Worst Case Scenario (17 page)

“If ambition alone led to murder, the homicide rate for any square block of Constitution Avenue would be higher than for Washington's entire drug corridor,” Michaelson said. “You didn't kill Sharon Bedford because you were ambitious. You killed her because you thought you were indispensable. In your own mind, you'd become the only person in America who could save science and medicine from the corrosive, corrupting effect of politics—from the Quentins of the world. That's what made Ms. Bedford's murder a Washington crime. She didn't die because of greed or hatred or lust. She died because of your delusion. She died because you talked yourself into believing your own press releases.”

“How much of this can you prove?” Quentin demanded.

Rising, Michaelson walked over to the bed and took the mint from the pillow.

“If this turns out to be laced with bufotenine,” he said, “I'd say we can prove a good deal of it.”

“Are you saying he'd pull the same thing again?” Quentin asked in astonishment. “Just so he could sell me that piece of paper instead of you?”

“Not primarily,” Michaelson said. “I don't think Dr. Marciniak will give the document to you except as a last resort. But he didn't just sneak in here to search my room. He also came in to kill me under circumstances that would permanently compromise you, Mr. Quentin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, come now,” Michaelson scoffed. “This is your field. Two people at two separate hotels who have something you want die under mysterious circumstances while you're in the neighborhood. That would be the Vince Foster suicide mess squared, wouldn't it? Do you really think you'd keep on breezing into the Oval Office with three bright ideas a day after something like that hit the papers?”

“But Marciniak would've been as compromised as I would have,” Quentin protested.

“I think not,” Michaelson said. “On the contrary, I think he'd feed the leaks and eventually posture himself as a sort of detective-scientist, fearlessly exposing the truth.”

Caught up in this exchange, Michaelson, Marjorie, and Quentin were all unprepared when Marciniak leaped forward. Quentin reacted first, tensing and crouching slightly to block the doorway.

But Marciniak wasn't headed for the door. In three quick strides he reached Michaelson, who looked around just in time to catch Marciniak's left forearm smashing across his face.

Dazed, Michaelson staggered backward against a window and slumped toward the floor, barely catching himself on the wide sill. He clenched his fist reflexively around the mint, but his strength didn't approach Marciniak's. In less than a second Marciniak held the foil-wrapped candy.

Marjorie was hustling desperately toward Marciniak. A whiplike backhand sent her reeling. As she stumbled to all fours, Marciniak popped the mint into his mouth and swallowed it.

Giving his throbbing head two hard shakes, Michaelson cleared the red-and-black fog stealing over his eyes. He saw his assailant sagging on the floor a yard or so away. Marciniak sank to a seated position with his back braced against the wall. His head cocked toward his right shoulder, tongue lolling from his open mouth.

Squatting beside the man, Michaelson grasped Marciniak's chin and moved it a couple of inches. No resistance, no reaction. Foamy pink drool bubbled from the right corner of his mouth.

“Go downstairs to the front desk and tell them to get help up here,” Michaelson said over his shoulder to Quentin, who was still frozen by the door.

As Quentin moved to obey, Michaelson began to feel Marciniak's pockets urgently. Dabbing at blood that pooled along her lower lip, Marjorie worked her way over to Michaelson.

“I haven't been hit that hard since before my divorce,” Marjorie said. “Should I call nine-one-one? They might get an emergency crew here faster than the hotel will.”

“It's academic,” Michaelson muttered. “I wanted Quentin out of the way, but even if they could get a tube down Marciniak's throat in the next thirty seconds, it wouldn't make the slightest difference.”

Michaelson pulled two key-cards from Marciniak's shirt pocket and held them out to Marjorie.

“One of these should open six-fifteen,” he said. “You know what to look for.”

“If removing it is probably a serious crime, I do,” she said, taking the keys. “If the police look like they're on their way up, give me a ring, will you?”

“Count on it.”

Marjorie bolted for the door. Feeling a spasm of weakness in his knees, Michaelson stood up and leaned once more against the windowsill. Perhaps ten seconds later he heard an amplified voice barking over an intercom.

“May we have your attention. Is there a doctor in the hotel? If there is a doctor in the hotel, please contact the front desk immediately from any phone.”

After a pause, the message was repeated. As he heard the voice ask for the second time, “Is there a doctor in the hotel?” Michaelson unconsciously shook his head. Not anymore there wasn't.

Chapter Twenty-four

In efficient but unhurried silence a white-jacketed waiter cleared heavy china plates and crystal stemware away from the four places at a table set in the middle of the ceremonial reception room on the eighth floor of the State Department. A second waiter slid substantial glass ashtrays and bulbous snifters into place on the rich linen tablecloth. Reappearing, the first waiter filled each of the snifters with Courvoisier.

“Success,” Pilkington said, smiling and raising his glass as the waiters withdrew.

Michaelson, Marjorie, and Quentin raised their glasses in polite response and joined Pilkington in a fastidious, throat-scorching sip. Marciniak's suicide lay six days in the past. Quentin's minions had searched thoroughly for Marciniak's duplicate of the coup d'état order but hadn't found it. The Washington media were all over the suicide, but seemed inclined so far to be buying the spin that Quentin had thoughtfully put on it.

“You know,” Quentin said contentedly, “in the last forty-eight hours I've actually started to believe that it's going to work. We're going to bring this off. All of us.”

He glanced down to his right and behind him in case anyone at the table had missed the significance of the last three words. One of the several important chambers on the seventh floor, immediately below them, was the Office of the Secretary-designate. That was where an incoming secretary of state sat during the transition, before he (no shes so far) had been sworn in, while he waited for his predecessor to wrap things up and clear out.

Michaelson reached beneath his chair and brought up a wooden cigar box, roughly twice the size of the cardboard variety. A rich-smelling gasp of air escaped as he opened the lid.

“These are quite legal, by the way,” he said as he offered the open box to Marjorie. “Hand rolled in this country by individual craftsmen under the supervision of Miguel de Santiago.”

“No, thank you,” Marjorie said, waving the proffered box away. “I smoked a cigar about twenty years ago, and if I have another one so soon, I might develop an unhealthy taste for them.”

Michaelson shifted the box to Pilkington, who with an expression suggesting vast appreciation and a questioning raise of his eyebrows lifted one of the three cigars in the box.

“By all means,” Michaelson murmured, smiling.

Pilkington held the Havana before him in the fingertips of both hands as he examined it with a connoisseur's relish. Taking the penultimate cigar for himself, Michaelson shifted the box across the table to offer it to Quentin. Had Quentin been paying attention, he might have realized that the box must have held only three cigars to start with, which would have left them one short had Marjorie not demurred. But he wasn't paying attention.

After they had completed the lighting ritual, the three men sat back with Marjorie in smoky blue complacency and rehashed the improbable sequence of events that had led to and then followed from Sharon Bedford's murder. Oversized though they were, the cigars burned inexorably lower as the brandy snifters emptied and coffee cups replaced them. For years afterward Michaelson would remember with sea-sun sharpness the textured mellowness of that twenty-five-minute period and the sense of uncomplicated contentment that seemed to suffuse Quentin during it.

“Your key break in this thing,” Quentin said to Michaelson toward the end. “Did you get the critical information legitimately or corruptly? Was it volunteered or procured?”

“I'll answer your questions in order,” Michaelson said, thinking of his talk with Quentin in the Old Executive Office Building. “Corruptly. Procured.”

“Now,” Quentin said as he ground out a cigar stub less than an inch long, “enough about the past. Let's talk about the future.”

“Hear hear,” Pilkington said quietly.

“I know you don't think I'm much of a gentleman,” Quentin said to Michaelson, “but I'm gentleman enough to enjoy a good cigar, and I keep my word. More important, I know you're a gentleman. I know that tonight you're going to keep your promise to give me Bedford's hard copy of the coup d'état order. And I know this won't be the last celebratory dinner the four of us have.”

“There are three more things you should know,” Pilkington said, smiling primly. “First, you are no gentleman. Second, you wouldn't know a good cigar if you had one shoved up your nose.”

“And third,” Michaelson said as Quentin's mouth gaped a bit, “I've already kept my promise. I gave you Ms. Bedford's duplicate of the coup d'état order, and I gave it to you tonight.”

“What do you mean?” Quentin managed.

“Your cigar was wrapped in it. You've spent the last half-hour smoking it.”

“But—but
why
?” Quentin sputtered.

“It's like jazz,” Michaelson said. “If you don't understand, I can't explain it to you.”

“You total moron,” Quentin spat. “And you fucking cretin on top of it. You had it in the palm of your hand.”

“I know.”

“What do you think? Do you seriously believe that silly little task force of yours is going anywhere? Do you think it's getting a penny's worth of funding after nine a.m. tomorrow?”

“No.”

“You threw away the last chance you'll ever have just so this patronizing, Ivy League fossil across the table from me will smile at you and pat you on the head and tell you how you did the old school proud. You've just fucked yourself—big time and permanently. You'll never be a player again. As of this moment and for the rest of your meaningless fucking life, you're even more irrelevant than you have been up to now.”

“Politics is fickle.” Michaelson shrugged. “I think Sharon Bedford and Deborah Moodie would have approved of the choice I made. That's more important to me than your good opinion.”

“You may be excused, Mr. Quentin,” Pilkington interjected then. “Please take with you as you leave the sincere hope of everyone at the department that you enjoy the remainder of your stay in Washington.”

Tight-lipped, Quentin rose stiffly from the table and stalked from the room.

“Up in smoke,” Pilkington said then. “With Marciniak's copy apparently unrecoverable, we just destroyed the last documentary evidence of an act of treason. Quite bracing, actually. A crime dwarfing Watergate and everything since. Except for presidential assassinations and secession, maybe the greatest political crime in the nation's history. And we've just covered it up.”

“For a political crime, though,” Michaelson said, “it had a certain grandeur about it. It wasn't venal or self-interested. It wasn't some tawdry vote-fiddle like Watergate or a money-grab like Teapot Dome and Whitewater. They were trying to save the country.”

“And that makes it okay?” Pilkington demanded sharply.

“Certainly not. The most you can say for it is that it might not have been entirely misguided. However you might defend the order, though, it represented a failure of confidence in the Constitution and the country itself.”

“Which strikes me as less than commendable,” Pilkington said.

“Me, too,” Michaelson said. “It's an apt topic for a scholarly debate or a word in the ear of someone choosing running mates or cabinet members or even a congressional hearing someday. But it doesn't strike me as an appropriate instrument for job-seeking purposes—or as a very promising subject for a series of thirty-second campaign ads designed by the likes of Mr. Quentin.”

“Speaking of whom,” Pilkington said then pensively, “it's tempting to give your Southern friend Mr. Gallagher the full story about Quentin's role in this affair. He might do the little fellow considerable physical violence.”

Michaelson shook his head, frowning with distaste.

“That would be like using a Shefield steel saber to trim a Tiparillo,” he said. “Marjorie and I and Johnny Walker Black met for some time last night with Todd Gallagher. He now knows how Sharon Bedford was murdered and how much he did to bring the facts to light. More important, he understands that she died for something that mattered, at least to her—that she wasn't just collateral damage. I intend for him to go on understanding that.”

“No doubt you're right,” Pilkington said dismissively. “However that may be, and for what it's worth, I deeply appreciate what both of you have done.”

“Thank you,” Marjorie said as she glanced at the door through which Quentin had exited, “but we didn't actually do it for you.”

“I know you didn't,” Pilkington said. “I suppose I'd be a little disappointed in you if you had.”

“Careful,” Michaelson said. “A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing. And neither of us is buying it anyway.”

“Fair enough,” Pilkington said. “Enough fencing. Once and for all, before we adjourn: Did you or did you not find Marciniak's copy of the order? I really do have to know.”

He looked searchingly at Marjorie. An expert scrutinizing her bland expression couldn't have said whether she was holding a royal flush or a pair of deuces. He shifted his gaze to Michaelson.

“Define ‘know,'” Michaelson said.