Conspiracy (34 page)

In the lobby of the building, Bruce, the regular evening guard, sat at a desk close to the elevators.

"Evening, Bruce," Taylor said, taking the security key from her purse that operated the elevators after normal business hours.

Bruce stood up at his desk and looked awkwardly at her. "Sorry, Miss Ferrari. I can't allow you to go up in the elevator."

Taylor was flabbergasted. "What did you say?"

"I-I'm sorry," he stammered, "but you can't go up."

"I'm a partner in this law firm. Have you forgotten that?"

"No, Miss Ferrari, but I have orders not to let you go up."

"Orders?" she shouted. "Who told you that?"

"Mr. Harrison himself called me about an hour ago. He gave very strict instructions. He said that you were a fugitive from a Mississippi warrant. That I shouldn't let you up in the elevator. That if I saw you, I should call the D.C. police. He gave me a special number at police headquarters."

Taylor was too stunned to respond, but not Cady. He whipped his wallet out of his pocket and flashed his Department of Justice ID in front of Bruce so fast that Bruce never had a chance to see his name. Then he took the .38 from his jacket pocket and pointed it at Bruce.

"Now, listen up," Cady barked. "I'm with the FBI, here on an official government investigation. I've asked Miss Ferrari to go up to her office and get me some papers. If you don't let her go up in that elevator right now, I intend to haul your sorry ass to jail for obstruction of justice. Do you know what that is?"

Bruce shook his head weakly from side to side.

"It means that you go to jail for not letting the FBI do its job. Mr. Harrison doesn't go to jail. You do. You got that?"

Cady gripped the gun in one hand and reached for the phone with the other. "Now, do I call headquarters at the FBI to have you arrested, or do you let her go up?"

Bruce pointed to the elevator.

As Taylor disappeared from Cady's sight, he said to Bruce, "Don't make any effort to reach for the phone." Cady moved to a position halfway between Bruce's desk and the glass front doors of the building. He wanted to keep an eye on both his car and Bruce.

Having worked closely with Harrison for so many years, Taylor knew a great deal about his personal habits. He never kept the door to his office locked. His most confidential papers were in two locked drawers at the bottom of one of the built-in bookcases that lined a side wall. Most important, the key to those drawers was inside a silver cup resting on the bookcase, which had been his prize for being on the winning team of a Newport-to-Bermuda sailing race three years ago. Once when she was alone in his office waiting for Harrison to return from a meeting, she had watched his secretary take that key, unlock the drawer, and retrieve a file that Harrison needed.

Not wanting to draw the attention of anyone who might be working late, she walked softly down the dimly lit corridor lined with Oriental carpets. At the entrance to Harrison's office, she turned on the lights, took a deep breath, then went inside. Her chest was pounding as she crossed the carpet toward the silver cup.

Quickly she opened the top of the two drawers. Inside were half a dozen red file folders, all neatly tied and arranged in a row. One by one she took them out and leafed through the papers inside. They all contained documents relating to the law firm's business. She put them back carefully and opened the bottom drawer, where she found two more red file jackets.

The first one contained documents related to a top-secret hostile corporate takeover being planned by a large French conglomerate, one of Harrison's major clients, for a Fortune Fifty American corporate manufacturer. She tied up that file and returned it to the drawer.

From the tension of what she was doing, her hands were moist with perspiration. The last folder had an S on the front. She carried it over to Harrison's desk, opened it, and began leafing through the papers inside. Japanese writing caught her eye. She felt more bewilderment. It was inconceivable that Harrison could be doing work for a Japanese client without involving her, unless...

She was fighting hard against what was now the likely conclusion. She went back to the beginning of the file and examined the documents one by one.

On top, Taylor saw a draft speech in Japanese dated October 2 of this year, and a typed English translation below it. It was a speech for Yahiro Sato to deliver at the Japan Defense Agency the day after the American presidential inauguration in January.

Taylor began reading the draft:

 

The banner that led Japan into the modern era was "Rich Country, Strong Army,"
[fukoku kyohei],
and these two have always been linked together throughout history. A strong military is absolutely essential for Japan's survival in the modern world. This thinking was expressed by Fukuzawa Yukichi at the end of the nineteenth century, when he wrote, "There is no single example of a nation maintaining its independence by relying on treaties and international law."

Today, our nation's economic development has stagnated because of our limited landmass. We have a population that is approximately half of the United States', but the total land of all of our islands is equal in size only to California, and very little of that is arable. To expand our economy we must reach out to our neighbors in Asia. This is critical if we are to expand our markets and obtain less expensive raw materials. In addition, if our neighbors compete unfairly with us in world markets, they must be persuaded to change their behavior. Finally, we must be sensitive to the threat that we are facing as the Chinese economy expands, and they continue to develop more sophisticated weapons.

All of these factors taken together have led me to suggest a major program for development of an expanded military, which is necessary for Japan's defense and to assure its proper role in the world.

 

The draft then outlined the first steps of the program for militarization, which would begin early next year:

 

(1) January 30, Sato, as defense minister as well as prime minister, publicly announces that all U.S. troops must leave Japan within 30 days.

(2) February 15, repeal Article IX of the Japanese constitution, which General Douglas MacArthur forced on Japan, contrary to the sovereign rights of every other nation of the world. It provides, "aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.... Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."

(3) March 1, develop plans for increases in manpower and equipment in the army, navy, and air force, and begin development of a nuclear arms program.

(4) June 1, begin negotiations with Taiwan for a mutual defense treaty.

 

In the margin of the speech were a number of handwritten revisions in a script that Taylor recognized to be Harrison's.

The next document in the file was the final version of the speech, in Japanese, dated October 20. With her knowledge of the language, Taylor compared the final with the draft. All of the changes Harrison had suggested had been made.

With a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, Taylor turned the speech over and looked at what else was in the folder. There was a copy of a fax addressed to Yahiro Sato, which read,
No need to worry. Everything is proceeding on schedule.
It was signed,
R.L.
That must be the code name for Sato's American contact. Under the fax was a report from a French investigator that linked Abdul Azziz and Maison Antibes and made the bribery case against Boyd.

She pulled out the calendar that Harrison kept in the center drawer of his desk. With trembling hands, she flipped back to August.

There it was staring her in the face. A line through August 27 and 28 with a note that read,
Y.S. The Alvear Palace, Buenos Aires.
Precisely the date that Alex Glass had said Sato had recruited his American supporter in Argentina.

There was no doubt it was Harrison.

Taylor felt light-headed and weak in the knees. She collapsed into Harrison's desk chair, and sat there for several minutes as the full measure of the conspiracy sank into her mind.

Sato's motivation was easy for Taylor to understand—his distorted view of what was good for Japan. But what about Harrison? What possibly could be motivating him? That had Taylor stumped. It couldn't be money. He had all he could ever want. Power? He had turned down important positions in the American government. Then what?

Whatever it was, it had to be significant enough to involve him in the murders of Boyd and Gladstone.

She would have bet anything that Harrison wasn't capable of arranging those, but now she realized that she would have been wrong.
Goddammit.
Cady was right. Harrison had been able to plan precisely every move because he always knew from her where the senator was and how he was reacting to Cady's investigation. She had been the perfect stooge.

Suddenly Taylor realized what else Harrison had done to her. He must have sneaked into her office and examined her Mississippi travel records in order to frame her for the hit-and-run that would have put her in a Mississippi jail.

Waves of anger and betrayal flooded her mind. She knew that she had to move, but she felt frozen. She couldn't get up from that chair.

* * *

Cady saw someone approaching his car, and he raced toward the front doors of the building, the gun in his hand. Once he saw it was just a young couple who stopped to admire the XK8, he breathed a sigh of relief.

While Cady was looking out front, Bruce reached down and pushed the button on the two-way pager hooked to the belt on his waist.

Terasawa was parked in the Toyota Camry a couple blocks away from Cady's house in order to avoid detection by the FBI agent parked in front. When Taylor and Cady came home, he planned to make a frontal assault, even if it meant killing all three.

Once he heard the beeper, he knew what it meant: Taylor was at the law firm. He started the engine and headed toward the building.

* * *

Taylor rose with a start and collected all of the documents she had been examining, as well as Harrison's calendar. With swift, purposeful strides, she walked down the hall to the copying machine and made two copies of each. Then she went to her own office, stuffed one set into a brown mailing envelope, addressed it to Chief Justice Hall at the Supreme Court, and applied more than enough postage to get it there.

The second set she placed in a red folder. After that, she returned the original documents to Harrison's office.

On her way to the elevator, she stopped in the firm's mail room and tossed the brown envelope into one of the bulging gray sacks of outgoing mail that would be taken to the post office first thing in the morning. The red folder she clutched tightly in her hand.

* * *

They walked quickly from the lobby to Cady's car. "Let's go back to my house," he said. "Then we can take a careful look at what you have in that folder. While I drive keep your eyes open, and I will too. Let's make sure we're not being followed."

Cady drove west on Pennsylvania Avenue and then cut over to Rock Creek Parkway and Beach Drive, which sliced through the large park in the center of the city. From the passenger seat in the front, Taylor kept glancing back, watching the flow of cars behind them. When they passed the P Street exit, she said to him, alarmed, "I think we're being followed."

"Keep watching," Cady said tersely.

Minutes later they went through a brightly lit tunnel. At this time of the night very few cars were on the road. Taylor kept her eyes riveted to the side mirror next to her window.

"It's still there," she said. "Looks like a beige Toyota Camry."

"Buckle up and hold on. I'm going to lose him."

For the next few minutes, Cady raced around the winding narrow roads that snaked through the park, with the Toyota hot on his tail. He was frantically trying to lose his pursuer, but the Toyota gradually gained ground. Cady slowed down slightly to cross a narrow stone bridge.

Through the rearview mirror, he watched the Toyota close most of the gap.

Taylor turned around in her seat. Terrified, she saw that the driver was a Japanese man clutching a pistol. "He's got a gun," Taylor screamed. "It must be Terasawa."

Cady floored the accelerator and shot around a bend. They heard a gun firing. The bullet sailed over the top of the green Jaguar. A second one shattered the rear right taillight. Cady stomped on the accelerator.

Just ahead a narrow road cut off to the right. At the last instant, without any warning, Cady swerved sharply and took the turn. The driver of the Toyota couldn't react in time, and he missed it. With a couple of seconds' lead time, Cady roared along the road. He turned left into a parking lot for a picnic grove and slammed on the brakes.

"What are you doing?" Taylor asked frantically.

"Out of the car. Fast," he snapped. "Follow me."

He turned off the engine, jumped out, slamming the door behind him, and ran into the grassy, leaf-filled area just ahead. Taylor followed him with the red file folder in her hand.

When he dove behind a bush, she was right with him.

It was quiet on the road.

"Maybe he won't find us here," she whispered.

"Let's hope so," he said anxiously.

Then they saw a set of headlights coming toward them. It was the beige Toyota. The car stopped on the road, adjacent to the parking lot. As they watched, Terasawa rolled down the window on the driver's side. In his hand he was holding a bottle. He raised it and flung it in the direction of the green Jaguar. It smashed the front windshield and burst into flames, exploding and triggering an explosion in the car's engine.

"Holy shit," Cady hissed, glued to the spot. "He thought we were in there."

The flames were shooting into the air with a savage heat that threatened to engulf Taylor and Cady. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. "We've got to get the hell out of here," she said. She began running with the folder clutched tightly in her hand. Cady was two steps behind.