He put the six photographs to the side and discovered a kind of ledger listing a series of payments made into a Swiss account, four separate transactions spread over six months, each one in the amount of one million two hundred fifty thousand dollars, for a total of five million. The last payment, he noted, had been made the day after Constable died. It listed the payments and the dates on which they had been made, but there was nothing to indicate where they had come from, or who, if it had not been Atwood, had made the arrangement to hire her in the first place. The next several documents had to do with the president’s itinerary, every place he had been scheduled to be, starting the month before the assassination. That seemed to mean that the time and place of the assassination had been left up to the killer. The woman hired to do it had first to get close to him, meet him somehow, let him know she might be available, that she understood the game and knew how to be discreet, that he could take her to bed and trust that she would not talk about it.
Burdick riffled through the next several pages, but there was nothing about when she finally met Constable or what happened between them when she did. If the evidence, or the lack of evidence, was any indication, she did not make reports. It occurred to him that perhaps she did not have any contact at all with those who hired her, that she simply did what she was paid for and then vanished out of sight. But that, he realized immediately, would not explain the photographs and the fact that they were in Atwood’s possession. She could not have been a hired assassin in the sense in which that was usually meant: someone who worked for anyone, someone who would kill anyone for a price. Someone like that would never allow anyone to know what she looked like, much less let them have half a dozen photographs of her.
She was a hired killer-there was no question about that-but a hired killer who worked for only one kind of employer, the kind that had a regular need for the service she performed. That meant the government, and perhaps other governments as well; intelligence agencies that shared with each other not just information but the means by which to eliminate someone seen as a threat. Whatever laws were on the books against political assassination, everyone understood that it was sometimes necessary to choose the lesser of two evils.
Burdick turned the page, and then he turned another, and each time he did it, turned to the next page in Atwood’s secret file, he did it with reluctance, worried what he was going to find, a feeling followed almost immediately by a strange sense of relief when, instead of a shattering revelation of the sort Bauman had talked about, it was another fairly pedestrian report, an account of expenditures, a reckoning of costs. Then he found it, a chronology of what had happened, a list of everyone involved, a detailed account of the first, and every subsequent, meeting where the matter had been discussed, debated, and decided.
He had not finished the first paragraph when his mouth went dry and his stomach started to churn. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. Bauman’s words echoed in his brain, not just about not wanting to believe it, but what he had said about Bobby Hart, when he asked if he trusted the senator enough to tell him something that was not just unbelievable, but impossible. Because that was what this was: impossible. It could not have happened, not here, not in our lifetime; but it had. The impossible had happened, and with what he had in this file he could now prove it.
Quentin Burdick had read enough. He pulled out his cell phone and called Bobby Hart. There was no answer and all he could do was leave a message that he had to see him right away. He was not sure what to do next. Then he remembered what he had been going to do earlier, when he was sitting at the station and thought Bauman was not going to show up. The Senate was in session. He could talk to Hart when he finished on the floor. He left the waitress a sizeable tip and caught a cab.
Clutching the package in his arms, Burdick found himself watching the passing sights of Washington with new eyes. All the old, familiar landmarks had taken on a strange and different meaning, almost as if the country had been taken over by a foreign power. The buildings, the monuments, the vast open avenues-none of that had changed, but instead of a tribute to the nation’s greatness, it now seemed to represent something important that was in imminent danger of being lost.
Burdick got out in front of the Russell Senate Office Building and hurried inside. The receptionist told him that the senator was not available; David Allen told him the senator was in New York.
“She’s new,” explained Allen as he led Burdick through the narrow passageway to his small backroom office. He removed a pile of documents from the only other chair and then went round to his desk. “Is that for him?” he asked, nodding toward the package Burdick held in his lap.
“No. I mean yes…well, sort of. It’s something I wanted to talk to him about. But you say he’s in New York. I just came down this morning.”
He looked around the cluttered room, books and papers everywhere; the plain wooden desk behind which David Allen somehow functioned, a mountain of what looked like debris, but which Burdick knew from experience was actually organized in a scheme that only Allen could understand, a method that allowed him, and no one else, to find anything he needed. It gave a certain antic, almost magical quality to the otherwise humdrum exercise of filing papers, the ability to find a needle in a haystack without so much as the bother of a search. Despite everything he had been through that day, despite everything he had learned, Burdick could not quite suppress a smile.
“When do you expect him back?”
“I thought tonight, maybe tomorrow; but now-he just called a few minutes ago-I don’t really know.”
“Can you find out? I have to see him; it’s very important.”
Allen had known Burdick a long time; not well, it is true, but in the way someone who worked on the Hill, someone who dealt with the press on a daily basis, would know a reporter. He knew him well enough, or at least he thought he did, to detect a nervous anxiety he had not seen before. Quentin Burdick was smart, insightful, with a judgment about people and events that went as deep as anyone and deeper than most. He had covered politics and government since the year before Richard Nixon was elected and he could still rattle off the names of those who had served in the cabinet of Lyndon Johnson as easily as he could give you the name of the present secretary of state. Burdick had seen everything, from Watergate to war, enough to know that most of what the current crop of politicians thought new and innovative was little more than a pale imitation of things that had been tried before. Nothing surprised him; nothing made him lose the calm, unflappable demeanor that Allen had often marveled at and sometimes envied; nothing, that is, until now.
“What is it?” asked Allen. “You look like you’re ready to come apart.”
Pressing his lips, Burdick spread his long tapered fingers and began to tap them together. Then he locked his fingers and tapped his thumbs, and then, shaking his head, he threw up his hands in frustration. With a quick glance, and a brief, apologetic smile, he let Allen know that it was not something he could talk about.