Wildcard

“Please, Monsignor, let us not devolve into boys, strutting about the schoolyard with our chests out. That would demean us and serve no one but your enemies.”

Veltroni was not accustomed to being lectured, nor to being patronized. His temper flared, his jaw clenching for a moment, before he bit back his reply and forced himself to take a long, slow breath. Wading into battle with an unknown enemy was the height of folly, and he was no fool. But signing a blank check to a stranger was equally foolish.

“It seems,” Veltroni said, “that we have little more to discuss. I cannot consider your offer unless I know what is involved. My superiors—and I do have them, even if my organization is not a formal organ of the Church—would not permit it. We could sit here and joust all day, but, as I said, I am not blessed with saintly patience.”

Cohen watched Veltroni rise and walk away. Another man might have regretted the course of the conversation, but Cohen had expected nothing more. Veltroni might lack patience, but Cohen did not. The Guardians had waited over three thousand years for a conjunction of opportunity such as now existed. A few more weeks were but a drop in a vast river of time.

Veltroni was not yet desperate. But he would be, and sooner than he knew.

7

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Tom and Miriam reached the door of her house just in time to keep the courier from departing.

“I’m Miriam Anson,” she said to the courier. “I believe that’s for me.”

“Identification?”

She showed him her Bureau ID. His eyebrows lifted, but he said nothing, merely had her sign a receipt. Then he was off, whistling, and Miriam and Tom entered her home with the box.

“I take it Terry came through,” Tom said as she dropped both the box and her keys on the dinette.

“You betcha.”

“So this is lunch?”

“Well, whatever you can find in the fridge is lunch. Unless you want to eat videotapes.”

The thrill of the hunt was rising.

“Pastrami and homicide,” he said, returning moments later. “Extra mustard.”

She opened a bottle of water. “You want to tell me what you’re looking for? We already know no one caught the assassin on camera.”

“Well, it’s really quite simple.” He used a key to cut the tape on the box. “I want to know what the Secret Service was doing during the shooting.”

She raised her brows. “Conspiracy involving the Secret Service?”

He shrugged and pulled a stack of videocassettes from the box. “We’re supposed to disprove a conspiracy, right? Well, I’m about to disprove one angle everyone is going to be screaming about.”

She nodded slowly. “Maybe,” she said.

“Right. Maybe. No one’s expecting us back, I hope.”

“Tom, at the moment I don’t think Kevin much cares if we fall off the edge of the earth, as long as we don’t get in the way of the ‘real’ investigation.”

“My thought exactly.”

He held up the tapes and gave her a crooked smile. “Shall we?”

Tom and Miriam were still hard at work in her living room later that night. It had become their base of operations. She had dragged in a whiteboard on an easel she’d packed away in a closet, some dry erase markers, a folding table and the torchère from her bedroom, which made the entire room nearly as bright as day.

They had watched the videos repeatedly and were now assembling a time line on the white board, listing who was where when.

Finally Miriam tossed her marker down in frustration. “I don’t see anything out of line.”

“I do.” As he stood looking at the time line, Tom pointed out each item he mentioned. “Okay, we’ve got one agent on the podium with him.”

“Right.”

“One in front of the podium on the ground floor.”

“Right.” She flopped on the couch.

“And two near the back of the room, right?”

“Right.”

“And none, absolutely none, outside in the lobby.”

“Well, Grant wasn’t out there.”

“Hmm.” Tom closed his eyes and pictured again what he’d seen on the tapes. “Wrong,” he said.

“Wrong?”

“Wrong. Most definitely wrong. There were nearly two hundred people in the lobby, and a constant flow of people in and out of the ballroom. Nobody was checking credentials at the ballroom door?”

“Campaign staffers were,” Miriam said. “Senior people were allowed in, and the rest were in the lobby. I’d guess that’s standard procedure in these things.”

“Maybe.” Tom opened his eyes and sat on the other end of the couch. “It’s possible. But Terry says they’re running down a bunch of threatening letters, right?”

She nodded. “That’s what he’s hearing. Shop talk. Lawrence’s protection team was busier than hell with all the hate mail. But he was the frontrunner. Terry didn’t sound like anyone thought it was unusual.”

Tom nodded. “The protection detail should have been more alert.”

She leaned toward him. “Tom, you can’t second-guess them. It won’t do any good. There were four agents there. Five counting the supervisor in the video room. That should have been enough. Those guys know their jobs.”

“Sure.” He rubbed his chin. “On the other hand, ‘those guys’ let someone change the parade route in Dallas. Did you know Kennedy’s limo nearly had to stop when it took that hard left turn onto Elm, and even so, it almost hit the curb? He was a sitting duck. And that was strictly against Secret Service regulations at the time.”

Miriam let out a sigh of exasperation. “Tom, things happen. Unforeseen things. It doesn’t make a conspiracy.”

“I’m not saying conspiracy. I’m just saying that somebody screwed up.”

“Okay. Okay.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “I’ll go with that. Security was a little lax. But in crowds like this…” She shrugged.

“You’re a good devil’s advocate, Miriam.” He smiled.

“How am I supposed to take that?”

“You make me think more clearly. That’s how.”

Surprising her, he reached for the remote and switched on the TV and VCR again. He hit Rewind, and a bewildering array of images flashed before her eyes. Apparently this was one of the security tapes, in full living color.

Suddenly a picture froze on the screen.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Jerry Connally and Grant embracing.”

“And where’s the agent?”

“Left rear.”

“Right.” He skipped ahead. “And now?”

“Grant’s coming down the steps from the stage with Jerry.”

“Right. And the agent is still on the stage.” Tom jumped forward again. “Still not following them.” Forward again. “He’s still on the stage. If I remember correctly, the other agents in the room stayed where they were, too. Except for the guy in front of the podium.”

Another picture showed that agent turning in the direction Grant and Jerry had gone. The next showed him take a step in that direction. The agent on the podium never moved a muscle.

“Now,” said Tom, “call me crazy, but I want to know why that agent on the stage never moved. You know the protocol for protection teams in a crowd, Miriam. A moving box, with the principal in the middle.”

“The crowd had been vetted, Tom.”

“Maybe. Maybe.”

He switched tapes to one with film of the lobby outside the ballroom. Grant and Jerry appeared in the doorway, stepping out into the crowd. The Secret Service agent was holding the door, eyes on Lawrence.

“It looks innocent enough to me,” Miriam said. “Do me a favor and don’t replay the shooting.”

“I won’t. But it’s not innocent. The agent is looking at Lawrence, see?” He pointed. “They’re trained not to look at the principal but at the crowd.”

“Lawrence is passing him, Tom. It’s a glance. He’s a human being. I’m sorry. I just don’t think there’s enough here to hang the security detail out to dry.”

After a few more minutes of discussion that went nowhere, Miriam went to bed. Tom replayed the news video that Jerry had sent. Only one of the news crews had been in the lobby…giving the world the unforgettable images that were still being broadcast.

Nothing.

Finally, to give his head a chance to clear, he picked up his files and drove back to D.C., where he could work on the Dixon conundrum without disturbing Miriam.

Like any good agent, he’d found an irregularity, and he was determined to run it to ground. So far he had only a probably illegal loan from a major bank to a slightly off-the-edge sheep rancher in Idaho who funded a private militia group that so far seemed to consist of five men and their dogs.

Which wasn’t a hell of a threat to the security of the United States. After Waco and Ruby Ridge, the FBI wasn’t about to ride in with guns blazing over six wackos with some semiautomatic weapons.

But the money…a quarter of a million dollars… That was too much to ignore. And for a while it silenced a small girl’s cry of betrayal.

It was the links. And he’d long ago learned that few links in life were purely accidental. Like attracted like. Harrison Rice had attracted Edward Morgan, whose sister had attracted a military cadet named Wesley Dixon—a man who by all accounts was destined for stars on his shoulders until he went…nuts?

Not nuts. If he was nuts, his wife would have left him and his brother-in-law wouldn’t have risked giving him a shady loan. Ergo, Wes Dixon wasn’t nuts, and nothing about him and his apparently crazy turn in life had caused a break between him and the powerful establishment he’d once belonged to.

That had Tom’s nose twitching like mad. If Dixon still had an in with the power elite, then he must in some way be useful to them. The question was, was he still on the A-list, or had he been demoted?

That was surprisingly easy to learn, thanks to all the security put in place since September 11, 2001. It didn’t take much effort to get his computer to spit out the records of all Dixon’s air travel in the last two years.

It was a pretty picture. It seemed he regularly traveled to New York and Boston, and once to D.C. His wife often traveled with him, but not always. He maintained connections.

Tom sighed and rubbed his eyes, not wanting to admit that he was getting too tired to think clearly. Admitting that would mean going back to his room to sleep, a guest room in Miriam’s house, a room with not one thing to identify it as his own space, even temporarily. Even in the bathroom, his toothbrush and razor were packed away in a travel kit. He was a man far from ready to move on with life, and far too close to his past.

So he got another cup of coffee from the machine, forced himself to drink it, then closed his eyes for a few moments as he tipped back in his chair.

Links. They were there. And for a quarter of a million, they meant something.

He returned his attention to the computer. By now the FBI had the names of all the agents assigned to Grant Lawrence’s protection. And while they had probably only taken statements, since the Secret Service was virtually above reproof, one FBI agent, semi-suspended or not, was going to do some background checking.

It was another link, possibly accidental, but his nose was twitching like mad.

After all, those guys were trained never to look at the principal.

Actium, Greece

31 B.C.E.

Osarseph stood beside his queen and watched the Roman ships doing battle in the clear blue waters below. This was not what he, or his queen, had wanted to see.

Marc Antony, the handsome Roman general whose heart she had won, was watching with a knitted brow, leaning over to an aide, who relayed instructions to a signalman, who in turn stood on the cliff to wave flags in encoded sequence. It was a vain attempt to control what had spun badly out of control.

Since the murder of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra had steered a dangerous course through Roman politics. Ten years had passed since she had arrived in Tarsus and invited the young general to dinner. Since then, she and Antony had increasingly cast their lot together. That much, at least, had gone as Osarseph had planned.

Antony had all but guaranteed that, once he disposed of Octavian, Cleopatra would retain control over Egypt as a sovereign ally of Rome. Indeed, more than once he had hinted at permitting the Ptolemaic Dynasty to rule the eastern half of the empire, while Rome governed the west. With no other power sufficient to challenge her, and the throne of Egypt both secured and enhanced, Cleopatra would be uniquely positioned to permit Osarseph and the Guardians to bring mankind forward into a new age of Light.

Osarseph had no such hopes for Octavian. A hardline Roman to his core, Octavian, if allowed to rule, would enforce Roman law—and, worse, Roman religion—throughout his reach. The prophesies had warned of a religion that would rise from Rome to dominate the world. Though by no means a superstitious man, Osarseph could feel in his bones the tingling of those prophecies emerging on this warm autumn morning.

Antony had hoped for a land battle, his army against Octavian’s. Antony was the better general, and his nineteen legions were better trained and more experienced than Octavian’s largely home-guard force. Weeks before, he had sent his twelve thousand cavalry on a raid to cut off Octavian’s water supply and force his army into battle. The raid had come to naught, and the campaign had ground to a stalemate.

A stalemate that had favored Octavian’s lies, for now Antony’s own troops were hearing rumors of a Roman general who had abandoned Rome for Egypt and a queen-sorceress who held him in thrall. Day by day, desertion and disease bled Antony’s once-proud legions. Finally he had been left with no choice but to meet Octavian in a sea battle. That battle was now proving why it had been Antony’s last resort. His fleet was simply no match for Octavian’s.

“You must prepare to escape, my queen,” Osarseph said.

Cleopatra—intelligent, charming, attractive despite her hooked nose, perhaps the most powerful woman the world had ever known—nodded slowly. “So it appears. Tell them to prepare my flagship, with sails at the ready.”

She turned to Antony. “We must go, my love. There is nothing left here to be won. We will fight that man at another time, in another place.”

Antony seemed poised to refuse, though in the end he gave the orders. “You get away first. If they catch you, Octavian will kill you. I will stay with my men until you are safely away.”

“No,” she said. “We go together. As we have always gone. Together.”

“I will permit no other course,” Antony said. “I must see to my men. Arrange for their withdrawal. Many have abandoned me, but I will not abandon those who have stayed by my side. They deserve my loyalty, as they give theirs.”

Osarseph knew this was not a battle Cleopatra could or would win. Antony was a soldier to his soul, and he would not leave his men leaderless. “Come, my queen. Let us away, and quickly.”

By the time they boarded her flagship, the captains had finalized the details of the breakout. Octavian’s ships, though greater in number, did not carry sails into battle. The excess weight merely slowed the oared vessels. But Antony and Cleopatra had insisted their captains be ready to raise sail. A freshening afternoon wind would be their deliverance.

If only for today.

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