Judith smiled at a private irony. During dinner, Forrestal had made it clear how much he loathed Stalin. But it was Stalin now keeping him alive. At that very moment, Roosevelt was with the Soviet leader, along with Churchill, in the Crimea. The President could not attend an important state funeral if he was out of the country.
Tench eyed her. “Why’re you grinning like the Cheshire cat?”
Judith cleared her thoughts. She returned her attention to her bed, her body, and the soft man lying with her.
“Just thinking of you as Secretary of the Navy. You’d be wonderful.”
“I would, thank you.”
He rolled his feet off the bed.
“I’ve got to go. I can convince her I stopped off for a beer, but not if I stay away much longer.”
“I understand.”
Tench stood, droopy and white, so unlike her own russet body. He dressed while she lay languorous on the bed, exposed, to keep him interested and to keep her control of him.
“You know,” he said with a chuckle, stepping into his trousers, “you talk about whose funeral would get Roosevelt out of the White House? I’ll tell you the truth—if my wife died, the whole goddam city would attend. Her father ran the Senate for thirty years. Roosevelt would be there.”
Judith tilted her head. She waited for him to button his starched shirt, then stood. She wrapped him in her arms, to lay her skin and scent against his expensive suit. He would have to hide these clothes from his wife.
“You know how you asked me what I want?”
Tench squirmed inside her grasp. He seemed to consider taking his clothes off again. He cleared his throat.
“You come up with something?”
“I know you’re married. I’m not asking for anything like that.”
He nodded, relieved. “That’s good.” He kissed her. She licked around his lips, as if to clean away icing.
“What?” he whispered.
“I want to meet President Roosevelt.”
Tench stood slack-jawed and greedy while Judith worked her tongue and hips on him. He took a deep breath, sinking into her again. She loosened her arms around him so he could leave. She stepped away. He looked as if he might fall forward to her.
“I want to shake the President’s hand,” she told him. “Just once.”
* * * *
CHAPTER TEN
February 16
Washington, D.C.
THE WAR WAS GOING well for America.
In Lammeck’s hands, the front page of the Washington Post trumpeted the first bombing raids over Tokyo. A naval task force was tightening the noose around the Japanese stronghold on Iwo Jima island. In Europe, every bit of ground the Germans took in their Christmas bum’s rush, now called the Battle of the Bulge, had been rolled back and bloodily reclaimed by Allied infantry. Patton had launched an all-out assault on the Rhine. Yank bombers had burned the German city of Dresden to cinders.
And the first words were leaking out of a secret meeting between the Big Three—Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt—from the Crimea, at Yalta.
The Post said, “The President is to be congratulated on his part in this all-encompassing achievement.” On pages one through six, FDR’s supporters crowed over his diplomacy, the supreme achievement of drawing all three Allied leaders to the table, where they could discuss and concede. The paper listed major victories for the U.S. at the conference: The Soviet Union promised to begin attacks against the Japanese as soon as Germany fell; Stalin backed off his demand for sixteen votes in the newly created United Nations, accepting instead only three; Russia accepted a French zone of occupation in defeated Germany, plus France’s permanent status on the UN’s Security Council; Stalin would allow “free” elections in Poland, while postponing the settlement of that war-torn nation’s western border until the war was over. Excerpts from other news organs around the world chimed in, overwhelmingly praising the triumph and accords of Yalta.
Not until page seven did FDR’s critics vent their spleen. They bayed that the President had been hoodwinked at Yalta. He never seemed to grasp that he was the rich uncle caught between two squabbling, poorer relations. Roosevelt did not so much bargain with Stalin as try to persuade the stubby dictator to accept less than the Russian hungered for. Yalta did not change Stalin’s insistence on the old Curzon line from 1919 as the official boundary between him and Poland, despite America’s and the Polish government-in-exile’s demands. Russia managed to hold on to multiple votes in the fledgling UN. And Britain, our bravest ally, who’d fought Germany alone for three years, received at Yalta little for her part in the war but more dismantling of her teetering Empire, and a ringside seat to watch the American President sweet-talk the Russian dictator to preserve the USSR’s participation in Roosevelt’s legacy, the United Nations. Yalta, the critics derided, was nothing more than the cobbling together of an agreement between three ideologically opposed nations, who’d banded together out of exhaustion and a short-lived euphoria, and only for so long as the war lasted. Once Germany and Japan were beaten, politics and power plays would surely undo these vows of freedom and mutuality. In short, FDR had traded hard concessions to Stalin for the gossamer of promises, and Churchill, the lion of England, was forced to sit quietly chewing his cigars while his old American ally did so.
But for now, these dissenting notes were shoved to the back by admiring headlines. Roosevelt was the golden child. No mention of his health at the meeting surfaced in the newspaper pages. The old man was pictured smiling in his navy cape, his long cigarette holder tilted jauntily. He was reported somewhere at sea, resting well, steaming for home.
Lammeck set down the paper. He walked to the window of his hotel room, gazing through the slanting afternoon sunlight to the north facade of the White House, a half mile off. That pale palace had been Roosevelt’s home for almost thirteen years now. It would soon welcome him as a returning hero from faraway lands. The President was on top right now, perhaps more than he’d ever been.
That, Lammeck thought, is when they come for you. When you’re at your strongest, a threat. Your enemies have always hated you. But now your friends fear you, too.
He thought of Caesar, at the peak of his power, stabbed by his senators in his own white palace, the Roman Senate. In 1935, Dutch Schultz, one of the most powerful gangland figures in America, had been murdered in Newark, New Jersey, by his associates in the New York crime syndicate to keep him from pursuing his plot to assassinate prosecutor Thomas Dewey. In 797, the popular Byzantine emperor Constantine had his eyes gouged out and was cast into a cell by his mother in a lethal struggle for the throne. Every one of them was at the top of his game, when he was cut down by betrayal, by trusted allies, by loved ones.
Lammeck turned to a knock on his door. He opened it, then backed away as Dag surged into the room. The Secret Service agent staggered under the weight of three boxes stuffed with files and manila envelopes. The top carton obscured his head.
“Put them on the bed.”
Dag dumped his burden on the mattress. Lammeck dove forward to keep them from spilling. Empty-armed and red-faced, Dag glared at Lammeck as if assigning blame.
“What?” Lammeck spread his arms.
“Down at the front desk.” Dag jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Two more boxes. You go get ‘em.”
Lammeck headed down two flights to the lobby. The boxes were waiting, jammed and heavy. He returned to his room huffing, understanding Dag’s irritation.
Dag was slumped in the overstuffed chair. His scuffed shoes rested on Lammeck’s bed.
“It’s all there. From January 3 to yesterday.”
Lammeck set his load beside the desk. “I see we have to watch what we wish for. Good old Mrs. Beach might get it for us.”
“That’s every new federal hire of a woman in the whole stinking city. We got job histories, school transcripts, security clearances, background checks, typing tests—you fucking name it, your United States government has a record of it. If she’
s working for Uncle Sam, she’s in one of those boxes.”
Lammeck grabbed a random folder. He opened it to a swamp of typefaces, illegible handwriting, rubber stamping, and black-and-white photos. Somewhere on these pages, he thought, was that good, clean fact that would let him start his “NO” stack; or there might be some small and fishy item that didn’t add up and he would set it on what he hoped would be a very short “MAYBE” pile. The determination might bob to the surface in seconds, or it might dodge him.
“How many are there?”
“About a thousand.”
Lammeck’s heart sank. His eyes felt glazed already. They stuck on the photo of a gap-toothed gal from Kentucky. She was skinny and timid, dipping her face as if terrified of the flashbulb that had gone off to freeze her image. She had light brown hair but it could have been dyed, no way to know. Lammeck dragged his finger down the first page. Fresh out of a two-year secretarial college. Single, one brother overseas in the Marines. How could this shy American girl be a foreign assassin who’d carved up two people on a beach and stage-managed the murder of a third? Lammeck wanted to toss this file out. His gut knew immediately this girl wasn’t the one. But the very notion of the murderer they were trying to track down was so implausible, how could he rule out any of these women? He had to read this file, and these thousand files, and he’d better get started.
Lammeck pivoted his chair to face the desk. Spreading the folder in front of him, he flicked on the lamp. Lifting the girl’s picture, he imagined her out there right now bundled in the chilly Washington dusk, fresh from Kentucky or Persia—which was it?
Dag rose from his chair.
“Whoa,” Lammeck put out a hand, “where’re you going?”
“Out to the car. I got Chinese take-out. And a bottle.”
* * * *
BY MIDNIGHT, LAMMECK HAD a “NO” pile of over two hundred files. Before he fell asleep, Dag had thumbed through half that many. They’d both tossed only one folder each onto a “YES” stack.
Dag lay snoring across Lammeck’s bed, tuckered out by reading and the bourbon. He’d rolled over, cocooning in the blankets and sheets. Dag disheveled things even in his sleep.
Over the past several hours, Lammeck had developed a system in his paper chase through the folders. As soon as he noted that the job application required a background check, he discarded that file. There was no choice but to trust the FBI and each government department to handle this low level of security. Certainly, they could spot a girl whose entire background was a fabrication. Also, instinct told him his assassin would never put herself in a spot where she would show up on the government’s radar. She would seek an unobtrusive hiding place. Her first job in America was to blend in.
But security checks only deleted 20 percent of the applications. The rest were for garden-variety typist and clerical positions. These had no hiring procedures other than an application, an interview, and a skills test. Lammeck’s training as an historian stepped in.
After years of research, he’d learned to look for similarities in the eras and personalities he studied, and to use these trends to uncover the anomalies. In these personnel files, he swiftly figured out the prevailing theme of the thousands of women flooding into wartime Washington.
Essentially, with few exceptions, there was only one woman in these folders. She had high school and some college, rarely a degree. She had one or more siblings, and her brothers were most often in the military. It seemed the Only Child did not leave home to come to the nation’s capital to seek her future. She was not Rosie the Riveter; instead of manual labor skills, she could type. She was more likely to be from a farming state in the South or Midwest than from New England or the far West. Apparently, she took typing classes as her way out of the small town or the farm. She was trim, even pretty. She probably viewed Washington as the last Mecca for romance in a nation where all the other men were gone to Europe or Asia. She came alone. She came to serve her country but not in uniform, so she was not the most intrepid of women. Still, she was an achiever, bright, and convinced she was bound for good things.
Lammeck read school transcripts and teachers’ recommendations, work histories, descriptions of school sports teams and extracurricular activities, family backgrounds, health status and allergies, driver’s license numbers and other identification papers. In his view, none of these mundanities served to disqualify an application enough to toss the file aside. Each of these items was easy to falsify, and besides, none of them would be back-checked. He scanned for the extra ingredient, that one scrap that told him this girl was authentic and no threat to anything but some boy’s heart. He read the brief essays, typed and timed, about the girl’s dreams and hopes, her hometown and kin. He looked for clumsiness and misspellings in the answers to simple questions, a hominess that spoke of an American girl on her own in a new, big town. He looked for nerves, discomfort, quirks, the little discrepancies about every person that do not add up, and so make up a complex and real whole. An assassin would not write these things. She would not make errors. She would be letter-perfect in her fraud.
The pair of files flagged by Dag and Lammeck had two items in common. First, they were both girls without families. One hailed from an Ohio orphanage; the other claimed her whole family had perished in an Oklahoma tornado. Second, both young women looked on paper too good to be true. Dag and Lammeck decided these needed another sniff. Dag wanted to find them both and, if they were not killers, ask them out on dates.
Dag griped for five hours, until he asked Lammeck for fifteen minutes of shut-eye. That was two hours ago.
Lammeck forged on. He peeled through the files with an increasing efficiency and sharpening instinct. Now it was midnight. With almost half the files rejected, he sensed that she was not in these boxes. She’d slipped him again.
Even so, he was only a step behind her. Lammeck felt it, stronger every day. He needed to get a handle on what that step would be, the stride that would finally bring him even with her. She would follow the path of least resistance to the President. Lammeck racked his brain to find that path.
He set the files aside and picked up a book he’d bought that afternoon at Garfinkel’s department store across from the Treasury Department, The Travels of Marco Polo.
To the sawing of Dag’s snores, Lammeck read again the passages about Hasan-i-Sabah and the Assassins of Alamut. Polo reported how the Old Man of the Mountain controlled his region and defended his faith by murder:
... when any of the neighboring princes, or others, gave offense to this chief, they were put to death by these his disciplined assassins: none of whom felt terror at the risk of losing their own lives, which they held in little estimation, provided they could execute their master’s will. On this account his tyranny became the subject of dread in all the surrounding countries.
Polo described the Mohammedans of Persia as “a handsome race, especially the women who, in my opinion, are the most beautiful in the world.” Hasan had put these comely native women to his uses, drugging his cadre of killers, then seducing them with “elegant and beautiful damsels, accomplished in the arts of singing, playing upon all sorts of musical instruments, dancing, and especially those of dalliance and amorous allurement.”
Lammeck left the book open in his lap, but his mind traveled beyond the words. On the page, walking through Polo’s prose, he imagined her. She was both sides of Hasan-i-Sabah’s deadly coin: a seductress and a martially trained assassin.
He lingered on the great temptress killers of history. Catherine the Great. Cleopatra. Salome, who danced in payment for the head of John the Baptist. Delilah, betrayer of Samson. The Jewish princess Judith, who on the eve of a great battle gave herself to the Assyrian general Holofernes, then emerged in the morning with his head in a sack, saving her Israel.
Lammeck set Marco Polo down. He sighed and dug into the cardboard box for another file. He was going to find her. Lammeck stayed awake, searching toward dawn.
* * * *
&
nbsp; February 17
Washington, D.C.
LAMMECK OPENED HIS EYES to where he’d left them, in the white width of an open file across his lap.
Dag’s voice greeted him to the morning. So did cotton mouth and a stiff spine. A dejected mood had settled on Lammeck’s spirit just before sunup; it was there still.
The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01] Page 18
