Chaos Theory

by Graham Masterton

  Noah peered into the box. ‘No medallion?’

  Rick gave the box a shake. ‘Not in this case. Wouldn’t have expected one, either. Duran wasn’t part of any terrorist group, so far as we could work out. He believed that the White House was connected to some kind of alien mist.’

  They walked further along the corridor, with Rick flicking his flashlight at every box they passed. Most of the names Noah didn’t recognize, but a few stood out. Dan White, 1978, the former policeman who had shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco. Talmadge Hayer, 1965, who had confessed to taking part in the shotgun assassination of the black power leader Malcolm X in New York. Collie Wilkins, 1965, accused of shooting civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in Alabama.

  ‘Rogues’ gallery,’ Rick remarked. ‘You have to learn all about these screwballs, when you’re training for close protection. It’s supposed to help you pick out a would-be assassin. Creepy, isn’t it, to think that those boxes contain their actual possessions?’

  They walked up and down five rows of shelving before they came to the boxes related to the 1900s. Right at the very end, on the top shelf, they found a dark brown plywood box with a faded label on it, and the inscription L. Czolgosz, 1901 written in italics in purple ink.

  Rick lifted the box down and set it on the floor. Inside was a pale brown tweed coat, carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper, even though it was worn-out and dirty. Underneath the coat there was a black hand-knitted sweater, with fraying cuffs, a grubby grey shirt with no collar, and a pair of dark brown corduroy pants.

  A pair of cracked brown leather shoes had also been neatly wrapped up, in a copy of the Buffalo Express, so old that the paper had turned amber.

  There were twenty or so letters and pages of notes, some of them written in blunt pencil, but a few of them written in a smaller, much more feminine hand, in ink. Rick picked one of these up and read it.

  ‘Dear Leon,

  ‘You ask me what an unemployed man should do to survive. I say he should ask for work. If they do not give him work, he should ask for bread. If they do not give him work or bread, then he should take bread.’

  Rick showed the letter to Noah. ‘Look at the signature – Emma Goldman.’

  Noah shook his head. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘Emma Goldman was a famous anarchist – or infamous anarchist, I should say – and one of the early feminists, too. Red Emma, they called her. She was all in favour of birth control for women, dodging the draft, and assassinating capitalists. Not necessarily in that order of importance.’

  ‘So maybe this Czolgosz guy wasn’t just a lone screwball.’

  ‘Hard to say, from this. But Emma Goldman’s boyfriend was sent to prison for trying to kill Henry Clay Frick.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Big industrialist, in the 1890s. Gave millions to the arts, but when his workers tried to strike, he hired Pinkerton men to open fire on them. It was a different world then, Noah.’

  ‘Maybe not so different,’ said Noah. ‘These bastards are still trying to kill Adeola, aren’t they?’

  Rick said nothing, but lifted out a grey cotton bag, with a drawstring. He shook it, and it sounded metallic. The drawstring was knotted so tightly that he had to cut it with his clasp knife. He tipped it up, and the contents spilled on to the floor: Leon Czolgosz’ personal effects.

  They sorted through them. There were three dollars and eighty-one cents in coins, two pencils with metal caps on them, a tortoiseshell comb with several broken teeth, a small screwdriver of the type used for fixing spectacles, and a heavy circular object wrapped up in greaseproof paper.

  Rick passed it to Noah and Noah carefully unfolded it. It was a tarnished silver medallion, identical to all the others, decorated on one side with arrow-like cuneiforms, and inscribed on the other side with the name C Z O L G O S Z.

  Noah said, ‘There. Guess that proves it, doesn’t it, without a doubt? Czolgosz was connected to Prchal, and Prchal was connected to those Arab guys who tried to kill Adeola, and all of those guys who killed Jenna and Mo and your friends, too.’

  ‘Wallace must have seen this at some time, or found it listed in the archive. I’m just amazed that nobody has ever made the connection before,’ Rick said.

  ‘Why would they? It’s not like Czolgosz and Prchal and those Arab guys had the same, like, political agenda. One was a communist and one was a Soviet agent and the other two could have belonged to any bunch of mad Muslims you can think of. Maybe Adeola was right. Maybe they assassinate people for no other reason except to keep the world in a constant goddamn state of turmoil.’

  They heard voices somewhere outside the archive, and a door slamming. Rick said, ‘I think it’s time we got the hell out of here, don’t you? Keep the medallion. I’ll put everything else back in the box.’

  He quickly refolded Leon Czolgosz’ clothes and returned the box to its place on the shelf. Then he and Noah made their way back towards the window, their soft-soled shoes squelching on the polished floor.

  They were halfway to the window when Rick stopped, and pointed his flashlight at a large cardboard box marked with red capital letters.

  ‘Will you take a look at this?’ he said. ‘Lucien Sarti.’

  They heard more voices outside the door, and the jangle of keys. ‘Come on,’ Noah urged him. ‘It sounds like they’re coming in.’

  But Rick had already pulled the box labelled Lucien Sarti, 1972 off the shelf, and started to pick at the thin green ribbon that was tied around the lid.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Rick,’ said Noah. ‘What’s so important about Lucien Sarti, whoever he is?’

  Rick gave up trying to untie the ribbon and cut it with his knife. He quickly lifted the lid and rummaged inside. The box contained a black suit, a white shirt, and several folders full of documents, as well as two strips of black-and-white passport photographs, showing a dark-haired man with bulbous eyes, a large nose, and a weak chin.

  ‘Lucien Sarti,’ Rick repeated. ‘He was killed by the cops in Mexico. I never realized they brought his stuff back here.’

  He rummaged around some more, coming up with a small spiral-bound telephone book, crowded with dozens of numbers; a penknife with a broken blade; and a necktie clip in the shape of a horse’s head with an orange agate stone for an eye. There was something else, too: and Rick lifted it out of the bottom of the box as if he had discovered the Holy Grail. A silver medallion, with cuneiform patterns on the front, and the letters S A R T I on the reverse.

  Rick shone his flashlight into his own face, so that Noah could see his expression.

  ‘What?’ said Noah. Outside the door to the archive, a man coughed, and another man said, ‘Give me a couple of minutes, OK? I have to put all these records back.’

  ‘What?’ hissed Noah.

  ‘Lucien Sarti was a hitman for the drug-trafficking mob in Marseilles, in the 1960s.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He was one of the prime suspects in the assassination of JFK. Years afterward, he even confessed to it. Two shots were fired from behind the presidential limousine. But Sarti said that he fired the third shot, from the grassy knoll – an explosive bullet that hit Kennedy from the front, and killed him.

  He lifted up the medallion and let it spin.

  ‘And just look what we have here.’

  Twenty-One

  ‘So, then, we have proved this connection between these different assassins,’ said Silja, lighting up another cigarette. ‘But what can we do about it? It seems to me that the more we discover, the greater the danger we are placing ourselves in.’

  They were sitting around Adeola’s cottage at the Bel Air, surrounded by the remains of the Mexican meal they had ordered on room service – chicken fajitas and carnitas duck and poc chuc with pasilla guacamole. They were drinking cold beer with wedges of lime.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Rick. ‘I was wary about going to the cops, even before we went to DC. But findi
ng that medallion in Lucien Sarti’s box—’

  ‘I’m not so sure I understand about that,’ said Silja. ‘What does that tell you?’

  ‘It tells me everything. Lucien Sarti worked for the Mafia in Marseilles and it was the Mafia who had JFK assassinated. But all of the law enforcement agencies were involved in it too, to a greater or lesser extent – the CIA and the FBI and the Dallas police. That’s why they were so insistent that Lee Harvey Oswald shot him. It’s always a whole lot more convenient to blame your classic lone gunman with a screw loose . . . that’s happened in almost every assassination you can think of. It’s especially convenient if you can also arrange to have him whacked before he can go to trial.’

  ‘But what about the Warren Report?’

  Rick smiled and shook his head. ‘Nobody with any expertise in ballistics was convinced for a moment. The shots that hit Kennedy and Governor Connally had far too low a trajectory to have been fired from the schoolbook depository, and how the hell did Oswald manage to shoot Kennedy from the front?

  ‘A guy called Thomas Killam was one of the first to point the finger at the Mafia, only a few days after JFK was shot. Well – you don’t forget a name like “Killam”, do you, not in this context? But Thomas Killam was found in an alleyway a few months later, and guess what? His throat had been cut wide open, same as your friends.

  ‘So – no – I don’t think it’s a great idea to go to the cops, not yet. It only needs a word to be whispered in the wrong ear.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Adeola, ‘how are we going to find these people unless we let them find us first?’

  ‘That’s something we’ll have to sleep on. But Silja’s right. The more we know, the more danger we’re in. We’re really going to have to watch our backs.’

  Early the next morning, Noah was woken by somebody persistently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and almost fell off the couch.

  ‘Jesus – I forgot where I was for a moment.’

  He sat up, squinting against the sunlight. Leon was standing over him in his cuneiform riddle T-shirt and a baggy pair of boxers, his curly hair tangled like a fright wig.

  ‘Noah? Sorry to wake you, man, but you have to see this.’

  ‘What? What the hell time is it?’

  ‘Five thirty. I’ve been up all night. You really have to see this.’

  ‘OK . . .’ Noah stood up and shuffled after him into his bedroom. Silja, on the other couch, was still fast asleep, with a multicoloured blanket pulled right up over her head.

  Leon sat down at his desk, where he had been working on Adeola’s laptop. On the screen was a black-and-white photograph of a hotel lobby crowded with men in suits. In the foreground a tall, handsome man was receiving some kind of award, and shaking the hand of an older man with a high, silver pompadour.

  ‘So? Who’s this?’ asked Noah.

  ‘Adeola asked me to check up on a guy called Hubert Tocsin. He owns an arms company in Houston, and he’s president of the Association of American Arms Manufacturers.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘She met him yesterday, that’s all I know.’

  Noah read the caption under the photograph. ‘“Loew’s New York Hotel, Lexington Avenue, New York, 06/15/89. Hubert Tocsin, chairman and ceo of Tocsin Weapons and Rocketry Systems, is presented with the Wernher von Braun Award for Technological Excellence.” So?’

  ‘Two things. I can’t be sure, but look at Hubert Tocsin’s hair. He could be the guy in that photograph with Professor Halflight in San Diego. Tocsin Weapons and Rocketry Systems is based near San Diego, and they look pretty much alike, don’t you think? But – look in the corner of this picture.’

  Noah examined the photograph more closely. On the left-hand side of the lobby, two men were deep in conversation. Although their faces were partially blurred by reflected flash from the mirror behind them, Noah recognized one of the men immediately. He was tall, and stooped, with an unmistakable lion-like head. Professor Julius Halflight.

  The other man was much shorter, thickset and swarthy, with a skullcap and a jazzy shirt that was open at the neck. Around his neck, in his woolly black chest hair, hung a shining medallion.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ asked Noah.

  ‘Yup. I’ve blown it up, and you can clearly see the cuneiforms.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who he is, this character?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s why I woke you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ve been looking through every mugshot of every well-known assassin for the past fifty years. This is El Sayyid Nosair, who shot Rabbi Meir Kahane at the Marriott Hotel on November fifth, 1990.’

  ‘You’re kidding me!’

  ‘No, I can show you dozens more pictures of him, if you like.’

  ‘Well, well. I wonder what the good professor could have found to talk about with him.’

  ‘Not much, apart from assassinating Rabbi Kahane, unless it was the price of toilet cleaner. Nasair worked as a janitor at the Manhattan Criminal Court.’

  Leon brought up a New York Times report from 1990. ‘See? When he went for trial, they tried to make out that Nosair was just another lone fruitcake. But there were two co-conspirators, at least – somebody who bought the gun for him, and somebody else who told him who he was supposed to shoot.’

  ‘You’ve done good work there, Leon,’ Noah told him. ‘I don’t know where this Tocsin guy fits into this, but it looks like your Professor Halflight is up to his neck in it, for definite.’

  Leon looked grave and tired. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you know what that means?’

  ‘Yes. It means that it was Professor Halflight who arranged to have your dad and your stepmom murdered. Or – at the very least – he must have tipped off the people who did.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Leon. ‘My dad never did any harm to anybody, ever.’

  ‘I know. But we’ll make sure that Professor Halflight gets what’s coming to him, I promise you.’

  ‘Oh, yes? How?’

  Adeola said, ‘Maybe I can act as a Judas goat. Bring them out into the open. Because there’s one thing we know for certain: they want to kill me. If I walk around freely when I go to the Peace Convention—’

  ‘Out of the question,’ said Rick. ‘Far too risky. And far too unpredictable.’

  ‘Rick is right,’ agreed Hong Gildong. ‘We want them to show themselves, but we must be in complete control of the circumstances. Otherwise they could kill you with a remote-control bomb or a sniper’s bullet from a thousand yards away and we would never find out who had done it.’

  ‘Rick – I’ve been thinking,’ said Noah. ‘Maybe I could, like, join them.’

  ‘Join them? How are you going to manage that? For starters, they know what you look like.’

  ‘I know. But supposing I approach them and they don’t recognize me.’

  ‘I don’t understand. How could they possibly not recognize you?’

  Noah turned around to Leon and said, ‘Show them, Leon.’

  Leon clicked Adeola’s laptop, and the face of a Latino-looking man appeared, with a heavy moustache and brambly eyebrows.

  There was a lengthy silence. Eventually, Rick said, ‘OK, I give up. Who the hell is that?’

  ‘That’s me,’ Noah told him. ‘That’s how I appeared in Border Patrol, doing the stunts for Pasqual Hernandes.’

  ‘Well, terrific make-up job, I have to admit. But would it fool anybody in daylight?’

  ‘Oh, sure. The foam prosthetics around the neck and chin are absolutely minimal. It’s mainly hair and colouring. And you see how my ears stick out? It’s amazing how much you can change somebody’s appearance by making their ears stick out.’

  Adeola said, ‘You’re suggesting you disguise yourself like this, and approach these people, and ask to join them?’

  ‘It’s an idea, isn’t it? Now we know for sure that Professor Halflight’s involved.’

  ‘Come on – you really don’t think that he’d
recognize you?’

  ‘I talked to him for less than ten minutes. Most of the time, he had his back to me. I’ll be dark-skinned, I’ll look thirty pounds heavier, I’ll talk with a foreign accent. I can do any accent you like. You vont German? You want Italiano?’

  ‘It’s insane,’ said Rick. ‘It’s a really original idea, I’ll grant you, but it’s total madness.’

  ‘Did you recognize him?’ Silja challenged him, pointing at the picture.

  ‘Well, no, I didn’t—’

  ‘Let me tell you, I was on a set once and Noah’s only make-up was a brown curly wig and brown contact lens in the eyes, and he was walking with his shoulders hunched up so that he looked so much shorter. I did not realize that it was Noah at all until he came right up to me and said hallo.’

  ‘But even if Halflight does fall for your disguise, why should he recruit you for Emu Ki Ilani? I mean – look at the lengths those bastards go to, just to prevent anybody from guessing that they exist.’

  Noah lit two cigarettes and passed one to Silja. Hong Gildong reached out for one too.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking about,’ said Noah. ‘Setting up an assassination, it has a whole lot in common with setting up a movie stunt. You have to calculate the timing, the risks involved, the angles, the coordination between the people you’re going to use, and you have to make allowances for the unexpected.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Adeola.

  ‘Almost every time, no matter what the location, they arrange their assassinations in pretty much the same way. They work out the logistics very carefully, but they recruit some stray nutjob to commit the actual killing, so that it never looks like some kind of organization’s involved.

  ‘Sometimes, when you’re setting up a movie stunt, you have to use the talent instead of a trained stunt-person, and so the stunt is much more difficult to get right. But you make allowances for the talent’s inexperience, and you factor in a far wider safety margin.’

  ‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘But I still don’t see how you can get to join them. Why would they want to recruit you?’