The Patriots Club (26 page)

45

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Feel free to give a call though, anytime. Really.”

“Thanks anyway.” Jenny closed the door of Professor Mahmoud Basrani’s office, walked down the hall, and collapsed onto the nearest chair. In the space of an hour, she’d visited two professors of American history, an associate professor of government, and a lecturer in sociology. Their reactions had run the spectrum from bewildered to bemused, but in the end, their responses were identical. None had the scantest notion what she was talking about. The search was over before it had even begun. Walsh had been right. It was time to sign up for Conspiracy 101.

Jenny felt tears welling up. She’d hardly begun to look for the club and already she felt defeated.
But it’s real,
she’d wanted to scream.
They shot me. Do you want to see? How much more real can it get than that?

A wave of fatigue swept over her and she wanted to go to sleep. Her shoulder was killing her, she was eight weeks pregnant, and she had absolutely nowhere to go, and no one she could turn to without risking dragging them into this mess as well. Worst of all, the father of her child, and the man she truly loved, was running for his life, and she couldn’t do a thing to help him. She slumped further into the seat, trying to find a spark, something that would light a fire inside her.

“You’re Jennifer?”

Jenny looked up to find a thin, red-haired girl hardly out of her teens bent over her. A nod was all she could manage.

“I’m Peg Kirk. Professor Walsh’s T.A. Harry told me that you’d visited him a little earlier. We talked about what you’d asked him.”

“About my ‘club’?” Jenny said, only half-facetiously. “I know it sounds stupid. I just thought that someone around here might be able to shed some light on it.”

“No,” said Peg earnestly. “It’s not stupid at all.”

Jenny looked at the slight girl, her plain face illuminated by a wide, believing smile and blue eyes that shone with enthusiasm. She was dressed in beat-up jeans and a baggy sweatshirt.
A student,
she thought.
A believer. God help me, I was like that once, too.
“Thanks, but I know when I’m beat.”

Peg dropped into the next seat. “Don’t let them get you down. They’re all a bunch of fuddy-duddies. They only know what they read. None of them go in for alternate history.”

“Alternate history?”

“You know . . . what might have been. Or as we prefer to say, ‘what really was,’ and has been papered over, hushed up, or just plain covered up since.”

“And you do?”

Peg shrugged. “Actually, I’m not sure yet. But between you and me, it’s the only area that’s still out there for the examining. Everything else has been written to death. The Founding Fathers, the Civil War, Manifest Destiny. You can forget the twentieth century. It’s all been done. I’ve got to read between the lines and ask, ‘What if?’ ”

“Have I got a story for you,” said Jenny, shaking her head.

“Not for me,” said Peg. “For Simon. He’s who you’re looking for.
Scientia est potentia.
He’ll love that.”

“Simon? Is he a friend of yours?”

“Simon Bonny? God no. Not a friend. I, like, worship him. He’s a teacher. Head of the department at the University of Glasgow. He’s a searcher. He looks in dark corners for the truth.”

Cue the
X-Files
theme, thought Jenny. Next stop: the Bermuda Triangle. “Glasgow,” she said, smiling ruefully. “Well, that’s a help at least.”

“No, silly,” Peg protested. “He’s not in Glasgow now. He’s here at Columbia. Professor Bonny’s teaching the freshman survey class this semester. He’s exactly who you need to speak with.”

“And he knows about the club . . . this Professor Bonny?”

Peg bunched her shoulders. “If anyone does, it’s him. And you know what else?” She motioned Jenny close. “He knows who really killed JFK.”

The Old Scotland pub was dark and woody with the smell of day-old beer hanging in the air and plenty of corners she wouldn’t dare set foot in. Simon Bonny stood at the rail of the bar, a pint of beer in front of him, an unlit cigarette resting in the ashtray. “You’re Jenny?”

“Professor Bonny?” Jenny extended a hand. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Not to worry,” said Bonny. “As you can see, the waiting room’s not exactly crowded.”

He was a tall string bean, dressed in blue jeans, a wrinkled button- down, and a tweed jacket. He was pale and anxious with slits for eyes, a fidgeting mouth, and a bobbing Adam’s apple. Scotland’s answer to Ichabod Crane. “Your call whetted my appetite. A club of influential gentlemen founded two hundred years ago. Governing without the consent of the people.
Scientia est potentia.
‘Knowledge is power.’ Fascinating, indeed.”

For once, some excitement. Jenny found his interest refreshing. “Really? Does it ring a bell?”

“Maybe,” said Bonny stuffily. “First, let me tell you that I gave Harry Walsh a jingle. Had to check your bona fides. Hope you don’t mind. He said you seemed a little rattled. He was rather worried about you. Any reason for that?”

“No, no.” Jenny lowered her head and laughed, as if upset with herself. “I’ve just been doing some reading. Professor Walsh . . . uh, Harry . . . was my advisor when I was a student here. I thought he might be able to help me out.”

“Decent chap, but he never read a source he didn’t believe. Takes everything as given. That’s the problem, you know. History’s written by the victors. If you want to really know what’s going on, you have to study the losers . . . how they might have construed things . . . search for any nuggets that give you their side of the story.”

“And that’s what you do?”

“I, madam, am the patron saint of losers,” said Simon Bonny proudly, punctuating his declaration with a long draft of beer. “Anyway, where were we?
Scientia est potentia.
That’s the key.” He sniffed and rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Talleyrand,” he said.

“What?”

“Not ‘what.’
Who.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. Just Talleyrand. Foreign minister to Napoloen. Cheat. Scoundrel. Visionary. Patriot. Interesting bloke.”

“What about him?”

“Good friend of Alexander Hamilton’s, actually. They palled around together in 1794. He’d come to Philadelphia to get away from Robespierre and ‘the Terror.’ A minor event called the French Revolution.”

Oh no,
thought Jenny.
A pedant without a leash.
“And this has what to do with the club exactly?”

“Wait, darling. You see, Hamilton and Talleyrand were best buddies. They were both realists, interested in the effective exercise of power. Sneaky little shits, really. But smart, dear. Really fucking smart. Napoleon called Talleyrand ‘shit in a silk stocking,’ while Thomas Jefferson called Hamilton ‘an evil colossus who must be stopped at the first instance.’ When Talleyrand returned to France, the two kept up a correspondence. It’s all in my book.
Shadow Monarch: Hamilton from 1790 to 1800.
”

“I apologize, Professor, but I missed it. My reading’s more toward Jane Austen these days.”

“Whose isn’t?” Bonny dismissed her apology with a good-natured laugh, surprising her. “Be out in paperback next year in the spring. I’m sure you won’t miss it a second time.”

Jenny knew he was trying to be funny, but she could barely bring herself to smile, let alone laugh. Her shoulder throbbed with a vengeance, and she was very much regretting her decision to turn down any pain medication.

“Back to these letters,” said Bonny, coming closer so that his narrow green eyes held hers. “You see, Hamilton is very explicit about going to private—read ‘secret’—meetings in the Long Room at Fraunces Tavern in New York, and the City Tavern in Philadelphia. All the big guns were there: George Washington, John Jay, Robert Morris, and later, Monroe, Madison, and Pendleton.”

“I don’t know a Pendleton.”

“Nathaniel Pendleton. Friend of Hamilton’s. Lawyer and judge. Served as Hamilton’s second at the duel of the century. Hamilton v. Burr.”

“Got it.”

“The meetings took place at the stroke of midnight. First, a prayer was spoken, always Washington’s favorite, which he had invoked at Valley Forge. No drinking was permitted. No cursing. No tobacco. The meetings were gravely serious and often lasted until morning. Afterward, Washington would lead everyone to a dawn service at St. Paul’s Chapel, just as he’d led the members of his cabinet there after his first inauguration.”

“What did they discuss?”

“Hamilton never said exactly—he was too wily a fox for that—but I have my suspicions. He hinted to Talleyrand that the meetings were to come up with ways to help General Washington, then President, circumvent the legislature, or, as was equally the case, to more quickly put into effect what they would vote for six months hence.”

Jenny wasn’t buying it. “This is the same Hamilton who helped write the Constitution and the Federalist Papers? He created Congress. Why in the world would he want to rob it of its power?”

“Made a mistake, didn’t he?” Bonny took a breath and looked around the pub, searching every corner as if needing to find a place to begin. “It’s 1793. Everywhere Hamilton looked, he saw the country falling apart. Too many parochial interests. Every man for himself. The farmers in Pennsylvania wanted one thing, the bankers in New York something else altogether. Hamilton favored a large country. In fact, he was one of the first who saw all lands west to the Pacific as being America’s natural boundary. But the republic was hamstrung. Paralyzed by conflicting interests. All for want of a strong executive able to act decisively without the belabored approval of Congress. ‘Your people, sir, are a beast,’ he wrote in a letter once. He didn’t refute the idea that every man should have a vote, but he wanted something done to lessen the House and Senate’s ability to restrict the ‘Chief Magistrate’ from acting as he saw fit. Jefferson called him a monocrat. Half monarchist, half democrat.”

“But Hamilton didn’t really want a king. He hated the monarchy.”

“To an extent, that’s true. But his words argue the opposite. ‘All communities divide themselves into the few and the many,’ he said to Talleyrand. ‘The first are rich and well-born, then the mass of the people. The people are turbulent and changing. They seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.’ The ‘permanent share’ he envisioned was the presidency. In his opinion, four years was too short a term. He preferred ten years. If not a monarch, then, a monarch in all but name.”

“But what did they do . . . Washington and Hamilton and all them? You said you had your suspicions.”

“They killed someone, didn’t they?”

Jenny reacted skeptically. “Are you sure they didn’t just sit around the table and talk?”

“Oh, there was plenty of talk. No doubt about that. But remember who we’re dealing with. These gents were soldiers used to spilling blood. Not an armchair general in the lot. Hamilton had two horses shot out from under him at the Battle of Monmouth, rode the third until it collapsed from exhaustion. Washington took his charger up and down the lines exposing himself to hellacious fire too many times to count. These were men on speaking terms with death.”

“Who was it?”

“A rogue. An upstart. Someone threatening the very life of the republic. Therefore an enemy. Do you remember the Jay Treaty?”

“Vaguely. Some kind of agreement that kept us out of war with Britain.”

“Precisely. Without the treaty, war was inevitable . . . and if war, the breakup of the states. At the time, you Yanks were much too weak to take on Britain again. You would have had your bottoms soundly thwacked. The country couldn’t have survived it. There would have been a division along the same lines of the Civil War. North versus South. Hamilton knew it. The Jay Treaty’s the most important piece of paper no one knows about.”

“Do you have a name?”

“That’s my secret. Subject of my next book.”

Jenny shook her head skeptically, then winced at a sudden stab of pain.

“What’s the matter with your shoulder?” Bonny asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re coddling it,” said Bonny, reaching a hand toward her.

Jenny turned away, a reflex. “Watch it.”

“What is it, then?” Bonny asked again.

“I was shot.”

Bonny sighed, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. He took a swig of beer, then said, “I’m not kidding, Miss Dance. Really . . .”

“Someone took a shot at me three hours ago with a high-powered rifle. The doctor said he thought it was a thirty-aught-six. Actually, the bullet only grazed me, but it hurts like . . .”

“You’re serious?” he said, setting the glass on the counter.

“Yes, I’m serious.”

“Gracious me,” exclaimed Simon Bonny. Suddenly, he was blinking uncontrollably, his lower lip moving as if he were talking to himself. Then he shuddered, and both the blinking and the lip thing stopped. “What in the name of Jehovah are you doing here, then?”

“Trying to find out who it was before they take another one. I don’t figure them as the types to miss twice.” Jenny pointed to his glass. “Mind if I have a sip?”

“Christ, have a whole one. Better yet, have a scotch. On me.”

“I can’t. I’m expecting.”

“My, but they’re coming fast and furious today.” Bonny put the cigarette in his mouth, took a faux drag, then replaced it in the ashtray. “Go on, then.”

“How much do you want to know?”

Bonny very carefully looked over either shoulder, then drew near Jenny. “I know who sent the anthrax to the Senate building,” he whispered, with a nod to show he meant it. “Try me.”

46

Jenny set her purse on the bar and climbed onto a stool. “It began last night,” she said. “Two men mugged me and my boyfriend downtown, near Wall Street.”

“Been quite a day,” said Simon Bonny.

Jenny nodded and went on to recount the events of the past fifteen hours. She left nothing out—not Thomas being questioned by Guilfoyle about Crown and Bobby Stillman, her abduction from school that morning, and being grazed by an assassin’s bullet in Union Square Park—right up to the point where a man impersonating her brother had tried to bypass hospital security. “I don’t think he wanted to bring me a get-well card.”

“Indeed,” said Simon Bonny. “Yes, then . . . you’re in some trouble, aren’t you?”

“If you’d like to leave now, I understand. I don’t want to involve you in something you don’t—”

“No, no. Can’t leave. You’re the real thing, aren’t you? A victim with a capital
V
. So,
Scientia est potentia
. This Stillman woman told you that was their motto, did she? That’s the key, you know. It’s what Hamilton said, too. One of his favorites. But why, Jennifer? Why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff? Why are they after your boyfriend? What does he do?”

“He’s an investment banker. He works at Harrington Weiss handling the big private equity firms like Atlantic, Whitestone, and Jefferson. He pals around with billionaires, flies on private jets to Aspen, tries to convince them to buy a company and let HW do the deal.”

“Ever screw any of ’em over?”

“Thomas? Never. He’s the last honest man. He says the whole thing is a mistake.”

Bonny pursed his lips and shook his head, letting her know it was no mistake. “Any of the firms associated with the government? Tied in with the CIA, maybe?”

“God no. They’re strictly private sector. Major profit motive. Scotch Nat’s the greediest man on the planet, Tom says. And the best businessman.”

“Scotch Nat?”

“James Jacklin, the chairman of Jefferson Partners. It’s his nickname.”

“I know who he is. Former secretary of defense. Stalwart of capitalism. But back up a second. What did you say he goes by?”

“ ‘Scotch Nat,’ ” said Jenny. “It’s what his friends call him. Not Thomas, of course, but you know . . . his buddies. I guess Jacklin’s Scottish or something. Does it mean something to you?”

Bonny was blinking madly again. “ ‘Scotch Nat’ was Pendleton’s nickname,” he said, his voice jumping half an octave. “Nathaniel Pendleton, Hamilton’s bosom buddy. An original member of the club.”

“Must be a coincidence,” said Jenny, though she didn’t quite believe it herself.

“You ever heard that nickname before?” Bonny demanded.

“No,” she admitted. “But come on, we’re talking two hundred years ago. More even. They’re not still around.”

“Why not? In the eight years that Hamilton wrote to Talleyrand, they’d already begun to rotate their members. Washington left, then died. John Adams took his place. Gallatin, the Swiss-born Treasury secretary, was recruited. Why shouldn’t they still be around? Masons have a thousand years under their belt. Two hundred’s just the beginning.”

“But you said Washington was involved? He was the President.”

“According to Hamilton, he came to every one of their meetings. Jefferson, too. After that we have to guess, don’t we? But that was the whole point of the club. To help the President get things accomplished when Congress was too pigheaded to act. And they shot you, poor child. Goodness, this changes things.”

“I don’t believe it. It’s too far back.”

“Your friend, Stillman, said it herself. A club. Actually, they called themselves a committee, but who cares? The scale. There’s the key.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just look at the scale of the operation that’s been mounted to track down and eliminate you and your boyfriend. And make no mistake, they want to kill you. It’s the country at stake. Oh, yes, scale, darling. Think of the manpower, the surveillance work, the tapping into phone networks, using your GPS signals to track you. Government has to be involved. Christ, they went all out, didn’t they?”

“That’s jumping to conclusions.” Talk of the government frightened her. It all sounded so crazy, so far-fetched. “You can’t hang all of that on a nickname. Maybe there are dozens of ‘Scotch Nats.’ ”

“Take it from me, lady, there aren’t. I’m a bloody Scot myself. Just forgot to wear the kilt, didn’t I?” Bonny crossed his arms and began pacing back and forth, talking half to himself, half to Jenny. “I knew it. I knew they were still around. I’ve seen their tracks, but no one believed me. Everyone said, ‘Bonny, you’re a loon.’ ‘Bonny’s round the bend.’ But no . . .”

“You’ve been keeping track of them?”

“You joking? Their tracks are all over the country’s history. Who do you think bombed the battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor?”

“It was an explosion in the coal room,” Jenny said. “Spontaneous combustion or something. I just saw an article in
National Geographic
about it.”

“An explosion in the coal room?” Bonny shook his head, as if he pitied her. “Spontaneous combustion? That’s Greek for saying they have no bloody idea what happened. Someone put a bomb under that ship, and it propelled the U.S. of A. straight into the fray of the imperialist age. Not six months later, Teddy Roosevelt was charging up Kettle Hill. In a few years, Hawaii, Panama, and the Philippines were all U.S. territories. Cuba and Haiti might as well have been. It was the country’s birth as a world power. A regular coming-out party.”

Jenny shook her head. But her skeptical smile was all Bonny needed to goad him further.

“And the
Lusitania
?” he said. “Who do you think got on the blower and tipped off the Hun that the boat was loaded to the gills with explosives?”

“A U-boat sunk it. Lots of ships were going down. It was the middle of World War One. Unrestricted submarine warfare and all that.”

“Ah, the young and naÏve,” said Bonny. His eyes hardened. “May the seventh, nineteen hundred and fifteen. Despite repeated warnings of U-boats in the area, Captain Charles Turner takes his boat directly into waters where three boats were sunk in the past weeks. Not only that, the man actually slows the boat down and guides her close to the Irish shore, where everyone knew U-boats loved to lie in wait. Did Captain Turner zig and zag like any God-fearing man with nearly two thousand souls on board? Did he? No. Captain Turner keeps her straight as she goes. Fog, he said, was the reason.
Fog? So what?
What was he watching out for? A bloody iceberg. It was May, and a warm May at that. One torpedo took the
Lusitania
down, a four stacker, in eighteen minutes. Four smokestacks! A behemoth she was! One lousy German torpedo with a twenty-pound charge. Come on, dear. It was a setup from the git-go. One thousand one hundred ninety-five souls went to the Lord that night. Captain Turner was not among them. No, he saved himself, didn’t he? Eighteen months later, the doughboys are shouting ‘Yee-ya-yip, over the top!’ Alvin York, Dan Dailey, and the rest of the Yanks are taking Belleau Wood. Come on, you don’t think those things just happened, do you? You can’t, really? Not after today. There are forces at work. And not necessarily dark forces, either. Some might say they’re rather enlightened.”

“Even the
Lusitania
’s almost a hundred years ago.”

“Nineteen sixty-four. Gulf of Tonkin. You don’t really think the North Vietnamese were stupid enough to have one of their PT boats fire on an American destroyer, do you?”

“Professor, that’s all a bunch of conspiracy gibberish.”

“Really? Well, before you go knocking my conspiracy theories, I suggest you take a look in the mirror. You, darling, are a conspiracy theory waiting to happen.”

“Me?”

Bonny nodded gravely. “Tomorrow or the next day, someone will walk up to you, put a gun in your back, and pull the trigger. Good-bye, Jenny. Good-bye, baby. The police will say robbery. Or just a random murder. All will agree it’s a tragedy. Case closed. Mention the club and see the look you get.”

“But . . . but . . .” Jenny felt stranded, violently alone. She reached over and drank the rest of Bonny’s beer. “Jesus,” she said, her breath leaving her.

“Somewhere there’s a record of it all,” said Simon Bonny, whispering now, his eyes gone buggy, his chin bobbing in seven directions at once. “Hamilton was specific about keeping the minutes so that posterity would know of his contributions. The Founding Fathers were such vain twits. All of them so concerned about how history would look back on them. All of ’em scribbling away in their diaries and letters and newspaper articles. Each one trying to outgun the other. Old Scotch Nat knows. He kept the minutes. He had to. Only one of them not in the government’s service. Apparently, they held quite a lot of meetings at his house, too. He lived on Wall Street, next to his best friend, Mr. Hamilton.” He stopped and fixed Jenny with a frightened, quizzical stare. “You’re not carrying one now, are you? A phone?”

“Yes, but it belongs to my doctor. I took it by accident when I left the hospital.”

Bonny took his wallet and began ripping out bills and throwing them on the bar. “Ten? That enough . . . oh bloody hell, give ’em a twenty.” He scooped his cap off the stool and grabbed his overcoat and scarf. “Get rid of it . . . might as well have a homing beacon planted on your head.”

“But they don’t know I have it.”

“How can you be so sure? They knew about you shooting your brother with a BB gun. I don’t even want to imagine how they found out that little nugget of information. Someone’s been on the phone with Daddy, haven’t they? Scale, my dear. Scale. Look around you. It’s the biggest government in the whole damned world!”

“But . . .”

“But nothing!”

With a final anguished sigh, Simon Bonny stormed out the door.