(1976) The R Document by Irving Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

that I was present to administer the Sacraments of Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick, and Viaticum if he so wished. He requested that I give him these sacraments, and I was able to do so in time for him to be reconciled with God Almighty as a good Catholic. Almost immediately after, he closed his eyes forever.’
    Collins was determined to cut through all this spiritual talk. ‘Father, are you saying he made a deathbed confession?’
    ‘Yes, I heard his final confession.’
    ‘Well, was there anything in this confession that could give me a clue - a clue to what he was trying to tell me that was so urgent?’
    Father Dubinski pursed his lips. ‘Mr Collins,’ he replied gently, ‘confession is a confidential matter.’
    ‘But if he told you something he wanted me to know - ?’
    ‘I cannot permit myself to determine what might be for you and what was meant for the Lord. I repeat, Colonel Baxter’s confession must remain confidential. I can reveal no part of it. Now I’d better return to Mrs Baxter.’ He paused. ‘Again, I’m sorry, Mr Collins.’
    The priest started for the adjoining room, and Collins walked slowly out into the corridor.
    Minutes later, he had left the hospital, and settled into the back seat of the limousine beside an anxious Karen. He ordered the driver to take them home to McLean.
    As the car began to move, he turned his head to Karen.
    ‘I was too late. He was dead when I arrived.’
    ‘That’s terrible. Do you - Did you find out what he wanted to tell you?’
    ‘No, I haven’t the faintest idea.’ He slumped deeper into the seat, worried and wondering. ‘But I intend to find
    out - somehow. Why would he waste his last words on me? I wasn’t even a close friend.’
    ‘But you are the Attorney General. You succeeded him as Attorney General.’
    ‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Collins said, half to himself. ‘It must have had something to do with that. With my job. Or with the country’s affairs. One or the other. Something that might be important to all of us. He said it was important when he sent for me. I can’t let this remain unresolved. I don’t know how yet, but I’ve got to learn what he wanted to tell me.’
    He felt Karen’s hand tighten on his arm. ‘Don’t, Chris, don’t get involved further. I can’t explain it. But it scares me. I don’t like living scared.’
    He stared out the window into the night. ‘And I don’t like living with mysteries,’ he said.
    They buried Colonel Noah Baxter, former Attorney General of the United States, on a wet May morning in one of the few available plots left in the 420-acre Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. Relatives, friends, members of the Cabinet, President Wadsworth himself, were at the graveside as Father Dubinski intoned the final prayer.
    It was over now, and the living, filled with sadness and relief, wended their way back to the business of life.
    Director Vernon T. Tynan, his shorter sinewy assistant, Associate Deputy Director Harry Adcock, and Attorney General Christopher Collins, who had come to the rites together, were now leaving together. They walked silently in step down Sheridan Avenue, past the gravestones of Pierre Charles L’Enfant and General Philip H. Sheridan, past the eternal flame burning low over the grave of President John F. Kennedy, going steadily toward Tynan’s official bulletproof limousine.
    The silence was broken only once, by Tynan, as they moved past a cluster of Civil War headstones. ‘See those Union and Confederate headstones?’ said Tynan, pointing. ‘Know how you can tell the Union ones from the Confederate ones? The Union dead have headstones with rounded tops. The Confederate dead have headstones with pointed tops - pointed, they said, “To keep those goddam
    Yankees from sitting on them.” Know who told me that? Noah Baxter. Old Noah told me that one day when we were walking like this away from some three-star general’s funeral.’