Trinity factor, p.13
Trinity Factor, page 13
Kennedy wet his lips, his eyes wide.
“President Roosevelt’s life could very well depend upon you, captain,” Lovelace said seriously. He was getting a perverse pleasure from this. “And I’m sure that when he is informed of your cooperation, he will be grateful. Very grateful.”
Lovelace could see the wheels spinning in Kennedy’s head. Weighing the alternatives. If Lovelace was telling him a lie, it wouldn’t really matter. He would be covered because the man was a CIC agent. There were no denying that. And if by some circumstance Lovelace was telling the truth, it would be a feather in his cap. Not many police captains had the gratitude of a President.
“How can I help?” Kennedy finally said, and inwardly Lovelace sighed with relief. As much as he despised the man, he needed him and his police force, as well as the cooperation of the Washington police, which Kennedy could assure.
“In a number of ways,” Lovelace said. “First of all, we must keep this absolutely secret. We’re looking for a murderer, nothing more.”
Kennedy nodded.
“Second, I need the results of the autopsy. Third, I want every man you can spare down at the bus depot to find someone who remembers the man and the woman. Gillingham can help with that. Fourth, I’ll want to contact the D.C. police chief and inform him that you believe the murderer or murderers are in Washington. Give him whatever you’ve got from this end, and ask for his department’s help. And finally, I’ll need some transportation back down to Washington tonight.”
“Can do,” Kennedy said briskly and without hesitation.
“But mum’s the word,” Lovelace said, theatrically placing his forefinger over his lips.
“I understand,” Kennedy said.
Lovelace smiled and nodded. For better or for worse, Kennedy was on his side now, or would be for a short while.
They went down the hall to Gillingham and the white-coated man. Kennedy made the introductions.
“Captain Michael Lovelace, Army Counter Intelligence Corps … Dr. Hubert Miller, Middlesex County assistant coroner.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Lovelace said, shaking the man’s hand. He was young, probably in his early or mid-thirties, and he looked almost as tired as Lovelace felt.
“Give Captain Lovelace your fullest cooperation,” Kennedy said, and then he turned to Gillingham, who was staring at Lovelace in open amazement. “Come with me. We’ve a lot of work to do tonight.”
“Yes, sir,” Gillingham said crisply, nodding to Lovelace.
Kennedy turned again. “When you’re finished here, captain, come across to my office. I’ll have your transportation arranged.”
“Thanks,” Lovelace said, and Kennedy and Gillingham strode down the corridor.
When they were gone, Dr. Miller led Lovelace into the autopsy room, where a body covered by a white sheet was lying on a stainless steel table.
“I wish I had been a little bird on your shoulder when you talked with Kennedy. Ten minutes ago he was cursing you up one side and down the other. And suddenly after a couple of minutes of discussion, he’s a pussycat.”
Lovelace laughed. “We’re old friends, actually.”
The doctor looked sharply at him, but said nothing. At the table he flipped back the sheet to reveal the nude body of a man, with several bruises on his face, and a large triangular patch cut out of his torso, the flap of skin loosely sewn over the opening like a gruesome trapdoor.
“Harvey Dansig,” the doctor said. “Age thirty-seven.” He looked at Lovelace. “What do you want to know?”
Lovelace stared down at the body for a long moment, wondering how Harvey Dansig, age thirty-seven, had spent his last day on earth, and what had moved him to pick up a pair of hitchhikers on a lonely road in the middle of the night. “Time of death?” he asked finally.
“Sometime between midnight and two—can’t get it any closer than that.”
“Cause of death?”
“The instantaneous fracture of the third lumbar and second cervical vertebra, which severed the corresponding lumbar, thoracic and cervical nerves.”
“In plain English,” Lovelace asked, staring at the man. He wanted a cigarette.
“The man’s back and neck were broken at the same time, severing his spinal cord in three places.”
Lovelace looked up. “Was he hit by a car?”
“Nope,” the doctor said, “but he might as well have been.” He sighed tiredly. “Do you want the long or the short version?”
“The short version,” Lovelace said, “but don’t leave anything out.”
The doctor smiled. “Your killer came up behind Dansig, grabbed his head in both hands—you can see the bruises on his face—shoved his right knee into Dansig’s back, and yanked hard. Death was instantaneous and totally unexpected.”
“What can you tell me about the murderer?”
“He’s tall, probably six-one or six-three. He’s long-legged … his hands are large, but his fingers are narrow. He’s very powerful, and he’s right-handed.”
“He needed the height and the long legs to get his knee up into Dansig’s back, and the size of the hands and fingers could be determined by the bruises, but right-handed?”
“The bruises on that side of Dansig’s face are deeper, combined with the fact that the fractures are spiral right to left, indicate a man whose right hand and arm are stronger than his left.”
“Anything else?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not unless you want the long version, but you’ve got the high points.”
“A man of ordinary strength couldn’t have done that?”
“Your killer isn’t a superman, if that’s what you mean. But he is strong, and he knows how to kill a man silently.”
“Thanks,” Lovelace said absently, and he started to turn away, but something the doctor had said earlier bothered him, and he turned back. “You said death was totally unexpected?”
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “There were no indications that his muscles had contracted. He was totally relaxed. He was even smiling.”
“As if he was being distracted … pleasantly?”
The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know. But he definitely was not expecting to be killed.”
“Thanks,” Lovelace said again, and he left the autopsy lab, went down the corridor, and took the elevator up to the street level, very puzzled.
Why was Harvey Dansig killed? There was no reason for his death. No apparent reason, that was.
16
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Jada watched the hands of the cheap alarm clock they had purchased two days ago creep toward a quarter to ten. She lay on the bed in their hotel room, dressed in a print blouse and a plain dark skirt. A Glenn Miller tune was playing on the radio, but she was only half listening to it as she tried without much success to clear her mind of the disturbing thoughts she had been having over the past three days. She kept coming back to the look on Harvey Dansig’s face when he died.
He had been smiling at her. Christ, earlier in the front seat he had even winked at her, and then Alek had killed him in cold blood.
But even more disturbing than that to her were her thoughts about Alek. For some insane reason he reminded her of the image she had had as a young girl of what her perfect man would be. Tall, strong silent, but with a deep, solid intelligence.
She had been very naive in those days, a trait she had inherited from her father, who had been a professor of history at Oxford, but who had retired early to write a series of books on the Great Russian Revolution of 1917. That naïveté was the man’s one major flaw, and he had passed it on in spades to his only child.
Like many academicians, the real day-to-day world outside of dusty historical tomes was out of his reach. And for his daughter, the world was nothing more than a wondrous fairy tale.
Those were the halcyon years … the late twenties and early thirties … for her. People were basically honest, and the ones who weren’t always came to justice. Women were kind yet strong … keepers of the home fires. While men possessed a different kind of strength tempered by gentleness—knights in shining armor and all that.
She remembered their house in Brighton, south of London, on the Channel. To her it was always a warm, sunny summer’s day. There were picnics on the beach. There were the constant houseguests—writers and artists and actors who would spend the night with her father and mother arguing politics and philosophy. There were train rides up to London to see the symphonies, and the plays and the ballet. And best of all there was her father, who had raised her with love, devotion, a certain idealism, and a feel for history and languages.
By the summer of 1926 when she was just five years old, her French was as good as her English. By the time she was eight she had nearly mastered Italian and Spanish. And by the time she was ten her father had started her on the long, rugged path of Russian, which he called the “bastard language of a lovely, stoic people.”
Then when she was thirteen her wonderful little world crumbled around her. It began in December of 1933 with her mother’s death of an undetected brain tumor, and by the next summer her father had sold their house and they had moved to Helsinki, Finland, where he took a post at the university.
That lasted only until the fall of that year, when they took the train the nine hundred kilometers to Moscow from where her father was accepted at a Moscow State University post.
They were given a fine apartment overlooking the Moscow River and within sight of the Alexander Gardens, and it was here at the age of fourteen that Jada made a number of important discoveries about her father and about the world in general.
Her father was an important man to the Soviets. Not so much because his field was important, but because his was a big name in academic circles. His immigration to the Soviet Union had been a propaganda coup.
Jada, whose name in England had been Marion Elizabeth Stanhope, had never questioned her father’s decision to immigrate or the extraordinary change of name, or even the courses in political theory she was required to take six days a week. Her father was happy, and that was all that mattered.
Too, she found the Russian people to be warm and friendly, whereas many of their British neighbors back home had been stuffy and pretentious. And although she found the language difficult at first, she was heartened by the depth of the poetry in a land she came to learn considered that art form a national institution.
When she was eighteen she was accepted to Moscow State University on the strength of her father’s position. But a year later he died.
For the first few dazed months after his funeral Jada had expected that her position at the university would be canceled, but she was allowed to remain enrolled.
The Germans had invaded Poland, the Russians had marched into Finland, and yet everyone at school expected war with Germany at any time.
Language clerks were desperately needed, and Jada, because of her perfect English, was recruited. She went to work in a drab office building near the Kremlin, where nearly a year passed before she realized that her employers were the NKVD. But by then her transition from being British to being Russian was complete … at least in her own mind.
Her father had loved the Soviet Union, had loved the Russian people, and had loved the idealism of communal government and ownership, and that was good enough for her.
No matter that she was constantly watched, no matter that she was constantly questioned, that her work was constantly checked. Those were necessary precautions. It was war.
Only now that they were in America, she found it hard to reconcile her fond memories of Brighton with the drab existence she had led in Moscow. Here in Washington, away from both worlds, she had a chance to compare them, and neither was satisfying in retrospect.
Alek, from what she had been told of him by Major Runkov, had led a tragic childhood. He, too, was a loner. And at this moment she desperately wanted him to be her knight in shining armor, yet she kept coming back to the look on Harvey Dansig’s face when Alek had killed him.
It was a quarter to ten finally, and she got up from the bed, smoothed her skirt, put on a clean blouse, and slung her purse over her shoulder, then left the room.
Alek had been out all day, returning earlier this evening to have dinner with her at a small restaurant around the corner, and then he had left again, telling her he was going to watch General Groves’ house on Thirty-sixth Street in the nearby Cleveland Park.
Last night after the ten o’clock call to their contact in the War Department, Alek had been excited. The man had told him that Groves was probably getting ready to leave for a week or more. The general had been staying late at his office, and bringing home two briefcases for the past few days. That pattern of behavior always preceded a long trip.
This morning Alek had gone out and purchased a four-year-old Ford coupe in good condition, and had seen to its registration and gas coupons.
If Groves was getting set to meet Oppenheimer somewhere, they would have to be mobile, ready at a moment’s notice to move fast.
Their room was on the third floor, and she took the stairs down and went out the back way. The evening was hot and muggy, but she was glad to be outside and finally doing something.
Alek had told her she would have to make the ten o’clock call to their contact, who was a night man in the War Department’s parking garage, because he didn’t want to risk losing Groves should the general decide to come home early and leave on his trip the same evening.
Now that there was a possibility that they soon would be doing what they had been sent here for, Jada was frightened. All along, in the back of her mind, she had harbored a secret hope that somehow their orders would be changed, or that it would become impossible to get to Oppenheimer, in which case they would have to return home.
Even now she hoped that the contact would tell her it was a false alarm. That Groves would be staying in Washington after all.
She reached the phone booth two blocks from the hotel with barely a minute to spare. There was no traffic on the road at that moment, and no other pedestrians, and for just a minute an overwhelming sense of loneliness, a longing for her safe, secure childhood, washed over her. But she shrugged it off, went into the phone booth, and dug a nickel from her purse.
The telephone rang as she was about to reach for it, and her hand stopped in mid-air, her heart seeming nearly to leap out of her chest.
It rang again, the noise like an explosion in the confines of the booth. It was ten o’clock. Who would be calling a phone booth? Had Alek given their contact the number?
She looked back up the street toward the hotel as a car turned the corner a block away, its red taillights receding in the distance.
The telephone rang again, and she picked it up. “Yes?” she said softly.
There was a silence on the line for a long time, and she was about to speak again, when a low, guttural man’s voice answered. “Who is this?”
Jada was confused and frightened. She wanted to hang up but something made her stay on the line. But what to say? “I think maybe I must have the wrong number.” She spoke the code words in desperation.
There was another long silence until the man replied, “If it’s extension seven-two-one you want, you have the right number.”
It was the proper response. “Then you must be the man I want to speak with about my car,” she said automatically. Her heart was pounding. Something was wrong.
“Where is Peter?” the man snapped.
“Working,” Jada said, not able to think of anything else. “How did you get this number?”
“Peter gave it to me,” the man snapped. “But listen, there is trouble. I must seen him tonight.”
“Impossible,” Jada said, trying to make her brain work. What kind of trouble? What was happening?
“I must. There is danger. I’m not calling from work. I must see Peter!”
“I don’t know when he’ll be back,” Jada said. It would be too risky to try to find him near Groves’ house. But what else could she do? Her knees were weak, and she wanted to hang up the phone and run.
“Then I’ll come to where you’re staying and wait for him.”
“No …” Jada said, but the man shouted her down.
“We’re all in great danger. I have to see him.” There was an edge of panic in the man’s voice.
Oh god, Jada thought. Alek. “The Dunbarton Oaks Hotel. Room 328,” she blurted in desperation.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” the man said, and he hung up.
Badim had parked his car around the corner on Thirty-fifth Street, and he had been standing in the shadows of a line of bushes across the street from the yellow brick house since nine o’clock. Groves had come home shortly before ten, parking his green Dodge in the driveway. A few minutes later he had come out of the house with a single suitcase, which he had placed in the backseat of the car, and then he had gone back inside.
That had been nearly fifteen minutes ago, and since then the house across the street had been quiet. Lights shone from the living room window and from an upstairs window, probably a bedroom. From time to time he could see someone moving around inside, but then the porch light went out, and the downstairs lights were extinguished.
Badim was keyed up, his mind hyperactive since his contact last night. Groves was getting set to make a move. Which could mean nothing more than a conference somewhere, probably New York or Chicago. Or it could mean he was going to meet Oppenheimer.
But he was also keyed up because of a brief article he had read two days ago in the Washington Post. Harvey Dansig’s body had been discovered in the trunk of his car near the Greyhound Bus Depot in Boston. The police there were looking for a tall, husky man and a young woman with long, light brown hair.
