The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Chapter Four

The 727 tri-jet came winging in to Boston from Washington on a long, swooping curve from the southwest, its wing tilting down like a giant aluminum finger to point out the thin five-mile peninsula of Hull that served as an enormous breakwater for one of the great natural harbors of the world.

From my seat in the midsection of the plane I could see the sparse modern skyline of the city rising bravely in the crisp, bright air. There were the tinted glass and steel towers of the Prudential Insurance Building, the John Hancock Insurance Building and the First National Bank Building. In their midst, almost overwhelmed by them, yet catching your eye before all else, was the round, gleaming gold-leaf dome of the State House rotunda.

Like Virginia and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts isn’t a “state.” It’s a Commonwealth and very proud of it. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston, its capital, is a bankers’ town. A town where old money has had more than 300 years to grow and spread its influence throughout the rest of the world, let alone the rest of the United States. And it’s quiet about its money. It doesn’t like to talk about it. Banks and insurance companies and enormous investment funds have quietly taken a firm grip on our economy.

The more I thought about it, the more I believed the Russian was right. If money is the basis of a capitalistic society, then it’s the most vulnerable part of our society. The wonder of it is that it hadn’t been subject to an onslaught by the Soviets long before now.

Or maybe it had been. The gold crisis of a few years back shook our economy to the core. First, we had to get off the gold standard, and then we had to devalue the dollar. The repercussions were international. Were they also plotted — by the Kremlin?

Calvin Woolfolk was waiting for me at the Eastern Airlines arrival gates at Logan International Airport. I had no trouble recognizing him, even though all Hawk had said was, “Look for a Yankee lawyer.”

Woolfolk was in his seventies, tall and lean, with the spare, gaunt look of a Maine farmer. His hair was white, thick and uncombed. The lines on his face had been carved one by one over the years, each experience deepening a line or adding a new one. When we shook hands, I felt callouses on his palm. His grip was as tight as if he were more accustomed to hefting the helve of an axe than gripping a pen to write torts. The creases on his face split slightly to show the thin line of his lips. I guess you could call it a smile.

“David Hawk said you could use my help,” he said abruptly in a frosty voice as he fell into step beside me. “You want to talk in my office, or somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else,” I said.

He nodded. “Makes sense.” There’s something about a New England accent that sets it apart even more than its nasal tone. It fits the region’s terse, no-nonsense, taciturn way of communicating. Woolfolk reached into his pocket and took out a single sheet of paper.

“Five names there,” he said. “Man you’re looking for could be any one of them.”

I put the paper in my pocket.

“You got any baggage?” Woolfolk asked as we came down the escalator to the lower level. The baggage turntables spun slowly and aimlessly, parading a variety of boxes, luggage, knapsacks and travel cases like horses on a carousel.

“It was sent directly to the hotel,” I told him. Automatically I looked around, trying to spot anyone who might be following me. Sometimes a tail gives himself away by showing too much interest in you — or too little. Only experienced pros know how to strike the right balance. There didn’t seem to be anyone.

By this time we were outside the glass doors. A cab pulled up. Woolfolk climbed in, and I followed him. The cab took us through the Sumner Tunnel under the Charles River, up onto the Expressway, and then curved off onto the Drive. We exited at Arlington Street.

Woolfolk insisted on paying for the taxi We strolled across the intersection of Arlington and Beacon Streets and turned into the Public Gardens, walking along a path until Woolfolk spotted an empty park bench. He sat down, and I sank onto the bench beside him. Across from us, on an hourglass-shaped lake, floated the swan boats. Forty to fifty feet long, some ten to twelve feet wide, each boat held rows of slat benches, each bench wide enough to seat four or five people. Most of the passengers were children, well-dressed, wide-eyed with delight.

At the stern of each boat was a carved, larger-than-lifesize, white-painted swan. Between its wooden wings, sitting on a bicycle seat was a teenager, who foot-pedaled away to provide the power for the small paddle wheel at the stern. By pulling on tiller ropes he guided the boat as it glided gently, silently on the calm water, circling the tiny islands at each end of the lake. It was all very quiet and very peaceful and very clean.

“Read the list,” Woolfolk said sharply. “I haven’t got all day.”

I opened the paper. Woolfolk’s handwriting was as crabbed and compact as the man himself.

Alexander Bradford, Frank Guilfoyle, Arthur Barnes, Leverett Pepperidge and Mather Woolfolk. Those were the five names.

I tapped the paper.

“This last one,” I said. “Mather Woolfolk. Is he any relation to you?”

Calvin Woolfolk nodded. “Yup. He’s my brother. We’re not close, though.”

“What can you tell me about these men?”

“Well,” said Woolfolk, “from what little information I got from David Hawk, I understand you’re looking for someone with a lot of influence in financial circles.”

“Something like that.”

“They all fit,” said Woolfolk. “That is, if you’re looking for a man with real power.”

“I am.”

“They’ve got it. So much that most people don’t know they have it. The only ones who really know how much power these men have are the people they let deal with them directly. And I can tell you they let damn few people deal with them directly!”

“Mr. Woolfolk...”

“Calvin.”

“Calvin, did Hawk tell you about me?”

Woolfolk’s thin lips twisted in a slight smile. He said, “Son, I’ve known about you for a long time. Nick Carter. N3. Killmaster. You ought to know that my knowledge of AXE goes back almost to its very beginnings. I’m an old friend of David Hawk’s.”

“What are the men on this list really after?”

“Not money. For them, money is just a tool. They don’t really give a damn about money. Control is what they’re after. When you can control the lives of hundreds — hell, thousands — of other men, well, son, that’s a pretty heady feeling.”

“Which of them has the most power?”

Woolfolk stood up slowly. “I can’t tell you that, Nick. I just don’t know. I guess it’s your job to find out, isn’t it?”

“Alright, Calvin. Thanks for the help.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Think nothing of it. You just call on me any time you feel like it.”

I watched him walk off in a loping, loose-jointed stride, quickly disappearing around the curve of the path.

Five men. Eleven days in which to uncover the KGB “plant.” There were two ways to root him out. I could start digging for him — and it might take a year or more to get the information. Or I could make him come after me.

He wouldn’t do it himself. He’d send someone else. And if I could spot that someone else, I’d be able to track him back to the man who’d issued the order, and from that man to the next one higher up. And if there weren’t too many in the chain, and if I were lucky and they didn’t get me first — well, I’d get my man. Maybe.

After awhile I got to my feet and walked down Arlington Street to Newbury Street and the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

Every city has at least one hotel like it. The hotel where people with quiet money and social status stay because of the panache, the atmosphere, the ambience — whatever you want to call it. It’s something that takes two or three generations to develop; an individual tradition of superbly efficient but unostentatious, service.

My bags were already in my room. Hawk had seen to it that they were sent directly from Andrews Air Base even while I was being driven to National Airport to catch the Eastern shuttle flight. All I had to do was sign the register at the desk. The first thing I did after I closed the door behind the bellhop was to put in a transatlantic call to Jacques Crève-Coeur in Marseilles.

The telephone rang half a dozen times before he picked it up.

I said, “’Allo, Jacques?” and before I could go on, the receiver crackled with his curses.

“You know what time it is here?” he demanded. “Don’t you have any consideration at all? Why must you deprive an old man like me of his sleep?” It was not quite 9:00 P.M. in France.

“You’ll get all the sleep you need in your grave. Jacques, were there any repercussions from that little incident on the beach?”

“Little incident! An understatement, mon ami. No, there were no repercussions. Why?”

“Do you think the opposition found out I was responsible?”

I heard him gasp. “Mon dieu! This is an open line! Why are you suddenly so careless?”

“Trust me, Jacques.”

He caught on quickly. “No, so far they don’t know about you, although they’re trying hard to find out who it was. Is it that you want me to pass the word along?”

“As soon as you can, Jacques. Such a channel is available to you?”

“One of the best. A double agent. He thinks I don’t know that he works for the KGB as well as for us,”

“Let them know that I rescued the Russian, Jacques. Let them know he told me everything he discovered. Also, let them know that I’m now in Boston.”

Jacques said somberly, “They’ll be after you, Nick. Take care.”

“Someone will be after me, Jacques. Let’s hope it will be soon.”

I hung up. There was nothing more to be said. What I had to do now was to wait, and my hotel room was not the place for it. Not if I wanted action. I had to expose myself and see what happened.

What happened was that two hours later I met a young woman. She was in her late twenties or early thirties and carried herself with the kind of poise other women envy and try to imitate. Brown hair, neatly brushed so that the ends curled in to frame an oval face. Just enough makeup to accentuate grey-blue eyes and the barest touch of lipstick to outline her full mouth. A blue, rough-nubbed linen jacket and short skirt and a paler blue turtleneck cashmere sweater covered the lines of an exceptionally feminine body.

Downtown Boston is a city made for tourists. Within a dozen blocks there are half a hundred places of historical interest. I had wandered across the Common to the Granary Burial Ground on Tremont Street — Ben Franklin’s final resting place.

Like most of the other tourists, she carried a camera. As she unslung it from around her neck, she came up to me and held it out. Smiling, she asked politely, “Would you mind taking my picture? It’s very simple. I’ve already set it. All you have to do is press this button.”

The smile was friendly and, at the same time, remote. It’s the kind of smile that pretty girls learn to turn on when they want something, and yet still want to keep you at arm’s length.

She handed me the camera and moved back, lithely stepping up onto the edge of Franklin’s grave marker.

“Be sure you get it all in,” she said. “The whole monument. Okay?”

I raised the camera to my eye.

“You’ll have to step back a few feet,” she told me, still smiling her warm but impersonal smile. But there was no warmth in those blue-grey eyes. “You’re really too close.”

She was right. The camera had a telephoto lens mounted on it. All I could see of her through the finder was the upper part of her torso and her head.

I started to move back, and as I did so, the weight and the feel of the camera in my hands told me that something was wrong. It looked like any one of a hundred thousand Japanese single lens reflex cameras of that particular popular model. There was nothing outwardly different about it to arouse my suspicions. But my instincts were suddenly screaming at me, telling me that something was wrong. I’ve learned to trust my instincts thoroughly, and to act on those instincts without delay.

I took my finger off the shutter release and moved the camera away from my face.

On the pedestal, the woman stopped smiling. Anxiously she called out, “Is there anything wrong?”

I smiled reassuringly back at her. “Not a thing,” I said and turned to the man standing a few feet away. He’d been watching the little by-play between us with an envious expression on his round face. He was short and bald and wore heavily-framed glasses, and he was dressed in a plaid summer jacket and bright red slacks. The look on his face said plainly that, while he wished she’d chosen him, he was used to the fact that pretty women never noticed him. I guess he might have been a nice guy. I’ll never know. He was a loser, one of the world’s little people who somehow always wind up with the short end of the stick.

I pressed the camera into his pudgy hands and said, “Do me a favor, will you? Take a picture of both of us.”

Without waiting to hear his reply, I sprang up onto the base of the marker beside the young woman and put one arm tightly around her waist before she could stop me.

She tried to twist away. There was real fright in her face. I held her even more firmly to my side, my arm gripping her torso, feeling the softness of her flesh under the softness of the cashmere sweater.

“No!” she cried out. “No! Don’t!”

“He’s just going to take one for my scrapbook,” I told her pleasantly, but my arm never relaxed its unbending grip on her in spite of her struggles and the smile on my face was as false as hers had been a moment before.

Desperately she tried to wrench herself away.

The man put the camera to his eye.

“Hey! That’s a great shot,” he commented admiringly.

“Damn you! Let go!” she cried out, panic filling her voice. “You’ll kill us both!”

“Hold it,” said the pudgy little man. I threw the woman to the ground, with myself on top of her, just as his finger pressed down on the shutter release.

The explosion fractured our little world with its sharp blast.

As explosions go, it wasn’t much. Just enough to tear the head off the man with the camera and splatter us with his blood. An ounce or so of plastique doesn’t take up much space. Neither does the tiny electric battery that makes it go off, but together they’re enough to do the job if all you want to do is kill the man who’s holding it to his face.

Some part of the camera — I guess it must have been the lens — flew across the few feet and slammed into the side of my head. It was like being hit with an axe handle. Everything went a reddish, hazy black and out of focus. Beneath me, I could feel the woman’s body squirming in her frantic attempts to escape. My hands wouldn’t respond. I couldn’t hold onto her.

People were shouting. There were a few screams that seemed to come from very far away, and then the noise swallowed me up.

I wasn’t out very long. Just a few seconds, but it was long enough for the woman to pull herself from underneath me and get to her feet. Dimly I could see her run down the path to the gate. She turned left on Tremont Street.

Groggily I pushed myself to my hands and knees. Someone helped me stand up.

“Are you alright?”

I didn’t answer. Like a drunk, I staggered down the path after her, knowing that I had to keep her in sight.

Someone shouted at me, “Hey, you’re hurt!” and tried to hold me back. I pushed him aside with a hard shove that sent him sprawling to his knees and continued my staggering run over the graves toward the gate. As I came out of the cemetery, I saw her turn the corner and head up toward Beacon Hill.

By the time I reached the intersection, she was far up the street. She had crossed to the other side and had slowed to a walk. If a running man attracts attention, the sight of a woman sprinting is enough to turn every head. Whoever she was, she was smart enough to know that. She walked at a quick, determined pace, looking neither to the right nor the left.

I slowed to a walk, too, staying on the opposite side of the street to keep her in sight. She went up the hill, past the State House, then turned right on Joy Street, still a hundred feet or more in front of me. When I got to the corner, it was just in time to see her turn left onto Mount Vernon Street.

The streets on Beacon Hill are narrow and not very crowded with people. It’s easy to spot anyone trying to follow you. I hung back as far as I dared, gambling that I wouldn’t lose her.

I didn’t.

She came to Louisburg Square, that small, privately-owned enclave that is the home of old Boston families, and turned into it. Two rows of adjoining townhouses that are not very wide and not very pretentious face each other across a small park. You’ve got to have more than just money to be able to buy one. They’re passed down from generation to generation, a legacy to be kept in the family. Outsiders are not welcome.

I watched the woman pause momentarily to unlock one of the townhouse doors. Not once had she turned her head to see if she were being followed.

The sidewalks of the Square are of brick, and in the street the original granite cobblestones are only partially covered by a thin sheeting of asphalt that time and traffic have worn away. The whole damn place looks slightly seedy, slightly run down, but you’d better not believe its appearance. Louisburg Square means something special to anyone who knows New England. The people who live there hide behind a facade of genteel poverty, and what they hide is old money. Old money and old family and what Calvin Woolfolk and I had been talking about earlier in the day. Power.

She’d led me to where I wanted to go.

Now the question was, which one of those five names on Woolfolk’s list lived at 21½ Louisburg Square?