He’d gotten as far as the Canadian embassy and had yet to be asked to identify himself. If only he could continue on like this and no one suddenly had use for his medical expertise—which was not unthinkable. There was a nasty mood in the air, a sense of impending violence. Someone could easily get hurt, and it wasn’t hard to associate this regime with the kind that maintained its authority through the barrel of a gun. There were military vehicles everywhere. Occasional rolls of barbed wire blocked the streets, and crack soldiers with automatic weapons were turning pedestrians back where they came from, while those who were allowed to proceed picked up their pace, worry painted on their faces. Otherwise the scene was strangely quiet, like a battlefield moments before dawn where troops in their trenches are waiting for the whistle to go over the top.
* * *
—
It had begun raining like hell by the time he reached Market Square, and his mustache threatened to come undone more than once. A look at his watch confirmed he was at least an hour and a half early. I can wait for Doggie inside the tearoom, he thought, the wet uniform plastered to his body. Still limping slightly from his fall, he entered the red building that housed the Teaism salon and nodded amiably to the manager, a guy of Mexican origin they called Roberto. John had always liked this place.
“Give me an oysterburger and a single trunk oolong tea,” he said, and sat himself on a stool by the window. From there he could see over to the Residences where Wesley lived. Could that be why she’d chosen this spot to meet? Was Wesley going to be participating, too?
He took a couple of bites of food and looked around the appealing little restaurant. Two young Latino types sporting black baseball caps and the traces of mustaches stood behind the teakwood counter, joking good-naturedly. They were obviously brothers. He devoured the sight of their broad shoulders and reflexively sat up straight and thrust out his chest.
Besides himself and the personnel, there were only three customers, tight-lipped white men in their forties in light-blue shirts, sitting at the same table, each with a cup in front of him. They don’t look like tea drinkers, he thought, and looked out the window again, this time over at the Atlantic café across the street. He could just make out some indistinct shapes staring out of the rain-spattered windows. From what he could see, they looked exactly like the men sitting a few feet away from him. Then his gaze panned up the street to the entrance to the underground parking lot in the Lansburg Building. CLEARANCE: 6 FT. 8 IN. was written above it, and under the sign a dark-blue van blocked the entrance and exit lanes. They won’t stay there forever, he decided, and let his eyes skim the menu. It had been a couple of years since he’d been here, and the prices were pretty much unchanged. Good place, he thought, looking up again in time to see a man get out of the dark-blue van. He was in his forties, once again in a light-blue shirt, this time under a gray suit that was quickly turning black in the rain.
John turned his head slowly towards the three men with teacups. None had moved an inch since he came. Then slowly, slowly, he looked across the street. The blurred shapes of the men in the Atlantic café hadn’t moved, either.
That was when the thought struck him. He pushed back his plate, dabbed his lips with his napkin, stood up, and nonchalantly walked past the three men and down the steel staircase to the restrooms. They didn’t watch him go. They didn’t do anything.
He ignored the little pond with Koi carp at the foot of the stairs as he headed straight for the men’s room.
Something’s wrong, he thought, staring unseeingly at the bottom of the massive sink. What would happen if I tried to call Danny? He shook his head to try to banish the idea.
But what else to do? he reasoned. There are all those men up there, for God’s sake, just waiting. And they have plenty of time. He looked in the mirror and could confirm that the mustache was in place. He wasn’t easy to recognize, thank God. Small details like his new hairdo and restyled eyebrows definitely helped.
I have to get away from here, but I’ve got to warn Doggie first. It’s either me or her they’re waiting for. He considered his options and felt an icy shiver in his stomach. But how the hell to warn her? He didn’t have her cell phone number, and he had no idea where she was. So he had no choice but to call Danny and hear whether she had given a counterorder. And if not, things were going to be bad. The boys upstairs weren’t waiting for nothing.
He turned on the phone and dialed the number. This has got to be quick, he told himself. Just time enough for Danny to give him a message, if there was one, and then get out of the tearoom.
The phone was answered almost immediately.
“Hey, Danny Boy,” he said, but Danny didn’t answer.
“Is it you? Is something the matter?” He could hear Danny was there. When you’ve lain in the same bed for years, your partner’s breathing pattern becomes imprinted on your brain. It was Danny, but still it wasn’t.
“No, it’s okay, I was just sleeping,” Danny’s voice said. It sounded natural enough, but the red warning lights were flashing in John’s head. He hung up. If Danny had been sleeping, it would have taken him ages and a day to pick up the phone.
“Oh, Danny, no!” he whispered, and sat down heavily on the toilet seat. “What has happened to you?” He stared at the cell phone’s display and considered calling again.
Then he let his hands fall in his lap and found himself praying instead.
* * *
—
He stood between the steel masts before the US Navy Memorial at Market Square and let his eyes pan all the way around the wet, glistening street. There were hundreds of uniforms to be seen, but none of them looked at him. They just paced around, eyes front, as though they were programmed to move only from point A to point B. Maybe it was because of the rain; maybe they were just making their way up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the White House for some reason or other.
Then he punched in the number of his editor in chief. John felt safe calling Alastair Hopkins—he was sly and experienced. He’d know if his phone was being tapped, and he’d know how to tackle the situation.
John looked at the statue on the square. A sailor stood in the rain, waiting on the pier with his duffel bag. Somehow he felt an affinity with him. What awaited the two of them out there?
He heard a click on the line. “This is Alastair Hopkins’s telephone. With whom am I speaking?”
Oh, hell, it was Hopkins’s secretary, Deirdre Boyd. His heart sank. She was an unendearing creature who could put a serious fright into the most hardened lawyers. The epitome of a superior being, an impudent, high-class spinster, and to top it off she was a Scot with a capital S, from her unmanageable shortish hair down to her brown walking shoes. Miserly about everything: a smile or a positive word. Even information was hard to get out of her, although that was the purpose of her job. She would under no circumstances transfer his call directly into Hopkins’s office. Not a journalist who had deserted his workplace and was wanted by the authorities, besides.
Before he knew what he was doing, he said, “This is Sunderland,” in a high voice. “Give me Hopkins.”
“Sunderland?” she asked. She knew exactly who Sunderland was. “We’re not hiring. Try somewhere else.”
Dumb bitch. Never afraid of anything.
“Thomas Sunderland, your vice president.” He pulled his collar up around his ears. Why the hell had he used that name, instead of someone Deirdre had a little bit of respect for—whoever that could be, besides her boss.
“If it’s Editor in Chief Hopkins you wish to speak to, I suggest you look out your window. I assume you’re in the White House. He’s standing on the lawn with the other bleating sheep, waiting for Prime Minister Watts to arrive. Good-bye!”
So Prime Minister Watts was on his way to Washington! That was why there were so many soldiers and police. President Jansen was having his first official state visit. Pretty brave of him, c
onsidering the circumstances.
“Just hold on, now,” said John in a cold voice. “So Hopkins is out there. Good, I’ll find him, but while I have you, I need you to answer a question for me.”
“My job description doesn’t include functioning as a search engine.”
“You may not have a job much longer, period. I want you to find out what a ‘swatter’ could be, besides a flyswatter.”
“Is it because you’re too embarrassed to ask your own people? Is it something you ought to know yourself?”
“Look it up.”
He could picture her: snug sweater, flat chest, lips pursed. No assignment good enough. But her keyboard was working in the background.
“Well, well,” she said. “It would seem there are also electric fly-swatters. Was that what you wanted?”
He could have killed her. “No, that’s not it. Try again.”
“Any model in particular?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are many different ones. You’re probably thinking about the 9M17P.”
He almost bit his tongue. “Oh, right. Umm . . . Can you describe it?”
“The dimensions are only given metrically. It’s eleven hundred sixty millimeters long and weighs thirty-one and a half kilograms. Its range is between five hundred and twenty-five hundred meters, and it has a velocity of one hundred fifty to one hundred seventy meters per second. Penetration strength is five hundred millimeters, and chances of a direct hit with model C are ninety percent. Satisfied?”
It was a totally surreal and horrific experience, hearing these words from this woman’s mouth, standing in a public square on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“A missile, in other words.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound like a Barbie doll. Is there more I can do for you, Mr. Vice President? Shall I send you a copy of the United States Constitution and underline the part about freedom of expression?” He had to admire her defiant courage.
“Yes, there is something else, now that you mention it. Please look up ‘the sixth of October’ on Wikipedia, and see what it says.”
“It was my grandfather’s birthday, along with Carole Lombard’s—how about that?”
“Excuse me, but would you be so kind as to give me your name?”
“Naturally. I’m not ashamed. Deirdre Boyd. Did you wish to invite me out? Because in that case I regret to tell you that my integrity forbids me to accept.”
No, there could be no doubt. Vice president or not, Sunderland was not her cup of tea. If only he had said he was someone else.
“Mrs. Boyd . . .” he said, raising his voice.
“Miss!”
“Miss Boyd, please pull yourself together. I’m speaking to your boss in five minutes. Don’t let my impression of an obstinate, cheeky employee be a lasting one.”
It must have been the term cheeky that did it. This was not the kind of predicate a Vassar girl appreciated having attached to her name.
“Okay. This is the last favor. I’m a busy person!” she snapped, but he could hear her working at the keyboard again.
“Yes,” she said after a half minute. “It’s the date in 2000 when Slobodan Milošević resigned. Is that it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“The sixth of October is also ‘Germany-USA Day.’”
“What else is there?”
“There are three pages of listings here. It would help if you could be more specific.”
“‘Cairo,’ then. See if there’s a sixth of October that has anything to do with Cairo.”
This time only five seconds passed. “It’s an Egyptian national holiday celebrating the victories of the October War. I thought they lost that one. . . . Ohh, here it says that President Sadat was assassinated that day in 1981.”
John stiffened. He’d known it all along. Her words reached his brain at the same time as his own realization.
He hung up immediately and looked through the mist towards the White House. He’d been racing through Virginia all night on the back of the motorcycle of a coup leader, and it looked very much like he and his eight officer-conspirators were in Washington at this very moment. “Big brother has the swatter,” they’d said. He suspected that meant it was already in position, and when it was time, they’d fire the missile in cold blood, and the country would be minus a president. Egypt’s President Sadat’s trusted protectors had led the treachery that had him killed. Murdered in broad daylight by members of his own corps of bodyguards during a military parade. Even the best-protected person has his Achilles’ heel.
At that moment his cell phone rang. He looked at it for ten seconds and then raised it to his ear.
“Yes . . . ?” he said, listening intently, but he heard nothing. He’d been localized.
He turned the thing off and threw it in the nearest trash can.
* * *
—
Making it to the White House turned out to be a drawn-out undertaking. Normally it would take fifteen or twenty minutes, but this time it took an hour, partly because his ankle was hurting again and partly because of the constant stopping of people by the security forces. Not to mention the masses of soldiers who were making their way up Pennsylvania Avenue, who John tried to keep pace with. Even though the atmosphere was hectic and the camouflage-clad men’s patience was at the breaking point, he figured there was less chance of him being stopped if he stayed with them. It was the other ones who made him nervous, the ones in civilian clothes, motionless except for their eyes. Those were the ones he didn’t want questioning him. They never saluted or paid attention to his medals. They observed his body language and how his tiniest face muscles behaved. If he were stopped by them, it was all over.
He reached the West Wing control post at a quarter past one, at the same moment as a helicopter swung into view above Lafayette Square and headed over the myriad of White House chimneys.
Jesus Christ, he thought, his heart pounding. Now it’s happening. In a way, he couldn’t have asked for a better moment.
“Let me through!” he called to some soldiers in ponchos. “It’s an emergency!” They were unimpressed and ordered him to turn back if he didn’t want problems.
The whupping sound of the rotary blades sliced through the air and faded behind the building.
“Ninety percent accuracy,” the Scottish banshee had told him.
“Let me through!” he screamed, this time to the guard behind the fence. “You better listen to me or you’ll regret it. I have proof that someone’s about to assassinate the president!”
The word assassinate got the guard to reach for his telephone, some of the soldiers to freeze, and two plainclothes agents to crowd in on him from either side with drawn weapons. He saw how ready they were to use them—one false move, and he’d be dead. So he raised his hands slowly in the air. “Let me speak to Wesley Barefoot immediately,” he said.
One of the plainclothesmen began talking into his lapel mike, but it wasn’t Barefoot he’d called.
* * *
—
He had been sitting in a little office for ten minutes. They’d considered handcuffing him, but for the moment the security agents were content to keep him covered with their weapons. A lot of muttering had gone on into lapel microphones, and security people were being positioned at strategic points inside the White House. Some suspected he had been sent in as a diversionary maneuver. They were taking nothing for granted.
The next security agent who came in was one he’d seen many times before. The man with the glittering, gold bracelets, the one he had suggested—before an open mike on Tom Jumper’s radio program—could be implicated in the murder of Mimi Jansen. Here was the man whom John had the least desire to see in the whole world right now: Ben Kane, Sunderland’s shadow.
“You searched him?” Kane asked.
The other se
curity agents nodded.
“And . . . ?”
“No weapon. False mustache and wig. Eyeliner on his eyebrows.”
“Identity?”
“Tony Clark, fifty-four years old. Officer in the medical corps. Reported as fallen in a skirmish in the Catoctin Mountains. Ostensibly an officer who deserted and joined the militia.”
John saw Kane’s smile and was powerless to keep his hands still on the chair’s armrest. He stared helplessly at his fidgeting fingers. The fight was lost.
Ben Kane squatted in front of him. “Mr. Tony Clark . . . I see. . . . Seems to me you look exactly like a certain Mr. John Bugatti, who, until only a few days ago, was one of our nation’s very best reporters but ended up a pathetic, pathological liar on the run. Doesn’t that fit your CV a little better? Or do you really prefer to be a dead officer in the medical corps? Because that can be arranged if you insist.”
“Let me speak to the president” was all he said. What else could he say?
“You can go; I’ll take care of this,” said Kane to his men. That sounded very ominous. His men were leaving when another security officer stuck his head in the door.
“Sunderland wants you down in Burton’s office. Now!” was all he said.
Kane stood up and gave John a deadly look. “You remain seated. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of this. And you,” he said, addressing two of his subordinates, “you don’t go anywhere. And you two stand guard outside the door. And keep a damn good eye on him!”
He left the office door open, and as soon as he had disappeared across the lobby in the direction of the chief of staff’s office, Bugatti began a verbal bombardment of the two men left in the room.
“Don’t you realize it’s him, not me, who must be stopped? Don’t you know what he’s capable of? I’ll tell you.”
He began talking as fast as he could, telling about the killing of the president’s wife and the shooting of Toby O’Neill. About the rebel soldiers in the forest who were preparing to fire an antitank missile at the nation’s commander in chief. About time running out and about this Tower of Babel that was on the verge of falling.
The Washington Decree Page 51
