Shall We Tell the President? Read online

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 Yesterday made that out-of-date.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

  Mark had had what he thought was the bright idea of checking the Criminal Fingerprints File. The FBI fingerprints records fall into three categories—military, civil, and criminal, and all FBI agents have their prints in the criminal file. This insures that they are able to trace any FBI agent who turns criminal, or to eliminate an agent’s prints at the scene of a crime; these records are very rarely used. Mark had considered himself very clever as he asked to see Tyson’s card. The Director’s card was handed to him by an assistant from the Fingerprints Department. It read—“Height: 6’1”; Weight: 1801bs; Hair: brown; Occupation: Director of FBI; Name: Tyson, H.A.L.” No forename given. The assistant, another anonymous man in a blue suit, had smiled sourly at Mark and had said, loud enough for Mark to hear, as he returned the card to its file, “One more sucker who thought he was going to make a quick three thousand bucks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The Director will see you now.”

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

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

  “Yes, sir,” Mark said very quietly.

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

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

  “We, Mr. Andrews …”

  It made Mark feel slightly royal.

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

  Under normal circumstances, Mark would have laughed.

  The Director was looking at the file.

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

  “Yes, sir.”

  Once more the Director looked down at the file.

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

  “Yes, sir.”

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

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

  “I want these conspirators to think they are now in the clear and for that reason, I am going to allow the President’s schedu