John Abbott - Scimitar

Perhaps he should call her.

Ask her to please stop bothering him.

No.

Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

He picked up the portion of leg he had severed, dropped it into a black plastic garbage bag, and set the bag on the floor beside the work bench.

Carolyn Fremont’s lifeless blue eyes stared up at him as he began severing her head from her torso.

The two people staring up at the Statue of Liberty were not the slightest bit impressed by her awesome majesty. They were looking for good camera angles. These were the President’s advance men, and they were here to make certain that everything went well, campaignwise, on the Fourth of July. You could maybe fool some of the people most of the time and most of the people some of the time, but you couldn’t fool anybody any time when it came to a good television show. Heather Broward — who was female but nonetheless one of the President’s men — sometimes thought that America itself was one big gaudy television show.

“How about we line the band up behind him?” she suggested.

She was dressed for work — linen slacks, loafers, a sand-colored, long-sleeved cotton blouse, a peach-colored ribbon holding her short brown hair, a Polaroid camera slung on a strap over her shoulder. Ralph Dickens, the man with her, was sixty-three years old and had been setting up Republican campaign stops from when Nixon was making his first bid for the presidency, but thirty-one-year-old Heather was his boss. He figured placing the band up behind The Man would steal his thunder, but he said nothing about it. He was thinking it was nice and cool out here on the island with the river breezes playing. He was wondering how hot it would be on the Fourth.

“Think they’d all fit up there?” Heather asked. “The band?”

She was indicating the area above ground level, some fifteen, twenty feet higher than where they were standing and looking up. White wall, looked like limestone or something, good backdrop for the podium behind which the President would stand, battery of network microphones on it. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie — the Republican uniform. White wall behind him. Above him the Marine Band in dress uniforms, all red-white-and-blue, and then the grey stone of the pedestal and above that the Lady herself all coppery green. Not bad, Ralph had to admit.

“How many people are in the band, anyway?”

“We can trim it to fit,” Ralph said.

He’d been through this shit a thousand times before. The President of the United States wanted a four-hundred-piece orchestra, he got a four-hundred-piece orchestra. He wanted just one guy with a piccolo up his ass, he got that, too. When you were President of the United States, you got whatever you wanted, period.

“We’d better go up there, check out the width, see how many musicians we can fit up there,” Heather said.

“Good idea,” Ralph said.

“How the hell do you get up there?” she asked.

The more CIA Agent Alex Nichols studied the letter purportedly written by Bush when he was Vice President in 1986, the more he wondered why it had been written and how it had ended up at the General Investigation Directorate in Tripoli.

During World War II, MI5 — in collaboration with Naval Intelligence and the Twenty-Two Committee — sent a British submarine to the coast of Spain. Its mission was to drop off the corpse of a so-called Major Martin of the Royal Marines, who incidentally happened to be carrying in his dispatch case plans describing a forthcoming totally fabricated Allied invasion of Greece. The Germans fell for the ruse, and were caught with their pants down when the Allies invaded Sicily instead.

When you got hold of something like this letter, you had to begin wondering why somebody had gone through all this trouble. Well, maybe not so much trouble, after all. Any intelligence agent worth his salt — as Miss Piggy Peggot had put it — could work up a piece of vice-presidential stationery and type on it any damn thing he felt like. The stupid part, the amateur part — and this was what separated the men from the boys — was that he’d used Bush’s presentday signature on it, instead of...

He suddenly wondered if Mossad had cooked up the letter; he wouldn’t put anything past the Israelis, they were the sneakiest fuckin’ spies in the entire universe.

But why?

Work up a phony piece of goods, hide it like it was the family jewels till some sucker took the bait and nabbed it. Then sit back and wait for it to work its way into the hands of the GID. Which, if their information was correct, was exactly where it had finally surfaced, only to be pilfered yet again by a conscientious digger.

If the Israelis were behind all this, what were they hoping to gain?

Nothing that he could see.

In fact, what could anyone gain by faking a letter and making certain it got into Libyan hands?

And then, all at once, Alex remembered something he’d been taught at The Farm, when he was just beginning to learn his craft. The instructor was a man who’d spent twenty-two years in the Middle East before coming back home to teach new CIA recruits like Alex. He’d been talking about Iraq’s Al Mukhabarat , when suddenly he’d cocked his head to one side and said — somewhat wistfully as Alex now recalled — “There’s an old Arab proverb that’s saved my life more times than I can count. ‘He who forgets is lost. He who forgives is doomed.’”

The fake letter had ended up in the hands of Libyan intelligence.

It placed directly at Bush’s doorstep full responsibility for the air raid that had killed Quaddafi’s fifteen-month-old daughter.

Alex figured he now had something to go on.

The telephones were secure. The one here at the beach, the one at SeaCoast. They could freely discuss whatever they wished, with no need for codes or veiled meanings.

“A man’s fate is written on his forehead,” Arthur said.

“I know that,” Sonny said.

“If it had been fated for Bush to die last night, God would have willed it,” Arthur said. “This means only that the Fourth will be a more propitious date.”

“I’m sure,” Sonny said.

He wasn’t at all sure.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.

“Yes, I have your messages. But I’ve been busy working for you , Sonny.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard or read anything about this second murder...”

“I have, yes.”

“I’ve been trying to find out who or why.”

“What do you think?”

“Well... I hope you haven’t been targeted.”

Sonny hoped so, too.

“What have you got so far?” he asked.

“Not much. But I have my very best people on it.”

“Good,” Sonny said.

He was thinking two of Arthur’s very best people were already dead.

“In any case, I don’t want you to be concerned about it.”

No, huh?

“If it turns out you’re in danger, you’ll get all the protection you need.”

Like the protection the two women got?

“But getting back to last night,” Arthur said, “at least it gave you an opportunity to study the security setup.”

“It won’t apply,” Sonny said.

“No?” Arthur said, sounding surprised.

“It wasn’t representative,” Sonny said. “There were agents from four countries there. It won’t be that way on the Fourth.”

“Lighter, do you think?”

“Almost certainly. The island will be closed to the public till noon. If there’re half a dozen people around him, I’ll be surprised.”

“That should make your job easier.”

“God willing,” Sonny said.

“But be prepared for...”

“I will be.”

“... the worst,” Arthur said, the tone of impatience creeping into his voice again. “There’s a saying you may not be familiar with. My mother taught it to me. It goes like this. ‘When you hear of no robbers, lock the door twice.’ It means...”