Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  A transplanted embryo could, of course, be carried to term by a woman of another race and emerge, genetically speaking, as the same child it would have been if it had remained in the womb in which it was conceived. Many affluent women spared themselves the discomforts of pregnancy by hiring surrogates, usually from the Third World, to gestate their children under medical supervision in commercial maternity homes, unrelated to Mallory’s operation, that sprang up all over the world.

  All embryos were genetically coded and tagged on recovery, and experts at the huge multinational corporation Universal Energy had developed a computer program capable of retrieving any given specimen from storage almost instantaneously. This was an important breakthrough: an eight-day embryo contains all the genetic information needed to produce a child unique in its characteristics, but it cannot be seen by the naked eye unless magnified at least ten times.

  Tens of thousands of implantations had been performed in the MAC clinics with normal results. But because many recovered embryos were not reimplanted, more than one hundred thousand remained in the legal custody of the Mallory Foundation. According to statistics published in the newspapers, nearly ninety percent of such unclaimed frozen embryos were classified by the computer as “other than Caucasian or East Asian.”

  If his writings and the crude cartoons with which he illustrated them were to be believed, Abdul Ahmed Jackson had become obsessed by the idea that Mallory intended to transport the many thousands of frozen nonwhite embryos in his custody into outer space, split them all into identical twins “under weightless conditions,” gestate them in artificial wombs, and employ the human beings thus produced as slave labor in mines owned by Universal Energy on the moons of Jupiter and other extraterrestrial locations. According to his diary he believed that “jezebels and harlots” had been assigned by Mallory and his close friend O. N. Laster, head of Universal Energy, to entrap him, the assassin, into impregnating them. On the evidence contained in his diary (“O my sons! O my daughters! I weep for thee in thy chains and bondage!”), he was convinced that he was the biological father of some of the embryos that were marked for lives of slavery on Ganymede.

  15

  Susan Grant’s murder was pushed out of the news by the two huge stories that broke on the day on which it happened: Lockwood’s inauguration and Mallory’s challenge to the authenticity of his presidency. Something more subtle was also going on. Owing to her choice of Mallory as a life partner, Grant was not the sort of person whose death aroused a sense of loss among people who entertained progressive political opinions, as most Washington journalists did. Even the reporters who witnessed the shooting did not treat it as an interesting crime, except in terms of the dining-out value of their personal exposure to danger and discomfort.

  Lockwood had been right: the media were disappointed in the story. If Mallory himself had been killed immediately after charging that the election had been stolen from him, that would have had potential. His assassination under such circumstances would have activated the entire political apparatus of the United States of America and, with it, its doppelganger, the news industry. But the Susan Grants of this world arrive in Washington out of nowhere with every new administration, have their hour of reflected glory, and then go back to nowhere. From the Establishment’s point of view, Grant had, for all practical purposes, committed suicide, earning her fate by flaunting the reprehensible sexual and political life she had led as Mallory’s lover and adviser.

  Most reporters and other members of the intelligentsia accepted without question the explanation provided by the all-too-familiar clues discovered in the suspect’s ghetto hideout. Plainly Jackson, like so many American loser-assassins before him, was a textbook psychopath who had been plotting to kill Mallory for months, possibly even years. This explanation had many weaknesses. One in particular bothered Macalaster. How had the assassin known that Mallory was going to give a press conference in time to make an attempt on his life? The first announcement of the event was broadcast at 11:10 A.M., at about the time Abdul Ahmed Jackson was supposed to have buried himself in the snowbank, and about five minutes after Macalaster had bumped into him coming out of the men’s room in the Library of Congress. Because a cordon sanitaire had been thrown up by the police and federal troops to keep people like Jackson’s neighbors away from the inaugural ceremonies, there was no vehicular traffic for fifteen blocks east of the Capitol on Inauguration morning. Macalaster knew, because he had timed it, that it took more than forty minutes for a man walking fast to cover the distance between Jackson’s room and the Capitol.

  After watching the tapes of the killing over and over, Macalaster was sure that the man he had seen was the assassin; the sleeves and the hem of his blue overcoat could be seen as he raised the pistol with both arms, hitching up the loosely fitting caftan. Besides, gas mask or no gas mask, caftan or not, Macalaster knew that this was the person he had encountered. His every instinct told him so.

  All this he explained to the detective in charge of the case. They met for the second time in a cubicle in the First District station house on North Capitol Street. The detective listened politely while Macalaster talked.

  “Did you walk the route yourself?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Macalaster replied.

  “That was a good piece of detective work. But I gotta tell you … ” He shook his head ruefully. “The mind plays tricks.”

  “Why do you discount everything I say?” Macalaster asked him.

  “We don’t discount anything any citizen tells us. We value your input. But at the same time, many hands don’t necessarily make light work. We have a certain amount of experience in these matters. Let’s go over what happened to you. You saw someone in a blue overcoat with a Persian lamb collar come out of the men’s room. You went inside and there, to your shock and horror, you found your poor handicapped friend Montague Love lying in a pool of blood in a toilet stall. With his pants down—significant detail. Then, instead of doing what you knew was the right thing, which was to call the cops and an ambulance and wait for them at the scene of the crime, you panicked, ran, and fell down and hit your head on a stone floor, knocking yourself cold. When you woke up you learned that someone you knew personally had been shot dead while you were unconscious. Naturally your unconscious mind, the part of us that old-timers used to call the conscience, got right to work, trying to make a pattern out of these random events. That’s what’s going on with you, Mac. Your conscience is trying to make sense of the inexplicable. We see this all the time in all kinds of people. The more decent they are, the more responsible citizens, the more likely the syndrome.”

  “The ‘syndrome’?”

  A nod of the head, a gentle smile, a look of sincere sympathy—the sequence recommended by the manual for handling difficult witnesses. This was an educated cop. Diplomas from two universities hung on the wall of the cubicle. “As a rule,” the detective said, “we recommend talking to a professional in cases like yours. I’ve got a list right here of some of the best.”

  “You think I’m imagining things?”

  “Of course not; we know a lot about you, and we respect your reputation for truthfulness and honesty, which is a pretty fine one, by the way. But maybe you’re misinterpreting things. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s only human. Farther than that it would be wrong for a nonprofessional to go. We’re getting into deep waters here, Mac. Obviously, you feel terrible—and not only emotionally. You’ve had a nasty concussion. You saw the victim, who was someone you knew personally and admired, just a few minutes before she died. No normal man wants an attractive, educated young woman to die; it’s against nature. You also suffered a sudden personal loss yourself not so very long ago. Sometimes it takes someone who understands the mysteries of the human mind to make all these factors add up. Because to be brutally honest, your theory doesn’t add up for purposes of this investigation. We wish it did. But it doesn’t.”

  Macalaster said, “Neither does yours, pal.”


  The detective smiled compassionately but raised both pink, unwrinkled palms in a gesture that said, “Please—no more.”

  In a matter of days, the horrifying images of Grant’s murder would disappear into the national unconscious along with the footage of thousands of other pointless killings.

  16

  On his way home, Macalaster rang Mallory’s number from his car and, after punching in a private code for confidential messages that Mallory had given him, told the computer that answered that he had unique information relating to the events at the news conference. Five minutes after he walked into his house, a pair of Mallory security operatives named Wiggins and Lucy knocked on the door. They were thirtyish, and like most Mallory people, they were prime examples of the healthy mind in the healthy body. Macalaster had the impression that either one of them could easily run five miles, bike ten miles, swim two miles, and then, in less than two seconds, while still standing chest-deep in the water, fire eighteen vinyl-tipped explosive/expansive rounds from a 6mm pistol into a three-inch bull’s-eye from a distance of fifty yards. According to tabloid folklore, this was a fitness test every Mallory security agent had to pass once a month.

  Wiggins and Lucy debriefed him by asking him to tell his story into the microphone of a tiny computer that transformed speech into printed English. With Wiggins doing most of the talking and Lucy most of the thinking, they questioned him much more efficiently than the detective had done. They knew the ground so well, and were so impervious to surprise, that Macalaster found himself wondering whether they did not already know everything he had said to the detective only an hour or two before, but their discretion was so ostentatious that there was no point in asking them. Neither commented in any way on Macalaster’s story.

  “President Mallory will have immediate access to your input,” Lucy told him. “However, he regrets that he won’t be able to see you for a few days. Susan’s funeral will be held tomorrow in Kansas City—”

  Macalaster said, “Is that where she’s from?”

  Lucy ignored the question. “The service will be private, for security reasons, and also because her parents do not wish to have the media present,” she said. “Unfortunately that includes you. We are instructed to tell you that nothing has changed in regard to the arrangements President Mallory made with you personally, and that he will be in touch as soon as possible.”

  Macalaster asked them to wait while he wrote a letter of condolence to Mallory. While he scrawled his dozen awkward lines in repayment for Mallory’s earlier letter of sympathy to him, Lucy went out to the car and transmitted his statement from the computer to Mallory Industries’ mainframe. The whole exercise lasted no more than five minutes, but as Macalaster handed over the letter, Wiggins said, “President Mallory thanks you for the information you’ve provided. He read it raw on his screen as it came up from the scanner.”

  “What does he think of it?”

  “He didn’t say. Goodbye, sir.”

  17

  On the morning after Grant’s funeral, in pitch darkness and the muffled suburban silence of six A.M., Lucy called Macalaster.

  “Wiggins and I will pick you up in a car at seven o’clock exactly, if that’s convenient,” she said. “You’re scheduled for a working breakfast at seven-thirty.”

  “I’ll be waiting outside,” Macalaster said.

  “No, please don’t do that. We’ll call as we turn into your street, then ring the bell.”

  By now the snow had melted, and even before dawn the thermometer was in the forties. As the car, with Wiggins at the wheel, rolled smoothly alongside the Potomac, then crossed the Chain Bridge into Virginia, the stereo played country music. Lucy turned around in the front seat and said, “Is the music all right?”

  “I like it,” Macalaster said. In twisting her body to face him, she had revealed the butt of a pistol in a shoulder holster next to her left breast, which was the only plump thing about her. He smiled. “Nice big gun.”

  Lucy smiled in return—no teeth or eyes, just a fleeting compression of unpainted lips. “You should see Wiggins’s,” she said. This was reflex, and he could see she regretted the wisecrack immediately—not because she cared about Macalaster’s feelings, but because it was a breach of discipline. He did not mind. He already knew that Malloryites did not like the press, no matter what their auspices.

  Because of the shooting, Mallory was staying—or at least receiving visitors—in the deep isolation of a Norman manor house set in a woods near Great Falls. The long front drive passed between two rows of stumpy plane trees, whose whippy branches had been trimmed back for winter. Acres of muddy vineyards lay to either side. “These are all New World grapes, collected in the wild from all over the Western Hemisphere,” said Lucy, though Macalaster had asked no questions. “The idea is to cross different varieties for desirable genetic characteristics, such as sugar and water content, and make American wines that owe nothing to Europe. The people involved think that genetic engineering will produce a better wine in two or three generations than the Old World managed to develop in thousands.”

  She imparted this information with an air of condescension, as if Macalaster might not have the money or the inside knowledge needed to understand the mysteries of winemaking. Witticisms occurred to him, but he suppressed them. Creating an all-American viticulture seemed an odd ambition in the twenty-first century, when even famous Burgundies and Bordeaux grands crus consisted mostly of mass-produced wines with traces of Pommard or Médoc added by the bottler to satisfy the labeling laws.

  Mallory’s Norman manor house had tiny diamond windowpanes glazed with thick imitation crown glass that admitted little light (and, Macalaster guessed, was designed to stop a bazooka round). In the gloomy morning room where Mallory greeted him, food was laid out in chafing dishes on a sideboard. Mallory, who ate solid food only at dinner, drank a cup of tea while Macalaster, taught by his working-class mother that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, helped himself to sausages, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and toast.

  “Thank you for your letter,” Mallory said. “It was a comfort to me.” Macalaster started to reply, but Mallory changed the subject before he could speak. “I understand you’ve been beating your head against the bureaucracy,” he said.

  “I’ve tried to get them to pay attention to the information I gave them, yes.”

  “You really think the fellow you saw in the library is the assassin?”

  “There’s no question in my mind that he was.”

  Macalaster repeated the reasons for this, including the clues in the television footage and his inner certainty.

  Mallory listened patiently to the end. “I see why you feel as you do,” he said. “But you do understand, don’t you, that all questions of who and how are irrelevant?”

  Macalaster was taken aback. What was Mallory talking about? “If the objective is to identify the person responsible and bring him to justice,” he said, “then how can any information be irrelevant?”

  “Because the question is not who did it, or the methods and tools he used,” Mallory said. “The question is why it was done, and we are in the process of asking why.”

  “Are you?” Macalaster replied. “Whom are you asking?”

  “So far, the computers, to establish the probabilities, based on the known facts. The candidates for questioning almost certainly will not include the gunman. We already know everything about him that we need to know.”

  “Really? What do you know?”

  “That all he knows is what he did, not why he did it.”

  “You don’t believe that stuff about your sending his frozen children to the moons of Jupiter?”

  “I think the evidence found in his room may answer too many obvious questions in too obvious a way. Do you remember what Orwell’s hero perceived in 1984? ‘The best books are the ones that tell you what you know already.’ That includes textbooks on assassins; according to the psychologists, they’re all alike. But
that’s not the only reason Abdul Ahmed Jackson doesn’t count. If he wasn’t a homicidal delusionary, as his diary and all other clues found in his hideout so plainly suggest, then the next possibility is that he was an agent acting for others. In which case he would never be told whom he was working for or the true reason for the murder he was commissioned to commit.”

  “In either case, he tried to kill you once, so it’s possible he might try again.”

  Mallory’s eyes changed expression. “What makes you think,” he asked, “that he was trying to kill me?”

  Macalaster was stunned. He said, “Why else would he come at you with a gun?”

  “He didn’t come at me with a gun,” Mallory said. “He came at Susan, and he killed her. She was the target. Do you really think a man who behaved as efficiently as he did—like an automaton, as you put it—would shoot the wrong person? He killed Susan with a brain shot and put five more bullets into her body before she could fall down. While this happened, I was standing less than two feet away from her. He had all the time in the world to blow out my brains with one of the fourteen live rounds of ammunition remaining in the magazine of his pistol. Nobody could have stopped him.”

  “But he tried to kill you by firing through her body when she jumped between you.”

  “What evidence is there for that assumption? He had a clear shot at me one second after he killed Susan. There was no need to be artistic about it. There was no one to stop him. But he disappeared into a cloud of smoke instead. Why?”

  “ ‘Artistic about it’?” Macalaster said. He was shocked that Mallory could use such a phrase—even think of it—in connection with the experience of seeing the woman he loved shot to death in front of his eyes.

  Mallory read Macalaster’s reaction and waited a moment for it to pass. Then he repeated his question. “Why didn’t he shoot me? He had time, he had ammunition, and God knows he had the nerve.”