The Chancellor Manuscript (8 page)

There was a spit, instantly followed by the quiet static of exploding electric filaments. The light went out.

He waited silently; there was no sound. In the darkness he opened the flap of the equipment case and slid out a metal cylinder eighteen inches long. It was the barrel of an odd-looking rifle. From another compartment he withdrew a heavy steel rod and attached it to the cylinder; at the end
was a curved brace. From a third pocket in the leather tool-case the driver extracted a twelve-inch infrared telescope that had been precision-tooled for the top of the cylinder; it was self-locking and once locked, accurate. Finally, the man reached into his jacket and pulled out the trigger-housing unit. He snapped it into the opening on the underside of the barrel and tested the silent bolt action; all was ready, only the ammunition remained.

Cradling the odd rifle in his left arm, he slid his right hand into his pocket and took out a steel dart, the flared end dipped in luminous paint. He inserted it into the chamber and slid the bolt back into place. The hammer was cocked, the rifle ready to fire.

His watch read ten forty-four; if the longstanding habit was going to be observed this night, he’d know it shortly. Suspended thirty-five feet above the ground, the man rebraced himself and tightened the safety strap until his body was pressed against the pole. He raised the rifle and jammed the curved brace into his shoulder.

He looked through the luminous green circle that was the sight and moved it carefully until he had the rear door of the director’s house clearly in view. In spite of the darkness, the picture was clear; the cross hairs of zero aim were focused directly on the steps of the entrance.

He waited. Minutes passed slowly. He stole a glance at the dial of his watch; it was ten fifty-three. He could not wait much longer; he had to return to the van to throw the switch.

Of all nights! Routine was not going to be observed!

Then he saw the porch light! The door opened; the driver felt a wave of relief.

Through his infrared scope the huge animal came into focus. It was Hoover’s enormous bull mastiff, rumored to be among the most vicious of dogs. It was said the director enjoyed the comparisons between the faces of master and animal.

The custom of years was being carried out. Every evening between ten forty-five and eleven Hoover or Annie Fields let the dog out to wander in the enclosed grounds of the residence, its waste picked up in the morning.

The door closed, the porch light remained on. The man on the pole moved his weapon with his quarry. The cross hairs were now on the animal’s enormous throat.

The driver squeezed the trigger; there was a slight
metallic click. Through the sight he could see the mastiff’s eyes widen in shock; the huge jaws sprang open, but no sound came.

The animal fell to the ground, narcotized.

A nondescript gray automobile coasted to a stop a hundred feet past the driveway of 4936 Thirtieth Street Place. A tall man in a dark suit got out of the passenger door and looked up and down the block. Near the grounds of the Peruvian embassador’s residence a woman walked a dalmatian. In the other direction, perhaps two hundred yards away, a couple were strolling up a path toward a lighted doorway.

Otherwise there was nothing.

The man looked at his watch and felt the small bulge in his coat pocket.

He had exactly half a minute, thirty seconds, and after that he would have precisely twenty seconds. He nodded to the driver and walked rapidly back toward the driveway, the crepe soles of his shoes noiseless on the pavement. He swung into the shadowed drive without breaking his stride, approached the door in the wall, and removed a small air pistol from his belt, shifting it to his left hand. The dart was in place; he hoped he would not have to use it.

He looked again at his watch. Eleven seconds; he would allow an additional three for safety. He checked the position of the key in his right hand.

Now
.

He inserted the key, turned the lock, opened the door, and entered the grounds, leaving the door open six inches. The huge dog was on the grass, its jaws slack, its enormous head pressed against the earth. The driver of the telephone van had done his job efficiently. He would remove the dart on his way out; there would be no trace of the narcotic in the morning. He returned the dart gun to his pocket.

He walked rapidly to the door on the first floor, his mind ticking off the seconds. He could see the intermittent dimming of lights throughout the house. By his estimate nine seconds remained as he inserted the second key.

The lock would not turn! The tumblers jammed. He manipulated the key furiously.

Four seconds, three …

His fingers—his surgeon’s fingers encased in surgical
gloves—delicately, swiftly maneuvered the jagged metal within the jagged orifice as if it were a scapel in flesh.

Two seconds, one …

It opened!

The tall man stepped inside, leaving this door, too, ajar.

He stood in the hallway and listened. The lights were steady again. There was the sound of a television set from the housekeeper’s room at the other side of the house. Upstairs the sounds were fainter but discernible; it was the eleven o’clock news. The doctor wondered briefly what tomorrow’s eleven o’clock news would be like. He wished he could be in Washington to hear it.

He crossed to the staircase and began to climb. At the top he stood in front of the door to the right of the staircase, in the center of the landing. The door that led to the man he had waited over two decades to see.

Waited in hatred. Deep hatred, never to be forgotten.

He turned the knob cautiously and opened the door. The director had dozed off, his enormous head angled down, the jowls falling over his thick neck. In his fat, feminine hands were the spectacles his vanity rarely allowed him to use to public.

The doctor went to the television set and turned it up so that the sound filled the room. He crossed back to the foot of the bed and stared down at the object of his loathing.

The director’s head snapped down, then abruptly up. His face was contorted.

“What?”

“Put on your glasses,” said the doctor above the noise of the television set.

“What’s this? Miss Gandy?… Who are you? You’re not—?” Shaking, Hoover put on his glasses.

“Look closely. It’s been twenty-two years.”

The bulging eyes within the folds of flesh beyond the lenses focused. The sight they saw caused their possessor to gasp. “You! How—?”

“Twenty-two years,” continued the doctor mechanically but loud enough to be heard above the sound of sirens and music from the television set. He reached into his pocket and took out a hypodermic needle. “I have a different name now. I practice in Paris, where my patients have
heard the stories but don’t concern themselves.
Le médecin américain
is considered one of the finest in the hospital—?”

Suddenly the director swung his arm out toward the night table. The doctor lunged forward at the side of the bed, pinning the soft wrist against the mattress. Hoover began to scream; the doctor jammed his elbow into the jowls, cutting off all sound. He raised the naked, trembling arm.

With his teeth the doctor took off the rubber tip of the needle. He plunged the hypodermic into the rubbery flesh of the exposed armpit.

“This is for my wife and my son. Everything you stole from me.”

The driver of the gray automobile turned in his seat, his eyes directed at the second-story windows of the house. The lights were extinguished for five seconds, then turned on again.

The unknown doctor had done his work; the release in the headboard had been found and activated. There were no seconds to be lost. The driver removed the microphone from the radio unit, pressed the button, and spoke.

“Phase One completed,” he said tersely in a pronounced British accent.

The office stretched for nearly forty feet. The large mahogany desk at one end was slightly elevated, facing low, overstuffed leather chairs, forcing visitors to raise their eyes to its occupant. Beyond the desk, obscuring the wall beyond, was a row of flags, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s banner sharing the center position with the nation’s.

Varak stood motionless in front of the desk, his eyes on the two telephones. One instrument had its receiver out of the cradle, the open line connected to a phone in the cellar of the building, to a man in the relay room where all alarms were controlled. The other phone was intact; it was an outside line that bypassed the bureau’s switchboard. There was no number printed on the circular tab in the middle of the dial.

The center drawer of the desk was open. Beside it stood a second man, the spill of the desk lamp illuminating his right hand, which was angled, palm up, in the open
space of the drawer. His fingers touched a small toggle switch recessed in the roof of the desk.

The telephone began to ring. Varak picked it up at the first hint of sound. He said one word quietly.

“Flags.”

“Phase One completed,” was the relayed reply over the line.

Varak nodded. The man in front of him snapped the unseen switch in his fingers.

Four stories below, in a concrete room, a third man watched a panel of dark squares built into the wall. He heard the whistle from the open telephone that lay within arm’s reach on the steel table beside him.

Suddenly a bell shattered the stillness of the enclosure. A red light in the center of the panel shone brightly.

The man pushed the square beneath the bright red light.

Silence.

A uniformed guard burst through the corridor door, his eyes wild.

“We’re testing,” said the man in front of the panel, calmly replacing the telephone. “I told you that.”

“Christ!”
exploded the guard, inhaling deeply. “You nightcrawlers will give me a heart attack.”

“Don’t let us do that,” said the man, smiling.

Varak watched Salter open the door of the closet beyond the flags and switch on the light inside. Both telephones were back in their cradles; there would be one more call. From Varak to Bravo.

Not Genesis. Genesis was dead.

The man was Bravo now. He would be told the job was done.

Several feet in front of the row of flags were two webbed metal baskets on wheels. They were a familiar sight in the bureau’s hallways, through which scores like them moved mountains of paper from one office to another. In a few minutes they would be filled with hundreds, perhaps several thousand, dossiers and taken downstairs past a senior agent named Parke to a waiting limousine. The files of John Edgar Hoover would be consigned to a blast furnace.

And a growing Fourth Reich would be crippled.

“Varak!
Quick!”

The shout came from the closet beyond the flags. Varak raced inside.

The steel vault was open, the locks on the cabinets sprung. The four drawers were pulled out.

The two drawers on the left were thick with papers, bulging. Files
A
through
L
were intact.

The two drawers on the right were empty. The metal dividers fell against each other, holding nothing.

Files
M
through
Z
were missing. One half of Hoover’s cabinets of filth was gone.

Chancellor lay in the hot sun and read the
Los Angeles Times
. The headlines seemed almost unreal, as if the event were not really possible, rooted somehow in fantasy.

The man at last was dead. J. Edgar Hoover had died insignificantly in his bed, the way millions of old men die. Without drama, without consequence. Just the failure of the heart to keep pace with the years. But with that death a relief swept over the country; it was apparent even in the newspaper copy reporting the death.

The statements issued by Congress and the administration were, as could be expected, sanctimonious and dripping with obsequious praise, but even in these well-chosen words the tears of the crocodiles could be clearly seen. The relief was everywhere.

Chancellor folded the paper and shoved it into the sand to anchor it. He did not want to read any more.

Far more to the point, he did not want to write, either. Oh, Christ! When would he want to? Would he ever want to? If there were such a thing as a Sybaritic vegetable, he would be it.

What made it ironic was that he was getting rich. Joshua Harris had called from New York a half hour ago to report that another payment had been made by the studio on schedule.

Peter was making a great deal of money for doing absolutely nothing. Since the episode with Sheffield’s wife he had not bothered to go to the studio or call anyone concerned with
Counterstrike!

Not to worry. You wrote a winner, sweetheart
.

So be it.

He raised his wrist and looked at his watch. It was almost eight thirty; the morning at Malibu had come quickly. The air was moist, the sun too bright, the sand already too hot. Slowly he got to his feet. He’d go inside and sit in an air-conditioned room and have a drink.

Why not? What was the old phrase?
I
never drink before five in the afternoon. Thank God, it’s five o’clock somewhere!

Was it past five—in the morning—back East? No, he always got that mixed up; it was the other way around. Back East it was barely eleven thirty.

The sky was overcast, the air heavy and oppressive. A steady, humid drizzle threatened to become a downpour. The crowds in the Capitol Plaza were quiet; muted chants of war resisters behind barricades intruded on the hum of the throngs, threatening, as the drizzle threatened, to grow louder as the rain grew louder.

Here and there an umbrella snapped; ribbed circles of black cloth sprung open, stretching over passive faces. Eyes were dull, resentful; expressions lifeless. The day was angry. There was an undercurrent of fear, the final legacy, perhaps, of the man whose body was being transported in the enormous hearse that was twenty-five minutes late arriving. Suddenly it was there, efficiently swinging off the tree-lined drive onto the concrete grounds of the plaza.