Program for a Puppet (19 page)

The Director stepped around to the front of the desk and quickly placed his gun and recorder back in the briefcase. He walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into the outer office. Giving a theatrical little wave to the dead MacGregor, he closed the door.

Nichols and the guard were standing, ready to show the stranger out.

As the Director walked out into the corridor, he turned and said angrily, “I wish your politicians would keep appointments! I shall be back to see him in one hour exactly.”

Nichols watched the stranger move toward the elevator. When he reached the side entrance, the Director resumed a leisurely pace past the four security men there. Assistant Security Chief Hallaway watched him go.

An hour later, Brad Nichols knocked on the senator's door. When there was no reply, he entered the office.

The department heads of the KGB sat in expectant silence in room 746 at their HQ, Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow, as their chairman, Nicoli Andropolov, put the telephone receiver down hard in its cradle.

“That was the coordinator of Cheetah supplies calling from Stuttgart,” he said to the ten people at the conference table, his moon face as vacuous as usual. “He assures me that the supplies of Cheetah will double next year. He is sending major suppliers here over the next few months to ensure they are aware of our requirements. If there are no unforeseen problems this is all very encouraging. Operation Ten is right on target.”

There were murmurs of assent from the others.

“Now let us consider item fifteen,” he said, adjusting his rimless spectacles and referring to an open folder. “Press reports on Operation Ten. The main problem seems to be this Australian journalist. Lasercomp is upset that we did not consult them about his liquidation.” He pressed an intercom button in front of him. “Send Comrade Bromovitch in.”

The deputy head of Department Four knocked and entered. Andropolov waved a hand at a seat at the other end of the table. All eyes turned to Bromovitch as he took his seat slightly self-consciously. Despite his apparent bungling of the attempt to eliminate the Australian journalist, everyone in the room held him in high regard. His reputation had been high ever since he had recently tracked down a top enemy agent from British Intelligence code-named Steven.

“Now, comrade, what is your report on Mr. Graham?”

“We have had some trouble locating him,” the assassin said, shifting in his seat nervously. “He is not living in his apartment.”

“Is he an agent?”

“It is highly likely. We are at present analyzing documents microfilmed in his apartment.”

“How much does this man know?” asked General Gerovan, the sixty-seven-year-old KGB chief of Soviet military services.

“You have been briefed on what he learned in Vienna. We are still assessing his knowledge. Personally I think it is now more than enough to justify neutralizing him.”

Andropolov took off his spectacles.

“We have agreed with Lasercomp not to do this until we see how he responds to their attempts to turn him off the investigation.”

Bromovitch opened a file. There were several photographs of Graham taken in London.

“But, comrades, how long can this man roam free?” Bromovitch said. “Apart from his contacts, he has murdered one of our operatives in Austria. He is a deadly enemy of the state and our people!”

He looked around the table for support, but no eyes met his. They were all embarrassed by this quaint outburst of patriotic jargon.

While Bromovitch had been speaking, Andropolov was gazing at a portrait of Lenin staring down from the back of the room. Now the KGB focused on the assassin.

“We appreciate your enthusiasm in this case. But we all must appreciate the situation. Lasercomp is concerned that neutralizing this man may focus too much attention on Operation Ten, especially now he seems to be cooperating with the U.S. Government. I have just spoken to the main Western coordinator of supplies. We don't want anything to stop the flow of machines here.”

Bromovitch stared at the KGB chief, who added, “Now, comrade, should this journalist fail to cooperate with Lasercomp, or should he give us any more trouble, then he will be liquidated.”

Bromovitch nodded.

Andropolov looked at his watch and dismissed the assassin. “That covers item fifteen.” the KGB chief said. “Could we now look at item sixteen, Professor Letovsky's report on progress at IOSWOP…”

Bromovitch left the meeting. To him item fifteen was still wide open.

President Rickard directed that the FBI should take charge
of the investigation into MacGregor's assassination. The local police and the rest of the nation's law enforcement agencies coordinated their efforts in the biggest manhunt in Washington's history. FBI chief James Dent first ordered that the city should be tipped upside down and shaken.

In the early hours of the morning of Friday, September 26, every Washington hotel from the smartest and most expensive to the sleaziest whorehouse was checked. Bars, nightclubs, restaurants, cabarets and cafés were haunted by every available cop and volunteer, who described the assassin to waiters, barmen and bouncers.

The home or hangout of every known political activist, from the most juvenile student Trotskyite to the local lobbyists for the Ku Klux Klan, was raided and turned over. There were arrests of people with everything from a German accent to a speech impediment, on the advice from one of the guards who described the assassin's accent as “not American and kinda funny.” Those arrested were kept in custody for hours, and only released the next day, often without apology. Anyone in the street was picked up. Roadblocks appeared on all major access points to Washington and all transport out of the city was halted for twelve hours.

In the Washington underground, every Mafia mover and shaker and black leader was at work slipping through the haunts of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, thieves, pickpockets, hoodlums and con men. The city was alive all night, because a man was dead.

The world watched a nation once more in agony and confusion, via the naked all-pervasive eye of satellite television. The cameras caught it all.

On the lawn outside the Old Senate Building, MacGregor's assistant chief of security, Mick Hallaway, told his version of events with thirty microphones pushed under his nose.

“I saw this film director go out of the building, and I thought to myself, ‘He wasn't with … the … the … Senator long …'”

“But why didn't you check him properly in the first place?”

“Why didn't you stop him on the way out?”

“Why? Why? Why?”

On Delaware Avenue an ambulance arrived for MacGregor's wife, Judith. Bedraggled and hysterical, she had collapsed
after seeing the crumpled body with two-thirds of the brain shattered.

Across the road at the Capitol, thousands of people gathered after hearing the assassination on late-night television.

Washington's ABC, NBC, CBS and FBS morning news programs told America two salient facts that had become highly embellished. Senator MacGregor had been assassinated. The assassin had not been caught. Most of the coverages included speculation and repetitive comment from leading politicians, and others, including the Vice-President, and several spokesmen for the dead candidate's party, including Paul Mineva. When asked who would now be the new nominee, he denied he would seek the nomination, telling interviewers indignantly that this was a “tragic” time. Not the moment to speculate on who would take Ronald MacGregor's place.

By midmorning the assassination squad was airborne from a field in southeast Florida. Each member of the squad had been met by a woman and driven to a place close to the field. The run had taken a leisurely eight hours and the couples had acted like holidaymakers fleeing the cold that was beginning to creep over the rest of the country. There were a few anxious moments with police patrols, and especially for Rodriguez's car, which had been stopped a hundred miles out of Florida. The police had found all they would expect from innocents heading to the Florida coast, including beach gear and golf clubs in the trunk.

Rodriguez had been supplied with a false driver's license and insurance details. His cool manner in the crisis covered for the woman driver, who had nearly panicked. Each woman had been told very little about her assignment except that each would earn $2,500 in cash on completion.

The nation had been alerted quickly to the assassin's act, but there were limits to the coordinated mobilization to round up the killers. One was the use of radar to track unspecified planes leaving the country. This allowed the two-engine private jet carrying the squad to avoid detection as it flew as low as possible to Cuba.

It wasn't until six days later that a group of hikers stumbled on three camouflaged cars in scrubland about a mile from the field. In each was the body of a woman with a neat bullet hole through the temple.

It did not take the FBI long to piece together the background to the assassination.

The most important evidence had come from MacGregor's own closest aides, especially Lionel Bannerman, his gangling six-foot, five-inch campaign chairman. Ever since MacGregor had won the nomination, his office had been inundated with requests from foreign media, not to mention myriad local requests, for interviews. Bannerman produced a list of ninety-nine approaches from foreign film companies, and 456 from foreign journalists. He had tried to group interviews every second Saturday afternoon, wherever MacGregor might be campaigning. Many, however, asked for exclusives.

One such group that intermittently kept in touch was Krupper Films of Munich, West Germany. A man calling himself Wolfgang Himmel, and purporting to be a Krupper representative, visited MacGregor's offices six times. He agreed to join ten other film crews one afternoon if Krupper was allowed an earlier ten-minute sound interview only with MacGregor. Himmel had explained that his Krupper film group planned to have many of their questions “voice-over” while film would show various MacGregor shots on the campaign trail. The sound interview had been arranged for Thursday, September 25, at 8:00
P.M
. and it was agreed that a Heinrich Sneller, who, it was claimed, was a leading producer/director with Krupper, would meet MacGregor at the Old Senate Building.

Bannerman had been able to produce the only two pieces of written communication between the MacGregor offices and Krupper Films sent on official Krupper letterhead paper. All other communications had been by personal contact, or telephone from inside America, and from France and West Germany. Bannerman had asked an aide to check out every organization that had contacted the office, a most tedious task assigned to a young girl undergraduate who was helping the MacGregor campaign for practically nothing. She confirmed that Krupper Films had a crew in the U.S. for three months from August. But she had not asked the reasons for the crew's visit. If the girl had taken that one little step, the bona fide Krupper would have told her that their crew was filming a special documentary: on sharks in the Pacific.

Identikit composites of the assassin and “Himmel” were flashed across the U.S. and around the world. President Rickard
stepped in for the second time and directed that the FBI work in conjunction with the CIA, but FBI Director Dent would maintain overall control unless there were international developments in the hunt. It soon became rumored that a foreign-based squad could have been responsible.

This added fuel to speculation in the media. Some argued that the assassination had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. The President was castigated for bringing in the CIA at all, and so early. Other papers and magazines, such as
U.S. News & World Report
, postulated that only the KGB could be behind such a professional effort. But they were hard put to explain the motivation. If anything, the U.S.S.R. would be better off with MacGregor, who seemed to be promising a softer line on foreign policy than the incumbent. Others looked for still more obscure political groups with grievances against MacGregor.

His every word on foreign and domestic policy was put through an exhaustive sieve. Was he pro-Israel or pro-Arab? What were his views on Africa? And Southeast Asia? Himmel was described as looking Spanish, and could have been South American. Which way did MacGregor saddle up in that part of the world? Still others started by asking, “Who stood to lose most with MacGregor as President?” or, “Who stood to gain most by having Rickard remain in power?”

Analysis led to innuendo. And it spared no one. Not even the President of the United States himself.

Graham's tour flew out of Kiev on Thursday afternoon, bound for the ancient Ukrainian city of Poltava for a twenty-four-hour stay, and then on to Leningrad. They arrived midafternoon, and Graham found that after checking in at the Soveyetsky Hotel he had a few hours to kill before a night at the Kirov Ballet.

He took a taxi to the Nevsky Prospect, Leningrad's main street. The autumn afternoon air was brisk, and despite the sun, many Russians were already wearing overcoats and fur-lined hats.

Graham sauntered toward the gilded steeple of the Russian Admiralty facing the Neva River, and stopped occasionally to photograph the blended styles of the prospect's austere classical façades alternated with baroque statuary. He found that every time he stopped, the young street merchants and illegal money-changers surrounded him. Just as in Kiev, they wanted to buy every item on him from sunglasses to shoes. He refused the offers of rubles for his clothes or his foreign currency and had to keep moving to avoid a crowd building up.

When he had almost reached the Hermitage, the former entrance to the Winter Palace of the czars, he crossed the prospect and walked back.

At the Griboyedov Canal running at right angles to and under the prospect, the silhouette of a multidomed structure caught his eye. He squinted into the sun and moved closer along the side of the canal to get a better view. It was the church of the Savior-on-the-Spilled-Blood, which was under repair. Scaffolding wound halfway around the front façade. Graham crossed a small footbridge which drew him up close to the church, and began to
take snapshots. A woman came into view about fifty yards past the church, heading in his direction.