A Clear and Present Danger Read online

  … The young American tourist who supposedly lost his means of support to pickpockets in London was someone named Edward Folger, an obvious alias with an obvious dummy address; presumably, Winship would be checking on that matter from the States while Slayton was off risking life and limb in Europe; Winship was convinced that the Wolf was ultimately gunning for President Reagan, though the Wolf himself had said something cryptic about it… what was it he had said?

  The taxi stopped abruptly at a row house near the Edgar-Quinet subway train station in Montparnasse. Slayton paid his driver and lumbered out of the back of the cab, leaving the stolen valise inside.

  As he climbed the stairs of the stoop, the driver called to him: “Your bag, sir! Don’t forget it!” Slayton obligingly reclaimed the suitcase full of girdles and corsets and whalebone brassieres. Would he ever be rid of them?

  Yes, he suddenly realized. Yvonne would take them.

  When he reached the door, Slayton tapped out the signal he had used twice before. Yvonne’s brothel owed its existence to the courtesy of Interpol protection. Hers was a convenient center for message exchanges.

  Three taps, wait; three more, wait; then two. A small peephole flap opened and Slayton could see the heavy blue-black mascara of Yvonne’s right eye. The good one.

  “Hiya, toots!” Slayton greeted her.

  She took him in her huge, fleshy arms, more the hug of a great-aunt who kisses a lot than that of one of Paris’ busiest madames.

  “Come on in, Benji boy, come right on in. We’ll get you a drink and a real good time while you’re here in the city of light, okay?”

  Yvonne’s French-accented English was more Brooklyn than French. C’est lsa vie, Slayton thought as he followed in her wake, which was the most appropriate way to describe walking behind Yvonne’s girth. He was offered a seat on a huge, overstuffed pink couch, decorated on one end by a tall Nubian woman in an ivory negligee. Slayton didn’t even perspire when he saw her, and wondered if he would ever be a well man again.

  “Now, Benji boy,” Yvonne said, after settling her great hams on a settee opposite the couch, “I got some news to tell you, you know?”

  He stared at her glass eye, the one that was slightly off-kilter every time he saw her. It slipped downward, as if it were made of steel shavings attracted by a magnetized bosom.

  “I am to tell you—”

  She stopped as one of the girls walked in, a trayful of drinks in hand. She bent over, revealing a pair of very white breasts tipped in pink. He took a glass of champagne and looked dully at the girl’s wares.

  When she left, finally—blessedly, as Slayton was beginning to worry himself sick about lack of appetite—Yvonne continued:

  “The bad boys of Tokyo have been terminated with extreme prejudice and the coast is clear for Sir Jellybean. You’re to hustle on home for a week off with pay, assuming all is connected on your end.”

  Slayton remembered then what the Wolf had said about President Reagan’s travel plans: “Your people believe it is safe for the President of Hollywood to travel to Japan. And that is exactly what we wish them to think… But the question is, will he be able to return?”

  He jumped up from his chair, spilling champagne over his clothes. The Nubian slid down the couch toward him, murmuring, grabbed him inside his thighs, and tried coaxing him back to the seat.

  “No,” he said quietly, firmly. He looked at the hurt expression on the prostitute’s face. “Sorry, but no. No thanks.”

  His mind was clicking, suddenly come alive in spite of his fatigue and his sorrow.

  He rushed from the room, toward the door and the street. Yvonne called after him:

  “You forgot your suitcase, Benji boy! Your suitcase!”

  He turned around and blew her a kiss.

  “It’s a present for you, with all our love! I’ll catch you in a Maidenform ad. Bye-bye!”

  And he was out the door.

  At the nearest telephone booth, he attempted the impossible: the use of a public telephone anywhere in France.

  He hailed a cab, hopped to the nearest police station, and instructed the operator to dial the special emergency number of Winship’s office.

  After several minutes of crackling sounds and after becoming accustomed to the echo in the trans-Atlantic telephone cable wires, Slayton and Winship spoke.

  “Just answer these questions, Ham, as briefly as you can. There may not be a whole lot of time.”

  “Right. Go ahead.”

  “The Edward Folger kid. What’s the word?”

  “Nothing much. He was supposed to have been from Yonkers, up in Westchester County, New York… my home grounds—”

  “Briefly, Ham.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s about it. He had a phony family setup, of course. Good enough to fool the embassy in London, but that’s it. The only thing we turned up with his name on it was a library card. Hard to believe he’s connected to the others.”

  Slayton’s muscles tightened. This horror wasn’t over. Not by a long shot, so to speak.

  “The President,” Slayton said. “He’s leaving exactly when?”

  “We’re making the announcement tonight. That is, the White House is making the announcement.”

  “When, Ham?”

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  Slayton cursed.

  “Listen, Ham. The Wolf is terminated.”

  “Sounds like a mission accomplished,” Winship said, jovially. “When will I see you?”

  “Later than you think. 1 hope not too late.”

  Then Slayton clicked off.

  Eighteen

  BUCHANAN, New York, 19 March 1981

  Buchanan is anything but typical of the glut of small factory towns at the upper reaches of Westchester County along the Hudson. It is neither gray nor grim, nor inhospitable to plant and animal life because of the bilge of industrial pollution in the air and water of other towns less fortunate than Buchanan.

  After all, Buchanan had a nuclear power plant. A clean, safe source of abundant energy.

  It allowed Buchanan to exist as a picture-postcard town in a part of the nation Washington Irving memorialized in his Tales of Sleepy Hollow. The village itself was perched between a pair of heavily forested mountains and the wide Hudson River, a soul-invigorating respite from Manhattan, with a real general store, a string of little taverns that sold mostly locally brewed ale, church spires, and a town hall straight out of Central Casting.

  The nearby Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant saved little Buchanan from financial obliteration back in the late 1960s, when it opened and provided a wealth of much-needed jobs in town. The Schenley distillery had just closed, throwing most of the Buchanan wage-earning class out of jobs.

  As an appreciation for Indian Point, the Buchanan police chief and all his men wore the atom-splitting insignia of the village’s biggest employer as its proudly chosen shoulder patch.

  A few malcontents in Buchanan suggested that the village formulate some sort of evacuation plan, just in case their town some day became another Three Mile Island. Majority ruled, and there was no evacuation plan.

  Up above the village, an old scratched Chevrolet idled in a cul-de-sac off a narrow, winding road. The heater tried to keep the driver’s feet warm, if not his hands and fingers, as the young man behind the wheel hunched over his notebooks and papers.

  A bitter wind off the Hudson made his fingers stiff and cold. It was hard to turn the pages, the more than three hundred photocopied pages of instructions, floor plans, and diagrams.

  Around the bend in the road, at the edge of a thick forest, was the entrance to the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, the pride of Buchanan. The young man sat in his car less than a mile away. He finished a sandwich as he went over his plan for the hundredth time.

  He had been tipped off about emergency evacuation drills for the plant guards and workers, and he knew that today it would be held at noon, precisely eight minutes away. He’d better step on it.

  During
the drill, one of which he had observed earlier via binoculars, all guards and employees would be withdrawn from their posts. All he had to do was drive up to the gate minutes before the drill bell sounded and say he had an appointment with the superintendent of operations, whose name he had learned on the ruse of having a letter to mail and needing to know the correct spelling of his name and his correct title. He planned to use a press pass he had had printed down in the city. Simple, he thought. So simple it was bound to work.

  Once inside the grounds, he would head straight for the nuclear reactor building and go to work.

  Ready to roll. He put the Chevrolet into gear and headed down the road.

  In minutes, he turned onto the four-hundred-yard long blacktop access road toward the main gate of Indian Point, only slightly worried about having his bag searched. He would simply say it was a camera. He was a reporter, after all. He looked the part, a combination of the characters Animal and Rossi he had studied on the “Lou Grant” television show.

  A guard signaled him to stop, stepping from the guardhouse and walking toward the Chevrolet. The young man rolled down his car window. “I’m a reporter,” he said. “There are some brass hats I got to see today, for my paper.” He handed over his press credentials, which the guard glanced at and returned.

  “Who you want to see today, son?” the guard asked.

  “Tom Emerson, superintendent of operations.”

  “You say you’re with what paper?”

  “The Times. The New York Times.”

  “Yeah, okay. You wait here a minute.”

  The young man was nervous. Only two and one-half minutes until noon. He wanted to be well inside the grounds by then. Was something going wrong?

  The guard sauntered back to the car after making a telephone call to someone.

  “I seen one piece of ID,” he said. “You got any more on you?”

  The young man produced a billfold full of credit cards, all in the name of Edward Folger. Every one a forgery.

  He remembered the precaution he’d taken of slipping a White House press pass into his bag of burglary tools in the event someone called him on it. He would simply fish out the White House press pass and impress the hell out of the yokels. It had worked before. How could anyone tell a press pass was counterfeit? How many people had ever seen a White House press pass?

  “Okay, I guess you’re a regulation gentleman of the press, all right,” the guard said. “They let you into the White House and everything, huh?”

  The young man made a joke, even though he was anxious about the time.

  “Guess security guards aren’t invited to the White House, right, Mac? Ever since that guy came across the adhesive tape at the Watergate complex, Presidents have been nervous around you fellows.”

  The guard laughed.

  “Okay to go now?” the young man asked.

  “Oh, they’re coming for you,” the guard said. “You wait right here and they’ll come for you in the limo. Mr. Emerson is waiting.”

  … Wait a minute. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Behind him, in the distance somewhere beyond the chilly mist, he heard the noon church bells from the village. But there was no drill siren blown at the plant.

  He saw a long black car pull up. A man in a suit emerged and gestured to him.

  “This way. Mr. Emerson is waiting,” the driver said.

  The young man had no choice. He walked to the limo in a trance. What would happen to him? He was sickened by the thought of failing… him… twice.

  In another minute—now it was six minutes past the hour—the young man was seated in a large executive office. Its occupant was not in. A secretary had seated him and given him coffee. He thought back to the secretary in London.… He was going through a nauseating sense of déjà vu.

  Thomas Emerson walked into the room. It was the alias of the day for Benjamin Slayton.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Folger,” he said. Folger hadn’t given him his name. “I’ve been waiting to see you.”

  The lines of exhaustion that had set around Slayton’s eyes for the past thirty hours he’d waited for Folger’s appearance disappeared. This would close the case and Slayton knew nothing more invigorating.

  Folger coughed.

  Slayton picked up a pencil from the desk top and held it while he sat on the edge of his desk, facing the young man who looked so much like a newspaper reporter.

  “I killed your father, the Wolf,” Slayton said.

  Folger blinked. The color went out of his face.

  “And your mother is dead, too. She died saving my life and saving the world from you and your father’s terrorists.”

  Folger made some gurgling noises in his throat.

  The pencil that Slayton held was especially sharp. Slayton’s eyes kept dancing from Folger’s face to his hands.

  Suddenly, Folger leaped from his chair. He was fast, maybe faster than Slayton. A stiletto knife dropped into his hand from its clip up inside his shirt sleeve. The blade was making its way for Slayton’s throat.

  Slayton darted out of the path of the stiletto. His cheek and right ear were caught by the tip of the knife. Slayton wouldn’t allow another wound. The young man was good. Too good. He’d been trained by his father, the best of his day.

  Slayton moved swiftly with the pencil. It stabbed upward, below the young man’s jaw, up through the soft palate and deep inside his brain.

  Edward Folger crumpled to the floor.

  Nineteen

  MOUNT VERNON, Virginia, 22 March 1981

  Ben Slayton wanted to be alone for a few days before making his verbal report to Winship. Guessing that he’d been through hell and back, Winship had allowed the luxury.

  Today, he was coming, though, and Ben fussed about his place. Winship was a first-time visitor to the farm, and his boss on top of that.

  It was late afternoon. The light would be good in the library and so that was where Slayton prepared for the meeting. He set out a coffee and tea service, biscuits and brandy, and set a fire ablaze.

  “Turning into an old cunt,” he muttered. “Look at me. Some guy’s coming to my place and I’m setting out the doilies.”

  He heard the sound of gravel crunching on the driveway and he poked his head around the corner to catch sight of Winship’s arrival. He came alone, in a silver Lincoln. Perfect.

  Slayton received him stiffly and thought how odd it was that the two men were shy with one another after what they had hatched and carried out. For an hour, they sat in front of the fire making small talk. The enormous implications of the mission could not be rushed conversationally.

  As Slayton let the brandy slip down his throat, then another and another, he made believe the older gentleman sitting next to him before the fire was his own father. He missed him.

  “Are you feeling better?” Winship asked for the fourteenth time, at least. Winship, too, was becoming quietly lubricated.

  “Yeah. Still a little rocky, that’s all. Killing that boy!” Slayton shook his head. “And losing Sigrid.”

  “Your country owes you—”

  “I don’t want my country knowing,” Slayton butted in. “This is dirty business. All right, I’m willing to do it. But I’m not willing to crow about it, okay? Besides, a lot of it was luck. Just plain bloody luck.”

  Winship nodded.

  “There was no other way?” he asked after a few moments’ silence.

  “I don’t see how. No particular loss, the Wolf and Folger. They were nonpersons. They don’t exist.

  “But Sigrid, poor Sigrid. I’m not sure that she thought of herself as any more real than her husband or her son.

  “But she was real, Ham. If she had lived instead of me, she would have found herself. And I think she may have found her son here in the States, too. Maybe she could have stopped him, short of killing him.”

  Slayton wiped his eyes and poured himself another brandy. Winship held out his own snifter and was refilled.

  “When did you begi
n putting it all together?” Winship asked.

  “That’s hard to pinpoint. I put myself in the stream of things, trusting for luck. And that’s exactly what happened. The small bits began adding up to the real plot. I played my hand and Sigrid played hers… maybe that’s when it began, meeting Sigrid.

  “Her behavior was so ambivalent, so damn curious. She’s cold as ice, then she’s a goddam tigress in the sack, and then the next morning she’s got me in a situation where the Wolf’s men could have killed me. She was loyal to the Wolf, but afraid of him; loyal, but unsatisfied with him. She was confused, maybe afraid of going mad herself, as mad as the Wolf.

  “There was the letter I saw on the Wolf’s desk, too. It was signed ‘Love, Edw.’ The love of a son for his father. That’s how such a letter would be signed. Sigrid was quite clearly the Wolf’s woman. It wasn’t such a difficult conclusion to make that she was also Edward’s mother. And that was part of her trouble, too.

  “She must have known that the Wolf, Edward’s father, was prepared to sacrifice their son in the name of this ‘new order’ business. How can a mother reconcile revolutionary sacrifice and the certain death of the product of her own womb?

  “So I was on hand and she saw me as a way to get herself the hell out of Andorra, don’t you see? Maternal instinct at work. She was trying to get to her son, Edward. Bloody luck. I learned what I had to learn at her tragic expense.

  “That letter on the Wolfs desk also mentioned the ‘amazing’ things to be learned at a library. When I spoke to you by telephone from Paris, you mentioned record of a Westchester County, New York, library card in the name of Edward Folger.”

  “What arrogance,” Winship humphed. “He used the same name for a public record as he did when he ran the London bomb attempt.”