Shall We Tell the President? (9 page)

‘Shall we tell the President?’

‘No, no, not yet. God knows, over the past
two years she’s had enough problems with the Gun Control bill without having to
look over her shoulder trying to figure out which senator is Mark Antony and
which is Brutus.’

‘So what do we do for the next six days?’

‘You and I will have to find Cassius. And
he may not be the one with the lean and hungry look.’

‘What if we don’t find him?’ asked Mark.

‘God help
America
.’

‘And if we do?’

‘You may have to kill him.’

Mark thought for a moment. He’d never killed
anybody in his life; come to think of it, he hadn’t knowingly killed anything
at all. He didn’t like stepping on insects. And the thought that the first
person he might kill could be a
US
senator was, to say the least, daunting.

‘Don’t look so worried, Andrews. It
probably won’t come to that. Now let me tell you exactly what I intend to do.
I’m going to brief Stuart Knight, the head of the Secret Service, that two of
my officers were investigating a man claiming that the President of the
United States
was going to be assassinated sometime within the next month. However, I have no
intention of letting him know that a senator may be involved; and I won’t tell
him that two of our men died because of it; that’s not his problem. It may
actually have nothing to do with a senator, and I’m not having a whole bunch of
people staring at their elected representatives wondering which one of them is
a criminal.’

The Assistant Director cleared his throat
and spoke for the first time. ‘Some of us think that anyway.’

The Director continued unswervingly. ‘This
morning, Andrews, you will write a report on
Casefikis’s
information and the circumstances of his murder, and you will hand it in to
Grant
Nanna
. Do not include the subsequent murders of
Stames
and
Galvert
: no one
must connect these two events. Report the threat on the President’s life but
not the possibility that a senator is involved. Is that how you would play it,
Matt?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said
Rogers
. ‘If we voice our suspicions to people
who don’t need to know them, we will run the risk of provoking a security
operation that will make the assassins run for cover; then we would simply have
to pick up our marbles and start over – if we were lucky enough to get a second
chance.’

‘Right,’ said the Director. ‘So this is how
we’ll proceed, Andrews. There are one hundred senators. One of them provides
our only link with the conspirators. It’s going to be your task to pinpoint
that man. The Assistant Director will have a couple of junior men follow up the
few other leads that we have. No need for them to know the details, Matt. To
start with, check out the Golden Duck Restaurant.’

‘And every hotel in
Georgetown
,
to see which one put on a private luncheon party on 24 February,’ said
Rogers
. ‘And the
hospital. Maybe someone saw suspicious characters hanging around the parking
lot or the corridors; the assassins must have seen our Ford there while Calvert
and you, Andrews, were interviewing
Casefikis
. I
think that’s about all we can do for the moment.’

‘I agree,’ said the Director. ‘Okay,
thanks, Matt, I won’t take up any more of your time. Please let me have
anything you turn up immediately.’

‘Sure,’ said the Assistant Director. He
nodded at Mark and left the room.

Mark had sat silently, impressed by the
clarity with which the Director had grasped the details of the case; his mind
must be like a filing cabinet.

The Director pressed a button on his
intercom.

‘Coffee for two, please, Mrs McGregor.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now, Andrews, you come into the Bureau at
seven o’clock every morning and report to me. Should any emergency arise, call
me, using the code name Julius. I will use the same code name when calling you.
When you hear the word “Julius”, break off whatever you are doing. Do you
understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now, a most important point. If, in any
circumstances, I die or disappear, you brief only the Attorney General, and
Rogers
will take care of
the rest. If you die, young man, you can leave the decision to me.’

He smiled for the first time - it was not
Mark’s idea of a joke. ‘I see from the files that you’re entitled to two weeks’
leave. Well, take it, starting at noon today. I don’t want you to exist
officially for at least a week Grant
Nanna
has
already been briefed that you have been seconded to me,’ continued the
Director. ‘You may have to tolerate me night and day for six days, young man,
and no one other than my late wife has had that problem before.’

‘And you me, sir,’ was Mark’s quick and
unthinking reply. He waited for his head to be bitten off; instead the Director
smiled again.

Mrs McGregor appeared with the coffee,
served them, and left. The Director drank his coffee in one swallow and began
to pace around the room as if it were a cage; Mark did not move, though his
eyes never left Tyson. His massive frame and great shoulders heaved up and
down, his large head with its bushy hair rocking from side to side. He was
going through what the boys called the thought process.

‘The first thing you’re to do, Andrews, is
find out which senators were in Washington on 24 February. As it was near the
weekend, most of those dummies would have been floating all over the country,
making speeches or vacationing with their pampered children.’

What endeared the Director to everyone was
not that he said it behind their backs but that he said it even more explicitly
to their faces. Mark smiled and began to relax.

‘When we have that list, we’ll try and
figure out what they have in common. Separate the Republicans from the
Democrats, and then put them under party headings as to interests, public and
private. After that, we have to find out which ones have any connection with
President Kane, past or present, friendly or unfriendly. Your report will cover
all these details and be ready for our meeting tomorrow morning. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now there’s something else I want you to
understand, Andrews. As I am sure you know, for the past decade, the FBI has
been in a very sensitive political position. Those watchdogs in Congress are
just waiting for us to exceed our legitimate authority. If we in any way cast
suspicion upon a member of Congress, without indisputable evidence of his
guilt, they will hang, draw and quarter the Bureau. And rightly so, in my
opinion. Police agencies in a democracy must prove that they can be trusted not
to subvert the political process. Purer than Caesar’s wife. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘From today we have six days, from tomorrow
five, and I want to catch this man and his friends red-handed. So neither of us
will be on statutory overtime.’

‘No, sir.’

The Director returned to his desk and
summoned Mrs McGregor.

‘Mrs McGregor, this is Special Agent
Andrews, who’ll be working closely with me on an extremely sensitive
investigation for the next six days. Whenever he wants to see me, let him come
right in; if I’m with anybody but Mr Rogers, notify me immediately – no red
tape, no waiting.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t
mention this to anybody else.’

‘Of course not, Mr Tyson.’

The Director turned to Mark. ‘Now you go
back to the WFO and start working. I’ll see you in this office at seven o’clock
tomorrow morning.’

Mark stood up. He didn’t finish his coffee;
perhaps by the sixth day he would feel free to say so. He shook hands with the
Director and headed towards the door. Just as he reached it, the Director
added: ‘Andrews, I hope you’ll be very careful. Keep looking over both
shoulders at once.’

Mark shivered and moved quickly out of the
room down the corridor, keeping his back firmly to the wall when he reached the
elevator, and walking along the sides of the passage on the ground floor, where
he ran into a group of tourists who were studying pictures of the Ten Most
Wanted Criminals in
America
.
Next week, would one of them be a senator?

When he reached the street, he dodged the
traffic until he arrived at the Washington Field Office, on the other side of
Pennsylvania Avenue
.
It wouldn’t quite be like home this morning. Two men were missing, and they
weren’t going to be able to replace them with a training manual. The flag on
top of the
FBI
Building
and the flag on top of the Old
Post Office Building were at half-mast; two of their agents were dead.

Mark went straight into Grant
Nanna’s
office; he had aged ten years overnight. For him,
two friends had died, one who worked under him and one who worked above him.

‘Sit down, Mark.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘The Director has already spoken to me this
morning. I didn’t ask any questions. I understand you’re taking a two-week
leave as of noon today, and that you are writing me a memorandum on what
happened at the hospital. I have to pass it on to higher authorities and that
will be the end of it as far as the WFO is concerned, because Homicide will
take over. They are also trying to tell me Nick and Barry died in a car
accident.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mark.

‘I don’t believe a goddamn word of it,’
said
Nanna
. ‘Now you’re in the middle of this,
somehow, and maybe you can nail the bastards who did it. When you find them,
grind their balls into powder and then call me so that I can come help you,
because if I lay my hands on those bastards .. .’

Mark looked at Grant
Nanna
,
and then tactfully away again, waiting until his superior had regained control
of his face and voice.

‘Now, you’re not allowed to contact me once
you leave this office, but if I can help at any time, just call me. Don’t let
the Director know, he’d kill us both if he found out. Get going, Mark.’

Mark left quickly and went to his office.
He sat down and wrote out his report exactly as the Director had instructed,
bland and brief. He took it back to
Nanna
, who
flicked through it and tossed it into the out-box. ‘Neat little whitewash job
you’ve done there, Mark.’

Mark didn’t speak. He signed out of the
Washington Field Office, the one place in which he felt secure. He’d be on his
own for six days. Ambitious men always wanted to see a few years ahead, to know
the shape of their careers; Mark would have settled for a week.

The Director pressed a button. The
anonymous man in the dark blue blazer and light grey trousers entered the room,
‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want a full surveillance on Andrews,
night and day; six men on three shifts reporting to me every morning. I want
detailed background on him, his education, girlfriends, associates, habits,
hobbies, religion, organisational affiliations, everything by tomorrow morning,
6:45. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Aware that Senate staff members would be
suspicious of an FBI agent who asked for information about their employers,
Mark began his research at the Library of Congress. As he climbed the long
flight of steps, he remembered a scene from
All the President’s Men,
in
which Woodward and Bernstein had spent innumerable fruitless hours searching
for a few slips of paper in the bowels of the building. They had been trying to
find proof that E. Howard Hunt had checked out materials on Edward M. Kennedy.
And for an FBI agent on the trail of a killer, just as for the investigative
reporters, it would be tedious research, not glamorous assignments, that would
make the difference between success and failure.

Mark opened the door marked ‘Readers Only’
and strolled into the Main Reading Room, a huge, circular, domed room decorated
in muted tones of gold, beige, rust, and bronze. The ground floor was filled
with rows of dark, curved wooden desks, arranged in concentric circles around the
reference area in the centre of the room. On the second floor, visible from the
reading area through graceful arches, were thousands of books. Mark approached
the reference desk and, in the hushed tones appropriate to all libraries, asked
the Clerk where he could find current issues of the
Congressional Record.

‘Room 244. Law Library Reading Room.’

‘How do I get there?’

‘Go back past the card catalogue to the
other side of the building and take an elevator to the second floor.’

Mark managed to find the Law Library, a
white rectangular room with three tiers of bookshelves on the left-hand side.
After questioning another clerk he located the
Congressional Record
on
one of the dark brown reference shelves along the right-hand wall. He carried
the unbound volume marked 24 February, to a long, deserted table and began the
tedious weeding-out process.