Crack-Up (35 page)

“And what will it buy me?”

“Security and protection for your family.”

My hard look and hoarse whisper won not a flash of fear from the impersonator.
 
“You threatening my wife and children?”

“No, no, Mister Ward, just the opposite.
 
We want to safeguard them.
 
See to it they’re provided for.
 
Because you—the sole bread earner—won’t be able to provide for them anymore.
 
As it stands, your total assets are somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half million dollars, but after attorney’s fees, well, there won’t be much left.
 
Not nearly enough for your family to live in the style they’ve become accustomed to, am I right?”

“You’re offering me money?”

“That and more.
 
We’re offering you five million dollars in cash.
 
But we’re also offering our considerable influence in keeping you off death row and out of prison.
 
We’ll get you into a mental hospital for the rest of your days—the same, cushy environment
Hinckley
got.”

“Nobody has that kind of power.”

“We do.
 
All you have to do is cooperate, and you’ll see.”

“What do I have to do?” I said.

“Assassinate the president.”

The rising music in my head distracted me so much by now that I thought I hadn’t heard right.
 
“What did you say?”

“You heard me right.
 
We want you to be the man.”

“Why me?”

“Because our plans have to change now.
 
What you told those Homicide detectives put them hot on our trail.
 
They’re getting close—so close we expect we’ll have to shut down our entire operation and start over again later.
 
Unless you come through for us.
 
You’d be perfect.
 
You’ve already killed once in a psychotic state.
 
You’re nearly psychotic now.”

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“We’ve been watching you.
 
We know your mind has begun disintegrating again without your medication.
 
You were hearing things outside the gates of the White House earlier today, for example, whatever the hell you were doing out there all that time.
 
You may be hearing things now, for all I know.
 
So you should strike soon, before you go completely mad, to increase the probability of success.”

“I won’t do it,” I repeated.

“Kind of ironic, I know.
 
You being former Secret Service, after all, and having once taken a bullet for another president.
 
But you’ll get over it.”

“You think you know me, but you don’t.”

“We’ll help you.
 
We’ll get you a gun.
 
A rifle, if you’d prefer.
 
We’ll give you the president’s schedule.
 
We’ll even tell you where the Secret Service will be dispersed at special events.
 
There’s a good opportunity tomorrow, by the way, right here in DC.
 
An afternoon visit to a local homeless shelter.”

I leaned forward.
 
“Maybe strangling you now is all the revenge I’ll ever need.”

The impersonator gulped and his steely expression melted into fear, but then swiftly reforged.
 
“Think of your family, Ward, if death row or forty years of prison won’t faze you.
 
I’ll be in touch.”
 
He rose, snatching his misshapen black hat, and fled the restaurant.

Chapter 37

I forgot about turning myself over to the authorities until I’d already raced from the restaurant—skipping out on the tab, of course—and into the street in search of the impersonator, hoping to tail him.
 
But he was nowhere to be found.
 
He’d vanished—into a waiting limousine, I imagined.

The surrender of my freedom I decided to put off until I’d digested all that I’d just been told, and so I meandered in the general direction of the National Mall.

Near the intersection of
23rd Street
and
Constitution Avenue
, I left the sidewalk in favor of a small, secluded garden on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences.
 
There I encountered Albert Einstein—a bronze statue of him, three times larger than life, seated on some granite steps and daydreaming about the cosmos in a casual sweater.

He was alone.
 
I sat in his lap.
 
I would remain there until after dark, thinking, crying, cursing the mad music pounding in my head, and talking with Albert.

“I can’t take the offer,” I told him at one point.

“Yah,” he said with a slight foreign accent.
 
“To assassinate zee president would morally nullify your entire life’s verk.”

“Besides, these are the people who destroyed my life!”

“Never appease evil,” Albert said.
 
“You must fight it.
 
No matter what the cost.
 
This we Germans have learnt.”

Focus
! I told myself.
 
Ignore Albert Einstein!
 
Ignore the music!
 
Only pay attention to what is real!

Figure out who you’re dealing with here, Argus.
 
Who are these guys?
 
These puppet masters of the sane and paranoid alike.
 
And what are they really up to
?

I had no doubt they wanted me to murder the president for them.
 
But why?
 
What was the link between John Helms, the wealthiest individual in
America
, and Eliot Ames, America’s most powerful man?

“Of course!” I shouted when the answer came to me.

“Of course!” Albert repeated.
 
“E equals MC squared!”

But his comment was a total non sequitur as far as I was concerned.
 
For I was at that moment recalling my recent phone conversation with Keisha Fallon, when she’d described the dead billionaire’s unaccounted for, secretive meetings with DARPA at the Pentagon, which he’d attended regularly in the months prior to his demise.
 
That had to be the link.
 
John Helms had been involved with some kind of government project reaching right into the White House and the Oval Office itself.

I felt absolutely certain of my new theory when I thought back to the day after Sally Anne Bilchik’s thwarted attempt on John’s life.
 
My old boss, Nathan Pitt, the current director of the United States Secret Service, had phoned me on that day, concerned about the incident.
 
He’d even volunteered to provide extra manpower to protect John.
 
He’d said that John Helms was more important to national security than I might imagine.

I left Albert Einstein with a new resolve.
 
I felt sure that if I could learn all about the top secret project linking John Helms to the highest reaches of government, then I could identify the impersonator’s clandestine organization with its vaunted powers, and at the same time convince my old colleagues in the Secret Service of all that I’d learned, before another madman—my replacement—assassinated the president of the United States.

For among those in attendance at those DARPA-hosted meetings at the Pentagon had been a number of big shots from the US Intelligence community, and one I knew personally.
 
Nathan Pitt.

I started off for Pitt’s home in
Georgetown
.
 
He was a recent widower and lived alone about a mile from my townhouse in a brick colonial once owned by
Washington
socialite and salon doyenne Pamela Harriman.
 
The walk was about two miles or so.

Along the way, I stopped at a hobby shop just as it was about to close its doors for the night and spent my last few dollars on a vial of graphite powder and a tiny application brush.
 
From an all-night drugstore I shoplifted an ordinary roll of adhesive tape.

By the time I arrived at Pitt’s house, the mad music in my head had finally and blessedly ceased and no more statues or other inanimate objects had conversed with me.
 
But there was no telling how long my relative lucidity would last.

I jumped the black wrought iron fence encircling Pitt’s spacious grounds and, beneath the floodlights that illuminated the front stoop of the house, I dusted the door for fingerprints with my graphite and brush.
 
In a jiffy, I picked up an image of a thumbprint with my adhesive tape and pressed the tape against an Identix Bio-Touch fingerprint reader that I knew would be there on the wall from previous visits.
 
Tricked into believing I was Pitt, the biometric device unlocked the front door to the house. (I was still a security expert, after all.)

I found Pitt behind his desk in his study or home office.
 
As you might imagine, he jumped out of his chair.

“Jimminy Christmas!” he said. (That’s not really what he said.
 
It was much worse than that.) “Argus Ward!”
 
He stammered out a question about how I’d gained entry, and I explained, which caused him to curse a good deal more, and then he studied me and said, “You don’t look well, son.”

“Get up, Nathan.
 
Please.
 
Away from your desk.
 
Hands where I can see them.”
 
I was worried the old man had a weapon in one of the drawers, or an emergency button of some kind to push.
 
He wasn’t about to take me on in hand-to-hand combat.

“You smell bad,” he said when he’d come face to face with me.
 
“What is this all about, Argus?”

“I need to know why John Helms was murdered.”

“Shouldn’t you be asking yourself that?”

“Turn around.
 
I want to pat you down.”

He complied.
 
“You’re in deep shit, son.”

“So are you.”

I finished patting him down.
 
He spun back around.
 
“Is that a threat?
 
Are you threatening me?
 
A brother—”

“It’s a warning.
 
Your top protectee is in jeopardy.”

“Potus?”
 
The President Of The
United States
?

“That’s right,” I said, “but I think I can help you, if I can just figure out who killed John Helms.”

“You killed John Helms, Argus!
 
You!”

“I was just the modus operandi.”

“What?
 
You’re talking nonsense, son.
 
Get your butt into a mental hospital.
 
Do you hear me?
 
Before you do something more to disgrace the agency, as well as your own—”

“I’m not going anywhere, Pitt, until you tell me all about the meetings you’d been attending every other week since mid March at the Pentagon with John Helms and most other leading members of the
US
intelligence community.”