The Eleventh Commandment (1998) Read online

  From then on Connor and Maggie spent every moment of their spare time together. She learned about touchdowns, end zones and lateral passes, he about Bellini, Bernini and Luini. Every Thursday evening for the next three years he fell on one knee and proposed to her. Whenever his team-mates asked him why he hadn’t scratched her name on the inside of his locker, he replied simply, ‘Because I’m going to marry her.’

  At the end of Connor’s final year, Maggie finally agreed to be his wife - but not until she had completed her exams.

  ‘It’s taken me 141 proposals to make you see the light,’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘Oh, don’t be stupid, Connor Fitzgerald,’ she told him. ‘I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with you the moment I joined you on that bench.’

  They were married two weeks after Maggie had graduated summa cum laude. Tara was born ten months later.

  5

  ‘DO YOU EXPECT ME to believe that the CIA didn’t even know that an assassination attempt was being considered?’

  ‘That is correct, sir,’ said the Director of the CIA calmly. ‘The moment we became aware of the assassination, which was within seconds of it taking place, I contacted the National Security Advisor, who, I understand, reported directly to you at Camp David.’

  The President began to pace around the Oval Office, which he found not only gave him more time to think, but usually made his guests feel uneasy. Most people who entered the Oval Office were nervous already. His secretary had once told him that four out of five visitors went to the rest room only moments before they were due to meet the President. But he doubted if the woman sitting in front of him even knew where the nearest rest room was. If a bomb had gone off in the Rose Garden, Helen Dexter would probably have done no more than raise a well-groomed eyebrow. Her career had outlasted three Presidents so far, all of whom were rumoured at some point to have demanded her resignation.

  ‘And when Mr Lloyd phoned to tell me that you required more details,’ said Dexter, ‘I instructed my deputy, Nick Gutenburg, to contact our people on the ground in Bogota and to make extensive enquiries as to exactly what happened on Saturday afternoon. Gutenburg completed his report yesterday.’ She tapped the file on her lap.

  Lawrence stopped pacing and came to a halt under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hung above the fireplace. He looked down at the nape of Helen Dexter’s neck. She continued to face straight ahead.

  The Director was dressed in an elegant, well-cut dark suit with a simple cream shirt. She rarely wore jewellery, even on state occasions. Her appointment by President Ford as Deputy Director at the age of thirty-two was meant to have been a stopgap to placate the feminist lobby a few weeks before the 1976 election. As it was, Ford turned out to be the stopgap. After a series of short-term directors who either resigned or retired, Ms Dexter finally ended up with the coveted position. Many rumours circulated in the hothouse atmosphere of Washington about her extreme right-wing views and the methods she had used to gain promotion, but no member of the Senate dared to question her appointment. She had graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr, followed by the University of Pennsylvania Law School, before joining one of New York’s leading law firms. After a series of rows with the board over the length of time it took women to become partners, ending in litigation that was settled out of court, she had accepted an offer to join the CIA.

  She began her life with the Agency in the office of the Directorate of Operations, eventually rising to become its Deputy. By the time of her appointment, she had made more enemies than friends, but as the years passed they seemed to disappear, or were fired, or took early retirement. When she was appointed Director she had just turned forty. The Washington Post described her as having blasted a hole through the glass ceiling, but that didn’t stop the bookies offering odds on how many days she would survive. Soon they altered that to weeks, and then months. Now they were taking bets on whether she would last longer as the head of the CIA than J. Edgar Hoover had at the FBI.

  Within days of Tom Lawrence taking up residence in the White House, he had discovered the lengths to which Dexter would go to block him if he tried to encroach on her world. If he asked for reports on sensitive subjects, it was often weeks before they appeared on his desk, and when they eventually did, they inevitably turned out to be long, discursive, boring and already out of date. If he called her into the Oval Office to explain unanswered questions, she could make a deaf mute appear positively forthcoming. If he pushed her, she would play for time, obviously assuming she would still be in her job long after the voters had turned him out of his.

  But it was not until he proposed his nomination for a vacancy on the Supreme Court that he saw Helen Dexter at her most lethal. Within days, she had placed files on his desk that went to great lengths to point out why the nominee was unacceptable.

  Lawrence had pressed on with the claims of his candidate - one of his oldest friends, who was found hanging in his garage the day before he was due to take up office. He later discovered that the confidential file had been sent to every member of the Senate Selection Committee, but he was never able to prove who had been responsible.

  Andy Lloyd had warned him on several occasions that if he ever tried to remove Dexter from her post, he had better have the sort of proof that would convince the public that Mother Teresa had held a secret bank account in Switzerland regularly topped up by organised crime syndicates.

  Lawrence had accepted his Chief of Staff’s judgement. But he now felt that if he could prove the CIA had been involved in the assassination of Ricardo Guzman without even bothering to inform him, he could have Dexter clearing her desk within days.

  He returned to his chair and touched the button under the rim of his desk which would allow Andy to listen in on the conversation, or pick it up off the tape later that evening. Lawrence realised that Dexter would know exactly what he was up to, and he suspected that the legendary handbag which never left her side lacked the lipstick, perfume and compact usually associated with her sex, and had already recorded every syllable that had passed between them. Nevertheless, he still needed his version of events for the record.

  ‘As you seem to be so well informed,’ the President said as he sat down, ‘perhaps you could brief me in more detail on what actually happened in Bogota.’

  Helen Dexter ignored his sarcastic tone, and picked up a file from her lap. The white cover bearing a CIA logo had printed across it the words ‘FOR THE PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY‘. Lawrence wondered just how many files she had stashed away across the river marked ‘FOR THE DIRECTOR’S EYES ONLY‘.

  She flicked the file open. ‘It has been confirmed by several sources that the assassination was carried out by a lone gunman,’ she read.

  ‘Name one of these sources,’ snapped the President.

  ‘Our Cultural Attache in Bogota,’ replied the Director.

  Lawrence raised an eyebrow. Half the Cultural Attaches in American embassies around the world had been placed there by the CIA simply to report back directly to Helen Dexter at Langley without any consultation with the local Ambassador, let alone the State Department. Most of them would have thought the Nutcracker Suite was a dish to be found on the menu of an exclusive restaurant.

  The President sighed. ‘And who does he think was responsible for the assassination?’

  Dexter flicked over a few pages of the file, extracted a photograph and pushed it across the Oval Office desk. The President looked down at a picture of a well-dressed, prosperous-looking middle-aged man.

  ‘And who’s this?’

  ‘Carlos Velez. He runs the second-largest drug cartel in Colombia. Guzman, of course, controlled the biggest.’

  ‘And has Velez been charged?’

  ‘Unfortunately he was killed only a few hours after the police had obtained a warrant to arrest him.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  The Director didn’t blush. Not possible in her case, thought Lawrence: after all, blushing requires blood.