Shall We Tell the President? (8 page)

6:27 am Eventually Mark could stand it no
longer and at 6:30 am he rose-, showered, and put on a clean shirt and a fresh
suit. From his apartment window, he looked out across the Washington Channel to
East
Potomac
Park
and went over in his mind all that had happened yesterday. In a few weeks the
cherry trees would bloom. In a few weeks…

He closed the apartment door behind him,
glad simply to be on the move again. Simon gave him the car keys; he had
managed to find a space for the Mercedes in one of the private parking lots.
Mark drove the car slowly up
6th
Street
, turns left on G and right on 7th. No
traffic at this time of morning except trucks. He passed the
Hirshhorn
Museum
as he crossed into
Independence
Avenue
. At the intersection of 7th and
Pennsylvania
, next to
the National Archives, Mark came to a halt at a red light. He felt an eerie
sense of nothing being out of the ordinary, as though the previous day had been
a bad dream. He would arrive at the office and Nick
Stames
and Barry Calvert would be there as usual. The vision evaporated as he looked
to his left. At one end of the deserted avenue, he could see the White House
grounds and patches of the white building through the trees. To his right, at
the other end of the avenue, stood the Capitol, gleaming in the early morning
sunshine. And between the two, between Caesar and Cassius, thought Mark, stood
the
FBI
Building
. Alone in the middle, he mused,
the Director and himself, playing with destiny.

Mark drove the car down the ramp at the
back of FBI Headquarters and parked. A young man in a dark blue blazer, grey
flannels, dark shoes, and a smart blue tie, the regulation uniform of the
Bureau, awaited him. An anonymous man, thought Mark, who looked far too neat to
have just got up. Mark Andrews showed him his identification. The young man led
him towards the elevator without saying a word; it took them to the seventh
floor, where Mark walk noiselessly escorted to a small room and asked to wait
.

He sat in the reception room, next to the
Director’s office, with the inevitable out-of-date copies of Time
and
Newsweek;
he might have been at the dentist’s. It was the first time in his life that
he would rather have been at his dentist’s. He pondered the events of the last
fourteen hours. He’d gone from
bring
a man with no
responsibility enjoying the second of five eventful years in the FBI to one who
was staring into the jaws of a tiger. His only previous trip to the Bureau
itself had been for his interview; they hadn’t told him that this could happen.
They had talked of salaries, bonuses, holidays, a worthwhile and fulfilling
job, serving the nation, nothing about immigrant Greeks and black postmen with
their throats cut, nothing about friends being drowned in the
Potomac
.
He paced around the room trying to compose his thoughts; yesterday should have
been his day off, but he had decided he could do with the overtime pay. Perhaps
another agent would have got back to the hospital more quickly and forestalled
the double murder. Perhaps if he had driven the Ford sedan last night, it would
have been he, not
Stames
and Calvert, in the
Potomac
. Perhaps . . . Mark closed his eyes and felt an
involuntary shiver run down his spine. He made an effort to disregard the
panicky fear that had kept him awake all night — perhaps it would be his turn
next.

His eyes came to rest on a plaque on the
wall, which stated that, in over sixty years of the FBI’s history, only thirty-four
people had been killed while on duty; on only one occasion had two officers
died on the same day. Yesterday made that out of date. Mark’s eyes continued
moving around the wall and settled on a large picture of the Supreme Court;
government and the law hand-in-hand. On his left were the five directors,
Hoover
,
Gray
, Ruckelshaus, Kelley, and now the redoubtable H. A. L.
Tyson, known to everyone in the Bureau by the
acronynm
Halt. Apparently, no one except his secretary, Mrs McGregor, knew his first name.
It had become a long-standing joke in the Bureau. When you joined the FBI, you
paid one dollar to Mrs McGregor, who had served the Director for twenty-seven
years, and told her what you thought the Director’s first name was. If you got
it right, you won the pool. The kitty had now reached $3,516. Mark had guessed
Hector. Mrs McGregor had laughed and the pool was one dollar the richer. If you
wanted a second guess, that cost you another dollar, but if you got it wrong,
you paid a ten-dollar fine. Quite a few people tried the second time and the
kitty grew larger as each new victim arrived.

Mark had had what he thought was the bright
idea of checking the Criminal Fingerprints File. The FBI fingerprints records
fall into three categories -military, civil, and criminal, and all FBI agents
have their prints in the criminal file. This insures that they are able to
trace any FBI agent who turns criminal, or to eliminate an agent’s prints at
the scene of a crime; these records are very rarely used. Mark had considered
himself very clever as he asked to see Tyson’s card. The Director’s card was
handed to him by an assistant from the Fingerprints Department. It read
-
‘Height:
6’ 1”; Weight: 180
lbs
; Hair: brown; Occupation:
Director of FBI; Name: Tyson, H. A. L.’ No forename given. The assistant,
another anonymous man in a blue suit, had smiled sourly at Mark and had said,
loud enough for Mark to hear, as he returned the card to its file, ‘One more
sucker who thought he was going to make a quick three thousand bucks.’

Because the Bureau had become more
political during the last decade the appointment of a professional law
enforcement officer was a figure whom Congress found very easy to endorse. Law
enforcement was in Tyson’s blood. His great-grandfather had been a Wells Fargo
man, riding shotgun on the stage between
San Francisco
and
Seattle
in the other
Washington
. His grandfather had been mayor
of
Boston
and its chief of police, a rare
combination, and his father before his retirement had been a distinguishes
Massachusetts
attorney.
That the great-grandson had followed family tradition, and ended up as Director
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, surprised no one. The anecdotes about
him were legion and Mark wondered just how many of them were apocryphal.

There was no doubt that Tyson had scored
the winning touchdown in his final Harvard-Yale game because it was there on
record, as indeed was the fact that he was the only white man to box on the
1956 American Olympic team in Melbourne. Whether he had actually said to the
late President Nixon that he would rather serve the devil than direct the FBI
under his presidency, no one could be sure, but it was certainly a story the
Kane camp made no effort to suppress.

His wife had died five years earlier of
multiple sclerosis. He had nursed her for twenty years with a fierce loyalty.

He feared no man and his reputation for
honesty and straight talking had raised him above most government employees in
the eyes of the nation. After a period of malaise, following Hoover’s death,
Halt Tyson had restored the Bureau to the prestige it had enjoyed in the 1930s
and 1940s. Tyson was one of the reasons Mark had been happy to commit five
years of his life to the FBI.

Mark began to fidget with the middle button
of his jacket, as all FBI agents tend to do. It had been drummed into him in
the fifteen-week course at
Quantico
that jacket buttons should always be undone, allowing access to the gun, on the
hip holster, never on a shoulder strap. It annoyed Mark that the television
series about the FBI always got that wrong. Whenever an FBI man sensed danger,
he would fiddle with that middle button to make sure his coat was open
.
Mark sensed fear, fear of the
unknown, fear of H. A. L. Tyson, fear which an accessible Smith and Wesson
could not cure.

The anonymous young man with the vigilant
look and the dark blue blazer returned.

‘The Director will see you now.’

Mark rose, felt unsteady, braced himself,
rubbed his hands against his trousers to remove the sweat from his palms and
followed the anonymous man through the outer office and into the Director’s
inner sanctum. The Director glanced up, waved him to a chair, and waited for
the anonymous man to leave the room and close the door. Even seated, the
Director was a bull of a man with a large head placed squarely on massive
shoulders. Bushy eyebrows matched his careless, wiry brown hair; it was so
curly you might have thought it was a wig if it hadn’t been H. A. L. Tyson. His
big hands remained splayed on the surface as though the desk might try to get
away. The delicate Queen Anne desk was quite subdued by the grip of the
Director. His cheeks were red, not the red of alcohol, but the red of good and
bad weather. Slightly back from the Director’s chair stood another man muscular,
clean-shaven, and silent, a policeman’s policeman.

The Director spoke. ‘Andrews, this is
Assistant Director Matthew Rogers. I have briefed him on the events following
Casefikis’s
death: we will be putting several agents on the
investigation with you.’ The Director’s grey eyes were piercing — piercing
Mark. ‘I lost two of my best men yesterday, Andrews, and nothing -I repeat,
nothing - will stop me from finding out who was responsible, even if it was the
President herself, you understand.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Mark said very quietly.

‘You will have gathered from the press
release we gave that the public is under the impression that what happened
yesterday evening was just another automobile accident. No journalist has
connected the murders in
Woodrow
Wilson
Medical
Center
with the deaths of
my agents. Why should they, with a murder every twenty-six minutes in
America
?’

A Metropolitan Police file marked ‘Chief of
Metropolitan Police’ was by his side; even they were under control.

‘We, Mr Andrews . . .’

It made Mark feel slightly royal.

‘. . . we are not going to disillusion
them. I have been going over carefully what you told me last night. I’ll
summarise the situation as I see it. Please feel free to interrupt me whenever
you want to.’

Under normal circumstances, Mark would have
laughed.

The Director was looking at the file.

‘The Greek immigrant wanted to see the head
of the FBI,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps I should have granted his request, had I
known about it.’ He looked up. ‘Still, the facts:
Casefikis
made an oral statement to you at Woodrow Wilson, and the gist of it was that he
believed that there was a plot in motion to assassinate the President of the
United States on 10 March; he overheard this information while waiting on a
private lunch in a Georgetown hotel, at which he thought a US senator was
present. Is that correct so far, Andrews?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Once more the Director looked down at the
file.

‘The police took prints of the dead man,
and he hasn’t shown up in our files or in the Metropolitan Police files. So for
the moment we must act on the assumption, after last night’s four killings,
that everything the Greek immigrant told us was in good faith. He may not have
got the story entirely accurately, but he certainly was on to something big
enough to cause four murders in one night. I think we may also assume that
whoever the people are behind these diabolical events, they believe they are
now in the clear and that they have killed anyone who might have known of their
plans. You may consider yourself lucky, young man.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I suppose it had crossed your mind that
they thought it was you in the blue Ford sedan?’

Mark nodded. He had thought of little else
for the past ten hours; he hoped Norma
Stames
would
never think of it.

‘I want these conspirators to think they
are now in the clear and for that reason, I am going to allow the President’s
schedule for the week to continue as planned, at least for the moment.’

Mark ventured a question. ‘But, sir, won’t
that put her in grave danger?’

‘Andrews, somebody, somewhere, and it may
be a United States senator, is planning to assassinate the President; so far,
he has been prepared to murder two of my best agents, a Greek who might have
recognised him, and a deaf postman whose only connection with the matter was
that he may have been able to identify
Casefikis’s
killer. If we rush in now with the heavy artillery, then we will scare them
off. We have almost nothing to go on; we would be unlikely to discover their
identities. And if we did, we certainly wouldn’t be able to nail them. Our only
hope of catching them is to let the bastards think they are in the clear -
right up to the last moment. That way, we just might get them. It’s possible
they have already been frightened off, but I think not. They have used such violent
means to keep their intentions secret they must have some overriding reason for
wanting the President out of the way within seven days. We must find out what
the reason is.’