The Almighty Part 49

'Anyway,' said Hannah, 'the note from you, after my being poisoned, coincided with the tragedy in your apartment. I guessed you were onto something of utmost importance, as you had written me.

In my interest in my own survival, I had to find out what you had in mind.'

'Now you know,' said Victoria.

'I know.' Hannah shook her head with conviction. 'We can't let him go on. You heard me characterize his behavior in recent weeks as that of a madman, possibly that of a homicidal maniac'

'And the leader of the most active of terrorist gangs.'

'That you believe?'

'Absolutely.'

Hannah stared at her visitor. 'But you can't prove it.'

238.

'No, I haven't been able to prove it. My last hope was that you could help.'

Hannah did not speak immediately. She stared into s.p.a.ce, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she spoke. 'I can help,' she announced. T can help prove - or disprove - Edward's involvement.'

'You can?' Victoria was on her feet, electrified, to learn what Hannah Armstead had in mind.

Hannah raised a hand and crooked a finger toward the corridor leading off the living room. 'Follow me,' Hannah said. She began rolling her wheelchair rapidly toward the corridor and into it, with Victoria right behind her.

At the doorway of the first bedroom, Hannah gestured for Victoria to wait. Victoria watched her roll herself up to the bedstand, fumble for a cane leaning against the headboard. Using the cane for leverage, Hannah pushed herself up and out of the wheelchair and onto her feet. Unsteadily, she crossed over to her dressing table. To the left of her mirror, she pulled out a lower drawer. She sought something difficult to find, apparently well hidden, and triumphantly found whatever she had been seeking. Victoria could not make out what she had found, but it appeared to be more than one object, possibly two, which she placed in a pocket of her dressing gown.

Hannah hobbled back to where Victoria was standing. 'Come with me,' she said. 'If proof exists, I'm going to show you the only place we could find it.'

Leaning on her cane, Hannah led the way up the corridor, with a curious Victoria at her heels. They pa.s.sed the second bedroom and came to a halt before a formidable oaken door with an impressive burnished bra.s.s doork.n.o.b and dead-bolt lock. 'Mr. Armstead's private study,' said Hannah. 'No one else is allowed inside without him there. I've never been in it with his permission. I've been in it once without his permission. This will be my second time.' She fumbled in her pocket for one of the objects she'd had hidden in her dressing table. In her hand she displayed a key. 'Edward thinks he has the only key to the study. He would not allow a spare one to be made. But I had one made without his knowledge, and this is it.' She inserted the key into the dead-bolt lock. It fit. 'I had it made without telling him. Not because I was suspicious at the time or wanted to spy, but because I still worried about him. He was spending so much time in his sealed room, working such long hours, that I was concerned for his health. I worried that one night he might have a heart attack, and it would be impossible to get inside and reach him when he might need help. So, secretly, I called in a locksmith and had this second key fashioned for his study. It was meant for an emergency. This, I believe, const.i.tutes an emergency.'

With a strong twist of her wrist she turned the key. There was a metallic sound. Hannah gripped the doork.n.o.b, put her shoulder against the ma.s.sive door. Noiselessly the door swung inward.

'Has this room always been his private study?' asked Victoria.

'Yes, but never before locked,' said Hannah, 'until a few weeks before the king of Spain was kidnapped in San Sebastian, when he installed the special lock and issued the no trespa.s.sing order.'

Hannah and Victoria exchanged looks and went inside.

Victoria took in her surroundings. A handsome room with exquisite light brown paneling with neocla.s.sical detailing, a wall of leather-bound volumes on one side, an immense television screen on a stand in a corner, an oil portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte above the huge fireplace ahead, two 239 pastel-covered armchairs behind an oak table, a wide couch draped with a velvet coverlet, a door to a private bathroom, finally a Victorian library-table desk with an electric typewriter on a stand beside it.

Hannah pointed to the straight chair resting between the typewriter and the desk. 'He's been coming in here almost every night, and he sits on that chair typing,' she said. 'I haven't seen him, but I know he does it and has been doing it since several weeks after he inherited his father's newspaper.'

A kind of awe rooted Victoria to the spot. Her eyes were on the typewriter. 'Do you suppose he's writing those terrorist stories?' she wondered.

'You want to know if I suppose my husband is Mark Bradshaw?' Hannah said. 'Let's find out.'

She turned around and lifted a forefinger to the wall across the study and behind the pastel armchairs. 'See that?'

Victoria had missed it the first time around. It was a medium-sized painting, lightly framed, of a young boy, perhaps ten or eleven, attired in a military uniform and posing as a juvenile version of the Napoleon portrait hanging over the fireplace.

'A memento of Edward's childhood,' Hannah explained. 'The safe is in the wall behind it.'

Victoria glanced sharply at Hannah. 'The safe?' she mouthed.

'The proof,' said Hannah. 'If it exists, it will be in that concealed safe.' She pulled a shred of paper from her dressing-gown pocket. 'Here's the combination. I found it, and copied it, the only time I was inside this room before, the time with the locksmith. Take this chair. Climb and remove the painting. You'll find the safe. I'll call the combination out to you. If there's proof, it'll be inside. It is all the help I can offer you. I wish you - not luck - I wish you truth.'

Momentarily Victoria wavered. She remembered reading in high school of a New England schoolteacher who had been the first to theorize seriously that Shakespeare had not written his own plays and that final proof might be found in Shakespeare's grave in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. When, after years of applying to open Shakespeare's grave, the schoolteacher had been given the opportunity to do so, she was afraid to follow through. 'A doubt stole into her mind,' her friend Hawthorne had written, 'whether she might not have mistaken the depository ... she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting the stone and finding nothing.' She had retreated and quit.

In these frozen seconds, Victoria was afraid to hazard the shock of finding nothing. Then the madness would be her own, not Armstead's.

'I - I don't know,' whispered Victoria.

'It'll be the last chance you'll ever have,' urged Hannah. 'We both deserve to know the truth.'

Victoria bobbed her head. She dragged the straight chair across the study to a position behind the armchairs and under the youthful painting of the publisher. She climbed up on the chair, and with ease was able to lift the framed painting off its hook and hand it down.

A miniature silver combination-lock dial, set into a blue one-foot-square metal safe door, was revealed.

'I'm ready,' said Victoria to Hannah, who stood beneath her.

240.

Hannah peered at the directions on the shred of paper. 'Spin the dial three times around to the left, and the fourth time around stop at 56.'

Victoria spun the dial left past zero three times, and on the fourth time stopped at 56. 'Okay.'

'Spin it right two times, and the third time around stop at 26.'

Victoria did as she was told. 'Okay.'

'Now turn it left once, and the second time around stop at 74.'

Once more Victoria followed the instructions. 'Done. Any more?'

'Turn the dial right to zero. That should do it.'

Carefully, filled with doubt, Victoria moved the dial to zero.

Click. The bolt had retracted.

She pulled at the lever, and the wall safe was open.

She reached inside it, probing with her fingers, and felt a large manila envelope. She withdrew it.

There was nothing else in the safe. She looked down at the brown envelope. It bore no identification, only a neat penciled date across it. Tomorrow's date.

'Only this,' said Victoria, stepping down off the chair.

'What's in it?' said Hannah. 'What's inside?'

Victoria pulled up the back clasp and lifted the flap of the envelope. There were three sheets inside.

They were double-s.p.a.ced and neatly typed.

There was a by-line.

By Mark Bradshaw.

There was a story.

Side by side, Victoria and Hannah scanned it together.

After the first page, the two women stared at each other aghast.

'My G.o.d,' whispered Victoria, 'Hannah -'

Hannah was trembling. 'I can't believe it-'

'You'd better!' a voice rasped at them from across the room.

Both women looked up, horrified, petrified at the sight of Edward Armstead inside the open door.

He wore a set smile upon his face as he started into the room.

'It is not always, ladies, that you can read tomorrow's news today.'

He stopped beside his desk, leaned over, and ripped the telephone cord out of the wall.

He resumed his slow advance across the room toward the two women huddled together.

Reaching them, his smile was almost benign. He raised one hand, and almost delicately removed the pages from Victoria's hold.

241.

'I came back for this,' he said. 'Foolish to have overlooked it in my haste to leave.' He folded the pages of the story with care and slipped them into his overcoat pocket. 'Now, if you'll excuse me - oh, yes, Hannah, the duplicate key, please -'

Dumbly, his wife handed the key to him. As he turned to go, she suddenly came to life, clutching at him with both hands. 'Edward, you can't!'

With a shrug, Armstead shook free of her. 'My dear,' he said, 'everyone has to die sometime, doesn't he? As for yourself and your friend, you won't have to wait past morning.'

He walked back through the room into the corridor. He turned, and gave a courteous nod.

The door closed. The dead bolt sounded. The study was sealed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Hannah awakened gradually, and when she was able to open her eyes, she was disoriented. It took seconds for her to realize that she was lying on the couch in her husband's study. The events of the evening, the night, the long hours of imprisonment, surfaced. She was too exhausted to be horrified.

She moved her head sideways and made out Victoria standing beside her, staring down at her.

'I - I must have fallen asleep,' said Hannah. 'Did you sleep at all?'

'Briefly,' said Victoria, 'in an armchair.'

Hannah stared at the ceiling. 'I think you had better tell me again what it was,' she said. 'The story he wrote. The story he is running today. I barely had a glimpse of it. I missed most of the details.

The - the President's plane -'

'Air Force One will be hit in midair over the Atlantic by another plane,' said Victoria, her voice hollow. 'The collision will make Air Force One explode. There will be no survivors. President Callaway will die. His press secretary, Hugh Weston, will die. The newspaper correspondent Nick Ramsey will die. More than one hundred occupants of the President's plane will die.'

'Edward wrote that.'

'As if it had already happened. It will happen in little more than an hour.'

'At what time?' asked Hannah.

'The story announced that it had happened at 9:32 this morning.'

'What time is it now, Victoria?'

Victoria glanced at the clock on the desk. 'It's 8:08 in the morning right now.'

Hannah shuddered. 'How? How will he do it?'

'His story didn't dare tell too much. His lead, of course, was that President Callaway had been deliberately killed in a midair crash. Details were not known, but there was word from Havana TV that a Cuban Air Force M1G-27F, an imported Soviet plane, had been stolen by one of Castro's more violent anti-American factions from a military base near Cienfuegos. The pilot may have been a deranged ex-kamikaze officer who had written a threatening letter a week before, a crank letter not taken seriously. He had been a.s.signed to kill President Roosevelt in 1945, had failed, and to restore his honor had determined to kill another United States President. With the help of Cuban reactionaries, this j.a.panese had made off with the 242 MiG Foxbat fighter, obtained and charted Air Force One's flight course from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to London, and plunged the stolen craft into the President's plane 120 miles off the Atlantic coast, some forty minutes after it took off. Then there followed a fuller recounting of those who were believed to have perished - the President and everyone else aboard. That was all I had time to read.'

Hannah was sitting up. 'It's unimaginable. Edward must have hired the best professional terrorists in the world to attempt this.' Her head bowed in grief. 'We were right, Victoria. My husband's gone insane.'

'But logical enough to have arranged this,' said Victoria.

'He's utterly insane,' Hannah said again.

Victoria began to pace wearily. 'What do you think will happen to us? What will he do?'

'He made that clear, Victoria. By morning - any time now -he will send someone - probably two of them - to unlock the door and take us away somewhere and kill us the way poor Kim was killed.'

'But he could have killed us himself last night,' Victoria said.

Hannah was shaking her head. 'No, Edward's too smart for that. Kill us, and be left with the bodies?