Ikon (7 page)

‘I agree with you, Titus, you know that,’ said Senator Rodney. The only problem is, he’s strong. Marshall’s very, very strong. Not just strong but paranoid. He’s got a water-tight security set-up, and the best intelligence network since Eisenhower. It’s going to be hard to get to him, I warn you, and even when you do, you won’t be safe.’

‘Safety,’ Titus retorted, ‘is not my primary consideration. I was at Changjin Reservoir, remember? I was at Khe Sanh. I didn’t care about my safety then, and I don’t care

about it now. All I care about is putting a stop to these goddamned disastrous RING agreements.’

‘Well, I hope you won’t be sorry,said Senator Rodney. ‘Keep me in touch, will you? When are you going back to Washington?’

‘I’m going to drive back now. I have a few traps to set.’

‘How was the fishing?’

‘Good enough. A fair catch of trout. Not what it used to be, though. Maybe I’ve lost my touch.’

There are bigger fish in Washington, Titus. Whales, and swordfish, and sharks, too. Plenty of sharks.’

Titus grunted in amusement, and then put the phone down. Joe Jasper said, ‘You don’t have to go back straight away, Mr Secretary. The girl won’t be arriving in Washington until the day after tomorrow. You could have yourself one more day’s fishing, if you wanted to.’

Titus finished his drink, and held out his glass for another one. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘fishing requires calm, and concentration. Right now, I’m not in the mood for it. I smell blood, thanks to you, Joe. I smell blood!’

‘You’re flattering me, Mr Secretary.’

Titus stared at him. Joe Jasper was such a weasel, such a sharp, nibbling, chiselling kind of a creature, that Titus found him compelling company. Joe would accept any insult, and perform any task, no matter how menial or degrading. He had first come to Washington with Nixon’s West Coast cosa nostra, John Ehrlichman and Hank Halde-man and John Dean; but he had survived Watergate by attaching himself (‘like a leech,’ Titus often thought) to the caretaker administration which followed. Joe Jasper, despite his pale, unappealing face, despite his fastidious clothing, his Bijan shoes and his ostentatious gold rings, could worm his way in anywhere in Washington and get the goods on anyone. Anna Wuschinski, of the Washington Post, always called him Smeagol, after the snivelling, whining Gollum in Lord of the Rings. She was more accurate than she knew: Joe Jasper had a bite just as sharp as Smeagol, and just as much bony strength.

‘Pay the check,’ said Titus. ‘I want to leave for Washington right away.’

‘What about your luggage?’

‘Send Wilkins down to collect it in the morning.’

Joe closed the communications briefcase, and gathered up the papers and notebooks which Titus had left around his suite. A thorough search would be made of the entire room tomorrow, to make sure that not even the slightest scrap of classified documentation had been left behind. Other, personal objects would be removed, too. It wouldn’t do for the left-wing media to discover that the Secretary of State regularly ate Ex-Lax chocolate, nor that he used Chestnut-7 hair colorant.

Titus showered, and dressed in a grey slubbed mohair business suit, with a 2nd Infantry Division necktie, and a pocket handkerchief of exact isoceles sharpness. Meanwhile, Joe told the Secret Service man outside to arrange for Titus’ official black Cadillac to be driven around to the front of the hotel, ready for the drive back to the capital. It was almost 6:30 p.m., a grainy Shenandoah evening, and because of the fog it was practically dark.

‘We’re all set to go, Mr Secretary,’ said Joe, as Titus came out of the bedroom smelling of Jules aftershave, the last of his cigar still clenched between his teeth.

‘Did you put in that call to my wife?’

‘Yes, sir. She’s decided to stay in Philadelphia one more night, but she’s expected back by Thursday afternoon. Your stepchildren are both at home.’

‘Shit,’ said Titus, tautly tugging at his left cuff, and giving himself a last inspection in the mirror. That’s all I need. Carl and Samantha, unlovability incarnate.’

Joe picked a wiry grey hair from Titus’ shoulder. There was a call from Mr Nott, in Britain, but apparently it wasn’t urgent. And Mr Yusef called, about the pipeline arrangement.’

‘Any word from Schmidt?’

Joe shook his head. ‘None. He seems to be playing this one really close to the chest.’

‘Hm,’ said Titus. Then, ‘Let s go. We got everything?’

They left the suite and walked down the overheated, red-carpeted corridor. From inside one of the rooms they passed, there was the buzzing of somebody shaving, and from inside the next room, the muted burble of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The Secret Service agent walked a pace or two behind them, whistling between his teeth. His colleague was waiting in the lobby, bulky, nondescript, with brush-cut hair and the kind of belted weekend suit they advertise in the Saturday newspapers.

‘Mr Secretary,’ nodded the second agent, as Titus came down the staircase to the lobby. ‘Everything’s ready. I’m real sorry you had to cut short your fishing.’

‘Well, can’t be helped,smiled Titus, wryly. Over the hotel’s reception desk there was a large stuffed pike, illuminated with a spotlight. The Front Royal Towers had always advertised itself as The Compleat Resort for Anglers’.

They descended the wet stone steps outside. Titus’ official black limousine was parked just outside the wall that surrounded the sun patio. This evening, the sun patio was barely visible, puddled and mossy, with a solitary sundial dripping in the twilight like a forgotten tombstone.

‘I think I’ll travel with Joe, Titus told his Secret Servicemen. ‘Joe? I want to go over some of this RING business with you. Maybe we can work out some angles.’

‘Mr Jasper’s car isn’t bulletproofed, sir,one of the agents pointed out. ‘If there should be any kind of irregularity…’

‘Don’t you love it?’ said Titus, cracking into a grin. They call an assassination attempt an “irregularity”. Well, I can tell you son, the only irregularity that’s going on around here concerns my bowels, and that’s only because of those damned stepchildren of mine occupying both damned bathrooms for hours on end, making-up and shaving and popping their zits while I have to get myself off to the State Department. And let me tell you this is the first time in my life. I was so damned regular in Viet Nam that the USS New Jersey used to fire off its morning

salvo as soon as their lookouts saw my toilet door open. Better than a goddamn naval chronometer.’

The Secret Servicemen shrugged, and walked across to the official limousine with that arms-swinging round-shouldered gait exclusive to bodyguards. Titus climbed into Joe Jasper’s car, and said, ‘How about another one of those cheap cigars of yours, Joe?’ The car’s windshield was beaded with moisture, so Joe switched on the wipers, and cleared it away.

‘I’ve got to tell you, this is the first time I’ve gladly cut a fishing-trip short,said Titus. ‘You’ve got to tell me how you managed to lay your hands on that stuff. That was a stroke of genius. You hear that? I’m paying you a compliment.’

Joe started the engine. The whole thing came to light when I was talking to a man called lacono in Atlantic City. He simply said that he’d met a girl who was boasting that she’d once -‘

With a shattering crash, like the bow of an icebreaker cleaving its way into a glacier, the car’s windshield imploded, and dumped a slushy pile of sparkling broken glass into their laps. A nano-second later, the car rose and bucked and dipped on its suspension.

Then they heard the explosion, so loud that it deafened them, and their ears sang as they saw Titus’ huge black polished limousine rise into the air, its doors flapping open as if it were desperately trying to fly, turning over on its back twenty feet above them, tumbling, swallow-diving, and then rolling over and over on to the sun patio, crushed, smashed, and still rolling as it hit the sundial and broke through the stone balustrade which overlooked the garden.

There was a second explosion, and Titus said tightly, ‘Gas tank.’ A ball of flame licked up into the fog, and then the Cadillac was blazing fiercely from end to end, with a soft and a hungry roar which Titus hadn’t heard since Nam.

He climbed out of the car, brushing showers of glass off his suit. Joe said, Titus - Mr Secretary - we ought to get the hell out of here. They may have marksmen.’

But Titus ignored him, and walked across to the ten-foot wide hole in the brick-paved driveway where the explosives had gone off. The device had probably been slipped under the Cadillac while it was parked there a few minutes ago, and been detonated by remote control. Titus looked narrowly up at the hotel windows, checking one after the other, but they were all blank and blind and gave nothing away.

He climbed the low stone wall on to the sun patio and walked across the scoured, battered flagstones. The car was still burning, although its bodywork was already blackened and blistered, and there was more smoke now than flame. Hanging from the passenger window, he saw a human hand, charred, shrivelled-up, bare to the bone, but with the tips of its fingers still spouting little flames like a menorah. There was something ominous and supernatural about it, and Titus bit his lip and turned away, disturbed.

Joe came hurrying over with his gun held high in his left hand. It was a gigantic .357 revolver, and if he had ever fired it, the recoil would probably have knocked him flat. But he had only bought it to impress Dan Duggan of the National Rifle Association that he was doing his bit to uphold the spirit of the Second Amendment. He said, ‘Holy Christ,’ when he saw the burning car, and stopped where he was.

People were running down the steps of the hotel, and opening up their windows. Lights were being switched on everywhere. Somebody said, ‘Call an ambulance. There’s been an accident.’

An accident? thought Titus. He started to walk back to the car, and he was trembling like an old man of 80. No, not an accident. An irregularity that’s what it was. And he dearly and deeply wanted to know who was responsible.

Joe said, ‘Holy Christ,’ again, and then suddenly began to walk after him.

Five

Chief of Police Walter Ruse considered himself to be a true Westerner, in the sense that he believed in justice being fair, prompt, and memorable. He would not uncommonly deal with traffic offenders by giving them a swift hard kick in the pants, rather than write them a ticket; and all of Phoenix remembered the time when he had caught the Yapton boys for drunk driving on Van Buren Street, and knocked their heads together so hard that their lawyer had successfully pleaded in court that they had already been punished to the limits of the law.

He was a big man, huge-bellied, with a fat, tanned face, and two little near-together eyes the colour of cold steel. Kathy Forbes always said that his eyes reminded her of two nails sticking in a pig’s behind. Chief Ruse always said that Kathy Forbes reminded him of a medium-class madame. There was little love lost between the Press and the Police department in Phoenix; particularly that summer.

Because of his direct attitude to justice, Chief Ruse was not at all happy with the obvious complexities of the homicide on Oasis Drive. Here was a woman found with her head sawn off, one of the most brutal attacks he’d ever seen. Yet there was no apparent motive, no robbery, no rape, no vandalism, not even ‘Death to Pigs’ scrawled in blood on the wall. Just her head sawn off; and, worse, her head was missing. Police dogs had searched the area all morning and all they had come up with so far was an unpleasantly dead coyote. Chief Ruse hoped very much that this wasn’t going to be the beginning of one of those inexplicable new fashions in homicide. He had enough to contend with right now, keeping the husbands and wives of Phoenix from blowing themselves away with their own handguns. It always happened in the summer, when the temperature hit the high 80s. Chief Ruse took off his large

Western hat and wiped the inside of the brim with his handkerchief, and sniffed.

The headless body had just been taken away. Chief Ruse heard the ambulance siren warbling away down 36th Street. He stood with his hands on the bulges of fat which overhung his hips, and contemplated with absent-minded seriousness the hysterical splashes of blood on the walls and bedspread, and the dark tide of coagulated gore which spread out over the white carpet beneath his feet like a monstrous scab. He heard the front door of the house close behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He knew who it was. Lieutenant Berridge, humming to himself. Berridge was arguably the best homicide detective that Phoenix had seen in fifteen years - young, fit, intelligent, well-trained and well-experienced. Chief Ruse found him unbearable, not only because he was so damned good, but because he looked like one of those toothy California tennis-players, all flashing incisors and tanned knees, and because he was only 31 years old, and because he had thick sun-blond hair and sharp blue eyes, and because his wife Stella was exactly the same, a twin almost-blonde, athletic and wholesome; and because he was such a conceited paralysing pain in the ass. And because he would never keep still, but was always hopping or jumping or shuffling around as if he were warming up for a basketball contest.

‘You want to tell me your opinion, chief?’ asked Berridge, lacing his fingers together and popping all his knuckles, one after the other, in a controlled salvo. Chief Ruse closed his eyes. He hated people who made gratuitous noises with their body. He said, without opening his eyes, ‘Whatever opinion , happen to have, I know that you’ve got yourself an opinion which is a hundred times more dynamic, so why don’t you tell me what it is now and get it over with?’

‘Right, okay,’ said Berridge, raising his finger instantaneously to make point one. “There isn’t any question that we have some unusual difficulties here, particularly as far as identification is concerned. But I do think that we can

safely assume that the dead woman is in fact Mrs Margot Schneider, widow of the late Major Rudolph Schneider, of the United States Air Force. Everything we have here supports that assumption. We have no ID. No Social Security card. In fact, we have nothing with a picture. But we do have her pension papers, and when I checked with Luke Air Force Base, they confirmed her age and her general appearance - and they tally. Her doctor confirmed her blood group, which is another plus. What’s more, there are letters in her writing-table from old girlfriends in the service, going right back to 1951.’