Jeffrey Archer

by Shall We Tell The President (lit)

  'Are you certain?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  Mark gave the details of the car crash, trying to keep the weariness and emotion out of his voice.

  'Call your office immediately, Andrews,' Tyson said, 'without releasing any of the details that you gave me this evening. Only tell them about the car crash - nothing more. Then get any further information about it you can from the police. See me in my office at 7:30, not 8:30; come through the wide entrance on the far side of the building; there will be a man waiting there for you. He'll be expecting you; don't be late. Go home now and try to get some sleep and keep yourself out of sight until tomorrow. Don't worry, Andrews. Two of us know, and I'll put agents on the routine checks that I gave you to do earlier.'

  The phone clicked. Mark called Aspirin, what a night for him to have to be on duty, told him about Stames and Calvert, hanging up abruptly before Aspirin could ask any questions. He returned to his car and drove home slowly through the night. There was hardly another car on the streets and the early morning mist gave everything an unearthly look.

  At the entrance to his apartment garage he saw Simon, the young black attendant, who liked Mark and, even more, Mark's Mercedes. Mark had blown a small legacy from his aunt on the car just after graduating from college, but never regretted his extravagance. Simon knew Mark had no assigned spot in the garage and always offered to park his car for him - anything for a chance to drive the magnificent silver Mercedes SLC 580. Mark usually exchanged a few bantering words with Simon; tonight he passes him the keys without even looking at him.

  ‘I’ll need it at seven in the morning,' he said, already walking away.

  'Okay, man,' came back the reply.

  Mark heard Simon restart the car with a soft whoosh before the elevator door closed behind him. He arrived at his apartment; three rooms, all empty. He locked the door, and then bolted it, something he had never done before. He walked around the room slowly, undressed, throwing his sour-smelling shirt into the laundry hamper. He washed for the third time that night and then went to bed, to stare up at the white ceiling. He tried to make some sense out of the night's events; he tried to sleep. Six hours passed, and if he slept it was never for more than a few minutes.

  Someone else who didn't sleep that night for more than a few minutes was tossing and turning in her bed at the White House.

  Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon and Robert Kennedy. How many citizens distinguished and unknown needed to sacrifice their lives before the House would pass a bill to outlaw such self-destruction?

  'Who else must die?' she remarked. 'If I myself there is no hour so fit as. . .'

  She turned over and looked at Edward whose expression left no doubt that such morbid thoughts were not on his mind.

  Friday morning, 4 March

  6:27 am

  Eventually Mark could stand it no longer and at 6:30 am he rose-, showered, and put on a clean shirt and a fresh suit. From his apartment window, he looked out across the Washington Channel to East Potomac Park and went over in his mind all that had happened yesterday. In a few weeks the cherry trees would bloom. In a few weeks…

  He closed the apartment door behind him, glad simply to be on the move again. Simon gave him the car keys; he had managed to find a space for the Mercedes in one of the private parking lots. Mark drove the car slowly up 6th Street

  , turns left on G and right on 7th. No traffic at this time of morning except trucks. He passed the Hirshhorn Museum as he crossed into Independence Avenue

  . At the intersection of 7th and Pennsylvania, next to the National Archives, Mark came to a halt at a red light. He felt an eerie sense of nothing being out of the ordinary, as though the previous day had been a bad dream. He would arrive at the office and Nick Stames and Barry Calvert would be there as usual. The vision evaporated as he looked to his left. At one end of the deserted avenue, he could see the White House grounds and patches of the white building through the trees. To his right, at the other end of the avenue, stood the Capitol, gleaming in the early morning sunshine. And between the two, between Caesar and Cassius, thought Mark, stood the FBI Building. Alone in the middle, he mused, the Director and himself, playing with destiny.

  Mark drove the car down the ramp at the back of FBI Headquarters and parked. A young man in a dark blue blazer, grey flannels, dark shoes, and a

  smart blue tie, the regulation uniform of the Bureau, awaited him. An anonymous man, thought Mark, who looked far too neat to have just got up. Mark Andrews showed him his identification. The young man led him towards the elevator without saying a word; it took them to the seventh floor, where Mark walk noiselessly escorted to a small room and asked to wait.

  He sat in the reception room, next to the Director's office, with the inevitable out-of-date copies of Time and Newsweek; he might have been at the dentist's. It was the first time in his life that he would rather have been at his dentist's. He pondered the events of the last fourteen hours. He'd gone from bring a man with no responsibility enjoying the second of five eventful years in the FBI to one who was staring into the jaws of a tiger. His only previous trip to the Bureau itself had been for his interview; they hadn't told him that this could happen. They had talked of salaries, bonuses, holidays, a worthwhile and fulfilling job, serving the nation, nothing about immigrant Greeks and black postmen with their throats cut, nothing about friends being drowned in the Potomac. He paced around the room trying to compose his thoughts; yesterday should have been his day off, but he had decided he could do with the overtime pay. Perhaps another agent would have got back to the hospital more quickly and forestalled the double murder. Perhaps if he had driven the Ford sedan last night, it would have been he, not Stames and Calvert, in the Potomac. Perhaps . . . Mark closed his eyes and felt an involuntary shiver run down his spine. He made an effort to disregard the panicky fear that had kept him awake all night — perhaps it would be his turn next.

  His eyes came to rest on a plaque on the wall, which stated that, in over sixty years of the FBI's history, only thirty-four people had been killed while

  on duty; on only one occasion had two officers died on the same day. Yesterday made that out of date. Mark's eyes continued moving around the wall and settled on a large picture of the Supreme Court; government and the law hand-in-hand. On his left were the five directors, Hoover, Gray, Ruckelshaus, Kelley, and now the redoubtable H. A. L. Tyson, known to everyone in the Bureau by the acronynm Halt. Apparently, no one except his secretary, Mrs McGregor, knew his first name. It had become a long-standing joke in the Bureau. When you joined the FBI, you paid one dollar to Mrs McGregor, who had served the Director for twenty-seven years, and told her what you thought the Director's first name was. If you got it right, you won the pool. The kitty had now reached $3,516. Mark had guessed Hector. Mrs McGregor had laughed and the pool was one dollar the richer. If you wanted a second guess, that cost you another dollar, but if you got it wrong, you paid a ten-dollar fine. Quite a few people tried the second time and the kitty grew larger as each new victim arrived.

  Mark had had what he thought was the bright idea of checking the Criminal Fingerprints File. The FBI fingerprints records fall into three categories -military, civil, and criminal, and all FBI agents have their prints in the criminal file. This insures that they are able to trace any FBI agent who turns criminal, or to eliminate an agent's prints at the scene of a crime; these records are very rarely used. Mark had considered himself very clever as he asked to see Tyson's card. The Director's card was handed to him by an assistant from the Fingerprints Department. It read - 'Height: 6' 1"; Weight: 180 lbs; Hair: brown; Occupation: Director of FBI; Name: Tyson, H. A. L.' No forename given. The assistant, another anonymous man in a blue suit, had smiled sourly at Mark and had said, loud enough for Mark to hear, as he returned the card to its file, 'One more sucker who thought he was going to make a quick three thousand bucks.'

  Because the Bureau had become more political during the last decade the appo
intment of a professional law enforcement officer was a figure whom Congress found very easy to endorse. Law enforcement was in Tyson's blood. His great-grandfather had been a Wells Fargo man, riding shotgun on the stage between San Francisco and Seattle in the other Washington. His grandfather had been mayor of Boston and its chief of police, a rare combination, and his father before his retirement had been a distinguishes Massachusetts attorney. That the great-grandson had followed family tradition, and ended up as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, surprised no one. The anecdotes about him were legion and Mark wondered just how many of them were apocryphal.

  There was no doubt that Tyson had scored the winning touchdown in his final Harvard-Yale game because it was there on record, as indeed was the fact that he was the only white man to box on the 1956 American Olympic team in Melbourne. Whether he had actually said to the late President Nixon that he would rather serve the devil than direct the FBI under his presidency, no one could be sure, but it was certainly a story the Kane camp made no effort to suppress.

  His wife had died five years earlier of multiple sclerosis. He had nursed her for twenty years with a fierce loyalty.

  He feared no man and his reputation for honesty and straight talking had raised him above most government employees in the eyes of the nation. After a period of malaise, following Hoover's death, Halt Tyson had restored the Bureau to the prestige it had enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s. Tyson was one of the reasons Mark had been happy to commit five years of his life to the FBI.

  Mark began to fidget with the middle button of his jacket, as all FBI agents tend to do. It had been drummed into him in the fifteen-week course at Quantico that jacket buttons should always be undone, allowing access to the gun, on the hip holster, never on a shoulder strap. It annoyed Mark that the television series about the FBI always got that wrong. Whenever an FBI man sensed danger, he would fiddle with that middle button to make sure his coat was open. Mark sensed fear, fear of the unknown, fear of H. A. L. Tyson, fear which an accessible Smith and Wesson could not cure.

  The anonymous young man with the vigilant look and the dark blue blazer returned.

  'The Director will see you now.'

  Mark rose, felt unsteady, braced himself, rubbed his hands against his trousers to remove the sweat from his palms and followed the anonymous man through the outer office and into the Director's inner sanctum. The Director glanced up, waved him to a chair, and waited for the anonymous man to leave the room and close the door. Even seated, the Director was a bull of a man with a large head placed squarely on massive shoulders. Bushy eyebrows matched his careless, wiry brown hair; it was so curly you might have thought it was a wig if it hadn't been H. A. L. Tyson. His big hands remained splayed on the surface as though the desk might try to get away. The delicate Queen Anne desk was quite subdued by the grip of the Director. His cheeks were red, not the red of alcohol, but the red of good and bad weather. Slightly back from the Director's chair stood another man muscular, clean-shaven, and silent, a policeman's policeman.

  The Director spoke. 'Andrews, this is Assistant Director Matthew Rogers. I have briefed him on the events following Casefikis's death: we will be putting several agents on the investigation with you.' The Director's grey eyes were piercing — piercing Mark. 'I lost two of my best men yesterday, Andrews, and nothing -I repeat, nothing - will stop me from finding out who was responsible, even if it was the President herself, you understand.'

  'Yes, sir,' Mark said very quietly.

  'You will have gathered from the press release we gave that the public is under the impression that what happened yesterday evening was just another automobile accident. No journalist has connected the murders in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center with the deaths of my agents. Why should they, with a murder every twenty-six minutes in America?'

  A Metropolitan Police file marked 'Chief of Metropolitan Police' was by his side; even they were under control.

  'We, Mr Andrews . . .'

  It made Mark feel slightly royal.

  '. . . we are not going to disillusion them. I have been going over carefully what you told me last night. I'll summarise the situation as I see it. Please feel free to interrupt me whenever you want to.'

  Under normal circumstances, Mark would have laughed.

  The Director was looking at the file.

  'The Greek immigrant wanted to see the head of the FBI,' he continued. 'Perhaps I should have granted his request, had I known about it.' He looked up. 'Still, the facts: Casefikis made an oral statement to you at Woodrow Wilson, and the gist of it was that he believed that there was a plot in motion to assassinate the President of the United States on 10 March; he overheard this information while waiting on a private lunch in a Georgetown hotel, at which he thought a US senator was present. Is that correct so far, Andrews?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  Once more the Director looked down at the file.

  'The police took prints of the dead man, and he hasn't shown up in our files or in the Metropolitan Police files. So for the moment we must act on the assumption, after last night's four killings, that everything the Greek immigrant told us was in good faith. He may not have got the story entirely accurately, but he certainly was on to something big enough to cause four murders in one night. I think we may also assume that whoever the people are behind these diabolical events, they believe they are now in the clear and that they have killed anyone who might have known of their plans. You may consider yourself lucky, young man.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'I suppose it had crossed your mind that they thought it was you in the blue Ford sedan?'

  Mark nodded. He had thought of little else for the past ten hours; he hoped Norma Stames would never think of it.

  'I want these conspirators to think they are now in the clear and for that reason, I am going to allow the President's schedule for the week to continue as planned, at least for the moment.'

  Mark ventured a question. 'But, sir, won't that put her in grave danger?'

  'Andrews, somebody, somewhere, and it may be a United States senator, is planning to assassinate the President; so far, he has been prepared to murder two of my best agents, a Greek who might have recognised him, and a deaf postman whose only connection with the matter was that he may have been able to identify Casefikis's killer. If we rush in now with the heavy

  artillery, then we will scare them off. We have almost nothing to go on; we would be unlikely to discover their identities. And if we did, we certainly wouldn't be able to nail them. Our only hope of catching them is to let the bastards think they are in the clear - right up to the last moment. That way, we just might get them. It's possible they have already been frightened off, but I think not. They have used such violent means to keep their intentions secret they must have some overriding reason for wanting the President out

  of the way within seven days. We must find out what the reason is.'

  'Shall we tell the President?'

  'No, no, not yet. God knows, over the past two years she's had enough problems with the Gun Control bill without having to look over her shoulder

  trying to figure out which senator is Mark Antony and which is Brutus.'

  'So what do we do for the next six days?'

  'You and I will have to find Cassius. And he may not be the one with the lean and hungry look.'

  'What if we don't find him?' asked Mark.

  'God help America.'

  'And if we do?'

  'You may have to kill him.'

  Mark thought for a moment. He'd never killed anybody in his life; come to think of it, he hadn't knowingly killed anything at all. He didn't like stepping on insects. And the thought that the first person he might kill could be a US senator was, to say the least, daunting.

  'Don't look so worried, Andrews. It probably won't come to that. Now let me tell you exactly what I intend to do. I'm going to brief Stuart Knight, the head of the Secret Service, that two of my officers were investigating a man claiming that the Pr
esident of the United States was going to be assassinated sometime within the next month. However, I have no intention of letting him know that a senator may be involved; and I won't tell him that two of our men died because of it; that's not his problem. It may actually have nothing to do with a senator, and I'm not having a whole bunch of people staring at their elected representatives wondering which one of them is a criminal.'

  The Assistant Director cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. 'Some of us think that anyway.'

  The Director continued unswervingly. 'This morning, Andrews, you will write a report on Casefikis's information and the circumstances of his murder, and you will hand it in to Grant Nanna. Do not include the subsequent murders of Stames and Galvert: no one must connect these two events. Report the threat on the President's life but not the possibility that a senator is involved. Is that how you would play it, Matt?'

  'Yes, sir,' said Rogers. 'If we voice our suspicions to people who don't need to know them, we will run the risk of provoking a security operation that will make the assassins run for cover; then we would simply have to pick up our marbles and start over – if we were lucky enough to get a second chance.'