Meanwhile his father would be betting that his son would head toward the Midwest, in a University of Maryland vehicle.

  He was getting closer to the truth. He was certain of it.

  In the morning the university would report a stolen vehicle, give its license number and description, and the police would be looking for it. But that was another dead end, Kelsey reasoned. His father would have made sure another pickup truck was put in the parking lot to replace the one his son had taken. That was stretching it pretty thin, one part of his brain argued, but another part of him knew that his father’s money and organization could do almost anything. It was not beyond possibility.

  Marion got up from the edge of the bed, a wild look in her eyes. “They think you killed the President,” she said.

  “My father set it up,” he replied softly.

  “You’ve got to call them and tell them it wasn’t you.”

  “They’d never believe me. And even if they considered it for a moment, my father would prove that I was insane and was making it all up. He’d have us both killed.”

  “He’s going to do that anyway,” she cried.

  “Yes,” Kelsey said half to himself. “Yes, he is.”

  It didn’t really matter who caught them; the FBI, the Secret Service, some local authorities, or his father’s men. They would be murdered within hours of their capture.

  Meanwhile the President of the United States was an imposter working for the Odessa. Thirty-five years after the war had ended, the Nazis were in control of the most powerful nation in the world.

  His thoughts trailed off at that point, and he looked deeply into Marion’s eyes. She had no business being involved with this. But it was too late now. Perhaps it was too late for the entire world.

  A picture in his mind of jackbooted men in black uniforms goose-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, a swastika flying over the nation’s capital, flashed through his mind, and he recoiled from the thought.

  No, his mind screamed. It could not be allowed to happen.

  Engstrom had been assassinated in Alaska. And Barnes had been assassinated just outside the Oval Office. A few steps in either direction from his security detail.

  Despite the best efforts of the United States government to protect its top two leaders, they had been murdered.

  The protection would continue much the same as before. At least for the time being. The changeover from a democracy with its relatively lax, informal atmosphere to a Nazi dictatorship with its strict controls would not happen overnight. It would take time. Perhaps several years or more.

  Meanwhile his father’s people would be looking for him, and would continue the search until they found him unless Engstrom was toppled.

  Toppled—the word repeated itself in Kelsey’s mind. Toppled by word or deed. No one would believe his word, which left only …

  The door was flung open, and a man in a dark jacket leaped into the room, raised his arm, and fired a pistol twice, the muzzle flashes bright in the dark room, but the noise only a dull plopping sound.

  Blindly Kelsey struck out from where he stood, clubbing the man in the back of the head with his fist. Caught completely off guard, the man went down hard, his forehead slamming into the corner of the chest of drawers, and then he crumpled in a heap at the foot of the bed, his right arm outstretched in front of him, the pistol with its fat silencer lying half a foot away from his fingers.

  Kelsey shut the door and relocked it, then checked the man’s pulse. He was unconscious but still alive. Kelsey, whose heart was pounding nearly out of his chest, sat back on his haunches and breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  It had been close. Too damned close.

  He looked up. “Marion?” he said. “It’s all right now.”

  There was no answer, and he was about to call out her name again as he got to his feet when the words choked in his throat. The bedspread and the wall behind the bed were splattered with something dark, and caught on the edge of the bed he could see a bare foot.

  He took a step around the bed and a haze filled his eyes. Marion! his brain screamed, but no sound other than a low gurgling came from his mouth.

  He scrambled over the bed and on the floor next to his wife, ripped open her blouse and put his ear to her chest.

  Please, his brain screamed. Please let this not be true. Dear God, not Marion!

  But there was no sound. Her chest did not rise and fall, nor did the blood pump out of the gaping hole in her chest or the ragged tear in her throat.

  Her eyes were open and filled with blood, as were her nose and mouth.

  Either bullet would have killed her instantly.

  For a long time Kelsey knelt next to the body of his wife, his right hand caressing her still warm cheek as he listened to the occasional car or truck passing outside on the highway.

  One of his father’s men had found them after all. They had known about the university truck, just as he had reasoned, and his father had probably sent his men fanning westward along all the major highways, checking for the truck. This one had seen it parked behind the motel, silently picked the lock, jumped into the room, and fired at the first thing he saw. Marion.

  Kelsey looked down at her. Dear sweet Marion. Her face had already turned a ghostly, unnatural white, and suddenly she wasn’t Marion any longer. She was nothing more than a med school cadaver. A stranger. He did not know her.

  A noise behind him made him turn around in time to see Marion’s killer struggling forward in an attempt to reach the pistol.

  Kelsey jumped up, grabbed the pistol, and fired it point-blank into the man’s face, which erupted in a spray of bone chips, blood, and white brain matter.

  The man’s head snapped back and his body flopped over. Kelsey got to his feet and fired the remaining three rounds point-blank into the dead man’s face, completely destroying all the features, leaving nothing but jagged bone and flesh.

  Then he leaped to the man’s side, raised the butt of the pistol over his head and in an insane rage, started to bring it down with all the force he could muster, wanting nothing more than to hurt Marion’s killer. To crush him to pulp. To pound him into the floor. Beneath the floor. Deep into the ground, and still hurt him more and more and more …

  But suddenly Kelsey came to his senses, the pistol raised over his head, and he saw for the first time the destroyed remnants of what once had been a man. He got to his feet, went into the bathroom, and vomited, his mind spinning round and round, two central thoughts in the middle of it all: Marion was dead, and somehow he was going to have to remain alive at all costs, because he was the only one who knew about Engstrom.

  29

  Stan Lowe had been jumpy all week. Ever since Dr. Kelsey had come snooping around. But finally it had happened, he thought as he finished burning the last of the records tying Locke to President Engstrom, and now they could all breathe a sigh of relief.

  It was shortly before 10:00 P.M., a scant twenty-four hours since Barnes had been assassinated by their east coast special operative, and Lowe was tired. He had remained awake through most of last night and this morning as much of the world had, watching the bulletins and news reports on the President’s assassination and manhunt for Dr. Kelsey.

  Earlier this evening he had managed to nap for a few hours until shortly after nine o’clock when his orders had come in from Aerie via Chicago.

  “Destroy the subject records after replacing them with the new package,” the voice had come over the phone. “The flags are high.” The caller had given the proper authorization code words.

  With mounting excitement Lowe had driven from his condominium in Lake Geneva out to the clinic, where he let himself in the back way, pulled Locke’s jacket out of his safe where he had kept it since Monday, and replaced Kelsey’s sketches and the photographs Locke had brought with him with another set. If the new file was ever checked by the authorities, a possibility now that Kelsey was a marked man, it would show that Locke had indeed come to the clinic for reconstructive surgery. But the sketches would show that his face had been rebuilt to resemble someone other than Engstrom.

  Lowe managed to place the new version of the file in the records section without attracting any attention of the staff, especially not that bastard Sharpenberg, and then he had gone downstairs to the furnace room, where he had burned the old sketches and photographs.

  The clinic had been in an uproar all day. Even Sharpenberg, the bear of the hospital, had been upset, canceling all but one of the day’s scheduled operations.

  The opinion among the staff ranged from stunned disbelief to a studied nonchalance.

  “A terrible mistake has been made by those bunglers in Washington, but not to worry, Doc Kelsey’s father will straighten it all out.”

  “Dr. Kelsey assassinating the President? Don’t be an ass. Such a thing is totally impossible.”

  But overall the clinic had been tense through the day, with none of the light banter that normally went on among the staff.

  The flames from the open furnace reflected off Lowe’s sweaty forehead, and he smiled, bearing his teeth like an animal ready for the kill.

  He had taken shit all of his life. The worst assignments, the lousiest jobs; ever since he had been a boy in the German section of Milwaukee, his father had assigned him the dirty work.

  As a delivery boy for a number of influential Milwaukee citizens. As a houseboy for the mayor of the city one summer. And finally working nights earning a college degree in business administration.

  How he hated business administration, he thought as he watched the flames consume the last of the photos and sketches. All his life he had wanted to be a military leader, or perhaps a medical doctor. Like Kelsey. Looked up to. Respected. Treated with deference. But orders were orders. And he had been ordered into business administration.

  Years ago he had been invited down to Aerie, and he had gone expecting to meet with Der Oberst himself. A private conference, he had told himself. At long last he would be given a serious assignment.

  But it had not happened that way. Lowe had been one of nearly a hundred other men and women from all over the world to arrive at Aerie within a few days of each other for a weeklong indoctrination course. When the course was completed, each of them was supposed to be willing and able to subjugate their lives to the higher principles of international socialism, toward the bright day when a new world order would dawn.

  Bitterly disappointed, Lowe had returned to his mundane job in the States as an administrator for the All-America Insurance Corporation in Miami, until three years ago when he had been assigned as administrator of the Lake Geneva clinic.

  He had been given his assignment routinely with no hint of its importance. In fact, he had not been informed of what was happening until three days before Locke arrived; when Dr. Kelsey’s father, Oberst Kellner himself, had personally told him everything.

  And now, Lowe thought, his smile deepening as he closed the furnace door and trudged up the stairs to his office, the new world order he had been promised in Aerie years ago was finally dawning. Now he would finally become an important man. Looked up to. Respected.

  In his office he pulled on his coat, put on his hat, and went out the back way to where his car was parked.

  A light snow had begun to fall, and he shivered as he slid in behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. He paused a moment before he turned the key to think about Dr. Kelsey out there somewhere on the run. They would get him. It was only a matter of time. A very short time.

  Lowe turned the ignition key and the car exploded, the blast blowing out many of the clinic’s downstairs windows and several on the second floor, sending bits of steel, upholstery, and human bone as far as two hundred feet.

  At that moment it was eleven o’clock in Washington, where Charles Anderson, the former head of Vice President Stewart Engstrom’s Secret Service detail, lay in a coma in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

  Twenty-four hours after the helicopter crash in Alaska’s Mt. McKinley Park, Anderson’s condition had stabilized from critical to serious. But during the days since, he had regained consciousness only once to ask about the safety of Engstrom.

  Extensive head injuries in the crash had caused pressure on the brain, which kept Anderson unconscious and would eventually kill him. The operation to cure that damage by relieving the pressure and eventually leading to his recovery was scheduled for six tomorrow morning.

  A young, white-coated doctor who was doing a special internship from Georgetown University entered Anderson’s room, wheeling a stainless steel cart in front of him.

  Anderson was scheduled to be given muscle relaxants and a preliminary anesthetic about this time preparatory to the deep anesthetic he would be given in the morning, so the night duty nurse thought nothing of the young doctor’s appearance at this hour.

  Inside the darkened room the man moved to the respirator automatically controlling Anderson’s breathing and turned it off.

  For a few seconds Anderson’s breathing continued, although somewhat raggedly, and then it stopped.

  The intern went about his business administering the shots, and noting the times on the medical chart as if nothing had happened, spending a full six minutes with the dying man.

  Finally, just before he left to complete his rounds, he turned the respirator back on and air once again began pumping into Anderson’s lungs, only now the machine was connected to a dead man.

  Some eighteen hundred miles to the east, Robert Farley, president of Farley Chemicals, Ltd., was awakened from a deep sleep by his telephone.

  He struggled awake, flipped on the table light next to his bed, and glanced at the clock as he picked up the phone. It was just four o’clock.

  “Yes,” Farley said sleepily. “What is it?”

  His wife had awakened as well, and she sat up to look past her husband at the clock.

  “Mr. Farley … oh God … this is George at the plant!” an excited, barely understandable man’s voice came over the line. There was a great deal of noise in the background that sounded to Farley like sirens. He was instantly wide-awake.

  “George?” he said. “George Newell?”

  “Yes, sir … oh, Mr. Farley, you must come quick, sir. There has been a terrible accident.”

  Farley’s heart raced as he pushed the covers aside and swung his legs off the bed. “What is it, George? What has happened, man?”

  “An explosion, sir. A terrible explosion. Mrs. Grance, Mrs. Stanhope, and some of the other ladies were here … oh, God, sir—I don’t know why … but they were burned. It’s horrible, Mr. Farley … horrible … You must come quickly.”

  “Yes, of course, I’m on my way,” Farley said. Newell, who was the night plant engineer, rang off, leaving Farley holding a dead telephone.

  “What is it, Robert?” his wife asked.

  “George Newell at the plant,” Farley said. “There’s been an accident. Dotty and Margaret were there for some ungodly reason, and they were apparently hurt.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mrs. Farley said. She pushed back the covers and jumped out of the bed. “I’m coming with you, Robert.”

  “Yes,” Farley said dully. He was in something of a daze. He turned back to the phone and tried to get a dial tone. He wanted to call his day shift plant engineer and have the man round up his crew to meet him there, but something was wrong with the telephone, and he gave up after a moment.

  Within five minutes Farley and his wife had dressed and, without rousing their chauffeur, got the Mercedes out of the parking garage and headed west out of London past Newham, where the plant was located.

  There was little traffic on the road this evening, and once out of the city, Farley speeded up well past the posted limits.

  What he could not fathom was what the wives of two of his senior vice presidents were doing at the plant at this strange hour of the morning. It made no sense.

  He turned to his wife and was about to ask her just that question when she looked over his shoulder out the window on the driver’s side and screamed.

  Farley turned in time to glimpse a large, dark shape out of the corner of his right eye, and then a terrific crash slammed in the side of the car, crushing his right arm and shoulder, sending him across the front seat nearly out the opposite door with his wife.

  The car spun around, then hit something hard, and Farley, before he and his wife both died, was only vaguely aware that they were airborne, flipping end over end, and then there was nothing.

  It was dawn in the eastern Mediterranean, and this day promised to be as warm as yesterday in Tel Aviv. A small group of military men crouched behind a sandbag bunker in a deserted section of the military side of Lod Airport, waiting breathlessly as the army bomb disposal squad opened the large aluminum coffin two hundred yards away.

  Among the men crouched behind the bunker was Colonel Joseph Yesodat, in charge of the Israeli Secret Service Operations Branch, to whom the coffin-sized metal case had been delivered this morning.

  Sometime during the night a canvas-covered truck parked a half block from the front gate of Government House. A patrolling civil police radio car team had investigated the deserted truck, which contained the coffin with an address label to Yesodat.

  The colonel had been informed, the box had been removed by the army bomb squad to Lod, and was being opened now.

  A terrorist bomb, everyone was convinced, and twenty minutes after they began, the bomb squad team confirmed the suspicion by walkie-talkie.

  “It’s a bomb, all right, Colonel,” the walkie-talkie Yesodat held blared.

  He keyed the microphone and held the instrument to his lips. “Is it disarmed?”

  “Yes sir, but …”

  “But what, Sergeant?” Yesodat snapped.

  “That isn’t all that’s in this box.”

  Yesodat got to his feet and looked over the bunker across the field where the heavily padded figures of the two volunteers stood next to the open box. One of them waved.

 

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