Grand Master (21 page)

Bauman turned to make sure they were still
alone, and then bent forward.

“When he told me, when he called me into his
office the day after the President died and said there had been an
autopsy and that some drug had been used, I thought the
investigation had already started. I asked him who I was supposed
to talk to, who was in charge. He said he’d let me know, that there
were some other things that had to be worked out first. He didn’t
tell me what they were, and I was so distracted, so upset, I didn’t
think to ask. It was only later, after he talked to Hart, after I
began to realize what he had lied about, after he told me I was
finished, after more than a week had gone by and everyone was still
talking as if the President had died of natural causes, it was only
after all that, that I decided to find out. I broke into his
office.” He nodded toward the package and what it held inside.
“It’s Atwood’s file.”

“You took the file; you didn’t -?”

“No, I made copies of everything; he doesn’t
know I have it. His office is just down the hallway from mine. I
was there late at night, cleaning out my things.”

Burdick tapped his finger on the cover.

“Is this the only copy?”

“No. There’s someone else I thought might
need it.”

Burdick glanced at the black and white
photograph. She was more than good looking, she was extraordinary,
with large, bold eyes and a mouth that seemed somehow both
vulnerable and defiant at the same time. He wondered why Bauman had
thought to include several copies of the photograph instead of just
one. Then, when he put down the first and picked up the second, he
realized that they weren’t the same photograph at all; that they,
and the four others as well, showed her not just in different
outfits and different poses, but with such completely different
looks that she could have passed for six different women. He put
them down and searched Bauman’s eyes. “This is the girl, the woman
you saw that night, the one who murdered the President?”

“That’s not a face I’ll ever forget.”

“But how -, how did Clarence Atwood get a
photograph, six photographs, of her? How did he even know what she
looked like, if you didn’t work with a sketch artist?”

“Don’t you get it? She was working for us.
Clarence Atwood hired her; the head of the Secret Service hired the
woman who murdered the President of the United States!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They sat in a kind of stunned silence,
neither of them wanting to believe what they both knew was true.
Bauman had been right: It was more than unbelievable, it was
impossible; impossible that anything like this could have happened,
impossible that the President of the United States had been
murdered on the order of the head of the very agency sworn to
protect the President’s life. It was more than betrayal, it was
treason.

The more Bauman thought about it, the angrier
he became. This awful secret had been locked up inside him for
days, with no one he could talk to, no one he could trust. For more
than twenty years, he had done what he had been told. Like a
soldier in a war, he had understood that his job was to react, not
think for himself; and now, suddenly, he had to decide on his own
what he was supposed to do. He knew he had to do something; he
could not just forget what he had discovered. He had helped a
murderer, an assassin, get away; he was not about to let the man
who hired her go free.

But who should he tell? This was not
something that Clarence Atwood had done alone: If he hired someone
to kill the President, it was because someone told him to. He could
take what he had to the FBI. He had friends there, people he had
worked with in the past; but what if he made a mistake, told the
wrong person what he knew? The risk was too high, the danger too
great. He was not just thinking about himself, though he knew how
easy it would be to put him out of the way; the real danger, the
one he worried about, was what might happen if these people,
whoever they were, got away with it, murdered the President and no
one ever found out what they had done. The more he thought about
it, the less certain he was about how to proceed. Each alternative
seemed less promising than the last. And then he thought of it, and
wondered why he had not thought of it before.

“Hart,” he mumbled to himself.

“Hart? What about him?” asked Burdick.

Lost in his own reverie, Bauman had not
realized he had spoken out loud. He looked up from the table,
blinked his eyes, and then remembered.

“I was going to tell him, but then you
called. I thought I could trust him. Atwood lied to him, which
meant that Hart could not have known, could not have been a part of
it.”

But the question about whom he could trust,
whom he could safely tell, was secondary to a deeper concern, one
that had troubled him from the time he first read what was in the
file he had stolen from Atwood’s office, troubled him so much that
he had scarcely slept at night. It was still there, gnawing at him,
driving him a little more crazy each time he went back through what
had happened and how he had been made a part of it, an unwilling
accomplice in a conspiracy to murder. Suddenly, all that pent up
emotion exploded, and he hit the table with the flat of his hand so
hard that the waitress, sitting on a stool next to the cash
register in front, jolted sideways with the noise. When she saw it
was nothing, the startled glance vanished and she turned back to
the newspaper that lay spread out on the counter in front of
her.

“That explains it, doesn’t it?” insisted
Bauman, his eyes aflame. “Why Atwood didn’t have me work with a
sketch artist, why he didn’t want an investigation. He arranged it,
he organized the whole thing: the murder, the cover-up -
everything!”

Burdick smiled patiently. He understood the
pressure Bauman was under, the guilt he must feel, but still he had
to wonder why, despite all that, he had not seen the flaw; why,
despite his emotions, he had not realized his mistake.

“But Atwood is the one who told you that
Constable had been murdered,” he reminded him in a quiet,
sympathetic voice free from any hint of criticism. “If he hadn’t
told you that, you wouldn’t have known there was anything to
investigate.”

Burdick thought this would cause Bauman to
hesitate, to reconsider what he had said, but instead Bauman
dismissed the objection out of hand.

“He didn’t have any choice; not after I had
seen the girl.” Bauman’s eyes were eager, alive, filled with a
certainty so complete that it was impossible to doubt that he had
thought it all through and was utterly convinced he was right. “It
didn’t go the way they thought it would: Constable didn’t die
quietly, he didn’t just pass out from that injection. He cried out
for help. Maybe he saw the needle, maybe he saw what she was going
to do; maybe when he first felt it he struggled to get away.
Whatever happened, he made enough noise that I went running for the
door. She had to open it; she could not just hide behind that
locked door. Everyone on the floor would have been alerted and she
never would have gotten away. She knew that, she had to know that.
She had to open the door; she had to go into that act of hers:
pretend she was scared, panic-stricken, that in the middle of
having sex with the President he had had a heart attack and
died!”

Burdick waited, expecting more. Bauman seemed
momentarily transfixed by the certainty of his own account;
sufficient, it seemed to him, to remove every question, every
doubt. Burdick gave him a puzzled glance.

“But that still doesn’t explain why he told
you that Constable had been murdered. You saw the girl, but you
didn’t know then that she was pretending anything. You believed her
when she told you what happened. That was the reason you…, the
reason you did what you did.”

With a brief nod, Bauman acknowledged the
truth of what Burdick said. Then he gestured toward the
package.

“It’s all in there: the autopsy, the report.
There had to be one, but Atwood made sure it was carried out in
private, as few people as possible involved. It probably never
occurred to him that anyone would notice a small puncture wound,
and if that hadn’t been discovered there wouldn’t have been any
reason to look for evidence of a drug: It would have been a simple
case of heart failure, exactly what you would expect to find, given
his age and his history.”

But even as he said it, Bauman now seemed
uncertain. Despite his seeming confidence, he was bothered by a
latent suspicion that would not go away.

“Or maybe it did occur to him,” he ventured
after a pause. “Maybe that’s what he was counting on; maybe that’s
what he wanted: a way to prove that it was not a heart attack, that
it was murder.”

“What do you mean? If he hired her, if Atwood
hired someone to kill the President, what reason could he have to
want anyone to know that the President had been murdered?”

A look of contempt shot across Bauman’s
troubled mouth.

“Why would he want it known that the
President had been murdered? - I guess that would depend on who he
wanted to blame.”

Leaning on his elbow, Burdick rubbed his
chin, as he seized on that fugitive thought and tried to follow it
through to all its awful consequences. If Bauman was right, if
Atwood had hired someone to kill the President, the obvious
question was why. It was more than doubtful - it seemed to him an
absurdity - to think that Atwood could have had any reason of his
own to want the President dead. Robert Constable had made him head
of the Secret Service: that seemed to rule out the possibility of
some deep sense of disappointment, the kind that required revenge.
But if it was not personal, then Atwood had to have been acting at
the direction of someone else, someone who had something to gain
from the death of Robert Constable, something they could not have
so long as Constable was still alive. And not just that, it had to
be someone who could convince Clarence Atwood that it was worth his
while to betray his office - betray his country, if you will - and
risk his own life, to say nothing of his reputation, on a charge of
conspiracy to murder the President of the United States. Burdick
was almost afraid to ask.

“Who put Atwood up to this? Who is he working
for? Do you know?”

Bauman began to scratch the back of his
heavily veined hand. Staring blindly into the distance, he kept
scratching at it, scratching it as if it were the only way to erase
from his memory what he wished he had not learned.

“It’s all in there,” he said finally, though
even now he refused to shift his gaze, to look back at the package
that now belonged to Burdick. “Every rotten, dirty part of it.”
Slowly, and as if with a conscious effort, his eyes came back
round. He looked straight at Burdick. “You won’t believe it, the
first time you go through it; you’ll think it’s all a pack of lies.
You’ll want to destroy it, throw it in the fire and burn it, hope
that once you’ve done that it will leave you alone and you won’t
remember it,” he remarked in a strained, hopeless voice. “It’s sort
of like being told that someone you love is dead. I lost my wife a
couple of years ago; she died in an accident. There’s a moment when
you think that if you can just go back a few minutes, even just a
few seconds, you can start all over and that what you’ve just been
told won’t happen. But you can’t, can you? - And then you know with
that awful, perfect certainty, that nothing is ever going to be the
same again.”

Looking somehow much older than he had just
an hour earlier, when Burdick had first seen him, Richard Bauman
stepped out from behind the table with the threadbare tablecloth
and the tarnished silverware and stood for what seemed a long time
in the darkened silence of the deserted café. Finally, he put his
hand on Burdick’s shoulder and told him that whatever the
consequences, no matter who it might hurt, it all had to come out,
and that he trusted Burdick to make sure that it did.

“The country deserves the truth.”

“Where are you going to be?” asked Burdick.
“How do I get in touch with you?”

“I’ll try to reach you; but right now, I’ve
got to disappear.” He glanced one last time at the package, the
tale of horrors he had found in Clarence Atwood’s private office.
“Read that; you’ll see what I mean. And be careful. No one is
safe.” And then he turned and headed out the door, into the streets
of Washington and the hoped for anonymity of the city.

Burdick watched him go, struck by the
cautious efficiency of the way he moved, the pigeon-toed gait that
former fighters and former football linemen had, the clean
discipline of the athlete, trained to strength and quickness, who
knows as little about hesitation as he does about fear. If he was
not certain of it before, he was certain of it now: Bauman was not
bragging when he said he would have taken a bullet for Robert
Constable. It was who he was.

After the door swung shut and Bauman was
somewhere safe outside, Burdick asked the waitress for another cup
of coffee and, measuring in the right amount of sugar, began to
examine the contents of the stolen file. He started with the
photographs. The longer he looked at them, the more unlikely the
young woman seemed for the part of a killer. She looked too young,
too alive, too innocent, really, to have anything to do with death.
But then perhaps that was why she was so good at what she did, why
she found it so easy to get close to the men she killed. That was
one point on which Burdick was quite clear: this woman who appeared
to be still in her twenties had done this kind of thing, not just
once or twice before, but probably dozens of times. You did not
hire an amateur to murder the President of the United States.

He put the six photographs to the side and
discovered a kind of ledger listing a series of payments made into
a Swiss account, four separate transactions spread over six months,
each one in the amount of one million two hundred fifty thousand
dollars, for a total of five million. The last payment, he noted,
had been made the day after Constable died. It listed the payments
and the dates on which they had been made, but there was nothing to
indicate where they had come from, or who, if it had not been
Atwood, had made the arrangement to hire her in the first place.
The next several documents had to do with the President’s
itinerary, every place he had been scheduled to be, starting the
month before the assassination. That seemed to mean that the time
and place of the assassination had been left up to the killer. The
woman hired to do it had first to get close to him, meet him
somehow, let him know she might be available, that she understood
the game and knew how to be discreet, that he could take her to bed
and trust that she would not talk about it.