Chaos Theory (20 page)

‘Rick – you have to read this,’ said Adeola. ‘I’ll bet you this is what Bill Pringle was trying to tell you about.’

Leon typed at the keyboard some more. ‘There’s even a prison mugshot of him. Leon C-z-o-l-g-o-s-z, however the hell you pronounce it. And there’s some biographical stuff underneath.’

‘Read it,’ said Rick.

‘OK . . . “Leon Czolgosz was of Polish origin” – yeah, he sure
looks
Polish. “He was born in 1873, in Detroit. He suffered a nervous breakdown when he was twenty-five years old, and quit his job.

‘“In the summer of 1901, he rented a room above a saloon in Buffalo, New York, and bought himself a .32 Iver-Johnson revolver for $4.50.

‘“On September 6 1901, he approached President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and shot him in the abdomen at point-blank range.

‘“President McKinley died a week later, of shock. Leon Czolgosz was given a trial that lasted only eight hours and twenty-six minutes, and was found guilty in thirty-four minutes. He was electrocuted on October 29 1901, with three jolts of 1,700 volts each.

‘“His last words were, ‘I killed him because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people.’

‘“Sulphuric acid was poured into Czolgosz’s coffin before it was sealed.”’

‘I don’t think I know a damn thing about President McKinley,’ said Noah. ‘Was there any special reason why this Show-gosh guy should have wanted to assassinate him?’

‘Who knows?’ said Adeola. ‘But just like General Sikorski, McKinley was a very skilful diplomat. A great compromiser. He was the first president who really dragged the United States out into the big wide world. Up until McKinley, Americans had been very inward-looking, very isolationist. But McKinley got us involved in foreign trade and international politics. It was McKinley who annexed Hawaii, and the Philippines.’

‘See what it says here?’ put in Leon. ‘“He might have survived, if his doctors had managed to get the bullet out. There was one of the very first X-Ray machines at the exhibition where he was shot, but nobody thought to use it.”’

‘If Czolgosz has any connection to Prchal,’ said Rick, ‘that means this terrorist organization goes way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. And maybe even further. And who knows who else they’ve assassinated.’

‘Sure,’ said Noah. ‘But how are we going to prove it?’

‘Wallace Rudge must have known of some material evidence. Maybe we should pay a visit to the Secret Service Archives, see what we can find.’

‘Will they let us in?’

‘Are you kidding me? Absolutely not. We’ll have to find our own way in.’

 

T
hey waited until the last employee had left her desk at the First Columbia Insurance building and click-clacked on her court shoes to the elevator.

‘OK,’ said Rick, as they heard the elevator whine. He led Noah down to the end of the shiny marble-floored corridor, until they reached the window. Both of them were wearing blue overalls from the Potomac Office Cleaning Company and matching blue baseball caps, which they had found in the super’s storage closet in the basement.

The First Columbia Insurance building stood right next to the Secret Service Library and Archive at 948 H Street. It was set slightly at an angle to the Secret Service building, and a few feet further back, and its window ledges were six or seven inches higher. All the same, it was so close that they could see a Secret Service librarian sitting in his shirtsleeves, sorting through two folders of filing, and they could almost read the label on his file.

At the rear, the two buildings were less than ten feet apart. The windows of the Secret Service building had been painted over in solid grey gloss.

‘That’s the archive section, in back,’ said Rick. ‘Hardly anybody ever goes in there. I mean, it’s just like historical stuff. Cardboard boxes with Sirhan Sirhan’s bloodstained T-shirt in it. James Earl Ray’s forged Canadian passport, stuff like that.’

‘There have to be alarms on those windows, surely.’

‘Of course there are. But they’re not activated until the library closes for the night. And somebody’s almost always working late, like that guy there.’

They walked further along the corridor until they reached the last window. Rick opened the black canvas bag that he had brought with him and took out a broad-bladed chisel. He rammed it into the side of the bronze window frame, and levered the frame backward and forward. The catches had been permanently screwed into place, but it didn’t take him more than two or three minutes to bend the screws until they snapped. The window swung inward, and they felt the warm draft of traffic fumes rising up from the street below.

Noah leaned over and looked down seventy-five feet to the narrow triangular space between the two buildings. A high wall with metal spikes on top of it separated the space from the H Street sidewalk, and the space itself was cluttered with trash cans.

‘Hmm. Usually I have a mattress to fall on, or packing cases.’

‘Hey – you’re not counting on falling, are you?’

‘No. But, you know, accidents happen.’

‘Think you can do it?’ Rick asked him.

‘Well . . . it won’t be easy. But, yes.’

‘Don’t do it just to prove something to me, man. This isn’t a pissing contest.’

‘I wouldn’t. I’m doing this for Jenna, and Mo Speller, and Trina, and your friend Bill. Not to mention Wallace Rudge and his wife.’

Rick took a Capewell retractable grappling hook out of his bag, unfolded its four claws and handed it to Noah. Then he unwound a coil of nylon climbing rope, tying one end of it to the grappling hook and the other end around his waist.

‘There’s thirty metres of rope here, so you can rappel to the ground if you need to.’

Noah climbed up on to the window ledge. Rick held his legs to balance him while he swung the grappling hook around and around, and then threw it up to the parapet of the Secret Service building. He missed the first time, and the grappling hook clattered back down.

He swung it again, faster, and let out more rope. Then he hurled it upward and it caught on the guttering. He tugged it two or three times to make sure that it was firm, and then he turned to Rick and said, ‘OK, let’s go for it. You only live once.’

Rick handed him the chisel, which he tucked into his belt. He leaned back as far as he could, and then he swung himself across the gap between the two buildings, and landed with a complicated thud on the ledge of the window opposite.

The ledge was barely wide enough for Noah to kneel on, and there was only the narrowest rim across the top of the window frame for him to get a grip. For one long, vertiginous moment he was sure that he was going to lose his balance and fall. He didn’t even dare to look back at Rick, because he could feel his centre of gravity teetering from one side to the other, and it was a long, nasty drop to the ground.

‘You OK?’ called Rick.

He didn’t answer. Gripping the rope with his left hand, he edged himself a few inches backwards so that the sole of his right foot was wedged against the window frame. That steadied him, and allowed him to shift his right knee a little closer to the window, and make him feel more secure.

‘OK now,’ he said. ‘Just give me a second, and I’ll try to get this window open.’

Fortunately, it was a sliding window, which opened upwards. Still gripping the rope to keep himself from falling, he lifted the chisel out of his pocket and worked it into the gap underneath the frame. He managed to push the chisel in about an inch, but when he tried to pull the window up, he found that it wouldn’t budge.

‘What’s the problem, man?’ Rick asked him.

‘Damn thing’s jammed solid. Wait up.’

Inch by inch, he pulled himself upwards into a crouching position. He couldn’t believe that he was so afraid of falling. In movies, he was always toppling off buildings and trampolining himself off cliffs. But in movies, he knew that he was going to land softly and safely, in a stack of packaging. As the old saying went, it ain’t the falling you need to worry about, it’s hitting the goddamned ground . . .

The top of the window frame was too low for him to stand up completely straight, but he was able to lift his left foot and place it on top of the chisel handle. Then he bore down on the chisel with all the weight he could muster without losing his balance.

At first, nothing happened. He twisted the rope around his hand so that he could hold on to it more tightly, and then he stamped down on the chisel handle again. There was a splitting sound, and then a loud creak, and the window opened a half-inch. The chisel dropped out and fell into the darkness.

‘Shit,’ he said, but the window was open now. Carefully, he knelt down again and insinuated his fingers into the gap. It took three hard tugs, but at last the window slid upwards, and he was able to climb inside.

He looked around. He was in a long, gloomy storeroom, with rows of cardboard boxes and box files arranged on grey metal shelving. There was a strong smell of old paper and lavender floor wax.

He turned back to the window. ‘Everything OK?’ Rick asked him. He gave the thumbs-up. Rick pulled the rope tight and then swung himself across, clumsily grabbing at the window ledge.

‘Jesus! Ouch! And you do this for a living?’

Noah helped Rick to clamber in through the window, and then Rick immediately slid it shut. ‘Just in case somebody decides to switch on the alarms before we’ve found what we’re looking for.’

Taking a small flashlight out of his pocket, Rick checked the boxes closest to them. ‘These are recent. Look –
Francisco Martin Duran
,
1994
. He was the guy who took twenty-nine potshots at the White House, trying to kill President Clinton.’

He slid the long cardboard box off the shelf and opened the lid. Inside was a trench coat in a plastic bag, a stack of dog-eared notebooks, a collection of Polaroid photographs, a wristwatch, a cheap brown wallet, and a Chinese SKS assault rifle.

‘See? The Secret Service keep pretty much everything that characterizes any particular case.’

Noah peered into the box. ‘No medallion?’

Rick gave the box a shake. ‘Not in this case. Wouldn’t have expected one, either. Duran wasn’t part of any terrorist group, so far as we could work out. He believed that the White House was connected to some kind of alien mist.’

They walked further along the corridor, with Rick flicking his flashlight at every box they passed. Most of the names Noah didn’t recognize, but a few stood out.
Dan White
,
1978
, the former policeman who had shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco.
Talmadge Hayer, 1965
, who had confessed to taking part in the shotgun assassination of the black power leader Malcolm X in New York.
Collie Wilkins
,
1965
, accused of shooting civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in Alabama.

‘Rogues’ gallery,’ Rick remarked. ‘You have to learn all about these screwballs, when you’re training for close protection. It’s supposed to help you pick out a would-be assassin. Creepy, isn’t it, to think that those boxes contain their actual possessions?’

They walked up and down five rows of shelving before they came to the boxes related to the 1900s. Right at the very end, on the top shelf, they found a dark brown plywood box with a faded label on it, and the inscription
L. Czolgosz
,
1901
written in italics in purple ink.

Rick lifted the box down and set it on the floor. Inside was a pale brown tweed coat, carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper, even though it was worn-out and dirty. Underneath the coat there was a black hand-knitted sweater, with fraying cuffs, a grubby grey shirt with no collar, and a pair of dark brown corduroy pants.

A pair of cracked brown leather shoes had also been neatly wrapped up, in a copy of the
Buffalo Express
, so old that the paper had turned amber.

There were twenty or so letters and pages of notes, some of them written in blunt pencil, but a few of them written in a smaller, much more feminine hand, in ink. Rick picked one of these up and read it.

 

Rick showed the letter to Noah. ‘Look at the signature – Emma Goldman.’

Noah shook his head. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘Emma Goldman was a famous anarchist – or
infamous
anarchist, I should say – and one of the early feminists, too. Red Emma, they called her. She was all in favour of birth control for women, dodging the draft, and assassinating capitalists. Not necessarily in that order of importance.’

‘So maybe this Czolgosz guy wasn’t just a lone screwball.’

‘Hard to say, from this. But Emma Goldman’s boyfriend was sent to prison for trying to kill Henry Clay Frick.’

‘Who?’

‘Big industrialist, in the 1890s. Gave millions to the arts, but when his workers tried to strike, he hired Pinkerton men to open fire on them. It was a different world then, Noah.’

‘Maybe not so different,’ said Noah. ‘These bastards are still trying to kill Adeola, aren’t they?’

Rick said nothing, but lifted out a grey cotton bag, with a drawstring. He shook it, and it sounded metallic. The drawstring was knotted so tightly that he had to cut it with his clasp knife. He tipped it up, and the contents spilled on to the floor: Leon Czolgosz’ personal effects.

They sorted through them. There were three dollars and eighty-one cents in coins, two pencils with metal caps on them, a tortoiseshell comb with several broken teeth, a small screwdriver of the type used for fixing spectacles, and a heavy circular object wrapped up in greaseproof paper.