Marcus lifted his cup of tea and held it a moment. Tower said, “I didn’t put poison in it.”
“I don’t believe you would have.” Marcus sipped the hot tea.
“Why are you here?” Tower coughed, a raspy sound rattling in his lungs.
“The truth.”
“I often wondered what that ever really meant.”
“Why?”
“Maybe it was from war wounds…wounds to my head. My psyche, I guess.” He grunted. “What truth are you looking for?”
“General Patton. I have reason to believe his death was planned.”
“Are you writing a book or something?”
“No.”
“Then why do you want to unearth old ghosts? Tell me why you’re here.”
“I’ve been researching the Bible, plugging in ancient text and looking for syntax, patterns of language correlated with dates and geometric measurements of space and time. These things show a relationship to the design of a long ago destroyed building, to a theory of mathematics and to knowledge that began in a time that only a few people could recognize and appreciate.”
The old man looked straight at Marcus, holding his gaze for a few seconds. A grandfather clock in the corner of the room chimed. “What’s that have to do with me?”
“Because, in other forms — in other manifestations, I believe the reason Patton died still exists today, and it may be part of the sum, or part of the reason others died and may die. I want to find a way to prevent that.”
Tower stared at Marcus, his senses looking for the slightest hint of deception. He sipped his tea, placed the cup and saucer on the table in front of him and leaned back in his chair, his eyes shifting to a picture window overlooking a pasture. “At first I thought it was something that the very top down said had to be done for the security of the nation. They called it a justified pulling of a bad weed in the garden of evil. I don’t buy it anymore. He was killed because, as I was told, Patton had lost his mind and was a great danger to America.”
“Who told you that?”
There was a knock at the door. Tower looked at his watch. “Come in, Liz.”
A woman in her late twenties, dressed as a nurse, entered and smiled. Her crimson hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She carried a canvas bag and a notebook. “Liz, this is Paul Marcus. He’s visiting me from Virginia.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said.
Marcus smiled. “It’s good to meet you. Am I interrupting anything?”
The woman turned her head to Tower, deferring the answer to him. He chuckled. “Elizabeth and her colleagues have become my best and only friends these last few weeks. You see, Mr. Marcus, I’m dying. Maybe you’re interrupting death. That’s okay, though. If I make it until the end of next month, I’ll have outlived the doctor’s prediction by a year. But right now, speaking with you, I feel that at this moment, I’m more alive than I’ve been in a long time.”
SIXTY-SIX
The hospice nurse counted pills on the kitchen counter while Tower led Marcus into the backyard. Tower pointed to a sycamore tree. “I planted that tree the year Annie and I and moved from the states. It’ll outlive me, and that’s fine. I’ve become rather fond of my friend, the sycamore. I won’t even pick flowers now. Life, in any form, especially the beauty of flowers, seems like an utter gift to me. I see and appreciate things, the wondrous things, which I never even thought about during the war.” His thoughts drifted, eyes filled with secret memories.
“Why was Patton killed?”
Tower slowly turned his head toward Marcus. “I don’t think anybody alive really knows. I’m probably the last one alive who could, perhaps, most accurately speculate, and I’m not sure. I have my theories. The top guys in the OSS wanted Patton out of his job, wanted to quiet him. He was ranting about the way Eisenhower handled the war and its aftermath. It pissed off some big players. I even met with the OSS head, William Donovan. We called him Wild Bill, and he sure as hell was. I was recruited by the OSS, and I spent a lot of time behind enemy lines, Germany, where I did what was expected. I never liked it, not one damn bit. But, you know, it had to be done. When I was told that Patton, the great general I always believed he was…when I was told he’d crossed the line, I found it hard to believe. But they said Patton was about to drag us into a war with Stalin. They told me Patton was insane, the war had finally broken him, and he had to be stopped from shooting his mouth off.”
“How was it planned?”
“The car accident was set up. The idea was to get Patton in the hospital and take him out there.”
“Is that where you killed him?”
“I didn’t kill him. I actually couldn’t get inside the hospital because it was heavily guarded. Rumor was that the killer used a drug, administered from a needle, which simulated a heart attack.”
Marcus sipped his tea. “Do you believe that’s what happened?”
“They didn’t do an autopsy.”
“You said you thought it was justified, but not now…why?”
“That’s why I’m here in England. One thing I was told I’d have to steal during the accident scene was a small black attaché case that Patton always carried since shortly after Hitler died. Patton had a spear that Hitler had looted from some Austrian museum. It was believed that the General carried it with him always in that briefcase. The OSS wanted the spear.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t say, but I’d heard the spear was some kind of powerful weapon.”
“Did you get it?”
“Yes, but in all the confusion, as Patton was taken to the hospital, I hid it in my Jeep and took it back to my hotel that night.”
“Did you give it to Donovan or anyone with the OSS later?”
“I almost did. But I got to thinking about why the little head of a spear was so important to the OSS. And if it was so damn important and powerful, was it the real reason the general was killed? Did his death have nothing to do with Patton’s politics or the fact he said what he thought…even if it pissed off Eisenhower?”
“What happened to the spear?”
“After Patton died, I met Donovan and another OSS operative, Claude Bremen, at the Connaught Hotel bar in London. We were sitting at a corner table, and Bremen asked if I found the spear. I told him it wasn’t in Patton’s Cadillac; at least I couldn’t find it in all of the confusion. He hit the table with his fist and said I was incompetent and maybe the Russians had found it in the hospital. They ordered a bottle of Irish whiskey and started knocking them back. After a while, Bremen told me how the OSS originally began in a private room at the Rockefeller Building in 1933. At that point, he grinned one of the most chilling grins I’d ever seen on a man. He laughed and said that a group of very wealthy and powerful men, and their heirs, would always control the government because they could manipulate the intelligence that they chose to share with congress or the president.”
“What do you mean?”
“They had a long range plan, a ‘hundred-year plan,’ he called it, a plan to direct the balance of power. I was damn naïve, and thought he meant balance of power in our own government. He smiled and corrected me…said it was to run the balance of power around the world. But it would begin in our own country. So I started thinking hard about that. If congress and the president are stage-managed by powerful shadow groups, then who’s really running the nation…or the damn world, for that matter? Having done what I did in the war, I felt dirty. I was really nothing more than a hit man, and that picture didn’t sit too well with me. I told them that. I told them I’d have no more of the lethal charades.”