to Harry, for only one purpose-revenge. From the grave, Frederick Lacey meant to inflict more damage on the Kennedys. He killed them all, thought Harry. He killed them all! Who else was there to hurt? And, who would be afraid if the whole world knew? Who needed to stop it so badly they would murder for it? The Kennedys, or what’s left of them? Whoever it was, Harry knew he was now as much a target as the confession itself. Did Lacey have any idea his confession would prove this disastrous? Murder. Did he foresee the chaos? Could it be that’s what he wanted? Harry didn’t know, couldn’t know and Sir Anthony could shed no light on the question-not anymore. There was no time to waste. He had to get out, get away. He packed a small bag, took the Lacey document, and fled. He beat the police by less than five minutes.
The American Embassy was surrounded by the English authorities. The grounds themselves were American property, sovereign territory immune from English law, but he had to get inside to be safe. Only inside. All the entrances were guarded, even the few nobody was supposed to know about. Harry had no chance of getting back in. The rain that fell all day had drifted to a drizzle. The cold air did not warm with the afternoon. There was no late day sun. He was cold and damp. He needed to call the President back himself. The President would have an answer for all this. Certainly he would. Maybe the President tried to get him on the phone already and he wasn’t there. What would he have thought? “Christ!” muttered Harry. He so badly wished he was downstairs in his house in Roswell, Georgia. He longed to hear Aunt Sadie calling him to dinner. He missed his mother. She would know what to do. He was positive of that. She would never stand to see her son stranded on the street, in the cold, in the rain, a million miles from home. He turned and started walking toward St. James’s Square, where he stopped and found a public telephone.
“Please, Iden…”
“Albertson, is that you?”
“Mr. Levine?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll put you through.”
“Thank you,” said Harry.
“Levine,” said the President, almost immediately. “Where are you?”
“In a small cafe near St. James’s Square.”
“They want to talk to you.”
“I know. They’re all over the place.”
“We’re going to get you in, Harry, okay?”
“Yes. Sure, Mr. President.”
“I’m going to put someone on this line. His name is Louis Devereaux. I want you to do whatever he tells you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” With that, the next voice Harry heard was Louis Devereaux’s.
“Don’t worry, Harry. I’ve got it all under control. I need you to believe me.” It was as much a plea as anything else.
“Okay,” Harry mumbled.
“Do you have it?” When Harry gave no reply, Devereaux said it again. “Do you have it?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Have you read it?”
“Yes. Some of it.”
“About Kennedy?”
“Yes.”
“About others too?”
“Yes. I saw lots of names, going back many years. Lenin. Hitler. King Edward. Lots of them. I didn’t read it all. The Czar, too.”
“The Second?”
“What?”
“Czar Nicholas the Second?”
“Yes. Look, how can I…?”
“There’s an Indian restaurant,” Devereaux spoke over him. “It’s called The Standard. It’s on Westbourne Grove. Go there. You know where that is?”
“Yes. Go when?”
“Thirty minutes. When you get there, the owner will have a message for you. He’s an old man, heavy set, white hair. Indian, of course. He’ll be expecting you. Did you get that?”
“Yes. What kind of message will he have?”
“Just take whatever he gives you and follow the instructions.”
“And then?”
“Harry, trust me.”
“Yes, sir.” Harry said it, but he was far from sure. To Devereaux, how Harry felt didn’t matter. He knew the sound of obedience to the chain of command.
“Good. Now go,” he said. Harry was left holding a dead phone. The ISCOM connection was broken.
Louis Devereaux looked at the President and wondered what this guy would do without him. “I’ve got some things to take care of, Mr. President,” he said. “I’m sure you do too.” He started to walk out, but the President called after him.
“Louis. What are you going to do?” He pointed at the phone, the one Devereaux had just used to speak with Harry Levine.
“I’ll arrange for someone to meet him,” Devereaux said.
“And then what?”
And then what? Louis tried to contain his disbelief, his disgust. Asshole! Again he thought of T. S. Eliot. Will no one rid me of this troublesome President? Louis Devereaux just smiled and said, “I’ll take care of it.” A few minutes later he was talking to The Bambino.
Years ago, Devereaux emerged from the back offices at Langley mainly because of George Bush, the Father. When the Soviet empire collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity, Bush was caught off guard. At a meeting in the White House Situation Room, he gave his top intelligence people a piece of his mind. Few Presidents-even LBJ- have yelled louder and used as much profanity as Bush did that day. He was pissed and no excuse or explanation soothed his fury. The Russian bear was sick to dying and still they kept telling him it would be okay. Gorbachev would pull it together. But it wasn’t happening that way at all. The bear looked like Winnie the Pooh.
“Isn’t there anyone at your headquarters,” he screamed, pointing at the CIA delegation in the room, “who has a goddamn brain in their head? Do you all have shit for brains? Didn’t anybody have anything to say about what might happen to the Russians? They fell apart, goddamnit! They fell apart! And not a single sonofabitch at your place had a fucking clue? Nobody?”
“Mr. President,” one of the CIA crew spoke up. “We did have a report-a long time ago-years ago, from Devereaux. We all thought he was a bit over the top. I read it myself and thought he was nuts. I guess… in retrospect…”
“Devereaux? Who the fuck is Devereaux?” demanded Bush 41.
It turned out that Devereaux had written and distributed a paper, read by some in the highest circles of the Agency, in which he flatly predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. He’d been told to analyze the possibilities for Soviet growth to the end of the century, and he did. They wouldn’t see it, he said-the end of the century. He knew all along it was make-work and wasn’t at all surprised when no one paid any attention to his conclusions. The Soviet Union would, he claimed, disintegrate and disappear without a fight. He put the chance of armed rebellion, from any republic, at less than ten percent. The Soviet military complex was doomed, he said, done in by incompetence and corruption. The Eastern European states, as well as the Muslim republics of Central Asia, would soon reject their continued union with the Russians-and they would get away with it. It would not be Hungary or East Germany all over again, Devereaux wrote. No tanks in the streets, not outside Russia. He put the probability of a Russian invasion of any rebellious republic at absolute zero. The Soviet military was a paper tiger, flimsy paper at that. In fact, he saw a unified Germany as a catalyst in this movement. “The Wall will fall,” he wrote, with a bit of a smile at the time. The Soviet Union had ten to fifteen years left, he prophesized. Although outside his purview, he even expressed some doubt about the fundamental capacity of their nuclear arsenal. What’s most significant,
