Shall We Tell the President? Read online

  She still felt this was the only nation on earth that could entrust its highest office to the daughter of an immigrant.

  When the three-hour-long parade was finally over and the last float had disappeared down the avenue, Janet Brown, Florentyna Kane’s Chief of Staff, leaned over and asked the President what she would like to do between now and the first Inaugural Ball.

  “Sign all those cabinet appointments, the letters to the Heads of State, and clear my desk for tomorrow,” was the immediate reply. “That should take care of the first four years.”

  The President returned directly into the White House. As she walked through the South Portico, the Marine band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” The President had taken off her coat even before she reached the Oval Office. She sat herself firmly behind the imposing oak and leather desk. She paused for a moment, looking around the room. Everything was as she wanted it; behind her there was the picture of Richard and William playing touch football. In front of her, a paperweight with the quotation from George Bernard Shaw which Annabel quoted so often: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.” On Florentyna’s left was the Presidential flag, on her right the flag of the United States. Dominating the middle of the desk was a replica of the Baron Hotel, Warsaw, made out of papier mâché by William when he was fourteen. Coal was burning in the fireplace. A portrait of Abraham Lincoln stared down at the newly sworn-in President while outside the bay windows, the green lawns swept in an unbroken stretch to the Washington Monument. The President smiled. She was back at home.

  Florentyna Kane reached for a pile of official papers and glanced over the names of those who would serve in her cabinet; there were over thirty appointments to be made. The President signed each one with a flourish. The final one was Janet Brown as Chief of Staff. The President ordered that they be sent down to the Congress immediately. Her press secretary picked up the pieces of paper that would dictate the next four years in the history of America and said, “Thank you, Madam President,” and then added, “What would you like to tackle next?”

  “Always start with the biggest problem is what Lincoln advised, so let’s go over the draft legislation for the Gun Control bill.”

  The President’s press secretary shuddered, for she knew only too well that the battle in the House over the next two years was likely to be every bit as vicious and hard-fought as the Civil War Lincoln had faced. So many people still regarded the possession of arms as their inalienable birthright. She only prayed that it all would not end the same way, as a House Divided.

  Thursday evening

  3 March (two years later)

  5:45 P.M.

  Nick Stames wanted to go home. He had been at work since seven that morning and it was already 5:45 P.M. He couldn’t remember if he had eaten lunch; his wife, Norma, had been grumbling again that he never got home in time for dinner, or, if he did, it was so late that her dinner was no longer worth eating. Come to think of it, when did he last find time to finish a meal? Norma stayed in bed when he left for the office at 6:30 A.M. Now that the children were away at school, her only real task was to cook dinner for him. He couldn’t win; if he had been a failure, she would have complained about that, too, and he was, goddamn it, by anybody’s standards, a success; the youngest special agent in charge of a Field Office in the FBI and you don’t get a job like that at the age of forty-one by being at home on time for dinner every night. In any case, Nick loved the job. It was his mistress; at least his wife could be thankful for that.

  Nick Stames had been head of the Washington Field Office for nine years. The third largest Field Office in America, although it covered the smallest territory—only sixty-one square miles of Washington, D.C.—it had twenty-two squads; twelve criminal, ten security. Hell, he was policing the capital of the world. Of course, he must be expected to be late sometimes. Still, tonight he intended to make a special effort. When he had the time to do so, he adored his wife. He was going to be home on time this evening. He picked up his internal phone and called his Criminal Coordinator, Grant Nanna.

  “Grant.”

  “Boss.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “Not you, too.”

  Nick Stames put the phone down, and pushed his hand through his long dark hair. He would have made a better movie criminal than FBI agent, since everything about him was dark—dark eyes, dark skin, dark hair, even a dark suit and dark shoes, but the last two were true of any special agent. On his lapel he wore a pin depicting the flags of the United States and of Greece.

  Once, a few years ago, he had been offered promotion and a chance to cross the street to the Bureau Headquarters and join the Director as one of his thirteen assistants. Being an assistant chained to a desk wasn’t his style, so he stayed put. The move would have taken him from a slum to a palace; the Washington Field Office is housed on floors four, five, and eight of the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the rooms are a little like railroad coaches. They would have been condemned as slums if they had been sited in the ghetto.

  As the sun began to disappear behind the tall buildings, Nick’s gloomy office grew darker. He walked over to the light switch. “Don’t Be Fuelish,” commented a fluorescent label glued to the switch. Just as the constant movement of men and women in dark sober suits in and out of the Old Post Office Building revealed the location of the FBI Washington Field Office, so this government graffito served notice that the czars of the Federal Energy Administration inhabited two floors of the cavernous building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Nick stared out of his window across the street at the new FBI Headquarters, which had been completed in 1976, a great ugly monster with elevators that were larger than his office. He didn’t let it bother him. He’d reached Grade 18 in the service, and only the Director was paid more than he was. In any case, he was not going to sit behind a desk until they retired him with a pair of gold handcuffs. He wanted to be in constant touch with the agent in the street, feel the pulse of the Bureau. He would stay put at the Washington Field Office and die standing up, not sitting down. Once again, he touched the intercom. “Julie, I’m on my way home.”

  Julie Bayers looked up and glanced at her watch as if it were lunchtime.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, sounding disbelieving.

  As he passed through the office he grinned at her. “Moussaka, rice pilaf, and the wife; don’t tell the Mafia.” Nick managed to get one foot out of the door before his private phone rang. One more step and he would have made it to the open lift, but Nick never could resist the ring of a phone. Julie rose and began to walk toward his office. As she did so Nick admired, as he always did, the quick flash of leg. “It’s all right, Julie. I’ll get it.” He strode back into his room and picked up the ringing telephone.

  “Stames.”

  “Good evening, sir. Lieutenant Blake, Metropolitan Police.”

  “Hey, Dave, congratulations on your promotion. I haven’t seen you in …” he paused, “ … it must be five years, you were only a sergeant. How are you?”

  “Thank you, sir, I’m doing just fine.”

  “Well, Lieutenant, moved into big-time crime, now have you? Picked up a fourteen-year-old stealing a pack of chewing gum and need my best men to find where the suspect has hidden the goods?”

  Blake laughed. “Not quite that bad, Mr. Stames. I have a guy in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center who wants to meet the head of the FBI, says he has something vitally important to tell him.”

  “I know the feeling, I’d love to meet him myself. Do you know whether he’s one of our usual informers, Dave?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Angelo Casefikis.” Blake spelled out the name for Stames.

  “Any description?” asked Stames.

  “No. I only spoke to him on the phone. All he would say is it will be worse for America if the FBI doesn’t listen
.”

  “Did he now? Hold on while I check the name. He could be a nut.”

  Nick Stames pressed a button to connect him with the Duty Officer. “Who’s on duty?”

  “Paul Fredericks, boss.”

  “Paul, get out the nut box.”

  The nut box, as it was affectionately known in the Bureau, was a collection of white index cards containing the names of all the people who liked to call up in the middle of the night and claim that the Martians had landed in their back yards, or that they had discovered a CIA plot to take over the world.

  Special Agent Fredericks was back on the line, the nut box in front of him.

  “Right, boss. What’s his name?”

  “Angelo Casefikis,” said Stames.

  “A crazy Greek,” said Fredericks. “You never know with these foreigners.”

  “Greeks aren’t foreigners,” snapped Stames. His name, before it was shortened, had been Nick Stamatakis. He never did forgive his father, God rest his soul, for anglicizing a magnificent Hellenic surname.

  “Sorry, sir. No name like that in the nut box or the informants’ file. Did this guy mention any agent’s name that he knows?”

  “No, he just wanted the head of the FBI.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “No more cracks from you, Paul, or you’ll be on complaint duty for more than the statutory week.”

  Each agent in the Field Office did one week a year on the nut box, answering the phone all night, fending off canny Martians, foiling dastardly CIA coups, and, above all, never embarrassing the Bureau. Every agent dreaded it. Paul Fredericks put the phone down quickly. Two weeks on this job and you could write out one of the little white cards with your own name on it.

  “Well, have you formed any view?” said Stames to Blake as he wearily took a cigarette out of his left desk drawer. “How did he sound?”

  “Frantic and incoherent. I sent one of my rookies to see him, but he couldn’t get anything out of him other than that America ought to listen to what he’s got to say. He seemed genuinely frightened. He’s got a gunshot wound in his leg and there may be complications. It’s infected; apparently he left it for some days before he went to the hospital.”

  “How did he get himself shot?”

  “Don’t know yet. We’re still trying to locate witnesses, but we haven’t come up with anything so far, and Casefikis won’t give us the time of day.”

  “Wants the FBI, does he? Only the best, eh?” said Stames. He regretted the remark the moment he said it; but it was too late. He didn’t attempt to cover himself. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ll put someone on it immediately and brief you in the morning.” Stames put the telephone down. Six o’clock already—why had he turned back? Damn the phone. Grant Nanna would have handled the job just as well and he wouldn’t have made that thoughtless remark about wanting the best. There was enough friction between the FBI and the Metropolitan Police without his adding to it. Nick picked up his intercom phone and buzzed the head of the Criminal Section.

  “Grant.”

  “I thought you said you had to be home.”

  “Come into my office for a moment, will you?”

  “Sure, be right there, boss.”

  Grant Nanna appeared a few seconds later along with his trademark cigar. He had put on his jacket which he only did when he saw Nick in his office.

  Nanna’s career had a storybook quality. He was born in El Campo, Texas, and received a B.A. from Baylor. From there, he went on to get a law degree at SMU. As a young agent assigned to the Pittsburgh Field Office, Nanna met his future wife, Betty, an FBI stenographer. They had four sons, all of whom had attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute: two engineers, a doctor, and a dentist. Nanna had been an agent for over thirty years. Twelve more than Nick. In fact, Nick had been a rookie agent under him. Nanna held no grudge, since he was head of the Criminal Section, and greatly respected Nick—as he called him in private.

  “What’s the problem, boss?”

  Stames looked up as Nanna entered the office. He noted that his five-feet-nine, fifty-five-year-old, robust, cigar-chewing Criminal Co-ordinator was certainly not “desirable,” as Bureau weight requirements demanded. A man of five-feet-nine was required to keep his weight between a hundred and fifty-four and a hundred and sixty-one pounds. Nanna had always cringed when the quarterly weigh-in of all FBI agents came due. Many times he had been forced to purge his body of excess pounds for that most serious transgression of Bureau rules, especially during the Hoover era, when “desirability” meant lean and mean.

  Who cares, thought Stames. Grant’s knowledge and experience were worth a dozen slender, young athletic agents who can be found in the Washington Field Office halls every day. As he had done a hundred times before, he told himself he would deal with Nanna’s weight problem another day.

  Nick repeated the story of the strange Greek in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center as it had been relayed to him by Lieutenant Blake. “I want you to send down two men. Who’s on duty tonight?”

  “Aspirin, but if you suspect it might be an informer, boss, I certainly can’t send him.”

  “Aspirin” was the nickname of the oldest agent still employed in the WFO. After his early years under Hoover, he played everything by the book, which gave most people a headache. He was due to retire at the end of the year and exasperation was now being replaced by nostalgia.

  “No, don’t send Aspirin. Send two youngsters.”

  “How about Calvert and Andrews?”

  “Agreed,” replied Stames. “If you brief them right away, I can still make it in time for dinner. Call me at home if it turns out to be anything special.”

  Grant Nanna left the office, and Nick smiled a second flirtatious goodbye to his secretary. She was the only attractive thing in the WFO. Julie looked up and smiled nonchalantly. “I don’t mind working for an FBI agent, but there is no way I would ever marry one,” she told her little mirror in the top drawer.

  Grant Nanna returned to his office and picked up the extension phone to the Criminal Room.

  “Send in Calvert and Andrews.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a firm knock on the door. Two special agents entered. Barry Calvert was big by anybody’s standards, six-feet-six in his stockinged feet and not many people had seen him that way. At thirty-two, he was thought to be one of the most ambitious young men in the Criminal Section. He was wearing a dark green jacket, dark nondescript trousers, and clumpy black leather brogues. His brown hair was cut short and parted neatly on the right. His tear-drop aviator glasses had been his sign of nonconformity. He was always on duty long after the official check-out time of 5:30 and not just because he was fighting his way up the ladder. He loved the job. He didn’t love anybody else, so far as his colleagues knew, or at least not on more than a temporary basis. Calvert was a Midwesterner by birth and he had entered the FBI after leaving college with a B.A. in sociology from Indiana University and then took the fifteen-week course at Quantico, the FBI Academy. From every angle, he was the archetypal FBI man.

  By contrast, Mark Andrews had been one of the more unusual FBI entrants. After majoring in history at Yale he finished his education at Yale Law School, and then decided he wanted some adventure for a few years before he joined a law firm. He felt it would be useful to learn about criminals and the police from the inside. He didn’t give this as his reason for applying to the Bureau—no one is supposed to regard the Bureau as an academic experiment. In fact, Hoover had regarded it so much as a career that he did not allow agents who left the service ever to return. At six feet Mark Andrews looked small next to Calvert. He had a fresh, open face with clear blue eyes and a mop of curly fair hair long enough to skim his shirt collar. At twenty-eight he was one of the youngest agents in the department. His clothes were always smartly fashionable and sometimes not quite regulation. Nick Stames had once caught him in a red sports jacket and brown trousers and relieved him from duty so that he could return home an
d dress properly. Never embarrass the Bureau. Mark’s charm got him out of a lot of trouble in the Criminal Section, but he had a steadiness of purpose which more than made up for the Ivy League education and manner. He was self-confident, but never pushy or concerned about his own advancement. He didn’t let anyone in the Bureau know about his career plan.

  Grant Nanna went over the story of the frightened man waiting for them in Woodrow Wilson.

  “Black?” queried Calvert.

  “No, Greek.”

  Calvert’s surprise showed in his face. Eighty percent of the inhabitants of Washington were black, and ninety-eight percent of those arrested on criminal charges were black. One of the reasons the infamous break-in at the Watergate had been suspicious from the beginning to those who knew Washington at all well was the fact that no blacks were involved, though no agents had admitted it.

  “Okay, Barry, think you can handle it?”

  “Sure, you want a report on your desk by tomorrow morning?”

  “No, the boss wants you to contact him direct if it turns out to be anything special, otherwise just file a report overnight.” Nanna’s telephone rang. “Mr. Stames on the radio line from his car for you, sir,” said Polly, the night switchboard operator.

  “He never lets up, does he?” Grant confided to the two junior agents, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his palm.

  “Hi, boss.”

  “Grant, did I say that the Greek had a bullet wound in his leg, and it was infected?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Right, do me a favor will you? Call Father Gregory at my church, Saint Constantine and Saint Helen, and ask him to go over to the hospital and see him.”

  “Anything you say.”

  “And get yourself home, Grant. Aspirin can handle the office tonight.”