Lerrick grinned and appreciated the question. A chance to show off: 'I was twenty-four hours ahead of you, Cochrane. Two mine sweepers covered the harbor this afternoon. They're also proceeding along the coastal waterway as far as Georgia. An advance escort in addition to the PT boats.'
'And the sides of the Sequoia itself?' Cochrane asked.
'Six navy frogmen spent the afternoon going over every inch of it,' Lerrick said. 'There's not a barnacle on that boat's belly. They finished at four-thirty. Half an hour ago. And nothing, nothing, has come within two hundred, uh, yards of the boat since, Satisfied?'
Cochrane had to admit it. Yes, he was satisfied. Lerrick had done all the right things. The facts were the facts. Why then, did his instincts still rebel?
He thanked Frank Lerrick and departed.
His mood and suspicions simmered. He considered going for dinner, but wasn't hungry. He wound his way slowly through Washington traffic and discovered that he was heading, for no real reason, back toward the White House and his previous post across the street from the presidential residence.
Where would the attack come? He couldn't see it. He couldn't sense it. His intuition had left town. He began to wonder whether his common sense had, too.
Maybe, he postulated, it's all a conceit at this point. Siegfried knew he had lost and fled the country: he saved himself, just as I should now save myself.
Cochrane tried to place himself within Siegfried's twisted psyche. And when he did so, the sense of impending disaster remained. It was a sense he had developed involuntarily over the past five years. He knew when he was being tailed and he knew when he was close to his own quarry. His senses had never betrayed him. But tonight they were short-circuiting. He was getting messages, but did not know what they were.
Was he close to Siegfried, or was Siegfried close to him? Had Fowler flown the coop completely-he had to have had an escape route or two lined up-or was he still lurking somewhere in the capital, waiting for his shot at Roosevelt?
Cochrane sat in his car on Pennsylvania Avenue, parked by a fire hydrant. The flag flew above the White House, a yellow spotlight upon it.
He ran through everything again. The White House itself was secure from within. It had to be. Similarly, the White House grounds were clean. Cochrane had seen the Secret Service and Bureau people examining every inch that afternoon. They had even used dogs.
The presidential limousine had been under guard for two weeks. Secure, Cochrane thought, checking off a mental list.
What about the route to the yacht? Unpublished, Cochrane recalled, and the first blocks away from the White House were under guard by Secret Service, plainclothes D.C. police, Army, and F.B.I.. A cat couldn't slip in and out without being seen. That left the yacht, which had been searched and searched again from within. And the frogmen searched the outside at sunset.
So why did Cochrane sense disaster? Where, oh where, was the weak spot in security? He started his car, just for the exercise, and pulled into traffic. He circled the White House in its entirety, Pennsylvania Avenue, to Constitution, south, and back again. He had never seen such heavy security. He should have been reassured. But the feeling of doom was still upon him.
He parked again. The same spot. A brown sedan pulled from a parking area a hundred feet behind him, then cruised next to him and stopped.
They looked at him questioningly, a car full of hardnosed Secret Service faces. Cochrane kept his hands in full view on the top of the steering wheel. His window was already open.
'F.B.I.,' he said. He flicked one palm open in plain sight and showed a shield. They shined a searchlight in his face.
'What are you sitting here for?' the driver asked.
'Security's a joint operation, isn't it?' he asked. They looked at him resentfully, then rolled up their car window. They parked fifty feet down the block in front of him. They settled in to wait, and so did Cochrane.
*
Earlier that afternoon, Stephen Fowler had selected his key landmark on the Virginia side of the Potomac. It was the spire of St. Thomas’church, the tallest point near the riverside in Alexandria. The spire would be easily visible at all hours from the water, which was what counted.
Siegfried left his car one block from the Lutheran church. The trunk of the car contained the spy's escape material: fake passports, tickets, money, and dry clothing. Then Fowler took a public bus into Washington. He would start in the Washington Channel, upstream from the Sequoia, and swim downstream with the current to his target. Then the current of the Potomac would guide him back across the Potomac to Alexandria. For a strong swimmer, it was fiendishly simple.
He had ready his Pirelli diving suit. He carried the bomb in a small suitcase. He went to East Potomac Park at dusk, staked out a bench near the Washington Channel, and waited. A thousand thoughts were upon him: his proximity to killing the President… his escape through Mexico… his eventual reception in Germany.
His spirits rose. He was a commando, wasn't he'? A bomb beneath his arm. A diving knife sheathed and strapped to his shin. A loaded pistol in a waterproofed canvas wrapping was taped to his chest within his wet suit.
He stared at the water. Nothing could stop him. Not the foolish English, not the amateurish Americans. Not even the muddle-headed women who occasionally got in his way. At eight o'clock, his eyes accustomed to the dimness of the park, he stood up and began to stroll. He could almost feel the small watch ticking in its case.
Four sticks of dynamite, he pondered. Enough to depose Franklin and Eleanor from the White House, but probably not enough to sink the Sequoia. Well, he reasoned, some details did not matter. He would be on the midnight flight to Mexico City by the time the blast detonated. And he would be on a German warship by 7 P.M. the next evening.
Siegfried stopped near a clump of trees. There was not a soul within sight. Quickly, he undressed. He checked the waterproofing around the bomb and the adhesives that would secure it to the ship. He tossed away the small suitcase.
He patted his knife and his pistol. He blackened his face with burnt cork. Then, at half-past eight, he entered the channel.
He carried his clothing and abandoned it a hundred feet into the river.
He took a few strokes and began his path downstream. The friendly current carried him. Even the weather cooperated. Dim moonlight masked by a November overcast. In the center of the river, or under the hull of the Sequoia, Siegfried would be invisible. His presence would be known only long after his flowers were planted, when explosion and death would shatter the night.
His strokes were firm now, long, smooth, and even. He felt like a sculler on the Charles or the Schuylkill. Genius propelled him, Siegfried decided. That and a sense of mission.
It would be a different America after Roosevelt died. A different world. The next American leadership would surely see the folly of war with the Third Reich. How Hitler would welcome him! How he would be a hero in the week or two it would take to arrive in Berlin!
*
At five minutes past nine, Cochrane recognized a tall, lean man in a top coat and bowler walking past the White House. The man walked in Cochrane's direction. On his arm was a very beautiful woman. not a soul within sight.
Peter Whiteside and Laura Worthington Fowler approached Cochrane's car. 'Anything happening?' Whiteside asked.
'Sure,' Cochrane answered. 'There are so many security people within two square blocks that we're failing over each other.'
'I noticed,' Whiteside answered.
'American overkill? Is that it?' Laura asked with mock reproach.
'It sure isn't classic English understatement,' Cochrane allowed. 'Why don't you both get in?'
They did, Laura in front with Bill Cochrane, Whiteside in the back. Out of the corner of his eye, Cochrane saw Whiteside remove his pistol from his overcoat pocket, check the six cylinders, and click it shut again. For one terrible second a new horror seized him, and he was aware that he had his back to a man with a loaded
