The Machiavelli Covenant (9 page)

"Yes, but I didn't kill her." Suddenly Marten found an opening. If Fadden knew Lorraine Stephenson had been killed, he might also know something of what the police had found, why they were so convinced it had been murder, and why they were still holding the information back. "Fadden, the police talked to me yesterday. Her murder has still not been made public. Why?"

"Notification of next of kin."

"What else?"

"What makes you think there's anything else?"

"She was a name in this town. She was the longtime doctor to a number of people in Congress. Moreover, she was Caroline Parsons's personal physician. Caroline's memorial service is this afternoon. Maybe someone is afraid someone else might see a coincidence and start looking a little further."

"Who might that be?"

"No idea."

"Look, Marten, as far as I know you're the only one who thinks Caroline Parsons was deliberately killed. Nobody else has even suggested it."

"Then why has the murder of a prominent physician been kept so hush-hush?"

"Marten"—they walked by several people, and Fadden waited until they were past—"Lorraine Stephenson was decapitated. It took them that long to find out whose body they had. Her head was nowhere around. Nobody's found it yet. The police want some time to poke around on the quiet."

Decapitated? Marten was stunned. So that was the reason there'd been no publicity. It also meant someone had been there only moments after he'd fled, seen what had happened and decided to change the makeup of the
entire thing. And they had, quickly and efficiently. It made him think what he had before, that the suicide of a woman of Dr. Stephenson's prominence would be far more carefully scrutinized than if she had been simply murdered. The decapitation naturally removed any suspicion of suicide, but to him, the only person who knew the truth of what had happened, it raised the specter of conspiracy. That someone wanted to cover up one crime with another brought the whole Mike Parsons committee thing back in a rush.

"Fadden," he said, "let's get back to Mike Parsons. His subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism. What was it focused on? Why no formal witnesses?"

"Because it was a classified investigation."

"Classified?"

"Yes."

"About what?"

"A top-secret apartheid-era South African biological and chemical weapons program long thought to have been dismantled. The CIA had given the committee a checklist of covert weapons programs that foreign governments had previously had in development so in the future, if push came to shove, they wouldn't commit the WMD mistakes we did before the war on Iraq. The South African program was one of them. The committee wanted to be certain it was as dead as the government claimed."

"Was it?"

"From what my sources tell me, yes. They had the top chemical and biological scientist who headed it on the hot seat for three days and finally concluded that the program had been abandoned as officially declared years ago."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that all the weapons, pathogen strains, documents, and anything else pertinent had been destroyed. That there was no longer anything there."

"What was the man's name, the scientist who headed it?"

"Merriman Foxx. Why, did Caroline Parsons mention him?"

"No."

Marten looked away and they walked on in silence, the domed Capitol looming in front of them, the pedestrian and motorized traffic around them picking up, the daily activity of the seat of the federal government growing exponentially as the lunch hour ended. A moment later Marten thought of two separate things in rapid order.

The first was what Stephenson had said in the dark, icy seconds on Dumbarton Street before she shot herself, apparently taking him for one of the conspirators.
You want to send me to the doctor. But you never will. None of you ever will. Never. Ever
.

The second was what Caroline had uttered in her sleep—
I don't like the white-haired man,
she'd said, fearfully ranting about a white-haired man who had come to the clinic where she had been taken after her breakdown following the funerals of her husband and son and the subsequent injection by Dr. Stephenson.

"This scientist, Merriman Foxx," Marten said abruptly, "is he also a medical doctor, a physician?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Marten took a deep breath and then asked, "Does he have white hair?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Does he have white hair?" Marten was emphatic.

Fadden raised his eyebrows. "Yeah. A lot of it. He's sixty years old and has a mop like Albert Einstein's."

"My God," Marten breathed. Immediately the thought came. "Is he still here? Still in Washington?" he asked with urgency.

"For chrissakes, I don't know."

"Can you find when he first came to Washington? How long he was here?"

"Why?"

Marten stopped and took Fadden by the arm. "Can you find out where he is now and the day and date he came to Washington?"

"Who the hell is he in this?"

"I'm not sure, but I want to talk to him. Can you get that information for me?"

"I do, and you go to see him, you're taking me with you."

Marten's eyes glistened. Finally—maybe—he was onto something. "You find him, I'll take you with me. I promise."

•
ROME, 7 P.M.

The presidential motorcade turned onto via Quirinale in twilight. President Harris could see the huge lighted edifice of the Palazzo del Quirinale, the official residence of the president of Italy, where he would spend the evening in the company of President Mario Tonti.

Regardless of his failures and frustrations with the leaders of France and Germany, Harris was staying the
course: the traveling salesman making the rounds of the major capitals of Europe, drumming up goodwill and calling for a new era of transatlantic unity, meeting those countries' leaders on their home soil, where the trees and gardens and neighborhoods were as dear to them as the same things were to him in America.

With him in the presidential limousine were Secretary of State David Chaplin and Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon, both of whom had been waiting when Air Force One landed at the Champino Military Airport outside Rome. These two men were a show of force and assurance: one to demonstrate that the United States was openly courting a better relationship with the entire European community; the other to make clear that the president was not there hat in hand, that he had his own definitive point of view, especially as it applied to terrorism, the Middle East, and countries covertly developing weapons of mass destruction, as well as other pressing issues—trade, protection of intellectual material, world health, and global warming. In all those things, Harris was realistic but also politically and economically conservative, at least as conservative as the man he had succeeded in office, the late President Charles Cabot.

Not forgotten in all this necessary political "forward motion" was the incident aboard Air Force One on the flight from Berlin. He could still feel the numbing chill of Dr. James Marshall's proposal to assassinate the president of France and the chancellor of Germany.
To be replaced with leaders we can trust, now and in the future
. Followed by Jake Lowe's bold statement,
There are such people, Mr. President
. And then Marshall's
It can be done, sir, and rather quickly. You'd be surprised
.

These were men he'd trusted for years. Both had been instrumental in his election. Yet in the context of what
had happened it almost seemed as if they were people he'd never met before, strangers with a dark agenda all their own, urging him to take part in it. That he had fiercely refused was one thing, but that it had been proposed at all troubled him deeply. And the way it had been left—with both men looking at him almost in contempt, and Marshall's last words still echoing in his ears,
I think we understand your position, Mr. President
—made him think that, despite his outright refusal, in their minds their initiative was far from dead. It frightened him. There was no other way to put it. He'd thought he should bring it up with David Chaplin and Terrence Langdon on the way here, but both secretaries were filling him in on the meetings they had come from, and to bring up something so ominous and far-reaching then didn't seem appropriate, so he decided to hold off until later.

"We're here, Mr. President." The voice of Hap Daniels, his broad-shouldered, curly-haired SAIC (pronounced
SACK)
—special agent in charge of the Secret Service detail traveling with him—came over the intercom from where Hap rode shotgun in the limousine's front seat. Seconds later the motorcade pulled to a stop in front of the Palazzo del Quirinale. A military band in full dress uniform struck up the United States national anthem, and through a wash of armed men in uniforms and plain clothes, Harris saw the smiling, resplendent Mario Tonti, the president of Italy, step from a red carpet and come forward through the sea of pomp and security to greet him.

•
NATIONAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D.C.,
MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR CAROLINE PARSONS, 2:35 P.M.

Nicholas Marten sat near the back of the cathedral listening to the deep velvety voice and gentle words of the distinguished African-American minister who led the service, congressional chaplain Rufus Beck, who was pastor of Caroline's church and had made the call to Dr. Stephenson when Caroline had broken down following the funerals of her husband and son. A man he had met briefly in her hospital room.

Emotionally Marten had done everything he could to divorce himself from the event and from the official stamp the service itself gave, the awful acknowledgment that Caroline was truly dead. To that end he had created his own distraction, which he hoped would somehow bear fruit. It was to continually scan the mourners packing the church in the hope that the white-haired man, Dr. Merriman Foxx, had not yet left Washington and had instead come here to take some sort of perverse pleasure in the results of his work. But if he was here, if he was indeed as Peter Fadden had described him, sixty years old and looking like Einstein, so far Marten hadn't seen him.

Those he did see—and there were more than several hundred—were political figures he recognized from the press or television, and many others whom he did not recognize but who had to have been friends or at least associates of Caroline and her family. Just the size of the
gathering gave him a very real sense of how rich and expansive their lives here had been.

On a more personal level he saw Caroline's sister, Katy, and her husband, escorted quickly to the front of the church as they arrived, once again, and in so short a time, making an unbearably tragic flight from Hawaii to Washington.

Marten had no way to know if Caroline had shared any of her fears with her sister. Or if Katy knew that Caroline had asked him to come to Washington to be with her for the last hours of her life. It would have been wholly in character for Caroline to have been mindful of what Katy was going through, caring for their Alzheimer's-debilitated mother in Hawaii and not wanting to add another level of anguish, deciding instead to keep her beliefs about some kind of conspiracy between herself and Marten. But whatever Katy knew or didn't, the question of what to do about her lingered. If he went to her, reminded her who he was, told her a little of what had happened in the years since she knew him in Los Angeles, and then confided what Caroline had told him and showed her the notarized letter she'd had prepared for him, it was all but certain Katy would accompany him to Caroline's law firm and demand that he be allowed access to the Parsons' private papers, thereby breaking the firm's reluctance to give him access to those things.

That was on the one hand. On the other was the idea that his initial investigation had been smothered by someone in the firm powerful enough to be concerned about what he might find. If that were the case, and considering the situation with Dr. Stephenson, had he and Katy showed up to file a protest, there was every chance
that before long the same fate the Parsons family had suffered would befall either Katy or himself or both. It made the whole thing dicey, and even now he wasn't sure what to do about it.

"God's love pours out among us. As it pours out for Caroline, and for her husband, Michael, and their son, Charlie," Reverend Beck's voice filtered through the church.

"In the words of the poet Laurence Binyon—

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.

"Let us pray."

As Reverend Beck's prayer resonated through the church, Marten felt someone slide into the pew beside him. He turned to see a very attractive young woman with short dark hair, dressed respectfully in a black suit. A large digital camera hung from one shoulder, and around her neck was an international press pass with her photograph, her name, and her media affiliation, Agence France-Presse. Marten recognized her as the woman who had accompanied Reverend Beck when he'd visited Caroline in the hospital. He wondered what she was doing there, why she had come to the service. And why she had seated herself next to him.