The Plot Read online

  THE PLOT

  Irving Wallace

  First published by

  Simon & Schuster

  May 22, 1967

  HERE’S WHAT THE PROMINENT CRITICS HAD TO SAY ABOUT THIS HUGELY EXCITING INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER—

  “Wallace spells suspense, sex and a best seller…he’s hard to beat as a storyteller….”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “If you want to indulge yourself in a cliffhanger, get a copy…a sizzler that mounts in suspense until the explosion of the climax.”

  —Milwaukee Journal

  “Big is the word…big in characters, big in story…remarkably ingenuous….”

  —The Detroit News

  “Irving Wallace just might be the best storytelling novelist around right now….”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “THE PLOT delivers exactly what it promises—a many-keyed story, tautly assembled, attractively populated, occasionally sexy….”

  —Chicago’s American

  “Nothing short of a paper famine will stop The Plot from selling….”

  —Chicago Tribune

  If you were in a position of authority and these five came to you at the Summit Conference in Paris with the details of THE PLOT, would you believe any one of them?

  MATT BRENNAN—once a trusted member of the State Department until his life was shattered by accusations of treason…

  MEDORA HART—young, ravishing, beautiful, whose involvement in a Profumo-like scandal had all but toppled an English government…

  JAY THOMAS DOYLE—once a renowned and respected columnist, now struggling desperately to recapture his lost fame by a most dangerous exposé…

  HAZEL SMITH—an embittered American foreign correspondent and the mistress of a man high in the inner circles of the Kremlin…

  EMMETT A. EARNSHAW—an ex-President of the United States, fighting an all but hopeless battle against a ruthless German munitions tycoon to retain an honorable place in history…

  Books by Irving Wallace

  Fiction

  The Chapman Report

  The Man

  The Plot

  The Prize

  The Seven Minutes

  The Sins of Philip Fleming

  The Three Sirens

  Nonfiction

  The Fabulous Originals

  The Fabulous Showman

  The Nympho and Other Maniacs

  The Square Pegs

  The Sunday Gentleman

  The Twenty-Seventh Wife

  The Writing of One Novel

  To

  Three Loves plus One

  Sylvia

  David

  Amy

  &

  Paris

  ‘Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.

  —SHAKESPEARE, 1608

  Be patient, my soul: thou hath suffered worse than this.

  —HOMER, c.800 B.C.

  I

  HE STARED AHEAD, waiting.

  They were late.

  He was tempted to divert his gaze from Houston Street to the grassy knoll sloping from the railroad bridge on his right, to see if the other one waited, too. But he knew that he did not dare the distraction.

  Kneeling at the sixth-floor corner window, safely shielded from the doorway behind him by the semicircle of piled cardboard cartons stamped books, facing the lower portion of the window that had been raised halfway, he rested his gloved left hand on his thigh and his naked right hand on the wooden stock of the bolt-action rifle that leaned against the three stacked cartons beside him.

  He concentrated on the ribbon of thoroughfare below. They were almost five minutes late now. Nerveless, unmoved, unmoving, he continued to wait.

  And then in the near distance, he saw them. The procession of the motorcade came into view as it turned off Main Street onto Houston. Silently, he counted. First, the motorcycles. Second, the pilot car. Third, another phalanx of motorcycles. Fourth, the lead car. Fifth, the 1961 Lincoln limousine, the open limousine minus the plastic bubbletop, with its four occupants in the rear barely distinguishable.

  His eyes narrowed and held on the Lincoln limousine alone as it moved slowly north on Houston Street toward the Texas School Book Depository and eventually, the Triple Underpass.

  Watching, he saw the limousine, its chrome gleaming in the sun, reach the intersection of Houston Street and Elm Street, and then begin its slow turn into Elm, which curved southwest at a slight downgrade past him toward the Triple Underpass and the Freeway.

  His eyes caught the dial of the large steel wristwatch above his gloved hand. The time was 12:30.

  Unhurriedly, using both hands, he picked up the 7.65 bolt-action Mauser, adjusted the cheap wooden stock against his shoulder, rested the barrel firmly upon the uppermost tilted carton, poked the rifle through the bottom half of the window, and braced a knee beneath the sixth-story window ledge.

  Calmly, he placed his right eye behind the four-power telescopic sight attached to the barrel.

  At once, the radiator of the Lincoln limousine spread wide and clear to his aiming eye. Shifting his rifle slightly upward and to the left, he caught and focused upon the occupants of the open rear of the car, their heads and shoulders appearing almost life-size in his magnifier. Gently, he shifted the rifle scope again, so that the intersection of the cross hairs in the glass fastened upon the brown-haired young head, tracked that head in the circle, and then he knew that he had it.

  Unexpectedly, the head was gone, blocked out by the heavy foliage of an oak tree. Then for a fleeting moment the head was visible through the leaves and branches. For an instant, it was hidden a second time, and suddenly, the limousine emerged into the clear, and the head, caught again in his scope, was unobstructed.

  His forefinger tugged at the trigger.

  There was a loud clap in his ear.

  As he threw the bolt open to eject the empty cartridge case, he heard the second shot, and he knew it was not an echo.

  Pigeons, in a frightened flurry, were noisily flapping off their perches and taking wing above him. Undistracted, his eye stayed at the telescopic sight, where the brown-haired head remained frozen in his scope, but now a hand had gone to the throat.

  He pulled the trigger again. There was the clap in his ear once more, followed by a distant fourth explosion, no echo of his own shot. With a reflex motion, he threw the bolt, reloading the chamber.

  Relentlessly, his glass-reinforced eye followed the receding target. The head, its skull partially torn away, began to lurch forward and then to the left. Hastily, he pulled the trigger one last time, but this shot, he knew, had missed, for the head had left the view of his magnifying scope too soon.

  Coolly, he drew the rifle back into the room. He glanced at the bridge above the underpass, where at least a dozen terrified people were milling, scattering, and then his gaze went to the grassy knoll where more frightened people seemed to be scrambling away.

  He rose slowly and backed against his fortress of cartons. Carefully, yet swiftly, efficiently, he found his handkerchief. Then holding the Mauser in his gloved hand, he wiped down the barrel, the knob of the bolt, the trigger and its housing, the wooden stock. Forcing his handkerchief into a suit-coat pocket, still holding the rifle in his gloved hand, he dusted his trouser knee with his bare hand and smoothed his wrinkled suit.

  Quickly, now, he left the carton barricade and crossed the storage room. If there had been no mistake or miscalculation, the sixth-floor corridor would be empty. The warehouseman, the shipping wrapper, the clerk who filled orders, were all just below, on the fifth floor, eating lunch as they watched the motorcade. There would be only one person arriving on this floor shortly. That had been arranged.

  He hesitated at the door, peered at his wri
stwatch. One minute and thirty-five seconds had passed. There was still time enough.

  Confidently, he stepped into the corridor. As he had expected, it was empty.

  With caution, but without haste, he walked up the corridor, the rifle still gripped in his gloved left hand, held vertically close to his body. Near the landing of the sixth-floor staircase, there were rows of boxes. He went to them, lowered the Mauser between two of the rows, and, with his shoe, pushed the weapon out of view.

  Behind him, he heard the grinding of the east elevator, then the jolting sound of its stop. Falling back slightly, he looked down the corridor.

  The elevator door was opening. A slight figure, that of a young man holding a clipboard with attached invoices for book orders, appeared in the hall. He studied the man. There was no mistake. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  The moment Oswald disappeared into the room that he himself had just left, he would be free.

  After that, there would not be any time to lose. In those seconds, when Oswald saw the arrangement of the cartons at the window and the empty cartridge shells on the floor, and heard the chaos outside six floors beneath the open window, he would dimly comprehend, would realize his own position and how he had been used. Oswald would be out of that room fast.

  He watched Oswald start for the room. He watched until Oswald disappeared inside it.

  Then, instantly, he abandoned his position next to the cartons in the corridor and rushed to the west freight elevator, pushed the wall button, waited for the car, and entered it. He took it down to the fifth floor and left it. Going rapidly, he headed for the staircase and speedily, he descended to the fourth floor. There, on the landing, he halted. He could hear footsteps of persons scrambling up toward him. Casting about for the vestibule, he found it and quickly ducked inside. Seconds later, he caught a glimpse of two breathless men, one in the uniform of the Dallas police, the other in ordinary dress, hurrying past to continue their climb. The moment that they were out of sight, he left the vestibule and resumed his steady descent to the first floor.

  Arriving on the ground floor below, he consulted his watch one last time. Three minutes and ten seconds had passed. There would be activity at the front entrance of the building. But the rear would yet be unobserved and unguarded.

  He went out the rear exit. There was no one to stop him.

  What had been plotted in Vienna, thirty months before this month and this day, had finally been successfully achieved in the faraway alien place called Dallas. The deed was done. Already it was history. The future would be better for it. And best of all, the logical killer would be found, would be convicted, and so the case would be closed forever. All of them were beyond suspicion, and all of them were safe…

  Or so the assassins of an American President reasoned on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, and in the months and years to follow.

  But they were wrong.

  For I am here to write that “he” is known and “they” are known, that their evil international conspiracy and horrendous political crime are known, fully known, to this reporter, after years of relentless sleuthing and research.

  Like Zola’s J’accuse against the conspirators who used the innocent Captain Dreyfus to protect the true author of the bordereau, and the true betrayers of France, this documented brief is my accusation against, and exposé of, the conspirators who used the innocent Oswald to mask their roles in the most infamous assassination of the twentieth century.

  Before the bar of history, Truth, like murder, Will Out. And so, the world shall hear the Truth, at last.

  And so, the world shall hear the Truth, at last.

  Jay Thomas Doyle’s puffy hands remained at rest on the keyboard of his Swiss portable typewriter, as he contemplated the last sentence he had written.

  It was powerful enough to cap the opening section of his book, a provocative sentence that would surely bring a million readers excitedly into the heart of his sensational story. Yet, perhaps, as things stood, it promised too much. Considering the one piece of evidence that he still lacked, the categorical and authoritative ring of that sentence might invite a subsequent letdown and a reaction of antagonism from his book’s next reader—and that might be fatal.

  Thoughtfully, Jay Thomas Doyle weighed the possibility of modifying the last sentence, in fact, the last paragraphs, and instinctively, he knew that what he had just finished typing must stand as it had been written.

  The approval of the next reader of his manuscript, perhaps his last reader for better or for worse, was too crucial to Doyle’s life and future to risk losing because of equivocation and moderation in his narrative. Better, by far, to chance promising everything and deliver only half, than to promise half and default entirely. His next reader had been lured here to Vienna by great expectations. Any other bait would have failed to catch him.

  In less than two hours, this next reader, Sydney Ormsby, head of Ormsby Books, a subsidiary of Ormsby Press Enterprises, Ltd., of London, would be sitting across from him at dinner, reading the pages he had written and rewritten, and now rewritten at least a tenth time, during these years. There had been too many rejections and failures before. This was the last Main Chance. The very fact that instead of going directly to Paris Sydney Ormsby had come to Vienna first, merely to read Doyle’s chapter and his detailed outline, meant that the publisher’s interest was keen. There must be no disappointing him. At the moment that he picked up the first page, he must become engrossed.

  As to the ending of the exposé, if it did not live up to its beginning, no matter. Ormsby would have been gripped through it until then, and there would be time enough to discuss what yet was possible. He might regale Ormsby with an old Edgar Wallace anecdote. Wallace had published a serial, and at the end of the exciting opening installment, the hero had been trapped in a deep well, snared, lost, with no possibility of escape, and hundreds of thousands of British readers had held their collective breath for the opening of the second installment and the solution. When the second installment had appeared, it began, blithely, “Once out of the well …”

  Yes, Doyle decided, he would let stand what he had written, unaltered by timidity or conservatism.

  He yanked the page out of the typewriter, slipped it behind the other four pages he had just rewritten and retyped, and clipped them to the thirty-page outline of the remainder of the book. Pushing his huge bulk, imprisoned in the modernistic chair, away from the table that held his portable typewriter, Doyle clumsily backed into the footboard of his bed, and there was a clatter of dishes from the tray on the bed behind him.

  With a shoatish grunt, Doyle turned his chair to examine with relief and affection the abundant tray of tantalizing food that Room Service had delivered from the kitchen a half hour ago, and that he had neglected in his absorption with work. It was this, the products of the Hotel Imperial’s kitchen, this and the fact that the management remembered his days of glory with the same awed respect that they still conferred upon the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, that brought Doyle back to the Imperial on each visit to Vienna and overcame his aversion to the hostel’s disquietingly contemporary rooms.

  His single and bath, like most of the other 154 rooms, contradicted the traditional ambience of the old Austrian city and the needs of his own person. The furniture, functional and reminiscent of Swedish modern, like the colors and lighting, was too bright, too jarring, and the lines of the chairs, divan, tables were too geometrical, too angular, for one of his soft, fleshy rotundity. Friends, the few that were left, described him (as they had described an eminent journalist predecessor) as one who dressed like, and resembled, an unmade bed.

  Except when shaving—an act that seemed as time-consuming as trying to mow an African veldt—Doyle avoided mirrors. He was tired of their rebuke, tired of the infinite recession of hairline moving up toward the sparse thin hair struggling to survive on top of his cranial desert, tired of the oxlike eyes and rubicund bulbous nose wedged between bulging cheeks, tired of the contou
r of two chins that now had a chin of their own, tired of his hamlike arms and the protuberant belly that hung over his belt. At forty-five, and at this morning’s reckoning 240 pounds on the scale, he was the victim, he knew, of countless gastronomical orgies in countless temples of alimentary seduction like La Scala, The Four Seasons, Mirabelle, Lapérouse, La Réserve, Tre Scalini.

  Not many years ago, in the time of his fame, in the time of those duchesses and actresses and Hazel, he had been stocky and attractive. But failure had brought him down to his avocation, gastronomy, and continuing failure had eventually reduced him from gourmet to glutton, and so he was no longer stocky and attractive. He was, no corroborating mirror needed, fat and repulsive. He was a man still, but doubled and redoubled. He envied those lost even to alcohol or lust. At least their weaknesses were serious. His weakness was low comedy. Yet, he was helpless, and if he disliked the rooms in the Hotel Imperial, he was in one of them without complaint because here was the incomparable kitchen, a kitchen which was not new Vienna but old Vienna, and which catered to a civilized people on the Danube who ate five meals a day, and which rendered him helpless.

  There was the waiting tray on his bed, meant for the day’s fourth repast, the Jause, the afternoon snack. Doyle’s porcine eyes caressed the platters. There was the heaping plate of Bauernschmaus, and next to the sausages, sauerkraut, dumplings, there was the still-warm coffee, and next to that the generous portion of Guglhupf mit Schlag, the treasure of rich pound cake buried under a mountain of whipped cream.

  Accompanying his action with an asthmatic wheeze, Jay Thomas Doyle removed the typewriter from the table, and replaced it with the tray holding his Jause, and then he succumbed, each mouthful and swallow punctuated by a purr of ecstasy. As he ate, his tension abated, and he complacently examined the title page of his manuscript: The Conspirators Who Killed Kennedy… The Sensational Factually Documented Exposé by Jay Thomas Doyle. He began to turn the familiar pages and to proofread them. Once again, unfailingly, the manuscript renewed his spirits, just as, when he had been a youngster and impatient with school in November, he had been renewed by the knowledge that there would always be Christmas in December.