Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “No,” Lockwood said. “Why would I do that?”

  “You’ve had no word at all?”

  “I just said I didn’t. Spit it out, Alfonso.”

  “There was another bombshell,” Olmedo said. “Literally.” He summarized Philindros’s testimony.

  “Okay,” Lockwood said. “So that’s out in the open.”

  Olmedo said, “Are the facts as Philindros stated them?”

  “As far as he went,” Lockwood replied with an impatient gesture. “Hammett must have jumped out of his goddamn skin when they began talking about radioactive fallout. The ultimate harmful additive.”

  “Mr. President, please.”

  “Sorry. But we can deal with this. What was I supposed to do—go public and start an Easter egg hunt, with every terrorist in the world in on the game? The winner gets to blow up New York?”

  “I agree. But this is another blow to your credibility, Mr. President, another dangerous secret exposed. It’s systematic, day in and day out, and it’s devastating to your case, sir.”

  “Looks that way,” Lockwood said. “But there’s time on the clock and we haven’t had the ball yet.” Beneath the brim of his slouch hat, a look of shrewdness came into his eyes. “Have I got it right—Hammett asked all the questions and Busby fed ‘em to him?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well,” Lockwood said. “It looks like you had a point about the Whiffenpoofs.”

  The Secret Service agent who had led Olmedo to this spot stood just out of earshot on the path. Lockwood gestured him nearer. “Get Jeannie on the line,” he said. The agent punched a single key on the scrambler telephone he took from his pocket, listened until there was an answer, handed the instrument to Lockwood, and stepped back out of earshot again.

  “Jeannie,” he said, “Get hold of Tucker and Sam and say I want to see them up here for supper tonight.” He turned to Olmedo. “How’s the crowd around the White House?”

  “It’s a siege.”

  Lockwood nodded; he had guessed as much. Into the phone, he said, “Soon as it’s dark have the unmarked helicopter pick ‘em up at Andrews or someplace where there’s no damn press. And don’t talk to secretaries or assistants. Talk to Sam and Tucker only. Or Ablert. Nobody else.”

  He handed the phone back to the agent. The sun had disappeared again and a misty rain had begun to fall. Olmedo’s hair was beaded with moisture. He shivered. “Mr. President, we must talk,” he said.

  “Not now,” Lockwood said. “We’ll wait for Sam and Tucker. We’ve got to wrap this sucker up right quick. Go on inside and dry off. I’m going for a walk. Got some thinking to do.”

  9

  As the helicopter flying out of Andrews Air Force Base in the last light of day crossed the Anacostia River on its way to Camp David, Attenborough looked down on a burning slum house, red tongues of flame inside a maelstrom of smoke, a black woman screaming soundlessly in the street with arms outstretched toward the flames, no cop or fireman or neighbor to help her or rescue whoever was burning to death within. The next house in the row caught fire and all of a sudden, looking into the raging flames, he remembered one of his father’s sermons about how little it took to go to Hell. “A tattoo is enough, one forbidden stain on the flesh is all you need to burn forever!” The old man took his text from one of the many screwy commands Yahweh on his mountaintop had ordered Moses to pass on to the incredulous congregation of Israel huddled in the desert below: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD.” Book of Leviticus, chapter the nineteenth, verse the twenty-eighth.

  Recalling this, he remembered his place in his ninth-grade civics book and, in his mind, turned to the glossy page on which he had been reading the Constitution when he had his blood clot. “Section 1, terms of the President and Vice President. Section 2, Congress shall meet at least once a year, beginning on the third day of January. Section 3, qualification of the President and Vice President …”

  The words shimmered on the sun-dazzled page. Attenborough cried, “Sweet Jesus!” Then he fell into a violent fit of coughing.

  Sam Clark, sitting beside him, jumped at the outcry. “Tucker, what’s the matter?”

  “I just figured it out,” Attenborough said.

  “Figured what out?”

  “The whole damn thing,” Attenborough said, gasping for breath and waving away any further questions. “Leave me be, Sam. Got to think. I just hope that big dumb son of a bitch we’re going to see will listen.” He closed his eyes for the remainder of the trip, as if asleep—or, as Clark feared when he gazed at his old friend’s corpselike profile, comatose.

  In the main cabin at Camp David, Lockwood stood with his back to the fire, listening to something Olmedo was saying to him. He still wore his old clothes, and he held a drink in his hand. Norman Carlisle Blackstone stood off to one side, looking oppressed and worried.

  “Howdy, Mr. President,” Attenborough croaked.

  “What’s the matter with your voice?” Lockwood said.

  “Frog in my throat,” Attenborough said, stepping forward into the light.

  Lockwood had not seen him up close for weeks, not even on television since he had given up watching the news. “Jesus, Tucker,” he said. “What have you been doing to yourself?”

  “Malaria’s worse,” Attenborough said.

  “You been to a doctor?”

  “Got a good one—Albert’s boy Henry.”

  Lockwood stared in shock and disbelief but asked no more questions. With a jerk of his head in the direction of Olmedo and Blackstone, he said, “Tucker, Sam, you both know these fellows. I need your advice. Alfonso here thinks somebody’s out to nail my hide to the barn door and I’ve already stepped on the trap. He says the only way I can be cleared is stand up and admit the election was stolen. What do you say to that, Mr. Speaker?”

  Coughing again, Attenborough deferred to Clark with a weak wave of the hand. Clark said, “If you do that, you cease to be President.”

  “That’s what Alfonso told me,” Lockwood said. “Tucker?”

  Attenborough mopped his streaming eyes with a handkerchief. “As a lawyer,” he said, “I’d have to say there’s no way to do otherwise on the basis of the evidence.”

  Lockwood gave him a mirthless grin. “What would you say as the next man in line to be President of the United States?” he asked.

  Attenborough’s eyes blazed. He said, “I’d say, Wake up!” He took a step toward the towering Lockwood, pointed a trembling finger, and started to say more. Clark interrupted. “Hold it,” he said. “We can’t talk about the impeachment. It’s wrong. I’m one of your judges, Mr. President. I won’t talk about it.”

  “All right, let’s stick to politics,” Lockwood said. “This is a party matter or it’s nothing. As head of the party, I ask you this: How many votes am I going to have in the Senate on judgment day, Samuel?”

  “It’s too early to count,” Clark replied. “The other party will hang together no matter what happens. On our side, I don’t know. After adjournment today I counted at least six who’ll jump ship if one more lie comes out.”

  “Does that include Busby?”

  “Yes, but they’re all radicals. If that’s all you lost today, you’ve got a base of forty-four.”

  “So I can lose ten more and still win?”

  “Technically, yes. Thirty-four is all you need to survive—if all you want to do is survive.”

  “First things first,” Lockwood said. “What about this Hammett, the terrorists’ friend? Alfonso thinks he’s a bad guy.”

  Clark’s eyes moved to Olmedo for a moment, then back to Lockwood. “Thanks to his friend Busby he’s got the power to break ties and decide what the Constitution means.”

  “Can he do harm?”

  “It may be a little late for either one of us to be asking that question, Mr. President. But he’s a smart guy, just like Julian said.”

  “Best-laid plans
of mice and men,” said Lockwood with a tight-lipped smile. “Worst-case scenario: I lose. What would happen next? Does the House make Franklin President?” His head swiveled on his long neck. “Tucker?”

  “Under the Constitution, if nobody has a majority of the electoral votes, the House elects a President from among the three top candidates,” Attenborough replied. “But in a case where one of the three top candidates, namely you, has already been declared President by the Senate, which has subsequently reversed itself by declaring the election null and void, I don’t think the House can elect anybody.”

  Lockwood turned to Blackstone. “Is that right, Spats?”

  “It’s a sound argument, based on the Twelfth Amendment,” Blackstone said.

  “All right, then what?” Lockwood said. “Do I invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment and make Tucker President?”

  “Only a legally elected President or Vice President can do that,” Attenborough said, “and from the moment you admit the election was stolen and the Senate votes to declare it null and void, you won’t be President anymore.”

  “At that point nobody would be President,” Clark said. “Is that what you’re saying, Tucker?”

  Attenborough said, “That’s right.”

  “How do you figure that?” Lockwood said.

  “It came to me in a vision,” Attenborough replied.

  “You’re talking about chaos,” Lockwood said.

  “No, sir,” Attenborough said. “The Constitution does not provide for chaos. Article Two, as refined in the Twentieth Amendment, provides for just such a situation. I quote: ‘Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President–elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.’ ”

  “I thought Congress had already passed a law of succession,” Lockwood said.

  “That’s right, and amended it four times, plus adopting the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Attenborough said. “And Congress can amend it again anytime it wants to.”

  “Why the hell should it? The whole thing’s cut-and-dried: If there’s no President or Vice President, the Speaker of the House becomes President, then the president pro tempore of the Senate, then the Secretary of State, and right on down the cabinet.”

  Attenborough held up a hand. “The existing law rests on the assumption that everybody in the line of succession is fit to serve,” he said. “But this time you’ve got a moral degenerate, me, first in line, and Otis Dyer, who’s so senile he can’t tell time anymore, right behind me.”

  “And behind you two, the whole damn cabinet.”

  “What cabinet? If you weren’t elected, you had no legal power to appoint anybody to anything.”

  Lockwood glared. “Tucker, what you’re saying is nothing but one of your bullshit intellectual exercises. Get to the point.”

  “Glad to,” Attenborough said. “The point is, if the election was stolen, this is a unique situation not envisaged by Congress when it passed the law of succession. What they’re going to say is, ‘All bets are off, and the only thing we can do is go to the Constitution—back to basics, get us a real President.’ ”

  “The Supreme Court will never let them get away with it,” Lockwood said.

  “No?” Attenborough said. “Remember who the Chief Justice is and who his friends are. Frosty, wake up and listen to what I’m telling you.”

  “Jesus,” Lockwood said.

  Clark said, “What’s the time limit for qualifying a President or Vice President to take the place of the acting President?”

  “There is none in the Constitution,” Attenborough said. “What’s more, nothing specific is said about holding an election in a case like this, so the country could go on for quite a while without voting on the matter.”

  “But who the hell would they make acting President?” Lockwood said.

  “The answer is, anybody but Franklin Mallory,” Attenborough said. “But you’ve got to admit it’s a historic combination of circumstances.”

  “Spats,” Lockwood said. “Is what he’s saying right?”

  “In terms of his hypothesis, it’s certainly plausible,” Blackstone said. “This is the alternative I’ve been trying to tell you about, Mr. President. It’s a time bomb in the Constitution.”

  A long moment passed as the five men, standing in the firelight, looked at one another. At last Lockwood said, “I spent twenty-two years in the Senate and six in the House. I just don’t believe Congress would let itself be stampeded into something like you’re talking about, Tucker.”

  “You don’t?” Attenborough said. “Then you must have slept through the last three weeks.”

  Blackstone said, “May I make an observation?”

  Lockwood ignored him. Clark said, “Go ahead, Carlisle.”

  Blackstone said, “You’re describing a conspiracy of lunatics.”

  Attenborough said, “Maybe I am, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m the one that’s crazy.”

  Lockwood was shaking his head. “I guess I’m just the dumbest son of a bitch in the room,” he said, “but I’ve got just one question: Why would they do this?”

  “Why would who do what?” Attenborough asked.

  “Busby and his crowd. The radicals. Julian, for Christ’s sake, who was like a son to me. Why would they take me down this way? Why would they use the Constitution to overthrow the government?”

  “Well,” Attenborough said, “you’ve got to remember what they were trying to do in the first place, when they stole the election.”

  “Elect me, that’s what they were trying to do,” Lockwood said.

  “No, sorry, that wasn’t the idea,” Attenborough said. “They would’ve done what they did for Fred the Chimp.” He spoke the next words in something resembling his old mighty voice. “The objective was to prevent Franklin Mallory from being President. That’s still the objective, because he was their worst nightmare come true the first time he got himself elected, and if he gets in for the second time, just imagine what he’s going to do to them after what they tried to do to him.”

  Clark was the first to speak. He said, “Tucker, you’re asking us to think the unthinkable.”

  Though he knew it was an illusion, Attenborough had never felt more alive than at this moment, or more in command of the powerful brain he’d been born with. He said, “Hell, Sam, that’s what got us all this far. We might as well go home with the girl we brung to the dance.”

  10

  When Lucy and Wiggins reported their findings on the gender of Susan Grant’s assassin to Mallory, his first thought was for Zarah Christopher. “It was a woman who was following Zarah around,” he said. “Where is she now?”

  “At home,” Lucy replied, “in the upstairs study, reading a book.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Lucy stole a glance at Macalaster. Talking about these matters in the presence of a journalist was a breach of procedure and it bothered her greatly. But she answered because she had to. “We just checked, Mr. President, not more than ten minutes ago.”

  “Why check if you’re not concerned?”

  “It was a routine event, sir.”

  Lucy did not describe the means by which she had pinpointed Zarah’s whereabouts inside her own house. Not only was Macalaster present, but it was a fundamental principle of the craft of security that the person being protected should not know exactly what methods were being used to keep him from harm lest he give them away by drawing attention to them. But immediately after that first dinner party, as soon as Mallory had started to call on Zarah in an unpredictable way, Wiggins and Lucy had set up a routine watch for his own protection. They simply piggy-backed existing systems, installed in the house by Outfit technicians years before when it was occupied by the O.G. Random camera sweeps activated by sensors detected any movement or unusual in
frared signatures within the house walls. The computer recognized the radar and sonar signatures of Zarah’s image even in the dark—along with Mallory’s, of course.

  “Good, I’m glad you have an eye on her,” Mallory said. “But I meant the other woman. The jogger you were so concerned about.”

  “No sign of her in the neighborhood since that last encounter with Zarah on the street,” Lucy said. “Of course we know who she is now.”

  “Thanks to Zarah.”

  Lucy did not acknowledge this remark, even though it came from Mallory. She said, “We’ve done a preliminary assessment.”

  Macalaster realized that they must be talking about Slim or Sturdi. He asked which. Surprised but reluctant—Lucy really did not like sharing information with this man—she told him.

  Mallory gave Lucy a hard and searching look. “What exactly is your assessment of this woman?”

  Wiggins answered. “We’re still looking at her, Mr. President,” he said. “Once we learned her name it was a simple matter to run down her whole biographical record. Nothing out of the ordinary except that she’s a world-class athlete—just missed making the Olympic heptathlon team in her last year at Berkeley. Menstrual cramps on the day of the trial.”

  Macalaster, seated in the twin of Mallory’s leather wingback library chair, had been listening intently to this report. He said, “Where did she go to law school?”

  “Yale, full tuition grant and stipend,” said Lucy.

  “What does the computer have to say about her relationship with Archimedes Hammett?”

  “Relationship?” Lucy said. “She took a course with him at Yale. But that’s all. This subject has had no relationships with men. None, ever. She’s a lesbian who came out while she was still in high school.”

  “No kidding,” Macalaster said.

  Mallory waved a hand and Lucy and Wiggins left the room. To Macalaster he said, “I have a question. Knowing that the killer was a woman, what do we know that’s important?”

  “Well,” Macalaster said, “we’ve stopped looking at the wrong half of the human race for the person responsible.”