The Kennedy Endeavor (Presidential Series Book 2) Page 2

  He spotted his bulky limousine with its dark windows and diplomatic plates, double-parked along Constitution Avenue. He squeezed between vehicles and slid into the backseat, irritated his driver hadn’t seen him and gotten the door.

  “Go, go,” he ordered his driver as he unfolded the paper.

  It was code. He didn’t know what form, but he’d seen enough coded messages in his years to know what it was. Five letter groupings in a square.

  Mikoyan sighed, and it was only then, as his car began moving, that he realized he wasn’t alone in the back of the limo. He slowly folded the piece of paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. The man seated across from him held a suppressed pistol with the seriousness of one who understood the fundamental rule of never pointing a weapon at someone unless you were ready and willing to use it.

  “Ambassador,” the man said with a nod.

  “I am not an Ambassador,” Mikoyan said. “I am a diplomat at large representing the Soviet Union, and, as such, under the protection of international law.”

  The man nodded. “Yes, yes. That is what we all tell the world. That there is law and order and the world makes sense, but it’s really us—we who dwell in the shadows—who keep the law and order, although sometimes it doesn’t make much sense. Isn’t that true?”

  “I don’t know who you are,” Mikoyan said, “so I can’t answer what we do.” He glanced at the window. They’d just made a turn to the right, heading south.

  Not in the direction of the Soviet Consulate.

  There were three shadows crowded in the driver compartment, only their silhouettes visible through the opaque window that separated the passenger compartment from the front. The one in the center wore the outline of the cap of his driver.

  “My driver is all right?”

  “So far,” the man said. “Please pass over the paper you received from Mrs. Kennedy.”

  “It is privileged communication.”

  The man waggled the bulky barrel of the suppressed pistol. “This negates privilege.”

  “I will not give you the paper,” Mikoyan said. “And if you harm me, then—” he paused as the man rapped his free hand on the partition behind him.

  The shadow in the right side of the front twisted, the shape of a gun flashed by, disappearing in front of the head of the driver. There was the chug of a suppressed round going off and red splattered the glass. The driver’s head thudded back against the partition, then slumped over. A bullet to the forehead was as effective as one to the back of the head.

  “Messy,” the man said. “I told you ‘so far.’ Which part of that didn’t you get?”

  Mikoyan looked out the window. They were going down a side street. He sighed. “You dare not kill me. I am not some petty spy whose body can be tossed on the trash heap of dead operatives your CIA and my KGB have built in this so-called Cold War. It is not so cold for some.” That reminded him of Penkovsky and the spy’s fate, and he knew this was connected somehow.

  The man cocked his head and peered at him. “You have no clue what is going on, do you? What you have in your pocket, it’s important enough that I will kill you to get it. I prefer not to. But we just had a President assassinated. You think anyone is going to give a piss about you?” He lifted the barrel of the gun ever so slightly until it was centered on Mikoyan’s forehead.

  It was not the first time the Russian had had a gun pointed at his head.

  He didn’t want it to be the last.

  “Is it about the Sword of Damocles?” Mikoyan asked.

  Either the man was clueless or he was a great poker player. “My patience will run out in three seconds.”

  Mikoyan reached into his pocket, removing the piece of paper. “I will lodge a complaint. The Ambassador will be most upset about his car. And the driver.”

  “I’m sure,” the man said as he reached for the paper.

  The car slammed to a halt, and the man rocked back.

  The sound of breaking glass came through the partition, along with more suppressed weapons going off and more blood splattering the other side of the glass.

  The man’s eyes were shifting back and forth, keeping the weapon trained on Mikoyan. Doors on either side opened and two soldiers in army dress uniforms, wearing green berets and with suppressed pistols in hand got in, sitting on either side of the Russian.

  “Easy, easy,” the man said. “I’ll kill him,” he added, nodding toward Mikoyan.

  The Green Beret to Mikoyan’s left shrugged. “Go ahead. You’ll still be dead; we’ll still have the paper. He’s not what we’re here for.”

  “Gentlemen,” Mikoyan began, his brain racing through various enticements, threats and maneuvers to get out of another tight jam. “Perhaps—“

  “Shut up,” the soldier to the left said.

  “You Philosophers can’t—“ the man began, but the Green Beret to Mikoyan’s right fired. The bullet entered the man’s forehead, a small black hole. The exit wound coated this side of the window just like the other: brains and bone and blood.

  The Green Beret to the left turned to the Russian. “The message, please.”

  It was not framed as a question.

  Mikoyan handed the paper to him. The soldier looked at it, nodded, then surprisingly, handed it back to Mikoyan. “Make sure it gets to your Premier.”

  “I thought I was not important.” Mikoyan said, slipping it back in his pocket.

  “You’re not,” the Green Beret said. “If he’d killed you, the message would have gotten to Khrushchev one way or another. You’re just the most convenient mode at the moment.”

  The other soldier reached over to the body of the gunman. He flipped aside the man’s lapel. There was some sort of medallion pinned there. The soldier removed it and put it in his own pocket.

  “What is this about?” Mikoyan asked.

  The soldier gave a slight smile. “Deputy Chairman Mikoyan, your guess is as good as ours. Probably better. We follow orders.”

  “Whose orders?”

  The man nodded. “That’s a smart question, but I’m afraid I can’t give you the answer.”

  “How I do get back to the consulate?” Mikoyan asked as the two soldiers made to leave the car.

  That also seemed to truly puzzle the soldier. “You drive. I’m sure your resident KGB friends can deal with the bodies.”

  “Who is he?” Mikoyan asked, pointing toward the man who’d held the gun on him.

  “Just a pawn. Following his orders.”

  And then they were gone, leaving Mikoyan alone in the limo with four corpses.

  What did old Nikita do? Mikoyan wondered, and he felt a chill, as if a snowflake had finally landed on him.

  Chapter One

  The Present

  HERE RESTS IN

  HONORED GLORY

  AN AMERICAN

  SOLDIER

  KNOWN BUT TO GOD

  Colonel Paul Ducharme stared at the panel on one side of the marble monument that marked the graves holding the unknown soldiers from World War I through Vietnam here in the heart of Arlington Cemetery. He doubted there would be any more unknowns given DNA typing. The military had even backtracked and identified the Vietnam unknown and his family had claimed his body and re-buried him at Jefferson Barracks. But that did not mean there would be an end to the dead, because as Plato said millennia ago, only the dead have seen the end of war.

  Emergency lights were flashing around the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Ducharme knew the ‘authorities’ had their hands full trying to explain the night’s activities and remove the bodies. Too many people with too much power needed this entire event hushed up, so Ducharme wasn’t overly concerned about publicity. When the covert world wanted something kept quiet, they would go to any lengths.

  The 3rd Infantry, more commonly known as the Old Guard, whose duty it was to guard the Tomb, had not only just defended it, but already had a man ‘walking the mat,’ even though he was dressed in camouflage, not dress blues. Arlington was sh
ut down right now, but by daylight, all would be back to normal, the guard would be in the proper uniform and the world at large would be no wiser about what had happened overnight to save the country.

  Twenty years of Special Operations duty had carved their hardship into Ducharme. Scars crisscrossed his skull underneath hair that was more white than silver. He also had a scar just underneath his right eye. Despite his age, he was fit, physical conditioning being an ingrained part of his lifestyle and profession. Physically fit, that is. His hands occasionally had a slight tremor in them, and there was little he could do about the intermittent pain that lanced through his brain. He’d worked hard in rehab to deal with the mental problems associated with his traumatic brain injury (TBI) and was still, as he liked to say, functional.

  Almost all the time.

  “We can’t put part of the Cipher in the Tomb,” Evie said.

  “We’re not going there,” Ducharme replied.

  Evie Tolliver, the curator of Monticello and former CIA agent, was of roughly the same age as Ducharme, in her mid-forties, and also fit. Flanking her was Sergeant Major Kincannon, the third leg of the group that had succeeded in beating the Society of the Cincinnati to the parts of the Jefferson Cipher and decoding it in order to uncover the Jefferson Allegiance before the SOC did, thus keeping control of it.

  A powerful document, one that was a secret part of the Constitution, control of the Allegiance had allowed the country to keep the fulfillment of an Imperial Presidency at bay for two centuries. It was the ultimate weapon the Philosophers used to battle the Society of the Cincinnati. Brokered during the growing pains of the country between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, it was, and continued to be, the ultimate compromise between either extreme of government.

  Without another word, Ducharme headed out into the cemetery and the two followed without question into the calm of the fields of the dead. Dawn was lighting up the eastern sky and the tombstones cast long shadows in the early morning chill.

  Ducharme halted. “Here.”

  Evie looked at the newly emplaced headstone:

  CAPTAIN CHARLES LAGRANGE

  BORN NEW ORLEANS 6 MAY 1972

  DIED 3 JANUARY

  DUTY-HONOR-COUNTRY

  SILVER STAR

  Ducharme knelt at the foot of the grave where new turf had been laid. A raw grave was to the right: the General, murdered by the Society as part of their ploy to finally get their hands on the document that had eluded them for over two centuries. Ducharme pushed his knife into the loose soil and probed for a few moments. He struck something and pulled out the leather pouch he’d buried. He opened it and the two bulky West Point rings tumbled into his palm. He slid one on his finger. Then he took a third from a pocket—General LaGrange’s, which Evie had retrieved from the Surgeon’s body. He put it in the pouch next to the General’s son’s ring.

  Ducharme buried the rings back in the hole, pressing them down deep.

  Then he held out his hands to Evie. “Let me have the Cipher.”

  Evie removed the rods and disks. Ducharme unscrewed the end and removed 19 of the disks. He handed the rod and 7 remaining disks back to her. “You hide your seven wherever you want. Make sure it’s a place where whoever you appoint as your successor can unravel the clues to finding it by knowing you. I’ll hide the rest until we name the next two Philosophers. Then I’ll give each one their six.”

  Ducharme turned back to the General’s grave. He slid his commando knife into the dirt and covered it.

  “Won’t you be needing that?” Evie asked.

  “I hope I won’t need my knife. Not quite Kosciuszko’s sword, but you get the idea. We need to move beyond the sword. I think the words of the Jefferson Allegiance are more powerful than any knife or sword.”

  Evie nodded. “They’ve proven to be so far. It’s our duty to make sure they continue to do so.”

  Chapter Two

  The Present

  “People used to spend a considerable amount of time trying to determine exactly how many animals were on the Ark,” Jonah said as his small expedition stopped for the hourly break among the jumbled foothills at the base of Mount Ararat. “Along with the exact length of a cubit. There are various interpretations.”

  His companions, a half-dozen Kurdish porters and an American guide, paid him no heed, slumping to the ground and doing what a break called for: resting. This was a job for them, not a quest.

  They were in the northeast corner of Turkey, having illegally crossed the border from Iraq to the south during the night and driving north. The area was a jumble of nations bumping into each other: Armenia to the north, a slice of Azerbaijan to the northwest, abutting both Armenia, and to the east, Iran. A couple hundred miles to the south was Iraq.

  Amidst this jumble of nations, it was the Kurds who had been left without their own country, although they had practically taken over western Iraq since the Americans had invaded, and they’d always been a pestering presence in eastern Turkey. They saw little need to honor the haphazardly drawn borders that had torn apart their ancestral lands. It was a smuggler’s heaven, with so many borders in so many directions, and officials who were more than open to bribes.

  They’d driven from Iraq in an old Land Rover along back roads the Kurds knew of, until they reached a point last night where they hid the truck in a small Kurdish town, giving a local farmer a bit of money to hide it in his barn. From there, they’d started early this morning on foot with the bulk of Mount Ararat looming in front of them, weaving their way along a washed out road that had long ago ceased to be able to support vehicle traffic.

  Jonah didn’t sit down. He wanted to keep going, to not stop until they got to his destination. It was only after the porters threatened to toss down their loads, and the guide, Haney, took their side, that Jonah finally accepted these halts. It didn’t occur to him—couldn’t occur to him—that they didn’t share his passion. They also didn’t share his secrets.

  Jonah was skinny, with a slightly malnourished look he subconsciously maintained because it gave him the appearance of a fanatic; which he was, although not in the way most thought. He was ostensibly here in Turkey to discover Noah’s Ark.

  They were in jumbled country, not even at the beginning of the main ascent. The consensus, freely discussed in their native language among the porters, was that Jonah would never make it to the top. They were fine with that as they’d insisted on payment up front and they also knew even if Jonah could make the climb, they wouldn’t be allowed up above 14,000 feet as the Turkish military had roving patrols at that altitude, since the government had long ago designated the mountaintop a military base, as the border with Iran ran along the east of side of Lesser Ararat, the mountain’s smaller sister.

  They would be turned back and that would be that.

  Of course, they had no clue that Jonah had no desire to make it to the summit.

  Jonah checked his watch. Two more minutes for the five-minute break. “Some say there are too many species to have fit aboard an ark, but I think they’re taking things too literally. God works in mysterious ways, and if he’d wanted to fit every species aboard an ark, then Noah could most certainly do God’s will.” He knelt and bowed his head in prayer, as he had done for the last minute of every break, apparently taking sustenance from his faith.

  The guide, Haney, got to his feet, easily slinging his pack containing the tools of his trade on his back. He’d climbed Ararat a half-dozen times and was known as an expert at getting people into the country and onto the mountain. Whether he believed there was an ark somewhere in this corner of Turkey was an opinion he kept to himself.

  It didn’t occur to those who hired him to wonder about his motivation beyond the money.

  “Time,” Haney said. He repeated it in the porters’ native language. “Time to move.”

  The porters slowly got up and resumed their loads. Jonah was already moving, pushing forward. They were on a side of the mountain that had rarely been climbed and
wasn’t one of the more popular spots for speculation as to the Ark’s possible resting place. How Jonah had picked his own location for the legendary vessel was something he hadn’t shared, and that piqued Haney’s interest. The Kurds were uneasy, not just because of the possibility of Turkish military patrols, a people with whom they had battled many times in the past, but also because this area had some special significance to them. Haney, who spoke their language, had caught snippets of their worries. They never said anything specific, but it was clear from the way the villagers had glared at them this morning when they departed that this wasn’t a place one should go to casually.

  As the porters filed past, Haney retrieved a set of binoculars from their case and trained them eastward, toward Little Ararat and Iran in the hazy distance. Haney was a nondescript man, one who would not stand out in a crowd, which was a very good physical description for a spy, almost a prerequisite.

  He put the binoculars back in the case and looked up. Jonah was already out of sight, around the edge of a large spur. Haney shook his head as he followed: crazies. They came in all shapes and forms and nationalities. But they could be useful at times. Haney and Jonah were in Turkey illegally, but it would be Jonah whom would be the one held responsible. Haney could claim ignorance and that he was just doing a job.

  And he had connections at very high levels that could get him out of a political jam.

  There was a cry of alarm ahead and Haney sprinted, as best one could with an eighty-pound pack on one’s back, toward the spur. He rounded it to see the six porters along a trail cutting between two high cliff walls. The trail ended abruptly about a hundred meters ahead, a cliff face making it obvious why this route wasn’t used to get to the mountain.

  However, it wasn’t this that had caused Jonah to cry out. He was on the right side of the trail, running his hands along the rock.