"It's too late for that now," said Holliday, seated behind the wheel. "We're the patsies for whatever they have in mind."
"Which is?" Peggy asked.
"I don't have the faintest idea," said Holliday. "I don't even really know who 'they' are. The Vatican? The CIA? Rex Deus and that bitch Sinclair?"
"Maybe all three," said Peggy. "The Pope gets assassinated because he's some kind of threat to Brennan and his organization, this rogue element in the CIA is trying to alter the balance of power by getting rid of an administration that's been trying to marginalize it, and Kate Sinclair gets a shot at putting her son into the White House, or near it."
"Sounds a little complicated. Don't you think?" Holliday asked.
"Conspiracies usually are," answered Peggy. Holliday laughed. He swung the rental down the ramp at the first Geneva exit off the auto route.
"Conspiracies usually don't exist at all," he said. "They're just a lot of Internet fantasies."
"Tell that to Julius Caesar, or what's-his-name, the guy with the eye patch like yours, the Nazi Tom Cruise played. He and his buddies tried to blow up Hitler."
"Von Stauffenberg," said Holliday.
"A conspiracy only exists when it's discovered. If it succeeds no one knows it was ever there."
"Who knows?" Holliday shrugged. "Maybe you're right."
"And maybe Tritt left something behind to give us some clue."
Brennan had run Tritt's Geneva phone number and the plates on Tritt's vehicle several days before the rocket attempt on the president, and discovered that the car was registered to a man named Emil Langarotti. Langarotti's address was given as 1 Rue Henri Frederich Amiel, Apartment 5B. Holliday and Peggy booked themselves back into a suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, slept until noon, then headed to Tritt's pied-a-terre.
The address turned out to be a five-story, peach-colored stucco building just off the Rue des Delices, half a mile or so from their hotel. It was a quiet neighborhood around the corner from a busy thoroughfare and seemed made up almost entirely of buildings like Tritt's, done in varying pastel shades of stucco.
There was a wide, arched front door, the glass protected by ornamental ironwork. Above the door there was a large, black ONE. From a quick study it looked as though there were six apartments on each floor. Presumably Tritt's apartment was on the top one. They pulled open the big door and stepped into the building's lobby. There was a concierge's cubicle on the right but it was empty. On the left was a brass-doored elevator with a little porthole window. Directly ahead was a narrow flight of winding stairs. They took the coffin-sized elevator that creaked and groaned its way to the top floor. The elevator door opened onto an X-shaped intersection of four short corridors, badly lit by old-fashioned wall sconces. The floors were covered in green institutional carpeting that was stained and worn.
Tritt's apartment was at the end of the left-hand corridor. The door was brown-painted wood and the lock was a dead bolt.
"How are we supposed to get in?" said Peggy, a slightly sour tone in her voice. "You bring your handy-dandy lock picks with you, by any chance?"
"As a matter of fact I did," said Holliday. He reached under his jacket and pulled out the tire iron from the rental. The dead bolt was new, but the doorframe was as old as the building. He inserted the chisel end of the tire iron into the frame just above the lock and heaved. There was a sharp cracking sound as the frame around the lock set splintered. The door was open.
"You could patent that," whispered Peggy. "You could call it E-Z Key."
Holliday pushed open the door. The apartment was small, a one-bedroom. Two windows looked out onto Rue des Delices but the shutters on both were closed, letting in only slivers of daylight. The main room was anonymous, an Ikea ideal without a hint about the kind of person who lived there. Peggy crossed the old, dark hardwood floor and flipped open the louvers on the shutters. The room brightened. Couch, two bucket armchairs, all red Ikea, a glass-and-steel coffee table with a big glass ashtray. Beside it there was a remote control. A pole lamp in the corner and a small, high-intensity lamp on an end table to the right of the couch. Between the two windows was a modern desk made of some sort of maple veneer and the docking station for a laptop. A giant plasma TV had been installed above the old gas fireplace. To the left of the fireplace was an expensive, sleek Bang amp; Olufsen media center with a stereo and digital video recorder. Beneath the system was a large, fully filled cabinet of CDs and DVDs.
"Nothing here," said Holliday. He went down a short hall, heading for the bedroom. Peggy stayed in the main room and crouched down, investigating Tritt's taste in movies and music. Holliday returned a few minutes later, a sour expression on his face. "Not a thing," he said. "The man's a ghost. It's even more sterile than the place in Lyford Cay."
"Strauss, Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Susan Boyle." Peggy was still kneeling in front of the rack of CDs and DVDs.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's almost all classical except for the Susan Boyle."
"Who in hell is Susan Boyle?" Holliday asked.
"You're kidding, right?" Peggy stood up. She opened the plastic case and put in the Susan Boyle disc.
"Never heard of her," said Holliday.
"You've really got to get out more, Doc," Peggy said with a grin, shaking her head. She crossed the room to the coffee table, picked up the remote and pressed the power button. Nothing happened for a second and then the huge TV over the fireplace flickered into life. A grainy image appeared of a man standing in what appeared to be some sort of derelict summer camp, an AK-47 cradled in his arms. The image was saturated with color almost to the point of being garish, and Holliday instantly thought of old home movies shot on Super 8 film. An amateurish title appeared over the figure of the man with the classic Soviet assault rifle:
YOU AND MAINE'S RIGHT ARM
Below the title was a crude drawing of a screaming eagle clutching a bloodred swastika.
"What the fuck?" said Peggy.
"I'll tell you one thing: it sure as hell isn't Kansas anymore, Toto," answered Holliday.
21
The Maine's Right Arm Camp had formerly been known as Camp O-Pem-I-Gon, a two-hundred-acre tract on the shores of Lake Watson purchased by the Boy Scouts of America in 1922. That camp ceased operation during the 1960s for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that any twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy in 1965 wouldn't have been caught dead in a Boy Scout uniform.
In the early seventies a man named Reinhold Hodge tried to develop the entire lake as cottage lots. The Boy Scouts had chosen their wedge of property at the end of Eagle Road, the only property that wasn't swampy, mosquito infested or solid bedrock with no possibility of ever having anything except outdoor privies for sanitation. Hodge began by offering the lots at $2,500 apiece, went bankrupt by the time they were knocked down to $500 and left town when they hit $300 without a single lot sold.
In the end Wilmot DeJean purchased the entire lake, including the old Boy Scout camp, for $10,000 from the bankruptcy trustees in 1989, with the intention of changing the name of the property to the Light of the Lord Boys' Camp. As a result of the nebulous mental health problem that sent him into early retirement in 1991, the boys' camp idea was never brought to fruition.
By the mid-nineties DeJean finally found his niche. With the Russkies and the commies out of the picture, and the hippies all working on Wall Street or running health-food conglomerates and computer corporations, DeJean reinvented the old enemies that America needed so badly.