The Chancellor Manuscript (6 page)

He could not stop now. He could not allow the pain to interfere. Goddamn it!

“Oh, Pete, you’re something. Oh, Christ, you’re the fucker of all
time
! Come on, lamb! Now!
Now!”

The girl’s whole body began to writhe. Her whispers now bordered on shouts.

“Oh,
Jesus
! Jesus
Christ
! You’re driving me crazy, lover! You’re the best there ever was! There was never anyone like you!… Oh, my! Oh, my
God
!”

He exploded inside her, draining himself; his body limp, the ache in his temples receding. At least he was good for
something
. He had aroused her, made her want him.

And then he heard her voice, all professionalism.

“There, lamb. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

He looked at her. Her expression was that of a well-applauded performer. Her eyes were plastic death.

“I owe you,” he said softly, coldly.

“No, you don’t.” She laughed. “I don’t take money from you. He pays me plenty.”

Chancellor remembered everything. The party, the argument, the drunken trip from Beverly Hills, his anger on the telephone.

Aaron Sheffield, motion-picture producer, owner of
Counterstrike!

Sheffield had been at the party, his young wife in tow. In fact, it was Sheffield who had called him, asking him to come along. There was no reason not to accept, and there was a very good reason to do so: His elusive coauthor of the
Counterstrike!
screenplay was the host.

Not to worry. You wrote a winner, sweetheart
.

But last night there was something to worry about. They wanted to tell him in pleasant surroundings. More than pleasant. Quite a bit more.

The studio had received several “very serious” calls from Washington about the filming of
Counterstrike!
It was pointed out that there was a major error in the book:
The Central Intelligence Agency did not operate domestically. It did not involve itself in operations within the borders of the United States. The CIA’s 1947 charter had specifically prohibited this. Therefore, Aaron Sheffield had agreed to change that aspect of the script. Chancellor’s CIA would become an elite corps of disaffected former intelligence specialists acting outside government channels.

What the hell
, Aaron Sheffield had said.
It’s better dramatically. We got two types of villains, and Washington’s happy
.

But Chancellor was furious. He knew what he was talking about. He had spoken with truly disaffected men who had worked for the agency and was appalled at what they had been called upon to do. Appalled because it was illegal and appalled because there were no alternatives. A maniac named J. Edgar Hoover had severed all intelligence conduits between the FBI and the CIA. The men of the CIA themselves would have to go after the domestic information withheld from them. Who were they going to complain to? Mitchell? Nixon?

Most of whatever power
Counterstrike!
had was in the specific use of the agency. To eliminate it was to vitiate a great part of the book. Peter had objected strenuously, and the more angry he became, the more, it seemed, he drank. And the more he drank, the more provocative had the girl beside him become.

Sheffield had driven them home. Peter and the girl were in the backseat, her skirt above her waist, her blouse unbuttoned, her enormous breasts exposed in racing shadows driving him wild. Drunken wild.

And they’d gone inside together while Sheffield drove off. The girl had brought two bottles of Pernod, a gift from Aaron, and the games began in earnest. Wild games, drunken, naked games.

Until the shooting pains in his skull stopped him, providing a few moments of clarity. He had lurched for the telephone, thumbed insanely through his notes on the bedside table for Sheffield’s number, and punched the buttons furiously.

He had roared at Sheffield, calling him every obscenity he could think of, screaming his objections—and his guilt—at having been manipulated. There’d be
no
changes in
Counterstrike!

As he lay there on the bed, the blond girl beside him, Chancellor remembered Sheffield’s words over the phone.

“Easy, kid. What difference does it make to you? You don’t have script approval. We were just being polite. Get down from your sky-high perch. You’re just a lousy little homemaker-fucker like the rest of us.”

The blond girl beside Peter on the bed was Sheffield’s wife.

Chancellor turned to her. The vacuous eyes were brighter, but still dead. The mouth opened, and an experienced tongue slid sensuously out and then back and forth, conveying an unmistakable message.

The well-applauded performer was ready to perform again.

Who gave a shit? He reached for her.

The man whose face was among the most recognized in the nation sat alone at table ten in the Mayflower Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue. The table was by a window, and the occupant kept glancing through the glass absently, but not without a certain vague hostility, at the passersby on the street.

He had arrived at precisely eleven thirty-five; he would finish his lunch and depart at twelve-forty. It had been an unbroken custom for over twenty years. The hour and five minutes was the custom, not the Mayflower. The Mayflower was a recent change, since the closing of Harvey’s, several blocks away.

The face, with its enormous jaws, drawn-out mouth, and partially thyroid eyes, had disintegrated. The jaws were sagging jowls; creased, blemished flesh overlapped the slits that had been eyes; the touched-up strands of hair attested to the ferocious ego that was intrinsic to the aggressively negative expression.

His usual companion was not in evidence. Declining
health and two strokes prevented his elegantly dressed presence. The soft, pampered face—struggling for masculinity—had for decades been the flower to the bristled cactus. The man about to have lunch looked across the table as if he expected to see his attractive alter ego. That he saw no one seemed to trigger a periodic tremor in his fingers and a recurrent twitching of his mouth. He seemed enveloped in loneliness; his eyes darted about, alert to real and imagined ills surrounding him.

A favorite waiter was indisposed for the day; it was a personal affront. He let it be known.

Fruit salad with a dome of cottage cheese in the center was marked for table ten. It was processed from the open, stainless steel shelf in the kitchen to the service counter. The blond-haired second assistant chef, temporarily employed, marked off the various trays, appraising their appearance with a practiced eye. He stood over table ten’s fruit salad, a clipboard in his hand, his gaze directed at the trays in front of it.

Underneath the clipboard a pair of thin silver tongs were held horizontally. In the tongs’ teeth was a soft white capsule. The blond-haired man smiled at a harassed waiter coming through the dining-room door; at the same moment he plunged the silver tongs into the mound of cottage cheese beneath the clipboard, removed them, and moved on.

Seconds later he returned to the order for table ten, shook his head, and touched up the dome of cottage cheese with a fork.

Within the inserted capsule was a mild dose of lysergic acid diethylamide. The capsule would disintegrate and release the narcotic some seven to eight hours after the moment of ingestion.

The minor stress and the disorientation that resulted would be enough. There would be no traces in the bloodstream at the time of death.

The middle-aged woman sat in a windowless room. She listened to the voice coming out of the wall speakers, then repeated the words into the microphone of a tape machine. Her objective was to duplicate as closely as possible the now familiar voice from the speakers. Every sliding
tone, every nuance, the idiosyncratic short pauses that followed the partially sibilant
s’
s.

The voice coming from the speakers was that of Helen Gandy, for years the personal secretary of John Edgar Hoover.

In the corner of the small studio stood two suitcases. Both were fully packed. In four hours the woman and the suitcases would be on a transatlantic flight bound for Zurich. It was the first leg of a trip that would eventually take her south to the Balearic Islands and a house on the sea in Majorca. But first there was Zurich, where the Staats-Banque would pay upon signature a negotiated sum into Barclays, which would in turn transfer the amount in two payments to an account at its branch in Palma. The first payment would be made immediately, the second in eighteen months.

Varak had hired her. He believed that for every job there was a correct, skilled applicant. The computerized data banks at the National Security Council had been programed in secret, by Varak alone, until they produced the applicant he sought.

She was a widow, a former radio actress. She and her husband had been caught in the crosscurrents of the Red Channels madness of 1954 and had never recovered. It was a madness sanctioned and aided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her husband, considered by many to have been a major talent, did not work for seven years. At the end of that time, his heart had burst in anguish. He had died in a subway station on his way to a clerical job at a downtown bank. By now the woman had been finished professionally for eighteen years; the pain and the rejection and the loneliness had robbed her of the ability to compete.

There was no competition now. She was not told why she was doing what she was doing. Only that her brief conversation had to result in a “yes” on the other end of the line.

The recipient of the call was a man the woman loathed with all her being. A basic accessory to the madness that had stolen her life.

It was shortly past nine in the evening, and the telephone truck was not an uncommon sight on Thirtieth Street Place in northwest Washington. The short street was
a cul-de-sac, ending with the imposing gates of the Peruvian embassador’s residence, the national shield prominently displayed on the stone pillars. Two thirds of the way down the block, on the left, was the faded red brick house belonging to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One or both residences were continuously upgrading communications facilities.

And every once in a while unmarked vans patrolled the area, antennas protruding from their roofs. It was said that John Edgar Hoover ordered such patrols to check out any unwanted electronic surveillance that might have been planted there by inimical foreign governments.

Frequently complaints were registered with the State Department by the Peruvian ambassador. It was embarrassing; there wasn’t anything State could do about the situation. Hoover’s private life was an extension of his professional barony.

Peru wasn’t very important anyway.

The telephone truck drove down the street, made a U-turn, and retraced its route back to Thirtieth Street, where it turned right for fifty yards, then right again into a row of garages. At the end of the garage complex was a stone wall that bordered the rear grounds of 4936 Thirtieth Street Place, Hoover’s residence. Above and beyond the garages were other houses with windows overlooking the Hoover property. The man in the telephone truck knew that in one of those windows was an agent from the bureau, one of a team assigned to twenty-four-hour surveillance. The teams were secret and were rotated every week.

The driver of the truck was also aware that whoever was in one of those windows beyond the garage would place a routine call to a special number at the telephone company. The inquiry would be simple, asked above a strange hum on the line: What was the problem that brought a repair truck into the area at that hour?

The operator would check her call sheet and reply with the truth as it had been given to her.

There was a short in a junction box. Suspect: an inquisitive squirrel invading rotted insulation. The damage was responsible for the noticeable buzz on the line. Didn’t the caller hear it?

Yes, he heard it.

Varak had learned years ago, in his early days with the
National Security Council, never to give too simple an answer to questions raised by area surveillance. It would not be accepted, anymore than an overly complicated one would be accepted. There was always a middle ground.

The high-frequency radio phone in the truck hummed: a signal. An inquiring call had been made to the telephone company by an alert FBI man. The driver stopped the small van, once more turned around, and drove thirty-five yards back to the telephone pole. His sightlines to the residence were clear. He parked and waited, blueprints spread on the front seat as if he were studying them.

Agents often took late-night walks in the vicinity. All contingencies had to be covered.

The telephone truck was now eighty yards northwest of 4936 Thirtieth Street Place. The driver left his seat, crawled back into the rear of the van, and switched on his equipment. He had precisely forty-six minutes to wait During that time he had to lock in on the flows of current being received in Hoover’s residence. The heavier loads defined the circuits of the alarm system; the lesser ones were lights and radios and television sets. Defining the alarm system was crucial, but no less important was the knowledge that current was being used in the lower right area. It meant that electrical units were switched on in the maid’s room. It was vital to know that. Annie Fields, Hoover’s personal housekeeper for as long as anyone could remember, was there for the night.

The limousine made a right turn off Pennsylvania Avenue into Tenth Street and slowed down in front of the far west entrance to the FBI. The limousine was identical to the one that daily brought the director to his offices—even to the slightly dented chrome bumper Hoover had left as it was, a reminder to the chauffeur, James Crawford, of the man’s carelessness. It was not, of course, the same car; that particular vehicle was guarded night and day. But no one, not even Crawford, could have told the difference.

The driver spoke the proper words into the dashboard microphone, and the huge steel doors of the entrance parted. The night guard saluted as the limousine passed through the concrete structure, with its three succeeding concrete doorways, into the small circular drive. A second Justice Department guard leaped out of the south entranceway,
reached for the handle of the right rear door, and pulled it open.