A Clear and Present Danger Page 3

  He was thirty-five years old, an age when he was beginning to discover how much he didn’t know, despite an impressive scholastic background at the University of Michigan and his experience as a much-decorated fighter-bomber in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, a stock car racer, a collector of vintage automobiles, a collector of contemporary art and literature, a Korean martial arts black belt, and the ability to hold his own at diplomatic dinner parties in Washington. The truth was, he more than held his own. Ben Slayton was always invited, and it was difficult to tell whether the women liked him more than the men, or vice versa.

  “So if I’m so damned charming and all,” he thought, as he waited for his food and drink, “what am I doing assigned to the Vice Presidential Secret Service detail?”

  Slayton had plenty of objections to the bureaucratic pettifoggery of the Treasury Department—and Washington in general—but he always obeyed his superiors, though he would always make his objections well-known following an assignment. It could be worse, he realized. A friend of his had been posted to the Nixon detail. All the poor sap did these days was sit around the former President’s fifteenth floor office suite in New York’s Federal Plaza and read magazines.

  When he originally hired on with the Treasury Department, Slayton was assigned to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division—the “action” division, as all T-men called it. His father, a retired police chief in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had wangled the job for him, working through a Congressman pal. Despite the fact that Slayton had come home from the Vietnam War and objected to it vehemently, Slayton was hired. His superiors shifted him all over the Department almost immediately, a rigorous breaking-in period of several years, more rigorous than most T-men receive. Slayton had worked the Customs Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, and even the Bureau of Foreign Asset Control, in addition to A.T.F. and the Secret Service, where he was currently assigned.

  “Troubleshooter agent,” Slayton soon learned, wasn’t as impressive as it sounded. He was vaguely worried about his career, worried mostly that he wasn’t being noticed as he felt he should.

  And though he’d been in a favorite city for only a few days, Slayton would gladly trade London for a long weekend at home, on his beloved farm in Mount Vernon, Virginia, just outside the District of Columbia.

  He looked out the window at the fine gray sleet of the London winter day. His reverie was interrupted by the boisterous approach of the publican, his arms laden with plates of hot and cold meats, blood sausages, cheese, and pâté. Slayton shoved the newspapers he had just purchased to a corner of the table to make room for his late-morning repast, which he downed with two pints of Whitbread.

  As he ate, he perused the London press, one paper at a time. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun published the photograph of a particularly bare and buxom “Wakey-Wakey” girl on page three; the Daily Express prattled on about Ted and Joan Kennedy’s divorce plans; the Daily Mail managed to make a hair-raising kidnap yarn over in Dun Laoghaire sound as exciting as a milk carton; and the Times was mostly concerned with news of how it would soon fall under the ownership of the very same Murdoch who printed all that trash and flash in the Sun. Slayton could almost hear the cursing and shouting that would take place in Mother Punch’s a few hours hence when the Timesmens and their compatriots on the city’s other legitimate newspapers, the Observer and the Guardian, began to gather for drinks.

  Slayton examined the rest of the Times. Page one carried a feature about Ronald Reagan’s first two days in the White House and a longish piece about how the American hostages held 444 days in Iran received something less than hospitable treatment. Slayton figured as much. The Moslem yahoos in charge of Teheran these days had only recently begun walking erect. He wondered if there were anything in the way of Iraqi war bonds he might invest in.

  But where was the news that was responsible for bringing him here to England?

  Slayton riffled through the remaining pages of the slim edition of the Times. Then he found it, back by the truss ads:

  U.S. VICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH

  TO VISIT MRS. THATCHER “SOON”

  From David Crosley

  Washington, Jan 21

  President Reagan today told members of the press that his Vice President, Mr. George Bush, would “soon” visit Great Britain for talks with Prime Minister Thatcher.

  An aide to the new American President indicated that “soon” would mean “within the next few days.” He refused to be more specific, giving rise to some speculations here that American authorities charged with protecting government dignitaries were apprehensive about public announcement of international travel plans.

  Within the past few months, two members of the American Congress have died while abroad, one of them having been murdered under mysterious circumstances.

  A spokesman for the British Embassy here in Washington, however, said the Americans were planning a reception at their embassy in London on Monday evening, January 25. Presumably, Mr. Bush will arrive in London that day.

  Though the inexplicable secrecy surrounding Mr. Bush’s travels is something of a minor mystery here, there is no mystery about the new American administration’s interest in strengthening ties with Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, whose policies are much admired by the conservative Mr. Reagan… .

  Slayton stopped reading at this point, uninterested for the moment in the partisan political angle of the story. His concern was with the words “inexplicable secrecy.”

  He had been told nothing about any extraordinary security measures being taken for the Bush visit. He hadn’t expected, of course, that the visit would make news of any import. He figured that Reagan was like any other President in his desire to hustle the Vice President out of town as soon as possible; in fact, Reagan, being as old as he was, would be even more anxious to see little of Vice President Bush, a man whose only function in government was to remind the boss of his mortality.

  But Slayton’s Secret Service assignment was only temporary, what with the change in administrations and all. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t filled in.

  Something might be in the air about this Bush visit, something more than usual. Slayton was both excited and worried.

  LONDON, 8:12 a.m., 25 January 1981

  The young man tapped on the bullet-proof glass door, seeking the attention of a guard he could see dozing behind a small desk in the lobby. The guard looked up at the noise, a bit stupidly, and rubbed his eyes.

  The guard scowled and checked his wristwatch. Then he rose and walked insolently toward the door. He assessed the young man staring at him from the other side. Dumb punk kid in some kind of trouble far from home, and now he wants us to call his mommy and daddy, the guard decided.

  “We open at nine o’clock,” the guard shouted from his side.

  The young man shook his head. He couldn’t hear. The guard shouted again and this time the young man understood the muffled words.

  “Please!” the young man cried. And he did cry, too. Big, whelping tears poured from his eyes.

  The guard guessed he was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. He looked like they all do: long dirty hair, skinny as a hose, dressed up in surplus Army fatigues, and running around Europe with nothing that couldn’t fit in a rucksack.

  Couldn’t these damn kids find jobs when they graduated from those fancy schools they all went to, the guard wondered? Why’d they have to go gallivanting around Europe all the time, making life miserable for everyone who worked at embassies? How many punk kids like this had the guard seen turn up on the doorstep? God, he was tired of seeing these young snots with their messes that had to be cleaned up.

  Big strapping kid like this, and he’s bawling like a puking little kid, the guard thought. He’d seen it lots of times before.

  The guard unlatched the heavy door and opened it a crack to hear this one’s story.

  “Thanks,” the young man said quickly. “Thanks a lot… .”

  Good start, the guard thought. At least he knows
how to say thank-you. Most of the young punks only knew how to say “shit” and derivations of “fuck.” Those two words seemed to constitute half their vocabulary.

  “Listen, man, I had to sleep in the park overnight!” Still crying, the young man pointed to the statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the little park opposite the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  “I was robbed. I haven’t got a cent. And I lost my passport and credit cards… .”

  The guard snorted and thought to himself: That figures; the punk kid fits himself out like some sort of refugee and he travels with credit cards, yet.

  “… and I don’t know anybody here in London to help me. I got to get home, man… .”

  He started crying again. And he rubbed the back of his head. A trickle of blood appeared on his dirty neck.

  “Man, I had to sleep outside! I had to walk here, in the middle of the night, and… ”

  “All right, all right,” the guard said. “We’ll see to everything. Come on in. I guess it will be all right.”

  The guard opened the door wider and admitted the young man, whose fingers were now covered with blood from the nasty cut on his head.

  “I’ll just get you situated with someone,” the guard said, “someone who might be in early. But you’ll probably have to wait until the big cheeses start coming around. Maybe till 10 o’clock or so.”

  The young man nodded. “Thanks, man. Really, thanks a lot.”

  “Yeah, kid. Sure thing.”

  The young man followed the guard down a long corridor to a carpeted reception area. The massive reception desk was held down by a heavyset woman busy pulverizing a typewriter with her lightning quick, hammerlike fingers. She looked up from her work at the bedraggled young man and the guard at his side.

  “What’d you drag in here, huh, Henry?” she said.

  “Another Little Boy Blue who’s lost his horn is all,” the guard answered.

  The receptionist nodded. She had heard this story a couple of thousand times since she took the job at the Embassy. And she had taken care of matters in every case. No need to bother the brass.

  “Sit down.” She waved a fleshy finger toward a government-issue brown imitation leather chair at the side of her desk. Then she removed the paper she had been pounding at in the typewriter and replaced it with a government-issue form.

  “Okay,” she said. “Name. Home town. Father’s name.”

  “Edward Folger. Yonkers, New York. Thomas Folger.”

  “Lost your passport, I suppose?”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am.”

  She typed these bits of information onto the form.

  “Oh boy,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she stopped typing and sat back in her chair. “Tell me how it happened, Edward.”

  “Well, I was walking around the City… you know, the East End?”

  “I know, dearie. That’s where it always happens. Go on.”

  “… and anyway, I’m just minding my own business, looking around and all. It’s still daylight, and there’s lots of people around. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a group of maybe eight or ten little girls. Oh, ten or twelve years old, I guess. They’re all freckle-faced and in school uniforms. I didn’t pay any attention to them.

  “Then right when I’m passing them on the sidewalk, they jump out in front of me. Four or five of them are in front, one or two at a side, and the rest in back of me. They’ve got me completely surrounded in a tight circle. And they’re all mumbling something.

  “It’s confusing as all hell, you know?”

  The receptionist nodded.

  “And they’re raising their hands at me, but I can’t see them because they’re covered with sweaters. They’re all around me, real close in and mumbling, and I can see those hands moving under the sweaters.

  “And then, all of a sudden, just as quick as they mobbed me, they step aside. Then in a flash I realize they must be pickpockets! Damn, I never felt a thing!”

  The receptionist said, “They’re called ‘dippers’ here, honey.”

  The young man rubbed his head and winced. His fingers were now caked with dry blood.

  “How’d you get that, Edward?” the secretary asked. She was pointing at his head.

  “Well, when I realized they must be—‘dippers’—I felt in my pocket, in back, and my billfold was gone. I looked and they were running up a side street and then into an alley.”

  “And you chased them?”

  “Sure. My billfold had everything in it. Cash, passport, American Express… ”

  “Never leave home without it.”

  “Yeah. Well, so I chased them. I mean, I had to get back my cards and passport anyway, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “And somewhere in that alley, someone hit me over the head. I never did find the girls, let alone the billfold.”

  The young man wiped at his mouth.

  “You want some coffee, Edward?”

  “Oh yeah, thanks so much. I’m dying for coffee.”

  “Better than dying for something else, right, dearie?”

  The young man smiled, which brought out a maternal feeling in the receptionist. She waddled away from her desk to a coffee maker, returning with a cup for her charge.

  “Now, I’m going to have to check for passport information, arrange to issue you a temporary document, and then I’m going to have to call your parents and see if they’re good for your return ticket home,” she explained.

  “Oh, thanks a lot,” he said, a huge sigh of relief escaping from his dry lips.

  Then he asked, “Could I wash my face?”

  The receptionist took her place behind her desk. She smiled at him and said, “Yeah, I’d like you to wash your face. You’ll look a lot better. Men’s room’s down that hallway.”

  Folger followed her finger and disappeared from the reception area, leaving her to her typing and telephoning. He found the door to the men’s room, but before entering it, he looked behind him to make sure he was alone in the hallway.

  Then he walked past the door to the end of the corridor and a pair of large double doors. He cracked a door open. The ballroom beyond was empty.

  Folger stepped inside the ballroom and turned immediately to his right. The heating duct he knew would be about six paces right was where it should be, just above the baseboard and set into the wainscoting. He knelt to his task.

  He pulled a screwdriver from his rucksack and removed the metal plating of the heating duct. Then he took a small package from the rucksack, along with a roll of black electrician’s tape.

  He placed the package inside the duct and secured it with the tape. Then he worked at the package with his fingers, expertly. When he was through, he replaced the metal plating.

  Then he left the ballroom, washed up in the men’s room, and returned to the reception area.

  “Looks like everything checks out, dearie. We’ll provide your ticket back home. Your father and mother will be waiting for you at Kennedy. Better luck next time,” the receptionist said.

  “Thanks a whole lot. Really.”

  The young man smiled as the receptionist finished her typing.

  5:45 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, 25 January 1981

  Air Force II, carrying a napping George Bush, was 104 miles off the western coast of Ireland, en route to London’s Heathrow Airport.

  Six

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 25 January 1981

  Hamilton Winship was a man of habit. If it was forty-five minutes past the noon hour, which it was, then it was time to leave his office in the Treasury Building and take a stroll along the Potomac.

  He had begun this habit back in the Ford Administration, as he recalled. That was when Edith had started complaining that he ought to get more exercise, in addition to complaining about the weight he had been gaining as a result of the heavy eating and, for Winship, heavy drinking of late.

  Winship had his reasons for those indulgences. They helped dull the anxiety, the malaise he could not
shake. It was hardly the usual mid-life crisis. Hamilton Winship was sixty-three years old, and the malaise was still with him.

  Ever since the call from Dot Samuels—the hysterical call in the middle of the night—the malaise had grown to an abiding stomach ache. Even if he’d wanted a long lunch at the Sans Souci, it woud have been out of the question. His stomach couldn’t take it.

  And so he strolled along the Potomac. The day was gray and businesslike. A complete contrast from the bright blue skies of last week, he thought, and the bright hopes attendant to a new Administration. On top of it all, the hostages had finally come home.

  But today, on the first day of the first full week of the new order, it was gray and businesslike.

  Winship looked up in the air. Somewhere, the new Vice President was on his way to England. “Bush,” he spat out. He remembered Bush being the head of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the Orlando Lettelier assassination in Washington. Had Bush heeded warnings Winship knew he had received, that murder would not have happened. Had Jimmy Carter heeded warnings, the rabble in Iran wouldn’t have been able to hold fifty-two Americans for ransom.

  Why did they never listen?

  Winship shook his head and breathed in the clean, crisp air. “Don’t start it up again, old boy,” he said to himself, “or they’ll booby-hatch you for sure this time.”

  Still, he knew he was right. He knew that someone should be reading the warning signs. He thought about Bush en route to England, about the order he had issued against specific announcements regarding his travel schedule. Of course, he noticed how Bush’s schedule had been leaked anyway. So much for the authority of a Special Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.

  He thought, too, of the senseless assassination of that bourbon-belt Congressman over in Germany. What was his name? Hurgett. Barlow Hurgett. Didn’t anyone in the South have any sense when it came to naming their children?