Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Strictly routine. But McGraw had long ago learned to look for breaks in the routine. Working backward (last actions were usually the least typical ones), he asked the computer to search the logs for the last number Julian had called on the night he resigned and left the White House forever. The computer found and displayed the number. McGraw asked it to match it to a name and address. An instant later a name, Palmer St. Clair 3d of 1 Palmer Mews, Stamford, Connecticut, appeared on the screen. McGraw accessed Who’s Who in America and looked up the entry for Palmer St. Clair 3d. He, too, had gone to Yale. Yearbooks told McGraw that he too had resided in Calhoun College, graduating one year after Julian Hubbard and two years after Julian’s good friend Archimedes Hammett. McGraw accessed St. Clair’s Connecticut driver’s license and copied the picture and Social Security number. The latter gave him access to St. Clair’s credit card numbers. He asked the major credit data banks for a rundown of St. Clair’s recent travel, and found that he had flown to Washington from La Guardia just a few days before, taking the seven A.M. plane to National Airport and returning to La Guardia on the ten o’clock shuttle. This had given him about one hour in Washington. McGraw found the record of the car St. Clair had rented, determined the mileage, twenty-four miles, and asked the computer to draw a radius based on this figure on a map of Washington and Virginia. This graphic suggested that St. Clair could have traveled to Mount Vernon, the Washington Cathedral, or the Capitol, assuming he hadn’t gotten lost.

  This was about as far as McGraw could go without outside help. He walked down the hall to the office of Norman Carlisle Blackstone and told him about Horace Hubbard’s rendezvous with Busby.

  Blackstone listened soberly, making notes. “If those two have been getting together, in secret or otherwise,” he said, “it’s most improper conduct.”

  “Yeah, completely out of character for a Hubbard,” McGraw said. “There’s one more datum, seemingly unrelated, but maybe it’ll turn out to be a clue.”

  McGraw spoke the word “datum” deadpan, knowing that rigorous grammatical usage in all languages gave Blackstone pleasure. Grim and ashen from lack of sleep, the lawyer smiled in weary appreciation and said, “What datum is that, John?”

  “Horace Hubbard and Baxter T. Busby played on the same basketball team at Yale.”

  “Ah, that would suggest a bond.”

  “Could be,” McGraw said. “One datum sometimes leads to another.”

  “Is that what’s happening in your investigation?”

  “I think maybe that’s what’s beginning to happen. This particular datum got me thinking in a different direction.”

  Blackstone was suddenly alert. “Oh? What direction is that?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” McGraw said, “but it looks like I’ll have to visit New Haven.”

  7

  As a general rule, McGraw did not believe in telephone taps, or “intercepts,” as they were called by spies and others who did believe in them. Eavesdropping was a thief of time and money that almost never produced usable evidence. It stood to reason that no one who was engaged in espionage or other criminal activity on a professional basis was likely to say anything incriminating over the phone, and ordinarily McGraw was not interested in amateurs. At best, intercepts could be used to justify suspicions. But what was the point of doing that? There were no degrees of suspicion. If you had a suspect, you looked for hard evidence of his guilt. You looked for patterns. This was what McGraw believed in and what he lived by as an investigator: patterns.

  In his quest for evidence that might help Olmedo save Lockwood, McGraw had no real suspect, but he did have a starting point: Palmer St. Clair 3d of Stamford, Connecticut, to whom Julian had placed his last call from his White House phone, and who had made that flying visit to Washington. With the help of a friend in the telephone company, McGraw put together a pattern based on St. Clair’s incoming and outgoing telephone calls over the past five years. He discovered that a large number of calls had been placed to the number in Stamford from pay telephones in Washington or New Haven. Such calls were invariably followed, within sixty seconds, by a call from the telephone in Stamford to a third number. The most frequently called numbers belonged to Julian Hubbard and Archimedes Hammett. Within a minute or so after receiving a call from Palmer St. Clair 3d, the person called by St. Clair would dial another number, and then the person at that number would immediately make another call. And so on.

  At the end of a night of work on the computer, McGraw had compiled a long list of interconnected numbers. He matched these numbers to names and matched the names to biographical files. It was now that the pattern emerged: every one of the numbers belonged to a graduate of Yale who held a position of influence in government, banking, business, law, academia, or some other learned profession or prestigious occupation. They were of all ages from the twenties to the seventies; the oldest was the chairman of a private bank in Wall Street, the youngest a law student. Each member of the network was in touch with two other people, and those two were also in touch with two more. The entire network could be accessed in less than ten minutes.

  McGraw had just compiled the first directory of the Shelley Society. He did not yet know its name or purposes. But he knew it existed and he knew the names, addresses, phone numbers, and thumbnail biographies of most of the people who belonged to it. It was organized exactly like the Eye of Gaza and every other terrorist network he had ever penetrated. An operation set up in this triangular fashion was, in theory, impenetrable because no one member could betray more than two other people. The theory was erroneous, however, because, as McGraw knew from experience, all you had to do to discover all its members was to identify one of them, persuade him to identify the next one, and keep going in either direction until you got to the end.

  Not for a moment did McGraw think that these people were terrorists. But what was the purpose of the operation? What game were they playing? What unified them besides Yale? He had already established one interesting circumstance: Palmer St. Clair 3d’s brief trip to Washington. Why would a partner in a large Manhattan brokerage house fly to Washington for an hour when the airline data bank showed that he had not visited the city even once in the preceding five years? McGraw accessed the news files for the days before and after St. Clair’s trip to see if it might be connected to something in the news. He immediately struck pay dirt. Julian Hubbard’s name popped up in Ross Macalaster’s story about the Ibn Awad assassination, which had appeared in the papers the day after St. Clair’s visit. This would have seemed mere coincidence apart from the fact that St. Clair had received a call from a pay phone in Washington the night before and had made only one outgoing call for the rest of the evening—to the airline to book his early-morning flight to Washington. McGraw checked the mileage on the rented car again, projecting it on the map against the locations of Macalaster’s house, Julian Hubbard’s house, and Hammett’s apartment. All fell within the radius.

  By now it was five o’clock in the morning. McGraw booked himself on a flight from National Airport to La Guardia, rented a car after landing, and arrived in front of a large, dramatically modern house in Stamford at a few minutes after seven. It was a rainy morning. With the defroster running to keep the windows clear, he ate a granola bar, drank a half-pint carton of skim milk, and read the tabloid he had bought at the airport. At 7:20 A.M. a tall, gawky WASP scarecrow, a man in his fifties, came out the front door wearing a sweat suit. Planting his foot on the doorjamb, he did a series of elaborate stretching exercises, then started off on his morning run, elbows and knees going every which way. McGraw recorded this activity with a video camera that stored the images on the disk in his computer.

  8

  Back in Washington a couple of hours later, McGraw drove straight from the airport to Macalaster’s house. He did not know Macalaster, but he had been working with reporters all his life, and he knew that they were gossips at heart. They lived by trading information. He thought he had an item to trade that Macalaster
would not be able to resist. It was still quite early in the morning. A sleepy-eyed Macalaster answered the doorbell, but when he saw a redheaded stranger standing on his doorstep wearing blue-on-blue polyester—navy blazer, powder-blue slacks, blue checked shirt, sky-blue tie, he nearly slammed the door in his face.

  McGraw said, “Whoa!” and held up a hand with a vinyl White House security badge in it. He told Macalaster who he was and saw that he recognized the name. The journalist’s face registered a mixture of wariness and curiosity.

  “It’s nice of you to come by so early, Mr. McGraw,” he said. “But it may be a waste of your time. I can’t discuss sources with you.”

  “I’d never dream of asking you to do that,” McGraw said. “I know you fellows have rules. I just want your help on a small detail.”

  “What kind of a detail?”

  “I want you to look at some pictures.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  McGraw had brought his computer to the door with him. He switched it on and punched up the video footage he had recorded in Stamford. Then he turned the computer around so that Macalaster could see the screen, on which Palmer St. Clair 3d was taking his morning run under the dripping maple trees. There were several close-ups, taken with the telephoto lens, of St. Clair’s long-jawed, gin-ravaged society-page face. It was the same man who had collided with Macalaster in the parking lot and hooked the Ibn Awad tape to his coat.

  “I have no idea who this man is,” Macalaster said.

  But McGraw saw recognition flickering in his eyes. “I believe you,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you this guy’s name and address if you’ll tell me how you happened to recognize him.”

  “What makes you think I recognize him?”

  McGraw gave him a steady policeman’s look. “Absolute confidentiality guaranteed,” he said, instead of answering the question.

  Macalaster stepped aside. “Come in, Mr. McGraw.”

  In the den, Macalaster said, “You were right. I do recognize that person.”

  “Okay,” McGraw said. “Your move.”

  Macalaster told him what had happened in the parking lot, but nothing more than the details of the encounter itself. He protected Julian Hubbard; he protected everyone he had the slightest reason to protect. McGraw asked no further questions, but as he had anticipated, Macalaster’s curiosity was an irresistible force. Without waiting to be asked, McGraw fed it by downloading his video of St. Clair onto a floppy disk and providing Macalaster with a printout of the biographical sketch he had compiled from Who’s Who in America and other overt sources. He asked to see the fishhook, the plastic bag, the tape itself. Macalaster showed him these items. “Hey,” McGraw said, examining the fly, “a Mickey Finn.”

  “A what?” Macalaster asked.

  “That’s the name of this fly.”

  “Are you a fly fisherman?”

  “No, but I put one in jail once.”

  “For what?”

  “He drowned his wife in ten inches of running water and tried to make it look like a fishing accident,” McGraw said. “Is it all right with you if I take pictures of this stuff?”

  “Go ahead. What else can you tell me about this man St. Clair?”

  “So far, not much.” McGraw was packing up his computer. “Looks like his hobbies are jogging, fly-fishing, and delivering stolen goods to strangers in parking lots three hundred miles from home. He went to Yale, class of ‘71. Did you go there?”

  “No.”

  “Know anybody who did?”

  “This town is full of people who went to Yale.”

  “That’s funny, so is New York,” said McGraw. He made as if to get up out of his chair, then subsided. “Look,” he said, “I do know a little more. I don’t mind telling you what it is, but I’ve gotta get something back.”

  Macalaster said, “What, for example?”

  “Here’s the deal,” McGraw said. “I’ll give you two names of people right here in Washington who knew this character at Yale if you’ll let me make a copy of the tape.”

  “Why would you do that?” Macalaster said. “Everything on the tape was in the paper.”

  “Reading it isn’t the same as listening to it.”

  Macalaster examined his visitor. The legs of McGraw’s wrinkle-proof trousers had hiked up when he sat down. The meaty part of the left calf was marked by a vertical line of irregular roundish scars that resembled old-fashioned smallpox vaccinations. Macalaster, who had seen fresh punctures of this kind in Vietnam, recognized them as wounds inflicted by an automatic weapon.

  “Yes or no?” McGraw asked.

  Macalaster looked at McGraw’s scars again. He said, “Okay.”

  McGraw held out his hand for the minitape, snapped it into a slot in the computer and typed in a command. The tape whirred at high speed as the computer copied it into its memory. He rewound it and handed it back to Macalaster.

  “The names,” McGraw said, “are Julian Hubbard, class of 1970, and Archimedes Hammett, class of 1969.” He handed Macalaster a business card. “If you remember anything else you want to swap, tit for tat and strictly between the two of us, here’s my number.” He winked. “Just like on television.”

  After McGraw left, Macalaster looked at the evidence lying on the table. A tape cassette. In a Baggie. Hanging from a dry fly called a Mickey Finn. A wave of nausea rose in his throat. For the first time he perceived the smug, contemptuous joke contained in the method of delivery. The hook had been baited and he had swallowed it. Whoever had used him had known him well, and had known what he would do in response to the perfectly chosen lure.

  9

  “Sinclair,” Julian Hubbard said, correcting Macalaster’s outsider’s pronunciation of the name St. Clair as two separate words. “Yes, I know a Palmer St. Clair. We were in the same college at Yale.”

  “Which college was that?”

  “Calhoun. He was my junior by a year.”

  “Was Hammett in Calhoun College, too?” Macalaster asked.

  “That’s right, he was a year ahead of me. Just a moment, I think I see something interesting.” He lifted the Zeiss binoculars to his eyes, focused them, and said, “Ah!” Handing the glasses over to Macalaster, he said, “See that tall pine against the sky? Fourth branch from the top, left-hand side, right on the tip, a pine grosbeak.”

  Julian had suggested that they meet on Theodore Roosevelt Island, a wildlife preserve in the Potomac River; hardly anyone went there now because human life was not protected there, and as Macalaster had reason to know, the city itself was overrun with wild creatures. He looked through the Zeiss lenses but saw no bird.

  “Wasn’t that something?” Julian said.

  “All I saw was the Kennedy Center,” Macalaster said. He handed the binoculars back to Julian.

  “Really? Bad luck; you may not see another pine grosbeak for a while.” Julian lifted the glasses to his eyes again. “Why are you interested in Palmer St. Clair, of all people?” he asked.

  “I came into contact with him,” Macalaster said.

  Julian focused the binoculars. “Did you now? How is he?”

  “I don’t know. It was a brief contact. He hooked the tape of you and Philindros and Lockwood plotting to murder Ibn Awad to my coat and disappeared.”

  Julian lowered the glasses and looked into Macalaster’s face with a show of comic disbelief. “Palmer hooked what to your coat?”

  “The tape, Julian. It was in a Baggie attached to a dry fly, a Mickey Finn.”

  Julian listened, unblinking. “A Mickey Finn?” he said. “Haven’t seen anyone use that particular fly in years.”

  “Has Hammett? Or is he more a live-bait man?”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t think Archimedes knows one trout fly from another,” Julian said. “Ross, what is it you’re driving at?”

  “I want to know what the hell you think you’re doing.”

  “I’m watching birds,” Julian said. He pointed at a large storklike b
ird that stood motionless at the edge of the water. “That’s an American bittern down there. It’s motionless because it thinks we’re dinosaurs who can’t see it if it doesn’t move. It’s the phantom of the American swamp. When it calls out in the marshes at twilight it sounds like a ghost splitting wood with one arm and pumping water with the other. Dull ax, squeaky pump. What do you think I have to do with Palmer St. Clair’s hanging something to your coat with a Mickey Finn? Is he a friend of yours?”

  “That was our only meeting. But he’s a friend of yours. And Hammett’s.”

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right Palmer St. Clair? The one I know is a harmless stockbroker, skinny as a rail, no meat on his bones at all, not the kind of fellow that goes around frightening innocent journalists.” Julian’s equine face was open and amused. “Does that sound like the man?”

  “This is the man,” Macalaster said, handing Julian prints of some of McGraw’s close-ups of St. Clair in his running togs.

  Julian looked at the pictures, holding them out at the end of his arm and tilting his head backward to compensate for his long-sightedness. “That’s Palmer all right,” he said. “Looks like his house in Stamford in the background, too. Haven’t been there in years, but it’s all coming back. Have you been following him?”

  “No, Lockwood’s lawyers have.”

  “Not Blackstone?”

  “An investigator who works for Alfonso Olmedo—McGraw is the name.”

  “Ah, yes, McGraw,” Julian said. “Where did this strange encounter between you and Palmer St. Clair take place?”

  “In a parking lot on Wisconsin Avenue. The man in the pictures was dressed as a runner. He bumped into me and knocked my glasses off.”

  “You broke your glasses?”

  “No. The lenses are plastic.”

  “But they fell to the ground.” Macalaster nodded. Julian said, “And when you looked up your assailant was gone?”