“If he wakes up and wants to talk to you, I’ll try you,” she said.
That wasn’t what he had meant and he was sure she knew. “Thank you,” he said.
FIFTY-ONE
3:10 A.M.
West Crosse pulled his
Range Rover into the driveway of the visitor’s entrance at the White House. He knew by the time he came to a stop at the door that his license plate had already been run against a database on the computer inside. A series of cameras equipped for night vision had captured his image and transmitted it to the security desk. At any point, sharpshooters could have blown out his tires or put a bullet in his head.
A guard armed with an IM approached his window.
He lowered it.
“May I help you, Mr. Crosse?”
“Yes, I have a trunk in the back full of samples of granite and wood for the museum. I need to bring it to the first lady’s office, as close to the new site as I can get it. Some of the pieces are very heavy.”
“You’re at work awfully early,” the guard said.
“Not for me. This is when I’m most productive. No interference.”
He smiled. “I’m with you on that.”
Crosse parked and stood outside the car as the security
guard ran a chemical probe over the Louis Vuitton steamer trunk, checking for explosives.
“Protocol,” the guard said. “You understand.”
“Of course,” Crosse said.
He finished checking. “All set.” He helped Crosse pull the trunk out of the car.
“I’ll be okay from here,” Crosse said.
“Very good.”
Crosse wheeled the trunk inside, down the regal corridors of power, to the first lady’s office. He pulled it to the curved wall of windows looking onto the site of the future Museum of Liberty, exactly where he had stood the first time he contemplated its design.
He fully expected the museum would still be built according to his plans. What he had done, after all, was no insult to freedom, but his greatest act in defense of it
He was unarmed. His clearance was so high that he probably could have carried a gun into the White House, but he knew he would not need one in order to sacrifice himself to his cause. He could not walk into the Buckley White House, do what he was about to do, and walk out again. He knew his client very well.
He took off his overcoat and boots, leaving him barefoot, in a new, clean white linen tunic. He knelt beside the steamer trunk, unlatched it and opened it.
He smiled.
Blaire Buckley lay wrapped in a sheet inside, the magnificent organs that had nearly birthed resistance to her father’s great leadership neatly dissected, every trace of Eden gone, as if it had never existed.
He reached down and picked her up in his arms,
closed the trunk, and lay her atop it. Then he knelt in front of her, and prayed to God, who had given his life and his death such glorious meaning:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven
.
He stood up and gazed out the windows.
He knew he would not need to wait long. Within ten minutes, security cameras would focus on him and on Blaire, and Secret Service agents would begin racing toward the room.
It took just over four minutes for them to arrive.
He heard footsteps and turned around to see two men in dark blue suits emerge from different doorways, pistols drawn. Three more followed them, carrying Uzis. He watched their magnificently trained eyes collecting data, saw their perfect detachment—even from this moment—in which the President’s daughter lay perfectly dissected before them.
For an instant, he thought he saw the president himself watching from a distance. But perhaps he just wished that it were so.
He moved his feet apart and raised his empty hands out to his sides, replicating precisely the stance of da Vinci’s divine human form. The Golden Section. And as the first bullet struck his chest, his heart swelled with pride that he had designed his last moments on the earth so flawlessly, that the architecture of his existence reflected the will of Almighty God and that eternal life would be his.
FIFTY-TWO
10:20 A.M.
Our great romances and
triumphs and conquests ultimately do nothing to bind us together, one to another. It is in defeat and tragedy that our souls show through, and we are known.
A person may tell you about a glorious achievement in business, about being promoted or being hired for a dream job, and be saying nothing at all about his core self. But have that person speak to the sinking feeling of once being laid off, the anxiety of scrounging for tuition money and coming up short, the terror of losing a business or a home, and you are on your way to having a real bond, a real friend.
A woman may speak glowingly about finishing a marathon, or building a dream home, or having a child admitted to college, and yet be telling you nothing. But have her tell you about her panic at getting older, about the slow erosion of her body, or the lingering grief of a miscarriage years ago, or her waning passion for the man she still loves, and you may realize that we are,
truly, more alike than different in our needs and fears—and much more alone than we need to be.
But perhaps nowhere can we see each other more clearly than in an intensive care unit, under the cold fluorescent lights, exhausted by our vigils, surrounded by tubing running into and out of our bodies and those of loved ones, listening to the constant beeping of cardiac monitors. Because in an intensive care unit, your job doesn’t matter, the new addition to your house doesn’t matter, your religion and political party and even sexual orientation are irrelevant. The things that define you and those who love you are simply whether you will live or not and whether you are suffering or not.
There are no strangers and no enemies in the ICU.
Clevenger walked into cubicle 8D and sat down next to Billy’s bed. He had been there for over six hours, walking in and out of the room, standing, sitting, watching.
North Anderson had come and gone three times, and would be back again. And again.
Just listen, and the ICU will even tell you whether a man is your friend.
Billy was still comatose, a tube down his throat to deliver oxygen, IVs running into each arm. A new tattoo of a crown was emblazoned across his chest.
Yet even Billy had something to say, and Clevenger heard it.
A tear ran down Clevenger’s face. He took Billy’s hand and leaned close to him. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he whispered in his ear. “I won’t leave you. I’ll never give up on you. We’ll make it through together, out of
here and wherever you need to go in life. Okay? We’ll just figure it out together.”
He sat up and looked at his son, and all at once he felt the incredible force the best part of Billy had had to fight against, those early and brittle chapters of abandonment and fear and loss. A violent father. No real mother. A nineteen-year-old Billy Bishop might be in the ICU, but a nine-year-old, already shattered Billy Bishop had taken the overdose that put him there.
Clevenger thought of a favorite passage of his, by author Robert Pirsig:
I don’t know what kind of future is coming up from behind.
But the pastf spread out before us,
dominates everything in sight
.
“Dr. Clevenger,” Jane Monroe said from behind him.
He turned around. “It’s Frank.”
“Frank,” she said, with a smile. “Someone’s here to see you. She’s in the family waiting area.”
He walked out to the waiting area.
Whitney McCormick was standing just outside, looking very pale and tired.
He walked up to her. “You didn’t need to ...”
She shook her head. “You were right,” she said. “You were right about Grosse.”
“What? Why do you say that?”
“He brought the body of the president’s daughter— the retarded one, Blaire—to the White House a little over six hours ago. Her abdomen...” She stopped herself.
“Their daughter?” More than ever, he understood. “My God. Is he in custody? Tell me he didn’t get away.”
She looked at him and said nothing.
What he heard in that silence made him slowly take a step back. He looked into McCormick’s eyes, through a tiny window onto her soul, and saw... nothing. He saw the same emptiness he had seen in Billy’s eyes on Suffolk Street and in West Crosse’s eyes at the Mayflower Hotel bar. “I don’t think I understand,” he said.
She spoke even more quietly. “You don’t kill the president’s daughter and get taken into custody—not
this
president.” She shrugged. “The official reports will say he had a gun and fired first.” She looked through him. “That’s between you, and me. Period. No North Anderson this time.”
Clevenger squinted at her. “You’re saying they killed him?”
“There wasn’t any question of guilt here,” she said. “He had a whole mini operatory set up at the hotel. The last thing anybody needs is some long, drawn-out trial with Mark Geragos and Barry Scheck arguing an insanity defense or whether or not his surgical gloves fit.” She paused. “I should have listened to you. You had the thing solved for us.”
“They didn’t arrest him because it was easier to ... eliminate him? Isn’t that what
he
was doing with his victims?”
“Maybe that’s the poetic justice here.” She winked. “Case closed.”
Clevenger felt a cold sweat break out at the back of his neck.
McCormick looked over his shoulder, toward the ICU. “How’s Billy?” she asked.
He turned around and walked back inside.
FIFTY-THREE
AUGUST 23,2005
Gary Field, the president’s
chief of staff, phoned Clev-enger three days later and invited him to the White House. The president and the first lady, he said, wanted to thank him for his service and ask him for his help.
Now Clevenger sat across from President Warren Buckley and Elizabeth Buckley in the Oval Office. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Thank you,” the president said. “I know the grit you showed hunting down our daughter’s killer. And I know if you’d had your way, we’d have gotten him before he got Blaire.”
The first lady smiled and nodded.
The president sounded like a kid playing Cowboys and Indians.
You got my guy, but my other guy got you, except not until
... His wife looked like a windup doll. No apparent grief.
“I wish we could have found out why he did what he did,” Clevenger said.
“Hated me, hated the party,” the president said.
“You probably saw the garbage he spewed to the newspapers, just before he killed our girl.”
That garbage, together with the tragic death of his daughter, had driven Buckley’s approval rating to seventy-one percent, the highest point of his presidency. And that was before her funeral service, set to be broadcast nationally the next day. “Yes, I did,” Clev-enger said. “I’m just not sure that explains anything. After all, normal people don’t kill to make a point.”
The president smiled tightly.
“And thank God for that,” the first lady said.
“Doesn’t really matter what was in his head when he cut people up,” the president said.” ‘Cause he won’t be doing it again. Ever.”
The first lady smiled and nodded.
“That’s one way to look at it,” Clevenger said.
“ ‘Course, a trial would have been the best result, for Elizabeth, my sons, and me.”
“I thought you didn’t much care to find out anything more about him.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But I wasn’t here when he pulled that gun and made the Secret Service cancel his ticket. I would have liked to be at his execution and say goodbye to him, personally.”
“And I would have been right there beside him,” the first lady said.
“I understand,” Clevenger said.
The president grinned and winked, then seemed to catch himself and put on a blank mask of a face. “I want you to think about signing on with us here,” he said.
“Signing on? In what sense?”
“Let’s figure that out in the next week or so. Maybe
something high up at the FBI. Maybe CIA. They need psychiatrists now more than ever. Get the truth out of people. You could make a real contribution to our country.”
“I don’t think this is the time,” Clevenger said.
“Why not?” the president asked.
“I don’t mean timing, historically,” Clevenger said. “I mean personally. My son just got out of the ICU. He overdosed on OxyContin. And he has legal problems. Drug charges. He needs me.”
“Well, maybe there’s a pardon in his future,” the president said. “I can’t promise, but I can look at the case on its merits.”
“Thank you,” Clevenger said.
“Our prayers will be with both of you,” the first lady said. She glanced at her husband.
“Remember,” the president said, “the cause of freedom needs more good men than ever.”
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