Grass Roots

by Stuart Woods

  “Oh my God,” Tom Black said. “Is that true?”

  “While we didn’t choose him, we certainly paid his fee—twenty-five thousand dollars,” the young man said.

  The reporter came on camera. “I asked Will Lee about this only moments later,” she said.

  Will’s face appeared on camera, looking serious.

  “Mr. Lee,” the reporter asked, “were you aware that your fee was being paid by a white supremacist group?”

  “I was completely unaware of that until five minutes ago,” Will replied. “Shortly after Judge Boggs assigned me to the case, my office received a plain brown envelope containing twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and an unsigned note saying it was for the defense of Larry Moody. That same day, I reported to Judge Boggs that someone, who wished to remain anonymous, had paid a retainer for the defense of Larry Moody, and I asked that Larry be removed from the indigent defendants’ list and that I not be paid a fee from public funds.”

  “So you were well paid for your defense work?” she asked.

  “The envelope containing the money is still in my safe, and I have not spent a dime of it. In light of today’s discovery of where it came from, I have decided to donate the entire amount to ARE, Attorneys for Racial Equality, where I hope it will be used in the defense of indigent black defendants. I myself want no part of it.”

  “Whew!” Tom Black sighed.

  “That was scary,” Kitty said, holding a hand to her breast.

  “You never mentioned the money,” Billy Lee said.

  “To tell you the truth, I just forgot about it,” Will said, “and a good thing, too, or I would probably have dumped it into the campaign. It’s still sitting in my safe in the cottage.”

  “You know,” Tom Black said, “I’m beginning to think I may not be cut out for politics; I’m not sure my heart is strong enough.”

  “So what’s the next step in the campaign, Will?” his mother asked.

  “I’m flying back to Atlanta with Tom and Kitty tomorrow morning. We’re going to spend the rest of our time in the Atlanta suburbs, where we badly need votes. My only scheduled appearance is Sunday morning at Dr. Don’s church.”

  “Have you figured out what you’re going to say to those people?” Patricia Lee asked.

  Will shook his head. “I haven’t a clue.”

  25

  Perkerson had never seen the Archon in this sort of mood. The man seemed both depressed and agitated. He ranged nervously about his study, pouring drinks, fiddling with things on his desk, warming his hands at the fire.

  “The girl was an FBI informer,” Willingham said, taking a large sip of his bourbon. “I got some inside information. She was arrested last year on a drug charge, and she dealt with them in order not to be prosecuted. Apparently, they sent her to Leonard Allgood’s office, where she was hired.”

  Perkerson was shaken. “That means the FBI must know about me,” he said. “Why haven’t they tried to arrest me?”

  “Perhaps they were hoping you’d lead them to me. Are you sure you weren’t followed here tonight?”

  “Absolutely positive.”

  “Well, you’re out of the net, then, since the girl and I are the only ones who knew where you were, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did the girl know about me?”

  “No,” Perkerson lied. How long had it been since he had told her who the Archon was? Had she had time to report the information?

  “Good. Apparently, I’m in the clear, too. I’ve had the house and my telephones swept. No devices.” He went to the safe behind the liquor cabinet and took out an envelope. “Here is a new set of identification,” he said. “Burn your old license and cards in the fireplace now. Your new name is Howard James.”

  Perkerson did as he was told. The plastic cards melted away in the fire.

  The Archon tossed him some keys. “There is a Volvo station wagon parked in the northeast corner of the Lenox Square shopping mall. Take the Volvo and leave your car there with the keys in the glove compartment. It will be disposed of.”

  Perkerson nodded.

  The Archon still looked worried.

  “Is something else wrong, sir?”

  “We have a situation,” Willingham said.

  “How can I help?” Perkerson asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

  “I’ll come to that in a minute. Harry, I’ve never for a moment questioned your loyalty, but I have to now. I want to know if you’re ready to die, if necessary.”

  “Yessir, I am,” Perkerson answered without hesitation.

  Willingham sat down heavily in the chair across from Perkerson. “It may come to that,” he said. “I hope not, but it may.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “You’re like a brother to me, Harry. You know I wouldn’t give the order unless I absolutely had to.”

  “I know that, sir.”

  “There’s something else. I’m beginning to feel the strain of leadership; I have to question my own resolve.”

  “Not you, sir.”

  “You have to help me, Harry.”

  “Of course I will, sir.”

  “I’m going to give you an irrevocable order.”

  “I would never allow anyone to revoke your orders, sir.”

  “I mean irrevocable, even by me. If I should weaken, you must be strong and carry out this assignment, regardless of anything further I have to say about it.”

  “If that’s what you want, sir.”

  “We have a situation,” Willingham said again.

  Perkerson waited for him to get to the point.

  “This fellow Lee has turned out to be a problem. He failed us in Larry Moody’s trial. I had high hopes for Larry. I had hoped that, one day, he might be as good as you. It was only chance that tripped him up on his maiden assignment. Lee allowed Larry to be convicted, I think, because after he heard the schoolteacher’s testimony, he began to think that Larry was guilty. I tried to reason with him, but he ignored me, even insulted me.”

  “Sir, as far as I’m concerned, that’s reason enough to kill him.”

  “Perhaps, but there’s the election, too. I thought Lee would be a weaker candidate than Mack Dean, but I was wrong. Calhoun’s pollsters are showing the two nearly even. I can’t take a chance on Lee’s getting any luckier; there’s too much riding on it. You realize that, with Calhoun elected, we would have our own man in the United States Senate?”

  “Yessir.”

  “My plan is twofold: First, I want his death to look accidental, if at all possible. I believe I know how to accomplish that. Second, I have a way to simultaneously destroy his reputation. This is important to me. It’s because of the way he spoke to me this morning at the courthouse.”

  Willingham reached into his pocket and produced a handful of plastic bags. He smiled slightly. “This is something I came up with in Vietnam, but I’ve never had a chance to use it until now. These bags can be bought at any grocery store. They are of two thicknesses of weight: one will dissolve in gasoline in a little over an hour; the other will take something between two and three hours.”

  Willingham went on explaining exactly how his plan would work. Perkerson had to admit it was brilliant.

  “If this doesn’t work,” Willingham said, “then I will leave his demise in your hands. I realize that on such short notice it may not be possible to make his death look like an accident. In that event, you may use whatever means are necessary, and I realize that may mean the sniper’s rifle.”

  Perkerson nodded. “I’ll use it if I have to.”

  “If you have to kill him openly, you must never be taken alive, do you understand?”

  “I understand, sir. In that event, I know what I have to do.”

  “If my plan works, he will be dead before his appearance at the church on Sunday. If not, stay away from the church. We can’t have it seem that his death has anything to do with his appearance there. It would be best if he di
ed before the polls open on Tuesday, but he absolutely must be dead before the polls close on Tuesday, at seven P.M. A dead man can’t be elected; the man with the second-largest number of votes will be declared the winner. Do you have it all straight?”

  Perkerson nodded. “Yessir, I do. I promise you he will not live to see the polls close.”

  “This order is irrevocable; not even I may change it.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  They walked to the door together. “Wait until just before daylight to plant the plastic bags,” Willingham said. “He has to be back in Atlanta early tomorrow morning; he’s advertised to be speaking at nine.”

  “Yessir.”

  Willingham put his hands on Perkerson’s shoulders. “I know I can count on you, my boy,” he said. “If we don’t meet again, I want you to know how grateful I am for your loyalty.”

  Perkerson’s eyes brimmed over with tears. “Yes, sir.”

  Willingham embraced him, then sent him on his way.

  26

  Will, Tom, and Kitty left the Delano farm at six-thirty, in the dark of the November morning. It was Friday, and he had a nine-o’clock appearance at a businessmen’s breakfast in Lawrenceville, in the northern Atlanta suburbs. Tom and Kitty tried to doze in the car, to catch a few moments more of sleep before truly greeting the day. Will was working on waking up, because he had to fly.

  As he pulled into the entrance of Roosevelt Memorial Field, the Meriwether County airport, a predawn light was in the sky, and he was surprised to be met by a station wagon, on its way out of the airport. He got a glimpse of the driver, but he didn’t know him. Could some visitor have arrived at this hour? Will looked at the pilot-operated runway lights, which turned themselves off automatically after fifteen minutes of use. They were off. He wondered if someone had perhaps been trying to steal gear from the airplanes parked there.

  As he pulled the car up to the Cessna, he could see nothing amiss, with his airplane or the others, nor were there any airplanes he didn’t know. He roused his companions, and they got their bags into the luggage compartment. Tom and Kitty climbed aboard while Will did his normal preflight inspection and checked the fuel for water, which sometimes condensed in the tanks during the cool evening hours, or arrived in contaminated fuel. Then he climbed into the airplane and began working through his checklist.

  Tom was already snoring softly.

  Will started the engine, taxied into the runway, performed his usual run-up procedure, then centered the airplane on the runway, put in ten degrees of flaps, and shoved the throttle in. The airplane began to roll; at sixty knots, he pulled back on the yoke, and the Cessna rose into the air. The sun was just coming up.

  They climbed through the morning haze, over the green fields and woods, and Will set the autopilot to take them to a point southeast of Hartsfield International Airport, so as to avoid the Terminal Control Area around the huge facility. He never filed a flight plan on this forty-minute hop, and at this time of day, there would be few planes at his altitude, so he didn’t check in with air-traffic control and ask for traffic advisories. He leveled off at three thousand feet, and the little airplane drummed its way smoothly through the still morning air.

  Thirty-five minutes later, they were over Stone Mountain, the huge lump of granite in the northeast Atlanta suburbs, and descending into Peachtree De Kalb Airport, to the traffic pattern of two thousand feet above mean sea level, which was a thousand feet above ground level. Will listened to the Automated Traffic Information Service on the radio, then switched to the frequency of Peachtree De Kalb Tower. “Good morning, Peachtree Tower, this is November One Two Three Tango, six miles to the southeast, with information Alpha, for landing.”

  Then the airplane’s engine stopped.

  “Good morning, One Two Three Tango,” the controller answered. “Enter a left downwind for runway two zero left; cleared to land; no traffic in the pattern.”

  One moment the engine had been running smoothly, now there was only the sound of the wind rushing past the airplane.

  Will couldn’t believe it. Quickly, he ran through the procedure for a restart, while pulling the nose of the aircraft up to establish its best glide speed of eighty knots. The engine did not restart.

  “Will, what’s wrong?” Kitty asked, panic in her voice.

  Tom woke up. “What’s going on?”

  “Engine failure,” Will said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Both of you tighten your seat belts and be quiet. I’ll talk to you when I have time. Right now, I’ve got to find a place to set this thing down.”

  Will fought his memory for what to do next. Fly the airplane; airspeed eighty knots. He looked at the altimeter: 2,700 feet MSL, 1,700 feet above the ground. The airplane had a glide range of about two miles for every thousand feet of altitude; that meant he could fly for only three miles or so before he met the earth. He glanced at the distance-measuring equipment: five and a half miles to the airport. He tried to remember where the wind was: from the northwest at four knots. His direction was good to get the best out of the wind, but there wasn’t much of it. He began looking desperately at the ground.

  The airplane was descending at a rate of five hundred feet per minute over a densely packed suburban neighborhood of houses, shopping strips, and office parks. To make matters worse, the area was, like most of Greater Atlanta, thickly forested. He saw the northeast expressway pass under him; rush-hour traffic was heavy—no landing on the highway. The meridian, he thought, but then they were already past it, and there were too many bridges across it anyway. He continued straight ahead, in the direction of the airport.

  His mind, past the first panic, began to work better. He pressed the push-to-talk button on the yoke. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he said, “Cessna One Two Three Tango has engine failure four and a half miles southeast of Peachtree Airport. Restart has failed; I’m going in.”

  “Roger, One Two Three Tango,” the tower replied. “I have you in sight; I’ll follow your progress and alert emergency services.”

  “Can you suggest a landing place?” Will asked.

  “Negative,” the controller replied. “You are over a heavily populated area; you’ll just have to do the best you can. Watch out for WSB radio tower, eleven o’clock and two miles.”

  Will found the flashing lights of the tower. He saw a high school football field, but rejected it; it was only a little over three hundred feet long, and there was what appeared to be a marching band practicing on it. He needed a thousand feet of space to land—seven hundred and fifty was the absolute minimum. He kept looking. He was down to seven hundred feet. He had to commit.

  To his right, he saw a long, low building with a white roof, and immediately next to it, a large parking lot. The parking lot was his only chance; he turned toward it and began to think about when to put the landing gear down and whether to use flaps. He judged himself a little high and fast for the approach, but if he put the gear down, that would alter his glide path radically. Instead, he put in ten degrees of flaps. Immediately, the airplane began to rise and slow, and he adjusted trim to compensate. The lot was getting closer now, and he would clear the tall pine trees at its edge, he felt sure. Then he could see the lot better, and his heart sank. It was rapidly filling with cars, streaming in from the street, going in unpredictable directions. There were people walking from their cars to work in the building. He could not land there without killing himself and his passengers and people on the ground, too. With no engine, they would never hear him coming.

  Suddenly, he realized the roof of the building was flat. How long was it? No time to figure it out. He turned left twenty degrees and pointed at the building. It was his only hope. He pulled the mixture knob all the way out, and switched off the ignition and the master switch. He didn’t want the engine coming to life while he was landing.

  He was no more than two hundred yards out and a hundred feet high when he lowered the gear and flicked in a full forty degrees of flaps. The nose came up a bit
, and his airspeed dropped under sixty knots, too slow. He pushed the nose down, picked up five knots and aimed at a point ten yards before the edge of the roof, knowing from experience that the high-winged aircraft had a tendency to float.

  “Brace yourselves!” he said to Tom and Kitty.

  For a moment he seemed to be below the edge of the roof. Realizing his error, he yanked back on the yoke and the airplane came up a few feet, then settled quickly. Then there was a thump, and the nose dropped, and the airplane was on the roof. Gravel from the roof spewed up from the wheels and drummed against the bottom of the fuselage, and the opposite end of the long roof seemed to race toward the airplane. Will reached over and flipped up the flap switch.

  The airplane sank more and slowed. Will hit the brakes as hard as he could.

  The Cessna came to a halt. Will put his face in his hands and breathed as deeply as he could; he was shaking violently, and he felt as if he might throw up. With a trembling hand, he undid his seat belt, opened the door, and got out of the airplane; he took a few steps, then sank into a sitting position. The gravel under him was six or eight inches deep; that was what had stopped them so quickly. He looked at the airplane; the wheels were sunk in the gravel almost to the hubs.

  “Is everybody okay in there?” he shouted weakly.

  “I think so,” Tom said. “Kitty looks all right, but she won’t say anything.”

  “Go to hell, both of you!” Kitty suddenly shouted; then she hopped out of the airplane on Will’s side. “Are you crazy?” she demanded. “Why did you do that?”

  Will didn’t feel that he could stand up yet. “Kitty, I didn’t do it on purpose. The engine failed.”

  “Oh,” she said. She was breathing rapidly.

  Tom got out of the airplane and joined them. “What a hell of a way to wake up in the morning!”

  From a distance, ambulances and police cars could be heard approaching. Then a panel in the building’s roof opened and a man stuck his head up.

  “Jesus Christ!” he blurted. “Are you people okay? Do you need any help?”

  Will looked at his wristwatch: eight-twenty. “Do you think you could call us a taxi?” he asked. “We have to be in Lawrenceville by nine o’clock.”