by Stuart Woods
“Please be seated,” he said, looking around. He saw his wife, representing the CIA; the director of the FBI, James Heller; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marvin Moore; his National Security Advisor, Alice Ramirez; and the vice president, Howard Kiel. Other presidents had been briefed by one agency at a tune, but Will preferred having them all in the same room at the same time, since it promoted interagency information sharing. “Good morning to you all,” he said.
There was a murmur of greetings in response.
“Let’s get started. General Moore?”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff leaned forward in his seat. “Mr. President, it was a fairly quiet night. We have a helicopter down in Afghanistan, but it looks like mechanical problems. One injured, none dead. The chopper is being repaired. Nothing else of note.”
“Thank you, General.” Will went from person to person until everyone had reported. “Thank you, all. Jim, would you and Kate stay?”
The FBI director kept his seat, and so did Kate.
When the others had cleared the room, Will spoke again. “Jim, Senator Wallace of South Carolina was murdered this morning in Chester, South Carolina.”
“What?” the director asked, looking alarmed.
Heller always said “What?” to anything; put to him. Will let it sink in. “Get in touch with the local sheriff down there, Tom Stribling, and get some of your people up there from Columbia or Atlanta, or wherever’s closest, and start an investigation.”
“Mr. President, murder is not a federal crime,” Heller said.
Will sighed. He had inherited Heller from the previous administration, and he found him barely competent and, sometimes, a little dense. He had not replaced him on taking office, because he felt that the position of FBI director should not be a political appointment, subject to change with every administration. But now, having worked with the man for a year and a half, he had decided to replace him at the first reasonable opportunity. “Murder of a federal official is a federal crime,” he said, trying not to sound impatient.
“Oh, of course,” Heller said, turning a little pink. “Any details?”
“The sheriff will have them. All I know is that he was shot and killed instantly.”
“Any suspects?”
“Jim, I don’t know. Ask the sheriff. Kate, do you have any information that might be useful to the director?”
“I’ll check with my staff when I get to Langley, Mr. President,” she said. She always addressed him formally when doing government business in the company of others.
“I think we’re done, then,” Will said.
“Mr. President, may I have a moment?” Kate asked.
“Of course. Goodbye, Jim. Brief me personally when you have a grip on the Wallace murder.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” the director said. He got up and left.
Will went and sat by Kate. “Are you going to tell Heller about Freddie’s little indiscretion?”
“I don’t think so, unless it turns out later to have some relevance to his murder,” she said.
“I think that’s just as well.”
“However, the indiscretion reminds me of something that you and I should discuss.”
“Shoot.”
“I expect you remember Ed Rawls.”
“I believe I do,” Will said dryly. Ed Rawls was a disgraced former CIA operations officer, who had sold information to the Russians a few years back. He had been one of the Agency’s top operatives and Kate’s mentor there, until, largely through her efforts, he had been exposed, tried, and convicted. He was now doing twenty-five years to life at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
“I have a lot to tell you about Ed Rawls—things I had hoped you wouldn’t have to know. Freddie’s death has dredged it up.”
“You sound as though I’m not going to like this,” Will said.
“You’re not,” Kate replied. “”Neither do I. But it’s time you knew.“
4
Kate took a deep breath and began, using the voice she used when briefing the president, not the one she used when giving her husband bad news. “Christmas three years ago, when you were deciding whether to run, we were in Delano with your folks. Do you remember that I had to go somewhere on business?”
“Yes, you took the car, and I thought it was very odd, but I’ve been trained not to ask questions when you say ‘business.”“
“The business was Ed Rawls. I had a letter from him that morning, addressed to your parents’ house, asking me to come to see him at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.”
“And you went to see him?”
“Yes.”
“Why on earth did you do that? It would certainly be against Agency policy, wouldn’t it?”
“Not if I reported the visit, and I did. Something in the letter made it necessary.”
“What was in the letter?”
“He knew about Joe Adams.”
Adams had been vice president at the time, and only the day before, he had invited Will and Kate to Camp David for brunch and told them that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Will was stunned. “Jesus, you and I had only known about it for twenty-four hours, and I thought we were the only ones. How could a man in prison get that information?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He did say that all sorts of things went on there that no one on the outside could imagine. He said there were prisoners there with cell phones. For all I know, he might have been one of them.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me at the time,” Will said.
“There’s more. Freddie Wallace also found out about Joe’s condition and leaked it to a columnist, probably Hogan Parks.”
“Why didn’t Parks use it?”
“Because Ed somehow got to Freddie and threatened to expose his relationship with the black woman, if he let Parks run the story.”
Will shook his head. “This is insane, all of it. A man in prison knows the most intimate secrets of the vice president and a United States senator?”
“You have to remember who Ed is, or rather, was. Of all the people I knew in the Agency, Ed had the widest range of contacts in government and the press. In those days, he could find out anything, track down any rumor, scare anybody to death, if he had to. He was not the sort of man you’d want for an enemy.”
“I suppose not. But why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because of the real reason Ed wanted to see me in Atlanta.”
“Which was?”
“He wanted a presidential pardon, and he thought if he helped you wm the election you might come through for him.”
“This is the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Will said.
“Except that he did help you get elected. In fact, you could say that without his help, you would not have been elected.”
Will blinked. “By dealing with Freddie about Joe Adams?”
“Exactly. He got a letter to Freddie, threatening to expose his relationship with the woman if he used the information about Joe’s health. Freddie somehow figured out where the letter came from and had Ed thrown in some dungeon part of the Atlanta pen for a week, but when Ed got out, he managed to convince Freddie that he had the wrong man, and he continued to write to him, having letters sent from other places. He kept his foot on Freddie’s neck for months.”
“And he expects me to pardon him for that?”
“He does.”
“And how do you feel about this?”
“At the time, I thought he was crazy, and I told him so, but he actually did the things he said he would do. Think back: During the summer before the election, after the president’s stroke and Joe’s becoming acting president, what would have happened if Freddie had managed to expose Joe’s illness and the fact that Joe had told you about it? I’ll tell you: Joe would have been forced to resign, you would have been disgraced, and the speaker of the House—your opponent in the race—Eft Efton, would have become president.”
Will thought about that. “I suppose you’re right.”
“So, looking at it from your point of view, and incidentally, mine, Ed Rawls performed a valuable service for his country by keeping that shit Efton out of the White House.”
“You have a point,” Will said. “Was Rawls the one who leaked the story about Freddie and his lover later on?”
“Yes, but he did it with a light touch, so that it could never be substantiated. Freddie denied everything, and it all went away.”
“And what would the CIA’s position be on a pardon for Ed Rawls?”
“Until recently, dead set against it, but that position is softening.”
“Why?”
“Because Ed still has friends at the Agency, and because I’m now director of Central Intelligence.”
“So you’re sympathetic?”
“Ed is not well. He’s had some health problems, and he’s seventy now. He still has that house on the island of Islesboro, in Maine— you remember, I went to visit him and his wife there once?”
“Yes, vaguely.”
“He says he wants to die there. If it were up to me, I couldn’t deny him that.”
“Kate, I might as well pardon Aldrich Ames or that FBI agent who was selling stuff to the Russians for years and years. It would be worse than that stupid pardon that Bill Clinton granted that fugitive in Switzerland on his last day in office.”
“Will, I can’t tell you that this is politically feasible; all I can say is that, if you felt grateful enough to Ed to pardon him, I could make it all right at the Agency. Certainly, you couldn’t do it during your first term. You could pardon him on grounds of ill health. All I ask is that you think about it. Neither of us has to mention this to anyone else.”
“All right, I’ll think about it,” Will said.
There was a sharp rap on the door, and Cora Parker stuck her head in. “Mr. President, CNN has something on Senator Wallace’s death,” she said. “Shall I turn it on?”
“Please, Cora.”
There were four television sets in the Oval Office, tuned to the three major networks and CNN. Cora switched on the CNN set.
A reporter was standing a few yards from a rustic cabin beside a lake.“… and the senator was standing in the kitchen, only a few feet from the window.” He pointed, and the camera zoomed in on a smashed windowpane. “What has a lot of people in Washington worried is that Senator Wallace was rumored to have kept extensive files on various people in government and that the information in those files might find its way into the media. According to the rumor, only J. Edgar Hoover had more dirt on more important people. Now back to the studio.”
“You think that’s true?” Kate asked.
“I wouldn’t put it past Freddie,” Will said. “And next week, I’m going to give a funeral oration for a man who did everything he could to destroy my political career and my reputation.”
“If Freddie kept files like that, who would have them?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Will said.
In Chester, South Carolina, Elizabeth Johnson opened a desk drawer in the den of her home and took out a key. She went down the stairs to her basement and to a pile of boxes in a corner. She moved one, exposing a small filing cabinet, the kind that holds index cards. Tentatively, she inserted the key into the little cabinet and pulled open one of the four drawers. She switched on a light, illuminating a row of precisely filed cards, all of them labeled with the neatly printed names of some of the best-known, most powerful people in the country. Freddie had always been a splendid record keeper.
Elizabeth had meant to look through them, but instead, she stared at the cards as if they were a poisonous reptile. She closed the drawer, locked the cabinet, and went back upstairs. Instead of returning the key to the desk drawer, she went into her bedroom closet and pushed aside the clothes hanging there. She opened the wall safe that she had bought to keep the jewelry that Freddie had given her over the years, then she put the file cabinet key inside, closed the safe, and returned the clothes to their original position.
She would wait awhile, until the furor over Freddie’s death had died down, then she would burn all those index cards in her fireplace.
5
James Heller, back in his office at the Hoover Building, called a meeting of the half-dozen highest-ranking people at the FBI, all of them men.
“Gentlemen, I have some news for you,” Heller said, self-importantly. “Senator Frederick Wallace of South Carolina was murdered this morning.” He waited for a response.
“Yes, sir,” the deputy director for criminal investigations said. “It was On CNN a few minutes ago.”
Heller blinked. “But the president himself told me about it only a few minutes ago. He got it from the sheriff down there.” He somehow viewed this as a personal betrayal by CNN.
“Yes Sir,” the DDCI said.
“Bob,” Heller said, fixing the DDCI with his gaze. “I want you to call the agent in charge of the Columbia office on the phone right away and have him get some men over to Chester and talk to that sheriff.”
“I have already done so, sir,” the DDCI replied.
Heller blinked. “Oh.” He took a deep breath and tried to think. “As I’m sure you know, the murder of a federal official is a federal crime—”
“Yes, sir, I know that.”
“So we’re taking over this investigation. This small-town sheriff isn’t going to have the resources to properly investigate this killing.”
“I have already given those instructions to the AIC in Columbia,” the DDCI said. “The investigation is ours now.”
“Good. So, what do we know so far?”
“I spoke to Sheriff Stribling, and he tells me that Senator Wallace was shot through a kitchen window by a sniper, who was probably three hundred yards or more away, since the land around the cabin was cleared to that distance, affording no hiding place for a shooter. A single twenty-two-caliber bullet struck him in the left temple, killing him instantly.”
“Good, good. And what have our people turned up there?”
“Sir, Chester is more than an hour’s drive from Columbia. They would have left Columbia no more than fifteen minutes ago.”
“Do we have any suspects?”
“Sir, as you know Senator Wallace was a very popular man on the right wing of the Republican Party.”
“I didn’t know there was any other wing of the Republican Party.”
“Be that as it may, sir, the senator was very unpopular with almost everybody to the left of him. He was a very skillful obstructionist in the Senate, managing to block many pieces of legislation and judicial appointments, some of them sent up by Republican presidents. He had many enemies, and the first assessment of people with motive to kill him would run into the hundreds, perhaps thousands. By the time we eliminate everyone who could not have been in Chester, South Carolina, this morning, we may have pared the list to dozens.
“It’s possible that he was killed for political motives, but it’s just as possible that he was killed because of some personal grudge, by someone in his own hometown. We expect Sheriff Stribling to be valuable in that part of the investigation, so I’ve told our AIC to leave the sheriff in charge of the local investigation, liaising through one of our agents, who will be assigned to assist him.”
“So you’re telling me we don’t have a clue as to who killed him?”
“Sir, we’ve known about the murder for less than half an hour. It’s a bit early in the investigation to begin drawing conclusions.”
“Well, let me give you my take on this, Bob,” the director said.
I’d very much like to hear that, sir,“ the DDCI replied without apparent irony.
“I think what we’ve got here is a vast left-wing conspiracy to eliminate a senator who has driven the left nuts for decades.”
“Sir, with respect, I don’t think we’ve had a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country since the forties, maybe as far back as when S
talin and Hitler signed a nonaggression pact, which caused a lot of American communists to leave the party.”
“Are you suggesting a communist conspiracy, Bob?”
“No, sir, I am not,” the DDCI said, rather desperately.
“So, you think it’s a vast right-wing conspiracy?”
“I have not formed that opinion or any other opinion, sir. I think we have to wait until we have some evidence upon which to base a judgment, and that may take days or weeks, assuming there is any evidence.”
