It was darkened, and rightly so. The president was dead.
Dresden waited for several minutes after the bellman had departed, then left himself. He needed freedom, needed to walk. His injuries still pained him, but he found the exercise good therapy, each outing extending the time and distance he was able to walk.
There were armed guards in the side doorway of the Treasury building. Concrete barricades topped with barbed wire extended all the way across Pennsylvania Avenue, with uniformed police and men in civilian overcoats stationed behind them. A block beyond, parked in front of the White House, was a turreted armored personnel carrier equipped with what looked to be machine guns and a small cannon. Dresden took all this in with a few quick glances, but otherwise paid them little apparent attention.
He felt like shouting, bellowing his defiance at his faceless, ruthless enemy till the sound echoed off the marble facades of all these symbols of government, the supposed government of the people. But this was the impulse of the aging youth he had been in California. He had changed. As he had loved Charlene, as he had loved his wildness and freedom, now he loved vengeance.
With limping swagger, he swung about and started a long walk toward the Capitol.
The skies were lowering and gray, but they had been so all day, and there had been no rain. It seemed God’s contribution to the funeral—ambience without interference. It was cold, but that was fitting. Watching Special Agent Calvin Perkins’s earthly remains put to rest in the sacred ground of Arlington Cemetery was a chilling moment for Walter Kreski. He would not deny, he did not resent the man’s honorable gravesite. Perkins had won the Silver Star in Vietnam and probably deserved better for his courageous deed, saving the lives of four of his comrades, risking his own four separate times to do so. What Kreski resented was the man’s death and his everlasting silence.
Even if Perkins still lived, there would be little Kreski could do to make him reveal his secrets. Kreski was now a common, ordinary, powerless citizen. He had a vestigial importance for the remainder of this somber ceremony. But at its conclusion he would descend this hill of yellow winter grass and white crosses and disappear into the Metro subway, just another man in a raincoat.
His thoughts had drifted. The report of the rifles of the honor guard startled him. As his head snapped up, his eyes caught the gaze of the vice president opposite him across the small dark square into which the coffin had been lowered. The vice president’s eyes held so much grief and commiseration. Kreski had felt a duty to tell Atherton of his suspicions, his hard evidence and strong belief, concerning Perkins. But he had held back. The man had been told too many terrible things in too short a time. It would gain no good to tell him more. Steve Copley, who stood at the vice president’s side, had agreed.
Perkins’ widow, a small blond woman wearing large tinted glasses, had been given the folded flag. The ceremony was over. Some began to drift away. Most waited at a respectful distance for their turn to speak a few words to her. Kreski waited also, but all he could bring himself to do was touch her shoulder. She reached and touched his hand, but looked away. There could be a dozen reasons why she avoided his eyes, including the worst. It was pointless to speculate. This poor woman would now be gone from his life. He tightened his grip briefly, hoping she would take it as an expression of sympathy rather than pity, then stepped away. Copley caught up with him partway down the slope.
“You’re a dutiful man, Walt. Coming here.”
“It’s an obligation that goes with the job, even though I no longer have the job.”
They walked a moment in silence.
“I argued with the attorney general and Shawcross about that,” Copley said finally. “But the Congress was screaming for blood. The vice president had no choice.”
“I understand that.”
“He didn’t want to do it. He really didn’t.”
“That’s good to know. There was something of that in his face just now.”
“Ambrose concurred in the decision. In the president’s name. Did you get to speak to Perkins, before the bombing?”
“Not a word.”
“Damn.”
“Indeed.”
“We’re going to go full press, Walt. We’re going to turn this town upside down.”
“Start with my agency.”
“We have.”
“And the White House. Shake it good.”
“We’re doing that too, Walt. And Camp David.”
“That won’t be easy.”
“I’ve got men in there.”
They had reached the parking lot at the bottom of the hill. A tourist bus moved slowly by.
“What are you going to do?” Copley asked.
“I’m going to go to work for a bank. But not for a while. For the time being, I’m just going to rest and think.”
“You have that coming.”
“I suppose I do.”
“If there’s anything we can do. Ever. Any of us. Just ask.”
“Consider that reciprocal.”
They shook hands, Copley reaching to grip Kreski’s forearm.
“I wish we could make it be a month ago, and tell the president not to go to Gettysburg.”
“So do I.”
They looked at each other, but said nothing more. Kreski turned and walked off toward the subway entrance. Somehow, this conversation had brought a finality to everything. His job was truly gone. That Copley still had his, that he still had full powers to pursue the investigation, emphasized this as nothing else could—nothing else save seeing Marv Jellicoe sitting at his desk.
Near the subway entrance, a tourist came up to Kreski and asked for directions to the Kennedy graves. As Kreski turned and pointed the way up the hill, the man spoke again, with lowered voice.
“Mr. Brookes wants to see you, urgently,” he said. “Get off at the Rosslyn stop. There will be a blue Buick sedan parked around the corner. He’ll be in the back.”
Kreski simply stared.
“It’s important,” the man said. “He wants to help.” He looked up the hill in the direction Kreski had pointed, then smiled. “Thanks a lot.”
Kreski moved on quickly, not looking back. He had had no intention of getting off at Rosslyn, but when the conductor called out the stop, he found himself almost leaping from his seat and hurrying up the escalator from the platform. Peter Ashley Brookes was better than nothing, and nothing was all the government of the United States had left him.
The car pulled away from the curb the instant Kreski had slid into the rear seat and shut the door. The driver moved into the traffic flow heading toward Key Bridge and Georgetown just across the Potomac, but on the other side, he abruptly spun the wheel left. He followed M Street to the Canal Road intersection, completed a skidding U-turn, sped back to the Key Bridge, and in a minute or so was on the Virginia side heading down the ramp to the George Washington Parkway.
“The road’s clean, Mr. Brookes,” he said, with a final glance at the rearview mirror.
“Thank you for coming, Kreski,” Brookes said. “I wasn’t at all certain you would.”
The man’s eerie eyes seemed just as crystalline in the shadowy interior of the car as they had been in the light.
“To tell you the truth, neither was I.”
“I need your help.”
“Your man said you wanted to help us.”
“Help you. No one else. I’ll get to that later.”
“What is it you need from me?”
“They’re trying to pin this on me,” Brookes said.
“I think you’re exaggerating.”
“They’re planting evidence. A yellow flag with ‘La Puño’ on it turned up at one of our encampments in Florida. I’ve made sweeps. They’ve bugged my telephone system. They’ve tried to access my computer system.”
“Who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“You tell me.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. The appropriate agencies are pursuing an investigation. Ever
since the vice president’s wife was killed, they’ve been pursuing it hard. If they’re making it difficult for you, I’m sorry, but these are very bad times.”
“Kreski, I said they’re dropping little yellow flags. I want it stopped. I want you to help me stop it.”
The driver moved the speed up to sixty-five, even though the limit was fifty. He must have known the road. The upper reaches of the Parkway had only four access ramps. Police were scarce, and some motorists indulged themselves with seventy or better, many of them from the Central Intelligence Agency upriver at Langley, which had its own private access ramp.
“I’m a private citizen, Mr. Brookes. An out-of-work private citizen. I can’t stop or start anything.”
“Yes, you can. You can find out who’s behind the shooting of the president, and get everyone off my ass. I’ve been doing everything I can to help this administration from the very beginning, and I’m not going to have it dump on me for an easy out from this assassination mess. I’m a fucking patriot, Kreski. There aren’t many of us.”
“Mr. Brookes. Until a few days ago I was director of the United States Secret Service. I was working in full cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a dozen other police agencies. We were getting absolutely nowhere. And now you’re asking me to go out on my own and solve everything, when I no longer even have a permit to carry a gun.”
“You weren’t getting absolutely nowhere, Kreski. You were getting somewhere. They were just a couple of steps ahead of you. And when I said ‘they’ were trying to pin this on me before, I sure as hell was including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“I can’t think of anyone more clean in this. It’s my agency that was dirty. I’m sure one of my agents was involved at Gettysburg. He was killed along with Mrs. Atherton. Since then, Director Copley has been coming down hard on everything. If that includes you because of Huerta’s having your book and magazine, I’m sorry. Believe it or not, he’s coming down just as hard on the White House staff.”
“That’s bullshit, but it’s beside the point. I agree with you that you’re not going to accomplish anything here. I’m not a stupid man, Kreski. I want you to go down to Central America. There’s a lot to learn there—about Huerta, about what went down. I’ve got people in five countries down there. We can be a lot of help.”
“If there’s so much to learn, why don’t you just find out for yourselves?”
“I want you to find out for yourself. I want you to believe, Kreski. And then I want you to come back and tell the country. The Congress may have hung you out to dry, but you’ve got twenty years of credibility in the United States of America and there’s a lot of that left. Whatever you find out, whatever you believe, you can make others believe.”
Kreski simply shook his head. They were passing the McLean-Chain Bridge Road exit. The CIA’s was coming up. For a moment, Kreski wondered if Brookes would have them turn off there, if that was his home away from home while in Washington. Admiral Elmore was one of the most blunt and direct men in government when he chose to speak out, but he could also be oblique—damned oblique.
“Mr. Brookes. This is probably the strangest conversation I’ve had in my entire career.”
“Kreski, I’ll level with you. I’m a strange man.”
Kreski said nothing. Brookes startled him with a sudden reach to the floor of the car, but he pulled forth only a briefcase. Snapping it open, he took out an envelope, and set it on the seat between them.
“I said I wanted to help. If you go into Central America, here’s help—ten thousand dollars.”
“For God’s sake, Brookes. You’re bribing a federal officer.”
Now Brookes smiled. “As you just said, you’re not a federal anything anymore. This is a retainer. Expenses will be heavy down there. You may need every cent of this.”
Kreski stared at the envelope, but did not touch it. “Ten thousand dollars. It works out to exactly the same amount that turned up in Huerta’s strongbox.”
Brookes swore and reached back into the briefcase. He dropped a sheaf of bills, held together with a rubber band, onto the seat beside the envelope. Then he reached into his pocket and dropped some change there too.
“All right. There’s $11,000.52—a nice odd number. Nothing for the damn FBI to seize upon as another ‘coincidental’ clue.”
“I can’t touch it,” Kreski said.
“Yes, you can. Look, I’m used to working with the federal government, at least in this administration. I don’t know how to work against it. I don’t know how to deal with its working against me. I need you, Kreski.”
They sped by the CIA exit doing at least seventy-five. The next exit would be the last, the Capital Beltway.
Brookes shoved the money closer. “And I’m all you’ve got, Kreski. You’re not done with this, are you? You’re not going to go out of office with your ass kicked in for something you didn’t do. You want what I want.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Take as long as you want, as long as it isn’t longer than a couple of days. And take the money. If you don’t want to throw in with me, send it back. But I want your decision to involve some overt action. Send this back or get on an airplane. I’m not going to let you just slide away into the shadows. I want you to think about this. I’m not going to let you out of this car without the money.”
“Unless you plan to shoot me, how are you going to accomplish that?”
“All right. I’ll just mail you the money. Maybe they’re watching your mailbox too. Maybe they, whoever in the hell they are, would be just as happy to pin this on both of us. Like you said, it was your agency that was dirty.”
Kreski stared into Brookes’s ghostly, expressionless eyes, then looked down at the money.
“Very well,” he said, placing everything including the fifty-two cents in change in his pocket. “I’ll get back to you. One way or the other.”
Brookes’s arguments were persuasive, but Kreski felt he had just stepped into a rubber boat on a wild, rushing river.
By the early December nightfall, Dresden’s mood had utterly changed, the triumphant feeling of defiance become one of frustration and loneliness. He may have succeeded in placing himself in the midst of his enemy, but as he passed the armed policemen, as he glanced at the faces looking at his, that fact had become a source chiefly of fear. In the darkness the federal office buildings seemed even larger, monstrous and ominous. He had walked and sat and pondered, but his mind had proved incapable of any sensible plan or idea, every possible course of action seemingly leading only to his likely capture, arrest, and doom.
Returning to his hotel, he found the thought of his empty room also depressing, but he had to rest his leg. There was a restaurant up the street. He went first to its bar, carefully and painfully propping his leg over the empty stool beside him. Two Manhattans offered some cheer. He made himself eat a substantial meal, which warmed him, but its solitary consumption saddened him, especially when he paid the bill, using money that belonged to Charlene, that she should now be spending.
Still unwilling to return to his hotel room, he headed up 15th Street past the heavily armed barricades again, this time proceeding north and west until he came to DuPont Circle and one of the few districts in Washington that resembled a real city. Despite the cold, street musicians were playing in the park. Couples walked by, hand in hand. A panhandler approached him, a grizzled old man. On a whim, Charley gave him a twenty-dollar bill, thinking Charlene might be pleased. Startled, the man was speechless. Feeling pleased himself, Dresden moved on, lest the fellow decide to attach himself. He passed a policeman, who paid him no attention whatsoever.
On the other side of the Circle, following Massachusetts Avenue into the district known as Embassy Row, he found his depression returning. Here resided more power and authority, sinister because of its foreign nature, haunting because of the gloomy old mansions that housed it. His leg began to bother him again, but the pain served to drive hi
m on.
At last he came to what he’d been seeking, the long bridge with blackened pavement and sidewalk—police sawhorses with small flashing yellow lights set in front of the empty space in the concrete railing.
Here his enemy had struck as they had struck at him, only with more viciousness and violence. He stood gazing into the darkness of the deep ravine the bridge traversed, a curving road winding below. They were out there, somewhere, everywhere. If they could reach out to kill the vice president of the United States, how safe could he be? How safe could anyone in the country be? They may have been the ones who shot the president, or maybe they were the president’s men. For all his theories and beliefs, he could not say for certain who they were. That was a source of their power.
The flashing yellow lights were reflecting off his trenchcoat. Standing in this now notorious place, he would be dramatically visible to every passing motorist, a man in a raincoat, intermittently illuminated with a golden glow.
His limp worsening, he kept walking. In time he came to an odd complex of huge old Georgian and modern office structures, encompassed by a high wrought-iron fence, windows ablaze with light. It was the British Embassy. Farther on, around a curve in the road, a gate marked with floodlit ships’ anchors and many armed men proclaimed the Vice President’s House. Dresden wanted to pause a moment, to speak a few silent words of sympathy and shared grief to the house at the top of the hill, but he dared not. The armed men were already watching him.
On the way back, he stopped at a liquor store on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks from his hotel and he bought a fifth of Jack Daniels Black. Once returned to his room, he rang room service for ice. As he waited, he stood at his window, sipping some of the whiskey neat and warm.
There was something troubling. That half-moon window on the third floor of the White House was now brightly lit.
There was a knock at the door. Expecting only a bellman, he forgot the pistol in his belt at his back. Opening the door, he was quickly reminded. There was a man with a stern face and a neat dark suit. He held up a black leather case, letting it drop open to reveal a most official-looking badge.
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