A Clear and Present Danger (3 page)

At the ground floor, Anthony placed the Borsalino on his head, obscuring his face with the motion as he passed by the checkout
guards. They paid little attention to faces, he knew. But like his commander, Anthony was a careful man in such seemingly
small matters.

He touched two fingers to his hat brim in salute to the guards at the door, who held open the portals, obliging his perfectly
inconspicuous exit from Fiat Motors Italia, Ltd.

He saw her waiting in the first row of the visitors’ parking lot, waiting in her dark green Maserati, a shade of emerald that
matched her eyes. Sigrid was very tall, very blonde, and extraordinarily beautiful; if only she weren’t
his
property, he thought.

She popped open the passenger door and he stepped into the Maserati, giving her a peck on the cheek as if greeting his wife
after a long day’s work.

“The telegram?” he asked as he shut the door behind him and she fired the motor.

“I sent it, of course,” she said. Her voice carried a light German accent.

She turned the car out of the parking lot.

Richard Samuels wore the look of a man contented by a day full of shrewd business successes. As well he should. The meeting
had gone very well with DiNicolini. He knew that Riggio would eventually fall into line on the deal, he had been assured by
one of DiNicolini’s flunkies that he would be contacted by someone from Fiat before leaving Italy, which Samuels understood
to mean payment, and now, en route by the wonderful train Mussolini had built connecting Turin to Rome, he was headed to the
warm comforts of the little lady waiting at the hotel. The little lady was not his wife.

A porter knocked on the door of his compartment. Samuels gave him permission to enter.

“Anything I can get you, sir?” the porter asked.

Samuels took his eyes from the window. There was nothing more to be seen now. Darkness had fallen over the landscape.

“A brandy,” he told the porter.

Samuels settled back into the banquette and thought about lighting up his cigar when the brandy came. He also thought about
money and the day he would become President. Then he felt the stabbing pain in his chest.

It was as if someone were in the train compartment with him, a big knife in hand, the knife jammed into the left side of his
chest.

Then he couldn’t breathe.

Unable to move his left arm, Samuels grasped at his chest with his right hand as he struggled for air. He fell forward off
the banquette. His face hit the floor. Blood trickled out his nostrils. He rolled on the floor, landing finally on his back.

He tried to call out. He could hear his screaming, but he knew no one else could.

His only thought was the length of time it would take for the porter to return.

Sigrid slowed the Maserati to a crawl and joined the long line of automobiles at the border checkpoint. She looked into the
rear view mirror, unconsciously checking the suitcase she had packed earlier in the day. It contained weekend clothing and
related items for a man and wife off on a brief holiday to Austria. Anthony’s briefcase and business suit, as well as the
mustache and the glasses and Borsalino, had been disposed of along the highway.

They had no special difficulty getting past the Italian border police.

A clerk in the telegraph office of the Turin train station looked in her international code book and found the number sequence
necessary to transmit a message to a place called Chevy Chase, Maryland, United States of America.

She punched up the appropriate computer signals on the transmitter, and when the video screen indicated the channel was open,
she studied the slip of paper and carefully tapped out a five-word message.

CHEVY CHASE, Maryland, 17 November 1980

“Mrs. Richard Samuels?”

The voice on the telephone was foreign and very distant. That did not seem the least bit curious to her. But the fact that
it was a man’s voice did. Most of the international operators were women.

“This is she.”

She next expected to hear her husband’s voice.

“We are sorry to disturb you at this hour… ”

She looked at her wristwatch. It was nearly midnight. She swiftly calculated the time in Italy, a five-hour differential.
It was already the next day in Rome.

“… but this is an emergency,” the man said.

“I am afraid, Mrs. Samuels, that we have very sad news for you… ”

She sat down. She listened only slightly, hearing the man on the other end of the line introduce himself as Inspector Somebody
of the so-and-so division of the Roman police. He spoke on as she anticipated everything.

Her eyes were dry and her mind was crystal clear. She had known this moment would come, sooner or later. There were days when
she wished the call would come right then and there, so that she could be on with her life. She and her husband had long ago
fallen out of love, of course, as per the usual course of marriages in high-level Washington. But she respected him, in spite
of his considerable and all-too-human shortcomings. Besides, Richard Samuels had built up quite an impressive insurance portfolio
during the last twenty years. That and his Congressional pension, plus widow’s benefits…

“… and so, you will be receiving official written confirmation within the next few hours, Mrs. Samuels. My personal condolences
to you, and may Godspeed.”

She managed a thank-you and then made herself a drink, a double bourbon and soda. When she had drunk half of it, she went
to the secretary, slid open the center drawer, and reached for the personal telephone directory. It was next to his pistol,
a little .22-caliber that had never been fired. She knew she might be finding such curious evidences of his life for the next
several months, finding them at unsuspecting moments. A tear came.

She opened the directory to the W’s and found the number of her dear old friends, the Winships. Richard and Hamilton had not
been friendly for the last several years, though both men were close-mouthed about it to their wives. Each wife, of course,
understood the problem. Hamilton Winship hadn’t had the time of day for Lyndon Johnson, either, and Richard Samuels had learned
all he knew of Washington politics and Washington money from Lyndon. But now all that had died with Richard. She needed to
drink tonight with old friends, to drink to Richard’s better memory. Edith and Hamilton would come over, even at this hour.
They would understand.

Before she could pick up the telephone receiver to make the call, the phone rang. This time it was local.

“Mrs. Richard Samuels?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes.”

“Western Union, ma’am. We have a message for you from Turin, Italy.”

“Yes.”

The man hesitated.

“I read a little French,” he said, “but my pronunciation might not be accurate. The message is in French. That’s the way we
were told to give it.”

She didn’t know what to think.

“Should I go ahead? Mrs. Samuels?”

“Yes,” she finally said. “Go ahead with the message.” She neither read nor spoke French. What could this be? Now there was
no question in her mind but that she must call the Winships. Hamilton especially, since he worked with these mysterious things
all the time in his capacity as special deputy secretary of the Treasury Department.

The man from Western Union cleared his throat. Then he said:

“Non, je ne regrette rien.”

LONDON, England, 22 January 1981

Ben Slayton sat alone at a table in his favorite saloon, a place called Mother Punch’s Ale House. It was situated in the cellar
of a squat warehouse in Old Seacoal Lane, just off bustling Fleet Street.

Slayton liked Mother Punch’s because it was usually full of talkative journalists, whose company he both enjoyed and found
occasionally useful. Besides which, Mother Punch’s was a fair distance from the American Embassy, and the only attraction
there was shop talk. Slayton had long ago learned that the American Embassy in any country was the worst possible place to
learn anything about the host nation. So there was nothing Slayton liked more when assigned abroad than to nip out to some
place warm and dark and wet to listen and learn.

Over the past half-dozen years he had been with the U.S. Treasury Department as a troubleshooter agent, Slayton had traveled
through dozens of foreign countries; and by his insistent mingling with all classes of people, from the poorest workers and
peasants to the bejeweled, he felt he had grown particularly effective in his work.

The fact that he was fluent in French, Spanish, German, and Russian helped his minglings, as did the fact that he was handsome
in an average sense, in a pleasant, Middle Western sense, reflecting a secure and rooted upbringing. He was just under six
feet in height; a trim but muscular 170 pounds, the build of a light heavyweight boxer; and his dark brown hair, light brown
eyes, and narrow facial features told of his German and English ethnic makeup.

He was thirty-five years old, an age when he was beginning to discover how much he didn’t know, despite an impressive scholastic
background at the University of Michigan and his experience as a much-decorated fighter-bomber in the U.S. Air Force during
the Vietnam War, a stock car racer, a collector of vintage automobiles, a collector of contemporary art and literature, a
Korean martial arts black belt, and the ability to hold his own at diplomatic dinner parties in Washington. The truth was,
he more than held his own. Ben Slayton was always invited, and it was difficult to tell whether the women liked him more than
the men, or vice versa.

“So if I’m so damned charming and all,” he thought, as he waited for his food and drink, “what am I doing assigned to the
Vice Presidential Secret Service detail?”

Slayton had plenty of objections to the bureaucratic pettifoggery of the Treasury Department—and Washington in general—but
he always obeyed his superiors, though he would always make his objections well-known following an assignment. It could be
worse, he realized. A friend of his had been posted to the Nixon detail. All the poor sap did these days was sit around the
former President’s fifteenth floor office suite in New York’s Federal Plaza and read magazines.

When he originally hired on with the Treasury Department, Slayton was assigned to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division—the
“action” division, as all T-men called it. His father, a retired police chief in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had wangled the job
for him, working through a Congressman pal. Despite the fact that Slayton had come home from the Vietnam War and objected
to it vehemently, Slayton was hired. His superiors shifted him all over the Department almost immediately, a rigorous breaking-in
period of several years, more rigorous than most T-men receive. Slayton had worked the Customs Bureau, the Internal Revenue
Service, and even the Bureau of Foreign Asset Control, in addition to A.T.F. and the Secret Service, where he was currently
assigned.

“Troubleshooter agent,” Slayton soon learned, wasn’t as impressive as it sounded. He was vaguely worried about his career,
worried mostly that he wasn’t being noticed as he felt he should.

And though he’d been in a favorite city for only a few days, Slayton would gladly trade London for a long weekend at home,
on his beloved farm in Mount Vernon, Virginia, just outside the District of Columbia.

He looked out the window at the fine gray sleet of the London winter day. His reverie was interrupted by the boisterous approach
of the publican, his arms laden with plates of hot and cold meats, blood sausages, cheese, and pâté. Slayton shoved the newspapers
he had just purchased to a corner of the table to make room for his late-morning repast, which he downed with two pints of
Whitbread.

As he ate, he perused the London press, one paper at a time. Rupert Murdoch’s
Sun
published the photograph of a particularly bare and buxom “Wakey-Wakey” girl on page three; the
Daily Express
prattled on about Ted and Joan Kennedy’s divorce plans; the
Daily Mail
managed to make a hair-raising kidnap yarn over in Dun Laoghaire sound as exciting as a milk carton; and the
Times
was mostly concerned with news of how it would soon fall under the ownership of the very same Murdoch who printed all that
trash and flash in the
Sun
. Slayton could almost hear the cursing and shouting that would take place in Mother Punch’s a few hours hence when the
Times
mens and their compatriots on the city’s other legitimate newspapers, the
Observer
and the
Guardian
, began to gather for drinks.

Slayton examined the rest of the
Times
. Page one carried a feature about Ronald Reagan’s first two days in the White House and a longish piece about how the American
hostages held 444 days in Iran received something less than hospitable treatment. Slayton figured as much. The Moslem yahoos
in charge of Teheran these days had only recently begun walking erect. He wondered if there were anything in the way of Iraqi
war bonds he might invest in.

But where was the news that was responsible for bringing him here to England?

Slayton riffled through the remaining pages of the slim edition of the
Times
. Then he found it, back by the truss ads:

U.S. VICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH
TO VISIT MRS. THATCHER “SOON”

From David Crosley

Washington, Jan 21

President Reagan today told members of the press that his Vice President, Mr. George Bush, would “soon” visit Great Britain
for talks with Prime Minister Thatcher.

An aide to the new American President indicated that “soon” would mean “within the next few days.” He refused to be more specific,
giving rise to some speculations here that American authorities charged with protecting government dignitaries were apprehensive
about public announcement of international travel plans.

Within the past few months, two members of the American Congress have died while abroad, one of them having been murdered
under mysterious circumstances.