Rubicon, page 12
Coleman put the cigarette in a small plastic bag. He pointed back to the street where Hart had pointed before.
“They were probably parked out on the street somewhere, waiting. It’s dark out there. No one would have noticed. They walked up the alley - a car would have made too much noise. One of them smoked a cigarette - out of habit, maybe to calm his nerves. Probably stood here a moment, looked around, made certain no one was coming, then went for the door. We’ll put this through forensics,” he added as he put the bagged cigarette inside his pocket, “and see what we get.”
They stood a while longer next to the garage.
“You get out of the car - you and Mr. Shoenfeld - and you go directly to the house. Did you turn on the lights, the way they are now?”
“No, I started to, but Dieter asked me not to. He was so afraid that someone might have followed him that....”
“Yes, but that confirms what you said earlier about what you heard. One of them said that there were ‘supposed to be two of them.’ That means they hadn’t seen you both. They couldn’t have been following you. Yes, okay - go on. You walked across the yard, all the lights were out. You went inside the kitchen. What happened next?”
Hart led Coleman back into the kitchen, and then, just as he had Shoenfeld, led him through the dining room into the living room in front. A police photographer was taking the last pictures of the body. Hart could not watch. He walked away. Coleman said something to the photographer who quickly finished.
“You said Mr. Shoenfeld was going to stay here tonight, but he doesn’t seem to have brought any luggage.’
“All he had was his briefcase,” replied Hart. He was standing next to the bookshelf near the front windows, staring down at the floor. He forced himself to raise his eyes and point to the blood-stained sofa. “He had it there, next to him.”
“It’s not there now.”
“No, one of them - I remember now - told the other one to grab it just before they left.”
Coleman looked at Hart, and then at Shoenfeld’s body as it was being placed inside a black bag and lifted onto a gurney. There was a worried look in his eyes.
“But this wasn’t a robbery. They didn’t come here to steal. So why would they bother to take his briefcase unless they had some idea - unless whoever sent them had some idea - what was in it?”
Hart understood the implications, or thought he did.
“Which would mean that Dieter was right. He was being followed, because otherwise how would anyone have known he was here. But that means....”
“That the people who were having him followed are the same people who want you murdered.” Coleman gave Hart a searching glance. “What happened in Los Angeles - both of you were looking into that. I read the papers, senator. Eeryone knows the kind of questions you’ve been raising. That was the reason Mr. Shoenfeld came here tonight, wasn’t it - all the way from Germany without any luggage, only that briefcase? It must have been quite urgent. What was in it? What had he found out?”
“I don’t know. He never had a chance to tell me. He started to. He told me where he had been the last couple weeks when everyone thought he had disappeared. He told me he had found something out about Rubicon....”
“Rubicon, senator? What’s that?’
“The code name - what we thought was the code name - for what happened in Los Angeles. All I know, all he had a chance to tell me, was that what had happened in Los Angeles was not the end of Rubicon - it was just the beginning.”
It was slight, almost unnoticeable, but it was there, real, and in the instant it lasted, painful to see, the way that Leonard Coleman’s large, impassive eyes recoiled from what it meant.
“And there are people - in this country - who don’t want anyone to find that out?” He bit the inside of his lip and thought hard a moment. “You were in the service. You know the drill. Someone higher up is going to try to take this over. I’m just a cop. The FBI will be on this almost as fast as those reporters out there,” he said, gesturing toward the street outside where the television trucks had started to arrive. “Maybe you think that would be....”
Hart gave him a rueful glance.
“After what’s happened, do you think I trust anyone in the FBI, or any other part of the government? For all I know.... Stay on this case, I don’t care who tries to stop you.”
“You don’t know me, senator. We’ve only just met. Why would you trust me more than...?”
Hart looked straight into his eyes.
“I almost never trust anyone, especially in this town, but I knew right away I could trust you. It’s an instinct I have. And besides, what choice do I have?”
He quickly jotted down his cell phone number on the back of his card.
“I don’t know where I’m going to be, but you can always reach me at this number. I need to get out of here. There are places I need to go. Am I free to leave? Is there anything more...?”
“No, we’re all right for now. Someone will need to do something with those reporters outside. Do you want...?”
Hart thought about what he should do. He was running on adrenaline and he knew it. The death of Dieter Shoenfeld had not really sunk in yet; it was still too much a part of a nightmare that kept playing over and over again in his mind. He turned to Coleman.
“Come with me.”
With Leonard Coleman next to him, a half step behind, Hart stood on the front steps of his Georgetown home and gave a brief-explanation of what had happened.
“Earlier this evening, two men broke into my house and murdered my good friend, Dieter Shoenfeld, who was visiting me from Germany. As many of you know, Dieter Shoenfeld was the distinguished editor and publisher of one of Europe’s most important journals. The reason for what happened remains unclear. What I can tell you is that this was not an attack by terrorists. I heard their voices and....” He paused, wondering if he should say it and knowing that, whatever the risk, he had to. “And I saw their faces. They were Americans, both of them. Given what has happened, I’m sure you’ll understand that for the moment at least I can’t take any questions. Let me turn this over now to Lieutenant Coleman of the police who is heading the investigation.”
He touched Coleman briefly on the arm and went back inside. Uniformed officers were still moving through the house, gathering evidence. He went directly upstairs, shut the door to the bedroom, and packed a bag. Then he called Helen.
“I’m all right,” he told her. “But Dieter....” He started to feel it, the first signs of collapse, a wave of fatigue that rolled over him like a thick, dense fog. He tried to shake it off. “Dieter is dead. Look, Helen, I have to go away for a few days. There is something I need to do, but don’t worry - I’ll be all right. Or I will be, if I know that you’re going to be okay.”
He listened to her promise, knew that it was a promise she would keep, and, knowing that, managed to find more strength.
“I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
He took a last look around the room. Then, with the overnight bag in his hand, he quickly went downstairs. He was all the way to the kitchen when he remembered. He went to the living room and reached up on the shelf.
“I better have something to read,” he remarked by way of explanation when a young uniformed officer saw what he was doing. He tucked under his arm the book that Dieter Shoenfeld had risked, and lost, his life to bring him, and hurried out the back door.
Chapter Thirteen
Chance was everything. If Dieter Shoenfeld had waited a day, Hart would have gone home by himself and been killed. If Dieter Shoenfeld had waited a day, Dieter would still be alive; if Helen had called just three minutes later, he would have been murdered along with Dieter. Everyone who had learned anything about Rubicon had become a target for murder, and now, strictly by chance, Hart was the only one who knew anything who had not been killed.
He drove through Georgetown and back across the bridge, past the Capitol to the dilapidated building where David Allen had an apartment. He parked around a corner three blocks away, just beyond the reach of the flickering neon light of an old hotel. He grabbed the overnight bag, turned up the collar on his coat, and walked quickly, but not so quickly as to attract attention, to Allen’s building.
“I’ve been trying to call!” exclaimed Allen when he opened the door and found him standing there.
Recently divorced, Allen lived alone in a small one-bedroom apartment. Everything had the look of a temporary arrangement. The bookshelves - the cheap kind you assemble yourself - were filled with congressional reports, legislative proposals, the usual paperwork of a congressional assistant. Allen picked up an armful of newspapers from the only sofa and dropped them on top of another stack near the door.
“Sit down, sit down.” He took the overnight bag from Hart’s shoulder and gestured toward the sofa. He pulled a chair from in front of the small desk in the corner and dragged it over.
“I kept trying to call, but I couldn’t reach you. I was just about to get in the car and drive over.”
“I turned the cell phone off. I didn’t want to talk to anyone...and I didn’t want anything traced.
“Traced? The phone?”
Hart glanced around the small, cluttered room. His eyes began to focus.
“Can I bother you for a drink?”
Allen made him a scotch and water. Hart took a drink and then stared into the middle distance, a study in dejection.
“Dieter....” His voice trailed off and the name echoed into the silence.
“You better stay here tonight,” said Allen. “The sofa makes into a bed. I’ve got some clean sheets in the other room. It won’t be too bad.” He bent his balding head to the side, worried. “You look like you’re about to fall apart, Bobby. You need to get some rest.”
“Rest? I couldn’t sleep tonight if I tried. They came to kill me - two hired assassins. I saw them both. They came to kill me, and they got Dieter instead.”
Hart took a second drink, longer, slower, than the first. The cool fire felt good against his throat. He leaned forward, the drink held between his knees, staring into it as he thought about what he had to do.
“I need a favor,” he said, raising his eyes. “I need to borrow your car.”
“Sure, but you know, it’s got a few miles on it, and.... Why? What happened to yours?”
Hart tossed him his keys.
“It’s parked up the street, just past the hotel. I need something to drive to Michigan, and I better not use mine. They have the license.”
Allen jumped out of the chair and started to pace, realized there was not room, and sat down again. He looked at Hart, not as the senator he worked for, but as his oldest friend.
“Who tried to kill you tonight? And why?”
“Rubicon.”
“You’ve never told me what it meant, just that it was the code name for the assassination plot.”
“Dieter was convinced that what happened in Los Angeles was only the first step, but the first step in what, I don’t know. He didn’t tell me; he didn’t have the chance. The phone rang, and I knew it was Helen and that I had to take the call, and then, when I was upstairs on the phone….”
He drank some more, then put down the glass.
“When Caulfield was killed – I know he was murdered - the only logical conclusion seemed to be that someone connected with a terrorist cell had managed to get inside the agency. But what happened tonight was a contract killing. Since when does a terrorist organization in the Middle East hire professional killers to do their work? I don’t know who is behind this. I don’t even know what they’re trying to do. But everyone who has tried to find out anything about Rubicon has been killed.”
Hart started to reach for his glass, but then, suddenly, changed his mind and got to his feet.
“First thing tomorrow I want you to fly back to California. It isn’t safe here. You were going out anyway in a few days,” he said when Allen started to protest. “Do it now instead. Look in on Helen. Make sure she’s all right.”
Allen knew there was no point trying to stop him. He gave him his keys and told him where the car was parked.
“You’re going to see Charlie Ryan. That’s why you’re going, isn’t it? You’re not going to try to drive straight through? It’s six hundred miles.”
Time, distance - none of that seemed to matter anymore. There were no alternatives, no choices he could make. Everything was chance, but chance was fate, and the path now in front of him was the only one he could take.
He drove for hours, deep into Pennsylvania, lost in the constant migration of Americans moving everywhere at once. A little before three in the morning he stopped for gas. There was a small coffee shop at the turnpike station. After he filled the tank he went inside for something to eat. Two truckers were sitting together at the far end of the counter. A middle-aged waitress with a mole just above the corner of her mouth poured him a cup of coffee before he had time to ask. She handed him a plastic menu. He did not bother to open it.
“Bacon, two eggs and toast.”
The eggs were runny and the bacon black and brittle, but Hart did not mind. It was good to be out of the car and able to stretch his legs. He listened to the voices of the two truck drivers with their confident, abbreviated speech and envied a little the lives of normal people.
“You driving all night?” asked the waitress, warming his cup.
“I’m not sure,” he confessed.
“How far you going?”
“Michigan,” he replied. “Ann Arbor.”
She seemed to take it under advisement, like someone who spent her days - or, rather, her nights - calculating for others time and distance and, depending on the season, the effect of the weather.
“Should be there by noon, if you don’t stop anywhere too long. Be light in a few hours. It won’t be so difficult then. On the other hand, there’s a halfway decent motel not too far up the road. But, as I say, it will be light soon.”
The two truckers got up from the counter. Each of them left her a good tip.
“See you in a few days,” said one of them with a tired smile as they left.
She cleaned up their dishes and wiped down the counter.
“You hear what happened tonight?” she asked as she came back with the pot of coffee. “Another attack. Not like before - no one blew themselves up - but they tried to kill a senator! Right in his own home! Missed him, got someone else. But right in his home, in Washington, the Capitol. No one is safe anymore, are they?”
Hart paid the bill and left a couple of dollars next to the plate.
“Thanks,” he said as he walked to the door.
“Come back soon,” she replied in a dreamy voice. She waved a listless good-bye and leaned against the doorway, watching the endless traffic passing in the night.
The coffee kept Hart going until the darkness broke behind him and the sun began to rise. He made Michigan by eleven and, just as the waitress had calculated, Ann Arbor by noon. It was only when he pulled up in front of Charlie Ryan’s large Georgian style house that he suddenly realized that, just back from the Republican convention and in the middle of his own campaign for reelection, Ryan might be anywhere in Michigan, but certainly not at home.
He glanced in the mirror. His hair was a tangled mess and he needed a shave. He got out of the car, stretched his arms, and walked to the front door. Maybe someone was home and could tell him where he had to go next. The door opened before he got there. Charlie Ryan stepped out to greet him.
“How did you...?”
“David Allen called me, right after you left his place last night. Why the hell did you drive? Why didn’t you just call? I would have come, taken the first flight back,” Ryan insisted as he shut the door behind them. “We’ll talk about this later. Right now, go upstairs, take a long, hot shower, get cleaned up. Go to bed for a while, get some sleep....”
“No, I can’t - not yet. I will take a shower, however. I must look a wreck.”
Half an hour later, showered and shaved and wearing clean clothes, Hart sat at the kitchen table and tried to tell Ryan everything that he knew.
“And you have the book - and the diagram - with you? The things Shoenfeld thought so important.”
Hart handed Ryan the leather-bound volume. With a raised eyebrow and a wistful glance, Ryan examined it.
“Plutarch. I haven’t read him since college. Though Father Henriot, my ancient history teacher, might have told you that I had not really read him then.”
He opened the tattered cover, careful to do it in a way that kept it from falling further apart. A slight grimace broke the even line of his mouth.
“Greek! The only subject I knew less about than ancient history.”
“But you know it.”
“Know it? I suppose that with the aid of a good dictionary I could probably translate ten or twelve lines in a month or so.” He saw the look of disappointment on Hart’s dead-tired face. He slapped him on the knee and got up. “But don’t worry, I have the solution.”
Ryan disappeared into the living room. He came back a few minutes later carrying a small book in a green jacket. He seemed quite pleased with himself.
“Something I thought I should probably study some day. Still looks new, doesn’t it?” He placed the book on the table and opened it at random to show Hart why it would help. “On facing pages: the Greek on the left, the English translation on the right. This should work. Show me the first passage he marked - Gunther Kramer, right?”
Ryan remembered enough Greek to find the corresponding place in the bilingual edition and then the same passage in English. After nearly an hour, he sat back and looked out the window, down to the edge of a creek to a stand of birch trees that had begun to turn yellow. Gray clouds scudded across the eastern sky, bringing with them a sudden chill and, for just a few minutes, the season’s first snow flurry. In the cold sunlight the air was crystal, pure, and clean. Winter might come early this year.
“It all seems pretty straightforward,” said Hart, while Ryan watched the last of the snow flakes melt on the grass.
“What?” asked Ryan. He turned from the window. Hart was still bent over the Loeb edition, reading again the last marked passage. “Yes, I suppose so. I’m not sure.”
