A Clear and Present Danger Page 5

  “Just a minute—”

  “Find it,” Slayton repeated.

  Posten was about to draw himself up to full height, which was some three inches more than Slayton, but knew it was a ridiculous gesture. Clearly, Slayton was correct to express concern. This was no time for pulling rank, no time for taking umbrage at the sound of a man’s voice.

  “Come on,” Posten said. Slayton followed the supervising agent to the main reception desk of the Embassy.

  “Keys to the desk,” Posten told a Secret Service agent stationed near the desk. The agent produced a ring of keys.

  From the center drawer, Posten produced a log book. He thumbed open the list of entries for January 25. Slayton checked his wristwatch. He calculated he had fifteen minutes before guests would begin milling about.

  Slayton’s finger ran down the day’s entries. He recognized several of the names. His eye returned to the first name, at the top of the list: Edward Folger.

  “This was before opening hours,” Slayton said, noting the 8:15 a.m. time of arrival at the desk. “Why?”

  Posten took a look.

  “Robbery victim,” Posten said. “See?” He pointed to the secretary’s cramped handwriting.

  “Probably slept outside overnight,” Posten explained. “It happens all the time. Kids get in trouble and head here when they haven’t got any cash. We get them back home and collect from their parents.”

  Slayton felt a little sick to his stomach. It passed. He had no time to be less than his most efficient.

  “We’ve got to check this one out, sir,” Slayton said.

  “I know,” Posten said.

  Slayton sat down at the receptionist’s desk and picked up the telephone. He dialed the Embassy switchboard.

  “Get me the home telephone of whoever worked at the main receptionist’s desk this morning,” he said to the operator. “And put a wiggle on it. This is an emergency.”

  He replaced the telephone and looked up at Posten.

  “Organize a very discreet search,” he said.

  Posten was about to say something like, “Who’s in charge here, anyway?” but thought better of it. Instead, he said, “I’m going to make a very quiet search throughout the building. I want you to let me know what you find out from the receptionist.”

  “Right, skipper.”

  The telephone rang. Posten scurried off to attend to his search as Slayton answered.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice.

  “This is Agent Ben Slayton, Secret Service,” he said. “Your name, please?”

  “Naomi. Naomi Wyatt… why?”

  “You were working at the main receptionist desk in the embassy this morning at about eight o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you attended to someone named Edward Folger?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “Tell me about him.”

  She did as she was told, relating how the young man had been the victim of pickpockets, how he had shown up at the Embassy penniless and frightened.

  “How did you handle the problem?” Slayton asked.

  “In the usual way. I telephoned his parents, back in the States, and had them arrange to meet him at an airport near the place of residence, which in this case was, as I recall, Kennedy, in New York. Then I—”

  “Is there a record of all this?”

  “In the upper left-hand drawer. It’s a typed form, about eight-by-ten.”

  Slayton tested the keys in the lock of the upper left drawer until he found the proper one and opened it.

  “Okay, Naomi, I’ve found it,” he said. “Right on top.”

  “I told you,” she said testily.

  Slayton ignored the remark. He didn’t care about diplomacy.

  “Thomas Folger of Yonkers, New York. That’s the father’s name?”

  “Right. I remember it now. The telephone number in the States should be right there on the form.”

  Indeed it was.

  “Tell me, Naomi, what happened when you telephoned Yonkers?”

  “Well, it was the middle of the night to them, of course. I woke them up. I explained that their son was stranded in London, and then I asked if they would guarantee repayment if we booked him on the next flight home, and they agreed, and that was that.”

  Slayton thought for a moment, and then said, “And how long did this Edward Folger stay here in the embassy building?”

  “Oh, not long, Mr. Slayton. I was able to get him on a 10 o’clock T.W.A. flight to Kennedy from Heathrow, so he only had time to clean up a bit in the men’s room here before leaving for—”

  “He used the men’s room? Which one?”

  “The one down around the corner from my desk.”

  “There is a men’s room near the doorway leading into the ballroom on the main floor of the Embassy. Would that be the one?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Good-bye, Miss Wyatt.”

  Slayton clicked off. He took a deep breath to calm himself. Then he dialed the Stateside number of Thomas Folger, Yonkers, New York.

  There was a scratching at the other end of the line, then some clicking noises and finally a recorded voice:

  “We’re sorry we are unable to complete your call at this time. The number you have dialed has been disconnected. There is no new number… .”

  More scratchings, then the recorded voice repeated the message.

  Slayton checked his watch. No time to lose.

  He dashed from the receptionist’s desk to the corridor, but slowed to a purposeful walk when he encountered the first streams of British dignitaries sweeping into the Embassy, on their way to the ballroom and an evening with the new American Vice President, “Sir Prep.”

  The ballroom had begun to fill as he entered. Glasses full of champagne began tinkling. Cigarette smoke and small talk filled the air. A pianist was playing something from Gershwin, softly, with just enough volume to start people speaking to one another slightly louder than usual. The Embassy social staff knew all the tricks of the trade.

  Slayton masked his frantic feelings. He had to assume the worst, that Edward Folger, whoever he was, was a saboteur. He had left the premises. That much Slayton knew. But had he left a little surprise behind? That was what he feared.

  Across the ballroom, Slayton could see Posten. It looked as though the supervising agent was sweating. Posten spotted him and crossed the room.

  “What have you got?” Posten asked.

  Slayton told him what he had learned from Naomi Wyatt, the receptionist.

  “Possible saboteur,” Posten said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  Both men swept the room with their eyes.

  “I imagine you’re going to have to evacuate,” Slayton said. “Have you contacted Heathrow yet? You can’t let Sir Prep in.”

  Posten slapped his forehead.

  “Oh my god,” he said. He walked briskly from the room, leaving Slayton to wonder if he had signed on with the Keystone Kops or with the U.S. Secret Service.

  Again, Slayton scanned the room. All his training taught him to seek out the most obvious. Better than ninety percent of the time, he had learned from his own investigative experience, criminals would take the easy route.

  His gaze fixed on a heating duct built into the wainscoting of the wall. Each wall was so equipped, he further noticed. They would all have to be searched. Slayton walked to the one nearest the entrance doorway.

  He knelt down on the floor and peered into the grating of the duct. He could see nothing. He drew a match from his pocket and lit it. He could see only dark shapes inside. Nothing unusual. He pressed an ear to the grating. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if he actually heard ticking or imagined he heard it.

  Then, with a dull horror and a quickened beat of his own pulse, Slayton realized he had found a bomb.

  He looked up. Incredibly, no one in the ballroom paid any heed to his kneeling before the heat duct, his ear to the wall.

  Slayton
reached into his pocket and removed a pen knife. He opened it and began working at the screws holding the grating into place. The screws came off easily, a further indication that something was amiss. Someone had taken off the grating this day.

  A line of perspiration broke across his forehead and upper lip.

  Finally, he removed the grating.

  There it was, neatly taped into place, softly ticking.

  Slayton carefully cut the heavy tape with his knife blade and pulled the square bomb package from the wall. He stood up slowly and covered the bomb with an edge of his coat. Then he began walking out of the ballroom.

  A heavy-bosomed society matron watched him as he made his way through the corridor to a service hall leading out through the kitchen to the rear alley.

  “I say, young man,” she’ said imperiously, blocking his path. “What have you? What seems to be going on?”

  Slayton grinned, just a bit wanly, and sidestepped her.

  “The latest in remote control gate-crashing,” he told her over his shoulder.

  Outside, finally, in the damp chill London air, Slayton set down the bomb. He delicately pulled the bits of brown cloth and paper that covered the package.

  Inside, he found precisely what he expected. Dynamite cylinders connected by fuse to a blasting cap and timing device.

  Slayton squeezed the positive terminus of the double fuse, holding it taut between the fingers of his left hand. His pen knife still open, he moved the blade to the fuse and closed his eyes. Gently, he made a slicing motion against the edge of the fuse with his knife.

  He felt the fuse sever, and he breathed a deep sigh of relief, knowing that the bomb was now useless.

  But blasting caps were not to be trifled with. Slayton’s work was not yet finished.

  He clipped away all ends of the double fuse, freeing the blasting cap itself from the dynamite. He sank the cap into a three-inch deep puddle of rain water.

  Slayton then made his way to the service door.

  When he reached the kitchen, he sat down before he fell down. His legs were shaking. His breathing was rapid and irregular.

  One of the cooks on duty, noticing how peculiar he looked, approached him.

  “Sick?” the cook asked.

  Slayton couldn’t say anything until he had caught his breath. Then, “Get word to Posten. Arthur Posten, supervising Secret Service agent. Tell him to get his fanny in here to see me.”

  The cook wasted no time.

  In five minutes, Slayton, considerably calmer now, his mind racing with questions about Edward Folger and Thomas Folger and Yonkers, New York, was greeted by an ebullient Arthur Posten.

  “Our worries are over,” Posten said.

  Slayton looked at him incredulously.

  Posten continued, “The Vice President has been delayed, by word higher up. His landing was scrubbed. Right now, Sir Prep and Air Force II are sitting quietly at Shannon Airport in Ireland.”

  “What?”

  “I say, the Vice President—”

  “Who ordered it scrubbed?” Slayton asked.

  “Honcho back in Washington. Hamilton Winship.”

  Eight

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 28 January 1981

  Hamilton Winship sat in his mahogany-paneled office in the Treasury Building, poring over the confidential memo sent to him by a young agent named Benjamin Justin Slayton. Underneath the memo was a manila folder containing a dossier on the memo writer, which Winship intended to read next.

  Halfway through the memo, Winship shoved his chair back from his desk and sighed. He took off his glasses, rose from his chair, and paced the floor in his vest and shirtsleeves.

  Photographs of Washington and of world notables, all of them shaking hands with Winship, covered those sections of the walls not filled by bookshelves or paintings. He paused as he passed by each of the Presidents he had known in his time—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and now Reagan. He had met Reagan for the first time back in 1968, the first time Reagan had been a Presidential candidate, the time when two men armed with Molotov cocktails were arrested by alert California state troopers outside the then-Governor’s Sacramento residence.

  All of the Presidents had been the target of assassins, Winship mused. The public had known about most of the attempts, though the Secret Service had managed to keep out of the press those attempts against Eisenhower, Johnson, and Carter.

  Now this attempt on Bush.

  Winship muttered. Bush would keep quiet, he figured. He was an ex-C.I.A. man, so he would keep his mouth shut about this. Thankfully, no press had been on hand when it happened. And the press was still being so polite with the new Reagan-Bush administration that no one thought to ask why Air Force II was mysteriously called down to Dublin, why the Vice President’s appearance in London had an unannounced twenty-four-hour delay.

  He wanted a drink very badly. Winship felt the old paranoia, which he knew deep down to be a perfectly proper reaction to many of the events he watched from his office, and the simultaneous outrage. Other Americans must feel the same way at times, he thought. One of these days, someone like Lyndon LaRouche was going to be taken seriously. His paranoid constituency would eventually be able to show that someone, somewhere is after us all.

  Winship took some small comfort in knowing that men like himself, who ran the intelligence divisions of the Treasury Department, had always worked against the frustrations of an official Washington which refused to be vigilant.

  The first refusal to recognize the special vulnerability of Presidents and Vice Presidents came on the tenth of January, 1835. Winship reflected on the history of that day:

  President Andrew Jackson was attending the funeral of a South Carolina Congressman in the Capitol Rotunda. One of the mourners was a fellow named Richard Lawrence, who worked his way through the crowd, confronted the President, flung open his coat, and brandished two pistols.

  The first pistol failed to fire. Jackson was enraged, and rushed his assailant with the intention of delivering a sound thrashing with his own hands. But Lawrence managed to wriggle out of Jackson’s grasp.

  Lawrence stepped back and squeezed the trigger of the second pistol. Miraculously, that, too, failed to fire. Andrew Jackson lived.

  At his trial a few months later, Richard Lawrence was adjudged not guilty by virtue of “having been under the influence of insanity at the time he committed the act.”

  No special action was taken by Congress—or even the Department of the Treasury—to establish a formal bodyguard service for the President.

  Then came Lincoln.

  In 1861, an operative of the Baltimore private detective agency headed by Allan Pinkerton got wind of a conspiracy involving a group of Southern extremists bent on assassinating the Yankee President as he traveled through Baltimore en route to Washington. The Pinkertons—with absolutely no help from the government—arranged a series of disguises for the President, and managed to switch railway cars, thereby successfully foiling the death plot. That time.

  There would be, of course, a bullet for Lincoln. It would come four years later at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, on the evening of April 14, 1865. In that tensest time of the nation’s history, a time when assassination plots and assorted other treacherous conspiracies filled Washington’s air following cessation of the Civil War, the President was guarded by a single police officer employed by the City of Washington.

  That police officer became bored with his duty that fateful night and left the theatre for a nearby saloon. Enter John Wilkes Booth, a man who for months previous to April 14 had told anyone who cared to listen that he was bound and determined to murder Abraham Lincoln.

  During the afternoon prior to the evening murder, John Wilkes Booth actually prepared the stage, as it were, for homicide, going about his deadly business with complete freedom from interference by any police agency or police officer. He bored a peephole in the door to the private box reserved by the theatre for President
and Mrs. Lincoln; he made certain that the door could not be latched in the normal way from the inside; and he even constructed a device with which he could bolt the door himself after he had gained entry for his murderous deed.

  After killing Lincoln with a single shot, Booth injured himself in flight, actually breaking a leg. Even so, the President’s security was so lax that a man with a broken limb managed to flee the city in the dark of the night.

  But even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln failed to bring about proper and permanent Presidential protection.

  Sixteen years later, President James A. Garfield was gunned down in a Washington railway depot some four months after being sworn into office. Like John Wilkes Booth, Garfield’s assassin—one Charles J. Guiteau—was a man whose repeated public utterances about assassinating the President should have guaranteed him a prominent place in even the crudest file of individuals to be kept under surveillance and away from the vicinity of the President.

  And even this Presidential assassination would not be a catalyst to Congressional action. William McKinley would have to fall.

  It was on September 6, 1901, while President McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, that a young anarchist named Leon F. Czolgosz slowly moved through a throng around the President and his party, quietly removed a .32 caliber Iver-Johnson revolver from his belt, and jammed it up against the President’s breast bone, firing twice before being beaten senseless by a swarm of local police and a handful of soldiers accompanying the President.

  On that occasion, the President’s guard had seemed adequate, in terms of the sheer number of men around him, and in terms of accurate intelligence. Twice the schedule for McKinley to receive the public was postponed when his guards heard of anarchist plots to kill him. But McKinley himself refused to cancel his appearance altogether, telling his aides, “Why, no one would want to hurt me!”

  Theodore Roosevelt became President upon McKinley’s death. He managed to convince the public and the Congress that the Presidency offered the surest route to the grave since Russian roulette, and saw to it that the Treasury Department’s Secret Service unit, busied heretofore with the formidable battle against rampant counterfeiting, was assigned the additional task of protecting the President and the Vice President. It became the single most difficult job to be laid before the doorstep of a law enforcement agency anywhere in the world.