Free Shall We Tell the President? by Jeffrey Archer Page B

this time of morning except trucks. He passed the Hirshhorn Museum as he crossed into Independence
Avenue . At the intersection of 7th and Pennsylvania , next to
the National Archives, Mark came to a halt at a red light. He felt an eerie
sense of nothing being out of the ordinary, as though the previous day had been
a bad dream. He would arrive at the office and Nick Stames and Barry Calvert would be there as usual. The vision evaporated as he looked
to his left. At one end of the deserted avenue, he could see the White House
grounds and patches of the white building through the trees. To his right, at
the other end of the avenue, stood the Capitol, gleaming in the early morning
sunshine. And between the two, between Caesar and Cassius, thought Mark, stood
the FBI Building . Alone in the middle, he mused,
the Director and himself, playing with destiny.
    Mark drove the car down the ramp at the
back of FBI Headquarters and parked. A young man in a dark blue blazer, grey
flannels, dark shoes, and a smart blue tie, the regulation uniform of the
Bureau, awaited him. An anonymous man, thought Mark, who looked far too neat to
have just got up. Mark Andrews showed him his identification. The young man led
him towards the elevator without saying a word; it took them to the seventh
floor, where Mark walk noiselessly escorted to a small room and asked to wait .
    He sat in the reception room, next to the
Director’s office, with the inevitable out-of-date copies of Timeand Newsweek; he might have been at the dentist’s. It was the first time in his life that
he would rather have been at his dentist’s. He pondered the events of the last
fourteen hours. He’d gone from bring a man with no
responsibility enjoying the second of five eventful years in the FBI to one who
was staring into the jaws of a tiger. His only previous trip to the Bureau
itself had been for his interview; they hadn’t told him that this could happen.
They had talked of salaries, bonuses, holidays, a worthwhile and fulfilling
job, serving the nation, nothing about immigrant Greeks and black postmen with
their throats cut, nothing about friends being drowned in the Potomac .
He paced around the room trying to compose his thoughts; yesterday should have
been his day off, but he had decided he could do with the overtime pay. Perhaps
another agent would have got back to the hospital more quickly and forestalled
the double murder. Perhaps if he had driven the Ford sedan last night, it would
have been he, not Stames and Calvert, in the Potomac . Perhaps . . . Mark closed his eyes and felt an
involuntary shiver run down his spine. He made an effort to disregard the
panicky fear that had kept him awake all night — perhaps it would be his turn
next.
    His eyes came to rest on a plaque on the
wall, which stated that, in over sixty years of the FBI’s history, only thirty-four
people had been killed while on duty; on only one occasion had two officers
died on the same day. Yesterday made that out of date. Mark’s eyes continued
moving around the wall and settled on a large picture of the Supreme Court;
government and the law hand-in-hand. On his left were the five directors, Hoover , Gray , Ruckelshaus, Kelley, and now the redoubtable H. A. L.
Tyson, known to everyone in the Bureau by the acronynm Halt. Apparently, no one except his secretary, Mrs McGregor, knew his first name.
It had become a long-standing joke in the Bureau. When you joined the FBI, you
paid one dollar to Mrs McGregor, who had served the Director for twenty-seven
years, and told her what you thought the Director’s first name was. If you got
it right, you won the pool. The kitty had now reached $3,516. Mark had guessed
Hector. Mrs McGregor had laughed and the pool was one dollar the richer. If you
wanted a second guess, that cost you another dollar, but if you got it wrong,
you paid a ten-dollar fine. Quite a few people tried the second time and the
kitty grew larger as each new victim arrived.
    Mark