Shall We Tell the President? (10 page)

After leafing through the digest of Senate
business for half an hour, Mark realised that he was in luck. Many senators had
apparently left
Washington
for the weekend, because a check of the roll calls on 24 February revealed
that, of the one hundred senators, the number present on the floor never
exceeded sixty. And the bills which were voted on were sufficiently important
to command the presence of those senators who might have been hiding in the
nooks and crannies of the Senate or the city. When he had eliminated those
senators who were listed by the Whips of each party as ‘absent because of
illness’ or ‘necessarily absent’, and added those who were merely ‘detained on
official business’, Mark was left with sixty-two senators who were definitely
in Washington on 24 February. He then double-checked the other thirty-eight
senators, one by one, a long and tiresome task. All of them had for some reason
been out of
Washington
that day.

He glanced at his watch: 12:15. He couldn’t
afford to take time off for lunch.

Friday afternoon, 4 March

12:30 pm Three men had arrived. None of
them liked one another; only the common bond of financial reward could have got
them into the same room. The first went by the name of Tony; he’d had so many
names that nobody could be sure what his real name was, except perhaps his
mother, and she hadn’t seen him in the twenty years since he had left Sicily to
join his father, her husband, in the States. Her husband had left twenty years
before that; the cycle repeated itself.

Tony’s FBI criminal file described him as
five-feet-eight, a hundred and forty-six pounds; medium build, black hair,
straight nose, brown eyes, no distinguishing features, arrested and charged
once in connection with a bank robbery; first offence, two-year jail sentence.
What the rap sheet did not reveal was that Tony was a brilliant driver; he had
proved that yesterday and if that fool of a German had kept his head, there
would have been four people in the room now instead of three. He had told the
boss, ‘If you’re going to employ a German, have him build the damn car, never
let him drive it.’ The boss hadn’t listened and the German had been dragged out
of the bottom of the
Potomac
. Next time they’d
use Tony’s cousin Mario. At least then there would be another human on the
team; you couldn’t count the ex-cop
and the little Jap who never said a word.

Tony glanced at
Xan
Tho
Hue, who only spoke when asked a direct question.
He was actually Vietnamese, but he had finally escaped to
Japan
in 1979.
Everyone would have known his name if he had ruined the Los Angeles Olympics,
because nobody could have stopped him from getting the gold medal for rifle
shooting, but
Xan
had decided, with his chosen career
in mind, he had better keep a low profile and withdraw from the Japanese
Olympic trials. His coach tried to get him to change his mind, but without
success. To Tony,
Xan
remained a goddamn Jap, though
he grudgingly admitted to himself he knew no other man who could fire ten shots
into a three-inch square at eight hundred yards. The size of
Florentyna
Kane’s forehead.

The Nip sat staring at him, motionless.
Xan’s
appearance helped him in his work. No one expected
that the slight frame, only about five-feet-two and a hundred and ten pounds,
was that of a superlative marksman. Most people still associated marksmanship
with hulking cowboys and lantern-jawed Caucasians. If you had been told this
man was a ruthless killer, you would have assumed he worked with his hands,
with a garrotte or
nunchaki
, or even with poison.
Among the three,
Xan
was the only one who carried a
personal grudge. As a child he had
seen his parents butchered by the Americans in
Vietnam
. They had spoken warmly of
the Yanks and had supported them until the bullets tore into their bodies. They
had left him for dead. A target almost too small to hit. From that moment he
had vowed in silent torment to avenge his loss. He escaped to
Japan
and there, for two years after the fall of
Saigon
, he had lain low getting a job in a
Chinese restaurant, and participating in the US Government Program for
Vietnamese refugees. Then he had gone with the offer of practical assistance to
some of his old contacts in the Vietnamese intelligence community. With the
US
presence so scaled down in
Asia
,
and the Communists needing fewer killers, and more lawyers, they had been sorry
but they had no work for him. So
Xan
had begun
freelancing in
Japan
.
In 1981, he obtained Japanese citizenship, a passport, and started his new
career.

Unlike Tony,
Xan
did not resent the others he was working with. He simply didn’t think about
them. He had been hired, willingly, to perform a professional task, a task for
which he would be well paid and that would at last avenge, at least in part,
the outraged bodies of his parents. The others had limited roles to play in
support of his operation. Provided they played them with a minimum of foolish
error, he would perform his part flawlessly, and within a few days, he would be
back in the Orient.
Bangkok
or
Manila
,
perhaps,
Singapore
.
Xan
hadn’t decided yet. When this one was over, he
would need - and would be able to afford- a long rest.

The third man in the room, Ralph Matson,
was perhaps the most dangerous of the three. Six-feet-two tall and broad, with
a big nose and heavy chin, he was the most dangerous because he was highly
intelligent. After five years as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, he found an easy way out after Hoover’s death; loyalty to the
Chief and all that garbage. By then, he had learned enough to take advantage of
everything the Bureau had taught him about criminology. He had started with a
little blackmail, men who had not wanted their FBI records made public, but now
he had moved on to bigger things. He trusted no man - the Bureau had also
taught him that - certainly not the stupid wop, who under pressure might drive
backward rather than lot ward, or the silent slant-eyed yellow hit man.

Still nobody spoke.

The door swung open. Three heads turned,
three heads that were used to danger and did not care for surprises; they
relaxed again immediately when they saw
the
two men enter.

The younger of the two was smoking. He took
the seat at the head of the table as befits a chairman; the other man sat down
next to Matson, keeping the Chairman on his right. They nodded acknowledgment,
no more. The younger man, Peter Nicholson on his voter-registration card,
Pyotr
Nicolaivich
by birth
certificate, looked for all the world like the reputable head of a successful
cosmetics company. His suit revealed that he went to Chester Barrie. His shoes
were Loeb’s. His tie Ted
Lapidus
. His criminal record
revealed nothing. That was why he was at the head of the table. He didn’t look
upon himself as a criminal; he looked upon himself as a man who wished to
maintain the status quo.

He was one of a small group of Southern
millionaires who had made their money in the small-arm trade. Theirs was a
giant business: it was the right of every American citizen under Amendment Two
of the Constitution to bear arms, and one in every four American males
exercised that right. A regular pistol or revolver could be had for as little
as $100 but the fancy shotguns and rifles that were a status symbol to many
patriots could fetch as much as $10,000. The Chairman and his ilk sold handguns
by the millions and shotguns by the tens of thousands. It had not been hard to
persuade Ronald Reagan to leave the arms trade alone, but they knew they were
never going to convince
Florentyna
Kane. The Gun
Control bill had already squeaked through the House, and unless some drastic
action were taken, there was undoubtedly going to be the same result in the
Senate. To preserve the status quo, therefore, the Chairman sat at the head of
their table.

He opened the meeting formally, as any
regular chairman would, by asking for reports from his men in the field. First
Matson.

The big nose bobbed, the heavy jaw moved.

‘I was tuned into the FBI’s Channel One.’
During his years as an FBI agent, preparing for a career in crime, Matson had
stolen one of the Bureau’s special portable walkie-talkies. He had signed it
out for some routine purpose and then reported that it was lost. He was
reprimanded and had to reimburse the Bureau; it had been a small price to pay
for the privilege of listening to FBI communications. ‘I knew the Greek waiter
was hiding somewhere in Washington, and I suspected that because of his leg
injury, he would eventually have to go to one of DCs five hospitals. I guessed
he wouldn’t end up with a private doctor, too expensive. Then I heard that
bastard
Stames
come up on Channel One.’

‘Cut out the profanity, if you please,’
said the Chairman.

Stames
had given Matson four reprimands during his service with the FBI.
Matson did not mourn his death. He started again.

‘I heard
Stames
come up on Channel One, on his way to
Woodrow
Wilson
Medical
Center
,
to ask a Father Gregory to go to the Greek. It was a long shot, of course, but
I remembered that
Stames
was a Greek himself, and it
wasn’t hard to trace Father Gregory. I just caught him as he was about to
leave. I told him the Greek had been discharged from the hospital and that his
services would no longer be needed. And thanked him. With
Stames
dead, no one is likely to follow that one up and, if they do, they won’t be any
the wiser. I then went to the nearest Greek Orthodox
church and stole the vestments, a hat, a veil, and a cross and I drove to
Woodrow Wilson. By the time I arrived,
Stames
and
Calvert had already left. I learned from the receptionist on duty that the two
men from the FBI had returned to their office. I didn’t ask for
too much
detail as I didn’t want to be remembered, I discovered which room
Casefikis
was in and it was simple to reach there unnoticed.
I slipped in. He was sound asleep. I cut his throat.’

The Senator winced.

‘There was a nigger in the bed next to him,
we couldn’t take the risk. He might have overheard everything, and he might
have given a description of me, so I cut his throat too.’

The Senator felt sick. He hadn’t wanted
these men to die. The Chairman had showed no emotion, the difference between a
professional and an amateur.

‘Then I called Tony in the car. He drove to
the Washington Field Office and saw
Stames
and
Calvert coming out of the building together. I then contacted you, boss, and
Tony carried out your orders.’

The Chairman passed over a packet. It was
one hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. All American employ-
yees
are paid by seniority and achievement; it was no different in the criminal
world.

‘Tony.’

‘When the two men left the
Old
Post
Office
Building
,
we followed them as instructed. They went over
Memorial
Bridge
.
The German passed them and I managed to get well ahead of them. As soon as I
realised they were turning up on to the
G.W. Parkway
, as we thought they would,
I informed
Gerbach
on the walkie-talkie. He was
waiting in a clump of trees on the middle strip, with his lights off, about a
mile ahead. He turned on his lights and came down from the top of the hill on
the wrong side of the divided highway. He swung in front of the Feds’ car just
after it crossed
Windy
Run
Bridge
.
I accelerated and overtook on the left-hand side of the car. I hit I hem with a
glancing sideways blow at about seventy miles an hour, just as that damn-fool
German hit them head-on. You know the rest, boss. If he had kept his cool,’
Tony finished contemptuously, ‘the German would be here today to make his
report in person.’

‘What did you do with the car?’ ‘I went to Mario’s
workshop, changed the engine block and the licence plates, repaired the damage
to I the fender, sprayed it, and dumped it. The owner probably wouldn’t
recognise his own car if he saw it.’

‘Where did you dump it?’

‘New York. The
Bronx
.’

‘Good. With a murder there every four
hours, they don’t have a lot of time to check on missing cars.’

The Chairman flicked a packet over the
table. Three thousand dollars in used fifties. ‘Stay sober, Tony, we’ll be
needing you again.’ He refrained from saying what assignment number two would
be; he simply said, ‘
Xan
.’ He stubbed out his
cigarette and lit another one. All eyes turned to the silent Vietnamese. His
English was good, though heavily accented. He tended, like so many educated
Orientals, to omit the definite article, giving his speech a curious staccato
effect.

‘I was in car with Tony whole evening when
we got your orders to eliminate two men in Ford sedan. We followed them over
bridge and up freeway and when German swung across path of Ford, I blew both
back tyres in under three seconds, just before Tony bounced them. They had no
chance of controlling car after that.’

‘How can you be so sure it was under three
seconds?’

‘I’d been averaging two-point-eight in
practice all day.’

Silence. The Chairman passed yet another
packet. Another one hundred fifties, twenty-five hundred dollars for each shot.

‘Do you have any questions, Senator?’

The Senator did not look up, but shook his
head lightly.

The Chairman spoke. ‘From the press reports
and from our further investigation, it looks as if nobody has connected the two
incidents, but the FBI just aren’t that stupid. We have to hope that we
eliminated everybody who heard anything
Casefikis
might have aid, if he had anything to say in the first place. We may just be
oversensitive. One thing’s for certain, we eliminated everybody connected with
that hospital. But we still can’t be sure if the Greek knew anything worth
repeating.’