The First Assassin (31 page)

She put the picture back in her shirt, this time making sure none of it was exposed. She was irritated with herself for letting Nat have a look. She was grateful to him for what he had done, but she did not know whether she could tell him about her real purpose for being in Washington. Her grandfather had said only Lincoln was to see that picture, and she intended to follow his instructions.

“This soup is wonderful,” she said, wanting to change the subject.

“Tell me about yourself,” said Nat. “The only thing I know is your name and that you jumped out of that box on the platform.”

“Maybe that’s all you should know.”

“Does that mean I’m gonna get in trouble if somebody finds you here?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t ask questions. You’ve been very kind, and I don’t want to make a problem for you. I won’t be here long. I have somewhere to go.”

“You look tired. Get some sleep here, and then you can be on your way.”

When they finished eating, Nat collected their bowls and went into the other room. He was gone for just a minute or two, but it was long enough. When he returned, Portia was lying on her back with her eyes closed, breathing heavily.

As Nat tried to adjust her blanket, Portia rolled onto her side. The photo fell from her shirt. Nat stared at it a moment. Then he picked it up.

“Shut the door,” snapped Scott when Rook walked into his office. “It took you long enough to get here.”

Rook had not even removed his hand from the doorknob. “I came as soon as I heard you wanted to see me,” he said.

“You were quiet at the meeting this morning.”

“My mind has been focused on sandbagging. I’ve discovered that it’s a contemplative activity.”

“Knock it off, Rook, or that’s what you’ll spend the rest of your career contemplating.” The general reached for a piece of paper on his desk. He held it up in one hand and pointed at it with the other. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Rook took the letter. It was printed on cream-colored paper. The contents startled him. His secrets were secrets no more. Inexplicably, the letter seemed to have been written with knowledge deeper than what would come from mere observation. There was more to this.

“I would say that the author is Violet Grenier and that she is correct: some of your men have been keeping a watch on her. And I’ve locked four prisoners in the Treasury.”

“Damn it, Rook. I brought you into this position because I thought I could trust you. Now I find that you’re breaking orders and running rogue operations. How far has this gone?”

Rook felt he had no choice but to come clean. He described his activities going back to a week earlier, when he first took an interest in Davis and Stephens. He told of their walk around the Capitol, their visit to Grenier, the riddle that led him to the canal, the discovery of blasting powder on the boat, and his decision to imprison the collaborators. By the time he was done recounting these events, he felt better about them. He might have broken a few rules, but it was difficult to argue with the result: a group of dangerous men was now behind bars.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about any of this?” said Scott.

“I didn’t believe you were taking the security threat seriously. One incident led to another, climaxing in the discovery of these men and their explosives. Since their capture, I’ve been trying to learn more about their plans and who they’re working with—so far without much success, though I hope at least one of them will break soon. We haven’t had them down there for long. It was never my intention to keep this hidden from you, but I was waiting for the right moment to reveal everything.”

“Unfortunately for you, it was revealed to me before you were ready.”

“I’m sorry about that, sir. But based on what we have here, I’m sure you’ll agree with me about the significance of all this.”

“It’s certainly significant, Colonel—it’s a significant blunder on your part.”

“Again, sir, I’m very sorry. Please tell me how we can get past the blunder and do right by this government.”

“I’ve already taken care of that. I’m ordering the release of the men you’ve been holding.”

“You’re letting them go?”

“They’ve committed no crime. You thought they looked suspicious, so you followed them on a tour of Washington and found a few barrels of blasting powder on a canal boat. I don’t consider this compelling proof of a sinister plot. Colonel Locke will see to their release.”

“It’s enough blasting powder to take down half the Capitol!”

“Or to use in a mine. We can’t go around arresting people on mere hunches.”

“This is a grave mistake. Those men are part of a broader conspiracy. They were in contact with Violet Grenier, a known secessionist…”

“Don’t get me started on her again,” interrupted Scott, pointing his finger aggressively at Rook. “Their contact with one of Washington’s society ladies convinces me of nothing except their good taste. Violet Grenier hosts parties for members of the Lincoln administration and Congress. She is an acquaintance of mine too. Are you going to toss me into the cellar of some building as well?”

Rook was flabbergasted to hear this. For a moment, he was tempted to tear the insignia off his uniform and quit. He could tell Scott that he was done trying to protect the president, only to have his best efforts blocked by an old man who would fail to see a threat if a gun were pointed directly at Lincoln’s head. Yet Rook knew that if he exploded in anger here, he would make a bad situation even worse. He resolved not to lose his temper.

“Tell me,” said Scott in a calmer voice, “what do you think you have learned from your surveillance of Grenier?”

Rook wondered if the general was giving him an opening. He described what he had learned: the discovery and pursuit of Davis and Stephens, the monitoring of Grenier, and the observation of her guests as they came and went from her home and moved around Washington. Scott listened to the report without interjecting.

When Rook was done, the general shook his head. “So you’re spending your time following people into bookstores?”

“The way to uncover a conspiracy is to track down every lead, even the ones that seem trivial.”

Scott shook his head and let out a deep sigh. “I ought to fire you for insubordination. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you must stop the surveillance immediately. Take the rest of the day off. Get some sleep and come back in the morning. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll let you keep your job.”

Clark opened his eyes when he heard the voices. They did not belong to Rook or Springfield, which meant that for the first time since he had started guarding the prisoners in the basement of the Treasury, someone else was approaching—many people, judging from the number of footsteps.

“They must be this way,” said one of the men he could not yet see. They were getting closer. This sounded bad.

Clark jumped out of the small cot in the hallway. There was not much to do on duty, so he had spent a lot of time napping. He was awake instantly, aware that he was posted to this place for a moment precisely like this one. The main threat did not come from the prisoners, who were safely locked up. It came from their discovery by others. Clark needed to prevent it.

“Over here,” said an officer as he turned into a corridor and spotted Clark, who saw that the officer was a colonel. Five soldiers followed behind him. “What are you doing down here, Corporal?”

His confident tone suggested that he already knew the answer to his own question. Clark nevertheless pointed to a pile of boxes in the hallway. “Trying to find some old records,” he said. “There’s supposed to be some information about the construction of the Treasury. It’s wanted for defensive information.”

“Is that so? Don’t you think this is a strange place to store such valuable documents?”

“I just do what I’m told, sir. They haven’t been found elsewhere.”

“Who sent you down here?”

“Colonel Rook.”

“Ah, yes. Well, Corporal, my name is Colonel Locke, and I’m down here in this godforsaken place to find something too. Do you know what I might be looking for?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you sure about that? I would hate for you to be in a position that requires you to lie to an officer. You may be interested to know that Colonel Rook is in an enormous amount of trouble.”

Clark swallowed hard.

“Why don’t you just tell me where they are?”

Clark realized that it was useless to maintain the ruse. “Come this way, sir,” he said, resigned to defeat. He led Locke and the other soldiers through a door that led to a short passage lined by several other doors. “They’re in here,” he said.

Locke pointed to a door. “Open it,” he said.

Clark removed a key from his pocket. Inside the small room, Davis sat in a corner.

Locke entered the room. “It’s your lucky day,” he said. “You’re free to go.”

After crossing the bridge into Maryland, Mazorca turned south on a dirt road that followed the course of the Potomac River as it flowed toward the Chesapeake Bay. He passed Fort Washington around the middle of the day. Just as Fort Sumter was supposed to protect Charleston from attack, Fort Washington was supposed to defend the capital city from enemy warships that sailed upriver. The entrance gate was closed, and there did not appear to be anybody inside the fort’s walls. The fort was not ready to defend anything.

A little to the south, a path broke off from the main road and tunneled through trees and bushes to the river. Mazorca stopped his horse and looked over his shoulder. He saw nobody. For a long minute he sat motionless, listening for the sound of anyone who approached. He heard nothing. Satisfied that he was alone, Mazorca followed the trail as it sloped down to a muddy shoreline. A small rowboat was pulled out of the brown water and tied to a tree.

Mazorca smiled. He had planned to spend the afternoon searching the riverside for a boat, and here was one in the first place he had looked. He dismounted his horse and examined the boat. Except for a couple of oars, it was empty. The boat was weather-beaten, but it looked seaworthy. It would suit his purposes well enough.

He scanned the river and saw a single ship about a mile downriver, headed away from him. There was no way anybody on board could spot him. Across the river sat a columned house. Even from a distance, Mazorca could see that its white paint was peeling. The roof needed shingling. A lawn in front was ragged and unkempt. Mazorca realized that this must be Mount Vernon. Its famous owner had been dead since 1799. It appeared as though nobody had taken care of the home in decades. Mazorca was not surprised to see it in a state of disrepair. In the city, Washington’s monument was incomplete. In the country, his old home was falling apart. This was how America honored its heroes. No wonder the young nation was coming undone.

Mazorca fixed his horse to a tree. Then he removed a saddlebag and placed it in the boat. Next he untied the rope that secured the small craft to the shore. He shoved the boat into the water and hopped inside. The oars slipped easily into their locks. Mazorca began rowing north, against the Potomac’s slow current. He stayed close to the shore—so close that a few low-hanging tree branches brushed his hat. After rowing for several hundred feet, Mazorca found a small break in the foliage.

Maneuvering toward it, he heard the boat scrape its bottom. Mazorca got out and pulled the boat from the water, dragging it onto the land until it was a dozen feet from the Potomac. Behind the trunk of a large tree, he turned the boat upside down and covered it with branches and leaves. Then he walked back to the shoreline and studied his work. It was just barely possible to make out the contours of the rowboat, but only because he knew it was there. A casual observer almost certainly would not see it.

Mazorca figured that if the boat’s owner bothered to hunt for his missing craft, he would assume either that it was stolen and long gone or that it had broken loose and drifted downriver. The possibility of it being both nearby and hauled onshore just a bit upriver probably would not occur to him. Yet it was now positioned perfectly for Mazorca, who wanted to make sure he could have free access to water in reasonably short order.

Mazorca removed his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and tossed the saddlebag over his shoulder. Then he splashed into the river and waded back to his horse. He was pleased to think that he was well ahead of schedule. There was one more thing he wanted to do before leaving Maryland.

A block from Tabard’s, Rook told Springfield about the drubbing he had just received from Scott. “I’d like to know how Grenier came to write to Scott about me and those men from the canal. We’ve been watching her, but it seems like she’s been watching us.”

“Am I supposed to quit monitoring this fellow?” asked the sergeant, gesturing in the direction of the boardinghouse.

“He ordered me to stop the surveillance of Grenier. That’s all.”

Springfield smirked. “I suspect you’re living by the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.”

“At the moment, the spirit is moving me to learn more about Grenier’s friend,” said Rook. “Tell me what you know.”

After his meeting with Rook, Springfield had walked over to Tabard’s boardinghouse. He observed it for a little while. He concluded that the tenants were at work and that Mrs. Tabard was alone.

“So I knocked on the door,” he said. “When she answered, I introduced myself as Mr. Jones and inquired about a room. She said that she had one available on the third floor and offered to show it to me. Once we had looked it over, we sat in her dining room and chatted for several minutes. I made some gentle inquiries about her boarders. Thankfully, she’s a talker. I’m convinced that our man goes by Mr. Mays—he’s a new lodger, with a room on the second floor. It’s right at the top of the steps. She was reluctant to say much about him, but I could tell that she actually craved the conversation. She allowed that Mays is quite private and keeps strange hours. Sometimes she’s not even sure whether he’s in or out.”

“Do we know where he is right now?”