MY KING THE PRESIDENT

Praise for This Novel

“A new and chilling novel…begins with a shocker…moves rapidly. Keeping pace with the action will keep the reader on his or her toes. The writing is crisp and the action…is non-stop. Tom Lewis has a gift for the well-turned phrase. I enjoyed this book, and I imagine you will, too. Good story!”

—Ken Gruebel, Sun Journal

“A terrific book…reads fast…taut…more twists and turns than a tornado! It is indeed a thriller and the ending is explosive. One reader told me it was the most intriguing book she'd read in a long time. I totally agree.”

—G.K.Lewis

“WOW! This thriller has the best prologue I ever read. It moves so quickly and cleverly that I had to put it down every few minutes to catch my breath.”

—Kaa Byington

Other Books by Tom Lewis

SUNDAY'S CHILD

HITLER’S JUDAS

SONS OF THEIR FATHERS

Soon to be Released

LUCIFER'S CHILDREN

ZENA'S LAW

SHORT TALES and TALL

50 YEARS TO MIDNIGHT

CHAINS

FOR LOVE OF A SPY

A NOVEL BY

Tom Lewis

McBryde Publishing

NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA USA

McBryde Publishing

NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA USA

MY KING THE PRESIDENT

Copyright © 2008 by Tom Lewis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer

who may quote brief passages in a review.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,

is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover by Bill Benners

Interior Layout by Bill Benners

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-0-97-587005-1

First Printing April 30, 2008 By VP Publishing, LLC

Second Printing August, 2009 By McBryde Publishing

Printed in the United States of America

Lovingly,

For the younger Lewis bunch:

Erik and Elaine, Tony and Julie

And

Big John

Prologue

Officially, a day begins just after midnight. Most people ignore this fact, assuming a new day starts at daybreak, or when they themselves have to arise, whatever the actual time. This particular day began no differently. Later, people would refer to it in different ways; some would call it Doomsday, others Judgment Day. I would always call it Deliverance Day.

For two other men, it would be their last day.

On this morning, one of them, a man named Robert McCarty slid out of bed, glancing at the clock. He had not set the alarm the night before, knowing he couldn’t have slept anyway. After making love to his wife, he had held her close until she fell asleep. Afterwards, it had taken all his mental strength not to lie there all night crying.

He looked over his shoulder at her. She was still so beautiful. He almost wished she would wake up just long enough for him to see her eyes one last time.

But Abigail McCarty didn’t stir at all. She was used to his leaving at odd times, whether day or night, a common occurrence for wives of Secret Service men. Blinking back fresh tears, he turned away from her naked loveliness and stood. His own body was cramped from lying in the same position for so long. He held his legs straight and bent down from the waist to touch both palms on the soft carpet five times in succession, then headed for the bathroom.

He allowed the steam from the shower to totally cloud up everything instead of finishing off with his customary cold blast. No need. He was alert enough, and he didn’t want to see his face in the mirror. Not today. He didn’t want to look at himself and have to question whether he was staring at a hero or a coward. He dressed quickly, amazed at how calm his movements were. He knew it was the training, yet his self-control still surprised him.

Abby hadn’t changed her position in the queen-size bed. Robert gazed at her for another long moment before quietly unlocking, then reaching into the nightstand drawer for his weapon and shoulder holster. The clock read 4:50 A.M., its luminous digital characters blinking like captured fireflies. He sighed softly and walked to the adjoining bedroom. The twin boys were two small lumps beneath their identical Disney World blankets. He bent down and touched his lips to each one’s head, not trusting himself to do more. Then he turned and silently left the room, leaving the door ajar, knowing that if he shut it, no matter how carefully, it would still make a sound and Abby would be instantly awake. He didn’t want that kind of goodbye. He had left his goodbye deep inside her a few hours ago. He prayed, for her sake, that she would not conceive again.

Robert went through the kitchen to the garage, touching familiar things on the way. Since he knew every step from memory, turning on a light was unnecessary. Skirting Abby’s Volvo station wagon, he settled into the silver Corvette, his only other passion in this life besides his wife. No, that was not true. There was one other passion; one that dwarfed his affection for the old car, and lodged deeper in his soul than even his love for Abby and the boys. It was his honest and old-fashioned feeling of loyalty to his country.

The thing called duty.

He started the Corvette without touching the gas pedal, grunting with mild satisfaction when the powerful engine immediately purred into life. As it idled softly, he fingered the automatic garage door switch. He had always kept its cables well greased, and it opened with only minimal sound. He removed the 9mm pistol from its holster and checked its clip again, though he had done so a dozen times the night before. He slid the gun back into the worn leather that was as much a part of his everyday dress as a shirt and tie.

He backed the Corvette out of the garage, thumbed the door switch again, and headed down the empty street. At this time of morning, he knew it would take exactly twenty-nine minutes to reach his assigned parking space at the White House, another five to check in, and three more to be in his place by six, when his shift began.

Robert looked at the dashboard clock. 5:15. Still dark. Very little traffic. There hadn’t been much traffic in Washington this year, vehicular or otherwise. He thought about the handwritten note he’d given Father Tim, hoping he hadn’t placed his priest in jeopardy. Aside from Abby, Father Tim Flaherty was the only person on earth he had complete faith in. Well, it was too late now to worry about that. There could be no second-guessing. He’d have to trust. The few lines of the message he’d written to his old college team mate burned across his mind like a laser beam, but he banished them from his brain and concentrated on his driving.

And his mission.

He glanced at the clock once more. On time.

Secret Service agent Robert McHale McCarty easily made his 6:00 shift, and, at 6:21, opened the door he was guarding, took three quick steps inside the Madison room, drew the Walther one final time and fired two bullets into the head of his father-in-law, the President of the United States.

Chapter 1

I hate funerals. They give me lasting feelings of helplessness. Standing hatless in the late September rain, I told myself, Jeb Willard, this is the last time. The last one. I felt safe making such a stupid prediction because the only one I knew I would be absolutely forced to attend in the future would be my father’s, and Cal Willard would probably live forever. Outlive me for sure, the stubborn old hack.

Besides, as funerals go, this one was a disaster. Worse than any I had ever attended. Even my mother’s. But I had been only a five year-old then, and didn’t know how to be miserable. Only scared and bewildered. Exactly the way Abby’s twins looked now. I couldn’t see behind her black veil, but it was breaking my heart to imagine what she had to be going through, and I gradually became aware of something besides rain running down my cheeks. This was rapidly turning into the worst labor of love I’d done in a long time, and believe you me, that’s exactly how I thought of it. A labor of love.

I gritted my teeth, wishing I were home, or at least somewhere else. I hadn’t been back in Washington forty-eight hours yet, but found myself already missing my smug, Carolina-sunny privacy aboard LAST WORD, or maybe having an afternoon beer over the chessboard with Cal at Tyson’s Bait Shop.

The weather here was rotten. The whole atmosphere was rotten, and no one else seemed to be reacting to it any better than I was. How the hell are you supposed to act at the funeral of an old friend who had shot the President twice in cold blood, then swallowed the hot barrel and pulled the trigger again? When I surreptitiously looked up from the toes of my soaked shoes, I could tell the other people were obviously feeling pretty much the same emotions; those pitifully few who were stoically paying their last respects to Mac McCarty. My writer’s mind fished for a word to fit the scene. After a minute it came to me. . .

Ignominy.

I ground my teeth again. It might have helped if I had known more of the others, all standing like motionless wet crows in a plowed field, but I recognized only two faces in the small crowd, a few polite steps apart from Abby and the boys; the priest, and Special Agent Frye. At first I felt instantaneous resentment at Thurmond Frye’s presence there, but quickly surmised the FBI wasn’t about to let Abby McCarty out of their sight for a moment, even to bury her husband. There were probably one or two more agents waiting in the discreet dryness of their unmarked car.

Ignominy.

What was worse than the dank surroundings and the small knot of Mac’s old Chelsea friends was the absence of those who could have (make that should have) been there and weren’t. Nowhere to be seen was the former first lady, Abby’s mother, nor was there one man there who looked as though he might have been a Secret Service agent. I had counted fewer than thirty shoe-tops altogether.

A couple of men had been foresighted enough to bring umbrellas. Bright stripes and patterns over the bowed heads of their women provided the only, incongruous, color against black of dress, white of face, and gray of day. Most, like myself, were bareheaded, including the thin old priest, whose wisps of cotton hair strung down into his face like the way frayed threads of a storm-beaten flag clings to its wet pole.

Ignominy. The word wouldn’t let go of me. The priest must have been thinking of the same word, or some professional simile. What could he be thinking now of his church’s ridiculous rules about consecrated ground? Why could Robert McCarty not be buried in Chelsea, next to his parents? A Catholic murderer could be forgiven his deadly sin and be buried properly, and even with some dignity, but a suicide could not.

What could Father Tim Flaherty be thinking, not to be allowed to say a word at this sham of a service? We were standing in a shabby indigent cemetery miles from his own parish. What effect were the perfunctory words (uttered in a monotone dreary as the rain by a Unitarian mercenary) be having on this old man who had performed rites of baptism, confirmation, and marriage for the man in the closed coffin? He was standing there bawling unashamedly, holding the hand of a gorgeous young woman who looked vaguely familiar. I couldn’t place her, though, and dropped my eyes back down to my Wingtips. Why, Mac? Why did you do it? Doesn’t make sense. You were no murderer.

Lost in those confused thoughts, I almost didn’t hear the final flat cliché the Unitarian hired gun used to close the service. “…dust to dust… Amen.” Suddenly, I was shuffling along with the rest, who had formed the sheep line filing past the widow, mumbling soft condolences. “Abby, I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks for being here, Jeb.” Her voice was a whispered croak.

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Please.”

Feeling Thurmond Frye’s cold eye on me during that brief exchange, I put out my hand. “Good to see you again, Frye.”

“Been a while.” Minimal words. Hint of a smile. Neutral handshake. Same old ice man. I hadn’t seen him since Mexico, but he hadn’t changed a bit, except that the coat he had on and the suit beneath it was of much better quality. He must have gotten a promotion. “Didn’t know you were in Washington, now,” I added. “We’ll have to have a drink sometime.”

“Sure, Jeb.”

I moved away. The crowd was dispersing, fading into the rain like fishing boats in fog. I felt a tug on my sleeve. “You have a car, Mr. Willard?”

I turned to the old priest. “A rental, Father. Why? You need a lift?”

“I’d appreciate a ride back to my church.”

“Be glad to.” I didn’t ask him how he’d gotten there. I took his arm. Pointed. “It’s over there.”

Call it writer’s habit or whatever; I felt the need to fix the scene in my memory-bank, so I took one last glance back as we trudged away from the cemetery. The coverall-clad grave-digging crew had materialized and was already at work shoveling mud into Mac’s grave.

What a way to go. I’ll never forget it…

I had not forgotten the way to the grungy Irish neighborhood of Chelsea, nor to the equally drab church where I’d been only once before—for Mac’s wedding to Abby. During the drive, around most of Washington, the windshield wipers made the only sound. Father Flaherty said not one single word. Sharing his grief, I kept my own mouth shut, though I wanted to ask him about the girl who had stood beside him at the funeral. When we reached St. Michaels’ parking lot, he surprised me. “Come in, son. I have to tell you something.”

Wondering why he couldn’t tell me while still in the car, I got out and followed him inside. He led me straight to the confessional box, opened the door and said, “Have a seat.” It was a command, not a suggestion.

I had never been inside one before. Bemused, thinking of a dozen old B movies I had seen, I sat in the near darkness and waited. Momentarily, I heard the door on the opposite side close, and the lattice-like screen slide back part way. I didn’t know exactly what to say, and for a fleeting moment, was tempted to blurt out “Forgive me, Father” but I repressed that silly urge, knowing the old man had some good reason for putting me in there. “I’m not Catholic, Father Flaherty. You didn’t have to—”

“Be quiet, please. This place is probably still safe. Read this.”

Through the crack in the thin partition, he passed me a single sheet of ordinary typing paper. “Here, use this.” Now the hand held a cheap cigarette lighter. It took three or four tries before it worked. Ignoring the sudden acrid smell, I held it close to the paper and read:

Jeb,

There was a deep conspiracy. I couldn’t prove anything, but you might. Start with the saint who saw the turning wheel. End with Old Sarge. Also, please look after Liz.

Nice catch in the State game. Bird dog blue, left, on two.

Mac

Astonished, I read the note twice, then a third time before taking my thumb off the lighter. The voice on the other side came back. “Did you read it all?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have you memorized it? Word for word?”

“Yes.”

“Then pass it back to me. The lighter, too.”

I complied, and turned toward the connecting panel as I saw the flame flicker again, then flash, instantly realizing he was burning the note. It didn’t take long, and then I heard him stomping on the ashes. A couple of minutes went by before he said, “You remember where Sean Reilly’s place is?”

“Two blocks down the street, isn’t it?”

“Right you are. Meet me there in one hour. You can find your way out by yourself, can’t you?”

I could and did.

And drove around Washington suburbs for an hour in the drizzle. When did Mac give him that note? During a confession? It was no phony, either. It was from Mac, all right. No one else could have known the UNC playbook call for that touchdown pass he threw me to beat the Wolfpack that Saturday a hundred years ago. What kind of “deep conspiracy” could he have meant? One thing was certain. Father Tim Flaherty knew something about Mac’s last few days on earth. Maybe a lot more.

Something in the back of my brain sent up a red flag. Told me to walk away from this. Go home, Jeb. Let the FBI find out about any conspiracy. Your days as an investigative reporter are long over. You’ve been away from the Washington scene for years. Be sensible for once. It’s not your problem. But that note was Mac McCarty’s request. Possibly his last request. You don’t turn your back on an old friend. Never have. Not even a dead one. Not even if he shot the President. Won’t hurt to talk to the priest. Just a little talk, Jeb. Nothing more. Nothing less. No harm- no foul.

I spotted him at a back booth at Reilly’s Bar and Grill. Letting my eyes adjust to the bright interior light, I took off my raincoat and casually ran the olfactory gauntlet of pungent hamburger grease and stale cigar smoke, passing by only a handful of customers bent over their beers and arguments. Father Flaherty either hadn’t touched the glass of red wine on the table before him, or he’d ordered a refill. He was staring into the glass, toying with the stem, and I thought he hadn’t noticed my approach until he raised his head to signal both the bartender and me. “Sit. What’ll you be drinking, Mr. Jeb Willard?”

“Vodka on the rocks. Absolut if you have it,” I said to the portly man who had hurried over. He frowned at my order, and left, snorting.

“That could be a mite sophisticated for this joint,” Father Flaherty said, grinning. “And I hope you won’t expect olives, either, but Sean might drop in a bit of lemon peel, since you’re with me.”

“That’s okay. Anything’s fine. Looks like you haven’t touched your wine.”

“Can’t, much as I’d like to. Had a slight problem with the old ticker a while back. Since then, I come in here every day just as I have for years and Sean serves me the same as always. I just sit here for a while, savoring how I used to enjoy it. Old habits are hard to break, you know. I think Sean pours it back into the bottle after I leave, but it doesn’t matter.”

He started to say something else, but waited for his friend to deliver my drink, which did have a piece of lemon peel floating on top. In a quiet brogue, he told me that because I had been to Mac McCarty’s funeral, it was on the house. “Mac was well thought of around here, mister,” he said.

Father Flaherty waited until Reilly was out of earshot. “Mr. Willard—”

“Jeb, please.”

“All right. Jeb. “I’m well aware that you and Mac were close college friends, and I remember you were best man at his wedding, but there are a few ground rules we’d better establish right now. I also know you’re a newspaper man—”

“Ex-newspaper man.”

“What’s the difference? So you write books now instead of articles, but a guy like you would never be able to ignore what Mac asked you to do. Now, What I am is Mac’s uncle—and his priest. I will help you all I can because I loved him as if he were my own son. I don’t want his name and memory dragged through any more shit than it already has been, no matter what he did, pardon my language. I know you’re dying to ask me questions, just like the police and the FBI did, but there are some things I can’t tell you, and some things I won’t.”

“Because you’re a priest? Mac’s priest and confessor?”

“Partly. I was also his friend. Something of a mentor to him. He trusted me. I will never betray that trust.”

“I understand.”

“I hope so. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time and mine, and I don’t have much of that left. Mac asked me to do what I did and I did it, in strictest confidence. Beyond that, I owe you nothing.”

“Fair enough. I only have one question anyway.”

“Fire away.”

“Why?”

“Why what? The note?”

“Yes, and why he… Why he shot the President.”

“I can’t answer that question.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“No, I can’t. I don’t know why.”

“Surely you must have some idea.”

“If I did, it’s not you I’d be telling. I’m not even sure I could talk that over with God.”

Not wanting to push him too hard, I tried my drink. Sean Reilly apparently didn’t stock Absolut. This tasted more like American-made stuff. Well, there was no law I had to finish it. I took another couple small sips and looked across the table again. “How’s Abby holding up?”

“How would you think? She’s devastated. Standing on the wrong edge of a breakdown.”

“I can imagine.”

“You can? I doubt it. Losing your husband and your father like that? Maybe your journalistic work has hardened you to life, and God knows as a priest, I’ve seen some awful things, but never anything like this. And those poor kids. It’s terrible. Worse than terrible.”

I nodded over my glass and tried a new tack. “Had you ever talked to President Tyndall yourself?”

“Of course. First time was at the wedding, before he got elected.”

“How did Mac get along with him?”

“The General? Just fine, but not at first. It was an uphill fight for Mac and Abby before they got married. Jean Tyndall was sympathetic right from the start, but the General was a roaring Baptist bear. Only thing was, he didn’t know Mac, and he certainly had no idea that Mac was just as stubborn as he was himself. Mac wanted his overprotected, only daughter and she wanted Mac. It was that simple, and Mac and Abby were that determined. General Tyndall didn’t like it but he lumped it like a man. Still, after the wedding, he never let his precious little girl get too far away from the nest. How do you think Mac got that cushy White House assignment in the first place?”

“Could that be it? Maybe Mac hated the General because of how he’d muzzled Abby?”

“No, son. Mac McCarty never hated anyone in his whole life. Wasn’t put together that way. That’s why he knew he’d never make it as a professional football player. Didn’t have that headhunter, killer instinct. That’s also why I don’t have any more of a clue than anybody—”

“I thought I’d find you both here.”

We had been so absorbed in conversation; neither of us had noticed her until she spoke. The girl at the funeral.

We both stood, stammering apologies. Offering seats.

Her hand was as soft as her voice. “I’m Elizabeth McCarty. Liz. You don’t remember me, do you?”

My memory raced eight years backwards at Mach 2. “You’re—you’re the baby sister with the braces? One of the bridesmaids?”

“That she was,” said Flaherty, with a chuckle. “Sixteen then, all grown up now.”

That was an understatement! The braces had done their job. Her smile was terrific, set in an angelic face beneath the same dancing brown eyes Mac had. Her hair was dark, almost black, and long, and the severe mourning clothes she wore did nothing to disguise either a fantastic figure or the considerable height she’d reached since I’d last seen her. My mind jumped forward again, just as fast—to the last line in Mac’s note: Also, please look after Liz.

“I’m sorry, Liz,” I said. “Really. Please have a seat.”

“No, I can’t. My car’s running outside. Too many things to do before I go back to school. Great to see you again, Uncle Tim. Thanks for holding me up today. It was pretty grim.”

“You held me up, child,” the priest replied. “Call me when you can.”

“I will.” And then she was gone.

Tim Flaherty sat back down, still smiling. “Surprised?”

“Very. She was just a kid!”

“Not any more, and she doesn’t stay in one place long enough to cast a shadow. Mac knew what he was doing, including her in his note. I’m getting much too old now to keep up with her any longer. Now, a young fella like you—”

I laughed. “Next month I’ll be watching the sun come up on the other side of forty. You call that young?”

“At my age, you call everybody young. So, what are your plans?”

“Whoa, Father. I don’t have any plans. At least not yet. Before I can make any, or even decide whether I really want to dig into this thing, and since I can’t pry any more out of you, I think I’d best go home and talk all this out with another Wom.”

“Wom?”

“If you’d ever read any of my stuff, you’d know that’s what I call a Wise Old Man.”

Father Flaherty’s face turned red as the wine before him. “I confess. I have not read any of your books.”

I laughed again. “There have only been two so far. One good one and one flop.”

“Who’s the, uh, ‘Wom’ you’re talking about?”

“Somebody you remind me of a lot. My own father.”

“Good man?”

“The best.”

“You won’t forget about Liz?”

“I won’t forget about Liz.”

It struck me that what I had just said was also an understatement!

Chapter 2

I love this little spot I’ve always called my “think place.” Found it when I was about twelve, hunting stew squirrels to sell to the black ladies in the Oldfield neighborhood for a dime apiece. Little over a mile north of Tryon’s Cove, on top of the rocky ridge called King’s Point. Nothing here but a few flat rocks surrounded by tall pines, but from it, I can look south and see the entire half-moon bay and my home town as far as the white sand beach of Queen’s Point. As a kid, I could easily imagine I was Prince of the Sky, sitting on one tip of a crescent moon and looking over my little world to the other. The domain of my youth. Before I learned that I could talk through anything with Cal, I’d climb up here and try to sort out whatever problem was bothering me; acne, wet dreams over Edith Conway, fanning three straight times in yesterday’s game. Teen stuff. So, so long ago.

While I was an undergrad at UNC, I’d occasionally stop here briefly on my way home from Chapel Hill to figure out how I was going to tell Cal I was broke again, or why my grades had dropped, or which girl I had fallen desperately in love with that particular week. College stuff. Also a long time ago. Still later, after I’d made my journalistic bones overseas and between the fast lanes of the D.C. beltline, I’d still sneak up here every now and then, just to climb back into slow sanity. Touch base again with roots and reality. Level my keel.

I looked out over the shallow, shimmering cove at my boat. LAST WORD was gently riding at anchor, her dinghy trailing behind like an obedient puppy. From where I sat, I could see little stick figures moving along the waterfront, up and down Front Street. Between the contesting spires of the First Baptist and First Methodist I could almost make out the Tyron’s Cove Telegram building; not a house, but the only home I had ever known. Speaking of boats, Cal used to say his paper, also born in that brick building, was a “Tiny Republican tug chugging through a big Democratic sea.”

The thought brought a smile—and a reminder that I’d better take his Ford back to him. Or was it a Chevy? I’d been so entangled in thoughts about Mac’s funeral and his letter, I hadn’t noticed what car Cal was driving this year, which he’d loaned me to get to the Raleigh/Durham airport. Old Cal Willard is no fool. He trades cars every two years, alternating Fords, Chevys, and Chryslers, which keeps all three of the local dealers happy. No favorites, Republican, Democrat, or other.

I got to my feet, not exactly a happy camper. This time, my think place had failed. Maybe I’d come to rely on it one time too many. Maybe the last time I was here I had used up all its magic; the day I had decided to leave Washington for good, a casualty of industrial strength burnout. Did I really want to go back to that? Even for an old friend? Was there really some kind of nasty-ass conspiracy and possible cover-up concerning President Tyndall’s death? Rusty as I was now, did I stand any chance at all of finding out? Should I even try? I was no closer to making a decision than before. On the fence. Brain telling me to forget it, gut telling me Mac’s soul wouldn’t rest until I ran out for his last pass. Well, Cal could help. Always has, always will, usually spouting more dry logic than Spock ever irritated Kirk with.

I picked my way back down the narrow path to his car, which was, by the way, a Chevy. Ten minutes later, I parked it at Tyson’s Bait Shop.

Sammy Tyson is the only living human being who has ever beaten Cal Willard at checkers. That happened a long time ago, and when Cal gave up trying to teach the burly proprietor of Tyson’s Bait Shop and Marina how to play chess, he started picking on me. I must have been about ten at the time. I never could beat him either, though I tried hard to back then, and on every visit home after I was grown. In recent years, our games have gotten longer and longer because of more serious talks, discussions, and arguments over the chessboard. I can’t even recall when we began this last one. Must have been two years ago. “…And that’s where I’m at, Cal. Any ideas?”

“Whose move is it anyway?” he asked.

“It’s your move, old man,” piped Sammy, from behind his patched glass counter. “Jeb’s white. He moved last.”

“How the hell would you know that?” Cal’s Adam’s apple bobbed over his green bow tie. “You can’t even remember what year you were born. Or maybe hatched in some catfish pond. From the way you smell, I’m inclined to think the latter.”

Sammy came right back at him. “You been here fifty years near bout, and still talk like a uppity Yankee. ‘Nuff to kill my worms and minnows.”

Sammy laughed at his own wit, and then turned to me. “I sure wish you’d come back home more oftener, Jeb. With you bouncin’ all over the world, all he’s got left to pick on is me, and I ain’t got the time to mess with him. I got a business to run.”

I winked at him as he left to walk the docks, and then turned my attention to the board. Moved a pawn. The game was back on. “So, what do you think? Could there have been an honest to God conspiracy, or do you think Mac simply flipped out? Played solo?” Cal had listened to my entire monologue without yet saying a word.

“Conundrum,” he said. “Isn’t your first and won’t be your last, but this is a tough one, no doubt about it. My advice is to wait a while. See which way the Washington wind blows. See if any of the official people think there is any real evidence of a plot, and if there is, you were right, the FBI will be all over it like blue flies on a cow pie. And if not, there’s no sense in going back up there and asking a lot of fool questions over nothing at all, making more enemies than you did before. President Tyndall and young McCarty are both dead. They’re in no hurry. Why should you be?”

“You really have a way with words, Cal. What about Mac’s note?”

“If, as you put it, he’d flipped out, that note would simply be another indication of his dementia. I’d just sit pat for a while.”

“You’re probably right. It’s just that I’d hate to let Mac down. Or Abby and the boys.”

“I know, pal, but if there’s nothing to that note, your meddling could only make it worse for them. What the hell, you’ve been back here less than three weeks, and already chafing at the bit again. I thought you’d given up all those damn-the-torpedoes full-speed-ahead shenanigans for good. Almost got your fanny shot off down in Mexico last time.”

“Twice.”

“Third time’s a charm, right? Relax. It’s good having you home again. I was getting powerfully tired of Sammy’s company. That’s some boat you’ve got out there.”

Cal, once he thinks a subject has been closed, can shift gears to a new one faster than a girl can pull up her pants. This time, I didn’t mind. I was happy to brag some more about LAST WORD. After that Mexican fiasco, I had left Santa Fe and taken a winter vacation in Key West. On the way down, I’d stopped at Ft. Lauderdale to boat shop. You can buy anything that floats there, and I’d seen this lovely 38-foot double-ender, sloop rigged, with an appealing name and (because she was part of an estate sale) a reasonable price tag. Buying her broke my bank. But I had to have her.

Cal had only one more thing to say. “Sammy thinks a storm is coming.” He took my rook with his remaining knight. “Better find yourself a hurricane hole. Your move.”

I took both the advice and the hint, not wanting to see any more of the most elaborate television coverage of a Presidential funeral since the one for JKF. Since the weather heads were warning that Hurricane Freddy was rapidly moving within worry distance of the Carolina coast, I took LAST WORD several miles inland to the hole I knew of at Minnesott Beach, where the Neuse river bends north, just upriver from Oriental. I waited there nearly a week, but it turned out Freddy was a fizzle, so back home I went, after spending two sleepless days and nights at Cape Lookout.

I had no more than set anchor when Sammy radioed me Cal wanted to see me, ASAP.

I rowed ashore, tied the dink, and walked to the Telegram building. Cal’s office looked exactly the same as when I had sat in there on my rocking horse while he’d banged away on his Underwood, a fixture which had only recently been replaced by a state of the art computer. While working, Cal wore an old-fashion green eyeshade, the same color of his bow tie. As always, he maintained the persona of a small town-small newspaper publisher. Only thing missing from his daytime wardrobe was arm-sleeve garters.

He looked up from the clutter, an impish grin on his face. “You’ve been getting a ton of phone calls here. Good thing you came back when you did, I—”

The phone’s ringing stopped him in mid-sentence.

If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the look on Cal’s face when he handed it over. “For you, Pal. The White House. It’s… It’s the President!

Unbelieving, I took the phone from his shaking hand. “Hello?”

“Mr. Jeb Willard?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Please hold for the President.”

I held.

It only took a moment before the familiar smooth voice came over. “Mr. Willard, this is Helene Fordham. You are one hard man to track down. Tell me, is it possible you might be back in Washington soon?”

“Uh, yes, ma’am. I could be.”

“Good. Do you remember the house in Georgetown I rented right after my divorce?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Could you work it into your schedule to come there for coffee around one in the afternoon of next Friday, the 9th?”

“I guess I—I mean, certainly.”

“Excellent. I’ll look forward to seeing you.”

“Excuse me, ma’am, but could you tell me what this is all about?”

“Of course. What this is all about is employment. I want to hire you. See you next week, and thank you, Mr. Willard.”

Click.

I handed the phone back to Cal. He took it and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I wanted to know.

“I wish to God this phone was a camera. You should see the look on your face.”

Chapter 3

Talk about your anti-climax. It was scary. From Dulles to the Capitol, Washington looked like a dead city. Ghost town half-filled with plodding zombies. Pennsylvania Avenue looked like the abandoned street leading to the OK corral. It was as if the whole population of the District of Columbia had left their collective energy at Arlington last week, where President Tyndall was finally laid, I hoped, to rest. The young Iranian cabbie that drove me to Georgetown complained loudly of lack of fares. (“Serious, man, serious.”) I asked him to drive around until five till one, tipped him generously at the curb of the well-publicized brownstone, and was quietly surrounded by a phalanx of smart-suited, unsmiling Secret Service men who expertly ID’d and frisked me before escorting me inside, where I was unceremoniously searched yet again, but I kept an understanding smile on my face the whole time. At last the head honcho said, “Sorry about that, sir, go right in. The President’s expecting you,” and I was suddenly standing in Helene Fordham’s early-American parlor.

I wasn’t surprised at how she looked; casually coiffed, wearing just enough makeup to soften the fresh circles under her blue eyes, dressed in the usual loose-fitting pantsuit, which helped hide the thick ankles and thighs she had always been so sensitive about. Nor was I very much surprised that she called me by my first name when she stood and offered me her hand. “Jeb. I’m so glad you could make it. Make yourself comfortable.”

No, the surprise was the other person present, who didn’t rise from his armchair. Merely waved, as if he’d seen me just yesterday. “Jeb. Long time.”

Next to Cal, Ernie Latham is the man I have the most respect for in this old world, both personal and professional. Best friend and toughest boss a guy could ever have. I had to smile. Yeah, it would take a summons from no less than the new President to pry him away from his editorial desk at the Post.

“Ernie. Fancy seeing you here.” I turned back. “Madame President, I—”

“Oh, please. Ms. will do just fine. My former husband might like that other word better. God knows he knew a lot of them, and please forgive me for not telling you beforehand that I had also invited Ernie. Why don’t we have a cup of coffee while we talk? Made it myself. How do you take it, Jeb? I remember Ernie drinks his black.”

“Black’s fine, ma’am.”

The first female President of the United States poured and served coffee like any chattering suburban hostess, allowed us time for two sips, then got right down to business. “Jeb, I don’t have to tell you the country is a mess. National morale is lower than any time since Iraq. You know, being a Senator was fun, and I don’t mind admitting I always wanted a crack at this job, but I certainly didn’t expect it to come to me like this. As you might imagine, I’m not the most popular girl at the dance right now, and I’ve got a big, ugly task ahead of me. I don’t need any detours or distractions. One of my problems is the inevitable rash of rumors and innuendoes already floating up from the sewers of Washington that there may have been some kind of dark plot behind President Tyndall’s death. Some, I’m told, have even mentioned my name. I want that talk put to rest. Stopped cold, but I can’t do it until I know for sure whether there’s any truth in them.”

From beneath the silver coffee tray, she extracted a plain manila envelope, which she slid across the table. “There’s fifty thousand dollars of my personal money in there, Jeb. I want you to find out if those rumors have any foundation in fact, and if so, who and what are behind it all. I’ll pay you another fifty thousand when you give me your full report. Will you help me?”

My knee-jerk reaction to this bombshell was pitifully lame. “I’d be glad to help you in any way I could, ma’am, but I don’t understand why you want me. You’ve got the whole Justice department, the FBI, the Washington Police, and everybody else—”

“Already working in high gear, but I don’t trust any of them. They’re all Tyndall people, down to the last clerk typist, and they’re going to tell me what they want me to know. On the other hand, I’ve known Ernie here for thirty years, and would even trust him with my daughter. He tells me you are the best investigator he’s ever known, and I need the best. Ergo, you’re my man.”

I put my cup down, hoping I did with some semblance of grace. So, Ernie Latham was behind this deal. I knew he and Helene Fordham had a long standing friendship, based on how fair Ernie had always treated her, during her bad times as well as the good. “I’m very flattered, Ms. President, but I’ve been out of the loop for quite a while. Rusty.”

“How long have you been gone? Three years? That’s precisely why we think you’re the best man for the job. Aside from a few ladies I happen to know, most people around this town have forgotten what a tenacious tiger you can be. Besides, Ernie has thought up a marvelous cover for your private snooping, which he can explain to you later. As to your other concern, urgency is the best rust remover in the world, and I’m a woman in a hurry. Say yes, Jeb.”

I said yes, thinking I wasn’t the only tiger in this town. Not by a long shot.

“Um, about the money, you don’t—”

“Take it, Jeb. Ernie tells me you need it, and I can afford it. Just remember that it buys me your absolute discretion and exclusive loyalty regarding what you find, before you write or print one word.” This statement was leveled at Ernie and me both. “And gentlemen, I expect you to earn every dime of it! Now, you’ll have to excuse me, but do finish your coffee. One of the boys will drop you wherever you like. Jeb, you are to reach me through Ernie when you have it all.”

My “Yes, ma’am” followed her through the door. Funny, after agonizing over this thing for two weeks, our new President had made the decision for me in five minutes!

Ernie got up, took three paces toward me through the lingering ghost of her perfume, grinned, and said, “Persuasive, isn’t she.”

“You ink-pissing bandit. What have you got me into?”

Ernie laughed. “A nice new account at BankAmerica for one thing. Come on, let’s go to the office. Seems you’ve just got your old job back.”

I had to wait for Ernie to proof a short article for page two. Looking through the plate glass of his office, I was reminded of the time I took a useless biology course at Carolina. In some nearby woods off campus, our professor had cultivated a huge ant colony and had contrived to glass off a five-foot wall of it so students could see everything happening in his microcosm of the planet. From the inside of Ernie’s cubicle, the scene looked remarkably similar. Everyone was busy as hell, doing jobs that brought back a lot of memories, some of them very pleasant. I recognized a few faces, but most of Ernie’s worker ants were strangers, and none paid me the slightest bit of attention.

I shifted my glance back to my former boss. From past experience, I knew his routine never changed. Ernie Latham took his time. He’d speed-read through a piece of copy, then go back over each word, sentence, and paragraph with the care of a brain surgeon. Finally, he seemed satisfied, and tossed the piece into his outbox. When he removed his half glasses, I knew it was safe to talk. “Okay, Ernie, what’s the scam.”

“Scam?”

“The cover she mentioned.”

“Oh. It’s simple. I’ve temporarily brought you back out of retirement to write a guest series of post-obit articles. Human-interest stuff, based on interviews with people close to the late President Tyndall. It’s something we would probably do anyway, and we’re going to play up your return to the Post as something of a coup. Neat, logical, and will give you a legitimate press entree into areas you need to poke your nose into without raising a lot of eyebrows. Should work fine if you’re careful. And, by the way, I’m the only one in this building who knows what you’ll really be up to.”

“Right. And let me guess, the public purpose of that little tête-à-tête we just had with President Fordham was to set up an interview—with her.”

Ernie’s smile was genuine. “You ain’t as rusty as you thought you were. Any idea who you might like to talk to first?”

“No clue. Unless it’s Abby McCarty.”

“Lotsa luck there. She’s dropped out of sight. None of my people knows where she is.”

I had a good idea of someone who would know, but I didn’t mention Thurmond Frye’s name to Ernie. Probably for the same reason I had held back telling him or Helene Fordham anything about Mac’s note and my own nagging suspicions. Keep your own counsel, Jeb. Until you can separate fact from rumor. Because my new employer was in such a hurry, I knew I’d need some help, and told Ernie so.

“Thought of that already.” He pressed the intercom button. “Somebody get Walt Erikson in here.” He didn’t have to add “right away” or “yesterday.” The tone of his voice would have that poor man, if he was anywhere in the building, come a-running. I hoped he hadn’t been sitting on the john in the men’s room.

Not to worry. A bespectacled, bean-pole of a guy was standing there in less than a minute, grinning from Atlantic to Pacific, wearing Dockers and a Boston Red Sox tee shirt. Couldn’t have weighed much over one-thirty, though he was almost as tall as me.

“Jeb Willard,” Ernie said as I shook hands with the young man, “Meet Walt Erikson. He doesn’t look like he’s been out of high school more than a week, but he has a PhD in Communications, and is the best hacker in Washington. Spends more time in our morgue than the D.C. medical examiner does in his. He’ll be your legs. Now. I’ve got work to do, so the two of you get out of my sight. Jeb, I presumed you’d rather not work out of your old office, so Ms. You-Know-Who and I arranged to get your old room at the Mayflower back for you. Touch base with me tomorrow.”

“Will do. You got a car, Walt?”

“Yessir. In the ramp.”

“You old enough to drive it?”

Giggle and nod.

“Good. Let’s go.”

Walt Erikson’s car was a light blue, four year-old Plymouth. Nondescript. Couldn’t be better. On the way to Georgetown, and as tactfully as I could, I told him I was going to be moving around town a lot, mostly on short notice, that I appreciated his help, and that it would be best if he kept his questions about my activities to a bare minimum. “I’m on a short leash, Walt. Not much time, and it would also be good if you kept everything we do to yourself. Completely to yourself. Understood?”

“No problem, Mr. Willard.”

“You married?”

“Yessir. With a little girl almost eight.”

“That so? Well, I’ll do my best to not drag you away from them or your regular work any more than necessary.”

“No problem. To tell the truth, I’m looking forward to getting out of that basement for a change.”

“I may have to send you back down there pretty often. Research.”

“No problem there, either. Plus, I’ve got a better computer at home in case you need late-night fishing.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, and drop the Mr. Willard stuff. It’s Jeb. Okay?”

“Okay. Jeb it is.”

“Great. Now, first thing is, I’ve got to take care of some private business at the Georgetown Sheraton. Won’t take long, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“No problem.”

I made a mental note to clobber him if he kept saying “no problem.” It was getting on my nerves the same way that old hymn Amazing Grace had recently. I swear, if I had to hear that noble melody butchered one more time by so-called “song stylists”, it would turn me off music for a year. That would be a damn shame, too, because I dearly love good music, whether classical or good jazz—something else Cal and I share.

Walt waited for me to finish my business in the Sheraton office. He was probably bright enough to figure out I wanted an escape valve-think place somewhere away from the Mayflower, but I didn’t mention to him it would be my boat. There was still time for me to go back into town and make a very large bank deposit, get some cash, then pick up my bag from the Holiday Inn. All the while, Walt Erikson proved to be a talented driver, and made only small talk about his wife, Alicia, and his precocious daughter who was already learning advanced computer skills. Thank God, he didn’t say “no problem” one other time. He dropped me at the Mayflower and told me he’d be in the office by eight if I needed him.

My old room was exactly the same. Large. Old-fashioned. Comfortable. Some thoughtful person had left a bucket of ice and a bottle of Absolut on the dresser. Now, that’s thoughtful. Must have been my old buddy, Cecil, the, ah, colorful night clerk. I made another mental note to renew my good (hard cash) relationship with him. In the past, he’d been a tremendous asset.

I made a drink and called Cal. As usual, he listened to my complete report without interrupting. “…And Cal, I need a favor. Could you and Sammy please bring LAST WORD up to Georgetown? I’ve already made arrangements to berth her at the Sheraton.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Great! When can you get away?”

“I don’t know. Tomorrow, I suppose. I was going to run up to the cabin for a few days but that could wait. Why do you want the boat up there if you’re staying at the Mayflower?”

“I may need some place I can get away to that no one knows about. I’ve registered the boat slip in your name.”

“I see. Well, if we go up the ditch all the way, taking the Dismal Swamp canal to Norfolk, and motor-sail up the Chesapeake when the wind isn’t right, we probably can get into the Potomac in four days, maybe five. Count on a week or less altogether to Georgetown, weather permitting.’’

“Okay. Tell Sammy I really appreciate it, and I’ll make it worth his while.”

“Uh, huh. I guess you can afford it now. If I had your luck, I’d keep right on going—to Vegas. By the way, I think I have the answer to one of your riddles.”

“Which one?”

“The ‘wheel in the air’ reference. When you were a kid, if you’d read more Bible than Ian Fleming, you’d remember it was Ezekiel. Now. Who among the influential-and-powerful in Washington is named Ezekiel?”

The connection hit me like a thunderbolt. Ezekiel Koontz. Former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, advisor to several Presidents, as recognizable a Washington fixture as the renovated Monument, and nearly as old. “Koontz? The Judge?”

“Who else could it be, pal?”

“Jesus, I really am rusty!”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind. See you in a few days, and thanks again, Cal. I owe you a big one. Make that another big one.”

“Truer words were never spoken. Bye, bye.”

I called room service, had a dinner sent up, which I ate without tasting, and went to bed early. Slept badly, but at least with a clear idea of who the target of my first “interview” would be.

Chapter 4

Over the years, I’ve learned the hard way to let my fingers do most of the walking. Next to dependable transportation, a working telephone is the number one tool in any investigator’s bag. I called Walt at five after eight and used the magic word, “Walt, could you please go down to the morgue and scope out something for me?”

“Sure thing. No problem.”

I bit my lip. “I need everything you can dig up on Ezekiel Koontz.”

“The Judge?”

“Right. Anything you can find; history, family, politics, the whole spectrum. Do a complete printout, and a short, say, two-page summary.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“What do you mean, anything else? How long will that take you?”

“Should have it all by lunch.”

Walt Erikson’s stock took a quantum leap up, and his glib answer made me also realize how far technical advances had come during my three-year absence. “Yeah, there is one other thing. Does the paper still have video tapes of Tyndall’s first State of the Union address?”

“Yessir. They’re in the vaults.”

“Oh.” That was disappointing. Once in the Post’s sanctum sanctorum, they could not be removed. You could look at them there, but you could not take them out, and I wanted very much to watch that famous speech again, this time with new eyes. “That’s too bad. I really wish—”

“Not a problem, Jeb. I can access them from the morgue and make you a copy. Just don’t tell the boss.”

This time I didn’t mind his speech habit a bit. “You mean you can do that on your computer? Swipe a copy of a video?”

“Sure. You’d be amazed at what I can do with this thing.”

“I already am. Thanks, Walt. Call me when you have it. Can you transfer me to Ernie’s office?”

“No problem.”

Surprisingly, Ernie picked up, and I asked him to set up an interview with Judge Koontz as soon as possible. He said he’d get on it right away. Immensely satisfied, I hung up, redialed and ordered breakfast from room service, then settled back in the bed, propped up on three pillows and went to work on my legal pad. Having, unfortunately, not inherited Cal’s fantastic memory, I had long ago resorted to an old, but time-tested system of basic analysis. Precinct cops use a blackboard and chalk or white boards and grease pens. I use a plain legal pad and pencil. I call it my daily rip sheet:

WHAT YOU KNOW/ FACTS

1. Mac shot President Tyndall.

2. Mac believed (Knew?) there was a conspiracy.

3. Apparently, others do, too, hence the rumors around town.

4. Judge Koontz and someone Mac called “Old Sarge” must have had (at most) a part in it or (at least) knew something about it.

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

1. Whether Abby knew anything.

2. Who is Old Sarge?

3. And the biggie: Motive. Why did Mac do it?

YOUR NEXT MOVES

1. Talk to Abby

2. Interview the Judge.

3. Look at Walt’s pirated video. May be some clue there.

Over breakfast, I studied my first daily sheet. Damn little to work on, that was for sure. While I took my shower and shaved, I had a hard time pushing away a new thought, which had wedged itself in. Also please look after Liz. Did Mac’s beautiful sister need looking after? Why? Maybe Father Flaherty could tell me that. He might also know where Abby was. I sure as hell didn’t want to call Thurmond Frye. I was putting on my tie when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Jeb, it’s me, Walt. Have you seen the early TV news?”

“No, why?”

“Funny you should want stuff on Judge Koontz. Timing, I mean. It was just announced. He was appointed to head up the new Commission. We’re running a big front page piece on it today.”

“What new Commission?”

“Congressional. You know, like the Warren Commission after Kennedy got shot.”

At that moment, I couldn’t say why, but those words sent every nerve sensor off in my brain like the burglar alarm at Fort Knox. “Interesting. Thanks for the call, Walt.”

I think he said “No problem” again but if he did, I didn’t hear it. I hung up, grabbed my coat and ran out to hail a cab—

—And ran smack into Special Agent Thurmond Frye before I got half way through the lobby.

“In a hurry, Jeb?”

Since I was a boy learning the ancient game of chess, Cal always preached to me that the best thing to do when caught by a surprise move is to immediately attack. “Would you believe? I was on my way to see you. You’ve just saved me a taxi ride.”

“Really. What did you want to see me about?”

“I promised Abby McCarty I’d call her. Figured you knew where she is.”

“Uh, huh. Had your coffee yet?”

“Not yet,” I lied again. “Why? You in the habit of coming all the way over here for morning coffee? The Mayflower coffee shop’s good, but not that good.” Gambit. Counter. Answer a question with a question.

“Came to talk to you, of course. Come on. My treat.”

We took the far corner table, and since Frye didn’t bother to remove his coat, I knew this would be a short session. We ordered and I waited for him to make his next move. Thurmond Frye was what Cal calls a gray man. Gray hair, gray eyes. Gray skin. Gray everything. A man more comfortable in shadows than sunlight. He was also a throwback to an earlier age. The J. Edgar days. Not one of those button-down, smug lawyer types the FBI usually recruits now. He was big; he was smart, wary, and innately dangerous. Like a giant mongoose. I’d badly underestimated him once, in Mexico, then got lucky and managed to pull him out of a very tight spot when we got caught by some nasty Federales in a place where neither of us should have been. He owed me one, but we both knew neither of us would ever bring it up.

“I had word you were back,” he said. “What are you doing here, Jeb?”

I took a moment to sip from the heavy mug. I knew it was Frye’s style to know the answer to a question before asking it. It was cover story testing time. “I’m going back to work. Temporary thing, doing some guest articles for Ernie Latham at the Post.”

“Yeah, I know about that. I checked with him this morning. I hope that’s all you’re doing, because if you’re up to anything else, I would not be a real happy guy, and you wouldn’t want me to be a real unhappy guy, would you?”

“Nope.”

“And if I thought you were up to your old amateurish tricks, or poking your nose into my investigation, it could definitely cause a boil on my ass. Not fatal, but irritating as hell, and boils have to be lanced. You follow?”

“All too well. So you’re running the show?”

“Our end of it, and we’re the point people for the new Koontz Commission.”

“My, how you’ve risen.”

“I’ll ignore that. Look, old friend, turned out that business down in Mexico was productive for me and could just as well have been for you. By the way, I’m sorry your book about it was a dud. Things don’t always work out the way we’d like. So, do your little articles and go home, Jeb. There’s no big story here. I doubt if the Koontz Commission thing will take a more than a week.”

“I take it you’re ignoring the rumors, too.”

“Rumors are just that. Nothing more. Facts so far indicate a pretty open and shut. No conspiracy. What did you want to talk to Mrs. McCarty about?

Clever bastard. You won’t trip me up that easily. “Personal condolences, that’s all.”

“You can’t. She’s in seclusion. Hey, don’t give me that look. She requested it. Wants to be as far, figuratively and literally, from Washington as she can get. Can’t blame her for that.”

I was forced to play my only ace. “You owe me one, Frye. I want to at least talk to her on the phone, and I know you can set it up. She and Mac were both friends of mine. Good friends. I promised her I would at the funeral. Remember?”

An almost imperceptible tinge of red began to show around his jaw line. “I’ll see what I can do. Meantime, don’t let me find out you’ve been lying to me today. Have a good one, Jeb.”

He stood, dropped a five on the table and left me sitting there. He hadn’t even touched his coffee. This had been a warning. Shot across my bow. Something didn’t fit, though. Thing was, as I sat there mulling it over, that if President Tyndall’s murder was indeed so “open and shut”, why was Thurmond Frye concerned about me butting in?

I waited another ten minutes to be safe, and went out. It had started raining again, but there were plenty of cabs available.

A youngish, probably overworked priest at St. Michaels named Ralph told me Father Flaherty was away on a required retreat in Maryland and would be gone two weeks. Whether that was true or not, or whether Flaherty had chosen to purposefully escape Washington and all that was going on, I had no way of knowing. I hadn’t been expecting that, and had already sent the cab on its way. So, I trudged through the rain the two blocks to Reilly’s, cursing myself for forgetting, in my haste, to grab either a hat or an umbrella.

That Sean Reilly recognized me was something of a surprise. What he said to me when he came to the booth I’d sat down in was a bigger one. “Mornin’, Mr. Willard. Tim said you’d be back. Somebody here you should talk to.” He looked around to see if any of the early customers were watching. They weren’t. “Come with me, please.”

I followed him through the café doors into a neat, rather large kitchen. A stout, smiling woman whose face looked like a well-polished apple turned from the grill, wiped her hands on her apron, then stuck one out to me. “I’m Moira, Sean’s better half.” She cocked her head to the right. “Go on in.”

Sean pulled a brown curtain aside, revealing a small dining room, behind which was a staircase. I barely heard him tell me the stairs led up to their living quarters, because sitting at their linen-covered table, stirring a cup of coffee, was Liz McCarty. She looked up, managed a small “Hi,” and then looked back down into her cup. I noticed several things at once. She was dressed in a waitress uniform, her hair pulled back and pinned, she wore no makeup, and, she had been crying all morning long.

In the softest of voices, Reilly said, “Take all the time you need, honey. We don’t have much of a crowd yet. Glad to see you, Mr. Willard. You’re welcome in my house anytime.”

I sat down opposite the embarrassed girl. Gave her one of my best smiles and another one to Moira Reilly who silently placed a cup of delicious smelling coffee under my nose. “What’s wrong, Liz?”

Long pause. Fidgeting. Lip-chewing. Then it came in jets, between sobs. Had to leave school just shy of finishing Master’s at University of Virginia… Kicked out of apartment in Charlottesville… Clothes tossed out into the freaking street… Volkswagen trashed and burned by students… Nowhere to go… No money… Mac had been paying bills… Co-signing student loans… They knew I was his sister… Moira and Sean came through… Gave me a bed and a job… “Why, Jeb? Why in God’s name did he do it?”

“I don’t know, Liz. But I’ll find out, if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Promising to help her in any way possible, I got away as quickly as I diplomatically could. Cal used to say walking in the rain helps tamp down the fires of anger. It did, but not by much, especially since I’d had no chance to ask her the same question. No matter, since the way she’d asked it of me showed she knew nothing. Nothing at all.

My first official day on the job was rapidly going south, but my disposition improved a little when I got back to the hotel and found Walt Erikson asleep in one of the lobby chairs, briefcase resting on his skinny chest. Over a tasteless room service lunch we washed down with Heineken, I started to read the enormous printout he’d brought. After three pages, plus the inability to shove Liz McCarty to a back burner, I gave up. “I don’t have the patience for this right now, Walt. Hand me the short version, and please don’t say ‘no problem.’ ”

I was doubly impressed with Walt’s work when the short version turned out to be very short. I scanned the high points, already highlighted in yellow:

Ezekiel Joshua Koontz— One of the “Most-Admired-Men-of-America.”

Born 82 years ago at Beckley, West Virginia

Harvard Law School (dates)

Successful Beckley law practice (dates)

Circuit Judge (dates)

Federal Judge (dates)

Appointed Supreme Court by Carter

Served 20 years, resigned unexpectedly

Unofficial guru to every President since

Never married

Gourmet cook, loves music, parties

World-class domino and poker player

Heading new Commission re: Congressional Investigation

I put the single sheet down. Concentration was slipping badly. I’d have to go back over it tonight, when I’d cooled off. “Did you bring the tapes?”

“Yessir. Got ’em right here.” He fished them out of his briefcase and laid them on top of his printout. “And Mr. Latham says to tell you he set up the interview with the Judge for the day after tomorrow. I’m to tag along as the photographer. Don’t worry, I have some experience.”

“Good old Ernie. Thinks of everything. Thanks, Walt. You better go on back to your family. I’ll call you if I need you.”

Walt left, and I sat down to make another attempt to study his long printout. After half an hour, I gave up again in frustration, made myself a drink, and had started to the bathroom when I heard a knock on the door. I quickly looked around to see if Walt had forgotten something. He hadn’t, so I slammed the glass down, took three steps and yanked on the doorknob, my mood now blacker than the inside of a stovepipe. It took a couple of painfully mortifying, speechless seconds before I recognized the former First Lady, Jean Tyndall!

“Well, Mr. Willard, are you going to invite me in or not?”

Chapter 5

Once I had gotten over my pubescent crush on big-breasted Edith Conway way back when at Tryon’s Cove Middle School, there hadn’t been many times when I’d been at a loss for words around women, even Washington women, whether they were wives of Senators, ambitious pages, or cocktail waitresses. Now, within the relatively small space of twenty-four hours, I had been practically struck dumb by two; the new lady President, and now the widow of the man whose place she’d taken. I must have managed some kind of reflex gestures, though, since I quickly found myself sitting across my coffee table from her, an actor’s smile on my face, silently praising the dependable Mayflower housekeeping staff, and listening to her explain the unannounced and totally unexpected visit.

“Ernie Latham’s editorial today mentioned you were back in town and doing a series of articles on people close to my husband. Do I qualify?” Her teasing laughter was light. Like a dab of Cool Whip.

I found my voice, and promptly lied through my teeth. “Top of the list. I wanted to talk to Abby, too, but I guess that’s not possible right now.” I told her about Thurmond Frye’s little house call.

“That’s actually why I’m here. Abby asked me to talk to you in person. To thank you for being such a good friend.”

“I really appreciate that. I can’t tell you how much I felt her pain, and yours. You have both lost so much.”

“What about the country?”

“Pardon?”

“The country’s loss. Do you feel that, too?”

I didn’t understand her question at all, but I responded the way I thought she wanted me to. “Why, yes, ma’am. That’s a given.”

“Then you’re as wrong, as duped as everyone else. Buck Tyndall’s death was the best thing that could ever happen to these United States.”

I hoped my face didn’t show the astonishment I felt hearing those words. Here was this tiny wisp of a woman who had been a gracious White House hostess, a charming and attractive personality who had, at his elbow, buffered many of her husband’s rough edges while tirelessly championing women’s rights, now in essence telling me to my face that his murder was good for the country! This time, I made no response at all. Cal would have been proud of me.

“Do I shock you, Mr. Willard?”

“Yes, ma’am. You certainly do.”

“And you still want to interview me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Again came that frilly, lilting laugh. “Because you and I both know Ernie Latham doesn’t have the journalistic courage to print one word of it. My husband was close to turning this country into a police state. No one in America knows just how close. You know what I called him?”

“What?”

“Every morning—those mornings I saw him, I mean, I’d say, ‘What do you want for breakfast today, my King the President?’ I’m sorry about the way it happened, but at last I’m free of the bastard, and so is the rest of the country.”

“Are you telling me you hated him?”

“With every fiber of my being. But I wasn’t alone, was I? Where have you been these past few years, Mr. Willard? Except for soldiers and cops, every thinking person in this country hated his guts. Especially Snow White and his smart-ass dwarfs. Boy, did Buck turn the tables on them!”

She abruptly stood up. Dropped a card on the coffee table. “Well, I can see by the look on your very handsome face that I’ve told you enough to entice you to my suite at the Watergate next Monday at four for cocktails and a long talk. It’s Absolut you drink, right?”

She was gone before I could gather wits enough to react. I felt like a confused victim picking up pieces of his brain after a tornado had blasted through it. My rip sheet would need revising, and right away, too. I decided to do it in my favorite place; the ancient claw-footed bathroom tub—the only one I had ever seen long enough for me to stretch out in. I made myself a drink, went in, turned the water on, and then looked at my watch. It was past time for Cecil’s shift to begin, and I needed his expertise. I called the desk.

He hadn’t changed. “Hel-lo, darling. I think it’s marvelous you’re back. I have truly missed you. How may I be of service today?”

“I need your special shopping skills, Cecil. Like yesterday.”

“Do you now? So what do we need, precious?”

“Two new suits, some shirts, underwear, a sport coat, shoes, socks, ties, pretty much everything, plus I need what I was wearing today dry-cleaned by tomorrow at eight. It’s hanging in the same place. Just let yourself in. I’ll be in the tub.”

“My goodness. Sounds like old times.”

“Speaking of time, you’re wasting a lot of it talking so much, Cecil.”

“Oops. Right. Everything by eight tomorrow. Bye, darling.”

Cecil Hathaway was from the Cayman Islands, black as black can be, and gayer than a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but he was the world’s greatest procurer. For a price, he could deliver anything, and I do mean anything you want, to your room. And fast. I had not brought many clothes with me to Washington, nor did I have time to shop. To be honest, I didn’t own much of a wardrobe any more, unless you count khaki shorts, tee shirts, and boat shoes—not exactly the proper duds for where I’d be going.

I soaked and sipped; trying to sort out what Jean Tyndall had told me. She apparently had more she wanted to unload, and I found myself looking forward to the coming Monday as much as to my visit tomorrow with Judge Koontz.

Long baths usually make me hungry. I decided to treat myself to a steak downstairs before watching the tapes Walt had brought. I got out of the tub, dried off, and was putting on my robe when yet another knock on the door came. This time, however, I recognized Cecil’s usual; two raps, followed by two more. “Come on in, Cecil.”

I had my back turned to the door when Cecil opened it, and in his most professional voice, said, “Excuse me, Mr. Willard, sir, but you have a guest.”

I turned, and nearly dropped my teeth when my father marched right in ahead of the worried looking night clerk. “Cal? What the devil—?” When he started to tell me, I held up a finger. “Wait just a minute.” I picked up my suit and handed it to Cecil. “You need some money now?”

“Oh, no sir. We can settle accounts later. I shall have this back as promised. Have a nice evening, sir.”

He hurried out, closing the door softly behind him. Cal said, “Is he British?”

“Sort of. What are you doing here, Cal? You couldn’t possibly have gotten the boat—”

“Take it easy, pal. Sammy’s on the way with your boat. Pete Suggs was back in Tryon’s Cove with nothing to do, so I asked him to help Sammy. I drove because we needed the car after bringing the boat up. Besides, I thought you might need an extra pair of hands and feet. You think you can use your influence to get me a room here for a few days?”

I was pretty sure that was another thing Cecil could arrange, so I nodded. “Why the car? I told you I’d pay for yours and Sammy’s airfare home.”

“I know you did, but we’re not going back to Tryon’s Cove. Sammy and Pete are going to help me with a few things I need to do at the cabin, so we’re going to drive back together down through the Shenandoah valley and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Pretty this time of year.”

“Okay. You hungry?”

“Very hungry.”

“Just let me call room service. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

The New York strips were long gone and the excellent bottle of Cabernet down to the last half glass before Cal asked his first question. “So, who do you think ‘Snow White and the dwarfs’ may be?”

“No idea, but they must be people who had a big bone to pick with Tyndall. Possible motive. Maybe I’ll find out Monday. What she said got me thinking like an investigator again. Like, who stood to gain the most from Tyndall’s death?”

Cal’s eyebrows shot up. “A better question might be, who wouldn’t? Like she said, aside from the military and the police, nearly everyone in this country and several others stood to benefit, especially the NRA and every single criminal serving time. The man bred enemies like the ocean breeds fish.”

“You know, that’s close to what she said, too. Where have I been lately, Cal? I can’t believe I’ve been so out of touch I don’t know what’s been going on around this town.”

“You never watch TV and you don’t read papers any more. Not even mine. Book writing is a lonely business, and where you’ve been, like Alaska, and deep in the Mexican hills dodging bullets, it’s not too surprising. Tyndall certainly had his own agenda, that’s for sure. No one knew what he was going to do next. He made a lot of people very nervous, from Heads of State down to hired farm hands. But for the last couple of years, he seemed to have backed off some from such extreme moves. Mellowed a little. People were breathing easier, especially those on Wall Street. Anyway, what now?”

“Feel like watching a good re-run?”

It was the shortest major political speech in history, and maybe the most effective. Buford (Buck) Tyndall’s entrance, so unlike that of his predecessors, set the tone for the blockbuster he was about to deliver. Instead of backslapping, shaking hands, and schmoozing with dozens of leaning, smiling lawmakers, the ramrod straight hero of North Korea and the Middle East marched straight to the dais, waited for the thunderous applause to abate, then broke all traditional rules of salutation and got right to it.

“Americans. I am here tonight for the purpose of addressing you regarding the State of the Union. This I shall do, and then I am going to tell you what we are going to do about it.”

Again he waited for the cheering to die down. “I wish I could look out at you tonight, make a few clever jokes, and, like others before me, make a bunch of rhetorical promises that are hollow and hard to keep. It would also be moot, I suppose, to mention a few examples of historical trivia that might be fun for me and interesting for you, since I am not the first soldier to stand here. But I am not going to do that.

“Neither am I going to dwell on the number of things in our country that are in good shape. I don’t need to waste our time mentioning them since you already know what they are, and I firmly believe that if something ain’t broke, we don’t have to fix it. But we have problems that need fixing. Big problems. Let me first talk about those abroad.

“Since Vietnam, and in spite of our recent successful actions in the desert, the Balkans, and North Korea, most foreign regimes show us little or no respect. Behind our backs, they call us a paper tiger. A spineless, has-been power. That, I promise you, will cease immediately.

“Around the world, the U.N. is laughingly referred to as ‘Useless Nations’, or ‘Unnecessary Nonsense’ or worse. NATO is a bad joke, and to be blunt, under what has been our weak foreign policy to date, I agree with them. We supply the manpower and the money, and they want to call the shots. But I’m telling them all right here and now that if they go on thinking we have become an international eunuch, they have made one big mistake, and United States Marines don’t bluff.”

During the wild applause, I glanced at Cal. His chin was down on his chest. His lips pursed. He was watching the screen from beneath half-closed eyelids. We both knew what was coming next.

“From now on, they can fight their own border disputes, their own civil wars, political or religious, and by God, they can also pay for them. Our country does not cause their problems, and since they refuse to share equally in the manpower, the firepower, and the willpower, we shall not send one single American serviceman or one Yankee dollar to bail them out, only to receive in return derision and criticism instead of their thanks. Tomorrow morning, I am sending a recommendation to Congress that we, the United States of America, bring all our troops home where they can be used for more important duty, immediately suspend all financial aid of any kind to every foreign country except those of the former Soviet Union, and use the money we will save by doing so to cut our taxes and kill the expensive weeds growing in our own back yard.”

I knew Cal was watching the reactions on the faces of the wildly cheering audience who had instantly jumped up in unison. I found myself being caught up in it too. Nearly mesmerized. It was as if forty years of drifting patriotism had been suddenly revived and was squalling like a new baby. I couldn’t help but also feel a tinge of jealousy toward the talented writer or writers who had written that speech. I was so absorbed in fact, that Cal had to raise his voice to get my attention. “Aren’t you going to answer your phone?”

I hadn’t noticed it ringing. “Hello?” Cal took the remote from my hand and turned down the TV volume.

“Mr. Willard, this is Jean Tyndall again. I was just curious, and forgot to ask you, who else are you planning to interview, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Well, aside from you and Abby, I hadn’t actually made a list, but I thought I might talk to Judge Koontz.”

“Really? Old Snow White himself? What a coincidence, or had you already figured out that it was he and his cabal of dwarfs that got my husband elected in the first place? Anyway, I think you’d be wasting your time. You won’t get more out of him than a free meal, but then, he’s a hell of a good cook, I’ll grant him that.”

My brain suddenly up-shifted two gears. “I wish I could talk to those seven dwarfs, too.” I held my breath, praying she would drop some names.

“I’ll bet you would. Too bad.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because all of them are dead except Cancelossi and—no, I’ll save the other name until Monday. Please don’t be late. We’re going to have ourselves a good old time talking.”

She hung up before I could say another word, and I knew the moment I put the phone down she was teasing me. Making sure I wouldn’t find any excuse not to show up.

“Was that who I think it was?” Cal said.

“Yep. Tell you later. Let’s watch the rest of this tape first.”

But Jean Tyndall’s call had broken my euphoric spell. I watched, but paid scant attention to Tyndall’s outline for the country; how he was going to bring industry back home, fix the education problems, streamline fossilized government agencies, and bring Americanism back to America. It wasn’t until Cal reminded me of what a masterful piece of pure theater his closing was.

Everyone sitting in that venerable old chamber and everyone sitting on their chairs and sofas across the United States had held their collective breath as Tyndall stopped in the middle of his speech, took off his suit coat, reached under the lectern, and bought out the green fatigue jacket of a four-star Marine general. “Symbolically, I put this uniform back on tonight because you have placed me in this office to get a job done, and as Commander-in-Chief, I am telling you we are at war. Yes, war.

“This is my last battle. A battle to the death against crime, drugs, and poverty. If I may be excused for drawing one more analogy, any basic training Private or rookie cop can tell you that you don’t stand much of a chance carrying a pocketknife into a gun fight. Our pathetic measures in the past against these formidable domestic enemies have had approximately the same chance of success. So, I stand before you tonight in this uniform jacket to tell you that from tonight on, this country will use every resource it has, whether civilian or military, to win this war.

“You have put me here to fight, not talk. And, you have put me here on trust. In turn, I have full trust in you, the people of the greatest country on earth, the United States of America, to back me up all the way. My battle plans are drawn up and I will inform you weekly, on national television, of exactly how we will go about defeating these monsters. And defeat them we will.

“I close with a picture, a quote, and a short prayer. Remember that forgotten old poster picture of Uncle Sam, pointing his finger? America needs you. And so do I. God bless us all. Thank you.”

There was fifteen more minutes of frenzied, deafening applause on the tape. Cal touched the mute button, and we watched the faces of those sitting in the front row. After a few minutes he thumbed the power switch.

“What about it, Cal? Notice anything?”

“Just that they remind me of old newsreels. Like those of the Politburo standing around Stalin on top of the Kremlin on May Day. I’ll bet there are some damn good poker players in that bunch. They—”

“Wait a minute!” I jumped up, practically ran to the table where I’d left Walt’s printout. I grabbed the short version, scanned it, and showed it to Cal.

“Look here. ‘World class domino and poker player.’ ”

“So?”

I repeated my brief exchange with Jean Tyndall, and said, “He’s the one, all right. Snow White.”

Cal nodded slowly—agreeing with me. “What’re you gonna do?”

“Go fishing. I’m going down there tomorrow and catch a shark.”

“Sure you are. And what are you going to use for bait?”

“What I’ve always used. Myself. And a good bluff. We’ll just see how much of a poker player the Judge really is.”

One more phone call to Cecil took care of Cal’s room problem, and, looking forward to getting a happy night of good sleep for the first time in two weeks, I was standing in my shorts brushing my teeth when I got the last surprise of a day that had been chock-a-block full of them. Persistent knocking on my door had me grabbing for a towel, and cursing Cecil Hathaway all the way back to his African ancestors, but when I threw it open, ready to vent, I instinctively took a step back.

Liz McCarty, dressed in faded jeans and one of Mac’s old UNC letter sweaters, smiled up at me and said, “Father Tim said you’d help me. And, well, so did you. Moira and Sean are smothering me out of my mind. Can I stay here with you for a couple of days? Please?”

Chapter 6

Maybe it was the old-fashioned way Cal brought me up. Maybe it was some kind of latent sense of southern chivalry. Either way, I was not about to let Liz sleep on the sofa—or with me, and maybe being such a gentleman for once was a bad mistake. I woke up several times during the night with all kinds of kinks and cramps, finally resorting to pulling all the cushions off the sofa and using them as a floor mattress, which wasn’t much better. Twice I caught myself swearing under my breath that I shouldn’t have argued so vehemently with her when she’d suggested the sofa would “do just fine”. In any case, I had a new appreciation for the new king size bed the Mayflower had placed in my room. (Thank you, Cecil!) Funny how you take things for granted until you have to do without. I must have finally fallen asleep sometime before dawn, and slept like the proverbial dead.

I never heard her leave. The bed was made up, and for a minute or two, I thought I’d dreamed it all, but when I went inside the bathroom and found a bra and pair of pink panties drying over the curtain rod, and a pair of panty hose hanging on the shower head, I knew I hadn’t dreamed it. The Nike sports bag she’d brought with her was stowed under the bed.

Over breakfast and three cups of coffee, I tried three times to focus on my latest rip sheet. No way. Concentration had been neatly sidetracked to what kind of decision I had to make about this girl. Somewhere around nine or ten, it came to me. I spent the next two hours on the phone, then stretched out on my bed intending to take an hour’s make-up nap. Last thing I remember thinking was that Liz was going to have to damn well use the sofa tonight.

Walt’s call woke me up. “It’s almost four, Jeb. You hadn’t called, and we’re expected at Judge Koontz’s house at six, you know.”

“Jesus! Can you pick me up? I’ll be ready in ten.”

“On my way.”

Rain was slackening as we drove southwest through the soft rural Virginia countryside. Walt’s only comment was how surprised Ernie had been when the Judge had not only agreed to the interview, but had invited us to do it over dinner at his Vienna farmhouse! “Speaks volumes for your rep, Jeb. Lots of Washington people would practically kill for one of his prime rib dinners.”

I laughed off my embarrassment at the compliment. “Ancient history. Ernie’s editorial was way overdone. Just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. Koontz must not have seen the reviews of my last book.”

I found myself liking Walt Erikson more and more. Couldn’t help wondering if my attitude had been as good back when I’d put in my own “go-fer” days at the Post. Walt couldn’t have known that Ernie’s flowery editorial welcoming me back was aimed directly at the Judge, and the follow-up call to him had worked like a charm. Ernie had banked on Koontz’s colossal ego not allowing him to resist being the first person to be featured in my series of mini-eulogies. I hoped he would swallow my other bait just as easily, but I doubted it. I’d have to be cautious in my approach. Ezekiel Joshua Koontz was definitely not a quarry to underestimate. In the past, the many times I’d seen him bouncing in and out of posh Washington parties, I’d chuckled along with the other guests, but hadn’t been fooled by his shrewdly cultivated folksy manners and down-home, profanity-laced speech which sounded somewhere between Andy Griffith and Jesse Helms. Beneath his shock of snow-white hair that probably hadn’t seen scissors in thirty years, was a mind that clicked and whirred like Walt’s computer. Maybe faster…

The lion was in his den. Actually, standing on the porch, waving us in. There was one other car parked in the driveway.

“Evenin’ boys. Welcome to my humble home. You’re just in time for TSWT.”

We shook hands. “TSWT, Judge?” I asked.

“Tennessee Sippin’ Whiskey Time. Been around these parts lots longer’n your yuppie happy hour. Come on up and sit a spell. I like the south porch best, ‘specially after a rain.” He led us down the wrap-around porch to the south quadrant, which was screened in, and featured padded rocking chairs, a swing, and a portable, well-stocked bar—which also included Absolut. “Choose your own poison,” he said.

Until I remembered Walt’s research had revealed that Koontz liked music, I was surprised to hear Sibelius coming from somewhere inside. Jan Sibelius is one of my favorite composers, and his violin concerto is one of my ten all-time favorite pieces. Walt and I made ourselves a drink while the Judge rocked back and forth in the swing, telling us about his house. It was a solid-timbered, two story, gabled, frame dwelling that had sustained some damage during the Civil War, and over the years, successive owners had repaired, remodeled, and added extra rooms and landscaping.

“ ‘Course, when I bought it, ‘bout fifty years ago, I tore down those phony fluted columns that idiot of a preceding owner had added to the front facade. Pretentious clown. I replaced them with these ordinary square posts, like the originals, which suited me better. I’m ordinary and square, too. You boys smoke?”

We both shook our heads, took seats in the rocking chairs, and watched the Judge unwrap a Cuban cigar. “Too bad,” he said. “Nothin’ better of an early fall evenin’ than sittin’ out here with a good drink of whiskey, a good smoke, and some good company. Don’t you think?”

He had a point. The rain had completely stopped, and the sights and smells of the wet, still-green hills of Judge Koontz’s twenty-acre fiefdom were nearly hypnotizing. Every single plant, whether naturally or man-planted, was straining to outgrow and outglow each other. The Vienna countryside, so close to Washington, and yet, so far from it, exaggerated the difference with the songs of the birds, whose volume threatened even the lush second movement of the Sibelius. For several minutes, we all sat, listened, and sipped, like three opium smokers gliding through individual dreams.

The mood was broken by the appearance of a very pretty, forty-something woman whose skin looked like fine Swiss chocolate. I had often heard the noir rumors of Koontz and his housekeeper cum private secretary, but like most others around Washington, had never seen any evidence. When she smiled at Walt and me, (“Hi, I’m Hettie Keeler.”) then turned to the Judge with hands on her hips, I had a sudden, fuller appreciation of his range of abilities! “Judge,” she said, after he introduced Walt and me, “I stirred the juice, and the table’s all set. Wine’s breathing fine. You need anything else before I go?”

“Naw, Hettie. You go on home, I can— No, wait. Do me a favor and go in there and turn that infernal music off.”

“Why were you listening to it, anyway? I thought you hated Sibelius.”

“Can’t stand the stuff. It ain’t Bach, that’s for sure.”

“Why do you listen to it, then?”

“I figure he knew what he was doin’ when he wrote it, and everybody else thinks it’s good. Reason tells me if I listen to it over and over, I’ll discover what I’m missin’. I hope I have time enough left.”

“Ha! You’ll kill me with work twenty years before you pass on.”

“Oh, stop your belly-achin’. I know you put up with me only because of my cookin’.”

“Right. Well, I’ll turn it off, then I’m out of here for the night. Try not to leave too big a mess this time.” She turned to Walt and me. We’d been listening to their apparent daily banter with wide grins. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Willard. You, too, Mr. Erikson. I hope you both have strong stomachs for him and big ones for his food.”

The music soon ceased, and momentarily, we heard the car drive off. I made a mental note to tell Walt that Hettie Keeler would be a good subject for some of his late-night fishing.

“That gal’s got one smart-ass mouth,” Koontz said. “Build yourselves another one, boys. I ‘spect the rib’ll be done in ‘bout half an hour, time enough for me to give you the two-dollar tour. Poor old Erikson here ain’t shot one single picture yet.”

I bit my lip. Wake up, Walt. Take the cue, for chrissake, before his mind starts working faster.

The aromatic tour through Ezekiel Koontz’s house was like a walk through American history. Each room was full of valuable period pieces that had been painstakingly collected over many years. A few rugs were scattered here and there over hardwood floors that gleamed like the brass on my boat, and it was patently obvious Koontz was a bachelor. No woman would have ever arranged furniture in such asymmetrical fashion. The Judge was particularly proud of what he called his “music room”, which boasted an eighteenth century square grand piano that was musically useless, and a harpsichord which was kept in fine tune, and upon which he massacred Bach for an hour every day. He couldn’t resist giving us a fast rendition of a Two-Part Invention, while Walt, thank God, shot picture after picture.

From wall to ceiling were stacks and shelves neatly packed and labeled with old 33rpm records and more up to date CD’s; enough to be the envy of any critic or musicologist, but the turntable and player were nowhere in sight. Must be in another room. Remembering the Sibelius, I glanced at the “S” shelf: Saint Saens, C., Shostakovitch, D., Sibelius, J. ( Finlandia, En Saga, Symphonies 1-10, Violin Concerto) this jacket was missing. I also had the weird feeling that something was wrong here, but before I could figure it out, the Judge jumped up and said, “Let me show you my favorite room. My kitchen.”

Which was the only room out of sync with the rest of the house. Its burnished, stainless steel practicality and its size would have delighted the chef of any four-star establishment. “All right,” he proclaimed. “Looks like this steer’s ready to eat.”

Then it hit me. Koontz was stalling. Doing everything he could to keep us distracted from why we had come. “You boys go on in and sit down. I’ll carve this sucker and be right with you…”

We ate, and I knew I would never again order prime rib in any restaurant. But throughout the fabulous meal, Judge Koontz still hadn’t alluded to our interview. “And I made a banana puddin’ that’ll melt in your mouth.”

Good as it all was, I was careful not to consume too much of it, nor of the beautiful Cabernet he kept pouring. Walt, on the other hand, ate and drank like he had never had a meal! By the time we had finished, it was nearly nine. I decided to push things along. “Judge, you have any more of those cigars left?”

“ ’Course I do, and Cognac to marry up with ’em. In the study.”

Ezekiel Koontz’s study was by far the largest room in the house. Leather furniture, deep carpet, a massive oak desk, and walls not lined with books were covered with autographed photos of every President since LBJ, plus many well-known celebrities. Nursing the brandy and trying not to inhale the cigar, I waited for an opening.

“…And this is me and old George Burns. One time, years ago, he came to one of my birthday lawn parties. Came with a male nurse who stayed in the background and a big-ass blond who didn’t. Brought me a box of good cigars and a package of porno films for presents!”

I encouraged him to relate a few more personal anecdotes from celebs that had been his dinner guests over the years, then asked, “Judge, what was your favorite story about President Tyndall?”

“I’d have to think about that one, son, but off the top of my head at this moment, I’d have to say it was the time he called that Jap ambassador into the oval office. Ambassador Yoshita came in a’ bowin’ and a’ scrapin’ and the General, I mean the President, bowed one time back and asked him to have a chair. Soon as they sat down, Buck told him, eyeball to eyeball, ‘Listen, you little yellow son of a bitch, I’m gonna hold your tiny little feet to a hot fire. I’m giving you and your miserable, ungrateful country exactly three months to even up this trade business. You have been ripping us off for over forty years, and I’m telling you it’s going to stop. Now. If I don’t see satisfactory results within ninety days, I am going to freeze every asset you have in our country, and you will never sell one more car, radio, or computer here again. And, if you think I’m bluffing, or that Amercian business and industry aren’t behind me, as well as all our people, just try me. This meeting is now terminated. Thank you very much for coming by.’

“Poor old Yoshita never got to open his mouth. Lost a heap of face that day. It’s a wonder he didn’t trot right back to his embassy and commit honorable Hara-kiri.”

Walt and I laughed. I had heard similar accounts of that same story before, and realized Koontz must have gotten his version directly from Tyndall himself. Gentle urging prompted the Judge to relate a few more Tyndall stories, and then he subtly changed subjects. “I’ve been remiss tonight, son. I read that book you did on the Mexican rebellion. Splendid work. I think you were the best the Post ever had. Wish you were back with ’em permanently.”

“Thanks, Judge. It is good to be back, even for just this short stint. I’ve always wanted to do a piece on you, and this chance, circumstances notwithstanding, seemed irresistible. Historically speaking, do you consider Tyndall a good President?”

“The best since Truman.”

“You served as advisor to him, didn’t you?”

“Well, it’s been my greatest pleasure in this life to have known and been asked by every man since Carter for a little advice now and then. Some of ’em even listened.” He turned to Walt. “Hey, would you like to get a shot of me standin’ by this picture of the General? It’s my favorite.”

Neat. Adroit. But there was no way I was going to let him derail me now. While Walt took two or three shots, I said, “What I meant was, you were his chief advisor before his election, weren’t you?”

Koontz’s eyes narrowed. He fixed me with a stony glance, rolled his cigar between his lips for a moment, then stared at Walt. “Why don’t you go on down to the game room and play yourself a game or two of pool, Walter. Here, take the bottle with you. We’ll call you back up shortly.”

I nodded to Walt, who beat a hasty retreat, then faced my Tiger shark again. “I’ve got enough material for three articles, Judge. Let’s stop all this dancing. I didn’t come out here to do a piece for Gourmet or House Beautiful. I know all about you and your seven dwarfs.”

“Really. I reckon I must be slipping some in my old age. I’d nearly forgotten you are some kind of cross between an octopus and a pit bull. Got feelers out all over hell and back, and when you get hold of something, you never let go of it. Now you listen to me, you insufferable pen pusher. I invite you out to my home, go to some trouble cookin’ you and your friend a damn fine dinner, out of respect for a great President, a decent newspaper, and a man I thought was a reasonably bright young writer, and you up and ask me a whole bunch of nonsensical questions. All right, so be it. This is off the record now. Back then, the country needed a hero in the worst way. Besides, old Barney Quinn was all set to buy the presidency. You must remember that. He was buyin’ up newspapers, radio and television stations like Monopoly properties, and he had more money than Bill Gates and Buffett put together. Made poor old Ross Perot seem like a penniless choirboy. If it hadn’t been for me and a few friends of mine, he might have got away with it, too.”

What he said was certainly no lie. “True, and whoever was responsible for talking Helene Fordham into switching parties and running with Tyndall was a stroke of political genius.”

“Hellfire, I think Buck would have beaten Quinn even with Ronald MacDonald as a runnin’ mate. Anyway, what’s the use of bringing up those old days? Over and done with. Closed book.”

“Fine. What about now? What about your new commission? Off the record, do you personally think there was a conspiracy behind Tyndall’s murder?”

“You’re gettin’ awfully close to pissin’ me off now, son. What the hell are you tryin’ to get at? Do you think there was?”

It was time for my bluff. I kept my face straight as I could. “I’m sure there was.”

“Why?”

“Because I have the diaries.”

“What diaries?”

“The same ones that told me about you and your dwarfs. Robert McCarty’s personal diaries. They’re very revealing. Judge Koontz, is there anything else you’d like to tell me, off the record?”

I watched his face. If I’d managed to scare him, he didn’t show it. He smiled at me, like a player with a winning hand, then called and raised. “Sure, I do. You don’t have jack shit, Willard. And I’ll tell you something else. This interview is over. You have disappointed me mighty bad here tonight. First thing I’m gonna do Monday mornin’, I’m gonna call that asshole editor, Latham, and if you or he print one word of what we talked about tonight, I’ll break your balls. Both of you. And I can do it, too. I know the law better’n you know your alphabet. Now, call that photographer back up here and get the hell out of my house. You’ve given me a bad case of indigestion.”

Walt was hardly in condition to drive back to Washington, so I took the wheel. Five minutes out of Vienna, he said, “Some dinner. Did you get enough material?”

I stopped whistling long enough to say, “Oh, yeah. I got everything I wanted, and then some.”

Around midnight, I was in the shower and didn’t hear Liz let herself in with the extra room key I’d given her. I didn’t hear her open the bathroom door, either. The only thing I remember hearing, when she pulled the shower curtain back, naked as me, was, “You’re not married or anything, are you?”

Half an hour later, the dilemma of who was going to sleep where was solved. I had no problem with the “not married” part of her question, but the “or anything” part bothered me a little. Just a little. Certainly not enough to stop.

Chapter 7

Sunday was no day of rest. I would have liked nothing more than to have spent the whole of it in bed with Liz, but I knew if I did, I’d never be able to shove her out of my mind—or my sight—and I had work to do. When I gently explained my plan to her, she didn’t argue, although I couldn’t tell if her tears were caused by gratitude or something else. I gave her time to get packed by going to Cal’s room, asking to borrow his Chevy again. He wanted to know why, and I had to tell him. He fished in his pocket for the keys, tossed them over with a frown and said, “I swear, Jebediah Willard, you have a habit of picking up stray girls like an old maid picks up stray cats. Anyway, I think you’re doing the right thing this time. When will you be back?”

“Sometime tonight, I guess. Maybe by dinnertime. Then I’ll tell you all about my shark baiting.”

The drive from Washington to Chapel Hill took longer than I thought it would, and it was already dark by the time I left Liz in the care of my long-retired journalism professor, Max Johnson and his wife (along with a very large “scholarship” check.) I knew she would be safe; too busy transferring transcripts, managing late enrollment in the UNC graduate English program, and shopping for new clothes to think much about the night before. Or me. Or us. I kissed her on a wet cheek, promised I’d call her soon, then got back into the Chevy and started back to Washington, thinking I’d use the down time to mentally go over my rip sheet thoroughly.

Fat chance.

Also please look after Liz.

Last night I was certain I’d have guilt feelings the next day. I didn’t. It had all seemed so natural, somehow. Making love with her had been like one of those fascinating time-lapse films of flowers blooming; one soft, lovely movement at a time. Unhurried, delicate, a beautiful thing growing, unfolding, enveloping. To have tried to stop it happening would have been like trying to hold back a sunrise. Or trying to stop a cloud moving across the sky.

Father Flaherty had told me Liz never stayed still long enough to cast a shadow. Well, she had this time. Long enough to cast a pastel cloak of sensual poetry over my soul. A sweet-scented haunting that was not going to wash away like a piece of driftwood in a rip tide. No, the only bad feelings I had were those of banishing her to a distant academic prison, and my visiting days wouldn’t come for some time. That had taken a lot of willpower, believe me.

It took even more of the same for me to push those thoughts of her to the back of my mind, and concentrate on my larger problem. Just north of Richmond, I stopped for gas and made two phone calls:

“Hello?”

“Dr. Johnson, this is Jeb. I just thought of something I forgot to ask Liz. Is she handy?”

“Sitting right here, Jeb. We’re going over a game plan for her. Just a moment.”

Liz came on. “Jeb? Is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. Just that I forgot to ask you about something while we were driving. I was kind of distracted, I guess. Anyway, one time Mac mentioned a man he called ‘Old Sarge.’ Any idea who he might have been talking about?”

“Sure. That would be Joe. Master Sergeant Joe Mackenzie.”

“Joe Mackenzie. What connection did he have with your family?”

“None at all with our family. He was Buck Tyndall’s personal driver before he was elected.”

“Oh. Any idea where he might be now?”

“Nope. Haven’t seen him in years. Why? What about him?”

“Nothing important. How’re you getting along with the Johnsons?”

“They’re terrific. Both of them. And so are you. I miss you already.”

“Same here. I’ll call again soon, okay?”

“Okay. Bye, Jeb.”

I hung up, shook my head to clear away growing fatigue and the image of her face. Dialed another number. “Walt? It’s Jeb. Sorry to call you at home.”

(I knew what his response would be.)

“No problem, Jeb. What’s happening?”

“Feel like a fishing expedition tonight?”

“Sure. What kind of fish?”

“Some dead sharks and one unknown species. Got a pencil handy?”

“Yeah, shoot.”

“This is a tough one, Walt, even for you. I want you to backtrack over the years since Tyndall was elected the first time, and find any nationally prominent and powerful men who have died between then and now. I’m looking for six or seven names. I already know one, but he’s still alive.”

“Really? Who?”

“Salvatore Cancelossi.”

“Wow! The Prince of Miami. Mr. Mafia himself!”

“Right, and Walt, this next one may be tougher. See if you can hack your way into military files and dig out one Master Sergeant Mackenzie, Joseph, U.S. Army. May be retired by now. I need to find out where he is.”

“I’ll give it my best shot.”

“Thanks, Walt. You’re an Ace. Oh, almost forgot. Remember the Judge’s housekeeper? Hettie Keeler?”

“I’ll add her to the list. Anybody else?”

“That’s it. See you at the office tomorrow.”

“You got it.”

I paid for my gas and got back on the road, this time really enjoying a kind of second wind. Finally, I felt like I was back in the old saddle again, winging it the way I always had, and looking forward to tomorrow. I turned the radio on, pushed buttons until I found the nearest public radio station, and listened to the rest of somebody’s good performance of Brahms’ First, which lasted until the eight o’clock NPR news.

“…And the entire nation is reeling yet again with the tragic news of the apparent suicide of former First Lady, Jean Tyndall. Information is still very sketchy at this hour, but police sources tell us the body was discovered around six o’clock this evening in the master bedroom of her Watergate apartment by a maid. Death was by hanging. We will certainly pass on further details as they become available. In other news…”

I managed to get Cal’s Chevy onto the shoulder without wrecking it. It took me fifteen minutes more before my hands stopped shaking enough to drive the rest of the way to Washington.

Chapter 8

Thurmond Frye and one of his men were already in Ernie’s office when I got there at eight. I took one look at Ernie’s face, which was dark as an anvil cloud ready to explode. Something had come down, and it wasn’t anything good. I had no idea how bad it was until Ernie looked at the FBI men and said, “Gentlemen, would you mind stepping outside a few minutes? When I have to fire a man, I like it to be one on one.”

I kept my mouth shut until Frye and his man took seats at a desk not more than fifteen feet from Ernie’s glass cage, their backs politely turned to us. “You’re going to can me before I write my first piece?” I said.

“Before you write your first word! No, don’t bother taking off your raincoat and hat; you’re not going to be here that long. What the hell were you thinking about, threatening the Judge? In case you forgot, it’s not against the law to help get a President elected. Not only has Koontz burned up the phone lines all morning, he’s sicked the FBI on me—and you. Why didn’t you tell me you had McCarty’s diaries? No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I can’t tell anybody anything if I don’t know anything. Besides that, the owner of this rag, unlike her saint of a mother, has no personal connection, political or otherwise to Ms. You-Know-Who, and even if she did, she’d still want your head on a platter. Maybe mine, too.”

“I see. The reach of Ezekiel Koontz’s influence is as deep as it is long.”

“And on top of it all, Jean Tyndall had to go hang herself last night! I got a heap of misery coming down on my head this morning without having to fend off a big lawsuit.”

“There won’t be any lawsuit, Ernie. Koontz is bluffing. I got just the rise out of him I wanted.”

“Yeah? Well, not at this paper’s expense. I’ve been told not to let you write one single word. You’re outa here. As she put it, if you darken the door of this newspaper again, I’m to be thrown out along with you, and neither one of us will ever find another job anywhere.”

“Talk about the baby and the bath water. What about our other arrangement?”

“Can’t be helped. You’re on your own.”

Ernie Latham is the only journalist I ever met who could write and talk at the same time. During his tirade, he had scribbled a note, and turned it around so that I could see it.

GOOD LUCK/STAY IN TOUCH

As soon as he knew I’d read it, he deftly slid it under his desk calendar. “Those two guys out there were here an hour ago waiting for a piece of you, too. I think they mean business.”

Since I had nothing to lose, I thought it best not to have to tell Frye, or anyone else, that there were no diaries. Nor did I want to talk to anybody but Cal about Jean Tyndall. I needed to buy some time, and stood there a minute trying to think of a way to dodge Frye and his assistant. One crazy idea finally came to me. It had worked once before. Might again. “Ernie, I don’t want to talk to those guys out there just now. Is Dean Pittman still on the sports desk?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Could you do me favor and call him? Ask him to meet me in the first floor men’s room. Also, after I’m gone, please call my Dad at the Mayflower. Ask him to meet me at the dock.”

“Okay.” He reached for the phone and I walked out to face Frye. “Now, guys, I’ll answer all your questions, but first, I have to go pee. Be right back.”

Dean Pittman and I are the same height, build, and have more or less the same complexion. In the past, people at the Post had often gotten us mixed up. He was already inside the men’s room when I got there. “What’s up, Jeb?”

“Remember the time we pulled that switch when you had to duck out on that lady golfer? About five years ago?”

“Sure, I do. You saved my ass that day.”

“I need you to save mine today. Right now. You up for it?”

“Why not?”

It cost me twenty bucks, a good hat and a brand new London Fog raincoat, but when he left, doing a credible hundred yard dash to the front door, I figured it would take Frye and his buddy at least two, maybe three blocks to run him down, only to be triple pissed when they realized they had chased the wrong guy. That was plenty of time for me to snatch Walt from his desk and hustle to the parking ramp. The Plymouth made it out, and all the way to Georgetown with me hunkered down in the back seat. Walt pulled into the parking lot of the Sheraton and stopped the car before he said anything, bless him, and then asked me who I was running from.

I climbed from the back seat to the front. “Walt, I don’t want to get you into any more trouble than I probably already have. With Ernie, I mean. Look, you’re a really bright guy, and you must have already realized I’m working on something pretty important, and in the process, I’ve made some people just a tad upset.”

“Like Judge Koontz?”

“Like Judge Koontz and the FBI! If I told you anything more, much as I’d like to, I could put you between a rock and a hard place, and I don’t want to do that. I hope you understand.”

“I think I do. Need-to-know kind of thing, right?”

“Exactly. So if you want to cut out, now’s the time.”

“Not me. What do you want me to do?”

“How are you coming with those names?”

“Still working on it, but I did manage to track down your Master Sergeant.”

“Mackenzie? Where is he?”

“In the V.A. hospital at Bethesda.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m not that good, Jeb. I don’t know.”

“Never mind, I’ll find out. There is one other thing. Could you set up a computer in my hotel room? Maybe tie it into yours at home?”

“Sure I can, with about a thousand bucks.”

“Ouch. Well, it’ll be worth it, I think.” I figured Walt could find a better bargain on a computer than Cecil could, so I wrote him a check on the spot. “How soon could you—?”

“Not a problem. Maybe by tomorrow.” He grinned at me. “First thing, I’m going home and call in sick. Won’t fool Ernie Latham, but what the hell.”

“Good man. Listen, I may not be at the Mayflower when you get everything ready. Here’s my room key. I can get another one when I get back.”

“You’re going to Bethesda?”

“I don’t want you to know where I’m going, Walt. Need-to-know, remember?”

“Oops. Forgot. Okay. See you later.”

“Thanks again, Walt. For everything.”

I watched him drive away after he’d said you-know-what one more time.

I went inside the Marina office and asked the Harbormaster if he’d heard anything from LAST WORD. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Cap’n Tyson called in first thing this morning. Weather permitting, they should get here before dark tomorrow.”

My worried looking father drove up twenty minutes later. “Where the devil have you been? I’ve tried two dozen times to call your room.”

“Relax, Cal. Come on, lets have an early lunch, and I’ll fill you in.”

The Marina restaurant served decent shrimp salads. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, and ate two of them before we started talking. I say we, but it was yet another of my solo recitals. Cal listened to my considerably edited version of from Liz’s appearance to my improvised escape from Frye without comment, his frown growing deeper by the minute.

“…And, Walt’s getting me a computer. By the way, I just checked, the boat should be here by tomorrow night.”

“When did you hear about Jean Tyndall?”

“On the way back from Carolina. No way that woman committed suicide, Cal.”

“The newspapers said she left a note. Hand-written, saying she was depressed and ‘couldn’t live any more without her beloved husband’, something like that.”

“I don’t care what the media says. That note has to be a phony. She was no more depressed than her pet goldfish. She hated him, remember? So, somebody offed her, but why?”

“Because she knew something they didn’t want to come out?”

“Right. What really bothers me the most, though, is what she said about Tyndall nearly turning the country into a police state.”

Cal toyed with his coffee spoon. “He’d made a good start at it already, hadn’t he? Sum up, pal: A soldier or border patrolman every hundred yards along the entire Mexican border? Marines and National Guardsmen running and guarding the twenty new Federal tent prisons in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico? Navy personnel checking every passenger coming into the country by plane, ship, or pony cart? Army and Air Force searching every purse, suitcase, and golf bag, not to mention the people carrying them, in every airport in the country? M.P.’s and Shore Patrol by the thousands walking the streets alongside beat cops? Plus all the stuff we most likely don’t know about. You tell me.”

“Question is, how far was he going to take it?”

“Who knows? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. What did his wife call him? My King? Any number of a million people could have wanted him dead. But if Judge Koontz and his buddies helped him get elected, why would they want to kill him? Nothing makes sense. At least not yet. Maybe your old friend Frye was right. Maybe there really isn’t anything behind these conspiracy rumors after all.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do, Cal.”

Cal shook his head. “Well, if Mac McCarty didn’t have a personal grudge, why did he do it, then? He was, by your account, a very smart, stable man. Loved his family more than anything. Unless he had a big money problem nobody knows about yet, there’s nothing in his background to suggest somebody blackmailing him into such a desperate deed. Who could have been pulling his strings hard enough to make him pull the trigger?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself over and over. Listen, you want to take a drive?”

“Where to?”

“Bethesda. There’s a guy in the V.A. hospital there I want to talk to.”

Cal drove while I worked on my rip sheet. It was too full of whys. I reduced them down to the main three:

1. If there was no conspiracy behind Tyndall’s death, and Mac had acted alone, why did he set me up with clues to the Judge and Sergeant Mackenzie?

1. Why was Jean Tyndall murdered? What could she know worth killing her for then going to the trouble to make it look like suicide?

3. If the Judge was so Simon pure, why did he react so strongly to my diaries bluff?

So far, I had nothing. Spinning more wheels than Cal’s Chevy.

We found Master Sergeant Joe Mackenzie asleep in a semi-private room, almost unheard of in a Veteran’s Administration hospital. And, he had company. A chubby woman of maybe fifty or so was sitting by his bed, holding a limp hand. She looked up, smiled, and before we could introduce ourselves, said, “I’m Betty Kucinski, Joe’s wife. Well, common law wife, I mean. You men from the government?”

Keeping my voice down, I said, “No, ma’am. I’m Jeb Willard, and this is my father. Just private citizens. We’d like to talk to Sergeant Mackenzie when he wakes up.”

Betty shook her head slowly. Looked back at the ruddy, smooth-shaven face with the military haircut. “So would I. I guess you don’t know, do you?”

“Know what, ma’am?”

“Joe cain’t talk. Not to nobody. He’s had a bunch of strokes. Ain’t said a single word since he’s been here. Don’t even recognize me, and I’ve come to see him every day for two straight years. I feed him most of his meals, empty his bedpan, read him the funnies on Sunday, but he don’t even know I’m here. But you know what? I have a lot of faith. One of these days, he’s gonna wake up and know me, and I’m gonna shout glory hallelujah and praise the Lord all up and down these halls. You gents are the first ones not in uniform ever to come see him. That’s why I thought you was from the government.”

“I’m sorry, Miz Kucinski. Really sorry.”

“Oh, thanks, but that’s all right. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. One of these mornings Joe’s gonna pop up outa this bed and want some cold beer and then some never-you-mind. If you’ll leave me your phone number, I’ll let you know when he does. What did you want to talk to him about?”

“I’m a free-lance writer. I’d like to have heard his story. It occurred to me that a lot of people would like to hear about his adventures with General Tyndall.”

“Yeah, he’d have a lot to tell, all right. Too bad.”

I wrote down the Mayflower address and phone number, which she tucked in her blouse. “You gotta have some faith in this world, Mr. Willard. A lotta faith.”

“Yes, ma’am. We do that,” I said, and followed Cal out, feeling absolutely defeated.

On the drive back to Washington, Cal tried his best to lift my spirits, first by filling me in on the latest Tryon’s Cove gossip, which I had no interest in whatsoever, then by relating some of the Tyndall stories he’d written about himself. I paid no attention to those either, until one struck a nerve.

“They say the first twenty days and nights in office, he called every single Federal judge in America personally. It was rumored that he either insulted or bribed a lot of them enough to retire, and then appointed a batch of the hardest law noses he could find to replace them. Until now, I had always wondered where he got his list. Plus, don’t forget, two Justices from the Supreme Court left the bench as well. Garner retired and Brewster died. Old Snow White must have been one busy boy indeed.”

“You’re right, Cal. I had completely forgotten that.”

“An angle to check out, don’t you think?”
It was, for sure, and I promised myself to dig into it.

We parked the car in the Marina lot and took a cab to the Mayflower, having agreed to meet downstairs for dinner again soon as we each cleaned up. Cecil gave me a spare room key; using fewer words than I’d ever heard him say, which surprised me. I usually couldn’t get him to shut up. I took the elevator to my floor wondering why he’d been so close-mouthed for a change. I found out the moment I opened the door and saw all the lights turned on and a man sitting on my sofa.

It was the one who had been with Frye earlier at Ernie’s office. He wasted no time telling me his name, Special Agent Barnes, showing me his FBI credentials, and opened his mouth to say something else, but I got in the first shot. “I hope you have a warrant, mister.”

He pointed to the document lying open on the coffee table. “Right there. By the way, that was a neat little trick you played this morning. I kind of got a kick out of it, but my boss was not amused.”

“What do you want?”

“The diaries, of course. Where are they?”

I gave my room a quick look around. If it had been tossed, there was no sign, but then, these guys were pros. They wouldn’t have left anything out of place, not even a cigarette butt in an overfilled ashtray. I sat down. Sighed. “Go back and tell Frye there are no diaries. I made them up. They were a ruse to get Judge Koontz all riled up, that’s all. It worked, too.”

“You’re telling me McCarty’s diaries don’t exist?”

“Figments of my overactive imagination. Of course they don’t exist. Besides, if they did, do you think I’d be stupid enough to keep them here?” I don’t know why I said that. Maybe I was overtired as well as angry. Maybe I wanted to needle Frye a little more than I should have. Anyway, I said it, and Agent Barnes certainly heard it. “I’ll tell him what you said, Mr. Willard. Count on it. He also had a message for you. Actually two messages.”

“What?”

“The first was to forget about that private phone call you wanted. Abigail McCarthy had a total breakdown when we told her the news about her mother. She’s in a special hospital. No visitors.”

“Christ! Okay, what was the second one?”

“I think you made him really mad this morning. He said to tell you not to leave town.”

“That’s a switch.”

Barnes shrugged. “I’ll be going, now. I think you’ll find everything’s in place. My compliments on your taste in clothes. Nice stuff hanging in that closet.”

The shower I took after he left helped my muscle aches, but not my temper, which was strained further by the knock on my door just as I was putting on my shirt. Cecil came in with his arms full of more clothes, apologizing for taking so long to shop for me. Nevertheless, he wanted to be paid, and with tip, I was suddenly another thousand dollars poorer.

Chapter 9

I slept well into the morning, and woke up worried. After Barnes’ visit, I was sure I’d have a tail on me the moment I left the hotel. Neither could I be certain Frye didn’t know Cal was staying at the Mayflower, and knowing how thorough Frye was, he’d probably have Cal followed as well.

I could have kicked myself for not having thought about that the night before, when Cecil was on duty. Maybe he could help anyway. I went downstairs.

There was no use asking the manager or his assistant to give me Cecil’s phone number. All hotels have policies and rules to protect their employees. But I knew another way. As many times as I’d over-tipped Georgio, the headwaiter, I didn’t think it would cost me too much to get what I wanted. I was wrong. It cost me plenty! I ate an early, light lunch, and walked to the bank of phones in the lobby, noticing two unfamiliar men lounging there, and reading magazines. They were good, I’ll grant them that. I never caught them so much as glancing my way, ready to jump to it if I went out.

I dialed, praying I’d get lucky. A male voice I didn’t recognize answered, told me Cecil was asleep, and “wished to know” what I wanted with him. I told him I was Cecil’s number one business contact, gave him my name, and asked him to have Cecil call me as soon as possible. It was “Something extremely important to me, and very profitable for him,” I said. The voice said he’d give Cecil my message and hung up. I hoped whoever that voice belonged to was the recipient of most of Cecil’s loving generosity, and wouldn’t hesitate to awaken the gander that laid his golden eggs. This time I was right. I hadn’t been back in my room five minutes before my phone rang.

“I got your message, darling. “How may I help you?”

“Cecil, I’ll make it well worth your while if you can come to the hotel early. I need something only you can supply.”

“I do love the sound of that. I can be there around four this afternoon.”

“I love you, Mr. Hathaway.”

“Don’t I wish. See you at four.”

I hung up, noticing Cal leave the elevator on his way to the restaurant. I caught up with him, sat down and waited for him to order. “Aren’t you going to eat?” he said.

“Already have.” I told him about the two FBI men planted in the lobby.

Cal never missed a bite. “Saw them this morning when I came down for breakfast. They could be a problem.”

“I know. I’ve been working on it. I just talked to Cecil. I think he can—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Willard.” Georgio was addressing Cal, not me. “You have a phone call. You can take it at my desk if you like.”

Cal thanked the headwaiter and followed him to his station. He returned a couple minutes later, saying, “That was Sammy. They just pulled into the marina with your boat. Wanted to know if you wanted a phone hook-up as well as water and electricity. I told him you did.”

“Good thinking. Speaking of phones, did you think to bring your cell phone with you?”

“I’m never without it when I travel anywhere. Why?”

“Just in case I need to talk to you while you’re driving down to the cabin. By the way, when are you planning to leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, if Sammy and Pete don’t mind. What’s next on your agenda?”

I blew out my cheeks. “Nothing I can do until Walt brings that computer.” I glanced at my watch. “Bet you a buck he’s here right after lunch.”

I would have lost that bet. I paced my room until half past three before he showed up, loaded down with boxes. It took him three trips to his car to bring it all up. There was no surface of my room furniture large enough to hold the computer and monitor except the coffee table. “No problem,” Walt said, “I brought an extension cord that’s long enough.”

I called Cal, thinking he might be able to help, since I was hopeless with electronic gadgets. He arrived at practically the same time Walt brought in his final load, and they both began tearing into the boxes. They were maybe half way through their work when Cecil’s familiar knock came. I looked at my watch. Five till four. He was a greedy five minutes early. I asked Walt where he’d parked, then for his car keys, which he handed over without question. Like a kid with a new electric train, he was already absorbed with computer construction. I let Cecil in, led him over by the window, out of the way, and told him what I wanted. With what I was offering, it didn’t take too much arm-twisting.

He was back in less than an hour, and Walt’s Plymouth was now parked in the employee’s area of the basement parking garage, next to the door marked “Hotel Staff Only”; a door, which took a personal magnetic ID card to unlock. Cecil handed me his card and assured me he wouldn’t get into trouble. “I’ll simply report it lost. They will issue me another one. Once you’re inside, take three steps to the right. There is a service elevator that goes to every floor. Anything else?”

“No, not at the moment. You’re amazing, my friend.”

“Glad to be of service.” Ever the gentleman, he pocketed the bills I handed him without counting them.

I let him out and sat down with my rip sheet. The thing that was bothering me the most was the way Koontz had taken my bait. Okay, so he’d set the FBI dogs on me, looking for Mac’s non-existent diaries, and gotten me fired from the paper, but all in all, a relatively mild reaction. Practically anyone with his influence and a reputation to protect would have done the same in a snit. Also, what, if anything, did he have to do with Jean Tyndall’s death, which I knew could not possibly have been a suicide. All of a sudden, a flash came to me. “Walt?”

He looked up from his work. “Yessir?”

“I just thought of something that might narrow your search for those six men. Each of them would’ve had some personal connection with the Judge.”

“Really? Well! That’ll certainly make the cross checking easier. We’re almost done here, and I can get started on it. I’ve tied into my home computer, too. All you need to do is type in my password, which is—”

I grabbed the phone on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Mr. Willard?”

“Yes.”

“This is Betty Kucinski. Remember? Joe Mackenzie’s wife? Can I talk to you?”

I took a quick breath. “Sure. Yes, ma’am, of course you can.”

“I don’t mean on the phone.”

“All right. I understand. Where are you?”

“I’m in the hotel lobby. I took a bus down from Bethesda.”

I had to think fast. “Please listen carefully, Miz Kucinski. Go outside and take a cab to Reilly’s Bar and Grill. It’s in Chelsea. Whatever the cab fare costs, I’ll pay for it. I can meet you there right away. Can you do that?”

“Uh, huh. What’s the name of it again?”

“Reilly’s Bar and Grill. On Flanagan Avenue. Got it?”

“I think so. Reilly’s, on Flanagan Avenue. You’ll meet me there?”

“I’m on my way right now.”

I hung up, headed for the door at a run, hoping she had it right. “Walt, I’m borrowing your car for a while. Be back soon as I can.”

I was halfway to the service elevator when Cal yelled at me, “I told Sammy and Pete to come here for dinner. Will you be back by seven?”

“I don’t know. Just put it on my tab. See you later.”

Betty wanted to eat first. Sean Reilly, after wringing my hand and thanking me profusely for what I had “done for that poor girl, Liz” had graciously offered their private dining room, and Moira served us enough food for a large family! I had little appetite, but “Old Sarge’s” common law wife ate enough for both of us, taking plenty of time to do it, too. By the time she polished off a huge piece of apple pie, it was after seven, and I was like the old long-tailed cat in the room full of rocking chairs; outwardly calm, but nervous as hell on the inside. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Has there been a miracle?”

This brought a hearty laugh from my dinner partner. “Hey, I’ll tell you what the miracle was. Back when Joe was a foul-mouthed regular at the NCO club at Bragg—he was only a buck sergeant then, and I was the waitress he couldn’t keep his paws off of—I told him if he was ever gonna get to know me the way he wanted to, he’d have to take me to church on the first date and every other date after that first one. The miracle was, he did! I took him to my church and the second time, would you believe it, he got saved. He’s been a good born again Christian ever since.”

I kept my smile neutral. “That’s wonderful. You must have had a good life together.”

“We did, leastwise when he was home. Most of the time he was driving that mean old General around all over the world. Sent me his check every month, though, regular. You know, you have a good face, Mr. Willard. So did your daddy. You look like folks we can trust. God-fearing folks. Can I trust you?”

“Yes, ma’am. You can trust me. My daddy, too.”

“I believe you. Know what tipped me off? You’re polite. Ain’t too many men say yes, ma’am and no, ma’am any more. Joe noticed that, too.”

“He did?”

She laughed again. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned forward, her voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “Joe ain’t paralyzed, Mr. Willard. He can hear and talk just as good as he ever did.”

I didn’t dare say a word.

“He’s been faking that stuff for better’n two years now. Got ’em all fooled; doctors, nurses, orderlies, everybody. But when they let me take him out for walks with him strapped in his wheelchair, where nobody can hear us, he talks to me plenty. Now he wants to talk to you.”

“That’s… that’s great. When?”

“Tomorrow, if you want to. Only thing is, he don’t want you to write nothing in the papers about it.”

“Why not?”

“Same reason he’s been play acting all this time. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth to the wrong people, he’ll be killed. Could I have some more coffee?”

It was a miracle, all right. A blessing. Another crack in my reverse maze. I didn’t mind a bit driving her home to Bethesda. Didn’t mind a bit that she talked the whole way about how nasty General Tyndall had treated her husband. How he’d teased his driver—who couldn’t talk back—unmercifully about his being a holy roller. A Jesus freak. And worse. Didn’t mind a bit when she got out, promising to pray for Cal and me every night. I didn’t even mind the annoying extra hour it took me to change the slick right rear tire on Walt’s car that blew out halfway back to Washington, and messing up one of my new suits doing it.

I felt pretty good about everything until I got out of the service elevator on my floor and found the hall full of cops and FBI men. I didn’t start to feel really bad until I shouldered my way through them, past Thurmond Frye, and into my wreck of a room, nearly stumbling over Cecil Hathaway, whose sensual lips were formed into a small circle of surprise and whose forehead now boasted a smaller circle. No, I felt it when I saw Walt’s body lying on the littered floor behind the coffee table, an identical hole between his still open eyes. That’s when I felt bad. Real bad. When I noticed his severed hands resting on the computer keyboard, I began to get sick to my stomach.

And when Frye told me there had been an explosion at the Sheraton Marina in Georgetown, and that my boat had been blown up, I threw up on his raincoat, then felt my legs go out from under me.

Chapter 10

There is no kind of pain like the anguish of losing a close friend. None. And if you add to it the belief that you are responsible for their death, the hurt is unbearable. Experienced combat soldiers know not to allow themselves to get too close to a buddy for just that reason. When the guy next to you in the foxhole gets blown away, you still have to function. You can’t afford the time to be sorry or to ask, why him and not me? When I came to in Cal’s room, slapping away shock along with the hand holding smelling salts under my nose, my first thought was that I was the guy in the foxhole who survived. I had to function. To go on. To fight. Two people were dead because of me; one because he was trying to help me, and one simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had to find some way to insulate myself from that agony of conscience.

At least long enough to find their killers.

And when I found them, I’d kill them. This I knew.

Much later, Cal would say that when I came to, I had a different look on my face and in my eyes. One that scared him. A cold look. Like dry ice. He was absolutely right. What I felt was not the torture of grief. Not sorrow. Not even recrimination. No, what Cal saw on my face was a mask. A mask of manufactured calm concealing rage. A pure, white-hot hatred that had begun building inside me like the first deep rumblings of a wakening volcano. I would do my grieving later. Blame myself later. Shed the private, bitter tears of loss later. Right now I had to think. Act.

My head was crystal clear. I listened to and heard every word Thurmond Frye said. How it had happened: “The killer was after you, Jeb. He apparently forced Hathaway to let him in your room, shot him, and then shot Erikson, thinking it was you. At least we know who he is.”

“You do?” Cal said. “Who?”

“He’s a top-dollar pro. We don’t know his real name, but the arrogant son of a bitch always leaves one of two calling cards; either the chopped-off hands of his target, or his nickname—‘Hemiola’—written somewhere in the victim’s blood. We think he’s Latino. Maybe Puerto Rican or Cuban. Operates in both North and South America. Interpol thinks he’s responsible for maybe twenty or thirty assassinations, from Canada to Chile, mostly political, but we think most of the six or seven murders attributed to him in our country were Mafia hits.”

When Frye mentioned Mafia hits, a name jumped into my mind, and a second later I was dead certain I knew who was calling the shots that had killed Walt and Cecil. Ezekiel Koontz had ordered my death sure as God made little green apples. If you can’t find the diaries, kill the guy who knows where they are, right?

“But why blow up the boat?” Cal wanted to know.

I watched Frye shrug, then give an honest answer. “We don’t know. Not yet, but we’ll find out. Count on it.” He turned back to me. “Jeb, somebody wants those diaries bad. Where are they?”

“There are no diaries. I told your man Barnes that already.”

“Why do I have such a hard time believing that?”

“That’s your problem. You want me to take a polygraph?”

“I might, later on, but first things first. What to do with you right now.”

My mind was working hard. “Bury me.”

“What?”

“Bury me. Look, the killer thinks I’m dead. So does the bastard who paid for it. So let me stay dead. You’ll have a better chance of catching them that way. Besides, if they think I’m not dead, they’ll try again, and next time they won’t make any mistakes. Who were all those cops in my room?”

“The Washington P.D. ‘M’ squad. Captain Frank Kemp and his men.”

“They still in there?”

“Every man, and my forensic team. Why?”

“Can you please call Kemp in here?”

It took thirty minutes to solidify the idea I’d had. Another hour to work out the basic details. Some of it was cruel as hell. The FBI would contact Walt’s wife, tell her that Walt had been suddenly called in to work with the CIA on some hush-hush computer project out of the country, and would later become “missing in action” somewhere in Europe. His body would be kept in the morgue until then. I would hide out at Cal’s mountain cabin near the Carolina-Tennessee border for as long as it would take. Cal himself would go there for a period of personal isolation; a fishing trip, accompanied by Sammy and Pete Suggs, who were sworn on the spot to secrecy, as was Captain Kemp and his squad.

Neither Frye nor Kemp could think of a better plan. They didn’t have a lot of faith that the ruse would work for very long, but it just might, long enough to get a beachhead of progress on their joint investigation, plus it would keep me out of Frye’s hair permanently, which, I’m sure, was basically why he agreed to try it.

Both also agreed to give me time to drive the Chevy to the cabin before putting the rest of the plan in place. We sent Sammy and Pete to the ramp, along with one of Kemp’s men, to pick up the car, with instructions to take it to the “back door” of the hotel. While Frye and the Washington cop went back to my room to give their orders, Cal tried to get me to lie down and rest a while. I couldn’t.

I pantomimed writing a note. Cal nodded, fished out some hotel stationery from the side table and handed me a sheet, along with his pen. I wrote: “My room/phone was probably bugged. Yours may be, too, so don’t talk.’’

Cal Willard hadn’t acquired my “Wom” nickname for nothing. He turned the paper over, took his pen back and wrote: “Don’t trust Frye. Don’t trust anybody. Take no more chances.”

I shook my head. Then asked for the paper and pen back.

“Going to cabin via Chapel Hill.”

Cal arched one eyebrow, and nodded again. He knew as well as I did that if the plan failed, they’d go after Liz. She was Mac McCarty’s sister. Someone who might possibly know about his diaries, and dead women don’t talk any more than dead men do.

I washed my face with cold water and waited for Frye to tell me Sammy and Pete were back with Cal’s car. I shook hands with Cal, and went back the way I’d come in to the employee’s parking area. Pete had something to say while Sammy distracted the two policemen with some unknown tactic.

“Listen quick, Jeb. I was a Navy Seal until I retired, remember? That vessel was blown up by people who knew how to do it, and what to use. The boats on both sides of her weren’t even scorched. She imploded.” He cupped his big hands and clapped them together to show me. “Good thing Sammy and I were not aboard. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been enough of us left to spread on a piece of toast.”

I nodded, thanked him for the information, shook one of those big hands, and drove Cal’s Chevy out into the Washington dawn. It had begun to rain again.

* * *

In any normal year, this time of mid-autumn, many North Carolina natives become tourists, making annual treks to the mountains to see the enormous palette of color the forests become. It’s a kaleidoscope that’s as impressive as any drive through the New England fall foliage. This year, however, the unusual amount of heavy rain that had fallen all across the State was keeping most of them at home. Nonetheless, I-40 traffic, both ways, was enough to make me turn off and take the back roads. The ones I knew so well. I remembered the infrequent times I’d made the trip home by car, driving west to east, leaving the Great Smokies with their heads in the clouds and their toes in the Pigeon River, and rushing like a lemming down Black Mountain toward the coast, full of nostalgic anticipation. I remembered how the large cities had become larger, the small ones smaller; something that bothered me. What had bothered me more, though, had been the gaps in the pine forests, where loggers had taken what they wanted and left denuded acres looking like grainy news film of war zones. I’d pass rusting clusters of drooping mailboxes standing like squads of tired soldiers guarding dusty crossroads and rotting derelicts that had once been proud, whitewashed farmhouses. Most of them had been long abandoned to their swaybacked misery along with their broods of tobacco barns, all totally enveloped in vine and weed, like neglected graves.

Sometimes I’d stop and get out of the car to stretch, and watch a large family scavenge a peanut field, mining the tender nuggets left behind by the harvesting machine. I’d enjoy the smell of it, chuckling softly as I noticed some of the women wearing old fashioned bonnets tied with sashes as faded as my memories of Grandma, who wore them with grace and dignity. Often, there would be a small cemetery next to the field. The closer I got to Tryon’s Cove, the more of them I’d see. Then I’d smell the brackish water lapping roots of the cypress trees, and I knew I’d be home soon.

Those had been happier days, and seemed like a century ago. Now, I was driving in the opposite direction towards God knows what, and with a partner I had figuratively kidnapped. I hadn’t wanted to take any chance of seeing or talking to the Johnsons, so I’d parked a block down the street from their house. Luckily, Liz had emerged less than half an hour later, on her way to some class. I had gotten out of the car and waited for her. Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t recognized me until she was no more than a dozen feet away, then she’d rushed into my arms, given me a quick kiss, “Jeb!” Then another one. Deeper and longer. A kiss that under any other circumstances would have sent me into a different plane of existence altogether. I had shoved her into the Chevy and driven out of Chapel Hill as fast as legally possible. We were nearly south of Greensboro before I finished telling her everything.

She was quiet, then. Not sullen, only pensive. For a hundred miles. I knew she was trying hard to think it through. Understand it all, and I wasn’t much help. She asked very few questions, and finally said, “Jeb, I don’t want to die, and I don’t want you to die either. Why don’t we just keep on driving? Like maybe to California?”

That was a question I had a hard time trying to answer. I couldn’t tell her that three ghosts and the blue fire in my belly made such a tempting act impossible. The best I could do was, “You’ll be safe at the cabin. We both will.”

I stopped at Wal Mart stores on the outskirts of Hickory, Statesville, and Asheville, sending Liz into each one with cash to buy a few warm clothes, hiking boots, and personal toiletries. Using a credit card was out of the question, and I didn’t want to drop a large amount in any one place, but thankfully, money was not a problem. I still had better than two grand in my wallet, left over from the five I’d taken out of the bank when I’d deposited Helene Fordham’s down payment.

And so, we arrived at the cabin’s oak gate just before dusk. The first thing I noticed was the difference in temperature. Much colder than usual. The first thing Liz noticed was the noise. “What is it, Jeb? Sounds like the ocean.”

“It’s the river. Come on, I’ll show you.”

I took my time driving down the zigzag macadam driveway to the house, explaining to Liz that Cal had bought the cabin and the sixteen acres of sloping wilderness right after my mother had died. “There were no neighbors within ten miles then, and even fewer now. We always came up here for a few weeks each summer, and every other year Cal would bring his Boy Scout Troop up here for camping, fishing, and rafting. After we unpack, I’ll show you the cave we found, too. Real Robinson Crusoe stuff.”

“You must have had some boyhood.”

“That I did. Cal tells me I never quite got out of it.”

“You don’t call him Dad?”

“No. Ever since my Mom died, I’ve always called him Cal, and he calls me Pal.”

I set the handbrake and we got out of the Chevy. Liz was impressed with the five-room cabin; solidly constructed of real logs and indigenous rock, actually built in two levels, right into the slope of the mountain, thirty feet above the river. We walked, carefully, down the narrow footpath as far as we could go.

“My God, it looks like the Colorado!” Liz shouted. She was right. The flooding rains had turned the Quail River from a pebble-bottomed trout stream you could sometimes wade across into a raging, mud-yellow express train, fifteen feet above its normal bank. So close to the cabin in fact, that it almost reached the small shed and the four-man Zodiac hanging under it.

“Cal is an expert with that boat, Liz. We liked to take her downstream through the mild rapids to the reservoir, about eight miles from here. We called it ‘shooting the moon.’ He always keeps her in tip-top shape, too. Come on; let me show you our cave. We can unpack later.”

In certain areas, from New York to Georgia, the great eastern mountain range is pocked with caves; some tiny, some enormous; a spelunker’s delight. We had discovered ours the second summer up here, its entrance nearly hidden by a cluster of pine, now grown even bigger. It wasn’t a large cave, maybe thirty square feet of slanted floor, and anyone over five-three would have to stoop to walk in it. Liz poked her nose inside once and said, “I’m not going in there, Jeb Willard. Besides, it stinks.”

I laughed. “You’re right. We didn’t bring a light, anyway. Let’s go back. I think it’s going to rain again. Careful, now, I don’t want you slipping. It would be hard to fish you out of that river right now.”

It didn’t take Liz long to adjust to the rustic life. Well, hardly rustic. Cal had long ago installed a power generator—with a backup—in plus a freezer and fridge, always kept well stocked, and a pantry full of canned goods with a hanging wine rack. While I got the fire going in the living room fireplace, she busied herself with throwing together a meal worthy of any chef, and we ate every bite of it. The bottle of decent Cabernet finished me off. I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was, having had so little sleep. This of course, was a good thing. I was too bushed to think about anything. I was also too tired to argue when Liz came into Cal’s room where I had collapsed, sat down on the bed, and began massaging my neck and back. “I want to sleep with you tonight, Jeb, but not to make love. I just want you to hold me. That’s what will make me feel safe.”

I managed to move my head up and down a little. Her fingers were supple. Magical. “Where did you learn how to do that?” I don’t know whether I actually said that or simply felt it. In any case, I fell asleep before she could answer. I think she held me all night.

* * *

The following morning was a different day. I swallowed the sensual dreams I’d had of her along with the breakfast she’d cooked. I silently helped her with the dishes, dressed carefully, and ignored her angry outburst at my request. Pouting, she drove me to the Trailways station at Knoxville, dropped me off, and burned rubber turning around to go back, after promising not to answer the phone. “Why not?”

“Just don’t. Cal, Sammy, and Pete will be at the cabin in a day or two. I might be back by then, anyway.”

“Where are you going?”

“South.”

When the Chevy was out of sight, I went in and bought a round trip ticket to Miami. Mr. Mafia didn’t know it yet, but he was about to have a visitor.

Chapter 11

The long bus trip to Miami was a hell of a way to spend my birthday, and I seriously wondered if I’d live to see forty plus one hour. I hadn’t bothered to shave the past two days, or to shower, hoping that the apparent lack of personal hygiene, along with my costume, would discourage any fellow bus passengers or anyone on either side of the law from attempts at either conversation or something worse. I boarded wearing worn-out jeans with no belt, a dirty western style shirt left over from my Mexican adventures, a faded blue windbreaker with a busted zipper, and an equally filthy Dekalb seed cap. I’d had the foresight to also stash five C-notes in each sock before putting on my old hiking boots, and distributing the rest in various pockets. My billfold held nothing but my New Mexico driver’s license, which had already expired anyway, and I’d carried no baggage at all.

My precautions worked, too. No one recognized or bothered me, and I was happy that I was even able to take a few short naps. The bus pulled into Miami around ten, and the flophouse hotel I spent the rest of the night in asked no questions. The following morning, I ate a couple of sausage biscuits at a nearby Hardee’s restaurant, washed down with two cups of bad coffee, then hailed a cab. The condescending Cuban driver was reluctant to take me anywhere, so I surprised him twice; first by handing him a crisp fifty dollar bill, then by telling him where I wanted to go. I couldn’t have begun to guess his thoughts as he dropped me off at the steel gate of one of the largest estates on Biscayne Bay. He wasted no time leaving me there either.

I stood there for a minute or two, noting the closed-circuit cameras perched on top of both towers that framed the massive double gate, and the fifteen foot-high wall stretching practically into infinity on both sides of it. The two well dressed men who appeared instantly on the other side of the bars when I rang the speaker bell must have also thought some derelict had first gotten drunk and then lost. “Beat it, buster,” one of them said. “This is private property.”

I grabbed the bars in both hands. “I have a good reason to be dressed like this, and I want to see Don Cancelossi.”

The two men looked at each other, then laughed. The first guy looked back at me and said, “Bums in hell want ice water, too, but they ain’t likely to get none. Beat it. Get outa here.”

“Look, I don’t want to cause you guys any trouble. Just please call your boss and tell him Jeb Willard wants to see him. When he knows my name, he’ll want to talk to me. You can take that to the bank.”

The second man, a little younger than his partner, unbuttoned his suit jacket. I knew why, but I hadn’t come this far to be intimidated. I put up my hands. “I’m not carrying, or anything like that, boys, but you’d better hit that call button right now, or you’re gonna be in deep shit.”

A few more heated exchanges ensued, and when I saw the big Lincoln come roaring down the drive toward us, I knew the closed circuit system boasted state of the art audio as well, and somebody had been listening. It stopped five feet from the gate, and from it emerged one of the biggest men I’d ever seen. He had no hair and no neck, must have weighed close to three hundred, and didn’t look as though any of it was fat. The two guards stepped aside and he walked right up to me. His voice was surprisingly soft, though tinged with an Italian accent. “Who are you, mister, and what do you want?”

I repeated my demand, and added, “Tell your boss Senor Hemiola missed a beat this time, and wasted the wrong guy. Also, tell him that Snow White told me he was the ugliest dwarf of them all.”

The giant’s expression didn’t change a bit. “Wait right there.” He went back to the car, picked up the car phone, and spoke into it. A moment later, I saw him nod. He replaced the phone, got out and ordered his flunkies to open the gate. I went through, and was instantly frisked more thoroughly than President Fordham’s men had.

“He’s clean,” one of them said.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” the other added, wrinkling his nose. “Anyways, he ain’t carrying, Bruno.”

Bruno nodded, then looked at me. “This way, please.”

I thought he was going to put me in the Lincoln, but he didn’t. He led me up the drive maybe a hundred yards, then turned abruptly to the right. I followed him across an acre of manicured lawn into an equally perfect flower garden. Fifty more yards of winding gravel path led to an ornate gazebo, complete with an overhead fan which moved sweet air over twin padded loveseats. Big Bruno, polite as he could be, told me to “have a seat,” then took up an arms-folded, feet-apart position ten paces away, on the path toward the mansion. From where I sat, I could only see one rose-colored wing of it.

But I didn’t have to wait long.

Salvatore Cancelossi was nothing like I had imagined him to be. The few photographs I had seen of him had suggested a much younger, larger man. In fact, he wasn’t more than five-three, and probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds. He looked like a mummified jockey! And the bags under his eyes seemed as though they carried nearly a century’s worth of sadness. He was dressed in a loose, flowery shirt, open at the collar, which hung well over a pair of ridiculous red shorts. Between the bottom hem of those shorts and the sandals on his small feet, two legs the size and shape of gnarled walking canes propelled him along at a funereal pace. In one bony hand, he was carrying a book. When he reached the loveseat opposite me, I was amazed to see that the book was my first one! My photo was on the dust jacket.

He didn’t bother to shake hands, but he gave me a look that without the smile that accompanied it would have frozen my blood. Eyes like he had didn’t belong in a human being. Maybe an Osprey. Or a crocodile. “I read this with great pleasure, Mr. Willard. Your second one, however, was rather disappointing.”

I couldn’t for the life of me find a voice.

“I’ll give you ten minutes to tell me why you have come here.”

May as well be shot for a sheep as for a goat, I thought. “I came to see what kind of man would kill me, not to mention those two good friends of mine. And to tell you that if anything does happen to me, I have made arrangements for copies of Robert McCarty’s diaries to be published in every major newspaper in the country. Can we negotiate?”

The leather face never even twitched, nor did his eyes or voice. “I have been called worse than an ugly dwarf in my time, and it is true that in the past I have been suspected of many kinds of unsavory actions, but I have never been convicted of anything illegal, including murder, and I am not guilty of trying to kill you or hiring anyone else to.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I expect you will leave my home just as healthy as when you arrived. At that point, you will surely believe it.”

“You’re saying you can prove you didn’t contract that hit man called Hemiola on Judge Koontz’s orders?”

“Better than you can prove I did.”

“I’m listening.”

He fished in his pockets for a pack of Camels, shook one out, and waited while Bruno rushed over to light it. He inhaled deeply two or three times, then squinted through the smoke at me. “First things first. To bring you up to date, my confederation of families, which I like to call our brotherhood, stopped doing that sort of thing many, many years ago. Since those wonderful twenty years preceding the millennium, we have also found it to be a good deal more profitable to be involved with legitimate business and the stock market. And, with far less risk. The reason I have reached, let us say, my current position in our organization is because I was able a long time ago to convince my family friends and colleagues that owning resorts and casinos all over the world along with healthy investment portfolios produces far better balance sheets. They saw the logic of having much less overhead than running silly numbers rackets, prostitution, or losing so many of our people fighting street wars with ethnic types, minorities, and even ourselves over the sale of certain imported commodities. The often romantic and sometimes horrendous image of the so-called Cosa Nostra portrayed in old movies and by writers like the dear departed Puzo hasn’t existed for fifty years. What ordinary Americans like to call ‘The Mafia’ is colorful, but ancient history. I will readily admit we are somewhat insular, but our organization is now as benign as masons and shriners, though possibly not quite as benevolent, except for the church.”

I sat there listening to this bullshit with a straight face. When the Camel burned down, he promptly had Bruno light another. So the old man was a chain smoker as well as a great salesman. Though there was a certain element of truth in what he was saying, I knew he was only spouting the party line. Of all the world’s great sins, greed is well ahead of whatever is in second place, and there would never be a limit for people like Sal Cancelossi.

“Now,” he continued, “as to your personal predicament, I do keep up with things. I read many newspapers, including your old one, and watch a few choice television programs, plus, I am privy to other sources of information which are usually more reliable, so I happen to know of your recent loss, but I assure you I had nothing to do with it. Nothing whatsoever. It is true I was one of Koontz’s dwarfs. Don’t misunderstand me, at the time, I did not particularly think it was a smart move, but Tyndall did seem a better choice, and I owed the Judge a personal debt you don’t need to know about. So, after Tyndall was elected, I never had anything further to do with either man. It cost me millions, but Koontz and I were quits. Even.”

This time he waved Bruno away and lit his third Camel himself. “I am telling you all this because it bears directly on why you have come here. I have heard of this man who calls himself Hemiola, but may God strike me dead where I sit, he has never worked for me. I have no reason to see you dead, and since I owe Koontz nothing, he could not have persuaded me to do you harm either. You asked for proof. Come, I’ll show you some.”

With some effort, he stood. Smiling, he motioned for me to accompany him down the path through the rear of the garden. Bruno was three steps behind. The path led past a row of tall shrubs and palm trees to the private dock behind the mansion. “What do you think of her?” he asked, pointing.

The yacht was ninety feet if she was an inch. Gorgeous. Modern. Even had a helicopter deck. The sight of such a vessel could take the breath away from anyone who admires boats. “She’s magnificent.”

“She’s a custom built Hatteras. Named for my beloved Anna, God rest her soul.”

He looked at me, his eyes softening a little. “I happen to know you also love boats, and I am sorry you lost yours. Next to the woman you love, there is nothing in this world more desirable than a beautiful, well-built boat. I would never have taken it away from you. Not like that.”

I stared at him hard. No matter what he had said before, I knew, knew he was telling me the truth. I felt it deep in my gut.

“One other thing, young man. As I told you before, I enjoy your writing. You also showed a fair amount of intelligence and cleverness getting away like you did, not to mention one big pair of balls coming here to accost me. Who was the man killed by mistake?”

I told him about Walt, and why he was working with me.

“My regrets. So, my final words: I like you, Jeb Willard, and once more assure you I had nothing to do with that untidy mess. I doubt there was any conspiracy behind that boy’s shooting Tyndall, either, but if it will make you happy, come back here exactly one week from today and as final proof of my sincerity and innocence, I will give you two things.”

“What things?”

“If you promise you will take a bath beforehand, I’ll take you out on the ANNA B. for a little fishing trip, and, I will give you the names of the other six dwarfs.” He chuckled at my speechless reaction, and then signaled to his man, Bruno, who fished a wireless phone from his pocket, turned, then spoke into it. Cancelossi looked at me again. “There will be transportation for you at the front gate. Do we have a date?”

“You bet we do,” I said. The three of us started back toward the garden, and I couldn’t resist adding, “There’s one other thing I’d like to know.”

“And that is?”

“Why didn’t you like my second book?”

He stopped. Laid a hand on my arm. “Your first book was written in a breezy, fast-moving style. Like a thriller. The book about the Mexican rebellion was just the opposite. You were obviously trying to write like an intellectual. It was terribly sophomoric. I have no doubt your third one will be better.”

“If I live long enough to write it.”

“According to the national media, you’re already dead, and if I were you, I would stay buried for a while. There are times to move and times to go to ground. Invoke the Custer rule.”

“The what?”

His throat emitted a wheezy cackle. “Poor General Custer proved only one thing with his headstrong, stupid bravery at Little Big Horn—a good run is much better than a bad stand. Lie low for a while longer, and come go fishing with me next week.”

Chapter 12

I can’t say I enjoyed the ride back to Knoxville any more than the one to Miami, except that on the return trip, I had plenty of reading material. Before boarding, I bought two Miami papers, and at every stop, bought a local paper along with any national papers available. It wasn’t until the bus stopped briefly at Chattanooga that I was able to find a copy of the Post. I don’t know why, but I felt just a little miffed that the story of my “murder” and the accompanying brief obit, doubtlessly written by my old boss, was buried better than I was, on page five. (It didn’t even make any of the other papers.) But there was a good reason for it. The front pages of every paper were devoted to the Koontz Commission Report.

I wasn’t surprised at the “conclusion” reached, although I felt like a dog with a chicken bone stuck in his throat while I read it; the most asinine string of paragraphs I’d ever seen: Mac McCarty was the sole person responsible for President Tyndall’s death… No one else involved… No conspiracy… No cover-up… Several other Secret Service agents had testified Mac had been despondent, not quite himself, for a long time. That he may have harbored some kind of personal grudge against Buford Tyndall… Tyndall may have blocked a promotion? Transfer?… Friends (which friends??) had testified that over a period of time, Mac had dropped them, one after the other.

But the worst lie of all was that his wife, Abigail, now “in seclusion in an undisclosed location” had told the Commission that her husband had been depressed, more and more withdrawn from her and their children for the past four years, and that she had been afraid he might take his own life.

The whole thing made me sick to my stomach.

When I got to Knoxville, I was able to buy a copy of both the News and Observer and the Charlotte Observer, and read them on the local bus to Asheville. The front pages of both those major Carolina papers were filled with much the same, but there was a little more written about me as well. It was quite an odd feeling, reading my own obituaries. I never knew I was so important! The story of my death was about what I had expected, neatly spun out by Cal before he’d left Washington; tragic series of events… Shot to death in downtown Washington hotel… Robbery the obvious motive. No mention of Walt or poor Cecil.

The last few miles, I couldn’t help wondering how some other people might be reacting to my published demise. Ernie, for instance, and President Fordham. I was more concerned that Betty might have read about it, and dutifully reported it to her husband. I wasn’t too worried about how the good people in my home town might feel, since I knew I’d be resurrected one day, hopefully soon, and with a hell of a story to tell. For a few others, it was possibly just as well if they thought I was dead. Father Flaherty and the Reilly’s, who were known to have had some contact with me, would maybe be in a lot less danger now.

The bus dropped me off half a mile from Cal’s cabin gate. Twenty minutes later, I walked part way down the drive, turned one of its sharp curves, and practically ran right up the barrel of the shotgun Sammy Tyson was holding. “Jesus Christ, Jeb. I almost didn’t recognize you. I coulda shot you! Where the hell have you been, anyway? Your dad is goin’ nuts.”

Cal didn’t show much temper. “Take a shower, for God’s sake. I have an idea I know where you went, but we’re too busy right now to talk about it.”

I took the longest shower in history, but didn’t shave. Something in the back of my head told me that if I was to remain incognito for a while, I might as well alter my appearance some, not that it would matter much. No one was any more likely to spot me hiding up here than anybody had years ago when old Erik Rudolf dodged the FBI and local authorities for so long he had practically achieved folk hero status in these mountains Charles Frazier had written so eloquently about at around the same time. It was nearly dark when I emerged from the empty cabin and went looking for everyone. I was puzzled when I noticed that Pete Suggs’ pickup had been parked half way up the drive. I was even more curious to find out what he, Sammy, Cal, and even Liz were up to.

I stopped Cal, who was crossing the drive, carrying what looked to be a speaker and a spool of thin wire. “What’s going on? What are you guys doing?”

“You can help. We’re setting up a warning system. By the way, you had a beautiful funeral service. The whole town showed up. Not a dry eye in the bunch. But more about all that later. Here, give me a hand.”

I followed him through the dense bush to one of the pines he had set a ladder up against. I had to look closely to see the wires leading up the trunk. Quick as a spooked raccoon, Cal climbed the ladder, carrying the speaker, which he then hooked up to the wires. “There, that makes eight. Four to go.”

Before dark, my admiration grew a ton for my father, Sammy, and especially Pete Suggs, who had apparently learned a good deal about booby traps during his stint as a Navy Seal. The small cave was full of car batteries, wired separately to a DC sound system, and connected to several areas around the perimeter of the cabin, along with dozens of carefully camouflaged trip wires.

“When we’re done, not even a salamander could sneak up on your cabin,” Pete said, grinning. “And if your mister Hemiola shows up, he’s gonna get the biggest surprise of his life. I’ve planted small charges all over the place, and your Dad’s sound system would scare the living shit out of anybody trying to sneak in here.”

I went straight to the cave. Cal was busy wiring up three tape recorders to the batteries.

“Got the tapes from the radio station,” he told me. “Sound effects of small arms, shouting, whistles, sirens, you name it. If anybody trips over one of those wires, it’s going to sound like World War Three around here.”

“I’m impressed, Cal, to no end. But why do all this? Is there some problem I don’t know about?”

Cal straightened up, the look on his face dark. “A small one, but it could be disastrous. Liz was concerned that Professor Johnson and his wife would be out of their minds worrying about her, so she called to let them know she was okay.”

“Damn!”

“Don’t be too hard on her, pal. She didn’t realize… Anyway, Liz has worked like a Trojan to help us while you were so conspicuously absent. She’s quite a girl, that one.”

Since I had not done much of the hard work, I was the designated cook for the night, and managed not to burn the steaks Liz had thawed. The picnic table in the small clearing that served as the cabin’s front yard was quickly occupied by one hungry crew. Between bites, Sammy wanted to know what a Hemiola was. I nodded to Cal, who explained. “It’s mainly a musical term, Sammy. You’ve heard mariachi music in Mexican restaurants, I’m sure. They mix up their rhythms a lot, especially in three-quarter time. It alternates between two beats and three beats within the same measure. Ever heard Bernstein’s West Side Story?”

“I think so. Years ago, maybe.”

“Right. Well, he used it very effectively in one of the songs in the show.” Cal sang, in a reedy tenor, “Life if all right in A-mer-i-ca

If you’re all white in A-mer-I-ca.”

“Take your word for it,” Sammy said, laughing, “And don’t quit your day job.”

“Why would a killer use that for a nickname or calling card, as Frye put it?” Pete asked.

“No idea,” I said. “But if he shows up here, you guys have prepared a royal reception for him.”

“You got that right,” Pete said. “We’ll be done by noon tomorrow, and starting tonight, we’ll go on military watch. Guard duty. Two at a time, four hours each.”

“Whoa!” I said, looking at him hard. “No way I’m going to let you hang around here. You’re going back to Tryon’s Cove. You and Sammy both. I’ve gotten too many people killed already.”

A lively argument erupted, and lasted half an hour. I lost.

I stood my midnight-to-four shift halfway up the path from the cabin, armed with Sammy’s twelve gauge and one of the Walkie-Talkies Cal had brought, glad I’d put on extra clothing plus an old gray wool turtleneck sweater. I was also glad that the rain had stopped, but the cold wind portended an early winter. I had no trouble staying awake, either. The roaring of the Quail, embellished by the fascinating cacophony of night creatures around me was plenty of company. That is, until Liz walked up the drive and sat down next to me.

“I’m sorry I screwed up, Jeb,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have called the Johnsons.”

“It’s all right. I should have thought to get word to them somehow myself.”

She slid closer. “Forgive me?”

“Sure I do.”

She took my free hand and pulled it under her flannel shirt, then up. She wasn’t wearing a bra. “Prove it.”

I swear, if it hadn’t been so damn cold, I might have forgotten all about safety and ripped all the rest of her clothes off, but prudence prevailed over passion, and I tried to send her back with the longest kiss I dared chance.

“Okay, I’ll behave, but I’m not going back, Jeb. I’m staying here with you.”

It was an acceptable compromise. We sat there in silence, our warmth coming from each other, a long two hours before Sammy relieved me.

I gave Sammy his shotgun, clapped him on his broad shoulder, and led Liz back down to the cabin. I didn’t see either Cal or Pete, and figured right away that Pete was doing an extra watch somewhere, and Cal had gone to the cave where he’d already stashed a sleeping bag, and so his finger would be only inches from the switches, just in case.

I was tired, but when Liz poured two glasses of wine instead of making cups of hot chocolate, I knew I was not going to get any sleep right away. “I’m going to take a shower, Jeb. You used up all the hot water this afternoon, but it’s probably warm enough by now. Don’t go away.”

I had two, maybe three sips of the wine, and was starting to pull the sweater off, when all hell broke loose. It was as if all the trip wires had been sprung at once. I jumped off the sofa like a rocket, started to run outside, but remembered where Liz was, and hesitated. The noise outside the cabin became enough to wake people up two counties away: Cal’s recorded gunfire, some of Pete’s explosions, whistles, sirens, shouting, including Pete’s voice coming through the Walkie Talkie. “It’s a whole fucking platoon, Cal.”

Then, Cal’s voice, under control, “Bat Man to Robin. Respond.”

I took the cue. “Robin here.”

“Shoot the moon. Don’t wait. No time. Shoot the goddamn moon!”

I dropped the Walkie Talkie and ran to the back room just as Liz came out of it, half in and half out of Cal’s white terrycloth robe, her eyes full of terror. “Jeb?”

I grabbed her hand, and with my other one, a butcher knife from the kitchen table. Not taking the time to look around for a flashlight, I yanked her through the back door just as I heard a round from something a lot more powerful than a rifle crash into the living room wall. “Don’t talk, Liz, come on, we have to get to the boat.”

Halfway down the treacherous path to the boat shed, Liz snagged the robe on a limb, causing her to stumble. “Forget it!” I screamed. “Just leave it there.” I forced myself to go slow enough not to slip, turning every other step down to help Liz, ignoring her nakedness.

We reached the lean-to where the Zodiac hung from its lashings. My eyes had almost begun to adjust to the lack of light, and I noticed new raindrops between Liz’s face and mine when I grabbed her by both arms and yelled, “Listen to me, Liz. We only have a few seconds. This boat is our only chance. I have some experience with it, but not when the river was anything like—”

A crash came from above and behind us. Then a flare exploded above the river, illuminating for a second the unholy look of fear in her eyes. She was trying to say something, but no sound was coming out. I cut the first two leather straps. The rear end of the rubber boat dropped down to the ground. I pointed to the inside straps. “Hold on to these. I’ll try to steer. Whatever you do, hold on to those straps. Don’t let go, no matter what happens.”

She nodded, and I cut the remaining two straps. The nose of the boat fell and we pushed it to the edge of the small, level clearing that was now only inches from the water. I grabbed a paddle, threw it into the bottom of the boat, and helped Liz climb in. When I was sure her feet were secured and she was holding tight to the side straps, I pushed the nose into the river and dived in myself. We were instantly caught up in a maelstrom. Images flew past my eyes at speeds no camera shutter could possibly capture. Black, heaving walls of forest sped by, split by the yellow inferno of crashing water that had enveloped us, moving faster than from a broken hydrant. Spray, cold as liquid ice soaked me to the skin in seconds.

Several times, the rubber boat, thrown by the river’s centrifugal force in the curves, brushed scrub bush limbs and pine needles, scourging our faces and shoulders. I lost my steering paddle within the first thirty seconds of our ride into hell, and like Liz, held onto the straps with all my strength. Before we had been carried downstream of the winding river more than half a mile, probably no more than five hundred yards from the cabin as the crow flies, one final explosion lit up the night sky behind us. The resulting sound took a second longer to beat against our ears, over the awesome sound of the water. I knew in that millisecond that the cabin was gone. Forever.

The next thirty minutes held at least that many miracles. I tried to anticipate turns and wave action, but the river was sending the Zodiac down the twisting, freezing, yellow liquid valley willy-nilly, like an out of control bumper car traveling at Nascar speed. Twice, I was thrown over the side, but managed to somehow crab-crawl back in, losing both shoes somewhere in between. I will never know how Liz found the strength to hold on. The rain was now coming down in sheets, at forty-five degrees to the river, but felt like a warm shower compared to the ice water spewed up and over us by the Quail. I think the only thing that saved our lives was that the water was too high to expose the boat’s thin bottom skin to the rocks I knew were there when we hit the rapids. We were simply carried over the tops of all of them, too terrified to realize how cold it was. Too numb to even pray. Maybe our fingers had frozen around the straps. Before I knew it, two more miracles happened. The river smoothed out a little, and the rain let up some. Soon, we drifted into an area where the Quail broadened considerably, and a few minutes later, the current carried us well into the reservoir.

Exhausted and shivering uncontrollably, I was suddenly aware it had stopped raining. I had no idea when it had quit. Had I blacked out? I don’t know. The Quail’s tempest had pushed us half a mile or more into the flat water of the broad lake. Soon as the boat’s motion was quiet, I looked up to see a half moon trying to break through the scudding clouds, then I lowered my eyes and dully watched Liz give up her own consciousness. At the same time, I heard the thumping. At first I thought it was an echo in my ears. I was so tired; I didn’t realize it was a helicopter until we were speared by its nose light.

I had always thought of helicopters as the ugliest of all aircraft. Unlovely and unnatural. Ugly as beggars. Whores of the sky. But this one was an angel. Sent down from heaven by God. Somewhere, I found enough strength to peel off my soaked sweater, and help Liz, who was moaning like a keening widow, to get her arms and head into it. My hands were so frozen, I could hardly grasp the heavy wool material enough to drag it down over her breasts, but some inner force in me not yet called upon desperately wanted to warm her, and cover as much of her nakedness as possible from the leering white Cyclops sweeping over us. Its curious light was intermittently showing me her body was already a dangerous shade of blue. I pulled the sweater down far as I could, then fell back into the Zodiac’s flooded floor.

Sharp lucidity and total blackness visited me by turn during the next series of mini-nightmares: The frogman creature who appeared from the lake. The sight of Liz’s nearly nude body in the harness, swinging like a pornographic pendulum over me. Myself in the sling that cut into my armpits and crotch. Watching the tiny orange boat shrink even smaller, buffeted now not by the Quail’s wrath, but by the angel’s breath. Two pairs of strong arms pulling me inside. Liz, covered by a blanket. A blanket for me, too. No wind any more. No rain. Pretty little colored lights everywhere. A metal door slamming shut. Another miracle that tasted like brandy. A voice. Close up. The angel? The angel’s voice? No. NO! I knew that voice, and it was from no angel. The voice of the fucking devil himself.

“Welcome aboard, Jeb,” Thurmond Frye was saying. “Looks like you’ll live after all. And now you owe me one.”

Chapter 13

The first thing I saw was Lucille Sweeney’s face.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, the Sunday edition of Cal’s paper still carried several of the old-time comic strips; reprints of some that had been popular when he’d been a boy himself, including a few that dated from as far back as the 1940’s and ‘50’s, such as “Li’l Abner”, “Dick Tracy”, “Terry and the Pirates”, along with my favorite, “Buz Sawyer.” One of the chief characters in that series was a female football player named Lucille Sweeney. Lucille had a face that would scare Dracula and a fullback’s body that could run over an eighteen-wheeler. She was also the friendliest, kindest soul imaginable, and unless she was badly provoked, would never have harmed a fly.

But this Lucille Sweeney wore a white uniform, smelled like a mixture of carnations and Johnson’s baby oil, and had great hands! She had apparently finished massaging my back and was trying to turn me over so she could do my front when I woke up. I slowly realized that except for the towel discreetly draped over me just south of my Mason-Dixon line, I was naked, but I didn’t care. Didn’t give a happy damn. I was dry, I was warm, and I was alive. Every muscle in my body was screaming. Even those that controlled my eyelids, but good old Lucille was well on her way to kneading out the knots in every single one of them. “Where am I, Lucille?”

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Willard. My name is Mavis, not Lucille. Mavis Zinman. I’m a nurse. Just take it easy. We’ll have you back to your old self in no time. You’ve been asleep fourteen hours, and your girlfriend is still asleep, but don’t worry, she’s fine otherwise.”

I absorbed this information in silence. From where I lay, I could see that the ceiling of the room I was in was high; a single light fixture recessed in it. The walls were papered, but sported no pictures. Old fashioned, yet odd. Farmhouse? The soles of my feet were touching the foot of a brass bed, and over the tips of my toes, I could see a single window that had no curtains. Venetian blinds had been pulled up, and I could see blue sky. Nothing else, which told me the room was on at least the second floor of whatever building I was in.

Lucille/Mavis was talking again. “That must have been some ride. Took me quite a while to get you both cleaned up. You’re lucky to be alive.”

I managed to turn my head to the side, noticing the table by the bed, on top of which were a large, half-full washbasin, and a bar of soap in a dish next to my wallet. My clothes were nowhere in sight. She still hadn’t told me where we were. I asked her again, and, “What about my father and the others?”

“You’re in one of the safe houses we occasionally borrow from our CIA cousins. I’m not allowed to tell you where, or anything else. Please be patient. Mr. Frye will be back soon. I’m sure he will answer all your questions.” Her hands and fingers increased their expert pressure on my upper thighs. “You have an athlete’s body. Nice. Very nice. No wonder you survived. You must be hungry, too.”

It’s amazing how the power of suggestion works. Her last few words made me forget how my body ached. I was starving. I also had to empty my bladder, and told her so.

“Of course. I’m finished anyway.” She stood, and for the first time, I noticed the first two or three buttons of her uniform were undone, revealing a cleavage that most women would have envied. She didn’t miss seeing my glance, and the sly smile that split her plain face went, it seemed to me, a tad beyond the call of her duty. She pointed left. “You’ll find a robe in that closet. The bathroom’s at the end of the hall. You like bacon and eggs at four in the afternoon?”

“I love bacon and eggs at four in the afternoon. Grits, too.”

“No grits, I’m afraid.” She picked up the washbasin, balanced it neatly on one broad hip, opened the door and looked back before leaving. “Come downstairs when you’re ready. Over light or scrambled?”

“I don’t care.”

I watched her go through the door, walking on legs that would have supported a Steinway.

Her massage had done wonders, but I still felt like I had after the first excruciating day of every spring training football practice. I found the blue robe in the closet easily enough—it was the only garment there. I started to open the door into the hallway, then stopped. The door itself was not an old wooden one like the closet door. I rapped lightly with my knuckles. Metal. And heavy. I looked closer. So was its frame. I checked the door knob and its housing. It looked normal, but when I opened it and checked on the opposite side, I saw a stainless steel plate and keyhole. So. You could only lock or unlock it from the outside. Great. This wasn’t a room, it was a goddamn cell.

I knew I had missed something, turned and went back inside. Looked around closer. Sure enough, there was no light switch on any wall for that recessed overhead light. I squinted up, and saw a small dark circle in its middle. Closed circuit camera! Then I noticed the mirror hanging opposite the bed, to one side of the closet. It looked much too large for the room. Two way?

I padded down the hall to the bathroom, certain the hall and the bathroom, plus the two upstairs rooms I passed were equally equipped. While standing there relieving myself in the bathroom, it struck me that nurse Mavis was probably just as good with needles and certain drugs as she was with a washcloth and baby oil. Thurmond Frye was going to play some hardball, if he hadn’t already. I began to boil inside all over again.

There was no need to go back into my “room” so I went down the single flight of sturdy oak stairs, toward the smell of frying bacon, wondering which one they had stashed Liz in. All the doors I had passed were the same. Identical locks. At the bottom of the stairs, I turned left toward the roomy kitchen, noting on the way that there was yet another door under the stairwell. Must be to a cellar, or basement. Bet that’s where the monitors are.

I wasn’t surprised to see Frye’s man sitting at the kitchen table. He smiled up at me. “Jason Barnes. You do remember me, don’t you?”

“I remember you.”

“Well, you look no worse for wear. Did you rest well?

“Where are we? Where’s Liz?”

Barnes raised a hand in defense. “Hey, she’s okay. Eat something first, then we can talk all you want to.”

My stomach told my brain not to argue. Nurse Mavis Zinman proved to be as good a cook as she was a masseuse, and I polished off the small mountain of food she set before me, eating like a year-old hound. I looked up only once at Barnes, who said, “I’ve already eaten.”

Mavis set the coffeepot down on the table, and left the room. I poured myself a second cup, pushed my plate away, and tried to think of what to say first. There was no sense in making matters worse than they were, so I decided not to say or do anything to antagonize my host and hostess. Just the opposite. “You guys saved our lives. I should thank you for pulling us out of the river. You were aboard the helicopter, weren’t you?”

“Yes. So was Dr. Zinman.”

“She told me she was a nurse.”

Barnes laughed. “Basic psychology. People coming out of shock react better to nurses than doctors. Mavis was trained at John Hopkins. She’s been on our team for three years.” His face grew serious. “Now, about what happened, there’s the good news and the bad news.”

“I want to know about my father. Where is he?”

“We think he’s safe, or at least, we don’t know he isn’t. We didn’t find him. That’s the good news. The bad news, I’m sorry to say, is that one of your friends didn’t make it.”

“Which one?”

“Peter Suggs. He took four rounds in the chest.”

My coffee turned bitter. “And Sammy?”

“He’s at a hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee. Took a bullet in the left upper thigh. He might walk with a limp for a few months, but he’s going to be fine.”

“And you didn’t see my father at all?”

“No. We found the cave he had rigged, but no sign of him anywhere. We’re still looking.”

I breathed a little easier. Cal Willard knew those woods as well as the Indians who had first lived there. They hadn’t found his body, so he must have gotten away somehow. “The cabin’s gone isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What the hell happened?”

“We are still trying to put it together. Mr. Tyson told us you had wired everything up for one man. No way you could have stopped a small army.”

“A small what?”

“There were at least six men. Maybe more. A squad of expert paramilitary types.”

“You’re saying they were—like a private military force? Do you think Hemiola has his own commando team?”

“Frye doesn’t think it was him. We don’t know who they were, except that they were heavily armed, and knew what they were doing. We think maybe a couple of them were hit, too. Your friend Suggs obviously put up quite a fight, but they took their casualties with them. Our forensic people are still there checking blood samples. So is the boss, but he should be back—”

“Look who’s here.” Dr. Mavis Zinman led a very pale Liz into the kitchen. “And says she could eat two horses.”

Liz had several scratches on her face and neck, but looked to be pretty much together otherwise. Mavis had probably helped her with the fresh makeup she had on. The blue robe Liz was wearing, identical to mine and cinched tightly at the waist, didn’t detract one iota from the rest of her either. She gave me a weak smile. I got up, hugged her, and whispered, “We made it, Liz. We’re okay.”

“I feel like I’ve been pushed through a garbage disposal. Everything hurts, but Mavis says I don’t have anything broken.”

I hugged her tighter, and released her slowly. “Try to eat something. The food in this resort is wonderful, and the price is right, too.”

Liz didn’t need to be told twice. She ate eggs, bacon, and toast as fast as Mavis could cook it. Finally, she pushed herself away from the table with a very loud, most unladylike belch, and said. “I think I’m gonna live, cholesterol or not. Thanks, that was terrific. What time is it anyway? I mean, what day is it?”

Barnes gently told her a somewhat abridged version of what he’d told me. Liz never stopped him. A few tears appeared on her cheeks when he mentioned Pete’s death, and finally, I asked, “Look, you guys, do you mind if Liz and I take a little walk outside? I promise we’ll just walk around the house a couple times. We couldn’t get very far with no shoes and no clothes anyway, could we?”

Barnes and Mavis Zinman exchanged glances. Barnes looked at me and smiled. “No. That’ll be fine, but wait till I put the dogs up.”

I watched through the glass pane of the back door while he walked outside and reached into his pocket for some kind of whistle, which he blew into. I couldn’t hear it, but three huge Dobermans came tearing around the corner of the house, and froze two feet away from him. Barnes walked to a small outbuilding I thought was a storage shed, unlocked it, and blew the whistle again. The dogs trooped inside like chastised children. Barnes closed and locked the door. He saw me standing at the back door and yelled, “Okay, it’s safe now.”

I took Liz by the hand and walked out, down the steps to the freshly mowed yard. As soon as we were twenty feet away from the back door, I put my arm around her waist, and led her around the left corner of the house. I had no doubt Barnes and Mavis would be watching us, but I thought if we were far enough away from the main building, they wouldn’t be able to hear what we talked about. We circled the large, slag-stone house. For the first ten minutes or so, I didn’t say anything. Neither did Liz. The November air was quite cool on my bare legs, and the ground felt hard under my feet.

On the second time around, I spoke softly, “Liz, don’t look at me, just look straight ahead while we walk. I’ve noticed several things. First, this house-prison was well chosen. No telling how far we are from another one, or any town. Could be in any direction, too. There’s no telephone wire to the house either. If there are phones inside, they must be hooked up to underground cable. I think we must be somewhere north of Washington. This old house has a basement. I also noticed a pole behind that shed where the dogs are. There’s a satellite dish on top of it, but there’s a separate antenna, too. Have you noticed any TV sets?”

She shook her head. “There isn’t one in my room, and I didn’t see one in the kitchen.”

“Right. I think that shed serves more purposes than a doghouse. Anyway, there’s also a small airport—or at least a private airstrip—south of here about five, maybe ten miles away. All the time we were eating, through the kitchen window I could see a small plane come up, circle, and go down. Obviously some pilot practicing his touch and goes. There are some woods between, but I can’t tell how deep they are. In any case, we’ve got to get away from here, and that airstrip is our ticket.”

Liz stopped. Looked up at me so earnestly I could have cried. “Jeb, I’d follow you into hell itself. I already have, but how are we going to get away from Barnes and his dogs and that disgusting nurse?”

“Disgusting? Why do you say that?”

“I woke up with her washing me. And I mean all over, Jeb, and taking her time doing it.”

“So. Dr. Zinman likes girls as much as boys.” I told Liz how she had awakened me similarly. A budding idea was also forming in my mind. “Liz, I think I know a way for us to get out of here. We may get separated, or not allowed to talk to each other, but no matter what happens, when we are together, play along with me, okay? Even if it seems really weird. Crazy.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

I squeezed her waist. “But we’ll have to wait for the right moment. When we get our chance, we have to move—”

The sound of a car coming up the lane stopped us both in our tracks.

“Frye,” Liz said.

He got out. Walked up to us, but he wasn’t smiling.

“Have you found my father?”

“No, Jeb. We don’t know where he is. I know one thing, though, he isn’t anywhere within twenty miles of where that cabin was.” For the first time since I had met Thurmond Frye at Juarez, I thought I saw a speck of compassion in his gray eyes when he added, “I’m sorry, Jeb, but I have a gut feeling that those mercenaries may have taken him with them.”

Until Frye said that, I hadn’t thought things could get much worse.

I was wrong again. They just had.

Chapter 14

Dinner that night was a somber affair. Except to eat, Liz never opened her mouth during the entire meal which was prepared this time by Jason Barnes, from supplies and groceries Frye had brought. Mavis was also silent, and Barnes didn’t say anything more than “Would you like more of this or that?” Thurmond Frye did almost all the talking; going over in detail what Barnes had told us earlier. “Tracks we found indicated nine men. They must have been wearing night vision goggles. We also found brass and shell casings for M16’s, M60’s, and at least one S.A.W.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Shoulder fired anti-tank weapon. Probably laser guided. That’s what took out the vehicles and most of the cabin. We found grenade fragments and evidence of C4 plastique as well. They were effectively armed. No question about it.”

“How did they get there and how did they get away?”

“Had to be the highway. Cars or trucks. Their timing was perfect. A well planned and well executed operation.”

“What are you doing about my father?”

Frye paused. Looked around the table. “Let’s have our coffee outside, Jeb.”

Barnes did his thing with the Dobermans again, and Frye and I sat down on the bare front porch steps. Frye had not brought any clothes for either Liz or me, and I soon realized the warm southwest wind had long gone into hibernation for the season. Its northwest cousin had taken up the baton and was already proving it meant business during a winter, which was already in the wings, waiting for its cue. I was soon shivering, but Frye didn’t notice.

“We’re hoping to keep the raid out of the press, Jeb. Calling it an accidental butane explosion and fire. I hope I’m wrong about your father, but you only have yourself to blame. Damn it, man, I warned you to stay out of my business.”

“You’re going to lance the boil, I take it.”

“By keeping you here for a while. The girl, too. It’s for your own good. I’ve got a lot of work to do, which now includes the added complication of trying to find out who wants you so dead.”

New frustration welled up inside me. “It’s the diaries, Thurmond. I know who wants me dead.”

Frye looked down into his coffee mug. Shook his head slowly. “We know you don’t have any diaries.”

“How?”

“Let’s just say you told us in your sleep.”

Frustration was speedily morphing into fresh anger. I was right. Dr. Mavis and her needles! “Judge Koontz is the man behind all this. You know it and I know it. Why the hell aren’t you going after him? Another thing. How did you know just when to bring that helicopter over the cabin?”

Frye continued to stare into his coffee mug. Finally, finally, something began to ooze like oil into the pile of sawdust that was my brain. “Wait a minute. Wait just-a-fucking-minute! You knew those paramilitary guys were coming, didn’t you? You were using me. Using all of us as live bait! Nobody knew I’d taken Liz to Chapel Hill, and only Cal knew I was going to pick her up. How—?”

“Your father’s car, Jeb. We’ve had a pretty sophisticated homing device in it since day one. I’ve known your movements since you left the Mayflower garage. Now, please hear what I’m saying for once. I sympathize with you, whether you believe it or not. I know what it’s like to lose people. Damn it, I lost a good man down there, too.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. Give us a little credit, old friend. We had an agent on the ground next to your father’s property. He warned us, but about five minutes too late. It was his flares you saw. He’d hoped to blind the raiders with them, but all we accomplished was to spot your raft in the river. Listen, Jeb, I’m only going to say this once. I’ve got a team working hard with Captain Kemp on the Hemiola thing, but I’m personally working on something far beyond McCarty’s insane act. Have been for some time. Something I wouldn’t tell you about even if I could, involving national security. Sure, I used you. I’ve got a leak in our shop, and I’m pretty close now to finding out who it is, thanks to you, but I can’t afford to have you running all over the country any more messing things up. Don’t even think about asking me about Koontz, or anything else. Just enjoy your vacation here for a while, and don’t try anything stupid. We’ll find your dad, too, trust me.”

Trust you? If you had to pee, I wouldn’t trust you to find your own pecker. “Okay, you’ve made your point. I’ll behave, but we would like some clothes to wear. And shoes.”

Frye sighed. Stood. “I’ll see what I can do. I have to leave now. I’ll try to be back tomorrow. You and Liz will be safe here. Be just a bit patient with us.”

“I’ll try. Mind if I stay out here a while longer?”

He nodded, then went inside. A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying the briefcase he’d arrived with, scowled at me one last time, and got in his car and drove down the two-rut lane. I watched his taillights until they were out of sight, and took a deep breath. With no legal pad or pencil, I had to formulate my rip sheet in my head, which, thanks to the chilly northwesterly, was clear as the night sky, and just as full of the unknown.

But I was not the only one. There were still a few things Thurmond Frye didn’t know. One, he didn’t know I had gone to Florida. He knew Cal and I had taken the Chevy to the hospital at Bethesda, all right, but he didn’t know I took Walt’s car to see Sergeant Mackenzie’s wife at Reilly’s place. He might not know about Betty at all. Also, if there was a mole high up in the FBI leaking information to Koontz, the Judge would have also known I wasn’t dead, also knew as much as Frye did about my moves, and had plenty of time to set his traps.

More problems:

One: If Hemiola didn’t kill Jean Tyndall (There was no “calling card” or signature) who did? Who else does Koontz’s dirty work? Does he also have control over some far right paramilitary group?

Two: Is Frye lying? Setting me up for some in-house killers? I mean, Barnes and Mavis could wax us and who would ever know?

Three: Did Cancelossi lie to me after all? Is he the man at the end of Koontz’s long arm?

My stomach began to knot up again. I was no closer to knowing anything for certain than I was before. Plus, the expert attack on the cabin had shifted my priorities, big time. The conspiracy or conspiracies didn’t concern me so much any more.

I had to find Cal.

And keep Liz and me alive long enough to do it.

Which meant we had to get out of here somehow. Somehow…

“Thought you might like one of these.” I hadn’t heard Mavis come up behind me. She sat down next to me and handed me a glass. I knew it was Absolut even before I tasted it. “Thanks. You’re a real doll.”

“And you’re a poor liar. By the way, I’m sorry about the drugs we had to give you. Frye told us you knew.”

“It’s okay. You were only doing your job. I understand. Where’s Liz?’

“Went to bed early. She’s still pretty wiped out. Frye also told us he’d try to bring some clothes for you both when he comes back tomorrow.”

She laid her hand on my thigh, leaving it there just a fraction too long. “I really am sorry about your dad. We’ll do our best to find him, and we’re pretty good, you know.”

The vague idea I’d had earlier suddenly began to take shape. It just might work. “You’re very good with a massage, too. I enjoyed the hell out of that. What would it cost me to get another one? A much slower one?”

That sly smile I’d noticed before came back. “Are you possibly suggesting I do something just a tiny bit unprofessional, Mr. Jeb Willard?”

“What do you think? What’s that old thing about all work and no play? That rub down you laid on me was like a double aphrodisiac! Let me ask you something. You and Barnes are two parts of a three-person team. Are you two actually, you know, like maybe a couple?”

Mavis giggled. “Jason Barnes? And me? No way, Jose. Besides, he likes only dogs and other guys.”

“So you two sleep in different rooms?”

“Of course, but not at the same time. One of us has to be on watch at all times. Why?”

“When is his on-watch shift?”

“He’s off watch now. Comes back on at eight in the morning. What are you getting at?”

I stood. Gave her my best smile and softly touched her cheek with the back of my hand. It was time to find out if Lucille Sweeney was as horny as I thought she was. “If you’ll loan me your passkey and check your monitors to Liz’s room around daybreak, you’ll find out.”

I held my breath. She seemed for a minute or two to be weighing thoughts. Then, she reached into her uniform pocket and handed me the key.

“It’s the one across from yours closest to the bathroom.” Her voice was a husky whisper.

I took the key from her, squeezing her fingers lightly. “Thanks again for the drink. See you later.”

I left her sitting there, went inside, upstairs, and let myself into Liz’s room, leaving the key in the outside lock. Before I slipped out of my robe and into the bed beside my naked sleeping beauty, I raised the window blinds, praying the room was on the east side of the house.

It was, and the rising sun awakened me and lit the room enough for me to begin my debut as a porn star.

I am not proud of my performance. I woke Liz up with kisses around her neck and ears. When she was half awake, I whispered into one of them, “This is it, Liz. We’ve got to get Mavis in here. For God’s sake, play along with me. It’s our only chance.”

Her response was worthy of an Academy Award. The things we did to each other could have aroused a corpse, and with each kiss, each digital caress, each calculated movement, I made sure I smiled into the mirror and motioned for our hidden voyeur to join us. An unforeseen stroke of luck helped: Liz, once fully awake, really got with the program. She thought the whole scene was funny as hell, and began first to giggle, then passionately writhe and moan like a sex-starved wife. I was afraid she was going to overact her part, but when I heard the key turn in the door, my own heart rate jumped off the scale.

Like I said, I am not real proud of what we were doing, and less proud of what I did next. I sat tall on the edge of the bed, watching Mavis, who was practically drooling; fumble nervously with the buttons of her uniform. It dropped to the floor and when she reached back to unfasten her bra, I delivered a thrown elbow to her temple so vicious it would have made my old football coach scream with delight. Mavis dropped like a sack of rice. I hoped to God I hadn’t killed her, but wasted no time yanking off her shoes, which, besides the bra, was all she’d been wearing—except for the snub-nosed 32 caliber Smith and Wesson strapped just above her left calf.

I ripped the sheets off the bed, tore them into strips, and with Liz’s help, dumped the heavy, inert form onto the mattress, turned her over and tied and gagged her as best I could.

I fished the key out of Mavis’ uniform pocket and handed the uniform to my nude, wide-eyed co-star. “Put this on along with her shoes, and wait here. I have to take care of Barnes.”

“Be careful,” she said. “And hurry.”

I strapped the gun around my own calf, put my robe back on, and left the room, gulping deep breaths, close to hyperventilating. I made my way downstairs, helped myself to a glass of water, made a pot of coffee, then sat down at the kitchen table to wait.

Barnes came in less than five minutes later, headed straight for the coffee pot, poured himself a cup and said, “Sleep okay?”

I didn’t trust myself to speak out loud. Just nodded, rubbing my eyes.

Barnes took a sip or two more. “Have you seen Mavis?”

I didn’t wait any longer. Barnes dropped the cup of hot coffee on the table when I pointed the gun at his face, cocked its hammer, and in the calmest voice I could muster, said, “Where’s your weapon?”

His eyes moved down. Left. “Shoulder holster.”

“Keep your hands on the table, Barnes, and your eyes straight ahead. I don’t want to shoot you, but by God, I will.” I moved around behind him, reached under his jacket and removed the automatic. “Okay. Here’s what you’re going to do. In slow motion. Take all your clothes off. Now.”

Jason Barnes couldn’t see behind him. Good thing, because he would have known I was more scared than he was. He slowly stood, removed his jacket, pants, shirt, and all the rest before he spoke. “You know you’ll never get away with this, Willard. What you’re doing is a big time felony.”

“I’ll chance it. The shoes and socks, too, if you don’t mind.”

While he was doing that, I asked him where the dogs were. He told me they were outside. I made him lie down on his stomach on the floor while I searched his pockets for the whistle. I laid his gun down in the sink behind me, found the whistle in his left trousers pocket, then told him to stand up.

“If you try anything dicey with those dogs, I swear to Christ I’ll put a bullet in you before they run two steps. I want you to repeat that same trick you did yesterday. Put them in the shed.”

I handed him the whistle, and motioned for him to go out the back door.

I don’t know whether or not I would have actually carried out my threat. Though I was a reasonably good shot with both rifle and handgun, I had never in my life so much as pointed one at another human being, let alone fired at anyone, but Jason Barnes couldn’t have known that, and didn’t test me. In two minutes he and the dogs were locked in the shed, and I had the whistle in my hand.

I ran back inside, upstairs to my own room, retrieved my wallet from the night stand, then crossed the hall and let myself back into Liz’s room. Showed my partner a thumbs-up. Liz looked considerably better in the white uniform than had its previous owner, who was breathing okay, but still unconscious. “The shoes fit?”

“About a size too big, but they’ll do.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

I made sure I locked the door, and downstairs, I dressed in all Barnes’ clothing except for his boxer shorts. His shoes pinched a little, but I could live with that. I reached into the sink, picked up his pistol, and smiled at Liz. “We’re outa here.”

“Where’s Barnes?”

“In the shed with the dogs. Come on, we can’t waste a minute.”

We ran. South.

And reached the woods, which were immediately thick with undergrowth. I threw the whistle, the room key, and both guns away, and tried to keep my bearings, not an easy thing to do when I could no longer see the sun. But I remembered that moss grows on the north side of trees, and felt we were making good progress generally south. I had no idea when Frye was due back at the farm house, but I knew it wouldn’t take him long to come after us, this time with bloodhounds, not Dobermans. And, he wouldn’t be in any mood to make nice if he caught us. I pushed Liz, and punished myself. We had to keep going, no matter how tired we became. I prayed, with each painful step, that we were still heading south. I had no watch, but through the overhead branches, I could see an intermittent sun, which climbed ever higher. I kept to the right of it. We kept going, through every kind of brush and scrub, which tore at our faces, hands and arms. I was grateful we didn’t run into any swampy areas, and even more grateful for a small clearing which we emerged into; actually a broad swipe that had been cleared for east to west power line towers, maybe fifty yards wide.

“Can we please rest here for a few minutes, Jeb?” Liz begged, panting. “I’m exhausted.”

I allowed her only a couple minutes, and then hauled her to her feet, afraid that if I sat down once, I wouldn’t get up again. “We have to keep moving, Liz. Come on. You can make it.”

The punishment continued. On and on. Liz was too tired to complain any more. The brush became even thicker, but I kept thrashing through it, dragging Liz behind me. I looked up. The sun was practically over our heads now, and I was sweating like a Charleston dock laborer. Then, before I realized what was happening, I pushed through some bushes, tripped, and fell head first into a wide, stinking ditch, Liz tumbling in on top of me. The foot of stagnant water in it was tepid, and it took superhuman effort to climb the steep bank on the opposite side. Pulling Liz up took the rest of my remaining energy. I had none left in reserve. My head was reeling. I felt like I was going to faint. Thought I was seeing a mirage at first. Shook my head. Blinked. But it was no mirage. It was a chain link fence!

I wanted to shout, “We made it, Liz. It’s the fence around the airstrip.” But I didn’t have enough strength to talk. I leaned back against the cool, galvanized metal, not caring if it was electrified or not. It wasn’t, and I wanted to laugh. I looked at Liz, stretched out prone on her back. She had lost one shoe, and the formerly starched white uniform was now in dirty tatters. Her long hair was a tangled mess. Her face was filthy and bleeding slightly from several new cuts and scratches. I knew I looked no better. What was worse, my feet were hurting like hell. Barnes’ shoes, maybe a full size too small, had cramped my toes into fire-tipped nubs. I pulled them off and tossed them into the ditch.

I turned, hooked my fingers on the wire joins and pulled myself up to a more or less standing position. The grass on the other side of the ten foot-high fence was mowed, and I could see a small hanger and office building maybe a quarter mile to our left. I searched for a voice. Found a hoarse croak. “Liz. Look, it’s the airstrip. All we have to do is follow the fence. That way…”

Where we got the physical wherewithal to make it to the small cinderblock office of Abernethy Aviation I’ll never know, nor will I ever know how I summoned the mental equivalent to remember that Barnes’ FBI credentials were still in his inside jacket pocket. My own billfold, which contained nearly two thousand untouched dollars, was in the hip pocket of his pants, which I had to hold up with my bleeding hands. Anyway, we did, and I did, and also conjured from somewhere deep inside me enough grit and wit to show both to the bewildered mechanic we found loafing inside the hangar between two Cessnas. “FBI, mister. I’m Special Agent Barnes, and this is my partner, agent Zinman. We just got away from some real bad people and need to rent that pickup out front. National emergency. Do you have a map of the area?”

The middle-aged mechanic’s open mouth was so dry he couldn’t have made spit. His eyes were like red-veined blue plates, but he stammered, “Yessir. In the office.”

His hands shook as he spread the atlas out on the counter.

“Show me exactly where your airstrip is located,” I commanded.

He picked up a pencil and used it as a pointer. “Right here.”

I grunted with some satisfaction. I had been wrong in my guess that the safe house was north of Washington, but correct in figuring Frye wouldn’t have wanted to have to drive too far from his headquarters. We were half a mile west of the town of Salisbury, on Maryland’s eastern shore. Highway 50 would take us north and west, through Cambridge, Easton, and Annapolis. From there, it was only a short drive to the Capitol.

“Is there gas in your pickup?”

“Yessir. N-near ’bout a full tank.”

I extracted five hundred-dollar bills and laid them on the counter. “You can pick it up at the bus station in Cambridge. I’d wait until tomorrow to do it, though. Where’s the keys?”

He gave them to me. “Can’t I go with you?” he pleaded.

“Sorry, no.”

“I ain’t gonna get killed by no terrorists, am I?”

“Not if you stay away from this office or the hangar. I’d suggest you hide as far away from here as you can get. Run east, and don’t show your face no matter who follows us here. You have any quarters in that cash register?”

He had a half dozen, which he gladly handed over. “Now, go, and good luck,” I said. The last we saw of him he was running down the runway fast as his coverall-restricted banty legs could carry him.

I ripped his phone out, and Liz and I got in his old Ford F-150, which smelled nearly as bad as we did. But thank God, it started right away, and ran fine. We stopped at the first gas station that had a public phone booth, where Liz needed only two of the quarters to make the phone call.

Three and a half anxious hours later, smiling through his tears, Father Tim Flaherty and the young priest I’d met before picked us up a block north of the bus station in Annapolis. I fell asleep in the back seat of Monsignor Ralph’s car, with Liz’s matted head on my shoulder, listening to the old priest softly humming Amazing Grace. It was by far the most beautiful rendition I had ever heard.

Chapter 15

I have always had a great wonderment and a solid appreciation for the organization and vast power of the Catholic Church, but would never have thought of becoming any active part of it. Nothing in my personal makeup or background could have ever led me to dream of being even so much as a miniscule cog in that great, grinding wheel. Yet, as I looked myself over in the mirror, I had to admit I made a rather decent looking priest! With a freshly trimmed beard and shaved head, the face looking back at me certainly wasn’t my own, and wearing Monsignor Ralph Curtis’ collar and clothes, I had the glib thought that with only a little play acting, I could walk down any street and be taken for an authentic member of the Catholic clergy.

My looks were as far removed from Jebediah Willard as I could get, which was exactly what Father Tim had suggested. Moreover, Liz had undergone a mutation of her own. Sister Agnes, the Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, without her habit, could have easily passed for an aging lady wrestler. She seemed proud of the number she had done on the lovely young woman who now looked like just another of the plain-faced, silent figures who glided about the convent like shadows of shadows. Liz was unhappy to have had her own hair cut short, but after a day or two, had become more or less comfortable in her new costume. The scratches and bruises on her skin were fading rapidly, and the face now framed in white was one people might see as serene instead of beautiful—a remarkable transition.

I was further surprised at how fast both of us were recovering our strength and energy. My memory of how we had gotten to the Mother House (tucked neatly into the heavily wooded southern outskirts of Alexandria) remained only a hazy blur; a dimly lit stage scene furtively enacted in slow motion behind a scrim curtain. I could only guess at how long and vehemently Sister Agnes had protested and argued before giving in to Tim Flaherty regarding our sanctuary. That Liz herself was Catholic probably had helped, plus the fact that Father Tim had no doubt told his female counterpart the simple truth about us. In any event, after two days and nights of rest and good food, we were now priest and nun; I with Monsignor Ralph’s clothes, shoes, and wallet, including driver’s license, credit cards, and family photos. Now bald, it was uncanny how much I actually looked like him! Liz had also been furnished with proper evidence of her own new persona—a printed card that told any who might ask that she was Sister Corrine, a member of an order who didn’t talk. All she had to do was “Drop her eyes and smile shyly,” Father Tim said. “What’s next?” he asked us. “You can both stay here for a while if you wish.”

“Liz can,” I said, “But I have to borrow Ralph’s car and run back up to Washington. I should be back tonight.”

“I won’t ask where you’re going,” Father Tim said, frowning. “Ralph can stay here for one more day, but you can drop me off at my church if you don’t mind. I can’t afford to be gone any longer. At least one of us needs to mind the store.”

Not a word of conversation passed between us until I dropped him off at the corner of Tyne and Flanagan. “Will you be all right?” he said at last.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll stop back here on the way back to the convent.”

He nodded, turned and stepped toward his church, and I headed for the address I had looked up the night before.

The small, one-story stucco house looked like every other one in the crammed neighborhood. Only the shutters were different. It was easy to read the house numbers from the street, so I parked Ralph’s ancient Ford Contour at the curb, glanced around, and satisfied that there was no one in sight this early in the morning, I walked up to the front door with confidence. There was no bell or knocker, so I rapped a few times on the glass pane of the door. It opened within seconds, and I looked down at the pretty, thin face that looked so much like her dead father’s I almost lost it. “Hi. I’m Father Curtis,” I managed. “Is your mother at home?”

“Yeth, thir. Jutht a minute,” she said, giving me a gapped-tooth grin. She turned and ran back inside, yelling loudly, “Mo—om, there’th a man at the door.”

Alicia Erikson was not what I expected. I guess I didn’t really know what I had expected. When the plump, frowning woman without a trace of makeup came to the door wearing a tattered housecoat and her abundant red hair tied up in what seemed like a thousand curlers said, “May I help you, Father?” I momentarily lost my train of thought. She looked a good ten or twelve years older than Walt had. “Could I come in, Mrs. Erikson? I need to talk to you.”

Her ruddy complexion blanched to pale, highlighting hundreds of freckles. I saw instant apprehension in the green eyes that had been rubbed red. “It’s Walt, isn’t it? What’s happened?” Her voice was on the verge of breaking, but she opened the door for me. I walked in, determined to keep my own inner feelings tucked away out of sight. As soon as we were in the middle of the small, neatly furnished living room, I reached for her hand. She didn’t resist. I looked into her eyes and smiled. “Nothing’s happened as far as I know. Maybe you’d better sit down, Alicia.”

I shouldn’t have said that, I knew. She bit her lip, and new moisture began forming in the corners of both eyes. As she sank down onto the sofa, clutching the robe around her like a shield, I decided there was going to be no easy way to do what I had to do. Best to get it over with as quickly as possible, with the least amount of confusion. “I’m not a real priest, Alicia,” I said, casually removing my wallet, which had Agent Barnes’ ID in its first plastic pocket and which I showed her. “My name is Barnes. FBI, and I really need to get into Walt’s personal computer. There’s a certain file we have to examine. Could you please—?”

“Do you know where Walt is?” she broke in. “Is he all right?”

I kept the benign smile on my face as I lied. “I’m sure he is. His whereabouts and activities are not in my specific department, I’m afraid. I’m very sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but it really is important for me to look at that file.”

“I can’t help you,” she said, chewing on her lip again. “I mean, I don’t know how. I don’t know his password.”

“I do, Mom.” I had temporarily forgotten the child, who had stood silently behind me. At that moment I remembered how precocious Walt had said she was.

“You do?” I said, squatting so that I could talk to her without looking down at her. She seemed totally unafraid of me. Not in the least intimidated by my looks or what she’d heard me tell her mother.

“Sure,” she proudly announced. “It’th ‘Ethvilthivle’.”

Her mother was just as perplexed as I was. “It’s what?”

“Ethvilthivle. Eth-e-v-i-l-eth-i-v-l-e,” she spelled. “It’th a really cool pathword. Don’t you get it? Elvith livth, thpelled backwardth.”

Alica Erikson, long used to her daughter’s snaggle-thoothed lisp, helped me out, the birth of a smile creeping around her lips. “Elvis lives. Spelled backwards.” She reached for the girl and hugged her. “You’re something else, Jody, you know that?”

This was the first time I’d heard the child’s name. “Smartest one I’ve ever met,” I said. What grade are you in? First? Second?”

Jody’s face formed into a little pout. “No, thir. Mom thays I’m at fifth grade level in everything but math, and I’m in fourth grade with that.”

I glanced back at Alicia, who quickly explained. “We do home schooling. I was a high school teacher until a few years ago. Walt and I can’t afford a private school and we didn’t think there was a public school that could keep up with her.”

Before I could respond to that, Jody grabbed my hand. “Come on, I’ll do it for you.” Like she had a Saint Bernard on a leash, she pulled me back into a cluttered room that must have been Walt’s den. Jody plopped herself down in front of the large monitor, stuck the tip of her tongue through the space left by her missing front teeth, and began expertly touching keys. It took me only a moment to realize she had opened Walt’s hidden files. “Whath the name of it?”

“I’m not sure. Try ‘Willard’. W-i-l-l—”

“I can thpell it,” she said, not without a trace of irritation. Her slender fingers flew. “Nothing here under Willard.”

I grunted. “Okay, try ‘Judge’.”

Same result, same answer.

“How about ‘Snow White’.”

“Nothing. Thorry.”

“How about ‘Jeb’.”

Three fast clicks. “Got it!” she yelled. “Take a look.”

I leaned over her shoulder, staring at the names, feeling my own heart rate increase. “Can you print that out for me?”

“Uh-huh. How many copieth?”

“Just one.”

Another click or two and the printer obediently disgorged the two sheets, which she handed to me with yet another charming grin. “Any more?”

I patted her on top of her head. “Try Hettie.”

“Hettie with a ‘y’ or with ‘i-e’?”

“ ‘I-e’, I think.”

This time there was only a single page. I folded them all and stuffed them in Ralph’s coat pocket. “You did good, Jody. Real good. Now, you have to do something very, very important for your country.”

“What?”

“Copy all that stuff onto a disc and hide it somewhere really safe. Then delete those files.”

This time Jody frowned. Glanced past me at her mother. “Mom?”

Alicia sighed. “Better do as he asks, honey.”

Reluctantly, Jody turned back to her task. The whole process took her less than a minute! She handed her mother the disc, then touched a few more keys. The screen went blank. She turned around to face me. “Gone. All gone. daddy’th gonna kill me.”

I put on another happy face. Touched her shoulder. “Your Daddy’s going to be very proud of you. So am I. You have really helped us a lot. Can I come back and see you again sometime? Maybe you can give me a couple of lessons on that thing.”

“Sure. Why do you have to dreth up like a prietht?”

I shot her mother a quick wink. “Maybe your Mom can explain what National Security is, and what cover means. Bright as you are, we may need your help again sometime, okay?”

“Okay. Will you thee my daddy?”

“I don’t think so. Not right away. Like I told your mom, mine is a different department. Other agents will keep you informed, I’m sure.” Saying those words, I felt my stomach going queasy, and couldn’t wait to get out of Alicia Erikson’s house. I kept seeing Walt Erikson’s open eyes, the small hole between them, and his talented hands—

I drove at least ten blocks before I pounded the steering wheel and vented in language that was most unbecoming for a priest. From the corner of my eye, I spotted a playground, strangely deserted. I parked Ralph’s car and walked to a bench facing the swings and monkey bars, reached for the papers in my pocket, then changed my mind. My emotions were so high I knew it would be useless to try to make any attempt at studying them, or trying to concentrate on my mental rip sheet. Nightmarish faces of the dead kept appearing on all the playground equipment. Walt. Cecil. Jean Tyndall. Pete Suggs. Cal. Cal? No, not Cal. Please, God, not Cal.

Once again, fury burned out logic. Coherent thought. Plans of what to do next. I closed my eyes. Deep breathing. Tried to relax enough to think clearly. It was no use. All the faces melded into the sweet, thin face of a seven year-old little girl who would never again lay eyes on the father she so worshipped. I don’t know whether I cried real tears then or not. Something, something deep inside me pushed me up off the bench. Back to the car. Some unconscious force turned the key. Some other hands guided the car back to Chelsea. St. Andrews. Parked. The automaton that now resided inside Ralph Curtis’ clothes shuffled into the church. A voice not my own called out for Father Tim Flaherty. “Father? Are you here?”

But it was Jeb Willard who found him. In the same confessional booth where he’d shown me Mac’s note. I found him sitting in his own blood, his throat cut from ear to ear. I managed to turn around quickly enough so that this time I didn’t add any erupting contents of my stomach to the red-black, sticky pool on the floor between Tim’s feet.

I didn’t see it, naturally, the tiny room was too dark, but I knew it was there, probably on the wall, and written in a Wom’s blood.

HEMIOLA

Chapter 16

The change in my psyche was immediate, and my brain never worked faster. The first physical thing I did was to gently close the door to the confessional, crouch, turn, and look around, holding my breath and wishing I had a weapon. Could the slimy bastard still be here? Waiting? No. Not likely. Tim Flaherty would never have told Hemiola anything, even on pain of horrible death. I can’t say how I knew that, but I did. My next thought was that if I was going to be able to deal with this devil, I’d have to be just as cold blooded and clever as he was. Even more so.

I also knew it would be a bad idea to call Captain Kemp, even anonymously. Some unlucky parishioner would find the body eventually, probably within the next couple of hours. Something compelled me to reopen the confessional door and take another look at Father Tim. He looked even smaller in death. I closed my eyes momentarily, noting the sickening smell of hours-old blood. Still I didn’t feel nauseous. What I felt was nothing human. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Well, Lord, this time you’re going to have to share some of it. I closed the door again, this time remembering to wipe the handle with Ralph’s handkerchief.

In the time it took me to steadily walk out of St. Michaels back to Ralph’s car, all emotion, humanity, and decency had totally drained from my body and soul. My breathing was normal. My pulse, too. What was left of Jeb Willard was a working mind that was cool and clear as bottled water. The rest of me was beyond feeling anything at all, and I knew that for my survival, let alone getting the answers I needed, this was a good thing.

Priorities. The next thing my brain told my body to do was to somehow remove Liz, Monsignor Ralph, and the residents of the convent from harm’s way. Enough innocent people had died. Too many. Without hurrying, or driving carelessly, I drove back to the Mother House and made straight for Sister Agnes’ austere office. Reading my face, she raised her eyes in question.

My voice was flat. Calm. “Sister Agnes, everyone here is in great danger. We must all leave. Now.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Where is Father Flaherty?”

“He’s dead. Murdered. Some time this morning. Listen to me, please. There isn’t much time. The man who killed Father Tim is responsible for dozens of gruesome murders. Any creature capable of slaughtering a priest in his own church wouldn’t think twice of massacring everyone here just to get at Liz and me. We all have to get away. Right now! What kind of transportation does the convent have?”

Whatever shock the good Mother Superior felt, she didn’t show it. What she did show was uncommon intelligence and the ability to act in emergencies. “We have a small bus, but it’s large enough for all of us. We use it for trips to retreats and other church functions, except none of us can drive it.”

“I can. Where is it?”

“Parked in the garage, next to the tool shed.”

“Does it have gas in it?”

“Yes, my son. We keep it full, just in case we’re called out to—”

“I’m sorry, Sister Agnes. No time. Call everyone down, tell them all to drop whatever they’re doing and meet me out back. Monsignor Ralph, too. Don’t waste a second.”

She didn’t, and I ran down the corridor and through the rear door of the convent, not even breathing hard. I flung the double doors of the garage open and climbed into the old vehicle which looked like a clone of the white-painted activities bus our high school teams used for out-of-town games, only now the lettering painted on its side read: Our Lady of Perpetual Help, not Tryon’s Cove Cougars.

We desperately need your help now, Precious Lady.

The keys were already in the ignition, and the old crate started on the first try. Thank you! By the time I eased it out of the garage, the first of the fifteen nuns were already lining up, Liz among them. Silently, without panic, they all boarded, Liz giving me a wide-eyed look of questioning fear. “Later,” I said, noticing Ralph emerging from the convent door, looking like my twin. “No time now. Take a seat with the others.”

She brushed past me as Ralph climbed in, Sister Agnes right behind him. “We’re all here, Mister Willard.”

Monsignor Ralph took the front seat to my right. I put the bus in gear and started down the circular driveway, praying that its heater worked. As soon as I reached the main road, looked both ways, and pulled out onto it, he said, “Sister Agnes told me. It’s— It’s unbelievable.” In his next breath he wanted to know where we were going.

I downshifted. “You’re going to Dulles. The rest of us are going north. Best you don’t know exactly where. Do you have any money?”

“Money? Um, not much. Maybe seventy, eighty dollars.”

I nodded. Concentrated on my driving, knowing Sister Agnes was quietly passing from seat to seat, explaining the hard facts. Only the droning engine and the tires on the highway made any other audible sounds. A kind of eerie music. Like a perverted, monotonous Gregorian descant. Not much of a Requiem Mass for a Catholic Wom.

It took me two hours to drive to Dulles. I brazenly parked behind a shuttle bus directly in front of the United Terminal, took out Ralph’s wallet, and after removing Barnes’ ID, handed it to him. “Listen closely, and don’t argue. There’s over a thousand dollars of my own money in there. Don’t use your credit cards. Use what cash you need to catch the first plane out of here. Far as possible. Maybe San Francisco. Whatever you do, don’t go to your family, and don’t contact them. When you get situated, maybe at the Y, wait a few days, and then call Ernie Latham at the Post. Got that?”

“Ernie Latham at the Post. Got it.”

“Right. Don’t mention me, or anything that’s happened here. Just tell him your name and where you are. Tell no one else. Your very life depends on it. Now hurry.” I glanced backwards. Gave him my best smile. “They’ll be all right, I promise.”

He smiled once back at me, then was gone. I hoped he’d be okay. In the left rear view mirror, I noticed a scowling airport cop coming towards the bus, so I wasted no time pulling out, heading for I-95…south.

It was time for me to go home.

All along the Bible Belt from Virginia to Mississippi, every small southern town has one, and Tryon’s Cove is no exception. Yet, ghetto seems too strong a word to describe those areas, which often contain as much as a third of the town’s population: Communities within communities, where generations of black families have clustered since the Civil War; first on an outer boundary, often quite literally “across the tracks” and usually by a wide ditch if not directly on the banks of a flowing stream or river, much like their pre-slavery ancestors had. They lived in shacks, cheap frame houses, and abandoned boxcars that had seen little or no physical improvement since reconstruction. In Tryon’s Cove, the seat of Tuscarora County, that neighborhood was called Oldfield. In almost two hundred years’ time, the rest of Tryon’s Cove had grown around and beyond Oldfield, reluctantly enclosing, incorporating, and then ignoring it as though it was an odorous black lake, to be avoided, if possible, like some rat infested swamp.

During the post-WWII decades, several paved streets, indoor plumbing, electricity, even an occasional telephone, and other modest signs of the twentieth century had gradually seeped, like osmosis, into that isolated neighborhood, although not at the same speed of the birth rate. The only latter day phenomenon to keep pace with the white sections of Tryon’s Cove were proportionate numbers of sprouting television aerials.

And steepled churches.

It was to the oldest of those I was headed. Simon Peter’s church.

Dr. Simon Peter Williams tended his flock at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church with the same kind of organizational leadership, zeal, and style Ghengis Kahn had led his heathen hordes. At six-four, maybe three hundred and twenty or so pounds, and with a voice that could carry over two counties, Reverend Williams’ church never had any internal mutinies and seldom any arguments. When he said something was bad, it was bad, brother. Or vice versa. Amen! Every single member knew he had conveniently, perhaps shrewdly, prefixed “Simon” along with an added “r” to his given name, and he was no more a Doctor of Divinity than I was a Catholic priest, but his huge heart was of fourteen carat gold, and he and his wife, Lollie were among Cal’s oldest friends. Mine, too, for that matter. Both had known me since I’d been a baby. Lollie had been our housekeeper after my mother’s death, and in lieu of babysitting, had often taken me along to her church when her private work schedule conflicted with something Simon Peter needed done.

As a kid, and even when I was much older, I was always in awe of the sheer size of Mt. Zion’s. Twice as large as any Caucasian church in Tryon’s Cove, it had been rebuilt at least three times over the last hundred years, and now covered most of the entire block of 200 Pine Street. Down in the labyrinth of its enormous basement, the Boy and Girl Scout troop headquarters Mt. Zion’s sponsored, along with the offices of its two Little League baseball teams, had been moved to separate buildings. The vacated space, next to the remodeled, expanded kitchens, was converted into two dozen tiny, furnished apartments for the black unwed mothers of Tuscarora County. Nowadays, they were almost always full. That particular project had been started years ago by Lollie—with Simon Peter’s tacit approval—when two of their own daughters had needed such assistance. Simon Peter and Lollie had never been blessed with a boy child (a vexing cross that Simon bore stoically) and, of their seven girls, two of the first three, Pearl and Opal, had become pregnant before they were out of high school. The oldest, Amethyst, had married a young evangelist, and the youngest, Topaz, was a deputy sheriff who worked at the county jail. The others helped Lollie run the Mt. Zion Haven for Unwed Mothers.

I parked the bus in the church parking lot, turned off the lights and looked at the watch Monsignor Ralph had loaned me. Ten forty-five. I turned to face the women, all who had been truly magnificent on the long bus trip. I had only needed to make two gas-pit stops, and none of the nuns had complained a bit about where those stops had been. I had the sudden thought just at that moment, that Sister Agnes and Dr. Simon Peter Williams had a lot in common besides their faith. “You’ve all been terrific. I need you to be patient just a little while longer. I’m going inside, and it may take a while before I get back. Will you be okay?”

Sister Agnes answered for all of them. “We’ll be fine, young man.”

I left the bus, walked around the corner to the parsonage and knocked, not failing to again notice the hand-painted sign over the sill that said,

THIS DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN.

I hoped it meant what it said.

It was Lollie who came. And it only took her half a second to see through my disguise. Her right hand fluttered to her throat. “Lord God! Jeb? Jeb? We thought you were dead. Lord God Almighty! What you doin’ in that get-up? Child, I—”

“Please, Lollie, I need to talk to you and the Reverend. It’s mighty important. Can I come in?”

My tearful reunion with those two black saints was something like that of Lazarus, and it took me a good twenty minutes to tell the bizarre story I’d rehearsed on the trip south, most of it absolutely true, because Lollie, if not her husband, would have surely known if I was lying.

Simon Peter Williams never hesitated. “Certainly, certainly. The Lord will provide. We can make room for all of them, and of course your lady-friend can stay with us a while. Long as she needs to.” He turned to his wife. “Lollie, you go on out there with Jeb and take care of those ladies. I’ll go wake Ruby and Sapphire up. They’ll have some food cooked up in half an hour.”

Though polite and dainty, the nuns ate everything put before them, drank two gallons of iced tea, then silently went to their assigned cubicles with grateful, contented smiles on their faces. This in spite of hearing me tell them they’d all have to be ready to travel again by dawn. Liz avoided my eyes, and joined the procession without a word. At the time, I thought nothing of it. She’d been through a lot, and no doubt needed time for her own thoughts.

As for me, I was given a rollaway bed in the hall of the parsonage, along with fresh sheets, two blankets, and an old-fashioned alarm clock. As yet, I still had not had time to look over the pages Jody Erikson had printed out for me, but I was far too tired to, and was asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.

* * *

It wasn’t the clock that awakened me. I must not have been sleeping soundly, and subconsciously felt, sensed, a presence. I opened my eyes slowly, gradually recognizing Liz’s face. Liz’s tear streaked face. She was kneeling beside the cot. I tried to sit up but she pushed me back down. “Jeb, don’t leave me here. Let me go with you and the others wherever it is you’re planning to go. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t ever want to be alone again.”

“It will only be for a little while, Liz. Plus, you’ll be safe here. I’ll come back for you soon. That’s a promise.”

“I’m afraid you won’t come back.”

This time I did sit up. I took her face in both my hands. “Nothing is going to happen to me, honey. Nothing. And my friends here won’t let anything happen to you either. You have to trust me with this. Please.”

The alarm went off. I reached for it and shut it down quickly, then grabbed her face to kiss her, but she turned away so that my lips met only the fabric of the habit over her left ear. “Where are you going?” It was a whisper.

I flung my heavy legs off the edge of the cot and reached for my clothes. “I’m going to drive the nuns to South Florida.”

“Why Florida?”

“Because it’s a long way from Washington and Alexandria, and, I have a date to keep with someone there. Someone who can help us.”

“Who?”

I considered whether telling her all of it or nothing. At last I simply said, “He’s known as The Prince of Miami.”

Chapter 17

Sal Cancelossi made me wait until we were well out into the Gulf Stream before starting any conversation—except to snicker at my disguise. “Not the first time a fugitive has hidden behind a priest’s collar,” he’d said, and in the next wheezing breath had agreed that what I had done was the right thing after finding Father Tim’s body. I had located the offices of the Miami Diocese, left the bus, Sister Agnes, and all the nuns in the parking lot. Not particularly anxious to answer a battery of questions by a furious (or sympathetic) Bishop, I had simply walked down Cormiant Street until I could hail a cab. This time around, however, its driver hadn’t given me any condescending hassle.

The guys at the gate hadn’t either; after I identified myself and reminded them that Don Cancelossi was expecting me. One of them, after telephoning confirmation, had taken me straight to the massive front door that was guarded by two more well dressed apes with quick hands and eyes that didn’t blink.

Fifteen minutes later, we were aboard the yacht, and I was mildly surprised at Cancelossi’s seamanship. He handled the vessel as if he’d been born to the helm, though he had a crew of half a dozen to take care of mooring lines and other ship-handling tasks. His man Bruno was nowhere to be seen.

Once we’d cleared channel traffic, I commented, “Well done, skipper. You’re a hell of a sailor man.”

Cancelossi glanced sideways from the wheel back at me, looking for all the world like a guest character actor in one of the Gilligan’s Island episodes. “Thank you. Like a woman, a boat knows if you truly love her, and responds in kind, and like that old country song you’re too young to remember, she needs ‘a slow hand’. ”

“I’d have to call the ANNA B a ship, not a boat. My guess is this is not your first one, either.”

The light of happiness faded rapidly from his face. He turned his head and eyes forward again, and didn’t speak for a while. Then, in a low voice he said, “No, she isn’t, but she’ll be my last one. I’m dying, Mr. Willard. I don’t need all those expensive doctors on my payroll to tell me I probably have maybe three, four more months left. Six tops. But there’s a lot to do before I cash in my chips. Some of it rather unpleasant, and some of it urgent. Urgent as in today. Tonight.”

I nodded respectfully. There are times when saying nothing is better than any kind of vocal response, and I knew this was one of them. The diminutive admiral was doubtlessly in advanced stages of lung cancer or emphysema or both, but nothing was wrong with his brain. Or his attitude. Gradually, a new smile stretched his translucent, paper-thin lips back over his yellow teeth. “That’s a pretty good starting point, come to think of it. Before we get to your problem, allow me to tell you about that first boat. The story of it ties in with what you’re feeling right now. Your emotional state, I mean, which by the way, you’re doing a fair job of hiding.”

I returned his smile, but continued to keep my mouth shut.

“The ANNA B’s dinghies are bigger than my first boat. Actually our first boat. Let me explain. You may know that I grew up near the Baltimore docks. A skinny water rat wop from a rat-infested tenement. Smelled just as bad as the waterfront at low tide. Anyway, that boat was a small, beat-up wooden skiff Joey Tiberio and I stole from the city docks one night. Joey was twelve. I was ten. But I didn’t get any pleasure out of that skiff, though I had wanted to in the worst way.”

“Why not?”

“Because Joey sold it the next day for ten bucks. Didn’t give me a dime from the sale, either. Besides being two years older, he was at least thirty pounds heavier than I was, but I learned an important business lesson from it all. A lesson about trust, and so-called partnership.”

This time, I took the cue. “Whatever happened to Joey?”

“Joey Tiberio? Nothing. Not for a long time. Some years ago, I heard he was in a terrible accident at his cement mixing company up in New Jersey. I think he’s part of somebody’s driveway now.” He turned, winked at me, then emitted another of his dry, rasping laughs, which sounded like corners of burned toast being broken off. “I’m sure that was the first time the Tiberio Ready Mix Concrete Company ever delivered the full nine yards.”

Again, I said nothing, and stared ahead out at the line where the sky met the ocean.

“I know exactly what you’ve been feeling this past week, Mr. Willard. Funny thing about Sicilians, whether we were born there or not. We grow up feeling all human emotions just like everybody else, only we seem to inherit more of them. Long after we have no further interest in money, or the power money buys, or sex, or food, we still retain the strongest urges of revenge. It’s built in, as if we males are all born with an extra chromosome chain. And it’s wonderful how it can keep you going when nothing else can. When nothing else matters. Old Puzo was right about one thing; for us, revenge without passion is business. With it, it’s as natural as breathing. You follow?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

Cancelossi glanced at the Rolex, which flopped loose around his thin wrist. After checking the horizon and his course heading, he pushed the autopilot button, then said, “Let’s go up to the flying bridge. I promised you some fishing today, and we will certainly do some a little later, but first, I want to show you something.”

Climbing the ladder, I was reminded of something my coach at Carolina had said about giving up a touchdown; the old cliché; “don’t get mad, get even. Brains beats temper every time.” He’d been a small, dark man, too. I now wondered if he’d had any Sicilian blood. Cal had often told me that anger and hate were natural responses we all feel, but that a man who could control those feelings without acting in instant retaliation stood a much better chance of winning either a game—or a fight. I was rapidly, if grudgingly, adding Sal Cancelossi to my short list of Woms. And, I was missing the original terribly. Painfully. Helplessly.

I took the captain’s chair next to Cancelossi’s and watched as he switched the autopilot off, then headed the vessel directly into the wind and slowed down to maybe six knots. I had only a moment of confusion, but then heard the helicopter. Big as the ANNA B was, she’d nevertheless make a very small target from the air, the bulls-eye of the helipad even tinier. I had to admire the skill of the pilot who brought the craft in low, and settled it down like a hen squatting over her eggs. The rotors had hardly begun slowing down before several crew rushed beneath them with stays, which were firmly hooked into place. Two other men pulled a fuel hose from a locker and began refueling the small craft. I could see that there were only two people in the helicopter. One was the pilot, Bruno, which hardly surprised me. I’d have bet the last hundred bucks I had tucked away in my left sock that Bruno was also an expert seaman as well. Probably carried a legitimate master’s ticket alongside his pilot’s license. The other man was a total stranger to me. The expensive suit couldn’t disguise his build. Short, stocky, swarthy, sixty-ish. A full head of jet-black hair, which was combed straight back, eyes hidden behind wrap around sunglasses beneath a single, non-stop eyebrow. Clutching a thin attaché case, he climbed out of the helicopter just as Sal Cancelossi explained:

“My son, Johnny, with his business report.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Looks more like his mother every day. We used to do this monthly conference in the house, but I enjoy it more out here, now. He doesn’t like it much, but then, there’s a lot he doesn’t like about my methodology. And after I’m gone, he will probably sell this boat.” He gave me another warped smile. “Well, you can’t take it with you, can you? Let’s go below.” He pushed the autopilot switch again, and led me back down the ladder and into the main cabin.

Cancelossi Jr. and Bruno must have gone below by a different door. No one else was in the spacious salon but my host and me. “You must be starving,” he said. “It’s way past normal lunchtime. Please be seated. My steward will bring you something. Johnny and I have a little business to take care of elsewhere. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

Having said that, he turned and disappeared through a door aft. I sat down at the huge mahogany table, noting that there was an elaborate place setting for only one, complete with three different wine glasses. I had no more than picked up the folded linen napkin when a white-jacketed black man—maybe the size of Mike Tyson—appeared, a towel professionally draped over one arm. His face was neutral as he handed me a menu, leaving me with the impression that I was in a four-star restaurant, and that I should act my part. I glanced at the menu while he poured a glass of water, then said, “I’ll just have whatever you recommend.”

This brought half a smile from the huge steward, who took the menu back and left as silently as he’d come in. Half an hour later, I had consumed one of the best meals I’d ever had, with two glasses of light, excellent wine that couldn’t possibly have been domestic. The only dish I recognized was the sautéed shrimp appetizer, and was not about to ask the efficient servant what anything else was. Besides, I was too busy. I had forgotten how long it had been since I’d eaten, and ate like an ungraceful stevedore who’d just finished an eighteen-hour shift, but didn’t give it a thought, especially since there was no one to watch me. Midway through, I heard the helicopter take off again, but didn’t give that a second thought either, except to briefly wonder who was driving the yacht.

I was finishing my second cup of coffee when my host and his son, Johnny reappeared. Cancelossi the Younger wasn’t very friendly, and not only didn’t offer to shake hands when his father introduced me as Monsignor Ralph, he positively glowered at his father when told—not asked—to sit down. I gathered their business conversation hadn’t been all that good.

The Prince of Miami didn’t waste much time. “Johnny here isn’t hungry, it seems. His stomach is as sour as his disposition today. No wonder, either. Nobody likes to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”

Johnny Cancelossi’s face began turning red, slowly, from the neck up, like a thermometer stuck in hot water. “Papa, you—”

“Shut up.” Papa’s voice had an edge that scared me. He looked at me, frowning. “My son is embarrassed to have his confession to a priest done for him. What he’s too shy to talk about, aside from being so impatient for me to die, is admitting to something that happened years ago. When he was, oh, maybe eighteen, I sent him down to Charleston to oversee the garbage truck business we’d worked so hard to establish there. At the time, it seemed a pretty easy way for him to learn something of our operations, and to get used to doing some actual work.” Cancelossi paused, as if remembering something trivial. “By the way, that was Charleston, West Virginia, not South Carolina. Well, old Johnny here didn’t care much for Charleston. ‘It’s full of dumb-ass hicks, Papa,’ he’d tell me. ‘It’s boring as hell, Papa,’ he’d tell me.”

He paused long enough to light yet another Camel. Puffed a couple times, then went on. “But he liked the dumb-ass hick broads. One in particular. Had her knocked up in no time. Pretty young daughter of the City Manager, no less. Fifteen years old. When she refused to get an abortion—well, I’m not certain she knew what one was—young stud here beat the living shit out of her. She wasn’t very pretty after that. Punched her in the belly, too. Enough to put her in the hospital. To make a long, unpleasant story short, I hustled down there, nosed around, and found this judge who was about my age. He came on with a local-yokel cornpone crust, but underneath it all was a smart man with a shrewd mind that knew the score. Plus, he was ambitious. Very ambitious. It cost me a lot of money to get Johnny off that Charleston hook. All charges dropped, hospital records destroyed, family paid off. You know the drill. I was in debt to that young judge for a long time. Wasn’t until Tyndall’s first election that he marked my bill paid in full. All square, as I told you earlier.”

The Camel had burned itself out. He lit another. In a few sentences, he had told me of the hold Ezekiel Koontz had had on him. His son’s face had taken on a purple fury, but he remained silent. So did I, waiting. For several minutes, only the faint droning of the twin Cats driving the ANNA B, more felt than heard, filled my ears and mind. Then, I finally remembered I still had Jody Erikson’s printouts in my pocket. I took them out and handed them to Cancelossi. He read the names on the list, nodding slowly. “Where’d you get this?”

I told him.

“What’s this all about, Papa?” Johnny wanted to know.

“I told you to shut up. You’re in enough deep trouble.”

Tapping the papers with a brown stained finger, he looked at me with a crooked sneer. “Pretty accurate, I must say. To wit: Clifford Mansfield: Blew his head off with a twelve gauge, like Hemmingway. Sure, maybe he pulled the trigger, maybe he didn’t. Carl Torrence: Died in a boat accident off Catalina Island. No other survivors. General Abner Turnberry: Plane crash in Alaska. No survivors there either. Paul Church: Dropped off the side of a stupid mountain in the Himilayas. Body found only last year. And the worst of all, Edwin Sneed: Slipped and fell— Fell? under that train in the New York subway. All powerful men. All influential men. All dead—accidentally. Accidentally on purpose.”

“Five of them. All dwarfs?” I whispered.

“All dwarfs. Koontz couldn’t get to me, but then he doubtlessly knew I’d be dead soon and it wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“And who’s the seventh one?”

“He’s untouchable, too. You can—”

The sound of helicopter rotors interrupted him. He twisted the gold band of the Rolex, glanced down once, and said, “Bruno. Right on time, bringing the fourth party for our fishing expedition.” With another of his popcorn-dry chuckles, he added, “He’s bringing the bait. Let’s all go topside.”

We climbed to the bridge in time to see the crew repeat their earlier operations. Bruno got out, followed by a pencil-thin man with sleek black hair pulled back, and so long behind his neck it took three rubber bands six inches apart to keep it in place. He was dressed in a silk suit and tie that not even Cecil could have procured, pointy shoes, and when he removed his sunglasses and looked up at the bridge with a smile that showed the whitest, most even teeth I’d ever seen and which split his deeply tanned, paper-smooth face, I was struck by how handsome—no, how pretty he was. He was waving. I thought at first it was Cancelossi, but a closer look showed me it was Johnny he was waving to. Bruno touched the man’s elbow, pointing to a door a deck below. As they both disappeared inside, Cancelossi unfolded his skinny arms and grinned at me like he was the cat and I was the canary. I followed him and Junior back down to the salon where the pretty man stood waiting, next to Bruno, making a slight bow and saying, “Don Cancelossi. A great pleasure.” His English was without a trace of an accent, and if he was surprised to see an Anglo priest aboard, he didn’t show it.

Cancelossi didn’t take another step forward. Instead, he turned to me and said, “Father Ralph, from the large island just to our south, may I present Senor Enrique Hernandez, a.k.a. Carillo, a.k.a. Gomez, and any number of other Latin names. Also known in certain, rather exclusive circles as Hemiola.”

Chapter 18

The chill that seized me, shaking my whole body, couldn’t have been either suppressed or hidden. I was glad the slightly built Cuban was watching Cancelossi’s face, not mine. It was all I could do to simply stare, saying absolutely nothing, mesmerized by what was happening.

Apparently, Cancelossi the Younger didn’t have any more of a clue than I did. “Papa, what are you doing? Why have you brought—”

His father shot him a glance full of poison. “I thought I told you twice already to keep your mouth shut. I’m not going to say it again. Go to your cabin. Now!”

Johnny meekly obeyed, and Cancelossi turned to the Cuban, softened his tone and said, “Senor, Bruno will show you to your own cabin. I’m sure you will want to freshen up and change into something more casual. You’ll find everything you need there, I think, also in your, ah, size. Join me for cocktails on the aft deck in exactly one hour. We can discuss your next commission then.”

When Bruno and the Cuban were out of sight, Cancelossi waited a couple more minutes, then took me by the elbow and led me out as well, saying nothing further until we reached cabin Number 6. He opened its teak door, gestured for me go inside, and said, “The shower is there, behind the mirrored door. There are fresh clothes for you here, too, in the closet. Jackson will take those you’re wearing to be cleaned. He’ll bring them back in plenty of time for dinner. When you get cleaned up, come have a drink with me, aft, on the sun deck. I’m sure you desire an explanation of my surprise.”

That was the understatement of the decade. After thanking him, I took the much-needed shower, found new underwear in the top drawer of the chest, and a white polo shirt and Bermuda shorts in the closet, along with several pairs of Sperry boat shoes, one pair my size. While I had been in the shower, somebody had come in and collected Ralph’s clothes and shoes, leaving my wallet and the last of my money on top of the bunk where I’d also dropped his wristwatch.

Feeling a lot fresher, my nerves now more or less under control, I made my way aft. Cancelossi was sitting at a large table on the sun deck, smoking. I had no more than sat down when Mike Tyson (or Jackson or whatever the steward’s name was) brought a tray of drinks, which he placed before us, along with monogrammed napkins. I knew before reaching for mine that it was my favorite—with lime! Gratefully taking a first sip gave me the excuse of not having to ask a first question. Cancelossi dismissed his black servant, took a swallow of his own drink, lit yet another Camel, inhaled deeply, then fixed me with those cold eyes. “It was Johnny, of course. Almost sixty years old and except for figures, hasn’t gotten one ounce smarter than when he was in Charleston. If it wasn’t for his mother…” He left that sentence hanging, puffed again, and went on, “He can’t wait for me to die. Can’t be patient a couple more lousy months. After your last visit, it took me only two days to find out that Koontz had contacted him, blackmailed the poor simpleton with that ancient Charleston business, and talked him into going over my head to hire Hemiola for the hit on you. Since all the books were in order, I figured he had been skimming us for years in order to have enough ready cash to pay the little killer. I confronted Johnny with it in our earlier session, and he finally admitted everything.”

“So, why did you bring him here? Hemiola, I mean.”

Cancelossi’s face turned even darker. “I don’t like being used or lied to, especially by my own son. That Cuban never would have taken the contract if Johnny hadn’t convinced him I was doing the hiring. After I got that part figured out, I gave Bruno a quarter of a million to entice Hemiola out here, with the promise of four times that much to ‘do another job’ for me. A more, ah, important contract as it were. Part of what I’ve done by bringing him here is for your benefit, and partly to teach that imbecile son of mine an important, long overdue lesson.”

With those words, he clammed up and I took the hint. We sat there in silence for a good twenty minutes, drinking. The Gulf Stream was behaving nicely. Low, innocent swells. There was no other vessel in sight below the cloudless sky. The air was warm. The breeze, most of which was created by the backward wash of the yacht’s cruising speed, swirled around our heads, flinging Cancelossi’s smoke away in ghostly gray wisps. I couldn’t help thinking of it as a metaphor for the old man himself. Soon, he’d drift away, too, and what would he leave behind? Was that what he was thinking about?

Finally, he glanced at his Rolex again, looked at me with a serious frown, coughed, and said, “Time to go fishing.”

The moment he said that, Bruno appeared, guiding the Cuban killer, now dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, white ducks, and sandals. Johnny Cancelossi, still wearing his three-piece, was a step behind them. The old man gestured for Hemiola and Junior to be seated, then glanced up at Bruno and softly said, “Take care of the crew, please, then change course.”

I had no idea what he meant by “taking care of the crew” but Bruno certainly did. He hurried forward without a word. Cancelossi ignored his son and inquired of his most recent guest if he was hungry.

“No, Don Cancelossi. Thank you.”

“Something to drink, then?”

“No. May we discuss why you have brought me here, please?”

A flicker of irritation crossed Cancelossi’s face, then was gone. Like his smoke trails. He looked at me, a nasty sneer on his lips. “All business, this guy. Neat. No nonsense. No waste. Just like his life and profession. Just like his chain of unseen contact links. Just like his sizable bank accounts in Switzerland and the Caymans, resulting from twenty-five very tidy and rather surgical operations. Or is it twenty-six?”

The Cuban’s face remained implacable. He flicked a manicured finger toward me. “Why is this priest here?” he wanted to know.

“What priest?” Cancelossi replied, enjoying himself now. “This man is no priest, although I will admit he could fool most people unless he tried to say Mass in Latin. No, my Cuban friend, his real name is Jebediah Willard. The man Johnny here paid you to kill, except both of you fucked up royally.”

I was watching Hemiola’s still inscrutable face, which didn’t so much as twitch under Cancelossi’s scathing insult, but neither did I fail to notice that Bruno had returned, and had taken up a stance behind his master’s deck chair. To my left, Cancelossi the Younger sucked in a very audible gasp.

Ignoring him again, the Prince of Miami continued, “Not only that, you embarrassed me as well. Led people to my door. Now, that was unforgivable, and for that you must pay. Both of you. Bruno?”

The giant moved quickly to a wooden locker on the bulkhead, opened its door and removed a short-barreled shotgun, which he then pointed at the Cuban’s head, only two inches away. Cancelossi leaned forward, his voice cold. “A man with your experience with weapons will surely recognize that piece. In Sicily, it is called the Lupo. Stand up.”

The Cuban didn’t move a muscle. Only the pupils of his eyes seemed to change. Grow smaller. Twin, black pinpoints of hatred.

“I said stand up.”

Hemiola didn’t budge.

Cancelossi glanced up at Bruno, who promptly delivered a backhanded, vicious slap to the handsome face, and as soon as the man’s head stopped moving, grabbed the pony tail and jerked the killer straight up out of his chair. From the corner of my unbelieving eye, I saw that Johnny C. was frozen in his own fear. Like me, he was totally speechless. Bruno dragged the Cuban four feet away to the semi-circular rail of the fantail, keeping the barrels of the shotgun glued to his temple.

“Remove your shirt,” Cancelossi commanded.

“What?” Hemiola finally found a hoarse voice.

“You heard me. Take your shirt off. If you don’t, Bruno will.”

I watched in morbid fascination as the man with the too-handsome face, now showing fury mixed with stark fear, nervously began unbuttoning his shirt. It fell away, and I caught my breath. What looked like a large Ace bandage was wrapped snugly around his chest. Some kind of wound?

Impatient now, Cancelossi’s hand fluttered up, scattering ashes, and Bruno produced a razor sharp switchblade from his pocket and proceeded to carefully cut away the bandage, revealing a pair of small, but undeniably female breasts. I stared then at the Prince of Miami. Looking at me with a kind of triumph in his glittering, bloodshot eyes, he said, “That’s why Hemiola has been so successful, Willard. Goes into a country, a city, or a hotel as a woman, does the job as a man, and leaves as a woman again. Or vice versa. Exactly like her nickname.” He nodded at Bruno yet again, and the big man used the knife to cut the rubber bands away from the long hair that cascaded down around the perfectly formed face, onto shapely shoulders.

“Quite attractive, isn’t she?” Cancelossi said, leaning back and lighting another Camel.

It was true. The half-naked woman standing before us was more than attractive. She was, in fact, lovely. Beautiful enough to elicit a pathetic protest from the man whose eyes she was now staring into, silently pleading.

“Papa,” Johnny croaked, “Please, you’re not —”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Cancelossi then stood, walked around the table to his son, folded his arms, and hissed, “No, Johnny, I’m not. You are.”

Then he turned. “Bruno, give him the shotgun.”

Bruno took a couple of slow steps backwards, towards us, keeping the barrels pointed at Hemiola, who stood like a statue, still not believing her change of luck. He handed the shotgun to Johnny.

Hemiola saw her last chance. “Wait, Johnny. Don’t you want to see the rest?” Slowly, like a teasing stripper, she undid the zipper of her pants. She started wriggling out of them, pulling black panties down at the same time.

Everything that happened next seemed to take an hour, although in real time it was only a few seconds: Johnny whining, refusing. His father slapping him back and forth across the mouth, cursing him in both English and Italian, yelling, “Shoot, damn you!”

Johnny aiming high and firing both barrels over her head. I flinched, but not before seeing a flash of steel. Quicker than mercury, she sprang at the old man, swinging the straight razor open. My own reaction was slow, but in time. The vicious body block I threw into her from her blind side knocked her over the side rail. Even before she splashed into the water, I heard Cancelossi scream again, this time at Bruno. “Kill the engines!”

I didn’t see Bruno move. I was already over the rail myself, diving deep.

The water was beautifully clear. As soon as I flattened out from my dive, emerging from my own bubbles, I observed two things at once: The cavitations of the ANNA B ’s huge twin screws was sucking me toward them faster than I thought was possible, but the yacht’s speed had already carried her past me. Not Hemiola. Bruno had been a bit too late with the engines. In horror, I saw the black hair flailing around the port side prop shaft, then only a red swirl. A second or two later, the propellers stopped, and the woman’s nude, headless body drifted toward me like in a grotesque, slow motion ballet. Without thinking, I caught one slender arm and pulled the body up with me, surfacing thirty or forty yards astern of the boat, which was already turning to starboard.

The rest, after Bruno’s strong hands pulled me—and Hemiola’s corpse—onto the yacht’s swim landing was mostly a blur: Johnny Cancelossi lying on the sun deck, blubbering like a baby. Bruno carrying the headless, bloody body up to the lower deck where a butcher block had previously been placed. The cleaver. The force of Bruno’s powerful forearm. The separation of limbs from trunk. The enormous hooks, from some abattoir in hell, baited, and then thrown overboard. The ANNA B slowing down to trolling speed. Bruno with the long-handled brush and fire hose, cleaning, scrubbing. And all the while, Don Salvatore Cancelossi sitting calmly in his deck chair, skinny arms crossed, watching, nodding, chain-smoking. He said only two words to me. “Corpus delecti.”

By sunset, I vaguely also remember him quietly saying that the fish were biting good. Real good. The bait was almost gone. Telling me Bruno would fly me back to the mainland, but hoping I’d wait until after dinner to go. After dinner? His telling me he knew I was resourceful enough to do the rest of my job without his assistance, advising me to stay in the priest’s clothes as long as it took, asking me to bring the Judge back to him in Miami if I possibly could. Telling me who the seventh dwarf was.

And, telling me that my father was indeed still alive, being held in the stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and that if I did have the diaries of poor Mac McCarty, to use them for a swap.

Chapter 19

Under any other circumstances, I would have enjoyed my pampered trip back to Washington. Who wouldn’t be impressed with a free helicopter ride from the middle of the Gulf Stream to the airport at Ft. Lauderdale, being hustled immediately aboard a private “company” Lear for the relatively short flight to Dulles, then into a limo waiting to take you to whatever address you named? Bruno, first as pilot, then as traveling companion, accompanied me all the way to 1400 Market—without opening his mouth once.

During both flights and the limo ride, I hadn’t minded his muteness, nor had I made any comment to him, not even to ask him to express my appreciation to his boss, who had so graphically removed one major mountain of an obstacle that had been standing in my path. I had closed my eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, several times to reassemble a mental version of my rip sheet, now so drastically altered. Each time, it started off all right, but rapidly became obscured by an untypical lack of concentration. All my thoughts kept bouncing off the sides my brain, like in a pinball machine. I couldn’t focus on any one string of thoughts. Nothing connected. True, Walt’s, Cecil’s, and Father Tim’s murders had been—if by proxy—avenged. In spades. But Hemiola’s grisly death had finalized only one of my problems. Too many others remained. Who had blown up my boat? Who had killed Jean Tyndall? And, my most pressing concern; who had destroyed the cabin, killed Pete Suggs, and kidnapped Cal? Oh, yeah, there was plenty of work left to be done. My mind’s eye kept seeing my father in some medieval dungeon, naked, hanging from iron manacles, being tortured by devices and machines more cruel than any King or Kafka could have imagined. Each time that image drifted over and into my subconscious, I shook my head to banish it, and started over. I had a name and a clue, of course, thanks to the old Sicilian who knew how to keep a promise. I now knew who Koontz’s seventh dwarf was, and where Cal might be, but had no idea on earth how to get to either one.

Plus, there was Liz. Jesus! I had been so involved in the action of the past twenty-four hours; I had not had so much as one second to think about her. Would she be okay for a while longer under Reverend Simon Peter’s ecclesiastical roof? Was she out of her mind with worry? Fear? Loneliness?

Was she—?

“We’re here, sir.” Bruno’s voice.

“What?”

The limo had stopped. “This is the address you gave us. 1400 Market Street. Are you all right?”

I shook off my sloth. “Yes. I’m fine, Bruno. Thanks for everything. Tell the Don I’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll tell him.” He reached over my lap and opened the door.

I got out and watched the big Mercedes’ taillights float away into the darkness, leaving me and my short shadow splayed beneath the spread fan of the street light in front of Ernie Latham’s apartment house. I was instantly cold. Freezing. Monsignor Ralph had not thought about giving me his overcoat—if he’d had one. At least it wasn’t sleeting. I glanced at Ralph’s watch. 3:42 A.M. Not even Ernie stayed up this late. I walked under the arch of the building’s entrance where there was more light, reached for and pressed the button next to the name over the mailbox: E.P. LATHAM. Funny, I thought as I waited, Ernie was short for Ernest. An apt name for a newspaper editor, but what was the “P” for?

It took four tries and five frigid minutes leaning hard on the bell button before the tinny, angry voice came through the tiny grill. “Who is it?”

I leaned toward it, though it wasn’t at all necessary. “It’s me, Ernie. Jeb. Let me in, for God’s sake.”

The next few words that came through the little speaker were unprintable, then, “If you’re Jeb Willard, you’ll know the name of the secretary I had five years ago. Who was it?”

“Eleanor Roosevelt, goddammit. You never had a secretary in your life. Ernie, open the door. It’s freezing down here and I don’t have a coat on.”

The loud buzz that came in the next moment was one of the sweetest sounds I’d ever heard. With nearly blue fingers, I pulled the heavy door open and walked into the brightly lit foyer. Ten more shivering steps took me to the elevator and to the fifth floor. Ernie’s apartment was directly across the hall and I wondered what he’d think, half awake, when he looked through the peephole and saw the bald head, full beard, and white collar. The appraisal he made through the round, microscopic telescope took only another few seconds, however, and I heard the three locks being worked on in rapid succession. Must have been my bloodshot eyes that did the trick.

Ernie Latham was Felix Unger and Oscar Madison put together. All four rooms of his bachelor apartment were a combination of old-maid neatness and unbelievable clutter. The living room and kitchen were a mess, but his bedroom/study and bathroom were practically sterile, which only proved one thing. Ernie didn’t spend much time in either his living room or his kitchen. Wearing a raincoat over his pajamas, he led me through the first disaster area into the second one, brushed some newspapers off one chair and instructed me to sit down. He moved dishes, pots, pans, and God only knows what other junk out of his way until he exposed the Mr. Coffee, which, miraculously, had been pre-loaded and timed for whatever hour he considered morning to be. Soon, it was draining brown, aromatic liquid that was as welcome to me as plasma would have been to a bleeding soldier. From somewhere or other, he managed to locate two clean mugs into which he poured half the contents of Mr. Coffee and some of Mr. Jim Beam. Ernie had the grace to wait until I’d had a few sips before saying. “Okay. I’m awake enough now. Take your time, and tell me everything.”

Except for my moments of intimacy with Liz, I told him all of it, from the time I’d left his office up until ringing his doorbell. Ernie listened to it all without interrupting once. When I’d finished, he shook his head and whistled softly. “Incredible. And Cancelossi let you go? Just like that? I mean, you had just seen him kidnap and attempt to murder somebody, for chrissakes.”

“Think about it, Ernie. Let’s say I went to the authorities. Who’d believe it? And even if they did, what could anybody do? There’s no record of Hemiola’s trip. No body. No proof. When Bruno got through scrubbing that yacht, she looked as pristine as the day she was commissioned.”

“What about the rest of the crew?”

“I think they’d all been herded forward. The boat was on autopilot the whole time. Besides, there is one other thing, Ernie. Cancelossi’s dying. Even if the FBI managed to arrest him, he’d be out on bond within an hour, and he’d be dead long before any trial came up. Oh, he knew what he was doing, letting me go. He also wanted me to deliver Koontz to him if I could.”

“Why?”

“Sicilian revenge, I guess. He wrote the book on it. In his eyes, the Judge broke a deal. Nobody—and I mean nobody—does that to Sal Cancelossi and gets away with it.”

Ernie got up, poured more coffee, and said, “By the way, that priest did call me. From San Francisco. So he’s okay. What are you going to do about McCarty’s sister, leave her down in Carolina for a while longer?”

I took the replenished mug from him. “Yeah. I’m sure she’ll be safe there.”

“And what about you? What’s your next step?”

“I’ve got to get my dad out of that stockade. Question is, how? To be honest, I’m so tired and brain dead, I can’t think of any way—”

“Hold on! I know a way. What was it Cancelossi said? ‘If you do have McCarty’s diaries, use them for a swap?’ What you can do is hole up here a few days and do what you do best. Write.”

“Write?”

“Sure. I’ve got some old notebooks around here somewhere. You can sit down and compose a diary. With your talent and what you already know, you could write a passable, fairly accurate forgery. Who would know it isn’t his?”

I was far too tired to think whether or not it was a good idea. Whether it would work or not. And, even if I did do it, who would I approach with it?

As if reading my mind, Ernie reached for the bottle of Jim Beam, poured another dollop into our mugs, and said, “The only way you’d ever get into that stockade at Fort Bragg would be to make a deal with the man himself. The seventh dwarf. Cornelius Ferris. The Secretary of Defense.”

“Oh, sure. And how the hell do you think I could get to him?”

“You probably couldn’t. But we both know somebody who can.”

I raised both eyebrows.

Ernie’s grin got wider. “He’s now a member of President Fordham’s cabinet.”

“Ernie, she told us to contact her after I ‘had it all.’ I don’t. Far from it.”

“You’ve got enough. I’m going to call her.”

“Now?”

“No, of course not. First thing after breakfast, though. Look, you need some rest. Use my bed. I’ll wake you up in a couple hours.”

“What about you?”

“I’d never get back to sleep anyway. Not now. Go on, Jeb, lie down. You’re running on fumes.”

I didn’t need further prodding. Ernie had a waterbed, and before it Jello-jiggled me twice, I was fast asleep.

The three hours he let me sleep were like only three minutes. It took me another two to realize he was shaking me. “Rise and shine, Father Jeb. The President wants to talk to you.”

His last sentence was like a quick slap in the face. I jumped up, then turned, staring at Ernie, not knowing where the phone was. He pointed to the neat desk, which was actually a computer center. The phone rested on top, next to the printer. I picked it up, gulped one deep breath and spoke into it, trying to keep my voice under control. “Ms. President?”

The voice coming back at me was definitely under control. “Jeb, I’ve had a brief talk with Ernie, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to stay there. I’m sending a car for you and will see you myself around three this afternoon. Are you all right?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m fine.”

“Good. I’ll see you then, and Jeb?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’m relieved. Ernie said you have quite a story to tell. You’ll fill me in, won’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Fine.” The line disconnected. For another few seconds, I stood there with the phone in my hand, not quite sure I was awake enough to have heard her accurately. Ernie gently took the phone from my hand, placed it back in its cradle, then said, “Take a shower, son. You’ll feel a hundred percent better. There’s an extra toothbrush in the medicine cabinet. You like waffles?”

“More than caviar!”

“I’m glad. They’re the only things I know how to fix. They’ll be ready in five.”

The unmarked Buick showed up thirty minutes later, with two Secret Service men inside wearing casual clothes and friendly smiles. Ernie waved good-bye from the archway of his apartment house, like a relieved father sending his kid off to camp. Before we had driven two blocks, the driver, who told me his name was Franklin, informed me we really were on our way to camp—Camp David.

Chapter 20

The back seat of the Buick was comfortable. Warm, and I would have gone back to sleep immediately had Agent Franklin’s partner not started in on a rambling, sophomoric oral history of the camp. (“…And Eisenhower named it after his grandson, David…”) I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was no stranger there, having covered two of the never ending, useless string of summit meetings between the two middle east adversaries who have been at each other’s throats since practically the beginning of measured time, and will be at the end of it. Still, I listened politely while he proudly spouted off his knowledge like a guide on a tour bus, including a few colorful anecdotes no one outside his own service could know. I don’t know whether President Fordham had told them who I really was. And, if either of them thought it strange to be transporting a humble priest to the famous Presidential retreat, they didn’t let on.

We were automatically passed through the gate that looked like the entrance to a maximum-security prison. It seemed a far cry from the simple opening it had been at the beginning, back in 1942, when FDR had named the then primitive camp Shangri-La, after the Tibetan paradise in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. A light snow had begun to fall, slightly obscuring the view of the neat collection of up-to-date lodges that had once been simple rough cabins, all named for various trees. Since Roosevelt, a dozen presidents—or their wives—had, over time, ordered changes; remodeling, updating and modernizing grounds and buildings alike. Eisenhower’s golf green, Kennedy’s stables (now razed), Nixon’s swimming pool, the pond, Nancy Reagan’s flowerbeds, and Buck Tyndall’s pistol range were all rapidly disappearing under virgin whiteness. Except for the Marine guards at the front gate, there wasn’t another soul in sight.

Franklin (who never told me whether that was his first or last name) and his tour-guide partner drove me straight to the lodge named Holly, no doubt thinking they would soon be back to their normal duty. I was sure they thought that since I had no luggage, I wouldn’t be staying very long. The only items I was carrying were the notebooks Ernie had given me, along with the light raincoat he’d been wearing over his pajamas. I wasn’t even wearing a hat, and I was really missing my hair!

Someone had built a fire in the wonderful fireplace, rendering Holly nice and toasty inside. Franklin showed me the two bedrooms, told me I had my pick of them, and that either he or his colleague would be in the other one in case I needed anything. I thanked him, wondering how many others like him were around, outside, out of sight. I told him any bedroom was fine, that what I needed most was a few more hours sleep, and asked if he’d give me a wake up call at noon.

Franklin’s knock on the door was prompt. To the minute.

I made myself at home, more or less. I washed my face, then wandered into the fully stocked kitchen, helped myself to two of the sandwiches already stacked on a platter, and some freshly brewed coffee, tipping my imaginary cap to not only the Secret Service’s thoroughness, but their timing as well. Carrying the steaming mug, I walked into the cozy living room, sat down at the table there, and opened the first notebook, suddenly struck by the painful knowledge that it had been a long time since I’d written anything, especially in longhand. My rip sheet, back in my room at the Mayflower…

Pencil in hand, I stared at the blank page without a clue as to how to begin. I must have sat there like that for ten minutes or so. My coffee had cooled considerably. I closed the notebook, knowing it would be useless to start until I had a chance to stow my present thoughts in a different brain compartment and concentrate on what—or how—Mac McCarty might have written. It also came to me that I didn’t know very much about him; except for the time we’d been teammates at UNC. Hey, that was at least a place to start. I reopened the notebook and wrote:

Natural athlete/Quarterback/ strong arm/ quick mind/made good decisions under pressure. Then, a moment or two later: Not a buddy-buddy type/ A little aloof/ Never joined a fraternity/ Never seen to smoke a cigarette or drink so much as one beer/ Dated very little/ Studied hard/ Excellent grades. Summation: Team player and leader on the field, a real loner off the field. No close friends!!

However, from that moment and those few sentences, I was stumped. Totally blocked. I sat there for two hours, drinking cup after cup of coffee without writing another word, frustration building inside me all over again. Come on, Jeb, get a grip. You’re a writer, for chrissakes. Write something down. Anything. Description. Hair color. Eyes. Height. Weight. Whether or not he’d spit through his facemask, or was left handed or right handed. Anything that will bust your block…

The sound of the approaching helicopter jerked me out of my mental vacuum. Agent Franklin came in from the second bedroom, straightening his tie. “That’ll be the boss.” He slipped his overcoat on and left, but was back fifteen minutes later. “The President will see you now, over at Aspen. Follow me.”

* * *

Helene Fordham didn’t waste time. As soon as I greeted her and was shown a seat across the low coffee table from her, she said, “I wouldn’t have recognized you, Jeb. I presume that costume and your altered looks are for a good reason. Who have you been hiding from?”

“The man behind it all. The man responsible for the deaths of five people since I saw you last, and the man who arranged to kidnap my father. Judge Ezekiel J. Koontz.”

Her reaction to my comment about Koontz was as if she’d just heard her straight arrow daughter had been arrested for shoplifting. For a moment or so, she made no reply. Recovering, her voice slightly lower, she said, “You have to be joking.”

“I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Can you prove it?”

That was the one question I’d hoped she wouldn’t ask, but knew she would. I shook my head. “Not yet. I’ve been too busy running for my life.” I then told her essentially the same story I’d told Ernie, and just as he had, she listened to it all without interrupting. After I finished, she sat there a couple minutes longer still without commenting. Then, in almost a whisper, said, “Koontz called me yesterday, offering to help me out in any way I might need him. I had him come to the White House for a long talk.”

She hesitated, then said, “Jeb, I don’t know how to tell you this, but at a press conference this morning at eight o’clock, I announced his appointment to the Office of Vice President.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I’m sorry, but it’s done. I’ll have to deal with all that later.” She straightened. Lifted her chin up in that resolute way she always had. “First we must decide on what to do about you. And your father. Any suggestions?”

I told her about the diary idea. “But I need some help with it. I need to talk to people who knew both Mac McCarty and President Tyndall.”

“Names, Jeb. Give me some names.”

I looked our new President square in the eye. If there was anyone who could do this, it was her. “Two, and neither are going to be easy. Sergeant Joe Mackenzie, who was Tyndall’s personal driver back when he was a General, and Abby McCarty, Mac’s wife.”

She nodded, got up and walked to her desk, picked up a pen and wrote the names down, along with Mackenzie’s Bethesda address, saying, “Ernie Latham was right, Jeb. There is no law against helping elect a President. I suppose I helped, too, in my own naïve way, and it’s going to be virtually impossible to nail Koontz’s hide to the wall regarding the deaths of all those people, especially now. Without rock-solid proof, we couldn’t touch him. Can you imagine the outcry in the country, especially in the press, if we tried? I’d be crucified. Drawn and quartered. On the other hand, I don’t really believe Jean Tyndall would take her own life either.” She returned to her chair, facing me. “There has to be a way. A better way than the crude bluff you tried before. First things first, however. I got you and your father into this mess, and I feel responsible for getting you both out of it, and in one piece. Do you have any notion of how we can do that?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“I’m listening.”

I took a deep breath and laid out the second part of the idea that had been forming in my mind since flying away from Cancelossi’s yacht. “My guess is that the toughest nut you’ll have to crack in your presidency will be the military. They’ve never had a lady boss-man. What if you called Cornelius Ferris and told him that because of that fact, you want to spring a surprise ‘inspection visit’ to several military bases? He is, after all, your Secretary of Defense now, and his reaction to having to set such a trip up on short notice might be very revealing. If I’m allowed to go with you, I might find a way to exchange the diary for my Dad. This Sergeant Mackenzie I mentioned knows his way around Fort Bragg, and—”

“You’re talking about a diversion.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m talking a major league diversion.”

A smile crept around the corners of her mouth. “I’ll say one thing for you, Mr. Jeb Willard. You’ve got one hell of an imagination.”

I grinned back at her. “It’s the only weapon I have to fight with, Ms. President. Plus, I’m sure Cal and I can find the proof we need against old Snow White, that is, if we can stay alive long enough to do it. The country has to learn that he’s responsible for a lot more than rigging an election, Vice President or not.”

She leaned back, thinking it over. At last she said, “I’ll never get my job done properly until this is behind me. Your idea is a good one, Jeb. Workable. I’ll get back to the oval office and make a few calls. Anything else you need?”

“Well, if it’s cricket, I’d really like for Mr. Franklin to take me back into town to the bank. With all this running, I’m almost out of money, and I’ll need some for sure.”

“Not a good idea, Jeb. People think you’re dead, remember? I’ll see that you have sufficient funds for whatever you need. You just sit tight here until you hear from me again, and get to work on that diary. Anything else?”

“Is it all right to use the phone in Holly?”

“Certainly. Your calls will be monitored, though. Who do you have to reach, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Mac’s sister. I left her in Tryon’s Cove when I took the nuns south.”

This time President Fordham laughed as she stood up, glancing at her watch. “Quite in character. I think I understand.” She put out her hand. “Good bye for now, Jeb. I’ll be in touch soon.”

As if on cue, my two keepers showed up at the door and wordlessly escorted me back to my cabin. A few minutes later I heard the helicopter take off for her twenty-five minute return trip to the White House. I poured yet another cup of coffee, went back into the bedroom and picked up the phone.

“She’s not here, Jeb.”

“Lollie, this is no time for jokes. What are you saying?”

“I’m sayin’ she isn’t here. That big boss nun came back here yesterday with a honest-to-God Bishop in a big car and Liz took off with them. The Reverend and I were both mighty upset, but I reckon there wasn’t much we could do about it. Liz left of her own free will. Said if you called to tell you she was fine and not to worry about her.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s it. I’m sorry Jeb. She’s one sweet girl. Pitched in around here like she was born to it. Put Ruby and Pearl to shame, she worked so hard.”

“All right, Lollie. Wasn’t your fault. Thanks for all you’ve done. By the way, I hope no one else in Tryon’s Cove knows I’d been there.”

“Not one soul outside our family.”

“Good. Keep it that way, please. I’ll get back to you soon. Promise.”

“Whatever you say, son. Any idea when Mr. Cal’s comin’ home?”

I took a deep breath. “It won’t be long, Lollie. We’re both really busy just now. You take care, and give my best to the Reverend.”

I didn’t have time just then to speculate about Liz’s departure from Tryon’s Cove, or her destination. I called information, asked for Bethesda, Maryland, and requested the number for Betty Kucinski. After giving it to me, the polite recorded operator dialed it for me.

“Hello?”

“Miz , this is Jeb Willard.”

“Mr. Willard? You ain’t dead?”

“No, not yet. I’m sorry to spring such a surprise on you, but it’s vital I talk to your husband. Is he there?”

“No, sir. He’s over at the gym, workin’ out. Under a different name, of course. Should be back in about an hour. Can I have him call you somewhere?”

“No. Listen carefully, please. Members of President Fordham’s Secret Service detail will be coming to pick him up. Tell him I said not to worry. He’ll be safe. They’re going to bring him to talk to me. Maybe both of you.”
“Bring us where?”

“I’m at Camp David.”

“You’re sure he’ll be safe?”

“Yes, ma’am. Absolutely certain. You have my word on it, and the word of the President of the United States.”

I paced the floor for hours, listening for the sound of a helicopter, a car, or the telephone. Nothing happened until well after midnight. Franklin came in, bringing with him a fleece-lined overcoat, scarf, and, bless him, a plaid hunter’s cap. I followed him to the door of the cabin named Laurel, waited while he knocked twice, then walked inside and found myself gazing into the warm brown eyes of Abigail McCarty.

And the cold gray ones of Thurmond Frye.

Chapter 21

There wasn’t much time to react. I hugged Abby and whispered into her ear, “Thanks for coming. I’ll explain everything shortly. Let me talk to Frye first.” She gave me a silent, weak nod, and went into the bedroom where I assumed her twins were. I turned then to the FBI man whose gray eyes seemed to be full of unanswered questions mixed with unhidden contempt. I put out a hand, which he ignored. Instead, he did something quite remarkable and totally unexpected. He reached inside his coat, removed both his weapon and his ID wallet, which he placed on the table next to the sofa. Lightning fast, he wheeled back around and looped a right cross to my jaw that knocked me backwards against the door I’d come through. I was stunned more than hurt; glad he hadn’t put his whole weight behind the punch. “That’s for Mavis, you son of a bitch,” he growled. “No more games, friend Willard. Start talking, and this time you’d better tell me the truth.”

“Okay, I had that coming,” I answered, rubbing my smarting jaw. “But first you tell me why you’re here.”

“Orders. The President called my boss who ordered me to drop everything and personally escort Mrs. McCarty and the kids to the White House. President Fordham then commanded me to bring them here. Told me in no uncertain terms to cooperate with you!”

“What else did she tell you?”

“Nothing. But you’d better. Otherwise, you and I are going to seriously tangle, even it costs me my job.”

I raised both hands. “All right. Cool off and sit down, for God’s sake. This may take a while.”

He parked it on the arm of the sofa, crossed his arms, and said, “I’m listening, and this had better be good.”

I waited a couple of beats. “You know about Father Flaherty?”

Frye raised one eyebrow. “I know he’s dead. Captain Kemp is going nuts, too. So is my team. What do you know about it?”

“I was there. At the church, I mean. Probably no more than an hour after Hemiola cut his throat. But she’ll never cut another one.”

“She?”

“Yep. Hemiola was a woman.” Feeling I had no other choice, I told Frye about my two trips to south Florida, and what had happened on the second one. “…And that’s the truth, Thurmond, so help me God. You can call your people and Kemp if you want to. No sense in any of you spinning your wheels any longer over Hemiola.”

Frye pursed his lips, and sat for a while without saying anything. When he looked back up at me, he had a completely different look in his eyes. Almost human. “Jeb, I’m going to tell you something, and whether you go to jail for a long time or not depends on how close you can keep a secret. I know you think there is a big conspiracy behind President Tyndall’s murder, and I also know you don’t trust me. Otherwise you wouldn’t have run from us. Finally, I know you think Judge Koontz is behind that plot and is also responsible for the deaths of your friends.”

He leaned forward, as if to emphasize how earnest he was and lowered his voice a notch. “I assure you I am not secretly working for Koontz. Just the opposite. I have been on his trail for almost three years now. I know all about the dwarfs, and all about how they got Tyndall elected. As I mentioned to you earlier, my team has been quietly working on something a lot bigger. Something we believe the Judge was up to that’s almost too fantastic to imagine.”

“What?”

“Jeb, with your journalistic experience, maybe you won’t have such a hard time believing what I’m going to tell you. I’m talking about an intricate plot to take over the government! For some time now, the highest officers of the FBI have suspected Judge Koontz was planning to literally become an American dictator, using President Tyndall as his front man. We thought Koontz and Tyndall were actually planning a coup. A military coup. Koontz would have been the brains, Tyndall the brawn. The mouthpiece.

“We also think Tyndall’s wife knew about it, or at least suspected it, and after he was shot, was probably going to spill the whole pot of beans to you. Why, I have no idea. Your cute little ruse about those diaries caught the Judge by surprise. Forced him into some uncharacteristic, rather careless moves, and threw a monkey wrench into my investigation to boot.”

I whistled my surprise, staring at him, until something clicked inside my head. “Wait a minute. You used the past tense. You said you thought, not you think. Have you people changed your minds?”

“Had to, didn’t we? Nothing added up. If Koontz was planning a coup, why would he have Tyndall killed? It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing makes any sense. Besides, I didn’t have one shred of evidence. McCarty blew his own brains out, too, don’t forget. We couldn’t find anything at all connecting him to the Judge. Nothing whatsoever.”

We both sat there for a while, eyeing each other. For my part, I was trying hard to absorb what Frye had told me. A plot to take over the government? How? When?

Before either of us could say anything else, a discreet knock came at the door, followed by Agent Franklin’s announcement, “The other parties have arrived, sir, and supper’s ready over at Birch. If you’ll please follow me…”

It was a strange, uncomfortable mixture gathered around the table. I made a quick mental list:

One irate, high-ranking member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

One trance-like widow—a subdued, frightened twin on either side of her.

One chattering common-law wife, who insisted on saying a lengthy, monotone table grace.

One crew-cut, stiff-backed former sergeant whose body looked half the age showing on his wary face.

Two affable Secret Service men who must have been instructed to keep a close eye on everyone present.

And one very anxious former journalist whose throbbing jaw was keeping him from enjoying the decent meal, and reminding him of Cal’s advice not to trust anyone!

Yet, I knew I had to start trusting somebody; otherwise I wasn’t going to get any further than this warm room! Also, I was going to have no chance to rescue my father, let alone try to unravel Thurmond Frye’s wooly ball of inconceivable conspiracy twine, which was harder to digest than the baked chicken I was painfully chewing. With every bite, Frye’s bombshell went off again in my head. Overthrow the United States Government?

After dinner, I at least had a few private moments to tell Abby about the note her husband had written to me, that I intended to attempt what he had asked me to do, something of the risks involved, and begged her to assist me with writing the diary.

Surprisingly, she agreed to. “For two reasons, Jeb. Robby and Bobby. They’re my life, now, and for their sakes, I can’t afford to fold up. I’ll help you all I can.”

“It’s going to be rough.”

“After what I’ve been through? This will be easy. When do you want to start?”

“Right here. First thing tomorrow morning.”

I watched Franklin and his nameless partner escort her and the kids back to her cabin, then turned back to the others, addressing my first remarks to Betty Kucinski. “Betty, not to be sexist, but I’d like to ask you to keep the coffee pot going if you don’t mind.”

She hoisted herself out of her chair with a good-natured grunt and headed for the kitchen. I looked at Frye and Mackenzie, heaved one big sigh, and said, “Gentlemen, we have to sit down and hold ourselves a war council. Big time role-playing.”

For the first time, the burly ex sergeant spoke, reaching into his shirt pocket. “Can we smoke ’em if we’ve got ’em, sir?”

I took my place again at the table. “Whatever makes you feel comfortable, Sarge.” My eyes traveled from his smiling face to Frye’s unsmiling one and back again. “Okay, guys. Sarge, you’re General Tyndall. Thurmond, you’re the Judge. We want to take over the government. How do we do it? What’s our first step?”

“Organization, Frye said without hesitation. “Meticulous military planning. I have a feeling the Judge had his organization man picked out long before Tyndall’s election.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Cornelius Ferris. What do you think, Sarge?”

“Makes a lotta sense. Ferris was also a four-star Marine General, Chief of Staff during the last administration, and the man who kept the military together through all the downsizing and cutbacks that had been done for twenty years. Everybody knows he was one of Tyndall’s best and oldest buddies.”

“Right on,” Frye said. “Not the charismatic, hell-for-leather leader Tyndall was, but the best brain, the best strategic planner the military has ever had. And now, he’s the Secretary of Defense.”

“And,” I pointed out, “The only one of the dwarfs who is still alive. Has to be a good reason for that. Okay. So, Koontz knows the only way he can get it done is by using the military. How does Ferris manage it?”

Sergeant Mackenzie leaned back in his chair. “Wouldn’t have been hard for him to do. Most of our troops are back in the States now. Scattered all over the country. Wouldn’t have been all that tough for Ferris to plant secret units in every command, which could be mobilized in hours. Tactical stations in every single state, every major city and airport. Maximum mobility, plus placing trusted commanders in every key position; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. Even the Guard.”

“Must have taken him years to set it up,” I said.

“Probably as many as five or six,” Mackenzie added, shaking his head. “Some of us old time lifers suspected something big was in the works, but nobody knew nothin’ for sure, and none of the career guys I knew was about to ask too many questions. When I had that little stroke, it was really a blessing. I had drove Tyndall to see Ferris privately lots of times, but I never saw him meet with Koontz so much as once.”

Frye commented, “Their communications schematic had to be just as sophisticated as all the rest. Besides, my guess is the Judge never let the right hand know what the left hand was doing, until maybe the last moment.”

“All right then,” I said, “We’ve got all the pieces in place. All systems ready to go. What’s the trigger? What starts it?”

All three of us sat there several minutes, brains working overtime. Finally, Frye said, “It would have to be some big calamity. Some gigantic crisis. Big enough for Tyndall to clamp down hard. Declare national emergency and invoke military law.”

“Phony terrorist attack?” Assassinations?” I ventured.

“Possibly,” Frye nodded, but it would have to be one—or more—done on an unimaginable scale.”

I shuddered, thinking of any number of grim possibilities. Impossible possibilities. I hated to ask, but did anyway. “So, what’s the absolute worst scenario you can think of? What would be big enough to make Tyndall give the ‘go’ word?”

Nobody spoke right away. I was certain they were, like I was, having a hard time conjuring up a mental image of an induced disaster large enough to declare martial law. Finally, I pushed a little. “Thurmond, what’s the worst thing you can think of?”

Frye’s gray eyes got harder. “H-bomb explosion. Sabotage at Los Alamos. Maybe also at Oak Ridge, simultaneously. Or two or three nuclear plant meltdowns.”

“Terrorist attacks in several major cities,” Mackenzie offered. “Bombings, with fires and rioting, maybe including Washington. The White House, maybe at a time when Tyndall was somewhere else.”

And with his wife still in there. It was a bone chilling thought. “What about a germ warfare agent?” I whispered. “Poisoned water supply, maybe in New York, or Los Angeles. Millions would die.”

We spent another two hours mock-planning doomsday events, and when we ended the session and went to our separate quarters, I wondered if the others had as much trouble as I did getting to sleep…

And so, I set about writing my first piece of fiction. For the next two days and nights, I worked feverishly at constructing a series of diary entries, incorporating occasional ghoulish hints of national catastrophe into mundane events of the McCarty family’s everyday life. Those were tearfully supplied by Abby, whose job of reminiscing personal anecdotal information (which only she and Mac could have known about) was certainly rougher than mine. Ignoring my writer’s cramp, I filled one notebook completely, and was three quarters through the second one when Franklin barged in to tell me we had one hour to pack up and leave.

“Why?” I asked.

“The President called, Mr. Willard. Said for us to drive you and Mr. Mackenzie to Edwards. Right away.”

“Edwards?”

“Edward’s Air Force Base.”

“What about Frye and the others? Are they coming, too?”

“No, sir. They’re staying here. My instructions are to bring only you and Mackenzie.”

“Why Edwards?”

Franklin shook his head. “I don’t know, sir, unless you’re going on a trip with the Boss. Edwards is where she keeps Air Force One.”

Chapter 22

Besides the spastic scurrying I’d been forced to do from place to place and state to state since Mac’s funeral, my past air travel experiences had been considerable. I had flown in all types of aircraft, from little Pipers to the redesigned Concorde; occasionally (when somebody else was picking up the tab) in first class. I was also familiar with Boeing’s magnificent double-decker 747 models, but the 747-200B monster (given the official military designation as VC 25A—Air Force One) was a whole ’nother ball game. Talk about your home-away-from-home! Nothing I’d ever seen could come close to it. I was in total awe from the moment Franklin drove into the gargantuan maintenance complex at Andrews which serves as the big bird’s nest, until the moment President Fordham summoned Mackenzie and me, shortly after take-off, to her “flying Oval Office.” On the way, trying my best to ignore the mildly curious glances of the other passengers, including the scowling Secretary of Defense, his aide, a few of the Presidential staff, and several select members of the press corps, I had the distinct feeling that the same people who had designed the interior of Cancelossi’s plush yacht had also done the job here.

I knocked gently.

“Come in, please… Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen.” The President’s tone was warm. Cordial, although her face showed she hadn’t had much sleep. Making ourselves “comfortable” wasn’t hard to do. Mackenzie and I both took chairs that practically swallowed us whole. “This is some treat, ma’am,” I said.

With a wry smile, she replied, “The plane? Yes, it’s quite a step up from what I’d been used to, but I remember it well from—before. I wish there was time to tell you about her modifications, but we’d better get down to business. I suppose you noticed the other people on board, including Secretary Ferris.”

“I saw him,” I answered. “He didn’t look too happy, either.”

“He isn’t. You should have heard the howl he put up when I called him at five o’clock this morning and told him I wanted to spring a surprise visit to several military installations. Keeping in mind that our primary mission is to get to Fort Bragg, I told him I wanted to briefly drop in on a few random bases on the east coast, namely, the Naval base at Norfolk, the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, and Seymour Johnson Air Force base at Goldsboro in your home State. I also told him that if we have enough time, I want to continue on down to Fort Benning. He doesn’t know it, but I’m going to change my mind about Benning soon after we leave Goldsboro. I’ll bet he called Koontz right after I hung up.”

“And his next calls would be fast ones to the commanders of those bases,” Mackenzie added.

Eyes twinkling, she smiled at the former sergeant, acknowledging his intelligence, then said, “Sergeant Mackenzie, I’d also be willing to bet you have some idea of how we can get Jeb’s father out of that Fort Bragg lockup.”

“Yes’m, I do, but it will take a little time. How long will we be on the ground at Goldsboro?”

“How much time do you need?”

“Three hours, max.”

“I’ll make sure you’ll have them. I don’t intend to ask you what you have up your sleeve, but I’m guessing it isn’t strictly by the regs.”

Mackenzie shifted in his chair. “Not exactly, no, ma’am, but I’m gonna need to talk to the senior NCO on base there, whoever he is.”

“Or she is,” corrected the President.

Mackenzie’s face turned beet red. “Yes’m.”

“All right, I’ll make another call or two. Anything else?”

I said, “I think it’s best if we stayed aboard while you’re taking care of business at Norfolk. No sense in muddying up the water there. I’m sure the people flying with you are curious as the devil about us already.”

“I’ve thought of that. If anybody asks you anything, simply say you’re on a private mission of mercy for me. Listen up…”

My appreciation for Helene Fordham’s smarts and imagination ratcheted up yet another notch while we listened to her plausible white lie; the “reason” for her bringing along a priest and an older relative (grandfather) of a fictitious, very sick child in a Goldsboro hospital. “Do you think any of the press people aboard recognized you, Jeb?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t think so. It’s been a long time since I was at the press club. I didn’t see more than one or two I remembered either!”

“Good.” She handed me a regular sized envelope. Its weight told me I didn’t have to ask what was inside it. “You two make yourselves at home up forward. I’ll have Bert Franklin stay aboard with you while we’re at Norfolk. I shouldn’t be more than two hours on the base. This first visit’s going to be a quick in and out, mainly to give Connie Ferris the impression that I’m simply doing a selfish PR stunt. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

So, I thought, closing the door behind us, Agent Franklin does have a first name after all, and wondered if he had known Mac McCarty…

He hadn’t. Or if he had, he wasn’t about to tell us. What he did know, like his partner had about Camp David, was a great deal about Air Force One. While everyone was gone, having de-planed at Norfolk after the President like a pack of hounds, noses up and anxious for a hunt, Bert Franklin casually showed us around the giant aircraft. Mackenzie and I were both properly impressed with our leisurely tour of both decks, which included more than ample space. Four thousand square feet of it! In addition to special quarters for the Chief Executive, we saw a conference/dining room, an office area for senior staff members, another office that could be converted into a medical facility, plus work and rest areas for other staff. The crew and media had separate quarters, and the big bird boasted two galleys that could handle meals for up to fifty passengers! There were innumerable telephones, radios, and, out of sight, banks of the most up to date satellite communications and electronic technology mankind has yet conceived, all harnessed, according to Franklin, into a network of more than two hundred miles of wiring. About the only thing he didn’t show us was the famous escape bubble.

All this took more than an hour, and when we took our seats again, and were served soft drinks, my lasting thought, which I quietly verbalized, was to wonder how in hell the beast ever got off the ground in the first place. Franklin laughed and told us that any two of the General Electric jet engines, each of which could generate up to nearly fifty-seven thousand pounds of thrust, could lift and fly the 231 foot-long Goliath. “It also has the capability for in-flight refueling, and, since she carries enough food for two thousand meals, could fly practically indefinitely—if it ever becomes necessary.

Saying he had some calls of his own to make, Franklin left us alone for a while, and I asked Mackenzie, “What impresses you the most, Sarge?”

“This thing has six toilets. Six! The folks who fly in this baby must have real stress problems.”

His comment reminded me of my own stress. My mind drifted back over our Camp David talks, which, now in the clear light of day, seemed so preposterous, so insane, they could only be pure, horrific fantasy. Like a child’s nightmare. “Do you really, honestly think such a coup was actually possible, Sarge?”

Mackenzie looked down between his knees, as if he were studying his shoes for a speck that might have marred their spit-shined perfection. Slowly, his head moved up and down. “They coulda done it, all right. I spent almost all my life in the military. Loved it. I loved the Army, and I know there were thousands like me that hated to see it going to hell in a hand basket, while the politicians divvied up barrel after barrel of the nation’s pork. They didn’t mind one bit putting our asses on the line anywhere in the world, but never wanted to spend ten lousy bucks to give us what we needed to back it all up, not to mention decent pay. They treated us like we were third class citizens, and I’m talkin’ from the generals on down, and have for thirty years.”

“I can understand that. What do you think was the underlying cause for it? Complacency? Habit? End of the Cold War?”

Mackenzie poked his lips out, still looking down. When he answered, his voice was almost a whisper. “We never had to do it here.”

“Do what?”

“Fight. Since Lincoln’s time, Americans don’t have no idea of what it’s like to have a real live shootin’ war in their own town. Their own neighborhood. See their own American Dream houses blasted around their ears. Their own grandmas and grandpas blown away. Their own children frying like little chunks of crispy bacon. Go hungry day after day. Go for a year without taking a bath. Oh, yeah, they could’ve pulled it off, and I don’t doubt for one minute that if General Tyndall hadn’t got shot, he might have yanked the chain, sooner or later.”

A cold shudder ran through me. Again. Mackenzie fell silent. So did I, for several minutes, then, for some odd reason, I felt like looking once more at Walt’s list of dead dwarfs. The sheets were still in my pocket. I took them out and studied the names over and over. Clifford Mansfield, Carl Torrence, General Turnberry, Paul Church, Edwin Sneed. Could any besides Ferris have had (or even suspected) any notion of what they were unwittingly helping to set up? Was that why they had all been systematically—and permanently—removed from the nation’s bosom?

While pondering those unanswerable questions, I happened to glance at the third sheet, which I hadn’t paid much attention to before:

HETTIE KEELER: This one’s a mystery, Jeb. Couldn’t find anything about her anywhere. Like she doesn’t exist at all! Only record I could trace of any Hettie Keeler was a three year-old child who had died with mother and two other kids forty years ago in a tenement fire in Harlem. Literal dead-end. Sorry. I’ll keep trying if you think I should.

The President, her entourage, and the press people came back before I had much of a chance to ponder the riddle of Hettie Keeler. President Fordham, walking briskly past us with a cell phone at her ear, gave me the beginnings of a smile and a quick wink before disappearing aft. As before, the few staff members and press corps people clattering behind her ignored us, this time muttering among themselves what a silly waste of time the Norfolk visit had been. I caught enough over-whispered, profanity-laced sentences that, added up, told me how disappointed they were. There was certainly no story there. She had sailed in, shaken a few hands, taken one fast boat ride around the harbor, promised to come back again soon, shaken a few more hands, and departed as rapidly as she had appeared, leaving the Navy brass just as bewildered as they were. For a moment, I forgot about my private thoughts and enjoyed the hell out of the surly scene like the all-knowing Cheshire cat. Faster than I would have thought possible, we were moving again, and within minutes, were airborne.

Our landing at Seymour Johnson was smooth as satin, and once more Mackenzie and I hung back, watching the President and her trailing hounds depart. After a ten-minute interval, we also trooped down the steps and headed toward a lone figure still waiting on the now empty tarmac, standing beside a blue staff car. He was tall, trim, with iron gray hair showing around his temples, and had more stripes on his sleeves than a zebra has on his back. Master Sergeant Kenneth Lyman greeted and shook hands with former Master Sergeant Joseph Mackenzie as if they were brothers who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. Lyman gave me one noncommittal, polite nod and held the back door of the car open for me. Mackenzie got in the front, and Lyman got behind the wheel.

“Okay, buddy,” he said to Mackenzie as he drove toward the gate, “What can I do for you? Must be important. First time I ever got a personal call from a Commander-in-Chief, let alone one in skirts.”

Mackenzie laughed. “I figured if anybody around this base knew where we can get our hands on some uniforms and certain other supplies we need, it’d be you. Has to be a surplus store somewhere nearby.”

Lyman nodded. “I know just the place. Smitty’s Army-Navy. ’Bout ten miles from here. You want to go there now?”

“Yeah, Sarge,” Mackenzie answered. “We ain’t got a whole helluva lotta time, neither. This Smitty guy runs that store, he do tailoring too?”

“Yep.”

“Doctoring, too?”

This time Sergeant Lyman glanced sideways. His profile showed no surprise, only mild curiosity, but he instinctively knew better than to ask any questions. “If you got the right price, he does. What do you need?”

“ID cards and the other usual stuff.” He jerked his thumb backwards. “Also, I need to borrow your office typewriter, and before he gets his picture taken, we need to get him a GI shave and a haircut.”

“Can do,” Lyman said, and stepped hard on the gas. “How long you been retired?”

“Too long,” Mackenzie said, “But its seems I just re-upped.”

“Feel good?”

Mackenzie nodded. “Feels damn good.”

I believed him.

Chapter 23

The three-hour period Mackenzie had requested was barely enough. If it hadn’t been for Sergeant Lyman’s local knowledge and influence (and a good sized chunk of President Fordham’s money) we would never have made it. Smitty’s in-house tailor measured Old Sarge and me carefully, and while he got busy working on the uniforms, Lyman drove us to a nearby barber shop where I lost my beard and all the hair that had grown back in the vicinity of my ears. I enjoyed the temporary luxury of being shaved and barbered, but when I was spun around to see the results in the mirror, it was something of a shock. I felt practically naked. Worse, perhaps once again recognizable.

I didn’t have time to worry about it, though, since I was immediately whisked back to Smitty’s. We were photographed by the close-mouthed proprietor himself, in a small room in the back of his large store that was cleverly camouflaged by house-cleaning supplies; mops, buckets, and strong smelling disinfectant, some of which had to be moved to get to the connecting cubicle that served as his darkroom. While Smitty was busy inside it, Lyman and Mackenzie explained to me that rather than getting chewed out by superiors when a soldier lost his ID, or had it stolen from him, (a black mark on the record) it was a fairly simple—if costly—matter to have people like Smitty make up a forged one. “It’s done everywhere there’s a big military base, Jeb,” Mackenzie said, with Lyman nodding his silent agreement. “Lots less grief involved, and good ‘doctors’ like Smitty can fix ’em so you can’t tell the difference. Lamination and all.”

It wasn’t long before I was staring at myself in another mirror. This time a full length one, dressed in the hastily but expertly tailored winter uniform of a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, with gleaming shoes and silver braided cap to match. Mackenzie, now decked out in his own new uniform, showed his satisfaction at the tailor’s work and explained, pointing at my lapels and shoulders, “That insignia shows you to be a JAG light Colonel.”

“JAG?”

Judge Advocate General’s office. Military lawyer. The ribbons you’re wearing ain’t much, but they’re about right for your time and grade. Nametag reads Col. James Will, close enough to Jeb Willard, I reckon, and that’s what your ID will show. Found you a beat-up GI briefcase out front, too, and soon as I can get to Sergeant Lyman’s office typewriter, you’ll have pretty authentic TDY orders to go in it.” He glanced back into the mirror, making me feel like I was Prokoviev’s fictional Lieutenant Kije “I guess you can pass for the real thing.” He turned to Lyman. “What do you think, Top?”

“Looks so much like an officer, I feel like fucking saluting,” he answered, laughing. “But what about you, buddy? Looks like you’ve demoted yourself. Ain’t you missin’ a few stripes? And about a dozen years worth of hash marks?”

“Yep. Wouldn’t do for me to show my true rank. I’m just the Colonel’s driver, remember? I also ain’t wearing half my campaign ribbons, but what the hell, I reckon we’ll pass muster for what we’re gonna do.” He turned to Smitty and the slender, aging tailor, whose name was never mentioned. “You guys done a good job. Now, all we need is a couple clothes bags to put this stuff in.”

Dressed as we had been before and carrying our new duds, we made it back to the big plane five minutes before President Fordham and the others re-boarded. When we climbed the steps and were once again enveloped inside its cavernous womb, I felt a great sense of relief. Here, I felt absolutely safe. Secure as I had felt at Camp David. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been chased or shot at for several days now. That light-headed feeling passed as quickly as it had come, however. Agent Bert Franklin, noticing my slick jaws and chin, gave me an icy look of disapproval and overt suspicion, and my apprehension returned in a hurry. But he was the only one who really noticed me. No one returning in the Presidential party gave me so much as a single glance. They were in no mood to note the change in my appearance, especially Connie Ferris, whose own square face, now a livid red, showed he had apparently just been told we were going to Fort Bragg, not Fort Benning.

Old Braxton Bragg’s bearded face, Mackenzie told me, had looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln’s. “He wasn’t near as tall, but his pictures show that he could’ve passed for Abe’s brother. Damn fine General, too. Took over from Beauregard after Shiloh, then liberated the whole State of Tennessee and most of Kentucky before his army ran outa gas. Probably was the high-water point of the Confederacy’s big push. I imagine Abe would’ve liked to have had him leadin’ Union troops.”

I had no idea that Fort Bragg had been named for a Confederate General, and was further impressed at Joe Mackenzie’s knowledge of Civil War history, and told him so as we circled for our approach into Pope Air Force Base, which joins Fort Bragg on its northern edge.

“Military history’s been my hobby since day one, Jeb.”

“So, who was Pope named for?”

“A young Flying Officer who crashed his Jenny into the Cape Fear River back in 1919.” He pointed through the window. “Right over there. General Bragg was born a ways right up that same river, in Warrenton. You bein’ a Tar Heel, I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

I had to laugh, and admit, “Joe, what I know about the military wouldn’t fill up a shot glass, and pretty soon I’m going to have to pose as a regular Officer and a Gentleman. Think I can do it?”

“Shouldn’t be no harder than posing as a priest. Act like you’re superior to anybody you see that don’t wear eagles or stars and you’ll be fine. Just don’t come on like John Wayne. Besides,” he added with a smirk, “You ain’t supposed to be regular Army anyway, just a hot shot lawyer in uniform.”

Put in my place, I smiled back at him just as the big bird’s wheels touched down—with no more of a bump than before. Air Force One hadn’t even come to a complete stop when President Fordham came out of her quarters, this time dressed in slacks and sweater, heading for the main door. Mackenzie and I watched her de-plane, followed once more by Connie Ferris and the entire string of grousing guests. We waited only five minutes, and then took our clothes bags into the dining room where Bert Franklin silently watched us change clothes. I glanced at myself in the mirror on the back of the door, took a deep breath, and told Mackenzie, “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

“Good luck, guys,” Franklin said as we walked to the ramp. “The Boss talked to me some. Told me she was going to ask for a demo drop. 82nd Airborne. You’ll probably have three, maybe four hours.”

“We’ll be back in two, I hope,” I said, “Either in person or in body bags.”

Franklin didn’t think that was funny…

The hardest part was the long walk to the motor pool, which was at least half a mile from the busy runways and hangars. My new shoes were a good fit, though, and my muscles needed the stretch. The laid-back sergeant at the gate of the motor pool took one look at Mackenzie’s pass and TDY orders, one at my rank, then merely asked if we wanted a car or a jeep. Joe told him we needed a car.

Fifteen minutes later, with me in the back seat, he drove it through the main gate at Bragg, telling me something about the fact that Pope was a closed base, but that Bragg was not. “Anybody can just drive right in and out any time they want to.”

“You know where to go?”

“Yessir,” he answered, in character now. “Ain’t never been a guest there, but I know where it is, all right. That is, if I can get through this traffic.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. It seemed that every single man or woman in uniform was moving somewhere—fast, whether by vehicle or on foot. Helene Fordham’s diversion plan was working to perfection. From the Commanding General on down, everyone had obviously been taken by surprise, having had not much more than an hour’s warning, and the whole base looked as though it was in the process of assuming full alert status. No one was standing still.

“Organized confusion,” Mackenzie said, laughing. “Thanks to the Commander-in-Chief-in-Skirts, as Lyman called her, it’s a helluva lot more confusion than organization.” He pointed through the windshield at a low building with no exterior windows. “That’s our objective.” Half a block from it, he pulled over and stopped. “Sir, would you mind handing me your briefcase?”

It was only then that I noticed how heavy it was! I passed it over the seat and watched through the rear view mirror as he opened it, extracted first an MP armband, then a web belt and holstered Colt 45. “Where’d you get that?”

“Smitty’s. You were too busy checking your new hair-do to notice. You ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

He nodded, pulled the car up a few feet, got out, and opened my door for me. There were troops moving double time down the street, but none paid us the slightest bit of attention. We casually walked inside the building into a spotless office. Behind an equally clean desk, a young First Lieutenant rose to attention, ignored Mackenzie, and saluted me smartly. “Yessir, Colonel, can I help you?”

I spoke my already rehearsed lines in as even a voice as I could. “At ease, Lieutenant. You the OOD?”

“Yessir.” He was looking from my eyes to my JAG insignia.

I placed my much lighter briefcase on top of his desk, turned my head a quarter turn, and jerked my thumb backwards. “This is Sergeant Dunn. What’s going on out there?”

“I don’t know, sir. I heard there were unexpected VIP’s on base.”

“You here by yourself?” Praying he was, I tried to put a little accusatory condescension in my tone. It worked. The Lieutenant’s face colored a little. “Uh, no, sir. Sergeant Manley’s back in the blocks, but everybody else has gone out to see… Need me to get him?”

“No, that’s okay. We’re just here to collect a prisoner.”

Right away, the Lieutenant, whose nametag said he was Morris, J.M. stood a little stiffer. “Prisoner, sir? Which prisoner?”

“The civilian. We’re taking him off your hands.”

At this point, Lt. J.M. Morris remembered his duty protocol. “Sir, with respect, may I see some ID?”

Acting as if I was bored, I sighed, showed him my ID card and the authentic-looking documents written in the peculiar terse hieroglyphic that is military language. “I’m here to escort the prisoner to Washington, then represent him, but some very important people there are anxious to talk to him first.” I fished again in the briefcase and handed him the second sheet. “Here’s my authorization. You are to release him to my custody. Right now, if you don’t mind.”

By now, the young officer, studying my “orders” plus those Mackenzie passed to him, seemed very nervous. Agitated. It was plain he’d never seen release forms dictated and signed not only by his commanding General, but also countersigned by the Secretary of Defense himself. He kept staring at the orders Mackenzie had forged in Sergeant Lyman’s office as if he’d just been handed a court order committing his mother to an insane asylum. Joe didn’t help his disposition one bit when he said, “Beggin’ your pardon, Lieutenant, but we ain’t got all day.”

I took Joe’s cue and glanced at my watch. “Plane to catch. When the Joint Chiefs are in a hurry for something, they don’t like to wait.”

Lieutenant J.M Morris was clearly shaken. “But I… I mean we, have standing orders not to even let anybody know he’s back there, let alone release him, Colonel.”

Trying to show he was seriously taxing my good nature, I answered, “I know you do, Lieutenant. Or did.” I tapped the sheets lying on the desktop with an impatient finger. “These supercede those orders. Now, if you don’t want to add your name to a certain, very nasty list at the Pentagon, you’d better shag ass.”

That threat was more than enough. The blocks he led us into at a brisk pace were larger than in any jail I’d ever seen, not that I’d seen that many, and were as clean as any hospital. We passed several men in cells; some asleep, a few lounging against their walls. One or two of the more curious, hearing our footsteps, had come to their cell doors, but none said a word. We made one left turn, followed Morris down a well-lit corridor that smelled of fresh paint to a pair of steel doors. Neither had bars; only small sliding panels for observation and food trays. Cells for the hard cases. Not bothering to peep inside, Lieutenant Morris rapped on the right hand door, took a large key from his pocket, unlocked, then pushed the heavy door open. There were two men inside. One was a three-striper who looked like a Sherman tank. Had to be Sergeant Manley. The other man was my father, dressed in too-large fatigues. Both were sitting at a bolted-down metal table, facing each other, a chessboard between them, and both looked up with exactly the same open-mouthed, blank stares.

I got in the first words. “Hello, Batman, I’m your new lawyer, appointed by no less than President Fordham, and I advise you not to make one single statement. Get your things together. We’re leaving.”

Cal leaned back in his chair, winked once at me, and promptly ignored his attorney’s advice. “It’s about time, but can we spare two more minutes? I’m only one move from checkmate.”

Chapter 24

I didn’t dare overplay my hand, but it was hard to keep my cool while we waited for Cal to nonchalantly finish off his stubborn opponent, and lean across the board to shake his hand. “Thanks for the game, Sergeant.” He stood, stretched and said, “I’m ready to go any time you say, Colonel, but I’d appreciate having my clothes back.”

I gave Lieutenant Morris a questioning look. In turn, in typical military pass-the-buck fashion, he faced his sergeant. “Where are the prisoner’s personal effects, Manley?”

Sergeant Manley’s already red face turned a shade redder, knowing that somehow, if something was wrong with this unusual release of a close guarded prisoner, he’d be the one who’d get the blame. “Sir,” he said, looking at me instead of his Officer of the Day, “Them clothes Mr. Doe was wearing when they brought him here ain’t nothing but dirty rags. He’d be better off wearing the fatigues.”

Joe Mackenzie took a step forward. “Not acceptable.” He looked at me. “Sir, I have to remind you we’ve got a plane waiting for us, but we can’t take the prisoner to Washington dressed like that. He’d be too conspicuous.”

“You’re right, Sergeant,” I said, an idea already coming to me. I’m only an inch taller than Cal, and I had never been more grateful for the Willard family height gene. Morris was almost my height as well, so I said, “Sorry, Lieutenant, but I’m going to need to borrow your uniform.”

The expected protest came in a hurry, but I stopped him in mid-sentence by quietly reminding him of the Pentagon black list. Within another couple minutes, Cal became another bogus army officer, grinning from ear to ear. From his new pocket, he extracted the key to his cell and handed it to me. His most recent chess partner suspected something was surely rotten in Denmark, but to his credit, kept his own mouth shut, no doubt surmising that list I mentioned also might very well apply to enlisted men as well as officers.

I gave him a hard look. “Where are the cell block keys, Manley?” I said while Cal was putting on Morris’ shoes.

“In the top right drawer in the front desk, Colonel.”

I nodded, and turned to Mackenzie. “Do your duty, Sergeant.”

Mackenzie unholstered his sidearm and pointed it at both men. “Lie down on the floor, please.” His tone of voice, along with his rapid movement of chambering a round produced instant results. Both hapless men hit the deck in a hurry. In the next moment we were out the door, and I locked it behind me. We started down the corridor but had only taken two or three steps when Mackenzie stopped. “Just a moment.”

We halted. “Why?” I wanted to know.

He reached for my shoulder. Right away, I knew what he was up to. In seconds, Cal had become the Colonel, and I was wearing the silver bars of a First Lieutenant. Quietly, taking unhurried steps, we walked past the cells back to the front office. The ring of block keys were exactly where the unlucky Sergeant Manley had said they were. I told Cal and Mackenzie to wait right there for me, then I walked back down to the blocks. By now, every single prisoner had heard the muffled screaming coming from the rear corridor, and were all standing by their own doors, bewilderment showing on every face. When I reached the middle of the block, I stopped and in a loud, slow voice, asked, “Who’s the senior man here?”

A low rumbling of voices answered me. “I am, Lieutenant,” came a strong voice from a cell three steps down to my right. “Staff Sergeant Willis, Andrew L.”

I walked to his cell. “Well, Sarge, this is your lucky day. How’d you like to get out of here?’’ I raised my voice so they all could hear. “How’d you all like to get out of here?”

I expected a raucous positive response, and was surprised when no one volunteered an answer. I looked through the bars at the grizzled old lifer. “Willis, I’m going to do you all a big favor.” Raising my voice again, I said, “Men, Lieutenant Morris and Sergeant Manley are locked up in one of the cells in the back. No one is guarding the building. I’m going to give the block keys to Sergeant Willis here. I’m also going to give him a thousand dollars, all in hundreds. I’m asking that he wait ten minutes after I leave, then let any of you out who wants out, and to share the money equally. If Sergeant Willis, Andrew L. double crosses you, I’m sure each of you will remember it and find him somewhere, sometime, and will know what to do to him.”

I took the envelope out of my pocket, counted off ten hundreds, laid them down on the floor in front of Willis’ cell in plain sight of at least half a dozen of the others, then handed him the keys, saying, “Here you are, my friend. Wait ten minutes, and if I were you, I wouldn’t think of crossing your mates. Besides, if you do, I’ll find out about it and come back and take care of you myself even if they don’t. You read me?”

Willis stared at me through the bars. “Yessir. I do. Loud and clear. Ten minutes it is, sir.”

I took my time walking back to the office again, hoping my knees weren’t knocking. In less than five minutes more, we were on our way to the main gate in the staff car. I was pretty pleased with myself for thinking of the extra diversion the mass escape might create, but more pleased that I hadn’t had to use the phony diaries at all. They were still in the briefcase.

It took only twenty minutes for Joe Mackenzie to drive to a big mall in Fayetteville. While he waited for us in the car, we bought Cal an off-the-rack suit, shirt, tie, socks, and shoes at one of the men’s stores there. Within an hour after leaving the stockade, we were back inside Air Force One. When we were once again closeted in the dining room, and with tears streaming down my face, I hugged Cal fiercely. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had. . .

Air Force One took off immediately after President Fordham returned, she chatting easily with a still purple-faced Connie Ferris. We were ignored again, to my relief, but we hadn’t been in the air more than half an hour before Bert Franklin quietly led us back to her private cabin. She had changed clothes for the third time and looked fresh. But this time she didn’t offer us chairs. Instead, she shook Cal’s hand first, and then embraced Joe Mackenzie like a sister. “Sergeant, can you still drive as well as you used to?”

A wide smile split his crimson face. “Yes’m I b’lieve so.”

“I don’t doubt it. I can’t put you back on active duty, but I may find a job for you on my staff when we get back home.” She then turned her attention to Cal. “Mr. Willard, you’ve got quite a son here, and my guess is he takes after his father more than he would admit. I don’t have time just now to listen to the full story of your abduction. That will have to wait until tomorrow, at breakfast. What I can do, however, is promise you a nicer place to sleep the next couple of days than where you were. In fact, I think you might be rather comfortable in the Lincoln bedroom. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make a few calls.”

Chapter 25

The ubiquitous Bert Franklin shook me out of sleep seemingly moments after I had crawled into bed, destroying a fragmented but nice dream of Liz aboard LAST WORD. “Sorry, Mr. Willard. Can you be ready in thirty minutes? The boss is on a pretty tight schedule this morning.”

I sat up. “What time is it?”

“After six.” The way he said that implied it was already very late. “Your clothes and shoes have been taken care of. You’ll find everything else you need in the bathroom.” I was on my way to it before he closed the door behind him. For a second or two, I had practically forgotten where I was.

Monsignor Ralph Curtis’ raiment, shoes, and a fresh shirt—starched collar and all—were neatly laid out on the sofa, and my first solid thought when the jet of shower water hit my head was how thorough the White House staff must be, to have its own self-contained laundry and dry cleaning facilities. The spacious guest room I had been given for the night had seemed much like one in the Mayflower, except for the decor and too-short bed, which I had been too tired to pay much attention to. I wondered, while shaving, if Cal had actually been able to go to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. I would have been too much in awe. I finished up my toilette two minutes before Franklin’s soft knock came. Cal was with him, bright eyed as ever, dressed in his natty new clothes. Where he’d obtained the red bow tie was a minor mystery.

Agent Franklin led us down the corridor to an elevator, which dropped quickly to the basement, where yet another surprise waited for me. I had been in the White House many times in the past, but only into the public and pressrooms. I knew the grand old mansion had undergone more face-lifts than the Gabor sisters, and over the years, significant internal surgeries as well. Still, I was totally unprepared for the glimpse—which is all Cal and I got—of the twists and turns of the White House bowels. An electric golf cart type vehicle was waiting, and with Franklin driving, we went whizzing down one branch of several well lighted and climate controlled concrete tunnels I had never known existed. He explained, “This takes us underneath Pennsylvania Avenue to the basement of Blair House. The boss hasn’t moved into the White House yet.”

We were shown into a cheerful south side dining room where a large table was immaculately set, but only for two. Cal and I, silently glancing at each other, sat down, and allowed ourselves to be served juice and coffee, then a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs and, wouldn’t you know it, grits! Neither my father nor I have ever been shy about eating, so we dug right in, and were maybe half finished when Helene Fordham came in, first telling us not to get up, then apologizing that she wouldn’t be able to join us. Fresh dark circles showing under her eyes showed she hadn’t had much rest, if any, and she wasn’t smiling. “Seems I’ve got a little emergency on my hands this morning, boys, trying to head off a strike by the mass transit people in New York. If busses and trains stop running there, the city could be paralyzed for God knows how long, which could definitely ruin a girl’s day. Were you comfortable enough last night?”

“Absolutely,” Cal said, “And thank you, Ms. President. It was a real honor.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry I have to postpone our chat. Bert Franklin will take care of you, and I’ll be back in touch as soon as possible. I will probably be back here by tonight. Meantime, is there anything you need?”

“No, ma’am. We’re fine,” I said.

“Good. Finish your breakfast, then.” Turning to leave, she produced a theatrical sigh. “It really does smell good! Anyway, I know you have a lot to catch up on, so stay here as long as you like.”

She left, but Cal and I both had lost our appetites. The blank-faced maid cleared the dishes away, leaving a pot of coffee on the table. Cal leaned forward. “You suppose it’s all right to talk here?”

I shrugged. “I can’t think of any place safer. You want to go first?”

He frowned. “They weren’t right wing militia rednecks, Jeb. Before two of them dragged me out of the cave, blindfolded me, and stuck me with a needle, a flare went off and I got a good look at them. I know camouflaged battle dress when I see it. Those guys were crack troops. Like Green Beret’s or Rangers or whatever they call elite commando forces nowadays. The stuff they shot me up with worked fast, though, and I woke up in that cell at Bragg.”

“How did you know where they had taken you?”

“I didn’t, not for a day or two. It didn’t take me long to make buddy-buddy with Sergeant Manley, first over checkers and then chess. He was pretty talkative after a while, although he didn’t have any idea who I was or why I was there. He also hinted, after I let him beat me a couple times, that there was fresh scuttlebutt of a lot of hush-hush Ranger training going on in a part of the base that had been closed off. Said that two or three of the other prisoners in the stockade were in there only because they’d asked a few out of school questions.”

“I’m sorry it took us so long to get you out.”

“How’d you manage it, anyway?”

I pulled a face. “Mostly blind luck.” I told him about my second trip to south Florida, and of the ghoulish scene on board Cancelossi’s yacht. “I don’t know how Cancellosi knew where you’d been taken. That old man has contacts you wouldn’t believe, and power to match.”

“I would believe it,” Cal said. “Cold-blooded little bastard, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. He told me he’s dying. Doesn’t have much time left. Neither do we. I swear, Cal, I don’t know what to do next, and I’m also worried about Liz.”

I related my phone call to Lollie. Cal dropped his chin down on his chest, toying with his coffee spoon, and I knew, from past experience, to shut up then, and wait until he’d sorted out whatever thought he was wrestling with.

He didn’t speak for several minutes, then, without raising his head, said, “Son, you remember when you were working so hard on your Boy Scout stuff, before you got your Eagle Badge? Remember the memory quizzes I used to run you through?”

I remembered all too well. Cal had a unique way of teaching me awareness and perception. He’d place a number of small, trivial and unrelated items on top of the table, such as a button, a fork, a snapshot, a pencil, a piece of thread, as many as two dozen simple odds and ends. He’d allow me to look at them for ten seconds, then close my eyes and tell him what I’d seen. After many anemic tries followed up by lots of practice, I got better and better at it. That training in memory retention and recall had stood me in good stead many a time in my adult life. I wondered why he’d brought it up now. “Sure I do. Why?”

He still hadn’t raised his head. “I want you to go back to that night you had dinner at Koontz’s house. Close your eyes. Step by step, word by word, I want you to remember what you did. What you said. What he said. What you saw. Exactly what happened and when.”

“Come on, Cal.”

“You can do it. Take a deep breath. Close your eyes. Go back. Was it raining when you got there? Who was there besides the Judge? Retrace your steps. Take your time, too. We’ve got all day.”

I wished I hadn’t drunk so much coffee. Made it harder to do, but finally I slipped backwards in time and relaxed enough to gradually put myself into a kind of quasi self-hypnotic trance. After a while, I wasn’t even conscious that I was talking out loud, nor was I aware of Cal’s presence any more until he abruptly stopped me. “Wait! Back up and tell me again about the stacks of recordings. Saint Saens, Sibelius. Go from there. Slower.”

I closed my eyes again. “…Saint Saens: Carnival of the Animals, Danse Macabre, Organ Symphony. Sibelius: Finlandia, En Saga, Violin Concerto, Symphonies one through ten. Tchaikowsky—”

“Stop! Sibelius? Symphonies one through what?”

“One through ten. Why?”

Cal stared at me hard. Then shook his head. “Try again, Pal. Sibelius only wrote five symphonies. What’s in those other CD cases?”

I stared back at him, remembering that something that night had bothered me, but at the time I couldn’t put my finger on it. “DAMN! Jesus H. Christ, Cal. We’ve got to get in there and find out.”

Something else was bothering Cal, too. He was biting his lip, his forehead creased like a plowed field. “Are those other people still at Camp David? Abby and Mrs. ? Abby’s twins?”

“Yeah. Thurmond Frye, too, far as I know.”

“We’ve got to get them out of there. Pronto.”

“Why?”

Cal jumped up, knocking his coffee cup over, spilling its cold contents all over the embroidered tablecloth. “Because that place is not guarded by the Secret Service, Jeb. They’re Marines. Military. Think, man. I’m sure Judge Koontz knew of my escape from Bragg not more than an hour after we were gone. And by now he probably also knows where Abby and her kids are. It wouldn’t take him long to arrange their kidnapping, and your FBI friend Frye is just one man. He couldn’t stop a platoon of commandos any more than we could at the cabin, and hostages like that are—”

I didn’t let him finish. I was already running through the hallowed old halls of Blair House, screaming at the top of my voice for Bert Franklin.

He wasn’t, thank God, very far away.

After picking up Mackenzie at the White House, Agent Franklin broke every speed law between Washington and Camp David, talking on his cell phone most of the way. By the time we reached the main gate, another light snowfall was in progress, but Franklin’s colleague was waiting there in another unmarked car, its motor running, with Abby, her twins, and Betty stuffed inside it like so many sardines. Frye was standing nonchalantly aside, smoking a cigarette and talking casually to one of the two tall Marine guards. His feet were spread apart, however, and I had the feeling he was ready to take instant action should anything out of the ordinary happen. When he saw us drive up, a distinct look of relief crossed his lean face, like a scudding cloud passing across the moon. And, it disappeared just as fast. He walked over to our car. Leaned over while Franklin rolled the window part way down. “What’s the deal, Jeb?” His voice had an iron edge. I didn’t know how much Franklin’s partner had told him, so I tried to keep my tone placid, not wishing to make the two Marine guards suspicious. “Time for everybody to go home. You can ride with us. Sarge, you can join Betty in the other car.”

During the ride back to Washington, I filled Frye in on what had happened, leaving out the part where I had left the keys and money at the stockade. “Thurmond, we have to move fast, now. We have to get into the Judge’s house, warrant or no warrant.”

“You sure are intent on getting me fired, aren’t you? Just when are you planning this little caper?”

“Tonight. We can’t afford to wait any longer.”

“Yeah? And what about the Judge? You think he’s going to oblige us by taking a short vacation while we burglarize his house?”

“I’ve got one idea. Bert, you’ve got to call the President and let me talk to her. Now, please.”

Franklin gave me a sour look. “She’ll have my head on a plate.”

“Either that or she will bump you up to Chief of White House Security.”

Franklin puffed out his cheeks, picked up his phone and dialed a series of numbers, never taking his eyes from the road. “Sorry as hell, ma’am, but I think you’d better talk to Mr. Willard.” He handed me the phone, with a glance that said, “She’s pissed.”

She was, but her voice was quiet. Controlled. “Jeb, this had better be important. I’m up to my earrings here.”

I took a deep breath. “Ms. President, I wouldn’t do this unless it was critical. More lives are at stake. I’ll explain it all later, but can you possibly call Judge Koontz and get him to the White House for a private dinner tonight? Use any excuse you can think of.”

“Why?”

“Please, ma’am. Just do it. We’re fairly sure we know where the evidence is, but it’s critical to have him away from his house, and just as critical we know where he is. Can you manage it?”

There was a short pause. Then, “I’ll guarantee it. I’ll have him at the White House by eight. It’ll be a five-hour foreign policy meeting, but you had better be right about him, Jeb. You’re sticking me out on a long, rotten limb.”

“I know. And thanks. Is it all right to bring Abby and her kids to the Blair House? It’s the only place I know where they’ll be safe. Camp David is a trap waiting to be sprung.”

“I understand. Yes, by all means, and call me tomorrow. Bert knows how you can reach me. Be careful, Jeb, and try not to break too many more laws. Now let me speak to Bert again.”

I handed him the phone, heard him grunt under his breath a couple of times, then say, “Yes, Ms. President. I’ll do that.” He put the cell phone down and gave me a quick glance, exhaling loudly. “All set. Anything else?”

“Just one thing more,” I said. “May I borrow this car tonight?”

Bert Franklin rolled his eyes and shook his head, left to right, but I knew he was saying yes.

Chapter 26

Once we had everyone safely herded into Blair House, I caught Franklin by the elbow and pulled him aside. “Bert, I didn’t want to mention this in front of the others, but I really need to use that car this afternoon.”

“Yeah? What for?”

“An important personal errand. You can say no if you like, and I can take a taxi or rent a car, but if it won’t get you in trouble, I’d really appreciate it.”

He hesitated for only a moment before handing me the keys. “What time will you be back?”

“Before dinner time. Promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he said. “And be careful. Anything happens to that car, we’ll both be up that well-known creek.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t drive nearly as fast as you do. See you later, and if anybody asks where I am, especially my father, tell ’em I’ve simply gone to get some civilian clothes.”

It had stopped snowing by the time I got to Alexandria, and when I pulled into the drive of the convent, the noon sun was shining brightly. An omen? I rang the entrance bell, praying that a caretaker, somebody was inside. I was not expecting it to be Sister Agnes, however, so when she opened the heavy front door herself, it took me a few seconds to recover my wits. She recognized me instantly, and spoke first, as I yanked off the hunting cap. “Mr. Willard. I’ve been expecting you. Come in, please.”

She led the way to her office, closed the door, and asked me to have a seat.

“How long have you been back?” I said finally.

“Since last Friday. All of us.”

“I’m looking for Liz. Do you know where she is?”

“She’s here. With us.”

Why did that not surprise me? “Great! Could you please tell her I’m here?”

She didn’t answer right away, which made me start to feel something like budding apprehension, though I couldn’t have said why. I waited, keeping a neutral expression on my face.

At last she said, “My son, we owe you a great debt of gratitude. Possibly even our lives. So does the Monsignor, and there is very little I would deny you. I’m going to allow you to see Liz, but I must also say to you that she was close to a total breakdown by the time you left her at Tryon’s Cove. Very close.”

“Breakdown?”
“Yes. With all the other things on your mind, you didn’t notice, but try to imagine how she felt: Her brother’s tragedy, her own misfortunes at school, her harrowing adventures with you, not knowing when or where she might be killed? Well, perhaps I had best allow Liz to speak for herself. Our chapel is midway down the corridor on the left. Wait for her there.”

The tiny chapel was candle-lit and quiet as a grave, which did nothing for the queasy feeling spreading like a mudslide through my gut. I sat down and waited, barely breathing. I didn’t hear Liz arrive, a few minutes later, and only sensed her presence when she eased down on the pew behind me. “Don’t turn around, Jeb. I don’t want to have to look at your eyes.”

Something in the sound of her voice froze me in place. “Liz? Sweetheart, what is it? I came for you as soon as I could. You—”

“Please listen to me, and don’t interrupt. If you do, I’m not sure I can get any or all of this out. First, I love you. I know I will always love you, but I have made a more important decision for the rest of my life. I’ve already started my initial probationary period. I’m a novice now, preparing to take my first vows. God willing, I’ll make it through my time as a novitiate, and within two years, will take my final vows. I’m going to be a nun, Jeb.”

I don’t know how much time passed between those shattering words and her next ones. The only sound I heard was the accelerated thumping of my own heartbeat.

“While I was in Tryon’s Cove with the Williams family and later, in Florida, I was close to losing it. Really losing it. I’d been trying hard to imagine a life with you. Every first thought was of living with you. Marrying you. Having your babies. Not dying with you in some God-forsaken place. And every second thought was, what about the day you didn’t come home? Or if you did, would you be dead or alive? I knew if we were together, I mean permanently together, I wouldn’t be able to bear it if anything happened to you. With the helter-skelter life you lead, the probability, the risk is too high. Maybe I’m weak, but I have already lost too much. Bishop Doyle knew I was at the end of my rope. So did Sister Agnes.

“But they didn’t talk me into this, Jeb. Nobody did, unless it was God. I’ve been dreading seeing you again. Telling you this, and I’m begging you not to say one single word. Otherwise, I’ll be lost forever. Let me go, my love. Just… let me go. Please.”

I didn’t hear her stand up and leave. I don’t know how much longer I sat there either, alone except for the sympathetic stained glass saints and slow-burning candles. I found myself staring at one in particular, trying to work out in my head how long it might take to burn down, or how long the air around it would stay warm if someone snuffed it out; ill-fitting metaphors for the quick flash and warm flame of Liz McCarty who had lighted a new part of my life with the brilliance of a Roman one, and with the same brevity.

Sister Agnes was standing beside the front door when I left, offering her hand. “We will all pray for you, Mr. Willard. God be with you.” I muttered a word or two of thanks and stepped outside. It had become cloudy again. Probably would snow again before nightfall…

Without really thinking about it, I drove into a nearby upscale mall, parked, and found a men’s store where I bought jeans, three flannel shirts, underwear and socks, plus a pair of comfortable Nike’s, all of which I wore outside, thus legitimizing my reason for borrowing the car. I dropped Ralph Curtis’ things in the first trash bin I saw. Since leaving the convent, I had felt like I was wearing somebody else’s skin, and it was burning me up. By the time I got back in the car, I was feeling a little better, at least physically. Another thought came to mind, so I got out again, looking for the nearest telephone. I dialed Ernie’s number and left a message on his machine to call Father Ralph. “Tell him it’s okay to come home, Ernie. It’s safe now, and his church needs him more than ever before. I’m okay, too, and so is my Dad. More later.”

It was snowing again by the time I got back to Blair House. Saying nothing to anyone, I found a sofa in an empty room, stretched out, my feet over the edge, and by some miracle, fell fast asleep.

The snow was heavier when Frye pulled out of the Vienna side street, glancing at his watch. “Seven fifteen. He’s on his way.”

“How do you know?” Cal said.”

“My secret.”

During our earlier dinner at Blair House, which I had barely touched, Thurmond had already reluctantly revealed to Cal and me a few of his long kept professional secrets, the most important of which was how he had known about Judge Koontz’s security system for three years, and while I had been off on my afternoon shopping trip, had arranged with the Vienna police and the Allison Alarm and Security Company to shut it down at seven o’clock because Judge Koontz had “wanted the FBI to make a few additional Federal modifications,” which would take until past midnight to finish.

And like Cal, I wondered how he had known exactly when the Judge had left his house for the drive into Washington, but I let that pass. The heightened spurt of adrenaline coursing through my veins when we pulled into Koontz’s property with our lights blazing shoved all lingering thoughts of Liz out of my head. I also swallowed another dose of grudging admiration for Thurmond Frye’s professionalism when it dawned on me that he had somehow commandeered a car that was the same make, model, and color as the one Judge Koontz drove!

It took him no more that twenty seconds to pick the back door lock. Inside, we used flashlights to find our way up to the music room. I went straight for the stacks of recordings, praying that Cal’s amateur musicology was on the money. Not taking any chances, I extracted all ten of the plastic Sibelius cases from the shelf. “What now?”

“First things first,” Frye said, not bothering to whisper. “We find a CD player and test them out.”

It took a while. We finally found it—in the Judge’s kitchen! I should have known that’s where it would be. One by one, we shoved the disks into the machine, set normal levels, and were rewarded by the darkly beautiful sounds of Jan Sibelius’ genius. Symphonies one through five were all legitimate performances. Collectively holding our breath, we listened for something musical to come out of the speakers when Frye jammed Symphony number six in. All we got was rough static. “Bingo!” Cal said, his own voice half an octave higher. “Let’s look for his computer.”

This was easier to locate. It was in Judge Koontz’s upstairs bedroom, which he hadn’t shown Walt and me before. Its animated screen saver was casting dancing light shadows on the far walls. “Uh, oh,” Cal said.

“What? I asked.

“Koontz’s password. We can’t do squat without that.”

Frye reached for the wall light switch and flipped it on, revealing a sneaky look in his eyes. “Not a problem. Like most people who aren’t computer experts, Koontz uses a password he couldn’t easily forget.” He sat down. Without saying anything further, and while we looked over his shoulder he typed in the word idamae. Turning back at us, he added, “His mother’s name.”

Cal and I exchanged glances, both of us thinking the same thought. How does he know?

He slipped the “Sibelius 6th” in, clicked on SHOW ALL FILES, and like Cal and me, caught his breath when it immediately responded with—OPERATION CASTLE

“Chess term?” Cal whispered.

Those were the last words spoken by any of us for over an hour. Thurmond tapped the mouse rapidly. It was there. All of it. The whole diabolical, unbelievable plan, in detailed perfection. As if by tacit agreement, Frye scrolled fast, only pausing here and there, as if he couldn’t quite believe some of the underlined names, phrases, and dates.

With a shaking hand, he inserted the next disk, then the next. We all stared unblinking at the screen, much, I imagine, the same way other eyes had first beheld King Tut’s treasure tomb. Or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or maybe the same way men in the New Mexico desert watched the first atomic bomb test.

Thurmond was slipping in the last disc when a voice from behind us quietly said, “Freeze. Raise your hands.”

Simultaneously, the three of us turned. A hatted, tall man in an expensive overcoat was standing in the doorway, holding a nasty looking machine pistol leveled at our chests. We had no chance to do anything other than what he’d commanded. We froze. The muzzle of the Uzi, or whatever type of weapon he expertly held, didn’t waver a millimeter. The voice didn’t either. “Hands on top of your heads, please, and don’t talk. Not a sound. I don’t want to shoot you, but if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to, you’ll all be dead before you fall.”

At the range of no more than four feet, with all three of us standing close together, we believed him, and slowly did as he had told us. It was only then that I noticed another man behind him, half a foot shorter, also holding a similar weapon. The second man came inside quickly and snatched up the discs, including the one still inside the computer. As if by habit, he touched the shutdown key, nodding to his partner, who said, “Good. All right, then. You’re all going back down the hall to the music room, one at the time.” With the barrel of the pistol, he motioned to Frye. “You first.”

In the soft, but adequate light of Ezekiel Koontz’s bedroom, I saw Thurmond Frye’s face harden as he stared into the face of his new enemy, and then took a slow step toward the door. “Just a moment,” the tall man said. “Hands up against the wall, please. High up. Spread your feet.”

Frye did as he was told, and was quickly frisked. In seconds, the tall man found Frye’s own gun, and the lock-picking tool case, which he shoved into his overcoat pocket. The second man then jammed the snout of his gun into the small of Frye’s back. “Let’s go.” The two of them disappeared down the hall. The shorter man returned within minutes, and motioned for Cal. “You next.”

Cal gave me a flashing look of absolute helplessness, then followed orders. I opened my mouth to say something, but the ice-cold eyes of the tall man with the steady hand holding the machine pistol changed my mind for me. His partner came back soon, and it was my turn to be marched down the hall. While the tall man held his pistol to my spine, the second guy unlocked and opened the door. “Inside, please.”

I obeyed, noticing that Cal was sitting on the harpsichord bench, but Frye was standing, leaning against the old piano, his hands resting on either side of its top. As I crossed the room, momentarily shielding him from the tall man, I saw him lean forward and lift his right leg, placing his foot against the thick leg of the heavy instrument. I would never have believed a man as big as Turmond Frye could move so fast. Cat-like, using the leverage of the piano leg, he sprang at the tall man with a blood-curdling scream. The surprise move was effective, but not quite fast enough. There was too much open space between his hurtling body and the tall man standing in the open doorway.

His machine pistol emitted one obscene burp, making not much more noise than a child’s toy. Frye dropped in a heap at the man’s feet, his body twitching like that of a poisoned animal. The tall man looked up at Cal and me, again leveling the pistol. “Impressive, but stupid. I’m sorry.” He turned his head sideways, toward his partner, but without taking his eyes away from us. “You have them all?”

The shorter killer patted his overcoat pocket. “Yes. All ten. Let’s go.”

“Just a moment,” the tall man said. “Cover them.” From his pocket he removed Thurmond’s weapon, ejected its clip, and extracted two of the bullets, which he dropped on the floor. Placing the clip back into his pocket, he dangled the empty automatic from his finger. “Listen to me carefully. I am not by nature a cruel man. I’m a hard one, true, but I’m not without compassion. I’m going to leave this weapon here when we leave. You will have two choices. As you can see, this is a solid oak door, with a modern steel lock. One of you can use those two bullets to try to shoot it out, but that would be futile, I think. Your other choice will be for yourselves. I wish I could guess which of you will go first.”

With those inhuman words, he turned quickly, flung the gun into the far corner, and slammed the door behind him. We heard the key turn in the lock, then nothing. They were gone—along with the proof of Koontz’s treason. Cal and I both stood stock still for a long couple of seconds before we thought of Frye. I bent over him, turned him over and tried to ignore the blood oozing from several holes in his upper body. He had not yet lost consciousness, and his tortured eyes looked into mine. Through pink froth and clenched teeth, he was trying to overcome his horrible pain to tell me something. His voice was weak. Otherworldly. Only a few croaked words at the time. “B—elt… Paaa—ger.”

A spell of spastic coughing followed, and I caught my breath. With great effort of will, he opened his eyes again, “B—button… Three… times. Thrrrrreee…” His eyes rolled back in his head, and I couldn’t tell if he had died or had only fainted from pain. Reaching through blood, I found the pager, or what looked to be a pager, turned it over in my hand and found the button in the back. I depressed it three times, then dropped it. When I looked up, Cal was uselessly trying the doorknob. Looking around the room in oncoming panic, I suddenly remembered that it wasn’t the number of Sibelius recordings that had bugged me about this room before. It was something else.

It had no windows!

Cal and I bent over Thurmond Frye, using the pressure of our open palms to try to staunch some of the blood flow. It was hopeless, we knew, and our shared glances of human inadequacy changed and multiplied fourfold—to terror—when we both realized we were smelling smoke. Cal’s voice was a choking whisper. “They’ve set the place on fire, Jeb. We’re trapped.”

I then believed I knew who had murdered Jean Tyndall, and it was also then that I fully understood why the “compassionate” killer had left behind Frye’s pistol and two bullets.

Chapter 27

Two things delayed my believing Cal and I were about to die.

The first was natural compulsion to do what we could for Thurmond Frye. He was still breathing, although blessedly unconscious. Cal ripped off his own coat, shirt, and undershirt while I struggled to remove Thurmond’s blood-soaked parka. Neither of us spoke. Cal tore his undershirt into strips which he folded into improvised pads. These I pressed down onto the four holes in Frye’s chest and stomach, using my hands and forearms. Seconds later, Cal’s shirt became strips which I tied over the makeshift bandages as best I could. It wasn’t enough, so Cal and I exchanged places; he compressing the wounds while I tore up my own clothes in similar fashion, tying the strips around Frye’s upper body as tight as possible. Smoke was already coming from beneath the door. We dragged Frye into the far corner, keeping our hands pressing down on his wounds. It was all we knew to do.

The second thing, mutually felt but unspoken as we avoided looking at each other and panting from the exertion, was unfathomable hatred for the tall man’s satanic cruelty. He had dropped only two bullets on the floor, and he had known Frye was still alive. No, it wasn’t compassion he had left behind, it was the stink of refined sadism he would obviously enjoy for hours wherever he had gone, guessing which of us would be the mercy-killing odd man out: Would the father shoot the son and then himself, allowing the already dying man to simply roast slowly in the flames or succumb to a combination of his wounds and smoke inhalation? Would the younger, stronger man prevail; put a bullet into his father’s brain, then put the dying man out of his misery, or become in the end, a coward, and use that last bullet for himself?

Between the thoughts of those macabre facts, I couldn’t help but also feel abysmal, crushing failure. Failure of underestimating Ezekiel Koontz a second time, and worse, failure of never being able to report his high crimes. Too, it hurt to know I couldn’t tell Abby that however Mac McCarty had learned of Koontz and Tyndall’s plan, he had died an unrecognized hero, because by shooting Tyndall, he had stopped the coup before it could be launched.

More smoke came beneath the door, making our eyes smart, then tear. Highlights, or rather, lowlights of Koontz’s fantastic scheme began flying through my mind:

Zero hour minus 24— Simultaneous prison breaks in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Riots in three others. Zero hour minus 20— Assassination of the President of Mexico, staged firefights along Mexican border in California and Texas. Zero Hour minus 16— Missiles from Air Force drones crash into both the White House and the Capitol, responsibility claimed in simultaneous letters and taped messages delivered to New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post from followers of the martyred Osama Bin Laden. Zero Hour minus 12— Massive sabotage at main New York City power—

“We’ve got to try to get out of here, Jebediah. These floors are hardwood. Help me with this piano.”

Cal’s idea jolted me out of my stupor. That, plus the rising heat and smoke which had already caused us both to start coughing. Together we were able to move the old piano a few feet toward the door. Summoning all our remaining strength, we got behind it, counted to three, and pushed as hard as we could, but we couldn’t get enough momentum to crash it into the door. It was simply too heavy. Still, we tried twice more. Collapsing on the floor, sweating profusely now, we frantically looked around the room for any object we could use to smash the door down. There was nothing. We could have moved the harpsichord easily enough, but its fragile wood would have splintered into matchsticks against the solid oak of the locked door. There was nothing else we could use. Nothing else we could try. Nothing.

After a minute or two more, Cal looked me in the eye, then toward the corner where Frye’s gun lay. The heat from the floor below was becoming intense. When he looked back at me, the tears in his eyes were not all from the smoke. “You want to flip me for it?”

I wondered whether I could summon up enough strength, enough guts, to crawl over to him and get him into a position where I could give him a sucker punch hard enough to—

“What was that?”

I stopped, turned my head. Someone on the other side of the door? Miracle?

Sister Agnes’ prayers, and ours, must have been heard and answered fast! Our too real purgatory had lasted only fifteen or twenty minutes! When we heard the key turning in the lock, my first thought was that the tall man might be coming back to be compassionate after all, and finish us off himself, but the face of our Angel of Deliverance was a female one. Hettie Keeler, carrying two water-soaked blankets, came through it, with Jason Barnes and Dr. Mavis Zinman hard on her heels. . .

My memory of the immediate events that followed are spotty. A few of them, however, are still crystal clear: Barnes and me, draped in wet blankets, carrying Thurmond down the stairs all the way to the basement. Out the cellar door to the back lawn, unmindful of the falling sleet, gratefully gulping the freezing, heaven-sent air. Mavis bending over Frye, then barking orders. Somehow getting him into the back of the unmarked van. With Cal driving the car we had come in, following the van to the emergency entrance of the hospital in Vienna. Falling asleep (or passing out?) in the back seat of the car with Barnes driving behind a parade of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars back to and past Koontz’s flaming house, but not before hearing what Cal said to me.

“Jeb, didn’t you recognize the killer?”

“Huh? No. No, I didn’t.”

“You should have. Would have if he’d had his uniform on. The big guy was General Abner Turnberry.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’d stake my resurrected life on it.”

The car’s bumping, then slithering sideways through snow-covered ruts woke me up. Through the windshield, I recognized the farmhouse Liz and I had run away from. This time I was damned happy to see it! I couldn’t imagine a safer haven than its remote, FBI-protected sanctuary, and once again I realized for the second time how lucky I was to be alive when I was brought here.

Inside, over coffee liberally laced with brandy, I half listened to Cal’s detailed recounting of our burglary, then to Barnes’ explanation that Hettie Keeler was the fourth member of Frye’s team. A careful legend had been constructed for her long-term undercover work, using the identity Walt Erikson had dug out. This reminded me of his family, so I asked Barnes if they had ever been contacted.

“Yes,” he said, lowering his voice. “One week ago. Had to do it myself.”

“How’d his wife take it?”

“Pretty hard. Sometimes this job really sucks.”

“Where’s Hettie now?”

“She stayed at the hospital with Mavis.”

Cal said, “Good thing for us Frye had planned back-up. That was a little too close. He’s a mighty good man. I hope he’ll make it.”

I tried to lighten things up some. “By the way, Barnes, I owe you an apology for the last time I was here. No hard feelings?”

Barnes shook his head. “No, but an apology might not be enough for Mavis.” He chuckled sarcastically. “The cousins really got on our case when they found out we’d let somebody escape from here, and I don’t mind admitting it was tough for us to swallow that pill. Since then, I’ve installed a laser beam barrier all around the perimeter. Nobody’s going to get in—or out—of here again without our knowing, but like I said, I can’t answer for Mavis. She owes you one. Big time.”

I wasn’t looking forward to that. Seeing the questioning look on Cal’s face, and not wanting to explain, I changed the subject. “Cal is certain it was General Turnberry who surprised us. Apparently, Judge Koontz didn’t get rid of all his dwarfs.”

Barnes asked, “Any idea who the other guy was?”

Cal shook his head. “No clue, unless he was one of the other five. But how could it have been Turnberry? He was killed in a plane crash, wasn’t he?”

Barnes poured more coffee all around. “With the kind of planning they detailed, it wouldn’t have been all that difficult. Find a fall guy with the same height and build, pre-planned exchange of dental records, sabotage the plane. Who would know? Accidents happen. What I’m wondering now is how many more of them might still be alive.”

It was another baffling twist, but one I couldn’t focus on. I kept seeing the animated face of Walt Erikson’s bright little daughter. Too, there was something else crawling like a mole through the cobwebs of my mind; something Cal had said, but I was so tired I couldn’t pinpoint what it was.

Barnes started to say something else when his cell phone rang. He jerked it from his pocket. “Barnes.”

We watched his face while he listened, then took a deep breath and let it all out in a long sigh. He closed the phone and looked at me, tears in his eyes. “That was Mavis. She thinks the boss will pull through. Said to tell you all is forgiven. You kept him from losing too much blood. He’s got a collapsed lung and two cracked ribs, but the lowest wound was below his stomach. He’s going to make it.”

“Thank God,” Cal said.

“Hettie’s on her way to headquarters to make a report. Mavis is going to stay there until he’s strong enough to move him to Mayo’s. I hope it won’t be long, either. Vienna isn’t a very healthy place right now.”

Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Mavis said Koontz’s house burned to the ground. Went up like kindling. Those guys must have planted incendiary devices all over the place. Or maybe the Judge did beforehand. Fail-safe precaution. We have a team already out there, but I doubt they’ll find anything.”

Cal reached for the brandy bottle and helped himself to another hit for his coffee. “You know what? I think those guys were already in the house waiting for us. It wouldn’t have been hard for them to have some hidden place, maybe in the attic or in the cellar. After all, we crashed the joint pretty much like the Marx brothers, what with lights on, talking out loud, the whole nine yards.”

Barnes pinched his nose. “Could be, but then they’d have to have had a third party pick them up, right? Timing would have to have been to the second. I guess we’ll never know, one way or the other. Not unless we can find Turnberry. Mavis said Hettie was going to get out an APB on those two guys, but my guess is it’ll be too late. No telling how far away they are by now.”

We all lapsed into a lethargic silence. Cal picked up his coffee mug and walked to the back door. He stared out at the falling snow for several minutes, then turned back, looking at me. “It adds up to more, Pal: McCarty shoots Tyndall, killing both Koontz’s partner and his time table. You scare the Judge with the phony diaries. In panic, he arranges hits on several people, but not all done by Hemiola. Who else? Our cabin was raided by elite commandos. I was taken to Bragg. Your boat was probably blown up by other Special Forces, too, probably a secret SEALS unit. All military operations. Koontz goes to considerable pains to cover his tracks, worms his way into the Vice Presidency, and then Turnberry shows up. General Turnberry. Why?”

Then I remembered what Cal had said earlier. “Sergeant Manley had hinted of hush-hush training missions going on at Bragg, too. Current training missions. It’s the Military.”

“Right,” Cal said, and added his kicker, “Don’t forget, we didn’t have a chance to see what was on that last disc. So, like I said, it adds up to more. A lot more.”

For several seconds, we stared at each other, neither of us wanting to verbalize what we were thinking. I opened my mouth, as if to deny the revelation we both were having. Cal nodded soberly. I turned abruptly to Barnes, ignoring the quizzical look on his face. “Let me borrow that cell phone, Jason. I’ve got to call the White House.”

Chapter 28

Shortly before dawn, flanked by a pale Bert Franklin and the agent who had been in charge at her Georgetown house, Helene Fordham stomped into the kitchen like the furious President she was, wearing a sashed sable coat and a matching Russian style hat. She marched right past the others and got in my face. “Damn you, Jeb Willard, you’re getting to be a bigger pain in the ass than my ex. What in hell’s going on? I feel like a college freshman sneaking out of the dorm on a back alley date. Bert practically kidnapped me. If this latest national security problem is so important he had to come barging into my private bedroom to roust me in the middle of the night, why couldn’t I have taken the helicopter? I’d have been here much sooner, and might have even caught two much needed winks of sleep.”

I raised both hands in genuine self-defense. “I’m really sorry, ma’am, but the Marine helicopter might have been too dangerous. We don’t know who may be controlling its crew.”

“You want to explain that in one sentence or less?”

Feeling my own heat rising, I took a deep breath. Blew out my cheeks. “Okay. Bottom line is, the conspiracy was real. Is real. We found out that Judge Koontz and President Tyndall had been planning a military coup. They had a nearly foolproof plan to take over the government. Uh, maybe you should sit down. This is pretty rough stuff.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. Her narrowing eyes never left mine while she lowered herself slowly into the chair Cal had eased up behind her. “Go on.”

I took another deep breath. “Robert McCarty somehow found out about it, probably through Mrs. Tyndall, and shot the President one hour before he and Koontz could make their opening moves. Mac’s action, ugly as it was, stopped what might have been the worst disaster in the history of the United States. Koontz has been frantically covering up ever since I confronted him.”

“So,” she said, getting right to the kernel of it. “Even if what you say is true, and I’m not in the least convinced it is, their lunatic plan never got off the ground, then, did it? What’s all this urgency about now?”

“Because we’re also certain Tyndall’s death didn’t make Koontz give up! He’s going ahead with it anyway, and we don’t know where you fit into his plan, if at all.”

I waited for a fiery response, and was surprised when she merely glowered at me, then got up and walked to the kitchen’s back door, much like Cal had earlier. She peered out into the darkness for several minutes, then turned back. I knew what was coming, and dreaded it. I was right, too.

“Two questions, Jeb: Do you have proof? And, if so, where is it?”

The only way I could truthfully answer her was to point at Cal. “In my father’s head, ma’am.”

She glanced once at Cal, then back at me, frowning even deeper. Then she looked up at poor Jason Barnes, who was standing aside like a man whose bladder was about to burst, with no toilet in sight. “Young man, is there something to drink in this mansion? I mean, something as hard as Jack Daniels? Neat, please.”

Barnes jumped like he’d had an electric shock. President Fordham tossed back half the tumbler he set on the table before her, shed her coat, and fixed her steely blues on Cal, who had sat down across from her.

Calvin James Willard is no southerner. Beneath his usual easy-going manners and lanky good looks, he’s as tough and stubborn as any New Englander who ever lived. At the time of his birth, in New Hampshire, he had been blessed with considerable gifts; one in particular. Like God grants a few musicians with perfect pitch, Cal had been given a photographic memory. Total recall. And at no time in his long life had it been more needed. Or appreciated. He quietly recounted everything we had seen on Koontz’s computer screen as if he had typed it into his own brain minutes before, only it took him over an hour to tell it all, including our too-close brush with death.

When he had finished, the whole kitchen atmosphere was steeped in dead air thicker than fog and heavier than lead. This lasted a full five minutes while the new President slowly sipped her whiskey, looking around at each of us. In a gentle, almost inaudible voice, she said, “Mr. Barnes, when all this is over, I’m going to personally see to it that you and the rest of your team are adequately rewarded for the tremendous service you have given to our country.” She looked then at me. “Jeb, I apologize for blowing up at you, and I’m so very thankful you and your father came through that ordeal alive.”

She reached across the table and took Cal’s hand in both of hers. “Mr. Willard, you and your son are really remarkable people. I can’t ever thank you enough, and I’m so very sorry to have placed you in such jeopardy. Please, would you mind going over the high points once more? I want to make sure I have it right in my own head.”

Cal leaned back in his chair. “It was total, ma’am. One carefully planned disaster after another, each worse than the one before. In addition to the nasty business with Mexico, the riots and bombings, the assassinations, and the calculated chaos in New York and other cities, all timed out to the minute, they had troops in place primed to take over every key television network, major newspapers, telephone headquarters, State houses, even local government centers. Aside from the military people, several secret police units were also included in the attack forces and would make their own moves in coordination with the troops. Commanders and Lieutenants from all branches of the armed forces, National Guard, and police were hand picked by Turnberry and Tyndall.”

Cal skipped a beat to allow that to sink in, and then continued.

“In my opinion, the worst trigger of all, the one that was supposed to be the final straw, was the plan to murder school children in Seattle and Miami. They figured that on top of all the rest, killing a bunch of kids would galvanize the country behind Tyndall out of sheer horror, and give him the final excuse to declare martial law, suspend congress and arrest anybody who objected. It was all tantamount to civil war. Tyndall would have been in position to become an American Adolf Hitler. Blitzkrieg and all.”

Cal paused to let all that sink in even deeper, then added, “I suppose then they would go about running the country in whatever warped way they wanted to. What Jeb said about his friend McCarty was true. He must have somehow found out what day Zero Hour was supposed to kick off, and shot Tyndall just before he could set his machine in motion. Trouble is, all that was on only four of the five discs we found. We didn’t get to see the fifth one, and Turnberry and his man Friday made sure they took all of them. What we think is that with a few minor changes, kind of a plan B, the Judge is moving ahead with it anyway.”

“But,” President Fordham argued, “With Tyndall dead, and me now in office, how could he possibly hope to get away with it?”

Another pregnant silence filled the room as Cal stood up and turned to me to drop the hammer.

I cleared my throat. “He couldn’t have, ma’am. Not until you appointed him Vice President. If anything happened to you, well, he would be the new president, and, he’d have Turnberry and Ferris right beside him. Because of us, Cal’s escape, and our burglary, I’m sure he’s feeling pressure to move rapidly before it all unravels. There is only one thing left for him to do now.”

Helene Fordham’s face turned chalk white. “You mean… kill me, too?”

I didn’t have to answer that.

She dropped her head. Her voice was a weak whisper. “Dear God in Heaven. It’s… It’s too unbelievable.” She looked up at Barnes. Tapped her glass. “Got any more of this?”

While Barnes poured, she leaned back in her chair. “I hate to keep harping on this, but the lawyer in me demands it. With all due respect to that marvelous memory of yours, Mr. Willard, we have to have physical proof. Without it, I’m powerless to act.”

“Not quite,” I said. “When I was a football player, my coach used to tell us to keep on running the same play until the other team stopped it.”

“You lost me,” she said.

“The ruse with Connie Ferris worked once. It might again. What we have to do is force the Judge into a bad move. A mistake.”

“All right, I’ll buy that, but how?”

I sat down in Cal’s chair. “First, we have to get you away from Washington. Out of harm’s way as much as possible, and as soon as possible. Secondly, I’m sure Bert here will confirm that you still have the loyalty and dedication of the Secret Service. Probably the FBI as well.” I glanced at Bert and Jason Barnes whose nods of affirmation were instantaneous. “Why not call Ferris again and tell him you want to continue your inspection tours of military bases on the west coast, maybe in conjunction with a few good will political visits, say, in San Francisco, San Diego, or wherever. This would accomplish a couple things besides getting you out of town. It would indicate to the Judge and his cronies that you don’t suspect a thing, and would maybe force him to make a move he hadn’t planned on. My hope is by doing so, he’ll slip up somewhere along the way, and we’ll catch him red-handed.”

President Fordham sipped and narrowed her eyes. “In other words, I’d be a moving target. Flying bait!”

I felt my face turn red. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s the only way, ma’am. Don’t forget, you’ll be flying in the security of Air Force One, and Bert and his people will be with you every minute, everywhere you set foot. Cal and I will go along too, if we may.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she said, her voice hard-edged. “Air Force One is also under control of the military.”

I shook my head. “Ferris will also be aboard the whole time, too. No, it’s not the flight I worry about. It’s where you might be going.”

She placed her tumbler down on the table with a gesture of decision. “Much as I hate to admit it, I believe you’re right. There isn’t any other way I can see, and they have to be stopped. Quickly and legally. You and Ernie Latham may certainly come along, but your father can’t. He’s going to stay here and write down every word he’s memorized. Names, dates, places, everything. His testimony in court or maybe a joint session of congress, under oath, may very well be needed.”

She stood, bringing all the rest of us to our feet as well. “Bert, we’d best leave now. I’ve got calls to make and some west coast political promises to keep.” She looked at Cal, smiled sweetly and quoted, “And miles to go before I sleep.”

At the door, she reached up and kissed me on my cheek. “Pray for us, Jeb. For all of us in this screwed up country.”

Then she was gone into the gray morning.

I turned around and asked Jason Barnes to loan me his phone. With it, I made two calls. A short one to Ernie and a long one to Salvatore Cancelossi.

Chapter 29

We had been in the air almost an hour when Bert Franklin touched my shoulder. “Can you and Mr. Latham come with me, sir?”

A few of the other members of the press corps who had been invited to make the trip west noticed this, though none reacted with more than a raised eyebrow of jealousy. We followed Franklin to the President’s quarters and were shown in. Helene Fordham got up from behind her loaded desk, removed her glasses, and shook my hand, then Ernie’s. “Glad you could come along, Ernie. Have a seat, please, both of you.”

We did, and she continued, looking at me. “Did you happen to see Connie Ferris when you came aboard?”

“Sure did,” I said. “He glad-handed all of us, and personally issued each of us a printed itinerary handout. A lot different than last time.”

“Yes. Curious, isn’t it? When I told him I wanted to do this west coast inspection tour, he acted like he was absolutely delighted. Couldn’t have been more cooperative and pleasant. Even laid on something special for me. You may know that the latest shuttle from the space station was supposed to land tomorrow morning in Florida. He’s arranged for it to land late this afternoon in California instead. Just for my benefit.”

Noticing the blank look on Ernie’s face, she said, “Jeb can fill you in later on what we’re talking about, Ernie. Ferris’ sudden attitude change, I mean. Meantime, I wanted to talk to you about our first stop. What do you know about Offutt Air Force Base?”

“Not a lot, Ms. President,” Ernie said. “I remember reading that’s where the Glenn Martin Company built big bombers during World War Two, including the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car, the two B29’s that laid the big eggs on Japan. Because of Offutt’s location, smack in the middle of the country, it used to be the brain center for the old Strategic Air Command. Back in the early nineties it was updated to the Strategic Command Headquarters, the Air Force Weather Center, home for other significant units, plus probably a lot more we don’t know about.”

“That’s all true,” she admitted. “What few people realize is that it’s also the operating center for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service. In short, it’s where Secretary Ferris holds tight to the military purse strings. Not a dime goes in or out that he doesn’t control. There are some parts of the underground complex I wasn’t even privy to as Vice President. Now, of course, Ferris is anxious to give me the cook’s tour himself. Short version. He told me it would take three hours. All you press people are going to be shunted to the base museum while I’m down there with him.”

Seeing the sudden cloud of suspicion invade my face, she laughed. “Don’t worry, Jeb. There’ll be a dozen Congressional people there as well. Besides, Bert and Joseph will be with me every step of the way. I’ll be safe enough, I think. Besides, it’s important that I seem to be enthused about everything Ferris wants to show me. Don’t you agree?”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“You and Ernie should just relax and enjoy the ride,” she added, with another reassuring smile.

“Yeah, right.” Ernie said. “We might even get up a bridge game, and fight over who’s gonna be the dummy.”

“Very funny. Okay, you two. Scat. I’ve got work to do. See you after Offutt.”

The carefully manipulated tour we were given would have normally been truly interesting, since Offutt has a long and unique history. A few miles south of Omaha and a couple miles west of the Missouri River, constructed on the original site of old Fort Crook, the exterior area of the base is vast. Many of the buildings on the post that were built before 1900 were still in use, including the guard house and various enlisted men’s and officer’s quarters. It’s a useful diversion for the nosy tourist, and publicly deceptive, since the nerve center of America’s military is as active as a beehive far below the benign surface of the flat land that encompasses more than 260 acres.

After a light lunch, a parade of staff cars taxied us back to the area where Air Force One had first parked, and was now being towed back into position for boarding. Ernie commented about that to our driver, a handsome, mustached Air Force captain, whose advanced training must have been in public relations. He puffed his chest out and answered, “Yes, sir. We’re very proud of our special operations people and their building, the Bennie L. Davis Aircraft Maintenance Complex.”

“I thought Air Force One was maintained at Andrews,” I said.

“Well, yes, sir, she is,” the young captain answered, smooth as a lawyer. “Our people have simply given her a bath and a vacuum. They’ve got nothing on us. We like for our Commander in Chief to fly in a clean ship.” He stopped the car and glanced at his watch. “Right on time. The President should be arriving in five minutes. You folks might like to go ahead and board.”

The glib captain was correct. President Fordham boarded only minutes after we had taken our seats, chatting amiably as she swept past us with Ferris and two senators I recognized. I glanced at Ernie, who bent sideways and whispered, “Jones and Wicker. Armed Services Committee.”

“Makes sense. Cornelius Ferris seems to have all his bases covered this time around, pun intended.”

Moments later, Ferris passed by us again, walking in the opposite direction, casually pausing here and there to speak to press people before going forward. After about ten minutes more, we felt a slight lurch as the big bird got underway, and two of the crewmember stewards passed down our aisle, quietly asking us to put our seatbelts on. A few minutes later, we took off. I pushed out a long, slow breath.

“Well, Jeb, so far, so good,” Ernie said. “Next stop, Edwards. Like the lady said, might as well relax and enjoy the ride.”

“Easy for you to say,” I muttered. I was feeling another gnawing bug crawling in my belly, but try as I might, I couldn’t pinpoint anything unusual. Still, I just couldn’t shake it. Things were going along fine. Perfectly. Too perfectly.

After we leveled off, the stewards came around taking orders for drinks and food. Ernie asked for a beer, but I didn’t want anything. For the first time in my life, I felt almost airsick. I kept looking at my watch. Half an hour passed. I noticed Ernie had dozed off beside me, and I tried to close my own eyes and relax, but it was no use. Another few minutes droned by and I wasn’t feeling any better. I was almost to the point of getting up and heading for the nearest toilet when President Fordham stopped at my aisle seat, leaned over and said, “Jeb, come with me. You deserve to see this.”

I stood, grateful as hell for the interruption. “See what?”

“A rather nice little surprise.”

I followed her forward, all the way to the door leading to the flight deck. She turned to me and explained. “Captain Nichols called a few minutes ago. Apparently something else has been laid on for my education. I thought you might like to see it as well.” She knocked. “An in-flight refueling operation. Should be really interesting to watch it from up here.”

Captain Edgar Nichols, the aircraft commander, was actually a full Colonel. His First Officer, whom he immediately introduced, was Major Caswell Jamison. Both men had the rugged, self-assured good looks of most senior pilots. Seeing me standing behind the President, Captain Nichols gave me one quick frown of disapproval, then spoke to his Commander in Chief. “Ms. President, Secretary Ferris thought you might like to observe how we do this.”

“Don’t tell me we’re out of gas!” she retorted, laughing.

Both men chuckled with her. “No, ma’am,” Nichols said. “We’ve got plenty. We’re just going to take on enough for you to see how it’s done. It won’t take long once we reach the rendezvous coordinates.”

“Where are we now, exactly?” I asked.

“East and north of Denver about a hundred miles. Rendezvous is set for 1500 hours. Practically right over Mount Rushmore.”

Automatically, I glanced again at my watch. Thirty minutes to go.

Major Jamison pointed through the windshield, up and to his right at a KC-10 tanker. “There’s the cow. She called a while ago to tell us they are even sending an F-18 out of Colorado Springs to the rendezvous point to film it all for your scrapbook, Ms. President.”

To this very day, I will never know why I thought to ask, “Where is Secretary Ferris, anyway? Wouldn’t he want to be up here, too?”

Captain Nichols half turned in his seat, his brow furrowed as he looked back at President Fordham. “Oh, he deplaned back at Offutt just before we took off. Said he had some extra things to do there, and that he’d catch up with us at Travis. Didn’t he tell you, ma’am?”

Suddenly the gnawing in my stomach came back. I was about to ask another question when somebody behind us knocked on the door. Bert Franklin identified himself and was admitted, his face red. “Ms. President, all the television networks have broken into regular programming. There’s been a school playground shooting at Miami. Really bad one from first reports. Maybe twenty kids dead. Vice President Koontz has called a news conference for four o’clock.”

That’s when my gut finally reacted—to the explosion in my brain. I unceremoniously grabbed Helene Fordham’s arms. “That’s it! We’ve got to get down! NOW.”

“Are you sure, Jeb?” She said, her eyes wide.

“Has to be. Ferris slips off the plane? School massacre? Koontz calls a press conference? It’s all falling into place. We have to—”

“What in hell are you talking about, man?” Captain Nichols growled.

I turned to him, hoping my face was showing half of what I felt. I yelled at him. “Captain, that fighter plane isn’t coming up here to take pictures. Soon as you hook up with that tanker, he’s going to shoot us down. With all that gas, and one little missile, there won’t be pieces of us big enough to find. The President’s life is on the line. Yours and your crew’s, too. You’ve got to get us out of here.”

President Fordham’s voice was ice. “He’s right, Colonel Nichols. Do as he says. Immediately, please. That’s an order. I’ll explain the details later, if I’m still alive. Where’s the nearest place we can land? Denver?”

I yelled again, “We can’t go there. We’d run right into him, and we sure as hell can’t go back to Offutt. I wouldn’t trust Omaha either.”

Major Jamison spoke up. “What about Sioux City? Not much traffic there, and the runways are long enough.”

Nichols nodded. “You’re right. Okay, SUX it is.” He turned further around and barked an order to Bert, “Strap the President in that jump seat, mister. Hold on to your hats, everybody. Grab hold of whatever you can. I’m taking us down. Gotta get us under radar.”

“Want me to call Sioux City, Captain?” Jamison wanted to know.

“And tip everybody off? Hell, no. I’ll tell you when.”

With that, he put the giant plane into a hard right bank, pushing the yoke forward. As Air force One changed directions and went into a steep dive, the sun flashed brilliantly inside the cockpit, then disappeared just as quickly. It seemed to take forever for the big bird to turn, yet she did, and the ground telescoped upwards toward us at an astounding rate. So much so that I found myself holding my breath in frozen fear, certain that Nichols was going to drive us straight into the brown, snow splotched earth. I gave one quick thought to Ernie and the other unsuspecting people behind us. Not knowing what was happening, they had to be experiencing mass hysteria at best and sheer terror at worst.

After an eternity of less than a minute, we leveled off, only two hundred feet above the ground! Nichols pushed the quad throttles forward as far as they would go. Our speed was tremendous, and staring through the windshield, it was as though I was watching a special effects movie—in fast forward. I looked first at Major Jamison, who was already talking softly to the crew on headsets, then to Captain Nichols, who was chewing his gum in slow motion. Didn’t appear to be in the least nervous. Like he practiced doing this every day!

At last he spoke—to Jamison. “ETA Sioux City?”

“Thirteen minutes, Captain.”

Nichols merely nodded. I glanced backwards at President Fordham. Her eyes were closed, her mouth drawn in a thin line. I could see moisture on her upper lip. I looked over at the First Officer who gave me a grin and a thumbs-up. His neatly trimmed mustache reminded me of the captain who had driven us back from the museum to the plane. The one who’d told us their guys had given the President’s private plane a wash job and a—Holy shit! Offutt maintenance crews had been all over her, inside and out. Plenty of time to—plant a fucking bomb? Maybe that fighter wasn’t sent to shoot us down. Maybe it was supposed to take pictures after all. Maybe it was to film a terrible accident while the President’s plane was refueling. I opened my mouth to say something more, but quickly changed my mind. This wasn’t the moment. Nichols was busy busting the President’s aircraft over farms, barns, and housetops as if it was a tiny barnstorming biplane, except at nearly five hundred miles per hour. There would be time enough to tell him, I hoped, when we landed. If we landed.

Nichols asked again, “How much time?”

“Ten minutes, thirty seconds, sir.”

“Roger that. Okay, call SUX. ID us and tell them to divert all traffic. Full Mayday status.”

Chapter 30

“Wait!” Nichols shouted. It was the first time he had raised his voice. “We have to lighten her up. Dump fuel first, then call. Forget the Minneapolis ARTCC. Bypass them. We don’t want the whole universe listening in. Use the tower frequency. 118.7.”

“Roger that,” Jamison answered, reaching forward to levers which he pulled, then to a knob which he turned a few clicks. “Sioux City tower, Sioux City tower, this is Air Force One. We have an emergency.”

A metallic, clear voice answered instantly. “Acknowledged, Air Force One. What is the nature of your emergency and what is your position?”

I seized my chance, screaming, “We’ve got a bomb on board, Captain. I’m sure of it.”

Nichols turned. Stared at me hard, his jaw clenching. He shot a rapid glance to the President, who nodded affirmation, and then he stared at Jamison. “Tell them.”

Jamison wasted no time. “We are eight-zero miles northwest of you, Sioux City, altitude one-five-oh. That’s one-five-oh feet, Sioux City, and we may have a bomb aboard. Fear imminent internal explosion. Request emergency landing in ten minutes.”

“Roger, Air Force One. Turn right and come around to heading three-zero-seven, runway three-one.”

“Negative, Sioux City. No time to turn. Divert any local traffic now. We’ve got only one shot and we’re coming in hot as hell. What’s the weather?”

“Clear. Visibility unlimited. Wind northwest, sixteen knots. Use runway one-three. No traffic expected. Do you request emergency equipment?”

“Everything you’ve got.”

“Roger that, Air force One. We’ll be ready. Good luck.”

The two pilots exchanged quick glances. Major Jamison didn’t need to be told what to do next. He flipped yet another switch. “Attention, please, all on board. This is First Officer Jamison speaking. We have a small problem and Captain Nichols is bringing us into Sioux City, Iowa for an emergency landing. Please follow the instructions of our crew. They are well trained for just such an eventuality. Stay calm, everybody. Everything is under control. We will be landing in approximately seven minutes. After landing, you will use emergency exits as per instructions. Sorry for the bumpy ride. Thank you.”

Strangely enough, I wasn’t yet worried! The cool, professional competence and demeanor of the two magnificent officers was such that I managed a reassuring glance at President Fordham and gave her hand a squeeze. “We’re gonna make it in fine. Just fine.” She responded by closing her eyes. Her lips were moving in what I knew was a quiet prayer.

I looked forward again, through the windshield. I couldn’t recognize anything ahead of us, but I knew we had to be close.

As if reading my thoughts, Nichols said, “How far out?”

“Fifteen miles, Captain.” Jamison answered.

Nichols reached for the throttles. Began pulling back. At first, I couldn’t feel any reduction in our speed, nor did I know which of the hundreds of instruments to watch. Seconds later, he pulled the knobs further back still. “Flaps.”

“Roger, full flaps. Twelve miles, Captain.”

When the flaps took hold, the backward centrifugal force nearly pitched me over the console between the two pilots. I grabbed the backs of their seats and held on with all my strength, my teeth rattling. I watched Captain Nichols gently pull the throttles back a little further.

“Eight miles, Captain.” Jamison’s steady voice hadn’t changed pitch.

“Six… Five… Four…”

I glanced up, but still couldn’t see the runway.

“Three… Two… One mile, skipper.”

Suddenly there it was. It looked like a stretch of desert highway, shimmering in the mid-afternoon sun. We were, just as Jamison had told Tower Control, coming in hot as hell. But there was plenty of runway, wasn’t there? It seemed to narrow into infinity ahead.

“Two thousand feet, Captain.”

Nichols’ response was barely audible. He pushed the yoke forward ever so slightly with his left hand, working the throttles with his right one. “Okay, we’re going in.”

I watched the scraped, gray runway easing up to meet us, its middle lines flashing by like tracer bullets. Closer. Closer. Then I heard the short squeal of the rear wheels hitting solid asphalt. The moment the nose wheels touched, Nichols reversed the engines’ thrust. Their roar was deafening.

I almost didn’t hear Captain Nichols’ yell, “Full brakes.”

This time Jamison didn’t repeat the order.

Over the din, Nichols yelled again. “How long is this runway?”

“Ninety-five hundred.”

“Shit! We need ten thousand with this tailwind.”

That was the last of the talk. Nothing else needed saying. The three of us watched the horizon zooming toward us. The ride felt like we were in a loaded pickup truck with no shocks on a washboard farm road. Had we slowed down at all? The horizon kept coming. And coming. I looked out the side window. Saw distant parked planes, a few low buildings. White fields. But, yes, we were definitely slowing down!

The reversed engines screamed their loudest. I didn’t need anybody to tell me the brakes were melting. Worse, I could now see the end of the runway, coming at us like hell. At the end of it was snow. Blessed, glistening white snow. I had no idea how deep it might be. I was aware how fast we were slowing down, but I didn’t think it was going to be enough.

With the others, I felt a sudden jolt. A lurch to the left. The big jet started veering slightly to port, and I knew the left side brakes were gone. Then we passed the end of the runway. There was an enormous shudder as I noticed the yoke wrenched out of Nichol’s grip. We turned sharply left, but the snow helped. Groaning, we ground to a stop. We had done it. Down. Safe!

Nichols shut down the engines and collapsed in his harness. He sighed once heavily, closing his eyes. Jamison was crossing himself.

I looked at my watch. Eight minutes till three. “Captain,” I said, trying to keep my own nerves under control. “Every second counts now. How do we get out?”

Jamison’s voice answered, but he was talking to the crew. “Deploy slides now. Get the people off as quickly as possible.”

“What about up here?” I wanted to know. “The President. We don’t have time to go back—”

“Shut up and listen,” Nichols said, his voice as hard as the set of his jaw. Then he reached up and pushed a button practically right over his head. Jamison did the same on his side. Twin compartments opened, and from them coiled lengths of braided nylon rope fell out. Both officers punched out their side windows, hooked the ropes to a steel ring over them, and tossed the weighted ends out the windows. I hardly noticed the freezing northwest wind now whistling through the flight deck.

Nichol’s left his seat, clawed his way back to the jump seat where President Fordham was still strapped in. His hands worked fast to free her. “Ms. President, there’s no time to get you into the bubble. You have to get out this way, with the rope.”

Helene Fordham didn’t flinch. She stood, made her way to the portside window, looked Nichols in the eye and said, “I can do this, Colonel, and if I make it, and you do, I promise you by next week you’ll be a General. Give me a hand, please.”

Both Nichols and Jamison helped her out the window, feet first. “Don’t panic, ma’am,” Nichols said. “Wrap one leg around the rope and let yourself down a little at the time. Don’t try to slide. “You’re right. You can do this.”

When she was out, lowering herself down so that only her head was visible, she looked up one last time and smiled. “Good thing I’m not wearing a dress!” Then she dropped out of sight.

Jamison looked at me, his eyes steady. “You next, this side, and no arguments please.”

I didn’t offer any. I climbed through the window feet first, wrapped a leg around the rope, and started down hand over hand, unmindful that I had thirty feet to go! Half way down, from the corner of my eye, I could see that three long slides were protruding from the fuselage, and people were tumbling down them pell-mell; head first, feet first, whichever way, with a lot of screaming. I knew the same process was happening on the opposite side. As I hit the ground, or rather the eight inches of snow covering it, I looked frantically around for the President. She was on her hands and knees, having apparently dropped the last few feet. I plowed over to her. Helped her to her feet. “Run! This way, into the wind. I’ll be right behind you.”

I didn’t look back to see if Nichols and Jamison had followed us down, or if any of the others were running in our direction. Over the President’s bobbing head, I could make out dozens of flashing lights on the shapes of toy vehicles, fire trucks, ambulances, and tiny people fanned out on both sides of the runway, coming toward us at top speed. We had covered maybe two hundred excruciating yards when the President stumbled. Fell head first into the snow. I jerked her up. “Run, goddammit, the plane could blow any—”

Whump—WHUMP… The two blasts were practically simultaneous. The President was thrown forward to the ground by my own body, but it had not been by the force of the twin explosions. I had been knocked into her by Bert Franklin’s flying tackle. Both of us lay on top of her, pushing her further down into the snow as bits and pieces of flaming debris landed all around and ahead of us, for another hundred yards at least. We lay there praying for what seemed like hours, until we felt strong hands lifting us. Helping us struggle toward a vehicle. I remember that from virtual shock, I giggled like an idiot when I saw the bright orange lettering: ECNALUBMA. . .

Sioux Gateway is not a large airport. Only two boarding gates, but its terminal is spacious, including a fair sized restaurant, both of which were soon filled with dazed, jabbering people. Bert Franklin and I pushed our way through them, making a path for the President, who had calmly told the ambulance crew she was unhurt and refused to be taken to the hospital. “Close that door, Jeb,” she said once we were inside the politely vacated restaurant. Then she turned to her faithful Secret Service man. “Is your phone still working, Bert?”

Franklin quickly tested his cell phone. “Yes, Ms. President.”

“Good. Call the Attorney General’s office. I want to speak to Richard Cameron personally.”

When Bert turned away to comply, she looked back again at me. “I’m going to have Koontz arrested for murder. Go out there and see if you can find out who’s in charge here. Whoever it is, send him in here, then see if you can locate Captain Nichols. Tell him to gather his crew together. My orders are for none of them to make any comment. Not to anybody. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I found Nichols first. He was already rounding up his crew. I passed the President’s message along, then began shooting questions to everybody I bumped into. It only took me a couple more minutes to locate the Airport Director, a stout, worried little man who looked as though he might wet his pants at any minute. I checked his brass nametag. “Mr. Grissom? My name is Jeb Willard. With the President’s party. She wants to see you. Please come with me.”

I led him through the crowd into the restaurant and introduced him. President Fordham smiled, shook his hand and calmly told him what she wanted. “Mr. Grissom, I have two requests. There has to be a local television station here, right?”

Grissom found his voice. “Uh, yes, Ms. President. Three of them, and I’m sure they’ll all have crews here any minute.”

“No doubt. What I want you to do is call the station managers of each of them. Tell them I want them to patch into their national networks—right now! By any chance, is there a private or corporate jet here?”

“Yes. Two of them.”

“Good. Soon as you call those TV people, I want you to call whoever owns them and tell them I need to borrow one of them to get back to Washington right away. If a pilot is available, fine. If not, I have two of the best. Can you arrange that?”

“Certainly.”

She turned. “Bert, lend him your phone and wait for me here. Jeb, you come with me.”

I followed her through the door into the terminal, where she climbed onto the seat of one of the chairs and yelled, “Listen to me, all of you. I want you all to sit down. Please just sit down right where you are. Everything is all right. I have one request of each of you. Members of the press will be here soon. Say nothing to anybody. I’ll take care of it myself.”

Like so many sheep, the stunned crowd followed her orders. Satisfied, she hopped down and marched straight to the Northwest Airlines ticket counter, smiling sweetly once more, this time at the white-faced agent. “I’m Helene Fordham. What’s your name, dear?”

“T-Toni Ellis, ma’am.”

“Nice to meet you, Toni. I need a favor. Go get your topcoat and your pocketbook and meet me in the ladies’ room in one minute, please. Okay?”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel, pulled me aside and said, “Jeb, find Captain Nichols again. Tell him to count noses. Find out whether we have casualties, and tell him I may need him and Major Jamison for flight duty again. Hop to it, I’m sure those TV people will be here any minute.”

She was right. I was in the middle of telling Nichols what she’d said when a small army of them came rushing though the front door, lights and cameras at the ready, already fighting for position.

Nor were they disappointed. I shook my head in both disbelief and admiration when Helene Fordham came out of the women’s rest room wearing a red three quarter length coat, a white scarf, fresh makeup on, and every hair in place! She walked resolutely to a central spot, waited for the cameras and lights to be set, and with her chin up and with a rock steady voice, made her electrifying announcement:

“Ladies and gentlemen of Sioux City, and my fellow Americans, let me first say that I am, as you can see, perfectly fine. I will also tell you that on our flight west, Air Force One developed a serious problem, which started an in-flight fire, but Captain Edgar Nichols and his heroic crew brought us in for an emergency landing here at Sioux City in plenty of time to avoid disaster. I’m sure the Federal Aeronautics Agency and the National Transportation and Safety Board will quickly confirm that was the cause of the terrible explosion which happened after we safely deplaned.

“Before I leave for Washington, I must commend the emergency personnel here, the Airport Authority, and the rest of you who have been so wonderful. I must also add that I am aware of the tragic news from Miami, and that my heart goes out to the parents, relatives, and teachers of those poor children. To them, I say that I, and the entire United States Government will do all in our power to immediately find and punish those responsible. To you splendid press people, I regret that I don’t have time just now to answer any questions, and have cautioned everyone aboard to do the same, until the officials of the FAA can interview them first. Having said that, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your cooperation and assistance. I should be back in the Capitol within hours. Thank you very, very much.”

With that, she smiled yet again into the cameras, and walked calmly back to the restaurant, which was now guarded by two State Highway patrolmen. I felt a tug on my sleeve, turned and was relieved the see the filthy face of my mentor. “Ernie!” I was about to say something about how glad I was he’d come through okay, but his eyes were following President Fordham.

“She’s something, isn’t she?” I said.

Ernie was shaking his head. “She’s a lot more than that, Jeb. She’s the President.”

Chapter 31

I crashed at Ernie’s apartment for 48 hours, eating ham sandwiches and watching the television news. Nearly all of it alternated between coverage of the Miami school tragedy and the aftermath of the “fire and explosion” of Air Force One at Sioux City. I don’t know which was worse; the gruesome pictures of blood-spattered bodies of eight and nine year-old kids, or the plumes of black smoke rising from the rubble of the President’s plane.

Early in the morning of the third day, I answered Ernie’s phone. “Hello?”

“Jeb, this is Jason Barnes. Thought you might like to know Thurmond Frye is recovering nicely. He’s even allowed to have visitors now. All except you, that is. He told me he hopes he never has to see your ugly face again.”

“Can’t blame him. What else is happening?”

“We’ve got teams making personal calls on every single man on your father’s list. Lots of very quiet, unpublicized resignations, from generals down to sergeants. They won’t be arrested or prosecuted unless they shoot their mouths off, which is highly unlikely. The FAA and the NTSB, haven’t, uh, found Air Force One’s black box yet. I don’t think they will, either, if you catch my meaning. The whole deal is getting lowest profile treatment. President’s orders.”

“What about Koontz?”

“Haven’t been able to find him. President Fordham’s national T.V. hook-up from Sioux City pre-empted him by twenty minutes. He never showed up at the White House press room. Like he vanished into thin air. We don’t have a clue as to where he is. Turnberry either. My boss is not real happy.”

“I guess not. Is my Dad still at the farm house?”

“No, he left for home this morning. What about you? What are your plans?”

“Don’t know yet. Keep in touch, will you?”

“I’ll do that.”

“By the way, when you went to Walt’s house, did you see the child?”

“Yeah. Broke my heart, too. Bye, Jeb.”

When he hung up, his last words rang in my head like a church bell. Then it came to me what I should do about the money in the envelope Bert Franklin had delivered the night before. I grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of Lloyd Eason, a bright young lawyer I had been barhopping with a number of times back in the old days. Luckily, I caught him in. “Eason.”

“Lloyd, this is Jeb Willard. Are you free for lunch? My treat.”

By three in the afternoon, I had set up a sizable anonymous trust for Jody Erikson, and feeling a little better about everything, I took some of the thousand dollars I still had left and went shopping for some warm clothes, dropping a buck or two in several of the Salvation Army kettles in front of the shop doors. Then I stopped by Ernie’s office at the Post. “I’m taking you to dinner, old friend. Feel like Italian? I haven’t been to Carmen’s in years.”

We hadn’t quite finished eating when I looked up and saw the huge form of Sal Cancelossi’s Number One making his way to our table. I stood to make some kind of awkward introduction, but Bruno stopped me half way through. “Excuse me for interrupting your dinner, Mr. Willard. Can I have a word with you? In private?”

“Sure.”

I followed him to the rear of the restaurant into the men’s room. “What can I do for you, Bruno?”

The big man’s face was not a happy one. “Don Cancelossi sent me. He’s dying, and wants to see you. Can you be ready by eight tomorrow morning?”

Something told me he was understating the urgency. I took a gamble. “I can go right now if you like. Just let me tell my friend and get my coat and hat. Where are we going? Miami?”

“Farther. Key West.”

I asked no more questions. After making my quick excuses to a flabbergasted Ernie Latham, I followed Bruno to the street, where the limo was waiting…

I spent the rest of a short night in a plush hotel in Miami, was served a beautiful breakfast in my suite, and by nine in the morning, was back in the private jet that had flown us south from Washington National. Before noon, I found myself in Cancelossi’s helicopter, with Bruno piloting, headed southeast, toward Cuba. Inside thirty minutes, I spotted the graceful shape of the ANNA B, cruising alone in the emerald water. Bruno punched in a few numbers on his cell phone and handed it to me. “Hello?”

Cancelossi’s weak voice came over. “Ah, it’s my young writer friend, come to say good-bye. Thank you for making the effort. I have instructed Bruno to show you something interesting. I’ll talk to you again in a few minutes.”

Bruno expertly guided the chopper in close. I could hear Cancelossi’s awful wheeze-cackling over the phone as I looked down on the yacht. Salvatore Cancelossi was waving at us from the flying bridge and pointing to the fantail. I had to blink twice before I recognized the naked figure strapped down to the deck! Bruno made another pass, left to right, and Cancelossi’s voice came back into my ear. “General Turnberry is a most unappreciative guest. I’m surprised you can’t hear his screams above the sound of the rotors. Such vile language!”

“How did you—?”

“Kidnap him? Actually I didn’t. If I may steal another line from my long departed friend Puzo, I made the Judge the old offer he couldn’t refuse. Namely, if he didn’t accept my fishing invitation, I would expose their entire plan to every major and minor media outlet in the world. The fool accepted, naturally, but sent his sacrificial lamb instead. He’ll make better bait than the Cuban woman did. His flesh is, ah, considerably riper. Besides, he was already supposed to be dead, wasn’t he? No one will miss him.”

“Don Cancelossi, you can’t do this thing.”

“Yes I can. Listen to me, young man. My doctors were all wrong. I’m about to take my last pill. A special one. Even as we speak, the pain is almost more than I can bear, and I can bear a lot. No, I’m going to meet my maker, and I know I have a great deal to answer for, but this piece of shit is not among them. So, watch and enjoy. Justice for the Judge is up to you. Bruno knows where he is. Good-bye, Jeb Willard, and tell my faithful manservant I said arrividerci. I’ll save him a place in hell.”

In helpless horror, while Bruno made criss-cross passes over the yacht, I watched him go below. Moments later, there was a dull thud. The Anna B shuddered violently, veered slowly to starboard, then stopped, dead in the water. I guessed that Cancelossi had taken his pill, and touched a switch that set off pre-set charges in her bilge. Bruno, tears streaming down his broad face, hovered the chopper over her until she settled, then rapidly sank beneath the flat sea. Nothing else was in sight on any horizon. Bruno circled twice more before turning back.

He didn’t speak to me until we saw the low profile of Key West rise up out of the Straits. “Our plane is waiting to take us to Charleston. We have rented a car there.”

It wasn’t a car. It was a big Suburban with studded tires, which took us safely and comfortably warm straight south down the snowplowed West Virginia Turnpike to Beckley. During the humming drive, Bruno explained, in his usual few words, “Some of our people tracked him down. He’s holed up at the house he bought for his mother years ago.”

“His mother’s house? You mean he never sold it?”

For the first time, I saw what looked like a smirk invade Bruno’s face. “We know that Judge Koontz never got rid of anything he ever owned. He’s there, all right, planning how to sneak out of the country.”

“I’m surprised he hasn’t already.”

“He couldn’t. Not without money. Yesterday was Saturday. Today’s Sunday. No banks open until tomorrow morning.”

He said nothing more until we pulled into a Burger King at a mall just inside the Beckley city limits. We went inside just as it began snowing again. I got two cups of coffee and made my way back to the far corner booth Bruno had chosen just as he was taking the cell phone from his pocket. He punched numbers and said, “Report.”

I couldn’t hear what the other party said, but I saw satisfaction on Bruno’s face as he listened and nodded. After a couple minutes, he stuck the phone back inside his pocket, picked up his coffee, took a sip, and then told me, “The rabbit’s in his hutch. We wait here for a while.”

Half an hour went by. I looked at my watch. Almost midnight. Sipping my coffee, I deduced that Bruno had one or more of his men watching the house where Koontz was, and figured we’d wait until he went to bed before attempting to surprise him. Another five minutes passed, and I was about to get up and get us refills when his phone rang. “Yeah?”

I watched his face change expressions, from placid to obvious anger. Then I heard him say, “Shit! Which way?”

He closed the phone abruptly, looked at me, and said, “Let’s go. He’s on the move.”

Outside, he gave me the keys to the Suburban. “You drive. I’ll tell you where to go.” We climbed in, and I started the big vehicle. “He’s trying to take advantage of the new snow,” Bruno said. “Must have spotted our guys. They’re following him out of town.”

“Is he heading our way?”

“Don’t know yet.” He reached into his coat and pulled out an ugly automatic. Looked like a Colt 45. “Here,” he said, offering it to me. “You might need this.”

I shook my head. “No thanks. I think I can handle an old man by myself.”

Bruno grunted. “Suit yourself, but he could be carrying.”

We waited only another minute or so before the cell phone rang again. Bruno listened, then said, “Okay. We’re on our way.”

He glanced at me. “We’re in luck. He’s taking State Highway 16 north, toward Prosperity and Bradley.” He pointed to the intersection just ahead of us, now partially obscured by the falling snow. “That way. He’ll have to pass right by us.”

“Why isn’t he taking the turnpike?” I wanted to know. “If he’s going back to Washington, it would be a hell of a lot easier drive.”

Bruno shrugged, his eyes peeled on the intersection dead ahead of us. Then it dawned on me that there weren’t very many roads of any kind leading in and out of this mountain town, and Koontz would know each of them like them back of his hand. He was apparently leaving earlier than he’d planned to, because of the new snowfall, which would soon make even the Turnpike dangerous for driving.

“There he is!” Bruno said, in almost a stage whisper. I recognized the car from before, saw the unmistakable shock of hair, and felt a kind of electrical charge shoot up from my toes. While waiting for the light to change, I watched him fire up a fresh cigar! I didn’t see Bruno dial again, but heard him when he told his men, “We’ve got him. Break off. I’ll be in touch.”

When the light changed, we watched the Judge turn left, passing right by us, onto 16 North. The car behind him kept going straight, and I waited for the next light, keeping Koontz’s taillights in sight.

The Judge was a good driver. The narrow, twisting, two-lane highway would have been a challenge for any vehicle, four wheel drive or not, and I was grateful Bruno’d had the foresight to rent the one we were in. The studded tires gave me good traction, although the Judge’s car wasn’t going more than forty. The snow was coming from the northwest, and our windshield wipers were working on high speed. I hoped it wouldn’t turn to sleet. There was no one else stupid enough to be on the road, and I kept the Judge’s taillights about sixty or seventy yards ahead of me. Any more than that, I might have lost them, and didn’t want to chance he might turn off onto some side road only he would know about, and lose him. Because there was no other traffic, I wondered out loud if he knew we were following him. “What do you think, Bruno?”

“Possibly. I’d make my move now. We’ll be coming up on the village of Prosperity in a few minutes.”

“How?” I said.

Bruno stared at me like I was the dumbest guy he’d ever seen. “Use your imagination. You’ve got a bus, here. Force him off the road. Make him stop.”

Easier said than done, I thought. I goosed the Suburban slowly, and gained on the Judge until I was right behind him. I leaned on the horn, hoping he’d slow down and stop. Instead, he sped up. Then it became a race. The powerful engine in the Chevy cruiser responded, though, and I managed to pull out alongside him, driving in the left hand lane. I couldn’t tell if Koontz saw or recognized us, but he stomped on his accelerator again, widening the gap between us. I responded in turn, unmindful of whatever danger lay ahead. So far, the road’s curves had not been too severe, and all of a sudden, I realized Koontz was setting me up. There was no way I could see very far ahead, but he would know if there was a bad curve coming, and might slow down in time, allowing me to pass him and not be able to recover in time. Maybe fly right off the mountain. I exhaled sharply and slowed down. A quick glance to the right confirmed my suspicion. A yellow, snow caked sign flashed by. Sure enough, the judge slowed down too, and when I could see that the curve ahead was one to the left, I goosed the Suburban again viciously, managing to get abreast, then slightly ahead of him. I was guessing we both were going no more than fifty.

It was enough. I eased to the right, slowing down gradually. In an instant, I felt the grinding metal of first contact, and turned the wheel even more to the right, hoping he’d simply slow down and eventually stop. That was when the Judge made his mistake. Trying to shake me off, he slammed on his brakes, lost control and went right through the puny guardrail of the curve.

I don’t know how long it took me to come to a complete stop, braking gradually, and not wanting to chance backing up, I simply pulled on the hand brake, opened the door and started running back toward the breach in the guard rail. At the same time, I heard the ugly sounds of Koontz’s car turning over, thrashing through the trees growing on the slope of the ravine. I was surprised that in spite of his bulk, Bruno reached the gap in the rail before I did, and was already half-sliding down to the wreck, which was some forty feet below us.

Using small trees and bushes to break my falling, I slipped and slid down the side of the mountain behind him, adrenaline pumping like crazy. For a second, I paused, peering through the curtain of blowing snow, and saw that the mangled mess of steel and glass that had been the Judge’s car was lying upside down, wedged tightly between the trunks of two pines, one wheel still turning like a child’s pinwheel. Bruno reached the crevasse before I did, and turned to me. “I think he’s still alive!”

I was thinking of how to answer him when the explosion rocked me backwards.

WHUMP!

Automatically, I raised my arm to shield my face. Gas tank! I saw Bruno clamber away from the fire, which spread rapidly. But through the flames, I could see Koontz’s head and face, bloody and distorted, and as I reached the spot where Bruno was crouched, knew he had heard the same thing I had. Koontz was alive, hanging upside down from his seat belt, his bloody face redder than his burning hair, and screaming at the top of his voice for help!

There was no way.

The fire had become intense. A blast furnace, enveloping the wreck totally now. Pinned hopelessly inside the squashed car, Judge Ezekiel Joshua Koontz was roasting in his own personal hell. Instinctively, I started to move forward, but Bruno grabbed me and held me back. We both stared at the inferno before us for several seconds before I finally said, “Bruno, give me the gun.”

Without a word, he nodded and handed it to me. I didn’t think further. With both hands, I aimed it across the fifteen or twenty feet of the ravine, closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. Again and again and yet again, until my finger was pulling uselessly. Bruno gently took the automatic from my shaking hands. I looked up, and into the eyes beneath the snow frosted eyebrows. They were soft. Understanding. His voice was also soft. So much so, I nearly didn’t hear him. “It was the right thing to do. You only hit him once, but that one was enough. Nobody deserves to die like that, even him. You did good, Mr. Willard. Come on, let’s get out of here. A State Patrol car could come by here at any time.”

I stood, still shaking, but before we climbed back up the steep slope, I watched Bruno carefully wipe all my fingerprints off the gun, replace them with his own, then toss the Colt over on top of the burning, now stinking wreck.

Neither of us spoke until we were almost to the Charleston airport. Bruno, who was now driving, said, “Soon as this storm lets up, we can take off.”

“Where will you go, Bruno?”

He turned sideways. Gave me a crooked smile. “I’m Sicilian. And unemployed. I’m going back home—to Palermo. You? back to Washington?”

I thought about that less than one second. “No. No, Bruno, if your guy can drop me off at Raleigh-Durham, that’s close enough. I’m going home, too.”

Epilogue

Sammy Tyson crossed his good leg over his bad one, frowning over the chessboard. “Nastiest winter I can ever remember in Tryon’s Cove. This cold weather makes my leg ache, and it’s bad for business, too. Where’s Cal? He ain’t hardly ever late. I can’t boil those lobsters till he gets here.”

“He told me he had some important business to take care of,” I said.

“On Christmas Eve?”

I shrugged.

“You ain’t even touched your beer. Look, Jeb, you gotta pull yourself out of this depression. What’s buggin’ you anyway? You been moping around town for a week with a face long enough to eat soup out of a gun barrel. Is it the girl?”

“Partly. I miss her like the devil, but mostly I’m disappointed about what’s going on in Washington.” I looked up, into Sammy’s sympathetic brown eyes. “It’s the biggest cover-up since Watergate, and I’m part of it.”

Sammy tried his best to change the subject. “People here sure were glad you weren’t dead. It was one helluva Christmas parade this time around. Cal said—Hey, here he comes now.”

Cal came stomping in, blowing on his hands. “Christ, it’s cold out there. Those lobsters ready, Sammy?”

“Gimme ten minutes,” Sammy answered. “See if you can cheer your boy up some. I ain’t never seen him so far down.”

Cal took off his overcoat and hat. Walked over to the old wood heater and warmed his hands. Without turning around, he said, “They caught the Miami shooter, Jeb. Some Coast Guard psycho with an IQ of twelve who hated teachers. Took it out on anybody in his gunsights.”

When I didn’t respond, he eased himself into the chair opposite me. “Listen to me, son. President Fordham hardly had any other choice. She’s got a mountain of ice to move out of her way with only one dull ice pick. The full story will come out someday, maybe twenty years from now, but since she never really had positive proof, keeping the whole thing under the government sheets was the most expeditious thing to do.”

“It’s still a cover-up.”

“Some things never change, especially in Washington. What’s really bothering you is that you can’t write a word about it. Well, neither can I, and neither can Ernie Latham. We all signed the same papers.” He stood. Stuck his hands in his pockets. “Anyway, I’ve got some more news.”

“What?” Sammy wanted to know. He had come back in and had heard what Cal said.

Cal coughed dramatically. “Got a big insurance check in the mail yesterday, and, I just finished up with the lawyers and bankers. I’ve sold the paper.”

That got my attention. “You what?”

“Randy Deason’s been after me for years to buy the Telegram. You know that. He ran it well while I was gone, and is quite capable of keeping its standards high. I’ve decided it’s time I quit. Retired.”

Sammy and I were both speechless. Cal reached into his jacket pocket, extracted three colorful envelopes, and slapped them on the table. “Merry Christmas, boys. Time to open our presents. These are tickets to Hawaii. We’re all three going for a long vacation, as far away from here as we can get, and where it’s warm.”

“Lord God,” Sammy said. “You serious?”

“As much as I’ll ever be.”

“Hot Damn!” Sammy yelled, and danced an awkward jig, bad leg and all. “How about that, Jeb! Come on, get that dog’s look off your face.”

“Now you listen,” I said to Cal. “I’ve got blood on my hands, I’ve lost my girl and my boat, a shot at maybe a Pulitzer, and I’m flat broke. What’s Hawaii going to change about that?”

Cal winked at Sammy. “I know this guy pretty well. I hear Hawaii is a good place to find a bargain on a blue water boat, and that most of the women over there are beautiful.” He looked back at me. “Besides, you are not broke. You’ve forgotten that your mother owned one third of the paper, which she left to you. You’ve got money in the bank. A fair amount, too, since I made such a good deal.”

Sammy said, “We’d better watch him like a hawk, though. If we don’t, he’ll probably go looking for another mess to get into.”

Cal laughed. “He won’t have to look. Trouble always finds him.”

He pushed his sleeves up, selected two pawns, and hid his hands beneath the table. “Now, how does Hawaii look?”

In spite of myself, I laughed, too. “Not bad, I guess, now that I think about the possibilities. Okay, you two jokers. Count me in.”

Cal said, “Hear that, Sammy? Like I said, some things never change.”

He held his hands up for me to choose. I pointed to his left one.

“White again. You see, pal, your luck’s changing already. Your move.”

McBryde Publishing

NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA USA