"There is great peril for Canada if the wrong people discover" Suddenly his face contorted and he pressed his head deep into the pillow and moaned.
Danielle was not strong enough to watch his suffering. The room began to spin. She put her hands to her face and stepped back.
"Max Roubaix." His breath was coming in short gasps. "Tell Henri to consult Max Roubaix."
Danielle could stand no more. She turned and fled into the corridor.
Dr. Ericsson was sitting at his desk studying Sarveux's charts when the head nurse entered the office. She set a cup of coffee and a plate of doughnuts beside him. "Ten minutes till show time, doctor."
Ericsson rubbed his eyes and glanced at his wristwatch. "I suppose the reporters are getting restless."
"More like murderous," the nurse replied. "They'd probably tear down the building if the kitchen didn't keep them fed." She paused to unzip a garment bag. "Your wife dropped off a clean suit and shirt. She insisted you look your best when you face the TV cameras to announce the Prime Minister's condition."
"Any change?"
"He's resting comfortably. Dr. Manson shot him with a narcotic right after Madame Sarveux left. A beautiful woman, but no stomach."
Ericsson picked up a doughnut and idly stared at it. "I must have been mad to allow the Prime Minister to talk me into administering a stimulant so soon after the operation."
"What do you suppose was in his mind?"
"I don't know." Ericsson stood up and removed his coat. "But whatever the reason, his delirious act was most convincing.
Danielle slipped out of the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and peered up at the resident mansion of Canada's leader. In her eyes the three-story stone exterior was cold and morbid, like a setting of an Emily BrontE novel. She passed through the long foyer with its high ceiling and traditional furnishings and climbed the wide circular staircase to her bedroom.
It was her haven, the only room in the house Charles had allowed her to redecorate. A shaft of light from the bathroom outlined a raised hump lying on the bed. She closed the door to the hall and leaned against it, a fear mingled with a warmth that suddenly ignited within her stomach. "You're crazy to come here," she murmured.
Teeth gleamed in a smile under the dim light. "I wonder how many other wives across the land are saying that very line to their lovers tonight."
"The Mounties guarding the residence."
"Loyal Frenchmen who have suddenly been struck blind and deaf."
"You must leave."
The hump unfolded into a shape of a nude man who stood up on the bed. He held out his hands. "Come to me, ma nymphe."
"No…... not here." The throaty tone in her voice gave away an awakening passion. "We have nothing to fear."
"Charles lives!" she suddenly cried out. "Don't you understand? Charles still lives!"
"I know," he said without emotion.
The bedsprings creaked as he stepped to the floor and padded across the carpet. He possessed a formidable body; the huge, swollen muscles, symmetrically formed layer by layer over years of disciplined exercise, rippled and strained beneath his skin. He reached up, ran a hand through his hair and removed it. The skull was shaven, as was every inch of his body. The legs, chest, and pubic area glistened bare and smooth. He took her head between iron hands and pressed her face against the pectoral muscles of his chest. She inhaled the fragrant musky scent from the light coating of body oil he always applied before they made love.
"Do not think of Charles," he commanded. "He no longer exists for you."
She could feel the bestial power oozing from his pores. Her head was swimming as a burning desire for this hairless animal consumed her. The heat between her legs flared and she went limp in his arms.
The sun seeped through the half-open drapes and crept over the two figures entwined on the bed. Danielle lay with her breasts enfolding the nude head, her black hair fanned on the pillow. She kissed the smooth pate several times and then released it.
"You must go now," she said.
He stretched an arm across her stomach and turned the bedside clock to the light. "Eight o'clock. Still too early. I'll leave around ten." Her eyes took on an apprehensive intensity. "Reporters are swarming everywhere. You should have left hours ago when it was dark."
He yawned and sat up. "Ten in the morning is a very respectable hour for an old family friend to be seen at the official residence. No one will notice my late departure. I'll be lost in the crowd of solicitous members of Parliament who are beating a path here this minute to offer their services to the Prime Minister's wife in her moment of anguish."
"You're a capricious bastard," she said, pulling the twisted bedclothes around her shoulders. "Warm and loving one moment, cold and calculating the next."
"How quickly women change their moods the morning after. I wonder if you would be half so shrewish if Charles had died in the crash?"
"The job was botched," she snapped angrily.
"Yes, the job was botched." He shrugged.
Her face took on a cold determined look. "Only when Charles lies in the grave will Quebec become an independent socialist nation."
"You want your husband dead for a cause?" he asked skeptically. "Has your love turned to such hatred that he has become nothing to you but a symbol to be eliminated?"
"We never knew love." She took a cigarette from a box on the nightstand and lit it. "From the beginning, Charles' only interest in me was a need for a political asset. My family's social standing provided him with entrde to society. I've supplied him with some sterling polish and style. But I've never been anything to Charles except a tool to enhance his public image."
"Why did you marry him?"
She drew on the cigarette. "He said he was going to be Prime Minister someday, and I believed him."
"And then?"
"Too late, I discovered Charles was incapable of affection. I once sought a passionate response. Now I cringe every time he touches me."
"I watched the news conference at the hospital on television. The doctor who was interviewed told how your anxiety and concern for Charles touched the hearts of the medical staff."
"Pure theatrics." She laughed. "I'm pretty good at it. But then I've had ten years of rehearsal."
"Did Charles have anything interesting to say during your visit?"
"Nothing that made any sense. They had just wheeled him out of the surgical recovery room. His mind was still numb from the anesthetic. He spoke mostly gibberish, raked up the past, a memory of an auto accident that killed his mother."
Danielle's lover slid out of bed and stepped into the bathroom. "At least he didn't babble away defense secrets."
She inhaled on the cigarette and let the smoke trickle from her nostrils. "Maybe he did."
"Go on," he said from the bathroom. "I can hear you."
"Charles instructed me to tell you to increase security at James Bay."
"Sheer nonsense." He laughed. "They have twice the amount of guards required to cover every square inch as it is."
"Not the whole project. Only the control booth."
He came to the doorway, wiping his bald head with a towel. "What control booth?"
"Above the generator chamber, I think he said."
He looked puzzled. "Did he elaborate?"
"Then Charles mumbled something about
. "
"Yes, discover what?"
She made a helpless gesture. "He broke off because of the pain."
"That was all?"
"No, he wanted you to consult with somebody called Max Roubaix."
"Max Roubaix?" he repeated, his expression skeptical. "Are you certain that was the name he used?"
She stared at the ceiling, thinking back, then she nodded. "Yes, I'm positive."
"How odd."
Without further elaboration he reentered the bathroom, stood in front of a large full-length mirror and struck a pose known in muscle control jargon as a vacuum. Exhaling and sucking in his rib section, he expanded his rib cage, straining until the network of blood vessels seemed to erupt beneath the skin's surface. Next he did a side chest shot, left hand on right wrist, arm against upper torso.
Henri Villon studied his reflection with critical concern. His physique was as ideal as physically possible. Then he stared at the chiseled features of the face, the Roman-style nose, the indifferent gray eyes. When he dropped all expression the features became hard, with a satanic twist to the mouth. It was as though a savage was lurking beneath the sculptured marble of a statue.
The wife and daughter of Henri Villon, his Liberal party colleagues and half the population of Canada would never in their wildest fantasies have believed he was leading a double life. A respected member of Parliament and minister of internal affairs in the open, he walked the shadows as the veiled head of the Free Quebec Society, the radical movement dedicated to the full independence of French Quebec.
Danielle came up behind him, a sheet wrapped around her, toga-fashion, and traced his biceps with her fingers. "Do you know him?"
He relaxed and took a deep breath, slowly exhaling. "Roubaix?"
She nodded.
"Only by reputation."
"Who is he?"
"Better to ask that question in the past tense," he said, taking the brown-haired wig with graying sides and neatly placing it on his scalp. "If my memory serves me, Max Roubaix was a mass murderer who swung from the gallows over a hundred years ago."
FEBRUARY 1989
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Heidi Milligan seemed out of place among the students grouped about the tables of the Princeton University archive reading room. The neatly tailored uniform of a navy lieutenant commander adorned a svelte body measuring six feet from manicured toenails to the roots of her naturally ash-blond hair.
To the young men in the room she was a welcome distraction from their studies. She knew instinctively that she was being stripped to her skin in their imaginations. But since she'd passed thirty, she'd become indifferent, though not too indifferent.
"Looks like you're on another allnighter Commander."
Heidi looked up into the ever-smiling face of Mildred Gardner, the matronly head archivist of the university. "Allnighter?"
"Late study. In my day we called it burning the midnight oil."
Heidi leaned back in her chair. "I've got to steal whatever time I can to work on my dissertation."
Mildred blew the bangs of her nineteen-fortyish pageboy hairstyle out of her eyes and sat down. "An attractive girl like you can't spend all your nights studying. You should find yourself a good man and live it up once in a while."
"First I'll get my doctorate in history, then I'll live it up."
"You can't get passionate with a piece of paper that says you're a Ph.D."
"Maybe the sound of Dr. Milligan turns me on," Heidi laughed. "If I'm to advance my career in the navy, I'll need the credentials."
"Sounds to me like you like to compete with the opposite sex."
"Sex has nothing to do with it. My first love is the navy. What's wrong with that?"
Mildred made a gesture of surrender. "No profit in arguing with a stubborn female, and hardheaded sailor to boot." She rose and looked down at the documents scattered on the table. "Anything I can pull from the shelves for you?"
"I'm researching Woodrow Wilson papers that deal with the navy during his administration."
"How horribly dull. Why that subject?"
"I guess you might say I'm intrigued by covering an untapped sideline of history."
"You mean subject matter no male has had the foresight to research before."
"You said it, not me."
"I don't envy the guy who marries you," said Mildred. "He'd come home from work and have to arm-wrestle. The loser cooking dinner and doing the dishes."
"I was married. Six years. To a colonel in the Marine Corps. I still carry the scars."
"Physical or mental?"
"Both."
Mildred dropped the subject and picked up the fiberboard case that housed the documents, and checked the file number. "You're in the ball park. This file contains the bulk of Wilson's naval correspondence."
"I've pretty much exhausted them," said Heidi. "Can you think of any avenue I might have missed?"
Mildred stared into space a moment. "A slim possibility. Give me ten minutes."
She returned in five, carrying another document case. "Unpublished material that hasn't been Cataloged yet," she said with a pontifical grin. "Might be worth a look."
Heidi scrutinized the yellowed letters. Most were in the President's own hand. Advice to his three daughters, explanations of his stand against Tammany Hall to William Jennings Bryan during the Democratic convention of 1912, personal messages to Ellen Louise Axson, his first wife, and Edith Boning Gait, his second.
Fifteen minutes before closing time Heidi unfolded a letter addressed to Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister of Britain. The paper appeared creased in irregular lines as though it had once been wadded up. The date was June 4, 1914, but there was no mark of acknowledgment, which suggested that the letter had never been sent. She began to read the neatly styled script.
Dear Herbert,
With the formally signed copies of our treaty seemingly lost and the heated criticism you are receiving from members of your cabinet, perhaps our bargain was never meant to be. And since formal transfer did not transpire, I have given my secretary instructions to destroy all mention of our pact. This uncustomary step is, I feel, somewhat reluctantly, warranted as my countrymen are a possessive lot and would never idly stand by knowing with certainty that
A crease ran through the next line, obliterating the writing. The letter continued with a new paragraph.
At the request of Sir Edward, and with the concurrence of Bryan, I have recorded the funds deposited to your government from our treasury as a loan.
Your friend,
WOODROW WILSON
Heidi was about to set the letter aside because there was no reference to naval involvement when curiosity pulled her eyes back to the words "destroy all mention of our pact."
She hung on them for nearly a minute. After two years of in-depth study, she felt she had come to know Woodrow Wilson almost as well as a favorite uncle, and she'd discovered nothing in the former President's makeup to suggest a Watergate mentality during his years in public office.
The ten- minute warning sounded for the closing of the archives. She quickly transcribed the letter on a yellow legal pad. Then she checked in both file cases at the front desk. "Run on to anything useful?" asked Mildred. "A trail of smoke I didn't expect," replied Heidi vaguely. "Where do you go from here?"