The Rose Conspiracy (2 page)

It was five minutes before midnight, and the car was cruising along the marble-and-monument-studded streets of the Capitol Hill district of Washington DC. The driver was tugging at a collar edge. Drops of perspiration trickled down back and torso, even with the air conditioning on. Maybe it was the freakish heat wave that had hit the city, causing brownouts and power failures across the city. Maybe it was something else…the nasty assignment that had to be taken care of. When the trigger was pulled, and it was all over, the long-missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's personal diary would then be in the grip of someone else's hand.

Yet the driver knew what was actually at stake that night. And it really wasn't about the Booth diary. Or even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at the hand of a Confederate radical. The note that was about to be seized contained a message with ramifications far beyond any of that.

Sweltering temperatures had suffocated Washington with a relentless haze of humidity that week. Even though it was only June, temperatures were in the low hundreds during the day and in the nineties at night.

The only thing cool to the touch was the white marble of the statues and monuments. The driver steered past the Lincoln Monument and then slowed the car slightly. As usual, interior lights illuminated the massive likeness of Abraham Lincoln in his great marble chair. Once past the monument, the car picked up speed, entered Constitution Avenue,
and started heading toward the National Mall. The destination was the Castle, the nineteenth-century red-brick building full of turrets and spires where the administrative headquarters of the Smithsonian Institution were housed.

The driver parked the car a block away and walked quickly to the side entrance of the Castle—then, reaching the door, quickly tapped a code into the security panel. The lock clicked open.

Upstairs, the lights were still on in the office of Horace Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was working late.

But the object of his work that night was not business as usual.

Only moments before, Langley had opened his safe and pulled out a metal case containing a folder enclosed within a plastic zip bag. Now he was studying the contents—eighteen pages from the diary of John Wilkes Booth. They had been missing for nearly one hundred and fifty years. Their disappearance had occurred suspiciously, about the same time as the federal investigation into the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was taking place. Booth's diary had been taken when the assassin was captured and killed. But at the time at least one witness swore that eighteen pages had been removed from it.

That was the point at which those pages seemed to have vanished forever.

Then, a century and a half later, the granddaughter and sole heir of a farmer in central Virginia went rummaging through her grandfather's attic after his death and happened upon some boxes of old letters and papers. But one sheaf of papers looked different. While much of the writing on them was faded and undecipherable to the layman's eye, a reference to Abraham Lincoln was visible. In his will, the farmer had given everything to his granddaughter—except the papers. Those, he said, must go to the Smithsonian Institution.

After some wrangling with lawyers, the eighteen pages were transferred to the Smithsonian. Horace Langley had succeeded in keeping the discovery from being leaked to the press, even though he was thoroughly convinced that the pages belonged to the Booth diary.

That June evening, as Langley studied the pages in his office, he knew that some eight hours hence, a council of epigraphers and historians were
scheduled to convene and, for the first time, to study the Booth diary entries in that same office.

But he had to get the first look.

He had a pair of white gloves on as he studied the brittle pages, yellowed from age. A pad of paper lay on the desk in front of him, next to his pen. There was a glass of water off to the side.

Langley then began to slowly, painstakingly, write down something on the notepad.

Just a few lines of writing.

He paused to study carefully what he had written.

Then he heard something. He looked up, half-expecting a late-night visitor. “I wasn't sure I would see you,” was all Horace Langley had a chance to say.

The individual who had entered through the side door below was now standing in front of Langley holding a handgun with a silencer—and proceeded to fire two clean shots directly into the left upper quadrant of Langley's chest.

The Secretary started to grope upward with his arm, trying to touch the injured area of his chest, but failing. He fell backward into his chair, slumped, and then fell to the floor, where he collapsed on his back, surrounded by an expanding pool of blood.

The shooter stepped over to the desk, picked up the Booth diary pages, placed them back in the plastic zip bag, and put that into a larger bag. The killer snatched the pad of paper, ripped off the top page that had Langley's writing on it and then another page for good measure, and put them also into the bag. Then the killer placed the pad of paper back on the desk with a clean page exposed as Langley lay dying on the floor, making a final gurgling, gasping sound. Before leaving the room, the shooter paused only for a moment at Langley's desk, gazing down at the empty drinking glass that was resting there.

Then, exiting quickly through the same side door below where entrance had been made a few minutes before, Langley's killer made a perfect getaway.

The security guards didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until twenty-five minutes later, when one of them was making the rounds and stopped to check in on the Secretary. He caught sight of Horace Langley's
feet protruding past the edge of the desk. And the feet in Langley's dress shoes were absolutely still.

As still as the marble and bronze statues of the famous men that were frozen in time, scattered as monuments across Washington, and that were illuminated by the halogen street lights that buzzed overhead in the suffocating heat of the night.

CHAPTER 2

Two Weeks Later

Y
ou've been called ‘one of Washington's most brilliant yet enigmatic lawyers.' That was from the
Washington Post
article. So, how do you react to that kind of assessment?”

“Enigmatically.”

“Clever. Okay, let me try it this way…in an article in
Beltway Magazine
you were called a ‘triple threat.' You are a trial lawyer and a law professor, as well as a psychologist. So which one really defines who you are?”

“I try not to define myself. I leave that job to reporters like you. And for the record, I decided not to finish my dissertation in psychology. So I never got my PhD in that discipline.”

“Why did you leave the law and pursue a graduate degree in psychology, just to return to teaching and practicing law after all?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Which would be…”

“Personal.”

The female reporter smiled politely.

J.D. Blackstone smiled back. He was used to press interviews. His meteoric rise as a topflight litigator in Washington DC garnered him some of the most celebrated politicians as clients, and some of the most notorious cases. And Blackstone's position as a professor of criminal and constitutional law at the Capital City College School of Law gave him added gravitas.

The reporter was glancing around Blackstone's cramped law-school office. Then she located the picture of Blackstone's wife, Marilyn, with her arm around their fourteen-year-old daughter, Beth. The girl, grinning exuberantly, was dressed in a formal gown. The photo had been taken a few hours before Blackstone had plopped down on his bed for a nap after some sleepless nights of work on a complicated case. And a few hours before his wife and daughter had climbed into the family car and driven off to Beth's piano recital.

“Well, I know, for instance,” the reporter went on, “that you've had to deal with some profound tragedy in your life. That must have impacted you.”

Blackstone stopped her there with an overobvious sigh.

They always go for that one,
he thought to himself.
The soft underbelly.

The attorney didn't respond. He took an exaggerated glance at his wristwatch.

The reporter took the hint and changed her focus.

She gazed at Blackstone for a moment and studied him before diving into the next line of questions. She found Blackstone attractive. Most women did. He was in his mid-forties but looked younger. His hair, longish, disheveled, curled around his collar. He had a face with strong, angular features. His body was athletic and in great shape.

“Let me just touch for a minute on some of your off-hours avocations,” the reporter continued. “You certainly are a man in perpetual motion—and so many different interests.” She began flipping through her notes. “Kayaking through the gorges of South America…driving the Baja road rally in the deserts of Mexico. And I find this one really fascinating—you're an equestrian. How did you feel finishing in the top ten competitors in the eight-hundred-mile Santa Fe Trail endurance horse race last year?”

“Sore.”

She was about to do a follow-up question, but Blackstone cut her off.

“I'm sorry, but I have a class I need to teach.”

“May I watch? I promise to sit in the back of the room. I'll be very quiet.”

“I'm afraid not. You see,” Blackstone shot back, “I sort of enjoy
humiliating my students. And like any good expert in torture, I work best when there are no witnesses.”

She gave a little laugh and nodded. Then she rose, turned off her recorder, and threw it and her pad into her purse. Blackstone shook her hand and then blew past her at a fast clip, grabbing a briefcase by the doorway on the run, and headed down the corridor to the lecture hall.

Most of the seventy-eight students were already in their seats when he hurried in. He strode to the lectern, dropped his briefcase, pulled a yellow notepad out, and slapped it down on the podium. Then J.D. Blackstone began.

“Alright, you minions of Lady Justice, first case—
Hamdi v. Rumsfield.
Here's the question: Did the Supreme Court really grant habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants or not?”

But that is when Blackstone noticed a redheaded male law student standing up and raising his hand.

The professor of modern criminal law and policy spotted him, cleared his throat, and nodded for him to speak.

“Professor Blackstone,” the student began. “Today is the last class of the year.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Delbert,” Blackstone shot back. “You've mastered the mysteries of the Gregorian calendar, I see.”

“Well, Professor,” the student continued. “You had promised us that on the last class period you would submit yourself to questions from the class.
Personal
questions.”

A few students were tittering.

Blackstone's face contorted with an overblown expression of pain.

“Fine. Okay,” he said with resignation. “But I control the time. You have five minutes. Mr. Delbert, you have showed some admirable boldness here today. Make note of that, students. When in doubt in the practice of law, when lacking in favorable law or strong facts to successfully plead your case, just rely on
audacity
—it works every time.”

Several of the students were laughing.

“So Mr. Delbert, you have the first shot.”

“Okay,” he began with a smirk. “Well, in that case we were to have read for today,
Hamdi v. Rumsfield,
in the opinion authored by Justice Scalia, he quotes the great eighteenth-century British jurist, Sir
William Blackstone. I have heard that you are related to him. Is that really true?”

“Yes,” Blackstone said. “Much to the mortification of the rest of his descendants I'm sure.”

More laughter.

A female law student in the first row raised her hand, fighting back a grin.

“What do the ‘J' and the ‘D' stand for in your name?” she asked and then quickly sat down.

“The ‘J' was my father's idea. It stands for Justinian, the emperor of Rome in the 500s. His claim to fame, among others, was the
Corpus Iurus Civilis.
You know it as the Justinian Code. The first codification of the laws of Rome into one unified system. That's the kind of name you're stuck with when your father is the Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and a former President of the American Bar Association.”