The Willard (31 page)

It was a dream. The whole thing was just a dream
.

She sat there leaning against the headboard contemplating how it could have been a dream when it was so real. Just then the phone next to the bed rang. She picked it up.

“Ms. Parker, this is your wake-up call. Your car will be ready to take you to your appointment at two o’clock as promised. Is there anything else I can do for you?” asked the efficient voice.

“Yes, could you have Mr. Chase come up to my room please?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, whom did you wish to see?”

“The concierge, Edward Chase,” she answered.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Parker. He’s helping a guest with an urgent matter down near the Treasury Building. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, thank you. I’ll be down to meet the car at two.” She put the phone back in the cradle and grabbed a bottle of water from the nightstand. She still had an uneasy feeling, but tried to shake it off as she dressed in her suit and heels and arranged her hair in a professional and flattering knot at the base of her neck. She grabbed her bag and went downstairs to the waiting Town Car.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Parker,” said the driver. “I have the address of your appointment. Traffic is a bit heavy this afternoon, but we’ll be there in plenty of time.”

She thanked him and settled into the leather seat. A few minutes later they arrived in front of the glass and steel building with the beautiful view of the Capitol.
Cameron, Hanson and Smith
read the elegant and understated sign above the massive doors.

Cameron, Hanson and Smith. Lawrence Cameron
. She sat there lost in thought while the driver held her door open. She took out her phone and pressed the contact number for their receptionist.

“I need to reschedule,” she told the driver as she waited for the call to be answered. “Please take me to Ford’s Theatre.”

C
HAPTER 76

TOM KELLY

1962

Tom asked some students where he could find the English department and from there he found a faculty directory that led him to the office of Dr. Hamish McAdams. Walking down the hall he could see the door was ajar and a light was on. From inside the office he heard the sounds of someone hastily moving things about and talking on the phone. Tom peeked through the crack in the doorway and saw a man packing an old valise with the handset of his office phone tucked under his chin as he spoke rapidly. The words were foreign to Tom, but the voice was not. He waited until the man hung up the phone before he pushed the door open and stood face to face with the man as he fastened the buckles on the bag. The man must have heard the creak of the door because he turned around and saw Tom standing there.

“You don’t look like a Scotsman to me, Anatoly,” Tom calmly said.

If Volkov was surprised to see Tom standing there he didn’t show it.

“I’m anyone I need to be, Thomas. I always have been,” the old man said.

He wasn’t what Tom had expected. Volkov, aka McAdams was short, not more than 5’4”, and he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He was stooped over
with age and his hands shook slightly as they hung by his side. He looked to be decades older than he should have been, given the timeline of his defection to America. But it was his eyes that fascinated Tom. They were bright green and they nearly danced with life. It was easy to see there was much going on behind those eyes. Whatever his body was lacking he more than made up for with a sharp mind. That part Tom knew well.

“I don’t know where you think you could run that would be safe, Anatoly. Or Hamish. Or whatever your name is. What you’ve set in motion will ensure that you can’t run far enough, fast enough to save yourself,” Tom said.

“I’m not trying to save myself, Thomas. I’m too old to run and if you think that’s what this is you aren’t as bright as I thought you were. I’ve been here for forty-two years. I don’t see any reason to leave now.”

Tom’s head was spinning with mathematical calculations. Something didn’t add up. The professor said he had come to America only fifteen years before, when he was old enough to take on the mantle of protecting the secret organization. The young son of Nicholas’ messenger couldn’t be a man of more than about fifty years of age, but the man before him was clearly much older. And he just said he had been here forty-two years? That means he would have to have come to the United States in 1920, just two years after the assassination of the Tsar.

Volkov could see that Tom was struggling to make sense of things. Suddenly things began to fall into place. Tom raised his head to look the old man in the eye.

“It was you. It was you all along,” he said incredulously.

“Sit, Thomas. I’ll tell you everything. We have nothing to hide anymore and time is short.”

C
HAPTER 77

CALVIN WALKER

2016

When he opened his eyes he was afraid to move. He wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive, in this world or the next. As his surroundings came into focus he pushed himself upright and felt something fall from his chest. He picked up the papers that had fallen and looked at them. Columns and columns of data. Specs for the new software that Diagnosis Digital was having patent problems with.

Calvin rubbed his eyes and stood up from the chair where he had fallen asleep while reviewing the data. He was standing in his room at the Willard, but he couldn’t understand how that was possible. Only moments earlier he had felt the life drain from his body as he lay on the ground at the Lincoln Memorial. He remembered the searing pain and the hands of strangers as they worked to assess his wounds. He remembered the sound of Dr. King’s voice as he began his iconic speech. Had it all been a dream?

His cell phone rang from the nightstand where he had put it to charge the night before. He spoke briefly with an assistant back at his office who had a last minute addition for the meeting. She told him she had sent it to his e-mail. There wasn’t even time to change clothes.

Calvin brushed his teeth and washed his face before stuffing the paperwork in his briefcase and heading for the door. He was still in a daze. As he approached the elevator he remembered his encounter the morning before. Quickly he
turned and walked down the hall toward the suite where he had reviewed Dr. King’s speech. When he was several yards from the door of the suite it opened and a couple with two small children walked out. They were dressed for sightseeing and the kids were excitedly talking about going to the air and space museum. Calvin went back to the elevator and rode it down with the family. They were talking about all they had done the day before in the city. Clearly they had not just checked in.

Edward Chase saw Calvin get off the elevator and he made a move to intercept him before he left the building. He could tell from the look on the man’s face that he was unsettled, but Calvin was so focused on getting outside that he didn’t see the concierge coming toward him and didn’t hear his name called. Chase thought it might be for the best. Calvin probably needed some time to himself to process everything he had seen. Chase would be waiting for him when he returned.

The meeting with the patent attorney went fine. The new information his assistant had sent helped fill in the gap that was holding up the patent and the attorneys felt certain everything would proceed normally. Calvin was happy to let his corporate counsel take the lead because his own mind was still spinning, but as the morning wore on he began to shake off the vivid dream he now believed he’d had.

After the meeting, he went for a walk on a street known for tourist shops. He had promised his son that football jersey and he liked to bring his daughters something from his travels as well, even though they acted like they were too old to care. He knew it was an act and that they’d be disappointed if he didn’t bring them a trinket of some type.

At the fourth store he finally found the jersey. It had the number 10 with “Griffin III” on the back and it was so big he knew it would swallow his son whole. Will would probably lose interest in it before he outgrew it. Now Calvin could browse for trinkets for the girls. He found a miniature of the Alexander
Calder mobile from the National Gallery of Art. It was delicate and whimsical. Cecily would like this. She was fifteen now and consumed with all things art-related. She wanted to be a famous painter of watercolors.

Amanda would be harder to pin down with a tourist trinket. She was thirteen and believed her older sister to be terribly flighty and her little brother to be hopelessly sports-addled. Amanda fancied herself the intellectual of the group. She was the bookworm and told anyone who would listen that she was applying to one college and one only—Harvard. Her father knew most of the items in this store would fall flat with her so he continued walking. Eventually he stopped at the display of one of the ubiquitous street vendors who hawk their wares from sunup to sundown along the busiest sidewalks.

He doubted there would be anything there for her among the plastic snow globes and t-shirts with slogans like “Future President” and “You Don’t Know Me: Property of Witness Protection”, but something caught his eye. It looked like white plastic, but when he picked it up he found it was heavy and carved from stone. Emerging from the stone was a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. Calvin remembered reading about the opening of the new memorial, but he had never seen it. This would mean something to Amanda so he paid for the statue and asked the vendor where the memorial could be found.

“Seriously, man? Where do you think it would be? It’s down by the Lincoln Memorial,” the vendor said.

“Of course,” Calvin answered. He wasn’t far from there and he started walking.

He couldn’t explain why he felt apprehensive as he approached the memorial. There were quite a few people milling about, most in quiet reflection. Calvin noticed there were two large, stone sculptures with a walkway through the middle of them. Pushed further ahead, closer to the water of the Tidal Basin and with a magnificent view of the Jefferson Memorial,
was a third stone that looked as though it had been hewn from the center of the larger ones. He picked up a brochure from an information box and learned that the split stone was called the “Mountain of Despair” and visitors passed through it to reach the forward stone, called “the Stone of Hope.” As he made his way around the forward stone, he came to the larger-than-life statue of Dr. King. Calvin examined it and was astonished to see the likeness to the man in his dream. The sculptor had captured the look of determination in his eyes. On the sides of the memorial were walls inscribed with his famous quotations. Calvin walked around and read each one. There were quotes about freedom and justice. Others touched on war, poverty, and education. They were inspirational and aspirational words meant for all races and classes, not just the privileged. Calvin knew all this. He had studied the works of Dr. King in college and yet, in this setting and given the dream he’d had the previous night, he found himself profoundly moved by the words in a way he had never experienced. Just then he realized two older men were close by and they were having a conversation he had to hear. Both had been at the March on Washington in 1963. They talked of the crowd that day and the atmosphere of brotherhood that permeated the large gathering. They laughed as they remembered rushing ahead of the crowd as it left the Washington Monument because they wanted to get to the Lincoln Memorial first so they could get a good spot in front of the stage. One remarked how he thought about putting his feet in the reflecting pool to cool down from the August heat. The other remembered that some of the speeches went a little long for his taste, but they were all good in their own way. They both agreed none was better than the one by Dr. King and they were glad they had been there to hear it. Calvin didn’t feel bad about eavesdropping because the two men sounded like they had told their stories a thousand times and enjoyed the reminiscing. They had been young men then, and now, in their old age, they had
come to this place to relive a day that had meant so much to them. Calvin thought about introducing himself to them and joining in the conversation, but what would he say?
I was there too. It was some day, yep, sure was hot. I read that speech before he gave it that day. Oh yeah, and somebody shot me and I died there, but here I am and I haven’t aged a day
. No, he wouldn’t join the conversation. It had all been a dream and he knew that now, but he liked hearing the old men as they continued talking.

“I was so excited to hear Marian Anderson sing. She did a fine job.”

“She did,” the other man nodded. “Yes sir, she did. And when that Mahalia Jackson went to singin’, Lord, you could have carried me on home!”

“I remember. That was a heavenly sound.” The men were lost in thought for a moment.

“Wasn’t that when it happened?” the first man asked.

“When what happened?”

“When that man got shot. Wasn’t that when Mahalia was singing?”

“Yeah, I believe that was when it happened. We never did hear anything about that shooting so that ole’ boy must have been alright. Might have just been a prank.”

“Probably was. We were darn lucky nobody did try to hurt us that day. You know all the talk that was going on.”

“Oh, I remember it well. It would scare me a lot more today if that was happening.”

“We were young then. We weren’t scared of anything.”

“You’re right. We thought we were as bulletproof as this stone statue!”

The old men laughed, unaware of the man on the other side of the statue who had steadied himself against the stone.

Calvin decided he wasn’t up for the walk back. He got to the corner and hailed a cab to take him back to the Willard.

C
HAPTER 78

OLIVIA FORDHAM

1913

After the parade, the crowd couldn’t stop talking about the presentation at the Treasury Building. The finale had been everything the organizers hoped for. Also, as they had hoped, Victoria was among a growing number of young, well-to-do ladies who were ready and willing to join the effort that would bear fruit seven years later when the 19
^th
Amendment was passed and ratified by the states. It wasn’t full equality, but it was a critical step. Word around town was that when President-Elect Woodrow Wilson arrived in the city that day he asked where all the people were since there were so few to greet him at the train station. He was told they were attending a march for women’s suffrage.