Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  I’d trained all of my focus on Sharon Lerner, so I wasn’t able to gauge the reactions of the president and first lady. Lerner, meanwhile, stepped away from her chair, her next intentions cloaked by the cold emptiness of her expression. I thought I was looking at a stone killer or, at least, someone with the emotions of one.

  “You should have stuck to books,” Lerner hissed.

  The Guardians . . .

  I was going to ask her if the people behind her actually called themselves that, when the president jerked up the famed paperweight on loan from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and flung it in the same swift motion. It plunked into Sharon Lerner’s skull with a cracking thud. I watched her empty eyes turn glassy as her knees buckled and she crumpled to the floor. The pistol she’d been holding ended up halfway between me and the first lady.

  Neither of us went for it. We were in this together now; at least, I hoped we were.

  “She was supposed to hold me here,” I told the Albrights, “for whoever’s coming. That must’ve been the plan.” I glanced down at the unconscious form of Sharon Lerner splayed on the Oval Office carpeting. “They’re probably coming for me now.”

  The first lady stormed past me, still ignoring the pistol. I thought she was going to push straight through the door, but she locked it instead.

  “Think that will hold them?” I asked her.

  “It doesn’t have to,” said the president. “You’re right, Jessica. This has gone far enough. We didn’t know about all these murders that manuscript caused. We thought everything was under control.”

  “It’s far from that, sir.”

  The president looked toward his wife, their stares locking, clearly of one mind on what had to happen next.

  “We’re getting out of here,” he said. “All of us.”

  I watched Robert Albright move from behind his desk to an interior wall and feel about it as if to check for a water leak. His athletic prowess was a well-known fact long incorporated into his biography. I recalled from reading up on him the previous night that he’d actually started at quarterback for his Ivy League college football team, which explained the ease and accuracy with which he’d hurled the paperweight at the now unconscious Sharon Lerner.

  His fingertips seemed to dig into a depression. He curled them and pulled, a segment of the wall receding into a swath of darkness.

  “It’s true,” I heard myself say.

  The legendary tunnels beneath the White House were real.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Lucky for us tonight,” the president said, opening the door all the way.

  Moments later, a moldy smell of age and long-trapped air filled the Oval Office and flooded my nostrils.

  Stephanie Albright brushed past me and stooped to retrieve Sharon Lerner’s pistol from the floor. For a moment, I thought she was going to train the pistol on me; then she aimed it safely downward after flicking the safety back on.

  “We need to hurry,” she said. “We’re in this together now.”

  I thought I heard footsteps converging on the Oval Office from the hallway beyond, caught the flicker of movement outside the windows behind the president’s desk.

  “Let’s go, Mrs. Fletcher,” the president called to me.

  I moved behind the first lady toward the secret passageway that led into the tunnels beneath the White House that no one really believed existed. The president flipped some switches on a landing, illuminating a narrow stairway that spiraled downward into the depths of the earth itself.

  Maybe bringing me along revealed the true character of the first couple, who had allowed themselves to be swept away on a tide of political ambition. I’ve heard power does that to people in general and Washington does it in the specific. In fact, by all rights Washington seemed to encourage the realization of such ambitions through any means necessary. The Albrights were guilty of taking advantage of a family crisis, turning a daughter who’d run away into one who’d tragically died. In the process, an event that could’ve ended the future president’s political career ended up providing the very foundation of his campaign.

  As I followed the president down the steel stairs, which wobbled a bit under our collective weight, I wondered if the force behind Sharon Lerner had approached Albright in the wake of his daughter’s disappearance, suggesting the exploitation that had ultimately propelled him to the White House. I wondered if that same force might have actually been responsible for Kristen’s disappearance; indeed, perhaps she hadn’t run away at all but had been kidnapped and disposed of to help convince the president to accept that force’s help. His political career would’ve otherwise been over, and by Washington standards, his actions might’ve even qualified as acceptable behavior.

  The light splayed by bulbs recessed into the finished ceiling of the tunnels was murky at best, revealing clouds of dust kicked up by our presence. I had no idea how well the tunnels were maintained or precisely where they led, other than what I’d learned from reading The Affair. Something continued to plague me about the manuscript, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The puzzle wasn’t complete yet, as much as I wanted it to be. There was still a piece missing.

  The pistol Stephanie Albright was holding caught some of the light spraying downward and bounced it back. She had mentioned once learning how to shoot a gun to defend herself well before she got to the White House, where being under constant Secret Service protection changed the entire nature of self-defense. The fact that we’d ventured down here alone, instead of the first couple trusting the Secret Service to protect them, confirmed for me that there were strong elements that couldn’t be trusted even within their protective cadre. Whoever was behind this hadn’t left anything to chance, and why should they? They were seeking to control the most powerful person in the world, to be free to alter the balance of power as they saw fit and to force the enactment of policies that best served whatever their ends were. They had assumed Robert Albright to be nothing more than a willing puppet, and he likely had served in just that capacity, until the moment he hurled John F. Kennedy’s coconut paperweight into the head of Sharon Lerner.

  Stephanie Albright was pressed close to me, bringing up the rear. Her perfume, the same one she’d worn for our meeting that afternoon at Compass Coffee, smelled sweet and fruity, vaguely like a combination of linen and fresh citrus. Still clutching the pistol, she swung her gaze back toward the tunnel’s origins when we both heard something like a door slamming.

  “They’re coming,” she said to her husband.

  At the front of our three-person convoy, the president picked up his pace, until a rolling gray blanket stopped him in his tracks.

  Rats . . .

  An endless stream of them, visible as specks of motion on the flattened surface of the plank flooring. Rummaging forward, stopping to sniff the air from their hind legs before settling back down and scurrying over our feet and pawing at our legs. The first lady looked like she would have shot them all, if she’d had enough bullets.

  Over the squealing of the rats, we all heard far heavier feet tramping our way from back beneath the Oval Office. What looked like flickers of flashlight beams sliced through the darkness, distorted by the winding bends along the tunnel’s length. I imagined the original tunnel footprint had indeed been laid two hundred years ago, when the White House was reconstructed, that the tunnel had been dug to steer around the heavier pockets of limestone and shale that couldn’t be hammered out with a pickaxe. What a formidable construction challenge this must have posed at the time, I considered, as we trudged on, our progress slowed by the growing wave of gray and black swimming about at floor level and climbing over itself.

  “Your perfume,” I said to Stephanie Albright, realizing what was whipping the creatures into such a frenzy.

  “What?” she said, kicking at the rats, only to have more of them fill the vacated spo
ts.

  “Rats are attracted by smell and sweetness.”

  They continued to cluster, slowing our progress and steadily shortening the distance between us and the pursuers back up the tunnel. The flickers were becoming less fissures in the darkness and more hard glimpses of focused beams.

  Closing in on us, certain to catch up before we could push through the black wave that continued to thicken at our feet.

  “Do you have it with you?” I blurted toward the first lady.

  “What?”

  “That bottle of perfume.”

  She switched the pistol she was holding to her other hand and fished a glass spray bottle from the designer bag slung from her shoulder.

  “It’s not your scent, Jessica,” Stephanie Albright said, handing it to me.

  “No,” I said, glancing toward the dark rolling, chirping blanket at our feet and ankles, “but it’s theirs.”

  I prepared to hurl the perfume bottle back toward the pursuers closing in on us, then thought better of it and looked toward Robert Albright.

  “I think you’d better do this.”

  The president accepted the bottle from my grasp and flung it lightly back in the direction from which we’d come. Just a flick of his wrist and it was soaring through the air, lost to the darkness. Then we heard the distinctive crackle of glass breaking and, almost instantly, the black wave seemed to move as one toward where the perfume bottle had shattered. A lumbering, rolling blanket that smelled of spoiled ground and wet burlap. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed the smell before, or why it seemed worse in their wake.

  We clung to the hope that the rats descending on our pursuers up the tunnel would buy us the rest of the time we needed to reach the exit. The way I recalled it from The Affair, we must be past the halfway point at the very least.

  The bulbs recessed into the ceiling flickered as the tunnel shook lightly. I felt my heart seem to lurch in my chest at the fear the tunnel was about to collapse, then felt the rumble of a Washington Metro train thundering along a tunnel that must have been built below or adjacent to our position.

  I started breathing easier and was further reassured by a chorus of chirping from the rats, which had formed a massive moving obstacle in the path of our pursuers. Slowed them enough that I no longer caught glimpses of the flickers from their flashlight beams radiating forward down the tunnel in our wake.

  The tunnel swerved one way and then the other before settling into a steep rise that tested both my endurance and my shapely, but thankfully flat, shoes. Still, I was out of breath by the time I drew behind the president on a narrow ledge that finished in what looked like a steel security door.

  “Open it,” I implored.

  “I already tried,” said Robert Albright. “It’s stuck.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The flashlight beams began to flicker and then flash again, our pursuers having surmounted the obstacle formed by the rats. I wished I could have lent something to the president’s efforts in trying to yank open the exit door from the tunnel, but I would only get in his way.

  The first lady, meanwhile, was standing poised on the steel landing in a shooter’s stance, Sharon Lerner’s pistol aimed toward the final bend in the tunnel our pursuers would soon reach. She looked steady and sure, no shakes or quivers, a woman utterly composed in the face of a grave threat. In that moment, I no longer saw the woman whom I’d assisted with countless fund-raisers supporting literacy. All of it, I knew now, had been a sham, her daughter’s death manufactured to further her husband’s political ambitions. Stephanie Albright herself was a sham, a facade, doing nothing more than playacting a role she’d helped write herself.

  Her steely conviction as she steadied her aim at the source of the flickering lights made me wonder if she had been the driving force behind the charade that had propelled Robert Albright to the presidency. They had both conspired with the force that had raised them to power to suit its own ends, but I had the distinct feeling that Stephanie had been running the show, managing the machinations for the two of them. I suspected her husband had been following her lead all along. As much as he’d wanted to become president, she had wanted it more.

  The lights brightened, shapes growing into shadows behind them. The first lady fired the pistol once and then again. The light beams jumped, then froze in place, our pursuers holding fast behind the cover of the last bend in the tunnel before it gave way to the upward grade that had brought us to the exit that the president was still trying to jimmy open.

  The flashlight beams brightened anew, our pursuers risking an advance Stephanie Albright swiftly chased back with three more shots. What kind of pistol was this? How many bullets did it hold in its magazine and how many were left? Assuming fifteen and a full magazine meant she still had ten remaining.

  Behind us, her husband kept pulling on the stuck latch, a metal-on-metal scratching sound accompanying his efforts as the heavy door ground against its frame, beginning to give. I was watching him make a bit more tentative progress when the first lady fired another two times and then let loose two more bullets after a brief pause.

  Leaving her only six shots, give or take.

  I glimpsed the strain of exertion on the president’s face, a shoe braced up against the frame now to add to his leverage. The seal had been broken, an inch of the door now protruding beyond the frame, lengthening incrementally by the second. I heard a thud, a rattle, saw him recoil, and spotted a squarish doorknob that had broken off in his hand, a rectangular hole revealed beyond it.

  The president tried to push his fingers into the breach to find something to latch on to in order to jerk the door open the remainder of the way, his hand too big to manage the task.

  But mine wasn’t.

  I heard Stephanie Albright squeeze off two more shots, only four or so bullets left to keep our pursuers at bay, as I eased up to the door and pushed my much smaller and more nimble fingers into the hole vacated by the doorknob after the president yanked his fingers out. I remained silent, knowing he’d grasp the point of what I was doing, and felt him grab my shoulders for leverage, bracing himself against the railing.

  I found a jagged edge, twisted and mangled by his efforts, which had ultimately left the knob in his hand. I was able to fasten my narrow, lithe fingers around it and pull with a single hand.

  The door moved, not much but a little. It moved more when I pulled again, and kept moving, more and more of the edge showing. The jagged metal was cutting into my fingers and I could feel the warmth of blood dripping down from them. I recorded the pain but didn’t really feel it, the motivation I needed found in the next three shots the first lady fired, leaving her only one.

  Click, I heard.

  Make that none, I thought, as I clenched my teeth and grimaced, finding better purchase on the jagged metal edge inside the hole at the expense of my already torn fingers. I didn’t even register the pain anymore. I just pulled.

  And pulled.

  And pulled some more.

  The first gunshots fired our way came as the door gave inward with a final heave, letting the fresh air spill inside, along with a flood of lights from just beyond the jamb.

  More of the men behind the murders that had dominated the past week, I thought, as I surged out just ahead of the president and first lady to avoid the spray of bullets that was closing in on us from behind. I dropped down a few feet off what seemed to be the base of a statue. Still blinded by the powerful beams, as I started to raise my hands in the air, I knew it was over.

  “Jessica!” I heard a familiar voice bellow.

  My eyes finally cut through the glare of light and found the familiar face of Artie Gelber standing before me, gun drawn, a virtual army of uniformed and plainclothes Washington, DC, police flanking him on both sides.

  “Go!” he ordered.

  And they surged through the o
pen doorway, weapons blazing. The gunfight raged on as I collapsed into Artie’s arms.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “I’m sorry I ruined your suit,” I said to Artie as the paramedics finished bandaging the hand I’d used to get the heavy exit door open the rest of the way.

  We had emerged in Lafayette Park, through General von Steuben’s statue, the same way Pace and Abby had entered the tunnels to gain access to the White House in The Affair. I couldn’t help but smile at the irony of that, in spite of all that had just transpired.

  Artie glanced toward his shoulder and the beginning of the blood trail I’d left all over the fabric. “I’ll expense it out.”

  He turned his gaze back toward the big door that spilled out onto a grassy, tree-lined patch of land. A number of dark-clad gunmen, some wearing suits, had already emerged in the custody of the police, and now I watched a pair of stretchers follow them in testament to the aim of the cops who’d accompanied Artie here.

  Secret Service personnel under Artie’s direct supervision had already taken charge of the president and first lady, cordoning off a separate area for paramedics to check them out. They wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight without a heavy complement of guards, and not back to the White House until it was fully cleared and deemed safe. I had no idea what the Secret Service knew, or even suspected; I knew only that more of what had transpired would emerge in the coming days. How much exactly, I had no idea.

  Secret Service supervisors made several attempts to approach me, only to be shooed away by Artie on each occasion. He clearly wanted to be the first one to hear my story in order to determine the safest strategy for us to pursue, as far as how best to release the narrative we’d managed to piece together. I could only imagine what he was thinking—speculating, at that point.

  “You’re not going to believe it, Artie,” I said the next time our eyes met, thinking of my exchange with the Albrights up in the Oval Office before we’d made our escape. “You’re not going to believe any of it.”