Rubicon: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  Rubicon

  Lawrence Alexander

  To J. C.

  For everything he taught me

  Contents

  1

  BOBBY HART SAT IN HIS OFFICE, REMEMBERING with a kind…

  2

  THERE WAS NO ONE THERE TO MEET BOBBY HART WHEN…

  3

  DIETER SHOENFELD STOOD AT THE RAILING NEXT to the tidal…

  4

  RAYMOND CAULFIELD GLANCED AROUND THE kitchen with its gleaming appliances…

  5

  THE HALLWAY OF THE WILLARD HOTEL WAS jammed. People were…

  6

  WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER, WHEN SHE AND Bobby first started…

  7

  HOW LONG HAD THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR LIVED in the same…

  8

  YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE. YOU SHOULD have seen it.”

  9

  IT LASTED ONLY TWELVE MINUTES, THE SPEECH that made Bobby…

  10

  THE ASSASSINATION OF PRENTICE ALWORTH, Mr. Townsend. Do you want…

  11

  DIETER SHOENFELD HAD CHANGED. HIS FACE had become gaunt and…

  12

  I’M ALL RIGHT,” HE WHISPERED INTO THE RECEIVER and then…

  13

  CHANCE WAS EVERYTHING. IF DIETER SHOENFELD had waited a day,…

  14

  HART COULD NOT GET THE WORD OUT OF HIS head.

  15

  GOOD EVENING, SENATOR HART. I AM MOHAMMED AL Farabi,” said…

  16

  IT TOOK A SECOND FOR DAVID ALLEN TO BE certain…

  17

  IT WAS A MOB SCENE, MORE REPORTERS THAN DAVID Allen…

  18

  BOBBY FOUND HER IN THE GARDEN, CUTTING roses.

  19

  FOR ALL THE CHARGES AND THE COUNTER-CHARGES, for all the…

  20

  RONALD TOWNSEND SAT ALONE AT THE WITNESS table tapping his…

  21

  THE THIRD ATTACK KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN the first two…

  22

  LATTIMORE SPUN HART AROUND AND PRESSED the gun against his…

  23

  THE CHIEF JUSTICE LEANED FORWARD. WALTER Devlin had been on…

  24

  QUENTIN BURDICK WAS NOT SURE IF HART WAS telling him…

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  BOBBY HART SAT IN HIS OFFICE, REMEMBERING with a kind of rueful nostalgia the cool summer nights at home in Santa Barbara, walking on the beach with a sweater thrown over his shoulders, and the dark, wet sand clinging to his feet. Summer here, in the District, on the other hand, was an endless stay in hell, the heat stifling, breathless, the air heavy and oppressive. It followed you everywhere, the humidity thick and unrelenting, and the nights not much better than the days. It produced a constant, restless irritation, and with it a strange, perpetual suspicion, as if, with weather bad as this, it was hard to believe in anything except the evil side of human nature. He could not wait to get home.

  His secretary knocked on the door, the way she did whenever there was something she knew he would want to know.

  “Mr. Shoenfeld is on the line, Senator. I thought you might want to take it.”

  Dieter Shoenfeld was a man of importance, the publisher of one of Europe’s most influential journals, and an old friend. He read everything, could talk about anything, and insisted in all seriousness that he knew nothing.

  “I have to see you,” said Shoenfeld. “There is something you should know.”

  Hart glanced out the window at the Washington traffic, barely moving on the street below.

  “I’ve only got two hours before my flight; I don’t see how—”

  “Cancel it.”

  It was the strange intensity in Dieter Shoenfeld’s voice that told Bobby Hart he was serious.

  “Cancel it,” repeated Shoenfeld. “Go tomorrow, if you still think you should. This is important, Bobby. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think—”

  “Where? When?” asked Hart, reaching for a pen.

  An hour later, Hart got out of a cab in Georgetown. He had been on the Senate floor or in committee meetings most of the day. Despite the sweltering heat and humidity he wanted a few minutes outside, where he could breathe, lost in the relative anonymity of a sidewalk crowd. He could not walk down a street in San Francisco or Los Angeles without everyone stopping to stare. Here, the looks were more subtle, more restrained; usually a quick, friendly glance, followed by a brief nod as someone who also worked in Washington passed by.

  Two men in their early thirties, the age of ambition, were crossing from the opposite side, moving, even in this debilitating heat, with the brisk efficiency with which they had learned to do everything. With measured smiles, they acknowledged his importance, no doubt wondering, each of them, whether sometime in the future others might look the same way at them.

  The restaurant where he was to meet Shoenfeld was crowded, the bar impassable, a sea of hot shining faces, everyone full of news. Shoenfeld stood waiting for him while Hart threaded his way through a maze of tables. He gave him a warm hug as he shook his hand.

  “Bobby! It’s so good to see you.”

  Shoenfeld’s small eyes were surrounded by drooping lids and large, dark circles. His nose was rather heavy and the nostrils rather wide. His mouth, even when he was sitting still, listening to you speak, was in constant motion, as if he could not help but react with some interest, some enthusiasm, to everything he heard.

  “How are you, Dieter?” asked Hart as he sat down at the table. “And how is your lovely wife?” It brought a muted sparkle to Shoenfeld’s solemn eyes.

  “Very upset, my friend, very upset,” he replied, full of soft mischief. His glance became more circumspect, and more serious. “She wanted you to run, you know. She thought you were the only one who could have changed things seriously for the better.”

  It was the mark of Hart’s own unthinking confidence, and perhaps of his own ambition, that the question was, even with Dieter Shoenfeld, one he felt compelled to answer in purely political terms, or rather, not to answer at all, but to deflect with the easy modesty that said one thing and meant another.

  “I doubt I could have won.”

  Shoenfeld studied him more carefully.

  “You know what Napoleon told the general who asked how he should take Vienna? ‘If you want to take Vienna, take Vienna.’”

  Hart laughed and bent toward him.

  “Is that what you think Napoleon told himself when he decided to invade Russia? ‘If you want to take Moscow, take Moscow.’”

  “Think what you could have done in those debates. All those cautious, carefully programmed, slow-thinking…” He shook his head, let the thought finish itself, and then bent forward on his elbows. “You were the one who insisted that the race was wide open, that people were looking for someone new. So why didn’t you…?”

  For an instant, Hart wondered whether, despite all the difficulties that had stood in the way, he should have done it, taken the chance when the chance was there.

  “People were looking for someone new. How long was this supposed to go on? The same two families running the country for nearly thirty years, trading the presidency as if they owned it and could loan it back and forth; the same dull faces, the same dull speeches, the same…But I couldn’t have done it, even though I voted against the war. Prentice Alworth knew what he was doing. He let everything come to him. He could attack the administration and not have to defend anything he had done.”

  Forgetting for the moment that he was in Washington and not in some European restaurant, Shoenfeld reached inside his jacket for a pack of
cigarettes.

  “You don’t mind,” he remarked as he took one out and lit it. Staring straight ahead he took one drag, and then another. “Do you know where I spent my morning?” he asked, waving his hand to clear away the thin spiral of gray smoke. “With your distinguished secretary of state, along with two of my colleagues from the German press.”

  “The occasion?”

  “She wanted to explain that what happened last week proved that everything the administration has been saying about the threat of terrorism was true, and that she hoped Europe would finally understand that the threat is serious and real,” said Shoenfeld. “She remembered that just two months ago, I had told her that the worst thing the United States has done in its history was Abu Ghraib and the other revelations of rendition and torture. I had told her that there was no justification for any of this, and that it had almost destroyed what was left of Europe’s faith in America. She reminded me of that and then began to lecture me on having had the presumption to question America’s right to defend itself by any means necessary!”

  Shoenfeld took another drag on the cigarette. His eyes were immediate, intense.

  “It was like listening to an automaton, programmed to repeat certain phrases—sometimes even whole paragraphs—but none of it with any meaning, no connection to the conversation or to the world around her. There is something stunningly superficial about her: all these facts and figures, but no sure grasp of how to put them together, or even what they mean. She is very smart, too smart: she knows so many different things, she makes the mistake of believing that the aim of intelligence is the expansion of knowledge rather than the depth of understanding.”

  Something occurred to him that he had not thought of before.

  “Have you seen her play the piano? Every note correct, exact, but brittle, mechanical, as if she is in a hurry to get to the end, finish it so that she can get to the next busy thing she has to do.”

  The waiter brought their orders. Hart began to pick at his food, wondering what the real reason was he was there. Shoenfeld lapsed into a thoughtful silence.

  “That was the reason, you see,” he said suddenly. “What I had said about Abu Ghraib, and the rest of it: torture and anything else they think necessary. There was always this self-righteous assurance that what she and the others in this administration want is a kind of moral imperative and that no one has the right even to question it. That was the reason, you see: when I knew for certain that I could not tell her or anyone else in the government about this threat. I had to tell someone I could trust, someone who might be able to stop it.”

  “What threat? Stop what?” asked Hart, but Shoenfeld was not finished.

  “Do you remember what I told you, just after 9/11? That there were people inside your government arguing that tactical nuclear weapons ought to be used, that both Baghdad and Tehran should be leveled. I don’t need to tell you who they were; we both know their names. Or some of them, because I must tell you, Bobby, there are so many secrets inside this government of yours, so many agencies and bureaus that most people do not even know exist, I doubt we’ll ever know who was really responsible for half the things that have happened. But never mind that; what I told you then was true, wasn’t it? Plans were drawn up to use tactical nuclear weapons in both Iraq and Iran, weren’t there?”

  Hart pushed his plate aside.

  “Yes, you told me; and yes, I checked. Or tried to check, because all I got was the usual runaround. I never got a direct response.”

  The small faint traces of a smile, a sign of appreciation for a well-told lie, made a brief appearance on Shoenfeld’s face.

  “You have better sources than almost anyone in Washington.”

  “I was only a minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.”

  “Your father was CIA.”

  “My father has been dead for nearly nine years.”

  “And no one in that business was ever more respected. That was the reason you voted against the war. Some of the people who worked with him told you privately that the intelligence the administration was using was suspect, and that some of it was demonstrably false. And those were the people you talked to when I told you what I had learned, and they told you—”

  “But it never happened,” Hart reminded him. “Maybe someone thought about it—that’s what they do in the Pentagon, come up with plans for every possible contingency.”

  “Yes, and they get buried in a file. No one takes them seriously. But this was taken seriously, wasn’t it: this notion that you could solve the problem of the Middle East by wiping out Baghdad and Tehran at a single stroke?”

  “I don’t know how seriously. There were discussions; that was all I ever learned.”

  “Discussions at the highest level,” insisted Shoenfeld.

  Hart did not disagree. “So I was told.”

  Staring into the middle distance, Shoenfeld tapped his fingers on the tablecloth.

  “I lived in Berlin during most of the Cold War. I was there, a young student, when Kennedy spoke to that crowd that must have been more than a million. Freedom had a meaning then because just the other side of that wall was Soviet oppression. But then the wall came down and the Cold War ended and everybody decided they could go do whatever they wanted. And while everyone went off to live their fortunate private lives, politics and diplomacy were left to amateurs, puffed up with their own importance and no experience of the world. The same thing has happened here.”

  Shoenfeld reached for the wine bottle and, ignoring Hart’s protest, poured them each another glass.

  “You have to come to Germany, and you have to do it right away.”

  Hart started to reply that he could not possibly do any such thing, but then he saw the worried expression on Shoenfeld’s face.

  “Why? What is it? Why did you remind me of what you told me right after 9/11?”

  “To remind you that there are no rules anymore; to remind you that everything is now possible. And to tell you that there is going to be another attack. That’s why you have to go to Germany. There is someone there who can tell you, an old friend of your father, who won’t talk to anyone but you. I’ve arranged the meeting.”

  “You’ve arranged…?”

  Shoenfeld reached inside his jacket and pulled out a plane ticket.

  “You’re meeting him in Hamburg, tomorrow afternoon.”

  2

  THERE WAS NO ONE THERE TO MEET BOBBY HART WHEN he landed at Hamburg the next day. Shoenfeld had given him the name of the place he was to go, but not the name of the man he was to meet. No name, no description; nothing, except the vague assurance that someone would be waiting for him at a place called the Cafe Petite at exactly three-thirty in the afternoon.

  The cab, a late-model black Mercedes, moved down a wide, leafy avenue, lined with prosperous-looking stone buildings set a discreet distance back from the street. The dockyards, the railway lines, the factories, the entire industrial infrastructure of Hamburg had been destroyed in the war, but the fashionable neighborhoods where the wealthy families lived had been left largely untouched.

  “Cafe Petite,” announced the driver. He gestured toward a small sidewalk cafe across a narrow side street, just a few yards ahead.

  Hart grabbed his overnight bag and got out. It was a quiet, warm afternoon, the kind of day that makes everyone look for an excuse to be out of doors. The sidewalk tables were crowded with smartly dressed women with shopping bags at their feet and gossip on their tongues. Toward the back, under the lengthening shadows of the trees, sat silent young couples lost in each other’s eyes.

  He moved cautiously across the narrow, shaded street, waiting for someone to catch his eye, to make some sign that he was the one Hart was there to meet. He stepped down two stone steps at the entrance, and went inside. A woman at the cash register asked whether he wanted to be seated in the main part of the restaurant or in the garden in back.

  “The garden, if you don’t mind,” said someone directly beh
ind him.

  Hart started to turn around, but the man who had spoken was already moving toward the narrow open doorway that led to the small garden area in back. He was tall, taller than Hart, who was himself nearly six feet, with straight shoulders and long, rather shaggy gray hair. He looked a little like an aging bohemian dressed in an old, but well-tailored suit.

  The garden was really a patio, enclosed by a high brick wall. Half a dozen small tables stretched out in a single straight line. The one closest to the door was vacant. As they sat down, the stranger introduced himself.

  “My name is Gunther Kramer. I knew your father.”

  There was nothing particularly unusual about Gunther Kramer’s physical features, nothing that would cause someone to take a second look or remark upon them later, nothing that anyone would especially remember. He had a face that could easily blend into the crowd.

  “Dieter said you had,” replied Hart.

  “He was a remarkable man, he—”

  “Yes, I appreciate that,” said Hart more impatiently than he intended. “But Dieter told me that you had something important to tell me. I’ve come a long way, Mr. Kramer; and, if you don’t mind, whatever it is, I’d like to hear it.”

  “You have your father’s voice, his manner, too—always in a hurry to get straight to the point. And if you made a mistake, if things had not worked out quite the way you had expected, forget about it—that was the phrase he used—forget about it and start thinking about the next thing you were supposed to do. It is the American luxury of always living in the future and never thinking too much about the past. It is probably what got him killed.”