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If there's a leak it will come from the presidential staff."
Fawcett smiled faintly. He knew he was on shaky footing. The looseness of the White House staff was open territory for the press corps. "They can't spill what they didn't know," he said. "Only now will they be waking up to the fact that the man in the helicopter with them isn't the President."
"They'll be well guarded at the farm," Lucas said. "Once they arrive no one gets off the property, and I've seen to it all communications are monitored."
"If a correspondent figures the game, Watergate will seem as tame as an Easter-egg hunt."
"How are the wives taking it?"
"Cooperating a hundred percent," Fawcett answered. "The First Lady and Mrs. Margolin have volunteered to stay shut up in their bedrooms claiming to have a virus."
"What now?" Lucas asked. "What else can we do?"
"We wait," Fawcett replied, his voice wooden. "We stick it out until we find the President."
"Looks to me like you're overloading the circuits," said Don Miller, Emmett's deputy director of the FBI.
Emmett didn't look up at Miller's negative remark. Within minutes after he had returned to the Bureau's headquarters at Pennsylvania Avenue and Tenth Street he set into motion an All Bureaus Alert, followed by a standby for Emergency Action of the Highest Priority to every office in the fifty states and all agents on assignments overseas. Next came orders to pull files, records and descriptions on every criminal or terrorist who specialized in abduction.
His-cover story to the Bureau's six thousand agents was that the Secret Service had come on evidence of a planned abduction attempt on Secretary of State Oates and other as yet unnamed officials of high government levels.
"It may be a heavy conspiracy," Emmett said finally, his tone vague. "We can't take the chance the Secret Service is wrong."
"They've been wrong before," Miller said.
"Not on this one."
Miller gave Emmett a curious look. "You've given out damned little information to work with. Why the great secrecy?"
Emmett didn't answer, so Miller dropped the subject. He passed three file folders across the desk. "Here's the latest data on kidnapping operations, the Mexican Zapata Brigade's hostage activities, and one I'm in the dark about."
Ennnett gave him a cold stare. "Can you be more explicit?"
"i doubt if there's a connection, but since they acted strange-"
"Who are you talking about?" Emmett demanded, picking up the file and opening th
e cover.
"A Soviet representative to the United Nations, name of Aleksei Lugovoy-"
"A prominent psychologist," Emmett noted as he read.
"Yes, he and several of his staff members on the World Health Assembly have gone missing."
Emmett looked up. "We've lost them?"
Miller nodded. "Our United Nations surveillance agents report that the Russians left the building Frinay night-"
"This is only Saturday morning," Emmett interrupted. "You're talking a few hours ago. What's so suspicious about that?"
"They went to great lengths to shake our shadows. The special agent in charge of the New York bureau checked it out and discovered none of the Russians returned to their apartments or hotels.
Collectively they dropped from sight."
"Anything on Lugovoy?"
"All indications are he's straight. He appears to steer clear of the Soviet mission's KGB agents."
