Trail of the Twisted Cros (7 page)

The helicopter made its final hovering approach. In a swirl of dust, Slayton set down. A few local cops and men he assumed
were from the nearest FBI Field Office in Wheeling, stood in a line just beyond the concentric circles of dust made by the
helicopter blades. Why the FBI at this stage?

Before he was out of the cockpit, something clicked in Slayton’s mind.

Scapegoats!

Unlike Hitler, Johnny Lee Rogers was a cool
Führer
. They were shepherds of madness in two different eras. Hitler needed to be hot, as his appeal had to be made in the beer
halls and in the great rotundas, in person. Rogers was a product of television, the cool medium.

Hitler’s scapegoats had to be obvious. Rogers would have to be more subtle.

Adolf Hitler surrounded himself with layers of protection, his own personal SS, his own changing command. He failed to learn
the lesson he himself taught, that to remove the rights of any part of a society was to remove everyone’s rights. In other
words, everyone would have to be a scapegoat for all the ills that the
Führer
and the
Führer
alone could solve.

The burning of the Reichstag, and before that, the night of the long knives; Adolf Hitler’s own duplicity in acts of sabotage
against his nation
…

Slayton’s thoughts came rapidly now. If he was correct, Johnny Lee Rogers might provide the world with an even greater malignancy
than that of Hitler.

NEW YORK CITY

The Secret Service agent left standing outside the street after the unloading of the station wagon spotted the mailman as
he turned from Lexington Avenue east onto 65th Street.

The mailman was a short, somewhat pudgy man, dressed in summer-issue shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and the customary U.S.
Postal Service safari hat. He pushed a cart bulging with letters and parcels.

The Secret Service agent would not move on the mailman immediately. There was to be no sign of alarm, no activity out of the
ordinary at The Residence.

In a few minutes, the mailman was making his way to the Nixon house, an arm filled with mail he was going over.

The T-man wouldn’t let him pass.

“I’ll take those,” he said to the mailman.

The mailman was confused, then suspicious. He gathered up his full height—all five feet, six inches—and said to the man in
a business suit and sunglasses:

“S’posed to take ‘em right into that door, mac. I can only deliver these to… wait, you can’t take ‘em—”

The agent had grabbed six envelopes from the mailman’s hands. Then he removed his billfold from a breast coat pocket and waved
his Secret Service credentials in the mailman’s face. “Now let go,” he said, as the mailman made a futile grab for the mail
he’d lost.

The mailman removed his safari hat, scratched his perspiring head, and whined, “I don’t know, I guess it’s okay.”

The agent turned on his heel and walked through the door of the first-floor command post of The Residence. When he had reached
the second large room, he laid out the six envelopes on the table. The men who had earlier arrived with the steel cases were
waiting.

“Okay, what do we got?” the one who seemed to be in charge said.

“Wait,” his partner said. “Look at those envelopes. See something missing?”

Five of the envelopes were stamped “Clear, U.S. Postal Service Special Investigations Unit.” All mail sent to former Presidents,
whether they live in Palm Springs or Plains or New York, has to go through the special detection procedures necessary to clear
up any question of letter bomb or poison processing.

The sixth letter was not so stamped.

“How the hell did this get through?” the man in charge asked. “We’re not set up for this.”

He was speaking of bomb and poison detection techniques. The steel cases contained all manner of forensic examination materiel—fingerprint
dusting powder in the event of latent prints, ultraviolet light lamps to indicate areas of skin oil or perspiration deposits
on envelope or letterhead paper, microscopes to help in the determination of handwriting analysis characteristics, electronic
calipers to record the thickness of bond used, and thereby to break down into categorical possibilities the purchase point
of the stationery, a variety of chemicals for determining ink categories, a chart to group general handwriting styles into
general personality types, and all manner of close-up photographic lenses and reproductive mechanisms to preserve the original
appearance of whatever letter would be the one promising to dictate further information regarding the demanded release of
Johnny Lee Rogers.

“We don’t know if we’ve got a fucking bomb on our hands or not!” the man in charge screamed. He looked malevolently at the
agent who had brought the mail in the first place.

“Let’s let the idiot here open up this one,” he suggested. “Stand back, boys.”

The red-faced agent stared at the uncleared letter, then looked up.

“God, I’d better go after him!” he said.

“You figured that out all by yourself, did you?” the forensic examiner in charge said. “You bet your ass you’d better haul
him back here.

“And if the old man upstairs,” he added, pointing up toward the Nixon living quarters overhead, “if
he
ever finds out…”

The agent ran out the door into the street. He looked frantically eastward, toward Third Avenue. The mailman couldn’t possibly
have completed his rounds on this block, not as far from Third as Nixon’s house was. But where was he? He couldn’t be seen.

The mailman couldn’t be seen because he had removed the leather bag from its cart and had hopped a Third Avenue bus heading
uptown. The agent came across the cart at the corner.

Meanwhile, the mailman had gotten off the bus at a corner in the seventies, and entered a restaurant. Inside the restaurant,
he used the men’s room, but not to relieve himself of anything but his postal uniform.

Inside his mail bag was a change of clothing, jeans, and a T-shirt. Left behind in the men’s room stall were his mail bag,
the letters and parcels of several celebrated persons on the Upper East Side, and Postal Service-issue summer uniform and
safari hat. The “mailman” had exited the restaurant through the men’s room window.

The agent radioed back to the command post at The Residence. Before he walked back to the Nixon house, he paused in front
of a row of rubbish cans and vomited.

FAIRMONT, West Virginia

“Of course, we can’t at this time guess the cause of the blast,” a mine safety crewman told Slayton. “But I guess that doesn’t
matter all that much.”

Slayton watched as rescue operators tried desperately to crack passages between huge slabs of fallen rock and tree, to form
a life-saving tunnel to the trapped men, fighting time and flames that still licked up from below.

“No guesses?” Slayton asked, feebly.

“Only that this was sabotage.”

“How can you tell?”

“By our procedures, which I know for sure were fully in effect before this blast,” the safety crewman said.

“Ain’t no way even an accidental flash could set off that kind of fire. There ain’t any levels of combustible gas to such
a point. Whatever set this off must have been a torch, and flammable gas to boot—something to prime the pump, as it were.”

The crewman wiped his sooty face. “Somebody sure as hell knew what he was doing down there with explosives, that’s all.”

Slayton agreed. He sniffed the air. Unless he was imagining things, there was a definite smell of cordite hanging about.

“You smell that?” Slayton asked the crewman.

“What?”

“Cordite. Smell it?”

The crewman sniffed.

“Sort of gunpowdery smell?”

“That’s it. Do you use it or anything like it in your explosive work?”

“Hell no,” the crewman said. “Blasting to move through a pit’s the old-fashioned way. We use sonar today. Cleaner, safer,
and no heat source necessary.”

Nonetheless, Slayton knew the smell of cordite. It was even stronger now, wafting up from the main elevator shaft, the unmistakable
odor of nitroglycerin, gun cotton, and gelatinized acetone. He had smelled it many times in Vietnam.

“How do you control who goes down into the mine?” Slayton asked.

“There’s just the man you want to see, over there,” the crewman said. He pointed to a large man wearing a blue suit and a
safety helmet, who was being interviewed by a television reporter. “C.J. Tolson, general manager. He’ll have to tell you all
that business.”

Slayton thanked the crewman and walked slowly toward Tolson, not wanting to interrupt the interview.

“—a terrible disaster for the entire community,” Tolson was saying. “We at Lovebridge intend to get to the bottom of it, with
the help of the FBI and all available investigative authority here in the State of West Virginia.

“I can assure everyone listening that all the usual intensive safety procedures were in effect—”

Slayton only half-listened to the rest of the Tolson interview. The one question that was relevant—who could have planted
a bomb?— would certainly not be asked by the modern-day press, a remarkably uncurious lot.

When he was through, Tolson chatted with the hair-sprayed television reporter, inviting him to his home that evening for dinner
to insure against anything untoward being said on air that might spoil the meal. The reporter eagerly accepted, as one would
when summoned to an evening’s entertainment in a mining town by the man who heads the mine.

Tolson took off his coat when the television crew had left. It was a hot day, and he knew it would get even hotter.

“Like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Tolson.”

Tolson gave him a reassuring smile, then a brush-off.

“I just talked to the press,” he said. “You missed out. Sorry, fellow. I’ve got work to attend to, as you can plainly see.”

“You’ve got me to attend to, mister.” Slayton pulled out his Treasury Department identification.

Tolson swallowed hard and mumbled something of an apology, something about not expecting a T-man to look like Ben Slayton.
Slayton had heard that sort of thing before and found it amusing. People expected him to look like one of J. Edgar Hoover’s
crew-cut agents. Instead, Slayton was a man of highly individual style, a characteristic that often rankled Hamilton Winship.

Rarely would Slayton deign to wear a suit and tie in Washington, for instance, preferring instead his jeans and sweaters and
boots. His dark brown hair was kept longer than the current style, which particularly annoyed Winship. His choice in clothing
made Slayton appear more athletic and less businesslike than the other T-men, which was, of course, to Slayton’s advantage,
both professionally and personally. Professionally, he never quite “looked” like a T-man, which was often convenient during
those times when looking like a government agent was a death warrant; personally, he didn’t quite fit the uniform, and was
happily allowed to report to his superior —the very uniformly dapper Hamilton Winship—by telephone, from his home in Virginia.

“Tell me now, Mr. Tolson,” Slayton said, his voice friendly and open. “What are the procedures followed when the men check
in before their shifts and go down inside the mine?”

“Well, let me show you, Mr.—”

“Slayton.”

“Yes. Slayton. Come with me.”

Slayton followed Tolson to a low building about a hundred yards from the elevator shaft. Inside was a small office with roster
sheets and the like, a large communal shower room, and rows upon rows of lockers for the men. Near the door the men would
take exiting the building for the elevator shaft was a large board filled with tags, all of them with numbers punched on their
metal faces.

“Every man’s got a tag and every man’s got a number. His number’s on the tag, and that’s the one he’s got to wear. His name’s
checked off the duty roster by the foreman in charge, and the tags are collected at the end of the day,” Tolson explained.

“What about visitors?”

“Visitors get special tags, marked with letters, which are kept in the safe in my office. We can check that safe if you like,
just to make sure all those tags are accounted for.”

“Not just yet. Tell me something first about the workers’ tags. Can they be duplicated?”

Tolson beamed. “Glad you asked,” he said. “Glad you asked.”

Slayton was taken to Tolson’s own office, which was in a separate building adjacent to the one they had just been in. When
they were inside Tolson’s private quarters, Tolson opened his safe and removed a small box. He opened it and showed Slayton
an ultraviolet marker and light-detection device.

“We got security gadgets just like the government,” Tolson said. “In fact, you might be interested to know that we just instituted
this ultraviolet marking system last week. All the workers’ tags are marked, though they don’t know it. That way, we can tell
which tags belong to us and which tags are counterfeit, in the unlikely event that any are.”

“Very good,” Slayton said, trying to sound impressed, but becoming more impatient with Tolson’s almost ebullient attitude
at the sight and sound of what would surely become one of the most tragic mine disasters in American history.

Slayton thought quickly, trying to figure a way to shorten the time he would have to spend with Tolson. He might have to return
to him for questioning, but time was now precious. He had none to waste on someone
too
helpful to official investigators, a common problem to all police agencies.

“I already told the FBI about the ultraviolet marking procedures,” he said, thrusting forward his chest as if he expected
Slayton to pin a medal on it.

“You what?”

“As soon as I heard of the blast, I naturally telephoned the FBI.”

“How does one ‘naturally’ telephone the FBI when a mine explodes?”

“Well, I was informed that the business with this Johnny Lee Rogers—”

“What?”

“Well, all the radio stations have it. At least the one I listen to.”

Slayton hadn’t thought to monitor the media. He wondered if anyone in Washington had thought to do so.