A Clear and Present Danger Page 6

  Teddy Roosevelt himself would be the victim of an assassin’s attempt eleven years after assigning the Secret Service its sobering responsibility. He was saved from death by gunfire when the would-be assassin’s bullet was slowed on its path to Roosevelt’s heart by a thick manuscript of the speech he carried in his inside breast coat pocket.

  In the next few decades, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would nearly be killed by Giuseppe Zangara, whose five shots squeezed off at Roosevelt in a Chicago appearance between F.D.R.’s election and 1933 inauguration managed instead to kill Mayor Anthony Cermak. Zangara, it was learned, had originally intended to kill lame-duck President Herbert Hoover, but decided at the last minute on Roosevelt, as the newcomer would be a handier target.

  Following F.D.R., President Harry S Truman would be the target of a pair of Puerto Rican nationalists bent on gaining world attention through assassinating the President. Then Gerald Ford, in the mid 1970s, would twice be the target of assassins, one of whom, “Squeaky” Fromme, had been a member of the Charles Manson murder cult. Richard Nixon would be stalked by one Arthur Bremer, who, like Zangora before him, switched his sights and gunned down Presidential candidate George C. Wallace instead, crippling the former Governor of Alabama for life.

  That was the stuff of public consumption. Along with a few other high-level intelligence men in Washington, Winship knew of other attempts not detected by the media.

  In June of 1957, for instance, a lunatic inspired by billboards calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren and political tracts which accused President Eisenhower of actively assisting the “international Communist conspiracy,” was nabbed on the fourteenth hole at Burning Tree Country Club when Secret Service agents accompanying the President noticed something amiss about the golf bag of an odd-looking man who spent a lot of time in the rough searching for errant balls. Agents discovered a shotgun where a seven-iron should have reposed.

  A few months after Lyndon Johnson left office to retire at the Pedernales ranch he had acquired while a high-rolling Senator from Texas, he was fired on from a helicopter as he rode the range of his spread in an open-top Lincoln Continental. The murderous pilot was shot down out of the sky. The Secret Service managed to trace the identity of the dead assassin, and because he was a recluse inventor with no special reason to go after Johnson, also managed to keep the lid on the story.

  Not long after Jimmy Carter was in office, he signed a blanket amnesty order, forgiving offenses against young men who had avoided conscription during the Vietnam War years. A deranged ex-Marine sharpshooter made an appearance outside the White House gates during a ceremony on the South Lawn. An agent of the Treasury’s I.R.S. investigation unit happened to spot the young man on the street as he hoisted what appeared to be a pool-cue carrying-bag through the gate bars in the general direction of President Carter. Again, the incident went unnoticed by the public.

  Winship thought for several moments about the Carter incident, reflecting on the irony of Carter’s would-be assassin being an ex-Marine sharpshooter. Kennedy’s assassin was an ex-Marine sharpshooter.

  Winship stood in the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows of his office, directly behind his desk, the windows looking over toward the White House.

  “This new President,” he said aloud, though he was alone in the office. “I wonder how long before he’s attacked?”

  He shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back and paced.

  “It wasn’t a week before they went after Bush,” he said, as if trying to help his thinking by verbalizing the incident.

  He stopped in his tracks. “The Mannlicher-Carcaño!” he said. “My God!”

  Winship returned to his desk and dropped heavily into his chair. He shuddered. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and opened the Slayton dossier.

  For the next twenty minutes, Winship read intently, occasionally issuing a favorable grunt as he came across entries such as Slayton’s military career as a fighter-bomber, his strong linguistic abilities, his expertise in Oriental martial arts and now the newest episode of his career as a T-Man—the discovery and defusing of a bomb timed to detonate some time during the arrival of Vice President Bush to a London reception party, the act of a cool and thorough professional.

  Cool and professional despite certain drawbacks in his character, Winship thought. He recollected the first time he met Benjamin Justin Slayton.

  It was three years ago, when Slayton was a rookie with the Treasury Department, just nicely past his academy training, and assigned to the Bureau of Foreign Asset Control. Hamilton Winship made an inspection tour of the B.F.A.C. one afternoon and was horrified by the sight of one of his T-men, namely, Ben Slayton, and his hair.

  “What’s your name, son?” Winship asked after a starchy march to Slayton’s desk, covered with a clutter of papers and sandwich wrappers.

  “Slayton. Benjamin J. And you?”

  Winship didn’t identify himself. “I would have thought you were lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones,” he said instead.

  “Indeed I was,” Slayton replied, “before I found peace and contentment rummaging through bank balances of sheiks and assorted pals of David Rockefeller temporarily between coups d’état.”

  “We have an image to maintain here, son, and that means a clean-cut image,” Winship thundered.

  “Don’t sweat the chickenshit, sir, with all due respect. I have on my desk at this moment the certified thievery of one Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, better known as the Shah of Iran, and I can’t help but notice that the major banks of the good old U.S. of A. are only too happy to handle his extortion accounts. Now, this outfit I work for has two ways to handle something that’s sure to come to a nasty head: refuse to be the Shah’s accomplice in the looting of Iran, or make a big fuss about the length of my hair.”

  Winship’s jowls trembled and quaked. Young Slayton regarded him with an expression that betrayed not a whit of emotion. Slayton had no way of knowing that Winship agreed with him, and Winship, at that time, had no way of knowing the destiny of their relationship. Besides, Winship had a role to play.

  “Cut your hair,” Winship said. “That’s an order. And that’s all.” He turned on his heel and walked away, red-faced.

  The next day, he received a memorandum from Ben Slayton which read, “Hair has been duly trimmed. However, I stand by my remarks.”

  Winship did not reply to the brash young agent. But he quietly admired him.

  Now he was in receipt of another Slayton memorandum, which he read for the fourth time. For the fourth time, he was struck by the last line:

  “… I don’t mind losing it all for Georgie, or even Ronnie, for that matter; but I would greatly appreciate in the future knowing when I am to be a decoy.”

  Winship permitted himself a small laugh.

  Earlier in the memo, Slayton had suggested a confidential meeting. It was this request that had occupied Winship’s thoughts today, this request that had prompted his historical remembrances, this request that had revived his terrible, unshakeable belief that certain ugly events had a grim connection.

  Benjamin Justin Slayton, whose life was spread before Winship on paper, had stepped into the shadows of a nightmare. Did Slayton know where he was treading?

  Winship knew only that there was no time to waste in finding out about this Slayton fellow. He telephoned his wife.

  “Edith,” he said to her, “I want you to arrange a party. Purely a social thing. Mix it up. You know, some serious types and some frivolous. Maybe a bit of the press as well.

  “I should like to watch a certain young man.”

  Nine

  MOUNT VERNON, Virginia, St. Valentine’s Day, 1981

  “I don’t suppose you’re able to break it?”

  The woman’s words came in short gasps, plaintively. She rolled out of Ben Slayton’s arms to the edge of her side of the bed and pouted. Slayton moved to her.

  “Ben? Oh why?”

  “Sorry, love. Command appearance.” />
  He put an arm around her, found her soft and yielding, turned her toward him. He kissed her, gently and properly, and she responded with an involuntary shudder that began in her shoulders and worked itself down to her loins.

  Slayton drew her tightly to his body. Her breasts pressed hard against his chest. Their hips swayed together, in a slow, undulating rhythm as they continued their embrace.

  Her face was flushed and warm, expectant. He kissed her eyes and her chin. She brushed her long fingers over his taut skin. A fire was building.

  “Let me ride you,” she said, leaning over his face now, kissing him languorously on the chest and forehead, on his shoulders. “Let me try to keep you to myself.”

  She straddled his hips as he lay fiat on his back, lowering herself to meet his manhood. He moaned, with a touch of helplessness in his voice that pleased her. She bent her head and kissed his lips.

  He dug his fingers into the soft flesh of her round hips, guiding her downward, rocking her. Her breasts bobbled not far from his face. She used one hand to pull his head to her bosom.

  He tasted the sweetness of her skin, the different textures of soft breast and rigid nipples; and he listened as she cried out each time she thrust herself down on him, again and again, going on long after he had spent himself inside her.

  Now dizzy and pleasantly exhausted, they lay on the bed’s cool linens, their naked bodies covered only by a sheet and a thin blanket.

  Slayton watched the sun rising over the treeline in the east. Bare wooden limbs were tinged with a cold orange. The day would dawn bright and chill.

  She clung to him, like a small child. He could smell her crisp scent, gentle and feminine, and the feral odors of their love-making. Women, he thought; such gentle creatures, capable of such frequent and unbridled passion, truly deadlier than the male.

  When his breathing returned to normal, he leaned across her lush body for the nightstand, brushing the sheet and blanket away from her breasts. He kissed her breasts and they grew instantly rigid at the tips.

  But he ignored this second chance, reaching instead for the nightstand. He slid open a small drawer, felt for the box he knew to be there.

  “A token of our time together,” he said, holding out the box to her.

  Slayton had met her several months ago at the Kennedy Center, during a performance of Evita. She was with another man and Slayton was with another woman. But accessories didn’t matter. Slayton smiled at her during intermission while the two waited for their respective partners to return from the pissoirs.

  He had said, “We’ll have lunch tomorrow.”

  And she had sputtered something about a trial beginning tomorrow, how she was a lawyer and how this was a major case—

  “Break the date,” he told her.

  She did, and they dined that next afternoon. And evening. And at breakfast the next morning, in her apartment.

  She looked so much like Jean Marie… he thought it then and he thought it now, as she examined the contents of the box, holding it up to the morning light shafting in through the windows.

  “A sapphire,” she said. “A perfect star sapphire. It’s beautiful, Ben. Gorgeous.”

  Then she pouted, jutting out her lower lip, which was about twice the fullness of her upper number. The Julie Christie look.

  “I’d rather have you, especially today,” she said.

  “So you shall, my flower. But not today. The sapphire will have to do until I return. Take care of things.”

  But he made no effort then to leave the bed. Instead, he lay back, as if to enjoy a cigarette, had he been a smoking man. She hugged him, nodding her acceptance, silently understanding.

  Slayton was momentarily saddened. Then he snapped out of it. He understood the meaning of Winship’s invitation and knew he had to attend. It was the Washington way.

  He closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, listening until his woman drifted off for another hour or two of sleep before rising for the day. Only then did Slayton slip out of the bed.

  Quietly, he showered and dressed in jeans, boots, and an oiled wool sweater. He made coffee, and downed two cups while he watered vegetables and flower plants in the greenhouse at the far end of the kitchen.

  The greenhouse was an adjunct of the solar heating unit Slayton had constructed on the south side of his house. He had first seen this combination in Vietnam, in the rural cities and villages outside Saigon—or Ho Chi Minh City. Slayton had immediately admired the self-sufficiency of the Vietnamese people and determined to build a home of his own modeled after the typical Vietnamese plan. Even the poorest home was rigged with a solar heat and power generator; even the poorest home contained its own greenhouse.

  Jean Marie had loved this greenhouse.

  Slayton had met her in his stock car racing days, an improbable but thoroughly enjoyable time of his life, a necessary bridge between his discharge from the Air Force, the resumption of his scholastic life at the University of Michigan, his days of political activism as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and his life today as a T-man.

  Jean Marie Parrish had come to the races that day in a tank town outside Washington, a town on the circuit Ben Slayton rode in. He remembered everything they talked about, but only a few things about their actual meeting.

  He was driving a ’72 Pontiac LeMans turbo-charger in those days, and he was winning a good percentage of the events he entered. The day he met Jean Marie was his biggest payday yet.

  It was a perfect Indian Summer Saturday. A high school band played the national anthem as all the drivers, in toggle suits with helmets held respectfully over the heart, stared at the flag flapping in the breeze. The dull roar of racing engines and the pervasive smell of motor oil accompanied the ritual music.

  Slayton, as usual, was doing stomach exercises while he stood waiting to race, a practice which he found calmed him. He forced his stomach out, then sucked it in, out, then in… .

  He heard a woman’s laughter and turned around. He could have reached out and touched her. She sat in a private box behind him. Or rather stood, her hand across her heart as the band played on. She wasn’t singing the words to the national anthem; she watched Ben Slayton’s stomach making its peculiar motions and she found it funny.

  Embarrassed and angry at the same time, Slayton quickly turned away from her, but not quickly enough to erase the image of her face from his mind.

  She was dark-skinned from the sun. Her hair was titian, her eyes a very dark blue, large and wide-set on her face. Her mouth was generous, her nose delicate. She had an intelligent and joyous look. In her face, he saw his future. Never had a woman had such an affect on him, such an all-encompassing, powerful effect.

  The band’s contribution to the day of racing and gambling was blessedly over. Slayton had never quite understood why the national anthem always had to be played for races and side bets.

  He took the wheel of his LeMans, and his seconds strapped him in. His gloved hands gave a final check to the roll bar, he revved the engine some to check for the bounce of the tachometer needle, and, without thinking, glanced back at the stands, to the box where the laughing woman had been. He saw her watching him. When their eyes made contact, she waved to him.

  A final check of the mirrors while he heard the starter’s count-down. He kept his eyes peeled on the track, depending on his ears to hear the gun fire above the cacophony of engine noise and on his peripheral vision for the downsweep of black-and-white checkered flag.

  He nudged the accelerator with his right foot, and made the LeMans jump from the line. He had enough play left to jump his car out in front of his competitors once he had left the line.

  Slayton was an excellent racer. With his fourteen- or fifteen-inch starting advantage, he nosed the car inward, toward the close track. He had the edge over cars whose drivers drew the favored positions. He forced one and then another driver to take his dust as he steered relentlessly for the inside track.

  Slayton had reached bet
ter than one hundred miles an hour in twelve seconds, a credit to his father’s excellent teaching, he thought, as he eyed the instrument panel. More power was needed as he went into the turn, he noticed, or else he would hit the wall.

  He gritted his teeth, and the muscles in his arms tensed as he held the wheel in a perfect straight line, making sure the wheels were in a square. Then he punched down hard on the accelerator, delivering a sudden burst of torque to the power train. The LeMans held the track as if it were glued to the pavement. Slowly, Slayton inched the wheel into the turn, minimizing the dangerous friction that could flip the fast-moving vehicle.

  Fully half a length in front of the only car threatening his victory, Slayton took the chance of torquing into a bank turn. For a suspended second, he thought he might lose control. The vibration was terribly strong, sweat streamed off his face, his arms, and his hands. But he held on, turning, turning… and he imagined that he heard the laughing woman, the beautiful laughing woman.

  He felt the tremendous rush of free air as he zoomed past his competitor, to the clear command of the track. Gently, Slayton worked the LeMans up into the safety of the oval bank. No one would catch him now. He punched the accelerator… one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty-eight miles per hour. Then he topped one-fifty, leaving more than a dozen lengths of space between his LeMans and what would be the second-place driver.

  At the end, he climbed out of his car more wobble-legged than he had ever remembered. It had been a grueling race, one in which he had had to battle for all the concentration he could muster, for he had wanted to think only of the face of the laughing woman.

  He had set a record that day, he learned as fellow drivers and racing association officials pummeled him on his back and shouted their congratulations. Slayton was floating somewhere above the praise, his perspiration-blinded eyes searching the stands for the vision of that titian-haired woman who had laughed at his stomach exercises.