Pantheon

by Sam Bourne

  They passed a series of imposing, governmental buildings rendered with imperial grandeur in grey-white stone. This must have been how London looked a century ago, James thought: a capital city with the power to rule the world. How that had changed, the great British Empire now reduced to praying that the young Americans would ride to their rescue. Without their help, his country was doomed. All that muscle, but so useless if America refused to flex it.

  He was just beginning to feel the heat — a damp, humid, almost tropical heat — when Ed signalled that they had arrived. The hotel was tall and wedge-shaped; it too would not have looked out of place on a European street corner. Through the windows on one side, he could see waiters in white aprons fussing over guests, lifting chrome plate covers to reveal steaming hot breakfasts. Even from the pavement, James could see a custard-yellow cloud of scrambled eggs placed before a moustached man, distractedly reading his morning newspaper. Even in his agitated state, James worked out that there must have been three weeks’ egg ration on that plate.

  They walked into the lobby, as tall as a cathedral and as opulent as a palace, the floor shiny, the pillars dizzyingly high in amber marble, the ceiling decorated in gold. It could have been Versailles. ‘Remember,’ muttered Harrison through gritted ventriloquist’s teeth, ‘you’re the snapper. Hang back.’

  James dipped his head to hide his face and whispered back, ‘But you don’t know what McAndrew looks like.’

  ‘Sure I do. Joy of working for a news magazine, Jimbo: we have a photo archive. I checked.’

  While Harrison strode over to the reception desk, James loitered in the lobby, his eyes scoping the room for a familiar face. No sign of the Dean. No sign of any groups at all, in fact; just individual businessmen coming down for breakfast. It was not yet eight o’clock. Once again James tormented himself with the probability that he had got here too late. McAndrew had had a head start of several hours; he had probably had his meeting last night…

  James could hear Ed Harrison demanding to speak to the manager, wanting to see the full list of associations holding meetings in the Willard Hotel. Just from the tone of the exchange, James could tell the reporter was being rebuffed. Perhaps McAndrew had left specific instructions to keep out the press. James strolled, as nonchalantly as he could, to the concierge desk. As he did, he called up before his mind’s eye page sixteen of that morning’s Washington Post. In that image, he found what he was looking for.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to a young man standing by a lectern-high desk, wearing a bell captain’s uniform at least two sizes too big for him. ‘I’m here for a meeting booked in the name of P Alexander Tudor. Could you tell me where I need to go?’

  ‘Oh, that would be a question for reception, I’m afraid, sir.’

  ‘I know,’ James said with a smile. ‘But they seem a little tied up.’ The sound of raised voices, Harrison’s the loudest, reached their side of the lobby.

  They exchanged a brief smile of shared understanding. ‘Of course, sir,’ said the concierge, reaching for a pile of papers. After he had run his finger down one and then another column, he looked up. ‘You need the Buchanan Room, sir. On our lower level.’

  James nodded his thanks and hissed in Harrison’s direction, eventually succeeding in breaking him away from his altercation with the front desk. He led the way down the carpeted stairs, following the signs until they came to two closed wooden doors bearing the name Buchanan.

  James paused, not sure whether they were about to barge into a room where a dozen people would be having a quiet — and private — discussion around a single table or where four hundred people would be arrayed like a theatre audience, listening to speeches from a platform. Against the first possibility, and the chance that he would see and be seen by McAndrew instantly, he held tightly onto the camera, ready to lift it to his face.

  Harrison pushed at the door confidently, notebook in hand. Everything about his demeanour, down to the tilt of his hat, announced him as a newspaperman. What a weapon it was, James reflected now: both a licence to pry and a protective shield.

  The instant the door was open, James recognized the scene. They had walked into an event that had not yet started, clusters of men standing together engaged in pre-meeting conversation. There were perhaps forty of them, hovering and shaking hands; behind them, a long boardroom table laden with untouched notepads and pin-sharp pencils. A portrait of George Washington in a cheap wooden frame appeared to have been hastily attached to the wall.

  James raised his camera and began to look through the viewfinder, hoping no one would realize what he had just realized: that although he had once been quite a keen photographer — an interest discarded, like so much else, after his injury — he had no idea how to use this machine. He let his finger feel for a shutter while surveying through the room. To his right he could sense Harrison advancing, plunging into the middle of the room as if he were the guest of honour apologizing for his late arrival.

  In the small glass window, James saw a series of faces, none familiar. That they were well-heeled, he could guess — from the silvery smoothness of their hair, from the effortless cut of their suits. But no sign of the salt-and-pepper of the Dean. He let the lens glide slowly across the room. More captains of industry, a dishevelled overweight figure James took to be another pressman.

  And then the camera froze in his hands.

  It was the dog collar he saw first, only later raising the lens to confirm the man wearing it: the Reverend Theodore Lowell, pacifist, chaplain of Yale University and alumnus of Wolf’s Head. Quite a crowd from Yale then, gathering here in this Washington hotel just yards away from the White House to stop the march to war. Perhaps he and McAndrew had travelled here together; maybe Tudor had acted as their chauffeur, driving his two most distinguished allies down here. James concentrated his lens on Lowell’s lapel and then focused on the same area of the man to whom the chaplain was speaking.

  Both wore the same Wolf’s Head pin.

  He could hear Harrison’s voice above the others now, buttering up the politicians and plutocrats in the room, no doubt the first step to extracting information — not that different, James supposed, to the way the reporter approached girls.

  And suddenly he was struck by a crucial realization. Though James knew what Lowell looked like, Lowell had no idea who James was.

  Emboldened, he strode over to the cleric, the camera still covering at least half his face. ‘OK, a group picture, gentlemen,’ he said. He gestured for Lowell to gather closely with his colleagues, guessing that one of them was young Tudor. And then, as naturally as he could make it, he said from behind the camera, ‘And let’s have Dr McAndrew in this one, shall we?’

  ‘Oh, darn, you’ve just missed him,’ said the younger man, gesturing at an exit James had not spotted, at the other end of the room. ‘He had to dash out for a breakfast meeting, must have been half a minute ago, tops.’

  James clicked and turned away, winded as surely as if he had been punched hard in the gut. After travelling all night, to miss him by just seconds…

  He swivelled back towards the door, catching Harrison’s eye. James glared at him with such intensity that the American understood immediately, broke off whatever conversation he was having and followed.

  They took the stairs outside two steps at a time.

  ‘He must have gone while we went downstairs or we’d have seen him,’ Harrison panted.

  ‘Not necessarily. He could have found another exit out of the hotel. Especially if he thinks he’s being followed.’

  ‘And does he?’ Harrison said, as they burst back into the lobby.

  James thought of the corpse lying by the railway tracks, the confirming phone call the gunman was doubtless meant to have made to McAndrew but hadn’t, the Dean’s knowledge that James was therefore still alive. ‘Probably.’

  Dashing across the marble floor, they emerged into the Washington morning. The warm, damp air hit James’s face in an instant, smothering blast. He look
ed left and right then right again, focussing on the other side of the street.

  He couldn’t see the man’s face. Nor was it the hair he recognized, though once he was in pursuit he caught sight of the familiar salt-and-pepper. It was, instead, the purpose that caught his eye. Unlike everyone else strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, Preston McAndrew was walking with unrelenting intent.

  So that he could move faster, James thrust the camera back towards Harrison, who took it and shoved it in his bag.

  James crossed the street with barely a glance at the traffic.

  The eyes are your most lethal weapon. Never let your gaze waver, not even for a second. If you stay watching him without a blink, then you will never lose him — and he will be yours.

  Jorge’s voice was his own now as James let his pace quicken and then slow, quicken and slow, synchronized with his prey. When McAndrew moved to cross Constitution Avenue, James did the same, reflexively making a three-quarter turn of his body, so that — had the Dean thought to look over his shoulder — he would have seen nothing to catch his eye.

  The buildings had given way now to green lawns on both sides. Up ahead, poking into the sky, was the pale golden obelisk of the Washington Monument. McAndrew was marching towards it.

  Suddenly James felt dangerously exposed. Buildings are a kind of shield for tailing a man; the pursuer always has the possibility of darting into an entrance or down a side alley. Jorge had warned him a dozen times. Once you are on open ground, you are in danger. Your subject will think, why is that man here, except to follow me? And he will be right…

  James slowed to a stop and Harrison was at his side within moments. The American was breathing hard. ‘What do we do now?’ he gasped.

  ‘We watch.’ James’s gaze followed McAndrew up the slope towards the needle. ‘And we walk slowly. That way.’ He indicated a curved path towards the monument, leaving McAndrew to take the straight route.

  The Dean was slowing down, just as James had hoped. He had guessed the rendezvous was here and it seemed he was right. He checked his watch. Twenty-five minutes past eight. Meet at the Washington Monument at eight thirty. He could almost hear McAndrew saying it.

  He watched him take a seat on a bench among the forty-eight flags of the forty-eight states, and felt the fury bubbling and boiling inside him. This man who had so nearly had him killed, this man who had kept him from his wife and child, this man who through lies and deceit was determined to pass a collective death sentence on the people of Britain.

  It would be so easy to have his revenge, James thought. The sprint across this patch of grass would take what, twenty seconds? McAndrew would run but he would not be as fast as James; few men were, despite his wound. He could tackle him at his knees, bring him tumbling to the ground and then it would require the smallest exertion of the fingers to choke the life out of him, to press his fingers to his throat and squeeze. And squeeze…

  It would be justified too. Not just as self-defence, but as vengeance — vengeance in advance for the crime of plotting the agony of England, and vengeance for the torments he had already inflicted on James. All he had to do was run a few yards and he could have this man in his hands.

  And yet he knew he had to resist that urge. It would not be enough simply to lash out and kill McAndrew. The Dean was here in Washington because he clearly had a plan, an operation involving others, and it was that plan that had to be stopped. Watching the Dean die now would be satisfying, but it would almost certainly leave the threat to England intact.

  James turned to Harrison. ‘In a minute or two, someone is going to join him. I need you to tell me who he is.’

  ‘I’ll have to get closer.’

  ‘You can get as close as you like. He has no idea who you are.’

  Ed Harrison walked ahead, gingerly and, to James’s mind, obviously. He had the studiedly casual gait of the amateur; so ostentatiously nonchalant it was immediately suspicious. It didn’t help that he was identifiable as a reporter from a distance of two hundred yards.

  But Harrison was no fool. He had the wit to hang back, so that he was not in McAndrew’s immediate field of vision. Besides, James, his focus still on the Dean, could see that the subject was too preoccupied with his appointment to notice much else. McAndrew checked his watch three times in as many minutes.

  At last, another man came into view. He approached the Dean’s bench, slowed, looked down and then appeared to hesitate. McAndrew said something and the man sat down. They then shook hands in a way that struck James as odd, looking straight ahead rather than at each other. But they were certainly talking.

  James stared at them, wanting to miss nothing. He certainly did not recognize the second man and, he concluded from McAndrew’s posture and that initial hesitation, neither did the Dean. They were strangers who had nevertheless arranged a meeting.

  So fixed was his gaze that only now did James notice that Ed Harrison had rejoined him. He heard him before he saw him, the same fast exhalation. Except this time it was not exertion that made the American breathless, but excitement. ‘You won’t believe who that is,’ he said. He looked back towards the two men conversing on the bench, surrounded by blue sky and fluttering flags. ‘Your Dean is locked in discussion with Hans Stoiber, the most senior diplomat at the Washington Embassy of the Third Reich.’

  Chapter Forty-one

  James couldn’t help himself. He turned to Harrison, his eyes wide and his mouth open, utterly aghast, before remembering his task and turning back. That man in front of him, just a matter of yards away from him, was a Nazi. Elegantly tailored, well-shod, a man you would pass without objection on one of these Washington streets — and yet a servant of a cruel regime bent on crushing and mastering all of Europe, if not the world. It was one thing to glimpse their planes in the skies, to witness the havoc their bombers could wreak, as James had first hand in Spain, or to see their leaders, Hitler, Goebbels and the others, in black-and-white on a newsreel. But to behold the enemy in the flesh and in colour, so near…

  And there was Preston McAndrew, happy to shake this man’s hand, happy to engage in polite chat with him, happy — more to the point — to do business with him. Was there no end to this man’s wickedness? Even the sight of it turned James’s stomach. He could feel his loathing turning into a physical thing, a viscous fluid flowing through his veins and vital organs.

  Of course James knew the Dean had come to Washington with evil intent: to prolong Britain’s agony. But he had assumed that his method would be… what? Perhaps some discreet lobbying, a quiet word in the ear of an official or two in the State Department? The scene James had witnessed in the Buchanan Room at the Willard Hotel, those lapel pins on Lowell and the other man, had reinforced that thought. He had expected McAndrew to be engaged in looking up his fellow alumni of the Wolf’s Head Society, doubtless spread throughout the higher reaches of the US government, using that network of old members to advance his cause, patiently putting the case for non-intervention. You’re too young to have served in the last war, he would say to those officials in the administration, as he began to detail the horrors of conflict…

  But he had never bargained for this, McAndrew supping with the devil himself. Sitting with the enemy — not America’s enemy, perhaps, not while the US remained so devoutly neutral. But James’s enemy: the enemy of his country.

  And then he was struck by a kind of premonition. His parents might have called it a divine visitation. Or perhaps it was just a lucky instinct. Without looking at Harrison, he whispered, ‘Give me the camera.’

  Then, in a walk that was stealthy, noiseless and fast, James got closer — though not so close that his camera would be heard. He put the device to his eyes and watched. He snapped once, moved the winder on, then snapped again. As he was moving the winder on again, it happened and just in time for him to capture it on film. In a movement so swift that it was barely noticeable, the German reached into his briefcase and produced a white, foolscap envelope. Just as James pressed on
the shutter, the diplomat handed it to Preston McAndrew, who in a similarly unfussy movement slotted it into a slim leather portfolio case which he then fastened and lodged under his arm. They shook hands — which James photographed too — and rose to their feet.

  At once, James pivoted around so that should McAndrew happen to look into the middle distance to his right, he would see only the back of a man walking away from him.

  James caught up with Harrison. ‘Can you see him? Which way is he going?’

  ‘West. Towards Lincoln.’

  ‘Lincoln?’

  ‘The Memorial.’

  James counted to three, then turned and walked in the same direction, wincing to hear the sandy gravel of the path crunch beneath his feet. He could see McAndrew clearly, perhaps thirty yards ahead of them, that same purpose in his stride.

  ‘Please tell me you got a picture of that,’ Harrison said eventually.

  ‘I hope so. I pressed the button, it made the right sound. I only hope you put film in the camera,’ he said, handing the machine back to the American.

  ‘You sure you didn’t become a reporter in England and you’re just not telling me?’

  James’s eyes were locked on the Dean, now about to cross 17th Street. Always the riskiest moment in any pursuit, the crossing of a main road. So many chances to lose the subject: he could turn left or right; he could get in a car; he could cross in a break in the traffic, leaving you stranded on the other side.

  ‘I mean when you said I’d get a story, I didn’t-’

  ‘We don’t have anything until we see what he does next,’ said James, his voice as firm and unwavering as his gaze.