The Lincoln Myth (Cotton Malone 9)

He glanced up. Hate filled the eyes that stared back. But the Spaniard was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

“I saw the body,” he said, his voice low and soft.

Salazar said nothing.

“He was an American agent. With a wife and kids.”

He threw a final glance at Cassiopeia. Her features had gained a brittle look. Her eyes said, Go.

He slid back the chair and stood. “I took down two of your men and Barry Kirk. Now I’m coming for you.”

Salazar stared back, still saying nothing. Something he learned long ago came to mind. Stir a person up and they could be made to think. Add in anger and they’ll screw up, sure as hell.

He pointed his finger. “You’re mine.”

Then he stepped for the exit.

“Mr. Malone.”

He stopped and turned.

“You owe this lady an apology for your insults.”

He threw them both a look of contempt, then focused on Cassiopeia. “I’m sorry.”

He hesitated.

“If I offended you.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

WASHINGTON, D.C.

STEPHANIE FELT AWKWARD BEING ALONE WITH DANNY DANIELS. They’d neither seen nor spoken to each other in several months.

“How is the First Lady?” she asked.

“Anxious to leave the White House. As am I. Politics ain’t what it used to be. Time for a new life.”

The Twenty-Second Amendment allowed a person to serve only two terms. Nearly every president had wanted a second term, despite the fact that history clearly taught the last four years would be nothing like the first. Either the president became overly aggressive, knowing he had nothing to lose, which alienated both supporters and detractors. Or he became cautious, placid, and docile, not wanting to do anything that might affect his legacy. Either way, nothing could be accomplished. Bucking the trend, Daniels’ second term had been active, dealing with some explosive issues, many of which she and the Magellan Billet had been involved with solving.

“This table,” Daniels said. “It’s really beautiful. I asked. It’s on loan from the State Department. These chairs were made for the Quayles, during the first Bush’s term.”

She could see he was unusually nervous, his booming baritone voice down many decibels, his look distracted.

“I had breakfast prepared. Are you hungry?”

Arranged on the table before them was a place setting each of white Lenox china adorned with the vice president’s seal. Tulip-shaped stemware stood empty, sparkling in bright morning sun that rained through the windows.

“Chitchat is not your specialty,” she said.

He chuckled. “No, it’s not.”

“I’d like to know what this is about.”

She’d already noticed the file on the table.

Daniels opened the folder and lifted out one sheet, which he handed to her. It was a photocopy of a handwritten letter, the script distinctly feminine, the words difficult to read.

“That was sent to president Ulysses S. Grant on August 9, 1876.”

The signature she could read.

Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.

“Mary Todd was a funny bird,” Daniels said. “Lived a tough life. Lost three sons and a husband. Then she had to fight Congress to award her a pension. It was an uphill battle since, while in the White House, she managed to alienate most of them. Just to shut her up, they finally gave her the money.”

“She was no different than any of the hundreds of thousands of other veterans’ widows who were granted a pension. She deserved it.”

“Not true. She was different. She was Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and, by the time Grant was elected president, no one wanted to hear Lincoln’s name. We worship him today like a god. But in the decades after the Civil War, Lincoln was not the legend he ultimately became. He was hated. Reviled.”

“Did they know something we don’t?”

He handed her another sheet, typewritten.

“It’s the text from the copy you’re holding. Read it.”

I have led a life of most rigid seclusion since I left Washington. If my darling husband had lived out his four years, we would have passed our remaining years in a home we both should have enjoyed. How dearly I loved the Soldier’s Home where we spent so much time while in Washington, and I loathe that I should be so far removed from it, broken hearted, praying death to remove me from a life so full of agony. Each morning, on awakening from my troubled slumbers, the utter responsibility of living another day so wretched appears to me as an impossibility. Without my beloved, life is only a heavy burden and the thought that I should soon be removed from this world is a supreme happiness to me. I wonder each day if I should ever regain my health and my strength of mind. Before they leave me entirely, there is a matter of which you must know. With all of the bereavement I have endured my mind had purged the thought, yet it reoccurred the other night as I lay waiting for sleep. Two years into his first term my beloved was given a message from his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan, one that had been passed from leader to leader since the days of Mr. Washington. Those words greatly upset my beloved. He told me that he wished the message had never been delivered. Three more times we discussed the matter and on each occasion he repeated his lament. His anguish during the war was deep and profound. I always thought it a consequence of being the commander in chief, but once he told me that it was because of the message. In the days before he was murdered, when the war was won and the fight over, my beloved said that those disturbing words still existed. He’d first thought to destroy them but had instead sent them west to the Mormons, part of a bargain made with their leader. The Mormons kept their end, as had he, so it was time to retrieve what he had sent them. What to do with it then he did not know. But my beloved never lived to make that decision and nothing was ever retrieved. I thought you might want to know this. Do with the knowledge as you please. None of this matters to me any longer.

She glanced up from the sheet.

“The Mormons still have that information,” Daniels said. “They’ve had it since 1863, when Lincoln made the deal with Brigham Young.”

“Edwin told me about that.”

“Pretty smart move, actually. Lincoln never enforced the anti-polygamy act against the Mormons, and Young kept the telegraph lines and the railroads heading west. He also never sent men to fight for the South.”

“This message passed between the early presidents. Is it real?”

“Apparently so. Something akin to it is mentioned in other classified documents. Ones only presidents can see. I read them seven years ago. The references are fleeting, but there. George Washington definitely passed something down that eventually made its way to Lincoln. Unfortunately, the sixteenth president was killed before he had a chance to pass it to the seventeenth. So it was forgotten. Except by Mary Todd.”

She sensed something else. “What aren’t you saying?”

He opened the file and handed her another sheet of more typed text.

“That’s a clean version of a note included in the classified papers. It’s from James Madison, written at the end of his second term in 1817. Presumably for his successor, James Monroe.”

As to the message sent forward by our first president, I, being the fourth man to hold this honored post do add this addendum, which should likewise be passed forward. Mr. Washington was present that Saturday evening of the great convention. He chaired the extraordinary session and has personal knowledge of all that transpired. Until assuming this office, I was unaware as to what, if anything, had occurred with the result of that gathering. I was pleased to discover that Mr. Washington had ensured that it be passed from president to president. Having never missed a day of the Constitutional Convention, nor at most a casual fraction of an hour in any day, I assumed a seat in front of the presiding member, with the other members on my right and left hands. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted what was read from the chair or sp

oken by the members. My notes of the great convention were motivated by an earnest desire for completeness and accuracy and, past my death, which hopefully will not occur for a number of years, they shall be published. But all later presidents must know that those notes are not complete. Hidden beneath my summer study is what is needed for a total understanding. If any subsequent holder of this office deems it prudent to act upon what Mr. Washington has allowed to survive, that bounty could prove most useful.

“We’ve had a lot of presidents,” she said, “since Madison. Don’t you think one of them went for a look?”

“This note was never attached to anything, nor passed on. It was apparently secreted away, then found a year ago in some of Madison’s private papers stored at the Library of Congress. No president, except me, has ever seen it. Luckily, the person who found it works for me.” He handed her another item from the file encased with a plastic sheet protector. “That’s Madison’s original note, as handwritten. Notice anything?”

She did. At the bottom.

Two letters.

IV.

“Roman numerals?” she asked.

He shrugged. “We don’t know.”

Daniels was clearly not his usual gregarious self. None of the brash stories or loud voice. Instead, he sat rigid in the chair, his face as stiff as a mask. Was he afraid? She never had seen this man flinch in the face of anything.

“James Buchanan is quoted, just prior to the Civil War, saying he might be the last president of the United States. I never understood what he truly meant by that comment, until recently.”

“Buchanan was wrong. The South lost the war.”

“That’s the problem, Stephanie. He may not have been wrong. But Lincoln came along and bluffed a pair of twos in a poker game where everyone else was holding a much better hand. And he won. Only to have his brains blown out at the end. I’m not going to be the last president of the United States.”

She had to learn more, so she tried a safer subject. “What did Madison mean by his summer study?”