Free The Machiavelli Covenant by Allan Folsom Page A

"Fadden, the police talked to me yesterday. Her murder has still not been made public. Why?"
    "Notification of next of kin."
    "What else?"
    "What makes you think there's anything else?"
    "She was a name in this town. She was the longtime doctor to a number of people in Congress. Moreover, she was Caroline Parsons's personal physician. Caroline's memorial service is this afternoon. Maybe someone is afraid someone else might see a coincidence and start looking a little further."
    "Who might that be?"
    "No idea."
    "Look, Marten, as far as I know you're the only one who thinks Caroline Parsons was deliberately killed. Nobody else has even suggested it."
    "Then why has the murder of a prominent physician been kept so hush-hush?"
    "Marten"—they walked by several people, and Fadden waited until they were past—"Lorraine Stephenson was decapitated. It took them that long to find out whose body they had. Her head was nowhere around. Nobody's found it yet. The police want some time to poke around on the quiet."
    Decapitated? Marten was stunned. So that was the reason there'd been no publicity. It also meant someone had been there only moments after he'd fled, seen what had happened and decided to change the makeup of theentire thing. And they had, quickly and efficiently. It made him think what he had before, that the suicide of a woman of Dr. Stephenson's prominence would be far more carefully scrutinized than if she had been simply murdered. The decapitation naturally removed any suspicion of suicide, but to him, the only person who knew the truth of what had happened, it raised the specter of conspiracy. That someone wanted to cover up one crime with another brought the whole Mike Parsons committee thing back in a rush.
    "Fadden," he said, "let's get back to Mike Parsons. His subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism. What was it focused on? Why no formal witnesses?"
    "Because it was a classified investigation."
    "Classified?"
    "Yes."
    "About what?"
    "A top-secret apartheid-era South African biological and chemical weapons program long thought to have been dismantled. The CIA had given the committee a checklist of covert weapons programs that foreign governments had previously had in development so in the future, if push came to shove, they wouldn't commit the WMD mistakes we did before the war on Iraq. The South African program was one of them. The committee wanted to be certain it was as dead as the government claimed."
    "Was it?"
    "From what my sources tell me, yes. They had the top chemical and biological scientist who headed it on the hot seat for three days and finally concluded that the program had been abandoned as officially declared years ago."
    "Meaning?"

    "Meaning that all the weapons, pathogen strains, documents, and anything else pertinent had been destroyed. That there was no longer anything there."
    "What was the man's name, the scientist who headed it?"
    "Merriman Foxx. Why, did Caroline Parsons mention him?"
    "No."
    Marten looked away and they walked on in silence, the domed Capitol looming in front of them, the pedestrian and motorized traffic around them picking up, the daily activity of the seat of the federal government growing exponentially as the lunch hour ended. A moment later Marten thought of two separate things in rapid order.
    The first was what Stephenson had said in the dark, icy seconds on Dumbarton Street before she shot herself, apparently taking him for one of the conspirators.
You want to send me to the doctor. But you never will. None of you ever will. Never. Ever
.
    The second was what Caroline had uttered in her sleep—
I don't like the white-haired man,
she'd said, fearfully ranting about a white-haired man who had come to the clinic where she had been taken after her breakdown following the funerals of her husband and son and the subsequent injection by Dr. Stephenson.
    "This scientist, Merriman Foxx," Marten said abruptly, "is he also a medical doctor, a physician?"
    "Yeah.