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He looked at her, his frown back in place. 'You do that,' he murmured, 'and while you do, I'm off to visit our Paula. No one else but Beppe has

seen Essary, that I know of at any rate; but she was close to her old man.

You never know, maybe she can shed some light.'

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'I made that call to lan,' said Sarah.

'I told you. I don't want to know anything about it.'

'Okay, I just thought. ..'

'Don't start thinking about this at this stage,' Bob snapped. 'You'l only confuse yourself.'

She looked at him across the bedroom, angered and hurt by his retort.

He softened at once and moved towards her. 'Hey, I'm sorry, love,' he said, wrapping his arms around her in a great bear-hug. 'You do what you have to do. It's just that this is going to be a difficult week for you as it is; I'm not sure you need this added complication.'

'You ain't kidding there,' she murmured, her voice muffled by his chest. 'But I have to deal with it, if I'm ever going to feel right about that time. I won't mention it again, I promise.'

'Fine. The main thing for you, for us both, indeed, is to get through Friday.'

'I know. The meeting at the law firm, whenever it happens, is going to be tough too. And there's something else I have to do before that.'

'What's that?'

'I have to see them, Bob. I have to say my goodbyes. I cal ed the mortician and arranged it for this evening.'

'Now I do understand that, love. Do you want me to come with you?'

She looked up at him, her eyes glazed. 'Take me there, please, but give me some time on my own.'

'Sure.'

The phone beside the bed began to ring, softly at first, then growing in volume. 'You'd better take that,' said Bob. 'Just in case it's your Reverend pal cal ing you back.'

She nodded and went to answer the call. He was on his way into the en-suite bathroom when he heard her speak. 'Joe. Hi, how are you?

That's good. Yes. He's here. Hold on.'

He was already by her side. 'Hello, mate,' he said as he took the phone. 'What you got?'

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'You want the interesting news or the really interesting news?' Doherty answered.

'Work me up to really.'

'Okay. I'll begin in New York; Troy Kosinski, large as life, called me half an hour ago from the Bureau office there. He reported on his meeting with Wilkins and he told me about the floppy he took from him.

I told him to send it to me by courier, pronto.'

'Did he know Wilkins was dead?'

'When I told him he whistled and went "Wow". Read into that what you will.'

'Have you recovered the bullet yet?'

'Fast work, but yes I have. I commissioned a trusted pathologist in Chicago, rather than send someone in. It was a nine millimetre; could have come from a Glock, but it'll take specialist testing to prove that. It didn't come from Kosinski's standard issue piece; that's for sure.'

'Okay, but if he didn't do it, and Wilkins' office was bugged, how come he was allowed to get back to New York with that disk?'

'Good question; maybe we'l find out when it arrives at my home this evening.'

Skinner frowned. 'Joe, your daughter lives with you. If that thing is hot. ..'

'Not a problem; Phil's out of town with the airline.' Skinner had forgotten that Philippa Doherty was a flight attendant. 'She won't be back for a couple of days.

'Anyway,' the deputy director continued, 'you wanna hear what's real y interesting?'

'Okay'

'You know, Bob, I'm always amazed by how open our so-called Secret Service really is. Goddammit, it even has a website, with the director's resume on it and every detail of its operation. It has several functions, but the one everyone knows about is presidential protection.

'This openness doesn't extend to its personnel records, though; they are not for public consumption. Still, I have some clever researchers here, and sometimes I don't ask how they go about their work. They tell me that Wylie, Garrett and Wilkins were indeed all on the presidential security team during 1963. But the real y interesting thing about them is that November twenty-second of that year was the only day on which they were all off duty at the same time.

'What do you make of that?'

There was a long silence. 'Nothing,' said Skinner, at last. 'I don't think I want to make anything out of it. And at this point, I don't think you should either, Joe.'

'Too late to stop me now, as Van the Man used to say. Hey, you got me started on this thing, buddy. Come on, look at the circumstances; the only day of the year, Bob, the only day of the year when these three guys were off duty at the same time, was the day when their man, the president, was shot. Now, nearly forty years later, they all get together in secret; and a few months later they're al dead. Now come on, copper; do you believe in that kind of coincidence?'

'No,' sighed Skinner. 'No, I don't.'

'That's good; don't want you going coy on me when it's starting to light up, my friend, 'cos there's a twist. My very clever researcher took things a little further; he looked deeper into the careers of these three guys. They were all still in the Service five years later; but they were no longer on the president's team. No, on the fifth of June, 1968, when Bobby was shot, Wylie and Garrett were working out of the Los Angeles office, and Wilkins was in San Francisco.'

'You going to tell me they were off duty that day too, or were they guarding him when that guy walked up to him and shot him?'

'The Secret Service didn't start to protect candidates until after Bobby was hit, so it doesn't matter whether they were on duty or not; but two out of the three were based in LA where it happened. And, Bob, there have always been conspiracy theories around that shooting, just like the other one. Come on, man, don't tell me your detective's pulse isn't racing at the very thought of uncovering them.'

Skinner took a deep breath, as he pondered what Doherty had told him, then let it out in another long sigh.

'Joe, my friend,' he said, 'I'm more than just a detective; as you. know.

Back home I have connections to a national organisation that deals in secrets, and I know the steps we're prepared to take to protect them, when they're important enough. But this isn't back home; this is your country, and I don't know what your people are capable of in the same circumstances.

'What I do know is this; if we have stumbled on to what you're suggesting, then six people have died so far because of it. As for my pulse, it isn't racing. As a matter of fact, it's beating nice and steady, and I want it to stay that way. I can see what's happening, and I can also see that it could have been sanctioned very far up your national chain of command.'

'But it's a crime, Bob,' Doherty protested. 'And I'm sworn to fight crime and uphold the federal law.'

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'Sure, I know that. So listen; I got involved in something like this a few years back, and I ended up kil ing someone. I shot him in cold blood. . . well no, that's not quite true; actually, I was fucking angry with him at the time. That was covered up too, and so was he, very quickly. Nasty things happen in the dark, Joe; sometimes it's better to leave the light off so you can't see them. Hear what I'm saying?'

'Loud and clear.'

'So what are you going to do with that floppy when you get it?'

'If it turns out to contain what I think it does, I'm going to print it and take it to my director.'

'What if he tells you to bum it?'

'Then I'l resign and give it to the Washington Post.'

'And what if your floppy turns out to have nothing on it? IfKosinski is clean, and he stil had the thing when he got it back to New York, what's the betting that before it gets to you, someone manages to run a strong magnet over it and wipe it?'

'Then, my friend, I'll still have my ace in the hole. This is the rest of it. Two days before he went off to meet up with Leo Grace, Jack Wylie, and Bart Wilkins in a small lodge in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Sander Garrett went into a computer store in Vegas and purchased four identical Apple Mac iBooks; he used MasterCard, incidentally. We know that his and Wilkins' computers were stolen by their killer, and we can assume that the same happened to Leo Grace's.

'I have no doubt that those machines were used to make four copies of a declaration, a confession, it may be, of their knowledge of the Dallas assassination . . . and maybe Los Angeles as wel . I'd guess it may cover how they were recruited to the plot, what the plan and layout was, how the patsy, Oswald, was put in place, and also, most important of all, who gave them their orders.'

'Why was Leo there?'

'You said that yourself; to legitimise the whole deal; as an independent witness, a person of standing who was around at the time and who could verify, in the event of official denial, that these guys were who they said they were.' Doherty paused; Skinner thought he heard a chuckle.

'So back to those computers; three were stolen, like I said. The fourth went up in the explosion on Wylie's boat. Only. . .' This time there was no doubting the laugh. 'Those boys at Apple Mac make a damn fine computer, you know. It's amazing what it... or at least, its central core, the hard disk . . . can withstand. Today we recovered what was left of Jack Wylie's iBook; my technicians reckon that, with care, they can recover the data that's stored on it.

'One way or another, Bob, the floppy or the hard disk, I've got it.'

The big Scot sighed, as Doherty finished. 'Cowboy,' he exclaimed,

'have you any idea how far this shit's going to fly off the fan?'

'Have I ever!'

'What about your career? Do you think you're going to get a medal for this?'

'Maybe; unless the director decides to grab all the glory for himself when I tell him.'

'If I were you, pal,' said Skinner, heavily, 'I would let him.'

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57

'You don't need to ask me how close to my father I was, Mario. You know quite well. I inherited his pushy gene, while our Viola takes after my mother all the way. They're both classic types; keep outa ma kitchen,'

she mimicked in harsh Scots Italian, 'but keep me outa the rest of the world.'

He looked at his beautiful cousin; her silver hair glinted in the flickering light of the candles arranged around the spacious apartment.

She was seated in a deep armchair, barefoot, her long legs tucked up under her, with a goblet of red wine warming in her hands.

'You know something else? I've never asked my mother about it, mind you, but I think their marriage was arranged, by Papa or Nana, or maybe even both of them.'

Mario laughed, quietly. 'Sure, kid, I know that; I've known it since I was fifteen years old. Papa Viareggio told me himself. He said that when Beppe was a lad they didn't trust him an inch, and even less when it came to fixing himself up with a wife. So the two old devils looked around for a nice quiet girl from a suitable Italian family ... in other words, one with no money, folk who would just be grateful for the match and wouldn't try and influence the family business . . . and they found Auntie Sophia, from the Belmontes in Dunfermline. Nana knew your other granny as a girl; she made the approach and a meeting was set up between your dad and mum.

'They both knew the score; plus, your mother was a very attractive girl... as she still is.'

Her mouth gaped open. 'Is that right?' she exclaimed.

'That's what our grandfather told me. You know, Paulie, it's a shame that you never real y got to know the old man, but you were just too young for him to take you under his wing, the way he took me. Plus, of course, you're a girl. That's why the trust was set up as it was; with Beppe in ultimate control, then me.'

She smiled; in the candle-glow, she looked devastatingly beautiful.

'So Papa was an old chauvinist, was he?'

'Yes, but no more than your father was. They were both wary of women with ambition . .. which is ironic, since Papa was ruled by the most ambitious woman I've ever met.'

'Nana?'

'Too right; our granny is the archetypal matriarch. That's why my mother made her way outside the family; she knew that our hive could only support one queen. With every respect to Beppe, my mum's forgotten more about business than he ever knew, yet Papa only gave her the minor role in the management of the trust, and he ensured that ultimately it passed to me, rather than you, regardless of how we grew up.'

'You're just like him, you know,' said Paula. 'I looked through my dad's office today, and I found an old piece of cine film that had been transferred to video. It was a family thing, a holiday in Italy when Dad and Aunt Christina were kids; Papa must have been around the age you are now, and honest to God, Mario, it could have been you. I was a bit scared of him when I was a kid, and of you, too.

'I imagined all sorts of things about him; I real y did think he was a Godfather type, and I thought that you were a sort of apprentice.'

'He wasn't, though,' Mario told her, 'he was one of the most honest men I ever met, even if he was one of the craftiest, too. You were wrong about him, and you're wrong about yourself as well. You're just like my mother; you've got Nana's blood flowing in your veins too. That's why she doesn't trust you.'

She stared at him in amazement that might just have been genuine.

'What! My own granny doesn't trust me?'

'It's true, she doesn't, because she knows she can't control you. She even told me to keep an eye on you.'

'Hah! Doesn't she know that you've been keeping an eye on me for years?'

'Only discreetly; and I haven't real y been keeping tabs on you. I'd rather you thought that I've been looking out for you. I was worried when I heard that you'd gone into the sauna business; especial y those ones. The guy who used to own them was the biggest fucking hood in Edinburgh, until he got topped.'

'Are you happy now?'

'Now that I understand why you did it, yes, I am.'

He flashed her a smile. 'Where did you get the money to buy them anyway? Go on, tell me.'

Paula sipped her wine; the air between them was sizzling, and they 240