The South Lawn Plot

by Ray O'Hanlon

  Of course, Conway thought, she had not showered for a couple of days because it had been impossible to get the water in the cabin up to a temperature that could even be called warm. She must be smelling like some old trapper, Grizzly Adams in old L.L. Beans.

  She did not move from the rock. She wanted to give the bear time to be well on its way. And it was time, she decided, to be on hers. It was time, she thought, to get back to the world.

  Perhaps she had been unsettled by the sudden collision of tranquility with a life changing, or life ending, moment. But it occurred to Conway that Washington and that wider world had been unusually quiet of late as well. And yet, or perhaps because of this, Cleo Conway had a gut sense that something, somewhere, was going down. And it would beat a path to her boss, the president of the United States.

  32

  “I THOUGHT YOU WERE HAVING ME ON,” Bailey said.

  “Yes, I'm standing outside the place. Cranmer and Cromwell, Solicitors and Commissioners of Oaths. Must get a few laughs anytime they turn up in court. Are you sure this isn't a put on?”

  Bailey winced. Henderson, at the other end of the cell phone, was shouting something across the newsroom at an unidentified victim.

  Bailey fiddled in his pocket, looking for his cigarettes. He was out, and there was nowhere in the immediate vicinity where he could load up again.

  Henderson had been right. This little corner of London really was off the map. How had Henderson put it? Missed by time, the Luftwaffe and the wrecker's ball. Not half. Bailey prided himself on his street knowledge. He reckoned he could match any cabbie but this nook on the South Bank of the Thames had somehow eluded him.

  “Okay,” Bailey said into the phone. “I keep going down the street, take the first left, then a right, and the pub should be in plain sight, right?”

  He nodded as the confirmation came through from Henderson.

  “I'll call you back,” Bailey said before flipping the phone closed.

  All right, he thought, Cranmer and Cromwell. What next, Raleigh and Drake?

  He walked slowly. There was no traffic as the street had long been cordoned off for pedestrians.

  The instruction from Henderson to seek out a pub called, of all things, The Hangman's Noose, had broken a dull torpor that had set in at the paper over the past week. The initial fuss and uproar over the dead priests had subsided and had been replaced by a par for the course sex scandal involving a leading opposition politician.

  Plaice, it seemed, had been assigned to other cases, and Samantha was off learning how to shoot guns. The dead priests tale was stuck in neutral.

  Then came the call from Henderson and the instruction to go and meet Sydney Small. Bailey was taken aback. He had not seen Sydney Small's byline for a long time. He thought Small, indisputably a legend in the Post, had either pegged it, or had parked himself in an old geezer home. Henderson had taken a certain pleasure in correcting Bailey.

  “If you bothered to read beyond your stories you would realize that Sydney Small is very much alive and still up to his tonsils in royal muck,” he had snorted.

  “Yes, the stories have been a bit thin on the ground lately, but don't underestimate Small. This has happened before. Just when you think he's gone off the boil for good he comes up with a whopper.”

  But of course Bailey understood this. Sydney Small was larger than life because of his apparent absence from it. He was a virtual unknown in the newsroom. Only Henderson and a couple of the more grizzled denizens of the place could claim to have ever clapped eyes on the Post's royal correspondent. He was, as a newsroom wag had once famously said, like Jesus: blessed were those who had not seen, yet believed.

  So Bailey was about to secure a great rarity in Post lore, a scoop, a head to head with the man who, as one story had it, was so close to one female royal that it was said he had fathered a child with her.

  “Sydney will be on the throne yet,” said Henderson with what almost passed as a smile after Bailey had quizzed him on a yarn that seemed tall even by the Post's standards.

  With Cranmer and Cromwell astern, Bailey made his way slowly along the narrow street. There were not a lot of people about, and those that were seemed to be just passing through on the way to somewhere else. Sure enough, there were not many businesses in the immediate vicinity to detain a passerby, and the street was mostly composed of small mews flats, most of them needing a little paint and something other than dirt for their flower boxes.

  Bailey took the left turn as instructed and proceeded for about twenty yards before reaching the right turn into what was little more than an alleyway. Henderson had told him that the alley was a dead end, but at the far end of it was the pub. Bailey could see the sign, a small wooden one that, as he got closer, revealed itself as a painted affair depicting a gallows atop a green hill. At least nobody was swinging from the rope, Bailey thought.

  He paused for a moment at the door. Henderson had warned him that Small could be a tricky customer and that there were certain protocols that were, as he put it, advisable when dealing with the man.

  Stepping inside, Bailey had to adjust his eyes to a gloomy room with few of the comforts that people expected when they forked over for a pint at the end of a day's work. What he noticed first was the silence. No jukebox, no telly. There was a radio on somewhere but the volume was low. A barman who looked like he might have been taking a break from hanging someone himself was slowly turning a drying cloth inside a beer glass.

  “Morning,” said Bailey. I'm looking for…”

  Before he could finish, the barman nodded to his right. The bar was horseshoe in shape, but the seating alcoves stretched behind the glass mirror that marked its rear. Bailey walked around, his eyes getting used to the dim light. The radio, he noticed, was playing classical music. The sound didn't quite match the sight of the hangman on station behind the bar.

  As he cleared the turn of the bar Bailey stared towards the tables at the far reaches of the room. To say he was taken aback would be an understatement. For a split second, he glanced back at the hangman, but the man just nodded again, thus confirming that the sole patron of the place had indeed been expecting the newcomer.

  “Sydney,” said Bailey. “Sydney Small.”

  Bailey hoped that Small had not noticed the slight stammer that had accompanied his salute.

  “I'm…” But before he could finish, Small had raised his hand.

  “Of course, you are. No need for introductions, Mr. Bailey. Sit down, have a drink. Dennis.”

  The hangman put down the glass and awaited Bailey's pleasure.

  Bailey made a pretense of glancing at his watch. Frankly, he didn't really care what time of the day he had a sup, but he was being cautious. How close was Small to Henderson, who could be a bit of a stickler over drinking on the job?

  Oh, bloody hell, Bailey thought.

  “I'll have a Guinness,” he said in the direction of Dennis the hangman. “A half.”

  Small, shaking his head, let out a low chuckle. “Oh, have full one,” he said. “Promise I won't mention a word to Henderson, the old puritan.”

  “No, half will be fine. For now,” Bailey responded.

  The man sitting across the table from him, and drinking what appeared to be a gin and tonic, was nothing like the compact, agitated chronicler of royal shenanigans that he, and just about everybody else working at the Post for less than a decade, had imagined. Sydney Small looked like someone he would cover in his own reporting. He was not small. Indeed, he appeared to Bailey to extend well over six feet. Up to six three, he estimated.

  Small had a long face with high cheek bones, a slight flush on his countenance that may or may not have been the gin. He was dressed immaculately in a tweed jacket and pressed pants. His brown leather shoes looked straight out of the box. All he was missing, Bailey thought, was a Fedora and a cigarette holder. But there was no sign that Small smoked, and a hat would merely have distracted from his swept-back mane of slightly dirty, blond hair. />
  Sydney Small, in short, looked like a toff, a rake, a royal rake. He might have stepped out of the owner's enclosure at Ascot. Of course, Bailey thought, as he glanced at Small's newspaper. It was turned to the racing section. Small seemed to read Bailey's mind.

  “Just keeping up with the gee-gees. If one is going to cover the palace with any effectiveness at all, it's a head start to know a thing or two about the nags and the form,” he said.

  “Have you discussed horses with the queen?” Bailey asked.

  “Oh, absolutely. I give her tips. She doesn't act on them, of course, but more than once I've been able to warm her up with a gentle ‘I told you so.'”

  “No kidding,” said Bailey, his mind wandering a bit as he tried to remember precisely why he was sitting in the pub with a guy who looked like he had walked off a Noel Coward set.

  “Any tips for today then?”

  “I'd hang on to your money today, old boy. Nothing but half-knackered trotters on the loose. Ah, your beer has arrived.”

  “Stout,” said Bailey.

  Small ignored the correction and closed his paper. He shuffled the pages so as to restore the tabloid as closely as possible to its off-the-press neatness. He was silent for a few seconds. He took a sip of his drink, carefully placed the glass back on the table and leaned forward slightly.

  “Everyone, and I mean everyone in this world is capable of murder. Wouldn't you agree?” he said.

  Bailey, about to drink some of his dark brew hesitated and nodded his head one side to the other.

  “There are very few saints, and that's for sure,” he said.

  “Quite so,” said Small. “I've been reading your stories about these dead priests. You've not pointed to any apparent link, but it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that there is none at all, don't you think?

  “If I backed four winners back to back, even at different meetings, I would put it down to a little knowledge and a lot of luck. But four dead men of the cloth, all out of the same stable, so to speak, well, it can hardly be just all bad luck. Somebody, somewhere, must have a little knowledge.”

  Bailey could follow Small's line of thinking, but what was drawing him closer into the exchange was that Small seemed to be looking beyond him as he spoke, and beyond hangman. He seemed nervous in spite of the cool, debonair exterior

  “Expecting someone else?” Bailey ventured.

  “Not at all, not at all,” said Small, straightening up and meeting the challenge with a full smile.

  “What if I was to tell you that there might be a connection between all these four dead men, one that defied the odds book, at least in one crucial respect?”

  “I'd say it's your story, not mine, Sydney.”

  “You're very generous, Mr. Bailey,” Small replied.

  “My name's Nick, and we are colleagues.”

  “As yes, that we are,” said Small, his half smile returning for a second. “Some stories are for sharing, Nick, and this, I am certain, is one of them. Listen, I know it's early and you've been most conscientious, but I think you might want to get something stronger than that.”

  Small was staring intently at Bailey's half-pint glass.

  “You think so?”

  “I know so,” said Small. “Dennis!”

  33

  “AS YOU CAN SEE, ladies and gentlemen, the president is down. Bill Mellon is on top of him and others are covering the immediate area, but really people, this is all too little, too late.”

  “How's Bill doing?”

  The question, from the rear of the darkened room, went some way towards cutting through the tension. For a moment at least, the focus of concern was on one of their own, one who at least had survived the debacle on the South Lawn.

  “Bill is still in the ICU. His prognosis is touch-and-go. I suggest if any of you have any religious affiliation, you say a prayer. Also, I would suggest that if you have no religious affiliation, you also say a prayer. Anyway, at this point, as you can well see, we have only partial control of the situation.”

  Several heads nodded in agreement.

  “We have not actually determined what has transpired and how the action against the president was effected. The visiting head of state is down, off camera to the left. We'll come to him in a few moments. At this juncture, the First Lady is in the White House, in the bathroom. She missed the whole thing.”

  “Lady luck,” a voice in the gloom muttered.

  “Screw that, no such thing.” Pete Asher snarled.

  The image on the screen froze. The camera, which had been mounted on a press podium at the edge of the open-sided tent, was focused on the prone body of the president who was stretched out on the ground, his body sprawled sideways on to the camera lens, his head turned away, his arms outstretched. Agent Mellon was draped across the president's back. Their bodies formed an X, the epicenter of the biggest presidential security breach since the Kennedy assassination.

  The image on the screen changed to a more distant shot. A number of cameras had been on the podium, and although most of them had been pointed in the direction of the president at the precise moment of the attack, one or two had been taking wider-angle pictures of the crowd under the tent canopy.

  “I'm stopping it here for a moment, and I want you all to study it closely.”

  Asher was the senior agent in the room, acting the part of director and editor for the initial post mortem into what was now, quite evidently, a total collapse of the service's shield around the president.

  “Look at that. Everybody's either running around like headless chickens, flat on the ground, or standing frozen. But who's this guy?”

  Just to the rear and right side of the president, a man was walking rapidly towards the edge of the picture. The camera did not follow him out of the frame.

  Asher pressed the rewind button. The man came into view again. The image was somewhat blurred, and the man was in view for only a couple of seconds. He appeared to be middle-aged, of medium height, fair-haired, no different in general appearance to a number of people at the South Lawn reception, indeed similar in appearance to a large percentage of the American male population. But it was not his physical characteristics that were pulling the assembled agents to the edges of their seats.

  “He appears calm. He is paying no attention to the president. He is walking deliberately and purposefully away from ground zero.”

  “Sir, he also has his hand in his suit pocket. Look, just there.”

  “Yeah, you're right. It was ninety degrees out there, hotter under the tent. Why put your hand in your pocket? Maybe there's something in his pocket.”

  The man had now disappeared off-screen again. Asher allowed the film to play forward, and as it did so, there were shots from other cameras. But the mysterious man was not seen again. Still, all in the room knew that after the attack and the deaths, everyone who had attended the White House South Lawn reception would have been searched and vetted before being allowed leave the presidential mansion, no matter what the individual's status.

  The recording had reached the three-minute-mark, and most of that time had elapsed since the president had gone down. This was enough time to vacate the grounds under ordinary circumstances. It was not a long walk from the lawn to the nearest gate over by the East Wing. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

  Asher lowered the tone of his voice, his words coming out slowly and deliberately.

  “So, assuming this guy got out of the White House, what do I want to know about him?

  There was no response in the room as all present knew that Asher himself would deliver it.

  “I want an enhancement of the video segment with this guy in sight. I want to know who this guy is. I want to know why he was at the reception. I want to know the color of his damn underwear. If this guy ever screwed up his knots in the Boy Scouts, I want to know which knots and why.”

  The sitting agents were already thinking in those terms anyway. Tough words were the only way to vent frustrati
on at a moment when all in the room were reflecting on their own helplessness in the face of a ruthless and seemingly flawless assault on the president of the United States and others in his vicinity, not least the distinguished leader of a close ally.

  “You know,” said Asher, “this is worse than Kennedy. Kennedy was in a public place in an open car. This was the White House, the one place where we are supposed to have absolute control.”

  There were more nodded heads and murmurs of agreement but Asher ignored them. He had been thinking about Kennedy. His uncle had been in the Secret Service back in the 1960s, so he had heard stories. Some of them had even managed to avoid inclusion in the never-ending avalanche of conspiracy books which had followed the findings of the Warren Commission.

  Jesus, the Kennedy business would be a child's puzzle compared to this one, Asher thought. His eyes returned to the screen. The image of the man walking off camera, indifferent, or oblivious, to the mayhem all about him, was frozen. It had indeed taken several minutes to lock down the White House after the attack on the president. He could have made his escape. Others involved in setting up the attack may have left as well during the course of the reception, before it had actually taken place.

  Asher chewed his bottom lip. “Christ, what a mess,” he said out loud to no one in particular. “If this was anything but an exercise, we would all be shaking hands at Wal-Mart, bet on it.”

  At the mention of the e-word the tension in the room lifted, if only a little. Asher glanced at his watch.

  “We'll break for lunch and get back together at two. We're going to look at this blockbuster again, and this time I want you to see the things you clearly didn't see first time. Don't talk about the film, guess or speculate over your salads, or whatever it is you need to keep body and soul in one piece. Stick to baseball and the weather. Each one of you will be asked to answer a series of written questions, and I want to hear it from each one of you separately. Now git, you've got just under an hour.”