The Machiavelli Covenant (2 page)

He tried not to think of Caroline. Tried not to acknowledge the pain that told him she was no more. Tried not to think that it had been little more than three weeks since she had lost both her husband and son. Tried to put out of his mind the idea that she might have been intentionally given something that caused her fatal infection.

"Something has been done to me."
Her voice suddenly echoed inside him as if she had just spoken. It resonated with the same fear and vulnerability and anger it had had when she had first called him in England.

"Something has been done to me."
Caroline's words came again. As if she were still trying to reach him, trying to make him believe without doubt that she had not been merely ill, but murdered.

What that "something" was, or at least what she thought it was and how it had begun, she'd told him during the first of the only two lucid moments she'd had since he arrived.

It had happened following the twin funerals of her husband, Mike Parsons, a well-respected forty-two-year-old congressman from California in his second term in office, and their son, Charlie. Certain she was strong enough to see it all through, she had invited numerous friends to their home to join her in a celebration of their lives; but the shock of what had happened, coupled with the almost unbearable strain of the funerals and the crush of well-meaning people, had overwhelmed her, and she'd broken down, retreating in tears and near-hysteria to lock herself in her bedroom, screaming for people to go away and refusing even to answer the door.

Congressional chaplain and pastor of their church, Reverend Rufus Beck, had been among the mourners and immediately sent for Caroline's personal physician, Lorraine Stephenson. Dr. Stephenson had come quickly and with the pastor's help convinced Caroline to open the bedroom door. Within minutes she had injected her, as Caroline said, "with a sedative of some kind." When she woke up she was in a room in a private clinic where Stephenson had prescribed several days' rest and where "I never felt the same again."

Marten turned down one darkened street and then another, replaying the hours he had spent with her in the hospital. With the exception of the other instance when Caroline had been awake and talked to him, she had simply slept, and he had stayed by her side keeping vigil. Throughout those long hours health care personnel monitoring her condition had come and gone and there had been brief visits by friends during which Marten simply introduced himself and then quietly left the room.

There had been two other visitors as well, the people
who had been immediately involved when Caroline had broken down at home. The first had been an early-morning call by the woman who had given her the "sedative" and prescribed her stay in the clinic, her personal physician, Dr. Lorraine Stephenson: a tall, handsome woman in her mid-fifties. Stephenson had exchanged a brief pleasantry with him, then read Caroline's chart, listened to her heart and lungs through a stethoscope, and left.

The second had been congressional chaplain Rufus Beck, who visited later in the day. A large, gentle, soft-spoken African-American, Beck had been accompanied by a young and attractive dark-haired Caucasian woman with a camera bag slung over one shoulder who'd stayed pretty much in the background. Like Stephenson, Reverend Beck had introduced himself to Marten, and they'd had a brief exchange. Afterward he'd spent a few moments in prayer as Caroline slept before telling Marten good-bye and leaving with the young woman.

A light rain began to fall and Marten stopped to turn up the collar of his jacket against it. In the distance he could see the tall spire that was the Washington Monument. For the first time he had some concrete sense of where he was. Washington was not just the inside of an intensive-care hospital room but a large metropolitan city that just happened to be the capital of the United States of America. It was a place he'd never been, even though he'd lived all of his life in California before fleeing to England and could easily have visited. For some reason just being here gave him a deep sense of belonging, to one's country, to one's native land. It was a feel
ing he'd never had before, and he wondered if there would ever be a time when he could return from the exiled life he lived in Manchester.

Marten moved on. As he did he noticed a car coming slowly down the street toward him. That the streets were all but empty made the vehicle's pace seem odd. It was late Sunday night and raining—wouldn't the driver of one of the very few vehicles on the street be anxious to get to wherever he or she was going? The car came abreast of him and he glanced at it as it passed. The driver was male and nondescript, middle-aged with dark hair. The car passed and Marten watched it continue down the street, its speed never changing. Maybe the guy was drunk or drugged out or—suddenly the reflection became personal—maybe he was somebody who had just lost someone extraordinarily dear to him and had no idea where he was or what he was doing other than just moving.

Marten's thoughts went back to Caroline. She had been the wife of a well-respected congressman who had become an increasingly popular figure in Washington and one who just happened to have been a close boyhood friend of the president, and the sudden, tragic deaths of both her husband and son had seen the political community embrace her with everything it had. It made him wonder why she would think "something had been done to her." Why she would think she had deliberately been injected with a disease that would kill her.

Methodically Marten tried to assess her mental state over the last two days of her life. In particular he thought of the second instance when she had been awake. That time she'd taken hold of his hand and looked into his eyes.

"Nicholas," she'd said weakly. "I—" Her mouth had been dry and her breathing labored. Just speaking took enormous effort. "I was to . . . have . . . been . . . on that plane with . . . my husband and my . . . son. There was a . . . last-minute change . . . of plans . . . and I . . . came back to . . . Washington a . . . day . . . earlier." She had stared at him intently. "They . . . murdered my . . . husband and . . . son . . . and now they have . . . killed . . . me."

"Who are you talking about? Who is 'they'?" he'd pressed gently, trying to get something more tangible from her.

"The . . . ca . . ." she'd said. She'd tried to say more but it had been as much as she could do. Her strength gone, she just lay back and fell asleep. And she had slept right up until those last moments of her life when she'd opened her eyes and stared into his and told him she loved him.

Thinking about it now he realized the little she had told him had come in two sections, one quite separate from the other. The first had come in snippets: that she was originally to have been on the ill-fated plane with her husband and son but a last-minute change of plans brought her back to Washington a day earlier; what had happened at her home after the funerals; and finally what she had told him when she'd called him in England, saying she was dying from a staph infection caused by a strain of untreatable bacteria that she was certain had been given to her deliberately. "The . . . ca"—what she'd started to say
when he'd asked her to explain it, and who the "they" were she was referring to, he had no idea.

The second section had come from utterances she'd made in her sleep. Most had been everyday things, calling out the names of her husband, "Mike," or her son "Charlie," or her sister "Katy," or saying things like "Charlie, please turn down the TV" or "The class is Tuesday." But she'd said other things too. These had seemingly been aimed at her husband and were filled with alarm or fear or both. "Mike, what is it?" Or "You're frightened. I can see it!" Or "Why won't you tell me what it is?" Or "It's the others, isn't it?" And then later, a sudden fearful blurting—"I don't like the white-haired man."

That part he was familiar with because it was a piece of the story she had told him when she'd called him in Manchester and asked him to come.

"The fever came less than a day after I woke up in the clinic," she'd said. "It got worse and they did tests. A white-haired man came, they said he was a specialist but I didn't like him. Everything about him frightened me. The way he stared at me. The way he touched my face and my legs with his long, hideous fingers; and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross. I asked him why he was there and what he was doing but he never answered. Later they discovered I had some kind of staph infection in the bone of my right leg. They tried to treat it with antibiotics. But they didn't work. Nothing worked."

Marten walked on. The rain came down harder but he barely noticed. His entire focus was Caroline. They had met in high school and entered the same college certain
they would marry and have children and be together for the rest of their lives. And then she had gone away for the summer and met a young lawyer named Mike Parsons. After that, his life and hers changed forever. But as deep as his hurt, as badly as he had been wounded, his love for her never diminished. In time he and Mike became friends, and he told Mike what Caroline and only a few others knew—who he really was and why he had been forced to leave his job as a homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and move to the north of England to live under an assumed identity as a landscape architect.

He wished now he had gone to the funeral of her husband and son as he'd wanted to. Because if he had he would have been there when she'd broken down and when Dr. Stephenson had come. But he hadn't, and that had been Caroline's doing. She had told him she was surrounded by friends and that her sister and husband were coming from their home in Hawaii, and that, considering the danger surrounding his own situation, it was better he stayed where he was. They would get together later, she'd told him. Later, when things had quieted down. She'd sounded alright then. Shaken maybe, but alright, and with the inner strength to carry on that she'd always had. And then all this had happened.

God, how he had loved her. How he still loved her. How he would always love her.

He walked on thinking only that. Finally, he became aware of the rain and realized he was nearly soaked through. He knew he had to find his way back to his hotel and looked around trying to get his bearings. That was when he saw it. A lighted edifice in the distance. A structure embedded in his memory from childhood,
from history, from newspapers, from television, from movies, from everything. The White House.

At that same moment the tragic loss of Caroline caught up with him. And against the rain and the dark, and with no shame whatsoever, he wept.

•
8:20 P.M.

It was still overcast and drizzling.

Nicholas Marten sat behind the wheel of the rental car parked just down and across the street from Dr. Lorraine Stephenson's Georgetown residence. The three-story house, in this leafy, upscale neighborhood, was dark. If anyone was home they were either already asleep or in a room to the rear. Marten chose to assume neither. He had been there for more than two hours. Someone asleep would have had to have gone to bed about 6:30. Possible, of course, but unlikely. Alternatively, over that same two hours, someone in a room to the rear would most likely have left it for one reason or another: to go to the toilet, another room, the kitchen, something; and because of the time of day and the dreariness of the weather that person in all probability would have turned on a light to illuminate their way. So common sense told him Dr. Stephenson had not yet come home. Which was why he was waiting. And would continue to do so until she did.

* * *

How many times that day had he taken the note from his jacket pocket and read it? At this point he could quote it from memory.

I,
Caroline Parsons, give Nicholas Marten of Manchester, England, full access to all of my personal papers, including my medical records, and to the personal papers of my late husband, United States Congressman Michael Parsons of California
.

The note—typed, signed in a shaky scrawl by Caroline, then dated, witnessed, and stamped and signed by notary public—had been delivered to Marten that morning at his hotel. The day and date of its writing and the timing of its delivery were telling. This was Monday, April 3. Caroline had called him in Manchester late in the day on Thursday, March 30, asking him to come, and he'd left for Washington the following morning. Her letter had been written and notarized that same day, Friday, March 31, but he had known nothing about it until this morning. On Friday she had still been lucid, and knowing her time was short and unsure that he would get there before she died, had called for a notary and had the piece done. Yet he had known nothing of its existence and it had not been delivered until after her death.

"That was as she wished, as I wrote you, Mr. Marten," Caroline's attorney, Richard Tyler, told him over the phone when he called to inquire about it. Tyler's cover letter had informed him that Caroline's letter was indeed valid. Just how far the authority she had given him might go if challenged in a court of law was difficult to say. Nonetheless it remained a legal document and Marten could use it as he chose. "Only you would know her intentions for writing it, Mr. Marten, but I take it that you
were a very close and dear friend and she trusted you implicitly."

"Yes," Marten had said, thanking Tyler for his help and asking if he could call on him later if legal questions arose, before hanging up. Clearly Caroline had not discussed her suspicions or fears with her attorney, which probably meant she had shared them with no one but him. That the delivery of the letter had been delayed until after her death would have given Marten an opportunity to reflect and to see how very serious she had been about her allegations that she and her husband and her son had been murdered. The letter and the timing were everything, designed with the sense that Marten might not fully believe her allegations because of her physical and mental state, but knowing too that if he did, he would do everything he could to find out about them.