CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND ⢠MAY 28 ⢠6:44 P.M. EDT
C
lint Harvester was having dinner with his personal physician, two neurological specialists from Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and the White House Chief of Staff in the President's lodge at Camp David when word came from Honolulu that the First Lady's motorcade had been ambushed on the way to the airport.
Drexel R. "Pep" Slingbury, Princeton '79, took the call. They had been watching NBC's Weekend News. While Pep pressed for details and scribbled notes on a linen napkin with a ballpoint pen, the second-string anchorman, interrupted by something that wasn't on the teleprompter crawl in front of him, hesitated, looked startled, then found his sonorous voice again and relayed the news to the network's viewers. Coverage supplied by the NBC affiliate in the fiftieth state flashed on the screen. The cameraman seemed to be covering the scene from the roof of an office building, perhaps half a mile away.
A smoking but upright limousine was sitting sideways in the middle of Ala Moana Boulevard, surrounded by fire and emergency vehicles and helmeted cops. There was rubble in the roadway. A palm tree, set ablaze by a rocket, was being hosed down by the fire department. Another heavily damaged car was on the curb at least a hundred feet away from the armored limo. They had pulled injured MORG agents out of this one. All of the limousine doors hung open. The press corps accompanying the First Lady was herded back into the vans by machine gun-toting MORG agents. Traffic on the busy boulevard was backed up for half a mile in either direction. There was no audio feed from Hawaii. The NBC anchor attempted his own uninformed commentary.
Pep Slingbury was ahead of NBC on the facts, which he blurted out as they came to him.
"Helicopter ... popped up out of nowhere. Four men with automatic weapons, RPGs, maybe a Stinger ... no, that's unconfirmed. Knew exactly what they were ... they hit the counterassault team's vehicle first, then the FLOTUS limo. Two tires shredded but it's operational. The package is approaching the airport now. Yes? Yes? ... the President's right here, he's standing by here ... yes ... Harry, you're breaking up ... as soon as you fucking
know
, God damn it!"
Clint Harvester had pushed his chair back a couple of inches from the table. He still had his spoon in his hand. He ate everything with a red plastic tablespoon, or his fingers. He was subject to clonuses, and could injure himself with a knife or a fork. He slowly chewed a mouthful of buttered croissant, watching the TV screen with a bland unblinking eye.
Paul Luckett, Deputy Chief of the Secret Service's presidential detail, came in fast with six more agents, who took up prearranged positions around the Chief Executive, code-named "Rawhide," hands on the Glocks and M-l6s they wore under their coats. Two DoD communications specialists appeared with secure telephones, Swedish-made, unbreakable cryptology scattered across a dozen channels.
"Mr. President," Pep said with a grimace of apology, "there could be more to this than Honolulu."
Clint Harvester looked around at Paul Luckett and grinned, gave him a merry thumbs-up, and pushed the rest of his croissant into his mouth. Paul Luckett grinned back, looked pained, looked at the Chief of Staff, who was using one of the secure phones to call the White House press secretary at home.
"I think this makes my case, Mr. Slingbury. What I've been saying all along."
"Yeah, Paul."
Luckett gestured at the TV. "No way this happens if
we're
protecting Zephyr."
"And there's no way Dallas could've happened to Kennedy, isn't that right, Paul?" Pep reached for the napkin he'd been writing on, remembering his notes only after he'd left smears of ink on his high perspiring forehead. "Hi, Moira. Got the TV on? No? Turn it on. Where's Cody, outside mowing the south forty? Page him for me, please."
Luckett keyed his walkie, began checking perimeter security at Camp David, which he referred to as "Cactus." Already there were heavily armed helicopters in the air around the mountain retreat, two teams of counterassault Marines deploying on the grounds.
Now on the dining-room projection TV there was an image of the President's 747, redesignated as Special Air Mission Z-1815 when Rona was using it, at the Honolulu airport and at least a mile from the camera. The limousine carrying Rona Harvester rolled toward the plane with two mangled tires designed to keep going even if they were flat. Police cars and motorcycle cops surrounded the limo. An Air Police SWAT team had arrived by helo from the adjacent Hickam Air Force Base to beef up security.
The shot-up but probably unpenetrated armored limousine stopped below the stairway. In a mob of security men Rona Harvester was removed from the limo and hustled through the glitter of a Hawaiian afternoon to the forward door of the immense airplane, all but invisible within the moving human shield. Clouds above the 747 were like a thick pile of whipped cream on a banana split. Two more men with machine guns stood in the doorway. All of this was being witnessed around the world as it happened, commercial-free. Images that would be repeated endlessly for the rest of the night in the U.S.
Rona Harvester hesitated at the doorway, seeming to resist efforts to hastily shove her inside. Saying something, gesturing.
Back off, please
. Unbowed, undaunted. She turned slightly, toward the terminal. She knew where the cameras would be. Was that a smear of blood on her forehead? Rona raised her right fist, double-pumping, knocking air, a gesture of defiance and victory.
"The little devil," Pep Slingbury said quietly, willing, for the moment, to suspend his dislike of the woman most responsible for his peptic ulcer.
Then she was gone. Safely inside SAM Z-1815, the door closing. As the mobile staircase was driven away the 747 began to move. The face of the NBC anchor reappeared, picture within a picture. He spoke movingly, with a firm jaw and admiration glinting in his eyes, of Rona Harvester's courage under fire, her popularity with the American people. While the 747 was taxiing for takeoff the network ran a file montage of Rona, highlights of her years at the White House. Touring areas of the U.S. that had been devastated by natural disasters. Floating a wreath, well upriver from the hot zone, for the dead and displaced of Portland, Oregon. Chairing important conferences on the humanitarian deficiencies of third-world nations. Visiting schools. Chumming with crowned heads at White House dinners. Horseback riding with her husband on their Montana ranch, her windblown hair back-lighted by a ravishing sunset.
Everyone in the room, including the Secret Service agents, had momentarily forgotten about Clint Harvester.
He was sitting forward on the edge of his high-backed chair. His left hand, holding the big red plastic spoon, rested on an arm of the chair. With his other hand he had unzipped his pleated honey-colored corduroy slacks and was peeing on the Navaho rug in front of him. His lower lip pushed in and out, ruminatively. His upper lip had a buttery, crumbed gleam. His active mind, what little remained of it, was somewhere else. His eyes were as still as swatted flies.
Now everyone in the room had noticed. Pep swallowed a desperate urge to bray like a donkey, shoot himself in the foot, do anything to divert attention from this humiliation of a man he happened to love. His heart gave a frightful twitch. Sweat blurred his vision.
But at least, Pep thought, they had progressed to a point where the leader and hope of the free world was taking it out before he obeyed the urge to relieve himself. So the news wasn't all bad tonight, was it?
INNISFALL, CALIFORNIA ⢠MAY 28 ⢠7:26 P.M. PDT
G
eoff McTyer had LoJack. It was no trouble for him to locate his car, parked near the top of the hill in the Memorial Gardens. One of the campus cops gave him a lift up there. He checked first to see if the Taurus had been hot-wired. No. He stood beside his car for a while, clothes grimy and stained with sweat, looking north with tired eyes to the Cal Shasta campus. It was dusk. The last light of the sun gleamed opaquely in the many windows of the school buildings. Lights had come on in the parking lots and along the winding drives. Except for the hulks of the burned-out airliner in and near the stadium, it was like any other balmy evening in late spring. There was rain farther off, to the north and east. Twenty-five, thirty miles away. Lightning flared within the heavy cloud formations.
The charnel reek of burnt flesh was all over him. A bath would help, but probably he'd continue to smell it in his sleep. For several nights to come. At least the poor bastardsâthey'd found seventeen shrunken bodies in the wreckage, many of them resembling charcoal mummies with shiny dabs of silver and gold jewelry embedded where ears, wrists, and throats had beenâshould have died on impact. A survivor who had been taken to the hospital hours ago probably was still in surgery. Geoff ate some dried apricots to boost his energy level and wondered how Eden had managed to drive the Taurus to the cemetery without the ignition key that was in the leather folder chained to his belt.
Maybe she'd had it towed, as a joke. But she hadn't been in a jolly frame of mind when he'd last seen her.
He took his cell phone from the trunk, tried to reach Eden. Three different numbers, including her pager. He left a message, but after ten minutes she hadn't called him back.
Where are you, baby?
Geoff got in the car. Needing the evening wind to air him out, he drove with the top down to the Warings' house on Deep Creek Road.
The sun was setting when he got there, a golden sky with birds flocking to the treetops like iron filings to a magnet. The merely curious were hanging out along the road with journalists from all of the important media. The journalists looked bored and disgruntled, as if they'd been stood up by blind dates. A chained and padlocked gate blocked the drive. Riley had procrastinated getting the electronic gate opener fixed. But Geoff had a padlock key. He got out of the Taurus with his shield in his hand.
The vid crews came at him with their usual dog-pack intensity, a brute assault with lights, cameras, microphones. They yelled questions from all sides as he walked to the gate.
Geoff turned and said, "I want every one of you two hundred feet back from the driveway entrance! Move your vehicles now or there'll be tow trucks out here in fifteen minutes."
A young woman wearing a lot of makeup trampled one of her slower-moving colleagues in order to get in Geoff's face with her microphone.
"Diane Kopechne, Channel Nine News at Seven. Why have the police been called? Has something happened here?"
"I'm off duty. I'm a friend of the family's. Would you please get out of my way?"
"Can you confirm that today's plane crash was not an accident?"
"What?"
"Did Eden Waring have prior knowledge the plane would crash? Is it true, as some of her classmates have said, that she is into Goth?"
"Get back or get arrested."
"Try it," she sneered, "and my station will sue your cute ass." The VJ glanced at her cameraman, pressed her free hand to the earpiece she wore, and said into the wireless mike pinned to a lapel of her suit, "Bernie, chrissake, are we
go
yet? I've got a breaking story here, man."
The cameraman said to her, "Three, two, one, we're hot."
She wasn't quite deft enough to arrange her smile and position her body for the live feed while keeping a tight grip on Geoff. He pulled away from her and unlocked the gate.
"Yes, well, as you can see, Ned, we're standing in front of the Waring house on Deep Creek Road, where an officer from the Innisfall Police Department has just arrived. There has been no activity around the sprawling redwood-and-native stone home for
several
hours now, although we can see that two vehicles, a large blue van and a dark gray sedan, are parked next to the house. We've just spoken to the officer, who claims to be a
close
personal friend of the Waring family. At this point he has unlocked the gate across the drive and isâ"
Walking fast, Geoff made it to the house in twelve seconds and continued on a flagstone path beneath some California oak and acacia trees to the walled patio off the kitchen wing. Another gate there, silvery cypress boards with hand-forged bronze hardware. Unlocked. On the paved patio the Warings' ancient blond Labrador crept out of his doghouse with a sadly wagging tail to greet Geoff. The kitchen door was also unlocked. Geoff went in and turned on the lights.
A moth was trapped and fluttering inside one of the ceiling light panels. The sink faucet dripped slowly. Riley hadn't gotten around to replacing the washer yet. There was an emptied can of Alpo on the butcher-block table in the center of the kitchen that someone had forgotten to dump into the garbage. As if feeding the dog had been an afterthought in the midst of a hasty departure.
"Hey, it's Geoff!
Eden?
Anybody home?"
But he'd known from the moment he stepped inside that no one was there. The house stood empty, except for himself and the moth.
He took a glass from a cabinet beside the diamond-pane cottage windows that overlooked the patio, opened the fridge. The light was out, Riley hadn't . . . He poured a glass of milk, drank it while walking through the house, turning on lamps as he went.