Worst Case Scenario (12 page)

Chapter Fifteen

“Somehow,” Marjorie said, “I thought that when I finally stumbled across a written document of immense importance, it would be a little less prosaic. You know, a palimpsest with an indictment of cruelty to bulls that was omitted by a printer's error from the published version of
The Sun Also Rises
. Something along those lines.”

“This will do, believe me,” Michaelson said in a deeply preoccupied voice as he gestured briefly with the single page he held.

They were sitting in his Georgetown apartment, where the smell of mediocre pepperoni and decent Cabernet still lingered. It was just after seven o'clock.

The paper Michaelson held was high-quality, eighty-pound, watermarked bond. dinar, stamped in oversized red letters, was centered at the top. In the upper left-hand corner, a string of numerals sandwiched around a single letter appeared: 87-14159195A003. Each character in the sequence was formed by a series of pin-sized holes machine-cut into the page.

A pebbled, red-and-blue border framed the array. After the last numeral, the words raised printing do not photocopy appeared in small black typeface against the same pebbled, red-and-blue background. A thumb-rub over the words confirmed that they were embossed and not merely printed.

It took Michaelson less than thirty seconds to read and absorb the document's text:

TO: GEN WP ARTEMUS MIL LIAISON OP WASH DC
GEN LR MECKSTROTH HQ/NATO BRUX
KR MCCRAFT NSC STAFF LIAISON WASH DC

GREETINGS

EFFECTIVE THIS DATE THROUGH NOON EST 1/20/89 THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES ORDERS REQUIRE SAY AGAIN REQUIRE APPROVAL STAT CHR NSC PRIOR SAY AGAIN PRIOR EXECUTION:

INITIATION CATEGORY 1 FORCES

ALTERATION RULES OF ENGAGEMENT US/FRIENDLY FORCES ETO

HOSTILE INITIATION SEA/LAND/AIR FORCES PRINCIPAL AREAS POTENTIAL ENGAGEMENT

EXCEPTIONS: NONE

COUNTERMAND: WCS ONLY.

The document was dated November 2, 1987. It bore a signature—or a purported signature—that Michaelson had seen many times.

“What does ‘DINAR' mean?” Marjorie asked.

“It's a security classification,” Michaelson said distractedly.

“Like ‘Top Secret'?”

“Like that, but considerably more restrictive. Literally thousands of people have top-secret security clearances. If a document is classified ‘Top Secret/Sensitive/Eyes Only for the President,' about two hundred people would be cleared to see it. A document stamped ‘DINAR' can legally be shown to only thirty-one human beings on earth. Technically, you and I have probably just committed espionage.”

“‘OP' is Office of the President, presumably, since that's where Artemus was at the time this was prepared,” Marjorie said. “‘Rules of engagement' are when, how, and under what circumstances you can fight. Even I know that. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that two and three are talking about NATO and the Fifth and Seventh Fleets.”

“Not to mention the marines on Diego Garcia and two combat-ready divisions in South Korea.”

“What are category one forces?”

“Nuclear weapons.”

“Which ones?” Marjorie asked.

“All of them. ICBMs, Strategic Air Command, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, cruise missiles surface to surface or air to surface, and anything else that those clever engineers out in California cooked up before they lost their jobs.”

“And what does ‘WCS' mean?”

“Literally it stands for ‘written, cut, and signed.' In other words, this order could only be countermanded by an order that was in writing, was signed by an officer or official with adequate authority, and had an authenticating confirmation number cut into it—just as this one did. More colloquially, because of the inflexibility that a designation like that implies, officers sometimes joke that ‘WCS' stands for ‘worst case scenario.'”

“I shouldn't ask because it only encourages you,” Marjorie said, “but I really do want to know. What does the ‘STAT C-H-R N-S-C' business refer to?”

“The statutory chairman of the national security council,” Michaelson said. “Or in plain English, the vice president of the United States.”

“I find myself a little uncomfortable with the implications of this.”

“If it weren't for the pose of blasé sophistication that I feel called upon to affect, I'd find myself appalled beyond imagination by its implications,” Michaelson said.

“Well,” Marjorie allowed after she'd drained her glass of wine, “in the genteel society in which I was raised, ‘appalled beyond imagination' is pretty much what ‘a little uncomfortable' means.”

“If this document is authentic,” Michaelson said, “this country underwent the first coup d'état in its history on November 2, 1987. The president of the United States was effectively relieved of his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Counting the addressees, there are seven—no, eight people who absolutely had to be in on it. At least one of those people is quite likely to be on the presidential ticket of a major party within three months. This piece of paper is the plainest documentary proof of treason since—since I don't know when.”

“Since South Carolina's ordinance of secession in 1860, presumably,” Marjorie said as her rich Southern accent deepened. Pausing thoughtfully, she refilled her wineglass and took another long sip. “Is it actually possible?” she asked then.

“Thinking back on things, it seems not only possible but stunningly plausible,” Michaelson said. “It certainly fits in with Artemus' morose ruminations this afternoon. When Iran/Contra was at its absolute worst inside the Beltway, when it seemed that it had completely paralyzed the administration, I remember seeing a flurry of obviously planted stories in the
Post
and the
Times
suggesting that unnamed aides thought that President Reagan was under undue mental strain.”

“As if they were trying to set things up to ease him out of office early under the Twenty-fifth Amendment—claim that he was mentally disabled and replace him?”

“That's what I thought at the time. Then the effort suddenly disappeared without a trace, and I assumed that it was just one of those nice tries that didn't quite get off the ground.”

“Whereas it may simply have become unnecessary,” Marjorie said.

“Yes. After this order circulated, any removal effort that was actually authorized by the Constitution would have been exquisitely superfluous.”

“What now?” Marjorie asked.

“They say that it pays to advertise,” Michaelson said. “I think our next move is to do something fairly conspicuous.”

“Wait a minute. Are you going to tell Gallagher about this?”

“Yes.”

“I expect he's going to be rather conspicuous around Washington himself about two hours after you do,” Marjorie said.

“I expect the same thing.”

“Wont't we be putting him in danger by inviting attention to ourselves, then?”

“You're right.” Pausing, Michaelson finished his wine and gazed reflectively at the goblet. “I suppose we'd better think up some non-Washington task to keep him busy for a day or two.”

“Good luck,” Marjorie said.

She rose to refill her glass, thought better of it, and sat back down. In what anyone but Michaelson might have taken as some agitation, she looked around the familiar room as if she'd never seen it before. Finally, resting her forearms on her crossed legs, she leaned forward.

“Was the vice president one of the eight people who had to be in the middle of it?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you think he knew?”

“Define ‘know,'” Michaelson replied.

Chapter Sixteen

The dull-finish metal box nestled inside the wooden cabinet above the gas stove in Michaelson's kitchenette as if it had been die-cut and laser-trimmed to the cabinet's dimensions. Someone poking his nose into the cabinet would see what looked like the outside of a ventilating shaft.

“This is the key,” Gallagher said, holding up a notched cylinder an eighth of an inch in diameter and two inches long.

He stuck the cylinder into what looked like a rivet head in the lower right-hand corner of the box's face. A gentle click sounded when he turned the cylinder. The front of the box popped open from the bottom, revealing that it wasn't waferthin tinplate but half an inch of carbonized steel.

Michaelson and Marjorie watched the performance with polite interest. It was just after three in the afternoon, not quite twenty-four hours after Marjorie's discovery of the November 2, 1987, order hidden by Sharon Bedford. Michaelson had called Gallagher the evening before, suggesting an off-hand hope that he might be able to come up to Washington over the weekend. Gallagher had been on a flight first thing the following morning and, once he understood the problem, had gotten a Deluxe Secure Hideaway LokBox delivered first thing that afternoon.

“We have almost a thousand of these installed around the country, with an absolute guarantee against forcible entry or removal. We've only gotten one claim, and that turned out to be an insurance fraud setup.”

“Very impressive,” Michaelson said. He took a sealed white envelope from his inside coat pocket, slipped it into the lock-box, and snapped the cover shut. He returned a collection of cellophane-wrapped napkins and paper-towel rolls to the cabinet and swung its door shut. Then he led Gallagher and Marjorie out of the tiny kitchen area and into a somewhat larger living room.

“Let's review what we have so far,” he said. “Three people with an established or presumptive interest in the November order are known to have visited Sharon Bedford in her hotel room the morning she died: Jerry Marciniak, Jeffrey Quentin, and Scott Pilkington.”

“What's Marciniak's presumptive interest?” Marjorie asked as the three seated themselves.

“Marciniak rose from a humdrum civil service slot in the health-care bureaucracy to a major policy-making position,” Michaelson said. “He did so with unbecoming speed. A suggestively short time before that ascent began, according to Artemus, Artemus used Marciniak to get his daughter priority for critical medical treatment. Artemus did that by using the order—the ‘lever,' as he put it. The order would give him leverage with Marciniak only if Marciniak thought he could use his knowledge of the order to his own advantage later on. The sharp hostility to Marciniak that Artemus expressed suggests that Marciniak did exactly that, and did it almost immediately, thereby exposing what Artemus had done.”

“Used it to boost his own meteoric rise, you mean,” Marjorie said.

“Yes.”

“I'm convinced,” Marjorie said. “Sorry about sidetracking your summary. You had placed three suspects in Sharon Bedford's room the morning she was killed.”

“Except that we're going to have to come up with some creative thinking to turn either Quentin or Marciniak into a legitimate suspect,” Michaelson said.

“I'm glad I'm not the only one worried about that,” Gallagher said. “The killer poisoned Sharon by injecting bufotenine into a mint she ate. The maid didn't leave the mint in her room until just before Sharon left the café where she was eating breakfast, and by that time both Marciniak and Quentin had long since come and gone.”

“What a depressing display of left-brained, logic-bound, linear Western thinking,” Marjorie said.

“But hard to argue with,” Michaelson commented.

“That's what's so depressing about it,” Marjorie said.

“Well, all that means is that we have one more question to answer before we have the solution,” Michaelson said. “There's an objection nearly as substantial to Pilkington as the killer. If he tampered with the mint, he had to do so while Ms. Bedford was in the room. He might have been able to accomplish that by distracting her and going through some sleight of hand. But he couldn't have counted on that when he was planning the murder.”

“The solution doesn't leap out at me,” Marjorie said. “But at least we can be reasonably sure Pilkington and Quentin knew Bedford had a duplicate original of the order. They knew about the order, and they had to realize that that was what she was hinting about in her job hustle.”

“Marciniak knew about the order, too, and she was also hustling him for a job,” Michaelson pointed out.

“Right,” Marjorie said. “But we have no reason to believe she was using the order to do it. Marciniak denied that she was shopping anything to him. We don't have any hard evidence that he was lying. He might have heard she was claiming at the conference to have something juicy up her sleeve, but the murder had to have been planned before the conference. No one just happened to waltz down there with bufotenine in his pocket. I think that if we're going to pin her murder on Marciniak, we're going to have to show that he had some way of knowing exactly what Sharon had, and some reason to want to keep her from using it.”

“And as if all of those problems weren't daunting enough,” Michaelson said, “Marciniak, Quentin, and Pilkington are only the people that someone spotted going into Ms. Bedford's room. We can't be certain that they're the only possible suspects.”

“Can you think of any others?” Gallagher asked.

Before answering, Michaelson rose lightly from his chair and crossed to a drink caddy near the window.

“I have the standard selections,” he said as he opened a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label scotch and poured two fingers into a crystal tumbler that he took from the caddy's bottom shelf. “Can I get anything for anyone else?”

“G&T, naturally.” Gallagher shrugged.

“Scotch,” Marjorie said.

Michaelson deliberately prepared and distributed the requested drinks, sank back into his chair, took one sip from his own glass, then smiled benignly at the other two for a moment before speaking.

“There is at least one other suspect,” he said. “And I think the next thing we have to decide is whether to focus on him or cross him off the list.”

“Who's that?” Marjorie asked.

“Alex Moodie. He was there, he was intensely interested in retrieving his wife's career, and when I talked to the two of them, Deborah told me a couple of deliberate lies. Or to be fair, made a couple of key statements that were incompletely truthful. She did so for what I'd regard as fairly noble reasons, but she still didn't come across with all the facts.”

“You going to expand on that for us?” Gallagher asked after putting a substantial dent in his gin and tonic.

“When her initial push on the Artemus matter went nowhere,” Michaelson said, “Deborah did what any savvy and experienced bureaucrat would do. She stopped pushing. Then, years later, she resumed the crusade. She told me that that happened out of sheer frustration. That wasn't the whole truth.”

“What is?” Marjorie asked.

“I don't know. But I think finding out should become a priority at the Washington end of our little adventure.”

“‘Washington end'?” Gallagher asked. “What other end is there?”

“There's a loose thread in Wilmot, Ohio, that we've been ignoring,” Michaelson said.

“The phony, obscene birthday card that was found in Sharon's room, you mean,” Gallagher said.

“Exactly. It connects to Quentin, obviously, but what exactly is the connection? The card as a blackmail instrument doesn't work very well. Is there something more substantial? Specifically, is there some link between Ms. Bedford and one of the victims of the campaign ploy involving that card that Quentin orchestrated?”

“Any ideas about how to answer that question?” Gallagher asked.

“One,” Michaelson said. “It involves you.”

He explained what he had in mind.

“That seems a little bit, ah, off-center,” Gallagher said.

“Agreed,” Michaelson said. “If a straight-ahead attack could expose the murderer, the Charleston police would presumably have him in custody by now.”

“I'm game,” Gallagher sighed.

“Happy hunting,” Michaelson said.