21
Zarah’s destination was Camp Panchaea. Although she knew the way and asked her not to do so, Emily insisted on driving her out for what she believed would be a reunion with Julian. “The way things are going for the Hubbards we may never have a chance to talk again,” she said. They started out at three o’clock in the morning, and Emily talked without stopping all the way to their destination.
Dawn was only a few minutes off when they arrived. It was a cloudless night with stars overhead and a spherical moon reflecting in the lake. A single long, slow ripple moved across its limpid surface. There were no waterfowl in sight. They sat in the car and Emily talked about her lost baby. Zarah looked long at the ripple before getting out of the car, then paid no more attention to it.
“Well, so much for the past,” Emily said. “I’ll wake Julian up and tell him you’re here. I brought breakfast in that cooler.” She pointed at a blue thermos bag in the back of the car.
“Tell him not to hurry,” Zarah said. “I’d like to take a little walk before the sun comes up.”
“A walk?” Emily said. “There are wild animals in these woods.”
“Lions?”
“Cougars, anyway, and wolves—native American species. The Euhemerians don’t admit they’ve turned wolves loose but they have, with chips implanted under their skin. Something electrical is buried around the perimeter of their territory. If they cross a certain line they get a shock. I’ll come with you.”
“No, go inside, Emily, if you don’t mind,” Zarah said. “I have memories of this place. I’d like to be alone for a moment.”
“All right.” The memories could only be of Paul Christopher. Nobody but descendants of Euhemerians ever came to Camp Panchaea.
Zarah was already well down a path leading into the trees. Because she knew the place so well, having scouted every foot of it—every trail through the woods, every place to swim ashore from the lake, every shooting stand—she followed a carefully chosen route. It was exactly as she remembered it; every step she took was planned. She came to a shooting range. The targets, relics of club shoots, were whimsical: original Disney characters, Mickey and Donald and Pluto, with bull’s-eyes drawn on their comical potbellies. Not a cougar or wolf was to be seen. Zarah did not look out for danger; she sauntered unconcernedly on.
She reached the shore of the lake. The eastern horizon was growing brighter, the moon dimmer. A frieze of cattails was etched black against the sky. Zarah turned around and looked into the woods toward the place where the sun would rise minutes from now. The lake was utterly calm, without a ripple or even the ghost of one remaining. It lay in a cup of land, so that the wind seldom disturbed it.
Behind her in the clearing by the cabins, almost half a mile away now, she heard Julian’s voice calling her name. She ignored him and walked on. A moment later, as if a door had been opened a crack, a shaft of sunlight flashed out of the east onto the water. Songbirds awoke by the hundreds, murmuring. This sleepy tumult increased as the light grew brighter.
Zarah turned around and saw exactly what she had expected to see, a figure in a hooded white caftan standing among the trees about sixty feet away, luminous in the forest gloom with the sun rising behind it, an Ingmar Bergman composition: Death as the Bride. In a loud, cheery voice Zarah called out, “Good morning!” Julian, nearer now but still not in sight, called out an answer.
The figure waved with its right hand and, also as expected, started to walk toward Zarah. She held her ground and waved back. The other advanced with long strides, smiling inside the hood of the caftan as if in happy recognition of a friend. When within ten feet the assassin stopped, planted her feet, and threw her weight forward, raising her left hand, in which she held a 9mm pistol exactly like the one that had killed Susan Grant. It was a smooth, much-practiced movement, and as on Inauguration Day, the technique was flawless. She was still smiling in the most friendly way imaginable. Zarah smiled back. Then, a fraction of a second before the gun stopped rising, she set off the MININOVA she held in her upraised hand. In its brilliant flash she saw that the assassin’s large blue eyes were fixed as if hypnotized on an imaginary spot in the center of her forehead.
Half an hour earlier, Lucy had swum across the lake underwater, her snorkel tube creating the beautiful ripple Zarah had seen from the clearing. Now Lucy saw the brilliant flash through the lake’s surface and rose to her knees out of the shallows in which she had been lying. She knelt in the water just behind Zarah and a little to the left of her. There was no time for Zarah to move out of the way or dive for cover, nor was that necessary. Lucy had a clear view of the target, and she recognized it immediately for what it was. Though dazzled by the MININOVA, the assassin also saw Lucy, or perceived movement or felt it, and turned toward the threat this represented.
Lucy had practiced this drill dozens of times, the swim, the wait, the flash, the shoot. Training eliminated the need for thought—even, as Zarah had foreseen, for intuition. Holding her 6mm all-vinyl issue machine pistol in both hands at the end of rigidly outthrust arms, Lucy fired a burst of twelve mercury-weighted, vinyl-tipped, soft copper rounds into the heart and lungs of the person who had killed Susan Grant. The first round killed the target; the woman grunted just once, then spun completely around and fell face downward.
After entering the thorax, each tiny bullet, only .23 inch in diameter on exiting the muzzle of Lucy’s pistol, expanded to the size and approximate shape of a Delicious apple, destroying all tissue around it but remaining safely inside the target instead of exiting like a Parabellum round and striking some innocent bystander.
There was practically no noise. The birds rose from the trees as if they were the nerves of a single invisible creature, then settled back onto the branches. A moment later the full orb of the sun appeared and in unison they burst into full-throated song.
Julian arrived in time to see the bullets strike and the target fall. “No! No!” he cried—mistakenly thinking, as he said later, that the assassin had struck again, and that the figure lying on the ground was Zarah. Wiggins rose from the lake in his wetsuit and covered Julian with his own unfired pistol. Zarah said, “It’s all right. It’s just my cousin/’ Wild-eyed, just up from sleep, Julian stared at Wiggins’s gun, which was still pointing at the bridge of his nose, then stared down at the corpse. It held a large black pistol in its hand.
He said, “For God’s sake, what is this?”
Julian began to tremble: he had never before witnessed a death by violence, not even in Vietnam, because he had flown so far above the war.
Lucy kicked away the assassin’s weapon. Then she turned the body over with her foot, sliding toe and arch beneath the armpit and heaving the weight with a smooth, almost balletic movement. Because there were no exit wounds, there was no blood on the snowy caftan apart from the twelve red dots where the bullets had entered the body.
With her pistol pointed at the corpse’s head, Lucy folded back the hood of the caftan. A shining cascade of hair spilled out onto the damp soil. The face was quite beautiful in its wide-eyed astonishment. Slim wore no mask this time, and to Zarah she looked very much as she had when she was enticing Attenborough, like an actress summoning up a former self to make the character she was playing believable.
Voices called. McGraw appeared, followed by a team, who supported a stunned and silent Sturdi between them. She had lost whatever head covering she had been wearing, and her polished scalp shone in the strengthening light. She stared at Zarah out of eyes in which there was no expression of any kind.
McGraw knelt by the dead assassin. Slim’s left hand, encased in a transparent surgical glove, was thrown across her bodice, five vermilion fingertips among the tiny bloodstains on the cloth. “A lefty?” he asked. Lucy nodded.
“How did you know?” he said to Zarah, who had gone to stand beside Julian.
“She asked to change places with me at a dinner party once so she could have elbowroom,” Zarah replied. “Even though I’m left-handed mys
elf.”
“So I noticed,” Lucy said.
22
In the next morning’s newspapers, Ross Macalaster broke his story identifying Slim Eve as the person who had assassinated Susan Grant, and her law partner, Sturdi Eve, as the accomplice who had led investigators down a false path by renting the hideout apartment and leaving a trail of fabricated evidence therein. Sturdi was also charged with the assault on Montague Love and the theft of his press badge and with complicity in the hammer attack carried out by Slim on Senator Wilbur E. Garrett. Macalaster had written as he went along, so the article was long and detailed, taking up the entire lead column on page one and two full pages inside. Because the story was really about Hammett, Macalaster broke a journalistic taboo and identified him as the original source of the story that launched his ambiguous journalistic career by shattering the presidency of the unfortunate man who had been defeated eight years before by Franklin Mallory.
Though he was in seclusion, Hammett was reached by Patrick Graham for comment about Macalaster’s revelations. He said, “I am unable to comment. The constitutional cycle is not yet complete, and as Chief Justice I must hold myself aloof from this fever of slander, allegation, and political maneuver.” To his audience Graham said, “I think what the Chief Justice is saying in his restrained and dignified way is that the good fight is still being fought.” But even Graham was subdued. More in moral fatigue than in insinuation, he reported, as the last word in the last segment of that day’s edition of Newsdawn, that Casey Isaacs, Ross Macalaster’s literary agent in New York, had announced plans to auction the book rights to his client’s story, and that he had already received a floor bid of two million dollars from a publisher.
The Senate and House convened at noon. No motion was offered placing Hammett’s name in consideration for the presidency. By one o’clock the Senate had approved Sam Clark’s nomination for the vice presidency by ninety-six votes to two, with Clark abstaining and Senator Busby of California absent and not voting. The House did not vote until four in the afternoon and the result was less overwhelming, with more than one hundred die-hard radical votes against the nomination, but effective work by the probable next Speaker, Bob Laval of Louisiana, and by other staunch allies of President Attenborough carried the day.
At five P.M. Sam Clark was sworn in as Vice President at Camp David, where Attenborough had taken up temporary residence in one of the smaller cottages. The witnesses included the leadership of both houses of Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in full uniform and ribbons—”an ominous bit of symbolism,” Graham mused. The oath of office was administered by Albert Tyler—”an opaque bit of symbolism,” said Graham.
By six P.M. the governor of Massachusetts had appointed a former governor who was a member of Mallory’s party to Clark’s vacant seat, and the Senate immediately reorganized itself with Amzi Whipple as Majority Leader. Bob Laval was elected Speaker of the House half an hour later, ending a day of decisive action rarely matched in the peacetime history of the legislative branch.
While the House was voting, Attenborough talked to Alfonso Olmedo C. and Norman Carlisle Blackstone.
“Mr. Olmedo, you’re one hell of a lawyer,” he said. “So are you, Carlisle.”
“So are you, Mr. President.”
Attenborough went on as if Olmedo’s words had hot been spoken. He said, “The country will thank the two of you for this when the history of it comes out. Did Lockwood?”
“In his way,” Olmedo said. “His farewell speech was thanks enough.”
“Nothing in the world wrong with Lockwood’s way,” Attenborough said. “Heart of oak; head, too. Well, you got him what he wanted—the chance to do right. And he did it, may he have his just reward.”
Olmedo said, “My work is done, Mr. President—”
Attenborough said, “Not yet. In your opinion—yours too, Carlisle— can Archimedes Hammett be successfully prosecuted for any crime?”
Olmedo hesitated, then inclined his head to Blackstone. “Carlisle?”
After a moment of thought Blackstone said, “Possibly. There’s a great deal beneath the surface there. He thinks he’s covered his tracks, but that’s impossible.”
“You think he can be linked to a felony?”
“Almost certainly. He was the puppet master.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he knew what was going to happen from the start because he made it happen. In terms of circumstantial evidence, we’ve got the goods on him. But that might not be enough. That woman Eve will never testify against him, and Hammett being Hammett, the more incontrovertible the proof, the more he’ll cry ‘frame-up’ and the more his tribe will beat the drums to drown out the evidence.”
Attenborough wore a look of grim determination. “That’s how the believers do it, all right,” he said. “Alfonso?”
Olmedo said, “I agree with my colleague in every particular. But, Mr. President, if I may say so, this is a one-question case. What could possibly be gained from such a prosecution that would justify the damage it would do to a nation that is already so battered and bruised?”
“Not a damn thing,” Attenborough replied. “Thank you, gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure working with you.”
Olmedo looked at the little wizened President with deep affection and deeper concern. He had never seen a sicker man conscious, upright, and talking, let alone making jokes.
At eight P.M. Attenborough went on television and told the American people that because he was unable to discharge the duties of the presidency for reasons of health, he had notified the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that he was handing over the powers of the presidency to Vice President Clark, as provided in the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
After speaking these words he paused and looked long into the camera with the same intensity with which he had gazed down at Hammett from the gallery—as if he were already beyond the grave and were examining a human heart from the vantage point of a being who now knows everything. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “As my final act as President of the United States, I have affixed my signature and seal to a full and unconditional pardon to Archimedes Mavromikháli Hammett for any criminal offenses whatsoever that he may have committed since being appointed Chief Justice of the United States. Regarding any possible impeachable offenses, that is a matter between Mr. Hammett and the Congress of the United States. As Federalist Paper Number 65 tells us, far better than I could ever say it, the Founding Fathers granted the power of impeachment to Congress because ‘the involutions and varieties of vice are too many and too artful to be anticipated by positive law.’ ”
In his studio Patrick Graham gasped audibly. “The old fox,” he said, “the old redneck. He has beheaded the Cause.”
Graham was far too professional to repeat this insight or anything like it on-camera or into a live microphone after he recovered from the stunning blow Attenborough, with the last ounce of his political strength and savvy, had delivered to him and everything he cared about.
23
On their last day together Mallory and Zarah Christopher walked to a hilltop above Great Falls. They paused beneath a spreading oak on a spot that commanded a view of the Norman manor house. In the distance the Potomac, tumultuous with rain that had fallen on the Appalachians, ran through its narrow defile. Horace had gone to prison that day. It was not yet known what would happen to Julian or Rose MacKenzie. They talked about Attenborough’s long coma; Lucy’s decision to have her twins; the charges filed in New York against Sturdi for acts of terrorism including the attempted murder, years before, of a police officer, John L. S. McGraw; Hammett’s resignation as Chief Justice and his billion-dollar lawsuit against Mallory for invasion of Sturdi’s privacy; Macalaster’s giving up journalism to write his book.
Zarah said, “I want to say this to you, Franklin. I wish your child had been saved.”
“So do I,” Mallory said. “How I wish you’d stay. It’s
very hard to accept that there’s no chance of having the child I’ve waited for all my life.”
“I thought you knew that already,” Zarah said.
“Not in quite the impossible way I do at this moment. I’ve never thanked you. What you did, seeing the truth, seeing the obvious, walking into the woods that way and …willing your death not to happen.” He paused. 44I just wish you didn’t want so badly to be”—he searched for the word—“apart.”
“It runs in the family,” said Zarah. “Goodbye.”
Just the word, not the smallest gesture. She simply left. Watching her walk down the hill, so singular and uncaptured, he fell into a reverie, wishing for a child in which they both could go on living. He had often thought of such a thing before, and he lost himself in the idea of it. In his mind he actually saw the child holding its mother’s hand. This was not an image, not a reality. It was something else—a memory he would never have. When he looked again the real Zarah was gone, as if he had fallen into a tiny sleep after an act of conception and given her the fleeting moment of solitude that was all she needed to become a memory.
EPILOGUE
Just as Dr. Chin had predicted, Attenborough’s heart kept on beating for a long time after his other vital organs stopped working one by one. The Speaker died on the first day of summer and was buried on Dead Horse Mountain, as far away from his father’s grave as possible in the little windburned cemetery that overlooked the desert below. While he was still able to do so, he had dictated and signed strict instructions about how the thing was to be done: the best aluminum casket money could buy, no flowers, no prayers, no clergymen, no eulogy, no politicians except those who had held the office of President of the United States or that of Speaker of the House of Representatives. No media. No women. No hymns. American music was all right, but no bugle calls. Albert Tyler, his sole heir and executor, carried out his wishes to the letter.
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