presidential kidnapping if the new Director of the Secret Service can take time out to give a speech.”
Lucas nodded. “I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Oates looked around the table. “Everybody plan on being back here at two o’clock. Maybe we’ll know something by then.”
“I’ve already sent a crack lab team over to the yacht,” Emmett volunteered. “With luck they’ll turn up some solid leads.”
“Let’s pray they do.” Oates’s shoulders sagged and he appeared to stare through the tabletop. “My God,” he muttered quietly. “Is this any way to run a government?”
17
Blackowl stood on the dock and watched as a team of FBI agents swarmed over the
A constant parade of them crossed the dock to vans parked along the shore, removing furniture, carpeting, anything that wasn’t screwed down and a considerable amount that was. Each item was carefully wrapped in a plastic covering and inventoried.
More agents arrived, expanding the search for a mile around the first President’s estate, examining every square inch of ground, the trees and shrubbery. In the water beside the yacht, divers scoured the muddy bottom.
The agent in charge noticed Blackowl rubbernecking beside the loading ramp and came over. “You got permission to be in the area?” he asked.
Blackowl showed his ID without answering.
“What brings the Secret Service to Mount Vernon on a weekend?”
“Practice mission,” Blackowl replied conversationally. “How about the FBI?”
“Same thing. The Director must have thought we were getting lazy, so he dreamed up a top-priority exercise.”
“Looking for anything in particular?” Blackowl asked, feigning indifferent interest.
“Whatever we can determine about the last people who were on board — identification through fingerprints, where they came from. You know.”
Before Blackowl could reply, Ed McGrath stepped onto the dock from the gravel path. His forehead was glistening in sweat and his face was flushed. Blackowl guessed he had been running.
“Excuse me, George,” he panted between intakes of breath. “You got a minute?”
“Sure.” Blackowl waved to the FBI agent. “Nice talking with you.”
“Same to you.”
As soon as they were out of earshot, Blackowl asked softly, “What’s going down, Ed?”
“The FBI guys found something you should see.”
“Where?”
“About a hundred and fifty yards upriver, hidden away in trees. I’ll show you.”
McGrath led him along a path that bordered the river. When it curved toward the outer estate buildings, they stayed in a straight line across a manicured lawn. Then they climbed a rail fence into the unkempt undergrowth on the other side. Working their way into a dense thicket, they suddenly came upon two FBI investigators who were hunkered down studying two large tanks connected to what looked like electrical generators.
“What in hell are these things?” Blackowl demanded without a greeting.
One of the men looked up. “They’re foggers.”
Blackowl stared, puzzled. Then his eyes widened.
“Foggers!” he blurted out. “Machines that make fog!”
“Yeah, that’s right. Fog generators. The Navy used to mount them on destroyers during World War Two for making smokescreens.”
“Christ!” Blackowl gasped. “So that’s how it was done!”
18
Official Washington turns into a ghost town over the weekends. The machinery of government grinds to a halt at five o’clock Friday evening and hibernates until Monday morning, when it fires to life again with the obstinacy of a cold engine. Once the cleaning crews have come and gone, the huge buildings are as dead as mausoleums. What is most surprising, the phone systems are shut down.
Only the tourists are out in force, crawling over the Mall, throwing Frisbees and swarming around the Capitol, climbing the endless staircases and staring slack-jawed at the underside of the dome.
Some were peering through the iron fence around the White House around noontime when the President came out, quick stepped across the lawn and gave a jaunty wave before entering a helicopter. He was followed by a small entourage of aides and Secret Service agents. Few of the elite press corps were present. Most were home watching baseball on TV or roaming a golf course.
Fawcett and Lucas stood on the South Portico and watched until the ungainly craft lifted over E Street and dissolved to a speck as it beat its way toward Andrews Air Force Base.
“That was fast work,” Fawcett said quietly. “You made the switch in less than five hours.”
“My Los Angeles office tracked down Sutton and crammed him into the cockpit of a Navy F-20 fighter forty minutes after they were alerted.”
“What about Margolin?”
“One of my agents is a reasonable facsimile. He’ll be on board an executive jet for New Mexico as soon as it’s dusk.”
“Can your people be trusted not to leak this charade?”
Lucas shot Fawcett a sharp look. “They’re trained to keep quiet. If there’s a leak it will come from the presidential staff.”
Fawcett smiled faintly. He knew he was on shaky footing. The looseness of the White House staff was open territory for the press corps. “They can’t spill what they didn’t know,” he said. “Only now will they be waking up to the fact that the man in the helicopter with them isn’t the President.”
“They’ll be well guarded at the farm,” Lucas said. “Once they arrive no one gets off the property, and I’ve seen to it all communications are monitored.”
“If a correspondent figures the game, Watergate will seem as tame as an Easter-egg hunt.”
“How are the wives taking it?”
“Cooperating a hundred percent,” Fawcett answered. “The First Lady and Mrs. Margolin have volunteered to stay shut up in their bedrooms claiming to have a virus.”
“What now?” Lucas asked. “What else can we do?”
“We wait,” Fawcett replied, his voice wooden. “We stick it out until we find the President.”
“Looks to me like you’re overloading the circuits,” said Don Miller, Emmett’s deputy director of the FBI.
Emmett didn’t look up at Miller’s negative remark.
Within minutes after he had returned to the Bureau’s headquarters at Pennsylvania Avenue and Tenth Street he set into motion an All Bureaus Alert, followed by a standby for Emergency Action of the Highest Priority to every office in the fifty states and all agents on assignments overseas. Next came orders to pull files, records and descriptions on every criminal or terrorist who specialized in abduction.
His cover story to the Bureau’s six thousand agents was that the Secret Service had come on evidence of a planned abduction attempt on Secretary of State Oates and other as yet unnamed officials on high government
