Hagerty, Len Hall, Jerry Persons, the Dulles brothers, and several men he didn’t recognize. It was clear that they’d been talking for some time, perhaps hours.
Adams pulled Nixon aside and said, “Dick, you may be president within the hour.”
The chief of staff told Nixon what they knew: a plane crash, a dead secret service agent, another badly burned. Eisenhower had been struck by shrapnel and suffered a heart attack sometime after the crash. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness soon after reaching the hospital. George Allen was wounded but in good condition. Allen confirmed that the plane had dived for them, and that they’d been saved by a “daredevil” clinging to the plane.
“If he hadn’t made that kamikaze hit that hill we’d be dead,” he said. Nixon scowled. “What daredevil? What do you mean, ‘kamikaze’?”
The men in the room turned to the Dulles brothers. Allen, director of the recently created Central Intelligence Agency, handed a folder to his brother, John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. “The plane was one of ours, stolen from Lowry Air Force Base,” Foster said. “But it was painted like a Japanese Zero.”
Nixon frowned but said nothing.
“The pilot was Lawrence Hideki, an Air Force helicopter mechanic of Japanese descent. The ‘daredevil’ is unknown at the moment—perhaps he was another airman on base. We’re checking to see if Hideki was troubled by psychological problems, or if he had any links to Japanese extremist groups. But frankly, we don’t expect to find anything along those lines.”
Again Nixon said nothing.
“This is not the first such attack on American soil,” Foster said. “Yesterday Allen ordered a search for similar cases.” He laid out several folders, and briefly described three previous attacks: May 1947, a Japanese man dressed as a kamikaze pilot stole a crop-duster plane in Kansas and crashed it an hour later, killing eight people attending a farm auction. July, 1949, a plane painted like a Zero crashed into the side of the USS
“There may be more,” Foster said, almost apologetically. “We’re pulling records of all plane crashes and hijackings right now.”
The room was quiet for a long moment. Finally Nixon spoke: “Did the president know about these attacks?”
Allen Dulles stepped forward. “You have to understand, Mr. Vice President, nobody thought these events were related. In each of these cases, the pilots were men with no criminal record, no history of mental illness, and no obvious links to Japanese nationals. We had a handful of coincidences, nothing that rose to a level worth the president’s attention.”
“Let me see the folders,” Nixon said.
Word came of Eisenhower’s death at 8:00 p.m. A short time later, Nixon was brought into an adjacent room where several people waited: his wife, Pat; his secretary, Rose Mary Woods; Nelson Pym, a staff photographer; and Justice Hugo Black. Pat had brought the Milhous family Bible from their apartment. In the official photo, Nixon is listening to the justice, his expression tight-lipped and grim.
After taking the oath of office, Nixon hugged his wife and returned to the briefing room. He didn’t have to call for attention; the atmosphere had already changed. President Nixon stood silently for a long time, arms folded tightly across his chest, staring at the table. When he spoke, he didn’t look up.
“I’m no general,” he said quietly. “I can’t be the kind of leader President Eisenhower was.”
Sherman Adams looked at Jim Hagerty with a worried expression. No one needed to tell them that Nixon was no Ike.
“But I know conspiracies,” Nixon said. “I understand how the Japanese, a defeated people, may turn desperate. How even the most innocentseeming of men can be secretly plotting the destruction of the nation.” He didn’t have to explain: Nixon was the man who had brought down Alger Hiss, the man who’d held the reins of the Un-American Activities Committee. “This is a new kind of war, a new enemy, whose weapon is fear.”
Nixon looked up, into the faces of men who’d been plotting his political death a day before. He showed his teeth, a twitch of a smile. Some of the men looked away uncomfortably.
“I promise you,” Nixon said. “We will root out this new enemy, wherever he is among us.”
13
“Let’s swing by again,” O’Connell said.
“It’s not even been ten minutes,” I said. “We can’t do it too often, you know that.”
We were parked in front of the Jewel grocery not a quarter mile from my mother’s house. I couldn’t see any way to “stake out” the house from any closer than that, not without getting caught in the same way that Amra had busted Bertram and the Human Leaguers. My neighborhood was a triangular clump of houses bounded by three very busy streets, the houses with their backs turned resolutely to the traffic. One road ran through the development, a wobbly horseshoe infested with cul-de-sacs. The place brimmed with retired people, the parents of the kids I’d grown up with. If my mom didn’t notice two people hanging out in an unfamiliar pickup, one of her understimulated neighbors definitely would. Worst-case scenario: they call the cops.
So every twenty-five minutes or so we drove past my mother’s house to see if her Chevy Corsica was still in the driveway, then headed back to Jewel. We’d done this since 8 a.m. and it was almost noon. Her car hadn’t budged. We knew she was there, because I’d called from a pay phone and hung up when she answered. We just didn’t know when she’d leave.
I’m not saying it was a particularly well-thought-out plan.
“Why don’t you just walk up to the front door?” O’Connell said.
“Ring the bell and say, ‘Hello, Mother, I just need to look at something in the basement.’ ”
“I’m not going to do that. I can’t just . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“She’s still your mother, Del. She’s still the same person who raised you.”
But I’m not the same person she raised, I thought. O’Connell made a disgusted noise. “I’m out of cigarettes,” she said, and slammed the cab door behind her.
We were tired of driving, tired of each other. She hadn’t wanted to come to Chicago. She was sure the Waldheims could help me figure out more about my nature, about all demon nature, if only I gave them time. But I’d begged, told her I’d do it with or without her, and she’d given in surprisingly easily. Maybe she knew I needed her.
She also didn’t fight me on the need to drive rather than fly. Neither of us wanted to put our names down on an airline ticket and get picked up for “questioning” as soon as we stepped off the plane. Eighty percent of the trip retraced the route Lew and I had taken out of Chicago. O’Connell’s rattling pickup was a lot slower than Lew’s Audi, but at least my chin wasn’t banging against my knees the whole way. We’d spent last night at a Days Inn just off the interstate—
separate rooms—and had driven the rest of the way in this morning. The number of things we didn’t talk about was enormous. O’Connell opened the truck door and dropped a Tribune on my lap. “Eliot Kasparian confessed,” she said.
“Who?”
“Dr. Ram’s killer. He admitted he made up the possession. He was fully conscious when he killed him.”
I looked at the picture under the headline and recognized the face.
“Holy shit,” I said. It was the Armenian kid. “I talked to this guy that night. He was at the party—a big fan of Valis’. He said Dr. Ram was trying to cut out our connection to God.” I skimmed the article and found the phrase I was looking for. In his confession, Kasparian said that Ram was trying to close the “Eye of Shiva.”
