The Assassin (28 page)

John Jackson would never be President of America and there would be no civil war, no dreadful upsurge from within to open the way for them. Because their hired assassin was going to kill him to prevent it. He buttoned his coat against the March wind in the street outside and began to walk towards the twin grey towers of the cathedral. At ten o'clock the body of the church was filling up with people; there was a subdued sound inside composed of many different noises; the movement of people taking their places; whispering, coughing, and through it all a subdued but beautiful anthem played softly on the magnificent organ high above the entrance. Keller knew every foot of the way he had to take. He had spent an hour there two days before, pretending to visit the side altars, getting every detail fixed in his memory. He walked through the enormous doorway, flanked by the massive bronze doors, elaborately ornamented with Christ and his Apostles above, three figures of saints associated with New York on each of them. Two men stopped him. ‘What's in your coat, mister?' Keller didn't argue; he handed it over to them. People passed him, staring, their heads turned. He wasn't the only one. A man carrying a brief-case had also been stopped and asked to open it. He was arguing angrily. Keller gave his coat to the security man, and raised his arms while a second ran over him with expert touch to see if he were carrying a weapon.

‘Sorry to trouble you,' they said when he was passed clean. ‘Regulations are tough these days.'

‘That's all right,' he said. He walked through and turned left up the aisle. He went up the short flight of steps leading to the back of the tall mahogany screen which closed out most of the high altar except its elaborately carved canopy arch. The special confessional was tucked into a corner, wedged into the wall, with one of the huge four-columned pillars as part of its construction. A number of people were in the area; Keller picked out three men who were certainly not worshippers moving watchfully up and down. He saw one of the sextants pause and speak to one of them. In that instant they were occupied; he looked from right to left, and behind him. For that brief moment no one was walking near or glancing towards the confessional. Keller had rehearsed it all so often in his mind that he acted inhumanly fast. He ducked inside the green curtains of the confessional, reaching towards the wall; his fingers found something long and loose; he slipped one arm through it and stepped clear. In full view of anyone coming up the steps towards him, he adjusted the sextant's robe and walked to the altar of St Rose of Lima. His heart was beating at a slightly faster rate than normal, but he tested himself deliberately. He went to the candlestand, blazing with votive lights, and adjusted one or two which were dripping wax on to the floor. People went past him, paused to kneel a foot or so away and pray, and accepted him as one of the cathedral staff. He began to walk back towards the confessional again. It was one thing to grab an overall left hanging for him to find; it was not quite the same to get that kneeler rail lifted and extract the gun. Now his heart rate was increasing; he hid his hands inside the robe and eased on his cotton gloves. There was another confessional box on the way; it too had the same curtains, looped to one side. He went up to it and swept them back, peering inside the narrow place where the penitent could kneel. He felt the kneeling rail and the top. It was all in one piece; nothing moved. The other must have been specially altered; probably weeks before. He walked up the steps again and turned behind the altar; the huge carved screens shut out the glittering lights which were being lit round the sanctuary; the passageway was not very wide and in places very shadowy. He knew exactly where the two doors were. The nearest to the confessional was the one through which the Cardinal and his procession of priests and acolytes would enter for the High Mass. Just beyond it was the exit leading to 51st Street, with the man on the outside who would be his final hazard as he got away. He went past both doorways and saw what he expected; four men were posted round the first exit, and one was on duty by the second. The man who had briefed Keller had told him not to worry about the man on duty by the door
inside
the church. He glanced up at him, and saw the security man watching him with unusual concentration. This must be their man; the one who had the opportunity to hide the robe and the gun; the one who would let him rush through after the killing. Keller didn't hold his look. He remembered exactly what Elizabeth had said: ‘Immediately you've killed Jackson you'll be killed yourself to stop you being arrested.' Immediately. Immediately after. That would be their security man's opportunity to close the bargain. When Keller tried to get out through that door he would be shot dead. King's executioner would be a national hero for killing the Cardinal's assassin. And there would be no chance of that assassin getting caught and giving any clue away. He didn't raise his eyes or look at the man again. Keller turned back and went up to the confessional. He didn't try to slip inside the curtains. He swept them right back and then moved in, pretending to look at something. There was an electronic headset for use by the deaf, hanging close to the small meshed opening which concealed the priest during confession. He lifted the edge of the kneeling rail, and a part of the top came up like the lid of a box. He plunged his hand inside the narrow space which had been hollowed out of the wood. The gun was lying in it; it was in his coat pocket under the robe before he withdrew his head from the darkness.

‘Everything okay?' One of the men on duty by the Cardinal's entry door had come up behind him.

‘Yes,' Keller said quickly. ‘I just wanted to be sure.'

‘You can't be too particular,' the man said. ‘With that bastard attending here today, anything could happen. Keep your eye on anyone coloured in your section; they're the ones to watch.'

‘I will do that,' Keller said. He nodded to the man—F.B.I., Police Department, or whatever he was. He kept his right hand in his pocket, holding the pistol. He checked his watch; it was ten-twenty-five. The main doors were closed now; the organ music had increased in volume, the whole body of the cathedral was full of people, their faces turning towards a small procession which was coming down the nave. These were the important, the privileged, coming to take their reserved places. Keller didn't recognise anyone from his position at the top of the steps leading down to the aisle; certainly Jackson was not among the group of a dozen men and women who were filing into the first three rows on either side of the nave. He hadn't come. At the last minute he had been warned off. There had been one attempt to murder him already. Keller knew about that from the TV news programme the night before. Maybe he had just lost his nerve.

But then he saw the other group, approaching from the opposite side of the cathedral, and the hand in his right pocket grew tense as he recognised the thin face, the white hair brushed up, the glint of the steel-rimmed spectacles on the snubby nose. John Jackson had come in with his party through a side entrance. It was an obvious precaution against a hostile demonstration from the crowds gathered round the cathedral entrance. Keller stood close against the huge supporting pillar with its Gothic saint suspended in perpetual levitation above the ground; round the corner, protected by that pillar, he had seen the splendid throne where Regazzi would sit during the Mass. He could see Jackson bowing to some of the people round him; a smile looked uncomfortable on the fanatical mouth. He had a nervous mannerism, more noticeable in the flesh than it had been on the screen, of sucking in his lower lip.

Keller judged the distance to be not more than fifteen feet, with an awkward angle for taking aim. The view was good but the angle was a disadvantage. It needed time to point the weapon and take a correct aim which would make sure the bullet penetrated the front cranial bone and through into the brain.

There was a tremendous chord from the organ; it filled the vast roof with a triumphant peal of music; at the same moment the congregation stood up. The noise was like a roll of distant thunder. Keller turned. Behind him, away down the side passage, the door to the rectory had opened. As the Cardinal's procession entered the cathedral, the choir began the opening anthem of the High Mass.

‘What's the time?' King had asked them the same question three times in what he supposed must be the last hour. He got the same reply. ‘Time you gave us a straight answer, Mr King.'

They were very polite, very correct. There were three of them, which was the routine number for an interrogation at this stage. Two to ask the questions and one to take it down on a transcriber. They were middle-aged men; the principal questioner looked like a college professor; he was quiet-spoken, his hair greying and cut to a liberal length. He had taken off his jacket, but that was the only cessation so far to the session which had been going on all through the night without a pause. There had been no brutality; King was too experienced to expect this at such an early stage. But he had been afraid all the same when they made the descent in the lift and began the walk down bare corridors lit with fluorescent ceiling lights.

It had begun politely, impersonally, as if he weren't important and it would soon be over. He had answered their questions with his cover story, and after nineteen hours he hadn't changed a single detail. He was sick with tiredness; his head ached with the effort to concentrate, and there was no aggression being generated against him.

This would have helped; this was what he needed at this stage to give his energy a shot and keep his mind off wanting to lie down. He had been given a chair but it was very uncomfortable. His buttocks ached in sympathy with his head and his legs were stiff with cramp. He had been given coffee, which at first he had refused. The chief interrogator had been mildly contemptuous. ‘It's not drugged, Mr King,' he said. ‘We don't use those methods over here.' He had drunk from King's cup to prove it. In the end King needed the coffee, and drank as much as he was offered. He wasn't really afraid, because he was a brave man, and this was a contingency he had prepared himself to meet for many years. But still he was more shaken than he should have been. The end had been so close, the contingency itself had receded further and further into the improbable until he hadn't really thought of it ever happening; and still it had. With an hour to spare, he had been arrested, and he still didn't know how they had found him out. They hadn't mentioned Beirut or Huntley Cameron; the whole line of attack against him had been directed to making him break down and admit that he was not Eddi King. While this was the worst development for him personally, because it supposed a vital leak in his security cover, it left his final blow against them time to be delivered. They hadn't discovered anything about the assassination which was going to take place that morning. It must be the morning; as his watch had been removed he couldn't tell what time it was in the underground room, and that was why he interrupted to keep asking.

‘You're very interested in the time, Mr King,' the second interrogator took it up to give the senior man a rest. ‘But time doesn't matter here. You can be here for days if you go on being obstructive. Weeks. You won't like that chair after a while; we don't have any beds.'

‘I want to see my lawyer,' King repeated. He said it because an innocent man would do so, but without any hope of convincing them. They knew enough about him to go on and on until he broke. He wouldn't be beaten up or doped. He would just be kept awake until his mind collapsed into hallucination and his body could hardly function except to restore a minimal balance and then woken up to start again. He wasn't expected to stand out indefinitely; in his case he need only resist until he was sure that Regazzi had been murdered and the political conspiracy directed at putting John Jackson into the White House was properly advanced.

Then he could admit just enough about himself to get him out of the interrogation centre. He was allowed to implicate a few minor agents, who were expendable, and couldn't provide any information if they were picked up. He could stand his trial for being what he was: a Soviet agent running an Intelligence network under cover of a magazine. He would get twenty, thirty years, and before long the negotiations to release him on the usual exchange basis would begin. The K.G.B. never deserted their big operators. All the top agents were assured that they wouldn't be left in capitalist prisons to finish their sentences, and by means of blackmail, kidnap and exchange of agents the K.G.B. had kept their promise. But if his part in the Regazzi assassination became known, then not only would his plan misfire completely, because any hint of a foreign conspiracy would distract public attention from the carefully laid frame against Huntley and the Democratic Party, but it would invoke the death sentence against King. And nobody had been able to rescue the Rosenbergs.

‘When did you take over Eddi King's identity? 1945—that's when he died in the death camp. We know this, Mr King; we know all about how the deal was set up for you.'

‘There was no deal,' King said, as he had been saying all through the night. ‘My name is Edward Richard King, I was born in Minnesota, I live in New York and I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I spent three years interned in a concentration camp and then I lived in France till I came home in '54. I've told you this over and over, and that's all I have to say till I see my lawyer.'

The two interrogators said something he couldn't hear. He leaned his head on his hand and shut his eyes for a moment, taking advantage of the pause. Elizabeth Cameron. That was the greatest single mistake of his career; leaving her alive that night at Freemont, waiting until the morning and then killing Huntley's strumpet in error. His people had to get her, or the truth about the assassination could still come out, now that he was caught, and she could connect him with it. She could prove that Regazzi had never been the target, that Huntley himself had been duped and double-crossed. His hand was damp with sweat against his forehead. To be caught was bad enough, but to fail in this, the most important mission of his life; this would forfeit him the protection of his own people. He would be abandoned as a punishment and an example. They must get to her. They would get to her. He had telephoned the best man, the expert who was in charge of the Regazzi operation. He had a long record of successes; he had been recruited by King's people during his army service; he had worked for them as well as for the millionaire crime syndicate in New York. King looked up; the three Americans were watching him. ‘I want to have a pee,' he said.