Flowers From Berlin (37 page)

When it was over, and when she lay next to him watching the final embers in the fire, words formed before she knew she was saying them.

"If America enters the war," she said softly, "don't you dare get killed."

FORTY-ONE

The sound of the persistent knocking, a fist on a wooden doorway, forced Laura to emerge from a deep, satisfying sleep.

There was the warmth of the strong male arm around her. His chest pressed to her back beneath a sheet and a blanket. There was, as she slowly woke, the excitement and strangeness of Bill Cochrane's bed. There was the sound of traffic outside. Then came that knocking again.

She felt Bill's arm leave her waist and she rolled over. She fluttered her eyes open and saw him hurriedly dressing. Slowly, her mind began to register. The previous evening. Dinner. Logs in the fireplace. A new lover.

He pulled on his clothes.

"Good morning," she said, sitting up.

Then came the knocking again.

"Morning," he said.

She sat up in bed, held the sheets to her, then figured, why bother? She liked her lovers to admire her. The sheet was across her lap.

"What is that?" she then asked, realizing that the persistent rapping would not go away. "Bill, what's going on?"

He sat down on the edge of the bed, wrapped an arm around her bare shoulders, and kissed her.

"You're very beautiful and you're a spectacular lover," he said to her. "And I have no idea who is downstairs at my door. So I thought I'd get dressed and find out."

"Oh," she said, feeling a trifle foolish.

He went to his dresser and withdrew his pistol from the second drawer. He checked it as he disappeared down the stairs. She listened.

Moments later, she heard the door unlock. Then there was an animated, tormented conversation. Bill's voice. Another man. She recognized it.

Peter Whiteside.

She found her own clothes, ran a comb through her hair, and paused at a mirror. She looked like a very sinful girl who had slept over at a strange man's house without even bringing her own things. Such was life, she reasoned. She was entitled to her own imperfections. Then she stopped at the head of the stairs. Snatches of conversation rose up from the living room.

. . shot to death by the filthy bastard. Two of my best bloody men. ."
Whiteside's impassioned voice:
"My own fault, I should have assigned fifty men to guard him. . . and what the bloody hell do we do now? Fowler is loose again!"

"For starters, we don't panic," Bill Cochrane answered. Laura tiptoed down the stairs and saw a greatly shaken Peter Whiteside standing in the living room with Bill. Whiteside's face was ashen.

"Mind?" Whiteside asked, opening a decanter of Scotch and pouring himself some.

"Suit yourself," Bill answered, his arms folded before him.

Whiteside gulped down three fingers of liquor as if it were water.

"And Laura's missing, too," Whiteside said urgently. "Tried to reach her since six this bloody morning. Called the hotel, finally had the bell captain check her room."

"And?" Cochrane asked.

"Never returned there last night." Whiteside threw down another gulp of whiskey.

"Is that a fact?" Cochrane asked.

"Laura's perfectly safe," Laura said from where she watched the conversation.

Whiteside whirled as if addressed by a ghost. "But we're going to have to do something about her former husband,” she added.

Whiteside stared at her. Then his gaze shifted to Cochrane. "Oh. I see," he finally said. He looked as if he were about to deliver a lecture on morality.

Cochrane interceded and saved the moment. "After you've finished drinking your breakfast, Peter," he said, "we'll have to get moving. I suspect Fowler's right here in Washington."

"Here? Why?"

"He's stalking Roosevelt."

"Oh, my Lord!" Whiteside, who was having a bad morning, exclaimed. He reached for the bottle again.

"Well," Cochrane said, "it's about time you both knew, isn't it? That's all we're doing. Preventing an assassination that could change the world."

*

There followed a day of quiet panic in the District of Columbia. Cochrane hit the pavements almost immediately and ferreted out anyone in the Bureau or Secret Service with whom he could still obtain an open ear. To most field agents, he was still a leper. The Secret Service was not partial to obtaining their leads from the F.B.I. and Frank Lerrick was either "out" or "unavailable" whenever Cochrane called.

All Bill Cochrane wished to convey was that Siegfried, or Rev. Stephen Fowler, had slipped the leash of British intelligence and was probably in Washington.

"So what's new about that?" asked one of the White House Secret Service detail.

"Just be extra vigilant," Cochrane advised.

"We'll keep our eyes extra open," came the response, heavy with sarcasm.

In the early afternoon Cochrane found his way into Bureau headquarters and onto the sixth floor. Most of the Bluebirds were absent: more empty desks and listening posts than Cochrane had ever seen. The place had an air of summer vacation or lunch hour, this in late November and in the middle of the afternoon.

He looked again for Frank Lerrick and failed to find him. Lerrick, since that previous morning, had gained the title of Acting Operations Chief, whatever that meant. Bill Cochrane supposed it was some sort of move designed to fill the vacuum left by Dick Wheeler's "sudden retirement due to illness," as insiders were asked to call it.

Cochrane drove by the White House and parked across on Pennsylvania Avenue by the curb. He sat and analyzed the street. He "made" as much of the plainclothes security as he could. His spirits were lifted slightly. Somewhere, perhaps, someone had been listening to him that afternoon. There was extra security.

For Siegfried? Or simply because most of Washington knew the unofficial news anyway: Congress was an hour or two from Thanksgiving adjournment. The President would be leaving for Warm Springs as soon as the final gavel cracked.

Cochrane pondered: a man needing heavy security, he knew from experience, is most vulnerable en route. In public places—in transit—a ring of security is most difficult to set.

Lincoln, he recalled, was shot in a theater. Garfield was shot at a train station. McKinley took a bullet at a public meeting hall. President Roosevelt, himself, escaped death in a Miami motorcade in 1933 when a bullet intended for him hit Mayor Cermack of Chicago.

Transit, thought Cochrane. Where in transit? He had been too close to Siegfried not to have some understanding of the man's moves. He knew a bomb was probably already made. Where was it?

Cochrane turned over the engine of the Hudson and drove to the Washington Naval Station. Cochrane showed his F.B.I. credentials at the main gate. Already he could see that security was tighter than usual. The word had spread. Something was going on.

"Are you with the F.B.I. contingent already here?" a Naval Shore Patrol man asked.

"That's right, sailor," Cochrane said.

The sailor waved him past while another sailor stood ten feet away with a carbine. Cochrane parked in the first space available. He walked toward the presidential yacht. He pinned his F.B.I. shield to his lapel and kept his hands visible.

The ship was ringed with sixteen Shore Patrol members, eight different posts, two men at each post. Cochrane glanced to the deck and saw a stronger presence there than usual. He moved down the pier a hundred feet from where
The Sequoia
was berthed and stared at the water.

No movement at all along the waterline of the ship. He raised his eyes. There were two armed US Navy vessels in the Potomac Harbor, visitors he had never seen before. One was a hundred yards upstream from
The Sequoia
, the other was a hundred yards downstream. Both dwarfed the presidential yacht. Cochrane studied them.

"Satisfied, Cochrane?" a voice asked.

Cochrane's head turned to his left. There was Frank Lerrick, who had spotted him, then appeared quietly at his side.

"I'll be more satisfied when the President arrives safely wherever he's going," Cochrane answered.

Lerrick looked angry. "Same old Bill Cochrane," he said. "Not your case anymore, but you have to keep nosing into it. Don't you understand what 'dismissed' means?"

"Maybe not. But my resignation's not effective till the end of the month, anyway."

Lerrick drew a breath. The wind was kicking up and the banks of the river were chilly. "What can I do to get rid of you?" Lerrick asked. "Short of having you locked up?"

"Convince me that your security is more than ample. I think there'll be an attempt on the President before he leaves this harbor."

"Impossible."

"Convince me," Cochrane again challenged.

Frank Lerrick went a long way toward convincing him. The yacht had been tossed inside out, Lerrick said. Even panels from walls had been taken off and riveted back on. Everything that could move had been picked up, shaken, and put back into place. Ten army demolitions experts had gone through the ship that very afternoon, and when they had finished, the District bomb squad had repeated the same procedure.

"You couldn't slip a wet cough drop on or off that boat," Lerrick said.

"How about the harbor?" Cochrane asked.

Lerrick motioned to the PT boats. "Navy operation all the way."

"What about a mine at the mouth of the river?" Cochrane asked.

Lerrick grinned and appreciated the question. A chance to show off: "I was twenty-four hours ahead of you, Cochrane. Two mine sweepers covered the harbor this afternoon. They're also proceeding along the coastal waterway as far as Georgia. An advance escort in addition to the PT boats."

"And the sides of the
Sequoia
itself?" Cochrane asked.

"Six navy frogmen spent the afternoon going over every inch of it," Lerrick said. "There's not a barnacle on that boat's belly. They finished at four-thirty. Half an hour ago. And nothing, nothing, has come within two hundred, uh, yards of the boat since, Satisfied?"

Cochrane had to admit it. Yes, he was satisfied. Lerrick had done all the right things. The facts were the facts. Why then, did his instincts still rebel?

He thanked Frank Lerrick and departed.

His mood and suspicions simmered. He considered going for dinner, but wasn't hungry. He wound his way slowly through Washington traffic and discovered that he was heading, for no real reason, back toward the White House and his previous post across the street from the presidential residence.

Where would the attack come? He couldn't see it. He couldn't sense it. His intuition had left town. He began to wonder whether his common sense had, too.

Maybe, he postulated, it's all a conceit at this point. Siegfried knew he had lost and fled the country: he saved himself, just as I should now save myself.

Cochrane tried to place himself within Siegfried's twisted psyche. And when he did so, the sense of impending disaster remained. It was a sense he had developed involuntarily over the past five years. He knew when he was being tailed and he knew when he was close to his own quarry. His senses had never betrayed him. But tonight they were short-circuiting. He was getting messages, but did not know what they were.

Was he close to Siegfried, or was Siegfried close to him? Had Fowler flown the coop completely—he had to have had an escape route or two lined up—or was he still lurking somewhere in the capital, waiting for his shot at Roosevelt?

Cochrane sat in his car on Pennsylvania Avenue, parked by a fire hydrant. The flag flew above the White House, a yellow spotlight upon it.

He ran through everything again. The White House itself was secure from within. It had to be. Similarly, the White House grounds were clean. Cochrane had seen the Secret Service and Bureau people examining every inch that afternoon. They had even used dogs.

The presidential limousine had been under guard for two weeks. Secure, Cochrane thought, checking off a mental list.

What about the route to the yacht? Unpublished, Cochrane recalled, and the first blocks away from the White House were under guard by Secret Service, plainclothes D.C. police, Army, and F.B.I.. A cat couldn't slip in and out without being seen. That left the yacht, which had been searched and searched again from within. And the frogmen searched the outside at sunset.

So why did Cochrane sense disaster? Where, oh where, was the weak spot in security? He started his car, just for the exercise, and pulled into traffic. He circled the White House in its entirety, Pennsylvania Avenue, to Constitution, south, and back again. He had never seen such heavy security. He should have been reassured. But the feeling of doom was still upon him.

He parked again. The same spot. A brown sedan pulled from a parking area a hundred feet behind him, then cruised next to him and stopped.

They looked at him questioningly, a car full of hardnosed Secret Service faces. Cochrane kept his hands in full view on the top of the steering wheel. His window was already open.

"F.B.I.," he said. He flicked one palm open in plain sight and showed a shield. They shined a searchlight in his face.

"What are you sitting here for?" the driver asked.

"Security's a joint operation, isn't it?" he asked. They looked at him resentfully, then rolled up their car window. They parked fifty feet down the block in front of him. They settled in to wait, and so did Cochrane.

*

Earlier that afternoon, Stephen Fowler had selected his key landmark on the Virginia side of the Potomac. It was the spire of St. Thomas’church, the tallest point near the riverside in Alexandria. The spire would be easily visible at all hours from the water, which was what counted.

Siegfried left his car one block from the Lutheran church. The trunk of the car contained the spy's escape material: fake passports, tickets, money, and dry clothing. Then Fowler took a public bus into Washington. He would start in the Washington Channel, upstream from the
Sequoia
, and swim downstream with the current to his target. Then the current of the Potomac would guide him back across the Potomac to Alexandria. For a strong swimmer, it was fiendishly simple.

He had ready his Pirelli diving suit. He carried the bomb in a small suitcase. He went to East Potomac Park at dusk, staked out a bench near the Washington Channel, and waited. A thousand thoughts were upon him: his proximity to killing the President. . . his escape through Mexico . . . his eventual reception in Germany.