The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Chapter Six

I came down Mount Vernon Street, turning on Charles Street on my way back to the hotel. At that time of night — it was after three o’clock in the morning — the street was deserted. The old-fashioned, black-painted, cast iron street lamps were on, forming pools of light with large patches of dark in between. I kept to the outside of the narrow sidewalks until I got down the hill to Charles Street.

There’s something menacing about a city in those early hours. There seems to be danger lurking in every alleyway, in every dark entrance and at every corner.

If I had been more cautious, I would have walked along Beacon Street around the edge of the Public Gardens, but that’s the long way around, and cutting through the Gardens at a diagonal is a lot shorter. So that’s what I did.

The path takes you first to the lagoon and then part way around it before you come to the small bridge that crosses over the narrowest part of the pond. The path is very close to the willow trees that border the water’s edge. The weeping willows are old and huge, thick and very tall, so their branches hang down heavily to block out most of the lamplight. The elms and maples, too, are big. They provide huge patches of darkness, and the grass is well kept and short-cropped. It bides footsteps completely.

Not until he was on the asphalt path only a few feet behind me did I hear the slap of his shoes on the pavement as he made his final rush. The walk down the deserted streets had sharpened my senses, made me totally alert. Without conscious thought, I dropped to one knee as soon as I heard the sound of his feet. His blow went over the top of my head, missing by only inches. The momentum of his attack crashed him into me, knocking me sprawling on my face.

He was a big man. I rolled away from him, scrambling off the pavement and onto the grass. He sprang for me again before I had regained my balance.

Whoever he was, the only thing he had going for him was his size and his strength. He wasn’t very fast and he didn’t know much about how to kill a man quickly or silently.

I fell onto my back when he made his leap. I barely had enough time to draw my knees up to my chest. As he flung himself on me, I uncurled both legs with all the power of my thighs, catching him full on the chest. The impact flung him over my head. It should have broken half a dozen of his ribs. If it did, he didn’t show it.

Twisting to my feet, I turned in time to see him stand upright. He was more cautious now. In his right hand he carried a length of lead pipe.

He came at me for the third time, swinging the pipe first one way, and then trying a backhand stroke with it to catch me off guard. I dove in under the swing of the lead pipe. My shoulder caught him at the knees, knocking him down. I scrambled away as fast as I could.

I didn’t try to close in. To do that with a man of his size would be sheer suicide. He was more than a head taller than I am. You’ve seen a football lineman towering over the others, his shoulder pads making him look gigantic. That’s how this one looked, only he wasn’t wearing shoulder pads. It was all his own muscle.

I moved crabwise to one side, legs apart, balancing on the balls of my feet. My assailant heaved himself upright. He took a step toward me, his arm going back for another blow. I took a short step, leaping high in the air, my right leg lashing out in a furious kick.

Karate and savate and Thai foot boxing have one thing in common. They all make use of the fact that a man’s legs are stronger and more lethal than his arms.

The thin edge of my shoe sole should have caught him flush on the chin, just under the ear, with the force of my leg and body behind it. If you do it right, you can split open the thick canvas of a heavy, sand-filled punching bag.

I missed.

Not by much. My foot scraped along his jaw as he moved his head away a fraction of an inch, but that fraction was enough to save his life.

He lunged back at me with the lead pipe, sideswiping me along the rib cage, knocking the breath out of me. A fire of pain spread out along my ribs, knocking the breath out of me. I tumbled away in a rolling fall.

He let me get to my feet. Gasping, I moved backward away from him. He stepped menacingly toward me, measuring me for another blow. I gave ground, not letting him get set, keeping him from that one instant he needed to strike again. Step by step I retreated, staying just out of range of his powerful swing.

I didn’t want to kill him. If I had, I would have shifted Hugo into my palm the moment I heard his footsteps. I wanted the man alive so I could get him to talk. I wanted to know who’d sent him after me. This was no ordinary mugging. A mugger would have been long gone once his first attack had failed.

Someone wanted me dead. Sabrina had set me up for the attack, but she was just an agent. I’d known from the beginning what was happening when, on our way to her house, she’d taken every opportunity to walk me under the lights. If anyone was watching us, he’d gotten a good look at me.

The lagoon curves in toward the footbridge. There is one exceptionally tall weeping willow at the small point that juts out into the water right there. It’s eight to ten yards from the steps that lead up onto the bridge itself. The footpath goes under the bridge. At that point, it’s only a few feet wide, with the stone buttresses of the bridge on one side and the water of the lagoon on the other.

I backed away under the bridge so that he would be able to come at me only from the front. One step at a time he advanced, the lead pipe in his big fist swinging threateningly from side to side, his body crouched to make it difficult for me to lunge at him.

There was one moment when we faced each other in the darkness under the bridge when it seemed that the whole world had paused in silence to await the outcome of our duel. There was no one walking on the bridge over our heads. The few nighttime noises of the city were too far away to break the deadly quiet. There was only the sound of a lone cricket nearby and the sound of my assailant’s breath coming in gulping heaves as he dragged air into his lungs. Mano a mano. One on one.

But he wanted me dead and I wanted him alive — if possible. The advantage was all on his side.

As he began to pull back his arm for another swipe at me, I spun away on my heel and ran a dozen yards. In front of the wooden dock where the swan boats are tied up at night, I stopped abruptly and whipped around again. He’d taken the bait and had run after me. He was off balance when I sprang at him. My left arm knocked the lead pipe to one side, my right forearm slammed him across the throat as he tried to swing the pipe. I wasn’t quite fast enough to evade it completely. It sideswiped me just above the left ear. Suddenly the sky was full of more stars than I’d ever seen before.

Staggering backward along the wooden planks of the dock, I tried to clear my head. His shadow was huge and ominous. The pipe was still in his hand.

By now we were only a foot or two from the edge of the dock. There was no place left for me to go, except onto the nearest swan boat itself, and its metal-framed wooden-slat seats were too close to each other to give me room to maneuver.

I realized that my chances of taking him alive were pretty slim. At this point, it was a case of saving my own life.

He took a moment, to measure me for what he probably thought would be a last crippling blow. As he ran at me, the pipe came up head height and then flashed down.

I moved a hairsbreadth to one side. The bludgeon missed me by inches. As his hand and arm came across my chest, I seized his right forearm in one hand and clamped the other behind his elbow. Pivoting from the waist, I slammed my hip into his and bent myself almost double. His momentum is what did it. That and the leverage I exerted on his locked arm.

Involuntarily he rose up off the ground in a giant arc, swinging over my head, flying over the end of the dock to come crashing down on the hard, unyielding edges of the metal and slat seats of the swan boat.

Under the impact of his more than 200 pounds, the swan boat dipped sideways in the water, bobbing up again and then down before it returned to a level keel. Ripples spread out in concentric arcs across the still water of the pond. He lay in a broken, unnatural attitude, his head and neck supported by one seat edge, his knees and legs by the seat back in front of him.

Panting, I moved slowly onto the swan boat, waiting for him to stir. He made no movement. I pulled Hugo from his sheath and pressed the blade gently against his throat, ready to shove hard in case he was feigning unconsciousness.

He wasn’t. He was dead. The back of his neck had come down with the full weight of his body on the thin edge of the back of the seat and crushed the vertebrae.

His face was toward me. The man was in his middle thirties. His slacks and shirt were expensive and tight fitting. Heavy facial features were topped by a shock of lank blond hair that fell across his forehead.

I turned him so that I could reach into his hip pocket, pulling out his wallet and putting it away in my own pocket. I’d look at it later. Right now I had to make him look like the victim of an ordinary mugging attack. His wristwatch was a Patek Phillipe. The least expensive models cost several hundred dollars, and this one was far from the least expensive in their line. I took his watch, too.

And then, suddenly, I changed my mind. I decided I wanted his death to attract more than ordinary attention. I wanted word to get back to the opposition that he’d failed to carry out his assignment. I wanted them to send someone better for the job — someone I could track back to the top. I was going to stir up public attention. If Bradford — whether or not he was in the conspiracy — hated publicity, then the others must share the same feeling.

Well, I’d give them publicity. The morning papers would carry the story of the tourist who’d had his head blown off by a camera. Tomorrow’s evening rags were going to have an even juicier item.

I looked around. There was still no one in sight. Considering the lateness of the hour, that wasn’t unusual. I bent and heaved his heavy, limp body across my shoulder. Stepping back onto the dock, I struggled to the far end of the boat.

It took a few minutes to do what I had to do. When I finished, I knew it would make the front page of every newspaper in town.

He looked quite natural.

It had taken a lot of effort on my part, because you just don’t heave around an inert 200-pound body without exertion, but it was worth it. He now sat on the bicycle seat between the great white wings of the wooden swan. I’d lashed him upright with the tiller ropes, and I’d put his feet on the pedals and tied them there. Except for his head drooping forward onto his chest, he looked as if he were waiting for morning to come, ready to propel the swan boat filled with children in a quiet, pleasurable ride around the islands of the lagoon.

One final touch. On his chest, buttoned to his shirt by a tear in one corner of the paper, I had fastened the list of five names that Calvin Woolfolk had given me.

I took one last look at him and walked away, up the steps to the stone footbridge, across to the path that leads directly to the far exit of the Gardens. There is a temporary link fence at the end of the path at Arlington Street, but there is a two-foot gap between it and the permanent cast iron picket fence. I squeezed through it onto the sidewalk.

The Ritz Carlton is just across the street, its blue awning with white piping looking crisp and elegant and welcoming.

Exhausted, I headed for the front entrance and my room.

By the time I closed the door to my room behind me, the left side of my rib cage was throbbing with a sharp ache and my head felt swollen to twice its size.

I undressed, took four aspirin tablets and a long, hot shower, letting the water pound on me with the faucets full open. After about twenty minutes of steaming, I began to feel more like myself again.

I was about to climb into bed when my glance caught the wallet and wristwatch lying on top of the dresser where I’d dumped them along with my own belongings. I went through the wallet quickly. A Massachusetts driver’s license, four credit cards and $350 in cash. The driver’s license was in the name of Malcolm Stoughton. So were the credit cards. I put them aside, picking up the Patek Phillipe watch. The case and the expandable metal strap were of eighteen carat gold. On the royal blue face of the watch, the numbers were picked out by tiny chip jewels, small but perfect garnets, glowing a deep red.

Idly I turned the watch over to look at the back of the slim casing. Normally, you’ll find tiny, engraved print that identifies the type of metal the casing is made of, whether it’s waterproof and, if it’s expensive, the maker’s hallmark. What caught my eye was a miniature engraving of a sort I’d never seen before.

It was hard to make out because it was so small. No matter how much I twisted or turned the watch in the light of the bedlamp, I just couldn’t determine exactly what the emblem was. I needed a magnifying glass.

Now damned few people carry magnifying glasses with them. I sure didn’t, and at four in the morning I wasn’t about to call room service to ask them to get one for me. Then I remembered an old trick. I went over to my suitcase and took out my camera. Removing the lens, I turned it upside down, looking through it at the engraving on the back of the watch.

The image leaped up, because a reversed lens makes a fine magnifier of about five to eight diameters of enlargement, depending upon the focal length of the lens.

What I saw, etched delicately into the metal of the gold casing, was a reproduction of a Revolutionary War flag — the famous Snake Flag. Underneath a partly-coiled snake are the words “Don’t Tread on Me!”

Puzzled, I put the watch down, replaced the lens on my camera and got into bed. I lit one of my gold-tipped cigarettes and lay there thinking for some time.

The flag on the back of that expensive watch made no sense, even though for more than a year Boston had been filled with trinkets and souvenirs of the Bicentennial, celebrating the two hundred years of our country’s existence. There was hardly a place you could turn without being confronted by historical banners, posters, flags, photographs, paintings, etchings, postcards and whatever else anyone could think of on which to slap a Bicentennial slogan. But not on a watch like this! You just didn’t do that to a Patek Phillipe that must have cost well over a thousand dollars. No one’s that patriotic.

I mulled it over until I could hardly keep my eyes open. Then I crushed out the stub of my cigarette in the ashtray and turned out the light. I fell asleep trying to dream of Sabrina and not succeeding.

I awoke late in the morning and ordered breakfast sent up. The tray it arrived on also carried a folded copy of the Boston Globe. Splashed across the front page were the headlines: “SWAN BOAT KILLER SLAYS PROMINENT ATTORNEY!” and “DEATH AT HANDS OF LUNATIC!”

The story went on to describe the finding of the body by a couple of teenagers who’d called the cops.

There were three inches at the bottom left of the front page devoted to the “bizarre murder” of a smalltime mobster who’d had his head blown off by an exploding camera in the Granary Burial Ground the previous day. The police were ready to term it a “gangland killing.” Which just proves that all chubby little men with horn-rimmed glasses aren’t as innocent as they look. At least the cops wouldn’t be sniffing up my trail.

But the “swan boat killing” was the important story. Important enough for the editors to have replaced the front page and brought out a special late-morning edition. Normally, the morning paper is made up and printed the night before. I read through the four columns they gave to the story, along with a “feature” on the dead man’s background.

Malcolm Stoughton was a member of a prominent Boston law firm. He also had a reputation as a sports buff. In college he’d played as middle linebacker and had spent two years playing for a pro team to earn enough money to pay his way through law school. Apart from this bit of information, the only other thing outstanding about him was that he came from a family that traced its beginnings back to the Mayflower.

There was no mention whatsoever of the list of five names I’d pinned on his chest.

Sometime between the finding of the body and the arrival of the reporters on the scene, someone had removed the list. I knew that the teenagers who’d discovered the body must have seen the list. They couldn’t miss it. The first cops to get there must also have seen the list. And if they saw it, then the sergeant and the homicide detail had seen it, too. God alone knows how many others saw it.

Yet there wasn’t a word in the news story about that list!

And that in itself told me a lot about the men whose names were on it.

About the time I was finishing my second cup of coffee, the telephone rang.

“What the hell is going on up there?” Hawk was angry.

“Right now,” I said, “I’m having breakfast. I was out late last night.”

“So I understand!” snapped Hawk. “For Christ’s sake, Nick, what the devil’s the idea of pinning those names on his shirt? Don’t you know who you’re fooling around with?”

I interrupted him. “How did you know about the list? There wasn’t a word about it in the newspapers.”

“There wasn’t?”

“Not one word. They kept it out. How’d you learn about it?”

“I get copies of requests for information made to the FBI by local police departments,” Hawk said. “And it’s none of your business how I get that information out of the FBI office.”

“Well, you’re not the only one who knows how to pull strings. Someone up here has done a lot of tugging to keep this quiet.”

Hawk made no comment, but I knew it had made an impression on him.

“I gather all hell must have broken loose down there for you to call me,” I ventured.

“Damn right.” Hawk was furious. “Just about everyone but the White House has been putting pressure on me to get me to call off whatever it is — you’re doing up there. I’d like to know how the hell they know you’re there!”

“Jacques Crève-Coeur,” I said. “I had him pass the word to the KGB that the Russian had talked to me and that I was in Boston.”

Hawk said nothing for a moment, letting the implications sink in.

“Does Washington know the mission I’m on?” I said finally, breaking the silence.

“No,” said Hawk. “They only know that someone from AXE is up there creating havoc, and they want it stopped. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next call came from the Oval Room itself!”

“Lots of power working behind the scenes, I take it.”

“More than you can believe! First of all, most of them shouldn’t even know that AXE exists. When a civilian not only knows about us, but knows whom to call to apply pressure on me, you’d better respect the kind of influence he has! So far, four Senators and two Cabinet members have telephoned.”

“Who put them up to it? That should clue us in on the man we’re after.”

Hawk snorted. “Every one of the five names on your list! That tell you anything?”

“So you’re calling me off the assignment?”

“Don’t be a damn fool! I’m still running AXE! And I’m telling you to get on with your job before they have my head. I want it finished and over with as soon as possible!”

“Maybe I need a secretary.” I heard him sputter, but stopped his response with a question. “Where are the dossiers on these men? When I called you last night, you promised to have them up here by courier this morning.”

Hawk took a deep breath. “There aren’t any,” he confessed. “There are no files on any of them.”

It was a bombshell. Things like that just don’t happen. Somewhere, in some government agency, there’s a dossier on everyone of any importance in this country, and AXE has access to any file in any Federal department.

“FBI? CIA? Secret Service? Department of Defense? Damn it, Hawk, someone’s got to have something!”

“You heard what I said.”

“Look,” I persisted, “every one of these men has met with the President at least once, and you know that no one — I repeat — no one ever gets to meet the President in person for the first time without being cleared by the Secret Service. They’ve got to be notified twenty-four hours in advance of the meeting to check him out. Now, where are those clearances? What were they based on? Someone’s got to have files on these men!”

“I’m well aware of the procedure!” Acid dripped from Hawk’s voice.

“And there’s no file on any of them?”

“Not a trace. We’ve been checking all morning.”

It was hard for me to believe. “You’re telling me that each one of these men has had his files removed from every intelligence unit in the country?”

“No,” said Hawk deliberately. “I think that just one of them has had all the files removed. Getting rid of his own would just single him out for attention.”

“Computer banks? What about the computer banks?”

“Nothing,” said Hawk. “They’ve been reprogrammed so that the information is either erased or simply won’t appear on a print-out.”

Hawk made a difficult admission. “I underestimated our opponent, Nick. The man has more influence than I thought. I didn’t really understand how much power our man can wield. What you’ve done, Nick, has pushed him into making his move earlier than we expected. You may not have eleven days to find him.”

There was something in Hawk’s tone of voice that told me he had kept something back.

“Spit it out, Hawk. What else is there I should know?”

“As of ten minutes before this phone call,” said Hawk, “you’ve been put on the wanted list by the FBI. And the Secret Service just got word that you’ve made a dangerous threat on the life of the President. Agents from both departments will try to pick you up as soon as their Boston field offices receive word. Get the hell out of that hotel and go underground!”

“And finish the assignment?”

“Certainly!” snapped Hawk. “What else did you expect?”

And with that he hung up.