Trail of the Twisted Cros by Buck Sanders Read Free Book Online Page B

minutes. The message
     and the treachery were unmistakable:
    Dear Dick,
    Surprise! We lied. It was 7 today! This is by no means all we have up our sleeves.

Chapter Five
    ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH II,
    Atlantic Ocean, 8 September
    Bejeweled and heavily powdered matrons alone and on the lookout for flashy young men they would prefer to think of as innocently
     attracted to older women, at least for the duration of the crossing, lined the upper deck. They were arranged in sweeping
     rows of
chaise longues
as if interested only in the strong sun and sea air, as if it were somehow necessary, in the privileged indolence that was
     their lot in life, to seek peace and quiet from imagined business.
    One deck below, the rope-enclosed volleyball court was an eye-catching swirl of harder and younger bodies leaping and stretching
     to keep up the game that would give one and all a social bond useful to some quieter evening activity, though no less strenuous.
     Watching this group, surreptitiously, was an embankment of potbellied, spindly-legged old men wrapped in terrycloth towelings,
     men who sadly imagined themselves in the place of their younger counterparts, frolicking in some distant past with delightful
     visions of leggy young women their various wives never were.
    Along the narrow promenade decks strolled middle-aged lovers—married, though not necessarily to one another—the occasional
     sharply uniformed officer wishing to be noticed by someone who could help him pass the time comfortably, and the rare child
     in parental tow.
    Practically no one was below at this mid-afternoon hour, not with the weather so fair and the romantic images so plentiful.
     The exception was a bearded man who hadn’t yet ventured out of his stateroom.
    He stood at a wash basin, dressed only in his trousers. His shirt lay on the floor, and his Burberry raincoat was left atop
     his unopened luggage.
    He had only a small grip open, and a toilet kit, from which he had removed a pair of scissors and shaving gear.
    Carefully, he snipped away the bulk of his salt-and-pepper beard, collecting the whiskery refuse in the basin. He was meticulous
     about washing the hairs down the drain, and out, eventually, to sea.
    When he had completed the first stage, he lathered his face and set to work with a safety razor. It felt good to be clean-shaven
     again. He ran his fingers across his newly bare cheeks, and marveled at how much younger he could look this way. He sprinkled
     a few drops of Yardley cologne into the palms of his hands and rubbed the cooling solution into the skin of his face and neck,
     enjoying the fresh bite of alcohol and the musk scent.
    When he was finished, he removed the dark brown-tinted contact lenses he had worn on checking in. His natural eye color was
     a pale blue, which he framed with clear steel-framed aviator glasses.
    NEW YORK CITY
    The dark green Ford stationwagon slipped into a spot at the curb in front of number 142 East 65th Street. It was expected.
    Two men in conservative business suits emerged from the step-down street door of the townhouse and checked the credentials
     of three other men who remained inside the station wagon. Then all five men began unloading the cargo brought to “The Residence,”
     as the town-house was called by the Secret Service. A collection of bulky steel cases that might have contained musicians’
     gear, by their appearance, were shuttled from the car to the ground floor security station—a small vestibule and a larger
     sitting room leading to a second large room toward the rear of the house.
    By this time, East 65th Street was in its customary form, a sedately bustling Upper East Side row of townhouses owned by Dick
     and Pat Nixon; David Rockefeller, the retired banker and international financier; Otto Preminger, the film director; and others
     of like wealth, but more private names. A Catholic girls’ school across the way from the Nixons emptied its doors of a few
     hundred