With a quick, puzzled smile, Burdick twisted his narrow head slightly to the side.
“Hart?-You’re talking about when he met with Clarence Atwood? What happened?”
“I told Hart everything I knew; I answered every question. I told him the truth, and then Atwood lied. It did not seem that important. What difference did it make that he had not done it yet; I was sure he would have me do it right away. It’s like I said, Clarence was just trying to protect himself.” Bauman’s eyes became hard, resentful, and full of disappointment, though, it seemed to Burdick, mainly with himself. “Clarence was always good at that,” he muttered, staring off into the distance.
“What did he lie to Hart about? What was it you thought he was going to have you do?” asked Burdick with an insistence that brought Bauman back to himself.
“The drawing, the one you thought was there,” he replied, gesturing toward the manila envelope that lay open on the table. “There never was a drawing, an artist’s sketch of what the girl looked like, never. I was never asked to do it. I wasn’t asked to describe to anyone-anyone except Atwood-what she looked like. Atwood lied about it to Hart, and he lied when he told him that he had given copies of it to the FBI. I was still so shaken by what had happened, by what I had done-that instead of protecting the president I had helped his murderer get away-that I didn’t understand how that lie meant that he had lied about that other thing as well.”
Bauman’s eyes, trained to search a crowd for the least little thing unusual, to move in a constant, relentless circuit, watching, waiting for something to happen, did not move at all. They stared straight ahead, empty, bleak, disconsolate, two hollow orbs sunk in a black depression. Burdick coaxed him out of it.
“That other thing?” he asked in a friendly, sympathetic voice. “Tell me what it was. It’s important, isn’t it?”
“What?” Bauman blinked his eyes. “Yes, it’s important. I don’t know why it didn’t seem that important when I heard him say it to Hart. It wasn’t just lying about a picture, a drawing of what the girl looked like, something we could have done the next day or even that night. He told Hart that copies of the drawing had been given to the FBI, and that the bureau had started an investigation. That’s what I remembered when Atwood told me I was finished, that I had to leave, that it was the only way I had to protect myself from public embarrassment when the truth came out that the president had been murdered and that I had helped the killer get away. There was no picture; nothing had been given to the FBI. Do you understand: Nothing had been given to the FBI-Atwood had never talked to them!”
“But he’s the one who told you that the president had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered. Why wouldn’t he tell the FBI? Why wouldn’t he want them to start an investigation right away?”
Bauman turned to make sure they were still alone, and then bent forward.
“When he told me, when he called me into his office the day after the president died and said there had been an autopsy and that some drug had been used, I thought the investigation had already started. I asked him who I was supposed to talk to, who was in charge. He said he’d let me know, that there were some other things that had to be worked out first. He didn’t tell me what they were, and I was so distracted, so upset, I didn’t think to ask. It was only later, after he talked to Hart, after I began to realize what he had lied about, after he told me I was finished, after more than a week had gone by and everyone was still talking as if the president had died of natural causes, it was only after all that, that I decided to find out. I broke into his office.” He nodded toward the package and what it held inside. “It’s Atwood’s file.”
“You took the file; you didn’t-?”
“No, I made copies of everything; he doesn’t know I have it. His office is just down the hallway from mine. I was there late at night, cleaning out my things.”
Burdick tapped his finger on the cover.
“Is this the only copy?”
“No. There’s someone else I thought might need it.”
Burdick glanced at the black-and-white photograph. She was more than good-looking, she was extraordinary, with large, bold eyes and a mouth that seemed somehow both vulnerable and defiant at the same time. He wondered why Bauman had thought to include several copies of the photograph instead of just one. Then, when he put down the first and picked up the second, he realized that they weren’t the same photograph at all; that they, and the four others as well, showed her not just in different outfits and different poses, but with such completely different looks that she could have passed for six different women. He put them down and searched Bauman’s eyes
“This is the girl, the woman you saw that night, the one who murdered the president?”
“That’s not a face I’ll ever forget.”
“But how-how did Clarence Atwood get a photograph, six photographs, of her? How did he even know what she looked like, if you didn’t work with a sketch artist?”
“Don’t you get it? She was working for us. Clarence Atwood hired her. The head of the Secret Service hired the woman who murdered the President of the United States!”
Chapter Fifteen
They sat in a kind of stunned silence, neither of them wanting to believe what they both knew was true. Bauman had been right: It was more than unbelievable, it was impossible; impossible that anything like this could have happened, impossible that the president of the United States had been murdered on the order of the head of the very agency sworn to protect the president’s life. It was more than betrayal, it was treason.
The more Bauman thought about it, the angrier he became. This awful secret had been locked up inside him for days, with no one he could talk to, no one he could trust. For more than twenty years, he had done what he had been told. Like a soldier in a war, he had understood that his job was to react, not think for himself. And now, suddenly, he had to decide on his own what he was supposed to do. He knew he had to do something; he could not just forget what he had discovered. He had helped a murderer, an assassin, get away. He was not about to let the man who hired her go free.
But who should he tell? This was not something that Clarence Atwood had done alone. If he hired someone to kill the president, it was because someone told him to. He could take what he had to the FBI. He had friends there, people he had worked with in the past. But what if he made a mistake, told the wrong person what he knew? The risk was too high, the danger too great. He was not just thinking about himself, though he knew how easy it would be to put him out of the way; the real danger, the one he worried about, was what might happen if these people, whoever they were, got away with it, murdered the president and no one ever found out what they had done. The more he thought about it, the less certain he was about how to proceed. Each alternative seemed less promising than the last. And then he thought of it, and wondered why he had not thought of it before.
“Hart,” he mumbled to himself.
“Hart? What about him?” asked Burdick.
Lost in his own reverie, Bauman had not realized he had spoken out loud. He looked up from the table, blinked his eyes, and then remembered.
“I was going to tell him, but then you called. I thought I could trust him. Atwood lied to him, which meant that Hart could not have known, could not have been a part of it.”
But the question about whom he could trust, whom he could safely tell, was secondary to a deeper concern, one that had troubled him from the time he first read what was in the file he had stolen from Atwood’s office, troubled him so much that he had scarcely slept at night. It was still there, gnawing at him, driving him a little more crazy each time he went back through what had happened and how he had been made a part of it, an unwilling accomplice in a conspiracy to murder. Suddenly, all that pent up emotion exploded, and he hit the table with the flat of his hand so hard that the waitress, sitting on a stool next to the cash register in front, jolted sideways with the noise. When she saw it was nothing, the startled glance vanished and she turned back to the newspaper that lay spread out on the counter in front of her.