back, Joyce drove the gray Ford slowly past the address on Rue Melisande in Hull. It was the third time they had done this. They had spent the night in a cheap motel northeast of Ottawa near the river, breakfasted well, picked up the money at the telegraph office without incident, and driven to the address given on the note. Puzzled, they had moved on quickly, driving through the neighborhood, rechecking their maps, and then driving all over Hull in exploration of streets with names remotely resembling Melisande. Then they had done the same in Ottawa, without success, returning again to the building on Rue Melisande, and once again moving on. Joyce had bought a street guide and laboriously examined it, while Showers pondered Porique’s notebook and the note from the Montreal closet. A puzzle indeed. The only solution was in Rue Melisande. And so they had gone back the third time.
It was a short street, running from Rue Maisonneuve to the river, in the most expensive neighborhood in Hull. The building at No. 114 was a glittering, canopied, very modern high rise, with a uniformed doorman. As they sat parked at the curb across the street, a Cadillac Seville pulled up and a very elegantly dressed young woman left it and hurried through the entrance. She looked nothing at all like the Felicity Stuart in the photograph or in any of their imaginations.
“Arteriosclerosis, age eighty-nine, active in the Alliance Francaise,” said Joyce.
“What?”
“That woman. Her obituary. She takes mighty nice care of herself.”
“You’re a ghoul, Mr. Joyce,” Alixe said.
“I’m in that kind of business. Showers, my man, I think this is the place.”
“Your remarks about junkies, whores, and dirty revolutionaries notwithstanding.”
“You said she was a classy lady. Maybe she decided enough was enough and it was time to go back to the good old days. You said Porique had money.”
“Not this much, not by half.”
“We’ve made a lot of assumptions, Toby. That this all has something to do with Canadian radical politics. That your friend Porique is a fugitive from the Canadian government. That Felicity has become some sort of gun moll.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, you could be wrong.”
“Maybe he turned to a life of crime, my man. Maybe he’s dealing heavy in Montreal coke. I know of dealers in Washington, very black dealers, who live on Massachusetts Avenue in digs like this.”
“Not Porique. That’s utterly ridiculous.”
“Okay, okay. Maybe he is a revolutionary. Maybe this is just what you’d call first-class cover.”
“I’m going to go in,” Showers said.
He crossed the street briskly, buttoning his blazer, nodding to the doorman as without hesitation the man swung open the door. Showers unquestionably looked as though he belonged in such a building, doubtless more so than some of its tenants.
There was a large vestibule with a wall directory listing residents and a house telephone adjacent to it. Showers searched over the names and numbers, which were arranged alphabetically, looking for apartment 735.
He found it. The name next to it was “Chauncey McQuillan.” He shook his head, close to laughing, then picked up the telephone receiver.
He nodded again to the doorman on his way out, striding just as briskly back to the car.
&nb
sp; “Drive on,” he said, getting in the back seat with Alixe. “The doorman should think I’m going away.”
Joyce did so.
“That high rise is the place,” Showers said. “Pull up around the corner.”
“Are you sure?” Alixe said. “Did you talk to her?”
“I didn’t talk to anyone. No one was home. But the name listed on the wall directory is Chauncey McQuillan.”
“Well, hot damn,” said Joyce. “That clears up everything.”
“Chauncey McQuillan is the name of a social studies teacher I had in my freshman year in high school. It was in his class that I first met Felicity. He was something of a hero to us.”
They parked the car.
“Now what?”
“Now, Mr. Joyce, we find a way to get into that apartment.”
“I don’t do windows, not in high rises.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s a top-security joint, my man. They’s rich folks in there. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s closed-circuit TV.”
“Can’t you pick a lock?”
“Most any lock. But I have to get to it.”
“C’est très simple,” said Alixe.
The two men looked at her.
“Mr. Joyce, you’re, well, too obvious, if you know what I mean, to come in through the front without making the doorman suspicious. So you must find the delivery door. There has to be one, for garbage removal, movers, things like that. You go to it, and Toby will let you in.”
“And how does he get in?”
“He will wait until he sees some people entering, and then go in with them, while I distract the doorman.”
“How will you distract him?”
“I’m a resourceful girl. I’ll think of something.”
What she thought of was to pretend to twist her ankle. She gave a most convincing performance, falling to the ground and scraping her knee, crying out from the pain. The doorman, a thin-faced, elderly fellow, hurried to her side and helped her to her feet. Wincing, she asked if she could go inside and sit down a moment. By the time he set her in one of the lobby chairs, Showers was in the basement. Still wincing, Alixe asked if the doorman might get her some antiseptic and a bandage for her bloodied knee. By the time he returned with it, she was gone.
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