Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) Page 19

  She stood and snatched her plate from the table. Walking to the sink, she stopped suddenly and spun her heels on the wood flooring. She leaned into the black granite of the countertop.

  “It’s always about me. When they chose me to lead the party, it was about me. If they kick me out, it will be about me. If the court rules that a woman Speaker cannot constitutionally assume the presidency because she is not an ‘officer’, it is most assuredly about me!” She turned her back on her husband and slammed her plate into the stainless steel sink. It rattled before the room was again uncomfortably silent. “Are you finished?”

  “With my meal or with the conversation?”

  “Either,” she huffed. “Both.” She reached the small table and was about to take his plate from him when he reached out gently and put his hands on her narrow hips. He pulled gently and she shuffled to him. He could see that she was doing her best to stay angry. But the slightest sadness in her eyes told him she was weakening.

  He could have fought her on the notion that everything was always about her. He could have argued the stupidity of comparing a no-confidence vote to a ruling on the constitutionality of presidential succession. But he spontaneously reasoned it pointless. His wife and best friend was hurting. She was a tightly wound ball of stress. Any disagreement with an irrational spouse would only serve to widen the emotional distance between them.

  “I was wrong,” he offered. “I know how invested you are in this. I understand your passion. I won’t bring it up again. Just know that I am here for you regardless.”

  He was good; she’d give him that. A lifetime together had taught him how to handle his powerful wife.

  “I know that,” Felicia said. She looked up at the ceiling and laughed, trying to fight back tears. “I know that.”

  He stood from his chair and wrapped his arms around her waist, his arms extending upward to her shoulders. She buried her head in his chest. He moved his right hand to the back of her head and gently stroked her hair. He knew indeed that if the court sided with Blackmon, it would not be okay.

  Chapter 33

  Bill Davidson was sweating through his shirt as he left the relative warmth of the Mayflower Hotel. The morning sun was just beginning to purple the sky along the horizon when he pushed through the exit onto DeSales Street. It was cold and cloudy outside. Despite the sun, Davidson thought it might rain. The dampness on the white cotton around his neck, under his arms, and in the middle of his back was uncomfortable. He’d had a busy couple of hours.

  First, he’d called the front desk and arranged to book the hotel room connected to his. He then extended his stay for two additional nights and asked that he receive no maid service in either room.

  He made a dozen trips to the ice machine down the hall and then, bucket by bucket, filled half of the bathroom tub with ice. It would slow the decomposition of the body and prevent an odor from alerting other guests or hotel workers.

  After managing to pick up, drag, and then dump the body into the iced tub, he dead-bolted the lock and pulled the safety bar across the door to his room. Once he’d cleaned up as best he could, he locked the adjoining door and exited through the second room.

  Davidson didn’t trust that the knight would follow through with the cleanup and wanted to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to enter the room.

  He’d considered the altruism of calling the police immediately, damn the consequences. Ultimately he decided his country might be better served by him avoiding arrest and lengthy questioning in a holding cell. He had things to do and lives to save.

  “South Street between Thirty-First Street NW, and Wisconsin,” Davidson instructed the cabbie as he opened the door and slid onto the black vinyl bench seat in the backseat of the taxi. He placed a bag on the seat next to him and then wiped the sweat from his forehead. He could feel his shirt sticking to his back.

  The cabbie turned off of DeSales, south onto Seventeenth Street SW, and then left onto K Street. The trip was only a mile and a half, but given early morning traffic, it took twenty minutes to pull up in front of the Hanover-Crown Institute.

  Davidson paid the cabbie, pulled his bag across the seat, and crawled out of the taxi. He stood on the sidewalk, looking at the building in front of him. The bland appearance of the façade saddened him. The limestone, glass and iron were unwelcoming.

  He’d never taken the time to notice it before, but now he saw the austerity of it. It was appropriate, he reasoned, that the bland, unimpressive entrance reflected the outward appearance of his own career.

  There was good on the inside. There was passion and intelligence within the walls of the place. There was unreasonable hope for a grander future and the respect of peers. He smiled weakly at the coincidence of it and slowly made his way into the building with his head down.

  Winded by the time he sat down in his office and swung the heavy bag onto his desk, Davidson leaned forward in his chair and pulled the boxed set of books from the bag. He slipped his index finger in between the box top and the spine of the center book.

  He pulled the book onto the desk and flipped to Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience”, thumbed to part one, paragraph four, and then stopped. He read the words aloud: “Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? In which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?”

  Davidson shoved the book away from him to make room for his elbows on the desk surface. He then leaned on the desk with his head in his hands and continued to read: “Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

  Davidson had always loved this part of the essay. But now it put a thick lump in his throat. It hurt to swallow against the dryness of it. He knew that Thoreau was arguing against patriotism and service to country for the sake of it. He understood that Thoreau believed conscience and moral compass should guide a man above the will of the majority. He was at once against civil government’s ability to oppress its citizenry and supportive of the few pragmatic taxes for needed social programs.

  Davidson wished that he’d always followed his conscience above the will of the majority. His life and country might have been better for it. He ran his hand down the page a final time and closed the book. He slipped it back into the box between the other two books. One of them contained a collection of Thoreau’s many politically-themed speeches. Among the addresses in that volume was one referred to as “Plea for Captain John Brown”, a speech that Thoreau delivered at a Concord, Massachusetts, town hall meeting in which he supported the actions of the famed, but violent, abolitionist.

  “I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable,” Thoreau contended. “The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it.” Thoreau, a noted pacifist, was advocating violence for the sake of revolutionary political change.

  It was the book containing that speech that George Edwards had meticulously hollowed out to make room for a Nokia 6210 cell phone strapped to a six-by-six-inch piece of thin plywood and eight ounces of Semtex. One quick phone call would wreak havoc on the written word and anyone within one hundred yards of the blast.

  Sir Spencer told Edwards that the explosive was meant to silence Davidson if, in fact, he was the leak. If he wasn’t the traitor, the knight suggested that Davidson was too weak regardless. The Daturan movement stood to suffer in the wake of the coup if Davidson’s conscience ever got the better of him.

  It was the artist’s sense of irony that led him to choose that book over the one containing “Civil Disobedience”. Edwards was more warped than anyone realized. Nobody ever really noticed it beneath his warmth and charm.

  Davidson never noticed the criminal alteration to the boxed set as he walked to a storage room next to his offi
ce and replaced the books on the shelf from which he had taken them.

  When he returned to his office, he noticed a woman sitting at his desk. She was wearing dark denim jeans, a pair of brown Gore-Tex Merrell Sport shoes, and a plain cotton heather gray sweatshirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. It took Davidson a moment to realize she was the same woman he’d glimpsed rushing past him at the art opening the night before.

  “Matti Harrold?” he asked and bit his lower lip. He was almost certain it was her.

  “Yes.” She stood from the chair and offered her hand. She recalled the last time she’d actually met the man and how different he seemed then. At B. Smith’s restaurant all of those years ago, he was larger than life. But here, in his cramped back hall office, he appeared small.

  Mattie always wondered what a shell of a man looked like, and now one stood humbly in front of her. His hand was thick but cold as he grasped hers.

  “I’m sorry I was sitting in your chair,” she said, gesturing behind her to the comfortable seat. “I am just so tired.” She smiled with her lips pressed together.

  “Oh”—he waved it off—“no worries, Ms. Harrold. It’s there for whoever needs it. And as you and I both are acutely aware, I won’t need it much longer.”

  Matti wasn’t sure how to respond to that and, in fact, felt rather awkward. Rather than respond clumsily to what she inferred, she chose to ignore it.

  “So you wanted to meet with me,” she offered as a change of direction. “You said you have something to share with me that might help.”

  “I do, yes.”

  Davidson stepped farther into the office, brushing past her, and sat at his desk. He rolled the seat to a beige file cabinet to the left of the desk, grabbed the handle on the bottom of three drawers, pushed an adjacent button with his thumb, and pulled. He reached into the drawer with both hands and withdrew a stack of small blue books. He spun back to the desk and set them down, then reached into a bag on his desk and removed a balled-up sports coat. He unwound the ball, found the inside breast pocket, and removed another blue book identical to the stack of five on the desk.

  “Okay.” He spun back around to face Matti and slapped his hand on the stack. “These are my journals. In these pages is everything you need to know about the Daturan movement: the people, the places, my thoughts, my fears, and the plot to secretly usurp the executive branch of the government for its own design.”

  Matti swallowed hard. She pulled her hands to her mouth before folding her arms in front of her chest. Her eyes danced between the books and Davidson as she considered the consequences of his gift.

  “Given the generosity of my girlfriend,” he continued, “you may already know much of the information they contain. I have no idea what she did or didn’t reveal.”

  “Your girlfriend was pretty forthcoming with some things,” Matti allowed. She thought ‘girlfriend’ a myopic description of the dead call girl, but she played along for the sake of expedience. “Not so much with other things. She was an unwilling asset for a while before I got involved.”

  “And how long have you been involved?”

  “Two days.” Matti looked at the floor as she said it.

  Davidson recoiled his neck like a chicken about to peck, instantly reconsidering his decision to share the journals with someone so lightly invested in the operation.

  “I’m an intelligence analyst,” she offered quickly. Matti could sense the regret in his tone. He’d pulled his hands from the stack of journals and had folded them in his lap. She noticed his shoulders hunched as the air left him. He was deflating.

  “I’m very good at what I do,” she assured him. “It’s because of my technical skill that my supervisors pushed for my direct involvement. They believed I could break through in ways other handlers could not.” She didn’t go into the sexist details of the reality of her involvement.

  “Did you?” He was the one looking at the floor now.

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you break through?”

  “Apparently not enough.” She hesitated before offering any more to Davidson. “I’m off the team now.”

  Davidson’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head slightly.

  “When you saw me at the art opening, I’d made some mistakes. My boss pulled me from the surveillance.” She waited for Davidson to respond, and when he didn’t, she added, “I compromised too much. They had to remove me.”

  He thought about revoking the offer of the journals. But he rationalized that she was the only one to whom he could give the journals. She was as on the outside looking in as he was. She was persona non grata at the NSA and he was the equivalent with the Daturans.

  Matti Harrold was maybe the perfect person to whom he could hand over the information. It made sense. He chose the journal atop the stack and handed it to her.

  “You’ll need these,” he said. “You are the only one in a position to really stop this. Your bosses may think they know what’s going to happen, but they don’t. They have no clue.” He pulled the other books to the edge of his desk and then piled them into Matti’s arms.

  “Ms. Harrold, I would suggest that you read the most recent one first. Everything is there.” He pursed his lips and nodded at her. It was his signal to her that she should leave. He rotated his chair, facing his desk again and turning his back on Matti.

  “You can’t do that,” Matti snapped. “You can’t hand me some instruction manual when you could just tell me what they’re planning.” She pulled her shoulders back, adjusting her posture as she cradled the books in front of her. “We both know there is no time for games.”

  She was right and Davidson knew it. He couldn’t just give her the books without an explanation. He couldn’t expect she’d dutifully walk away without challenging him.

  “They’re going to blow up the Capitol,” he said emotionlessly without turning to face her. “And they’re going to kill everyone inside of it by lining the president’s casket with explosives.”

  Matti stood motionless at first. The weight of the books was almost too much for her to hold. She backed out of the room slowly and then started an awkward jog down the hall and out of the building. They weren’t planning to blow up Arlington on the day of the funeral, they were planning the attack a full day earlier. The Daturans didn’t want to make a statement. They wanted to affect the country’s leadership. They wanted to destroy a symbol of American strength.

  She remembered people theorizing for years how the American psyche would have been affected if the 9/11 hijackers had succeeded in crashing a fourth plane into the Capitol dome. How much worse would it be now if homegrown terrorists did it? She didn’t want to think about the possibilities. She couldn’t let it happen. She couldn’t fail.

  Matti had to make a phone call; her supervisor needed to know. He’d passed along the wrong intelligence. If he’d listen to her, she could help him stop the pending attack and save hundreds of lives.

  Matti needed redemption.

  Chapter 34

  Dexter Foreman’s body lay in the casket in the basement of Harrowby’s Funeral Home & Chapel after arriving an hour earlier. The casket was surrounded by the six soldiers prepared to carry the president once they reached the Capitol steps.

  The soldiers were assigned to the Military District of Washington and the 3rd US Infantry Regiment. Most people knew them as members of “The Old Guard”. Since World War II, they had served as the official Army Honor Guard and the escort to the president.

  On the shoulders of their uniforms were blue oval insignias with red borders. The Washington Monument was at the center of the design, along with a double-handed sword. The monument was emblematic of their area of responsibility. The sword symbolized protection. Their motto, in Latin Haec Protegimus, translated to “This We Guard”.

  The War Department created the Military District to plan for any potential ground attacks against the nation’s capital during the war. But its mission evolved over the decades to more of
a ceremonial role. Its units eventually included the US Army Band, known as “Pershing’s Own”.

  Now the soldiers embarked upon their most solemn responsibility: they were to help bury their commander in chief. It was an awesome task.

  Dexter Foreman would be the twelfth president to lie upon the Lincoln catafalque. It was a simple bier of pine boards nailed together and covered with black cloth, constructed hastily to accommodate the public viewing for Lincoln’s casket. A century and a half later, it was still the same seven-foot-long, two-and-a-half-foot-tall platform. While the cloth had been replaced several times, it was in the original style drapery used in 1865.

  The soldiers were quiet as they checked the casket and tested its weight. The task of carrying more than three hundred pounds up the steps of the west front of the Capitol at the end of the procession was taxing. Even for six strong men, keeping the weight level up the steps and into the rotunda was fraught with potential embarrassment. After a final metal detector sweep around the outside of the casket, the men practiced carrying the full weight of it in Harrowby’s large basement.

  Harrowby himself stood to the far left side of the expanse. When the soldiers finished their brief exercise, Harrowby helped them place the casket onto the lift so that they could move it from the basement to the main floor of the building. He then followed the soldiers and a couple of other government types up the stairwell into the hallway. There was a group of Capitol Police officers, Metro Police, and uniformed Secret Service gathered in the crowded space. They were talking and laughing, a couple of them nursing cooling cups of coffee. Harrowby politely pushed his way through the grouping and made his way to the casket lift. Waiting next to the opening of the lift was a steel-tubed casket cart. Harrowby pulled open the lift door, and a couple of his employees help him shift the casket onto the cart, resting it on the six small rubber tips that kept the heavy wooden box in place. The officers, who just a moment before were chatty, fell silent. They watched wide-eyed as Harrowby kicked the brake off of the rear left wheel. With help, he rolled the cart toward an exit and the awaiting hearse.