The Matarese Countdown (19 page)

“Well, well, Squinty, you’d found another spoor, hadn’t you? You questioned the poor old dear and learned that it was a photo of Appleton and his closest friend. Two strapping young men in front of a sailboat, pretty much the same size, both with imposing builds, both handsome in the prep-school mold—like they could be cousins, maybe.”

“Closer, according to Mrs. Appleton. Brothers. Until one went to war and the other suddenly refused to go and flew to Switzerland.” Shields reached into his pocket and withdrew a small notebook; it was wrinkled, the pages yellow
with age. “I dug this out of a file cabinet. I wanted to make sure I had the facts and the names straight when we talked. Where were we?”

“A photograph …” Cameron, by the gunwale, was engrossed. “
The
photograph.”

“Oh, yes,” said the deputy director, flipping the pages of his notebook. “It was after Korea; Appleton was in law school when he was in a terrible collision on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He nearly died at Mass General, with multiple fractures, massive internal bleeding, and horrible facial disfiguration. The family had specialists from everywhere working around the clock; it seemed hopeless, but obviously it wasn’t. So your next move, Brandon, was fairly obvious. You marched over to Massachusetts General Hospital, directly to the Department of Records and Billing. Although she’s now retired, the woman in charge remembers you very clearly.”

“I got her into trouble?”

“No, but as the chief aide to Senator Appleton, you promised her a personal thank-you note from the man who was soon to become President. She never got it, that’s how she remembered.”

“Hell, I didn’t have time to write,” said Bray. “Go on, you’re doing pretty well.”

“The hospital’s R and B didn’t tell you a great deal—most of it was medical mumbo jumbo with eighty-odd pages of procedures, services, and whatnot—and you wanted more. You wanted names. So she sent you up to the Department of Personnel, by then completely computerized, the records going back years.”

“There was a black kid on the equipment and without him I’d have been a dead pigeon,” broke in Scofield. “He was a student at Tech, making ends meet to stay in school. It’s funny, but I can’t recall his name.”

“You should. He’s now Dr. Amos Lafollet—Ph.D.—and a leading authority on nuclear medicine. When I finally tracked him down, he said if I ever saw you, I should ask if you liked the inscription in his first book.”

“I didn’t know he wrote one.”

“Well, I went out and bought it; it’s a standard text on nuclear medicine. You want to hear the inscription? I’ve got it here.”

“Sure.”

“ ‘To a generous stranger who asked little and gave a great deal, making possible a young man’s career, including this book.’ … Not bad for a stranger who couldn’t elicit those words from his own mother.”

“My mother thought I was either a gangster or a professional gambler. Let’s get back to Boston.”

“Certainly,” said Shields, returning to his notebook. “Dr. Lafollet, then a young student working the hospital’s computers, discovered that the two surgeons of record for Appleton had been replaced, and to his astonishment, one replacement had died and the name of the other replacement had been deleted from the records.”

“Don’t forget the nurses, Frank,” said Scofield quietly, staring at Shields. “For me they were a significant bingo.”

“Indeed they were,” agreed the deputy director.

“What about the nurses?” asked Pryce.

“Presumably on orders from the Appleton family, the hospital personnel were replaced by three private nurses, all of whom were killed in a freak boating accident four days before Joshua Appleton was released and taken back to the family estate, which, incidentally, was in the process of being sold. To a very old, very wealthy banker named Guiderone, a friend of the Appletons who knew their money was dwindling.”

“Say it, Squinty. To Nicholas Guiderone, the Shepherd Boy.”

“You didn’t have any real answers then, Brandon, but you saw the pattern of a monstrous conspiracy. All you really had were the names of the original two surgeons of record, one dead, the other forced into retirement. His name was Dr. Nathaniel Crawford. He died about fifteen years ago, but I reached him several years before that. He also remembered you, remembered your very disturbing phone call. He told me it brought back his nightmares.”

“He should never have had them. His diagnosis was
accurate, but he was set up. His patient, Joshua Appleton the Fourth, died in the hospital as he predicted.”

“In the company of the two replacement surgeons and perhaps one or two of the private nurses,” added Shields. “I can’t know the sequence or what you were beginning to perceive, but I assume that’s when you persuaded the young Amos Lafollet to fly to Washington and pick up a set of old X rays.”

“Everything was happening so fast I can’t remember the sequence,” said Bray, turning the Chris-Craft into the mild wind. “Taleniekov and Toni were being held hostage; there wasn’t time to plan much. I was flying half blind but I couldn’t stop.”

“Yet you knew the X rays might prove what you had begun to suspect, no matter how outrageous it seemed.”

“Yes,” agreed Scofield pensively, his eyes on the water, seeing things and feeling things no one else could. “They were dental X rays taken so long ago, in such different places, they could not have been tampered with, much less removed.”

“But you only had one set and you had to match them against another, isn’t that right, Brandon?”

“Obviously,” said Bray, again turning back to Shields, “and since you’d gotten this far, you had a pretty good idea who it was, of course.”

“Of course, but there was no way I could prove anything because you had the second set. You saw, as I did in that room in Louisburg Square, that Appleton and his closest friend both went to Andover Academy. You drove over there, tracked down the dentist—close friends, especially teenage boys away from home, would certainly go to the same dentist—and persuaded the doctor to give you both boys’ X rays.”

“So then you learned the truth,” said Scofield, nodding. “Good work, Frank, and I mean that.”

“It was your bargaining chip if, indeed, you even had one, to free Antonia and Taleniekov.”

“
What
bargaining chip?” asked a perplexed Cameron Pryce.

“The X rays proved that the guest of honor that day at Appleton Hall was not Senator Joshua Appleton but a fellow student and close friend by the name of Julian Guiderone, the son of the Shepherd Boy who was soon to occupy the White House with all that it implies.”

“
Christ
,” exclaimed Cameron, “you weren’t bullshitting, were you, Bray?”

“You mean you accept it from Squinty, but not from me, youngster?”

“Well, you must admit Frank filled in a lot of gaps you didn’t bother to plug.”

“Not all of them.” Scofield looked over at Shields. “Did Crawford explain to you who one of the replacing doctors was?”

“He certainly did and he gave me his name, too. He was the most prominent cosmetic surgeon in Switzerland. Only the richest trekked to his clinic. Would you believe he was killed when his car went out of control and plunged over a high precipice in Villefranche? Three days after he left Boston for Europe?”

“I can’t understand why the Matarese waited three days.”

“And that Julian Guiderone, who left the country for Switzerland to avoid fighting in the Korean War, supposedly died in a skiing accident near the village of Col du Pillon, where he was buried because of his love for the Alps?”

“Yes, I read that twenty-five years ago in the newspaper microfilms. I wonder who was in that coffin, or was it merely empty?”

“There’s no point in digging up the grave—if there is one.”

“There’s no point in dredging up any of this, Frank. The Guiderones are gone. The Shepherd Boy and his son are dead. We have to look elsewhere for the Matarese hierarchy.”

“That may not be accurate, Brandon,” Shields said softly as Scofield snapped his head away from the wheel. “In your debriefing, what there was of it, you claimed that
Senator Appleton—né Guiderone—was killed in the cross fire that day at Appleton Hall—”

“The
hell
I did!” roared Bray. “I shot the son of a bitch
myself!
Through the shattered window, with my weapon!”

“The words didn’t come across that way.”

“Maybe I fudged, I don’t know! You bastards had me beyond salvage and I wasn’t about to give you any leverage.”

“Regardless, you said he collapsed into the immense fireplace, into the flames—”

“That’s
exactly
what he did!”

“The police were on the crime scene within minutes, Brandon. There was no corpse in the fireplace. Rather, there were scuff marks on the slate, as if a body had been dragged out. Burned strands of fabric around the area, the flatness signifying that they had been subjected to pressure, the fire stamped into submission. It’s my judgment, as well as our forensic laboratories’, that Julian Guiderone survived.”

“He couldn’t have!… Even if he had, which is
impossible
, how could he have gotten away?”

“How did you and Antonia get away? There was so much confusion—the gunfire, the explosions going off in the exterior sewers, which I assume you planted—everything was chaos. I interrogated every police officer, every private guard, and one member of the SWAT team remembered that a Mr. and Mrs. Vickery, a panicked man and a woman, reached the main gate in a speeding car claiming they were guests,
only
guests. They had hidden in a closet, and in a lull in the fire, raced out a back door to their car.”

“
So?
”

“Your sister’s married name is Vickery, Brandon.”

“You’re thorough, I’ll say that for you, Squinty.”

“I accept the compliment, but it’s irrelevant. There was another vehicle, a similar story. A wounded guest in a private ambulance that never reached the hospital.… The bottom line is that Julian Guiderone, the son of the Shepherd Boy, is undoubtedly alive, and if there’s anyone on this earth he wants in the crosshairs, it’s you. It’s Beowulf Agate.”

“Damned interesting, Frank. He and I are about the same age, two old men from another time, both hungering for what each is being denied. He wants obscene power, which I won’t allow him, and I want my personal peace, which he won’t permit me.” Scofield paused and looked at Cameron Pryce. “I suppose in the long or short run, we’ll depend on our commanders, and I have total confidence in mine.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Cam. “All I will say is that I’ll do the best I can.”

“Oh, you’ll do better than that, son.”

It was ten minutes to four in the morning when Julian Guiderone placed his last phone call to Langley, Virginia, from Amsterdam. “We’re on total
S
?” he asked.

“Total,” replied the voice in the CIA. “My scrambler is my own, courtesy of the Directorate.”

“Good. I’ll be leaving here in a few minutes, next contact Cairo.”

“Not Bahrain?”

“Not for at least three weeks. I’ve got work to do with our Arabs—not theirs,
ours.
”

“Good fortune,” came the words from Langley, Virginia. “We all believe in you.”

“You should. And you must also believe in Amsterdam. He’s on course.”

“Then we shall,” replied the mole.

Four days and three nights passed when Cameron Pryce confronted Scofield at the breakfast buffet. “This is getting us nowhere!” Cam exclaimed curtly under his breath while sipping black coffee.

“You seem to be getting somewhere,” said Bray, lighting a dark brown cigarillo. “With our lady commando, I mean.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not even trying.”

“You’re seeing a lot of her—”

“Wrong,” interrupted Pryce, “she’s seeing
me
. I go out to the gate, she shows up. I walk on the beach, suddenly she’s there. I mosey over to the chopper pad to see who might be on the next flight, she’s thirty feet behind me.”

“Maybe she’s got a thing for you, youngster. Toni says you’re prime.”

“Like in meat? That doesn’t sound like Antonia.”

“No, like in time. When you can supposedly find the best
programs. Perhaps the female colonel is curious about you. In other than a professional way.”

“Sorry,” said Cam, “no signals, no body language, just barely discernible hostility layered with pleasant inanities. It’s as though she’s watching me, not sure who or what I am. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does,” said Scofield, grinning as he exhaled the aromatic smoke. “It matches her latest, very professional request relayed by Colonel Bracket to Shields. She wants your complete, unabridged dossier. Naturally, you’re not to be informed.”

“I don’t get it.”

“She either wants to marry you, youngster, or she thinks you’re the high-placed leak.”

“I’m counting on the second. That lady’s military testosterone would blindside a general.”

Suddenly, breaking into the hum of the few other diners, there was an ear-shattering scream from across the large, screened-in porch. Frank Shields’s liaison, Eugene Denny, had lunged out of his chair, gripping his throat, his body twisting as he crashed to the floor, his legs kicking in spasms. Only seconds later, his breakfast companion, Colonel Everett Bracket, did much the same, his right hand curved around his neck, his left grabbing the table as he shook violently, finally collapsing across the surface, sending plates shattering on the tiles below.