Head Shot

42

'It's like stepping into history, Joe,' said Skinner, a man not normal y ' impressed by his surroundings, especially if they were late twentieth century and architect designed. But ugly or not, the Watergate Building was something else, having been the centrepiece of the biggest international political scandal of his life.

'That's al it is now,' Doherty told him. 'The Democratic National Committee ain't here any more; it's on South Capitol Street. I just thought you'd like to see where al that started. Head on down there, Max, please.'

'Yes, sir.' The deputy director's driver nodded and slipped the anonymous black car into gear. The Scot had never seen his old friend on his home patch before; he sensed the difference at once. He was more formal, and had seemed almost to grow in stature from the moment their flight had touched down, an impression confirmed by the deference of the chauffeur when he had picked them up.

They moved south, away from the heart of government, and came quickly into South Capitol Street. 'Should you be seen going in here,'

Skinner asked, 'with there being a Republican administration these days?'

'Ahh shit, it's Sunday afternoon. Look around you.'

It was true; for any capital city the streets were exceptional y quiet.

There seemed, almost, to be more tour buses than cars.

'Anyhow, Congress has been GOP for years,' Doherty added. 'It's only the White House that's changed hands. But suppose this was a weekday, there'd be nothing exceptional about me going to meet with Rusty. I do it fairly often, just as I keep in touch with the Republican Party organisation.'

'Who?'

'Rusty Savage; he's the guy we're meeting. He's deputy chief of staff of the DNC organisation, and he's been around for years, almost as long as me.'

'Does he normally work weekends?'

'When there's an election, yes he does, but not right now. He's here because I asked him to meet us in his office.'

The car drew up at the entrance to 430 South Capitol Street, and the two passengers stepped out. Sunday or not, there was a receptionist on duty in the foyer. She recognised Doherty at once. 'Good afternoon, sir,' she greeted him, with the same clear show of respect that Skinner had seen from Max, the driver, at the airport. 'How good to see you again.

Mr Savage is in his office; if you'd like to go on up in the elevator, I'll let him know you're on your way.'

Rusty Savage was waiting for them as the lift doors opened. Doherty greeted him warmly, and introduced his companion as they walked towards an office across the hall. 'It's an honour to meet you, sir,' said the American, taking the Scot by surprise. 'I know who you are, and I know what you did at that conference a couple of years back.'

Skinner looked at him, a touch warily, wondering how much he knew; most of the detail of that incident had been kept away from the media.

'It's okay,' Savage grinned. 'I heard the whole story at the time from the former White House chief of staff. The Man Himself is in New York for the weekend, otherwise I know he'd have wanted to meet you.'

'He might not have wanted to hear what we want to talk about, though,' muttered Doherty.

'Yeah, what is that, Joe? You were damned mysterious when you called me.'

'I had to be; I know that the Bureau isn't bugging your communications, but I can't be a hundred per cent sure about anyone else.'

'Wow,' Savage whistled. He looked around his modest office as he closed the door behind him. 'You can relax in here, though. We have these offices swept for devices once a month; there's nothing recorded here, unless we want it to be. Sit down, guys.' He poured three mugs of black coffee from a jug by his walnut desk and handed one each to his visitors.

'Now, what's so red-hot that it's come between me and my Sunday golf game?'

'A double homicide,' the deputy director answered. 'A week or so back in the Adirondacks National Park in New York State.'

'Leopold Grace and his wife,' said Rusty Savage at once. 'I heard about it. Tragic altogether, that such an eminent couple should die like that. Mr Grace was a Democrat from way back, and a personal friend of the former first family too. Matter of fact I had a cal from one of the new senator's aides a couple of days back, asking me if I could let her know about funeral arrangements.

'Still, how come the Bureau is involved? And what's your interest, Mr Skinner?'

'Mr Grace was Bob's father-in-law.'

Surprise flashed across the official's face. 'Ahh,' he exclaimed. 'So that's why you're here. When Joe said he was bringing you along, I didn't ask why. I just assumed you were on some sort of an exchange visit.'

He looked back at Doherty. 'That doesn't answer my first question, though, Joe. How come you guys have picked up on this? The man wasn't a public figure any more; although he was a former chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, and his word was still the law, when he offered an opinion on something or someone.'

'Do the names Bartholomew Wilkins and Sander Garrett mean anything to you?'

Savage leaned back in his chair, sipping his coffee as he thought.

'Bart Wilkins,' he murmured at last. 'Chicago, Illinois, I think; he was head of a law firm, like Mr Grace, and retired, like Mr Grace. But his involvement in active Democratic politics ended way back, when Governor Dukakis was adopted as candidate to fight Bush the Elder in 1988.

'Wilkins thought it was a disastrous choice… he was right, as it happened… and withdrew from the Illinois party executive.

'Sander Garrett? Yes, that name rings a bell; I remember meeting him in Los Angeles a while back, probably in the mid-eighties. He wasn't a Califomian, though; he was from Nevada as I recall, and involved with the Party as a volunteer fund raiser.'

Doherty nodded. 'That's very interesting. Let me throw another name at you; Jackson Wylie.'

'Leo Grace's former partner,' Savage replied at once. 'He worked for him in the attorney general's office nearly forty years ago, and fol owed him into the law firm in Buffalo. He's still an active Democrat, and a member of the State Committee.'

'I think you'l find he's less active from now on,' the deputy director drawled, with a trace of a wry smile playing at one corner of his mouth.

'How come? Who's upset him?'

'The guy who blew up his cruiser yesterday afternoon, with him in it.

He's dead. My team confirmed this morning that the explosion was no accident.'

'Dead?'

'As a rucking doornail, Rusty; and so are Wilkins and Garrett. They were both murdered in their homes within the last month. Their kil ings 172 .. ok like they happened in the course of burglaries; but they nla nro hits, both of them, as were the Graces' deaths. The Wylie Homicide wasn't disguised as anything; there was enough explosive one of his cabin lockers to have made a good-sized hole in the battleship New Jersey.

'So that's why we're here, my friend. We have a problem and so have there's someone out there who's making serious inroads into the rol of registered Democratic voters. If he isn't stopped, you could start to run out of them.'

'How can I help?'

'We're looking for connections,' said Skinner. 'We have several already from the backgrounds on the victims, gathered by the police officers who originally investigated their killings. We know that these men were al active members of your Party. We know that they were al lawyers. We know that they all worked in Washington in the sixties, during the Kennedy administration.

'But that's as far as it goes. There's something we don't know, something that links al four men together, something that's got them killed. There's nothing in the files of my father-in-law's old firm. We have people asking similar questions about Wilkins and Garrett, but if there's nothing in Buffalo, there's unlikely, in my view at least, to be anything in Chicago or Las Vegas.

'So we're here. You're the end of the road, more or less. We need to go as far back as we can into your records, to see whether they got involved in something through the Party that's led to this.'

The Democrat official took a deep breath and pushed himself up from his chair. He walked over to the window and looked out over the city, back up towards the seat of national government. 'You tried the State Department?' he asked. 'Or the attorney general's office?'

They were questions that Skinner himself had not asked, but Doherty answered. 'Of course I have. There's nothing that helps us.''

Savage turned back to face them. 'In that case, guys, I'm sorry, but I'm don't think I'm going to be able to help you, either.' He paused.

'You are correct to assume that we do store biographic material on our activists, usually going back to the earliest days of their work within our movement. However, these days we keep very few long-term paper records; just about everything we have is on computer. Last week, when I heard about Mr Grace's death, I went into our mainframe and cal ed up his file. It wasn't there; I asked our head of information technology what had happened to it.

'He looked into it, and reported that it had been erased; we've lost all the bios beginning with the letter G, and al of the Was, too. We interrogated al our users, but nobody admitted to doing it, accidental y or otherwise. His conclusion, although he couldn't be certain, was that someone had hacked in and done it.'

He frowned down at them. 'Looks like now we know for sure.'