Authors: Stephen Coonts
FBI, what do you say?” Quayle directed his question at the director.
“These aren’t ordinary times. We need quick results. To get quick results we need a lot of people. Yet when this is over the American people are going to hold the FBI and the military accountable if innocent people’s rights are trampled on, injustice done. That’s inevitable.”
William Dorfman jumped in with both feet. “The American people will hold us accountable if these murdering swine aren’t caught and caught damn soon. We’ve got to move heaven and earth to stop this slaughter or this country will come unglued. That’s the first priority. Better to jail some innocent people and turn ‘em loose later than let the guilty stay free.”
“How about innocent people shot by nineteen-year-old kids with M-16’s?” General Land asked Dorfman. “Don’t be a damn fool,” Dorfman retorted. “Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you can’t do the job we’ll
Dorfman had the sense to shut up just then, for the look on Hayden Land’s face would have boiled water. Jake Grafton doubted if there was another man living who had ever had the temerity to tell the general to his face that he was a damn fool. The silence that followed Dorfman’s outburst lasted for a long moment.
“Why not use regular troops?” Gideon Cohen suggested with a glance at General Land. “Handpicked noncoms and officers? This is the federal district. I think that would be legal. Certainly justifiable. Even if it isn’t legal, it’ll be a while before a judge says so.”
“No,” Dan Quayle said. “National Guard.” He stood. “When I get back to my office we’ll announce it and prepare an order. In the meantime all nonessential government buildings should be evacuated, the employees sent home.”
Quayle left the room first, surrounded by Secret Service agents.
Walking the corridors of the Capitol with General Land, Jake Grafton felt profoundly depressed. General Land apparently was in a similar mood. They paused by a body draped with a sheet that the forensic people had yet to get to and stood for a moment. Holes and blood in the wall, pieces of plaster and plaster powder on the floor. The toe of a woman’s shoe was just visible under the edge of the white cloth. She had been somebody, with a family and a job, ambitions and a future. Now she was a hunk of meat to be diced and sliced, mourned and buried.
We’re all victims, Jake mused, the living as well as the dead. The America that had given birth to this woman and made her what she was would soon be changed in unforeseeable, incalculable ways by the white-hot fury of the forces that had been unleashed here this morning. The transformations caused by war-make no mistake, this was warwd be irrevocable. And Jake knew that the changes so wrought would not be welcomed by most Americans, himself included.
damn these terrorists. He said it to himself as a
He was walking down the sidewalk carrying the toolbox in one hand and a four-foot length of ducting balanced on his shoulder when he realized that there were men on the rooftops. Henry Charon stopped at the corner and took a quick look upward at the tops of the buildings while he shifted the duct pipe to his other shoulder.
He had driven in from the east and had no trouble finding tilde a place to park. A lot of people hadn’t come to work today.
Keeping his gaze on the sidewalk, he proceeded to the entrance of the old office building and climbed the staim In the lobby he set the toolbox on the floor and punched the elevator button. The lobby was empty. Now if that office still was …
In the elevator he pushed the button for the top floor. The contraption wheezed and moaned, then with a hum rose slowly for several seconds. It lurched to a halt and the door opened.
The woman standing there gasped when she saw him and started. 6and0h, MY God!”
Henry Charon smiled.
Horror contorted her features. “Oh, I’m sor”…ity! Oh, my heavens, I am so sorry.” The door started to close, but she popped in, beating it. “What floor?” he asked.
“Five, please.”
Charon pushed the button as she continued breathlessly, “I just didn’t expect anyone to be in here. I’m so jumpy. All these terrorists and murders! My God! I should have stayed home. I am so sorry. What you must think.”
“Forget it.”
She gave him a big, embarrassed smile and got off at the fifth floor. He grinned at her again as the door closedThe top floor was the seventh, and Charon got off there. The hallway was empty. He walked over to the door labeled
srAIR and pushed at it. It opened. Satisfied, he went to the door at the rear of the hallway and laid down the duct pipe and toolbox.
The lock took half a minute. He sat the box and pipe inside, surveyed the empty room, then locked the door behind him.
Through the tree branches he could see the northern half of the Capitol’s grand staircase that led up to the main entrance, which led into the Rotunda. The marble steps were covered with people. That was the door those suicide pilots from Colombia went in this morning. But Charon could see only half the stair. The other half was obscured by the Supreme Court building.
The window was dirty. He wiped the inside of the glass with his sleeve. Some of the dirt came off. Out of the corner of his eye he picked up a man on the roof of the Supreme Court building.
This would have to do.
Luckily it was winter and all the trees on the Capitol grounds had lost all their leaves. In summer the vegetation would obscure the scene from here.
The scoped rifle was carefully packed inside the duct pipe and padded with bubble wrap. He removed the weapon and the three long sticks that were also there. These had a piece of rope carefully wrapped around all three sticks, near one end, so when he spread the sticks apart the contraption became a tripod.
He loaded the rifle and laid it on the floor. Then he used a squirt bottle of window cleaner and a rag on the inside of the window glass. He did the entire window as he scanned the Capitol parking lot and every roof he could see.
Four men in sight on the roofs. Hundreds of people over there around the Capitol.
He had one of the radios in the toolbox. With the earpiece in his ear, he turned it on and played with it until he found the audio broadcast frequency of a television station. In fifteen seconds it was plain that the announcer was on the Capitol steps. Listening carefully, Charon rigged the tripod and braced
the rifle upon it. He turned the scope magnification to its highest setting, adjusted the parallax ring, then settled the rifle on the tripod.
He stood well back from the window, near the middle of the room. Swinging the rifle through the narrow field of view rovided by the window sash, he was agreeably surprised at how much he could see. He was looking between tree branches though, and the breeze made them sway. The back-and-forth motion of the limbs made it more difficult to hold the reticle steady on target.
The announcer informed his audience that the VicePresident’s party would soon be leaving the building. He didn’t say how he knew.
If Charon made this, it would be one hell of a shot. Listening to the television audio, moving the crossbars from person to person, he thought about some of the more memorable shou he had made. None of them had been this iffy, he decided. He wondered if he should really try this one. The images in the scope danced uncontrollably as the instrument’s nine-power magnification exaggerated every twitch and tiny jiggle.
He settled the scope on a cop and took a deep breath, then exhaled smoothly and concentrated on holding the crossbars of the reticle as steady as humanly possible on the center of the man’s chest. Still, they moved around in a little circle. It was all he could do to keep the two filaments between the man’s armpits. Just when he thought that was good enough, the man moved unexpectedly.
How long after he pulled the trigger would he have to clear the building? Sixty seconds? Less?
And the flight of the bullet would be affected slightly by the window glass. He couldn’t open the window-an agent on a roof might see it and send someone to investigate. So he’d shoot through it. Impossible to say how much the glass would deflect the bullet. Maybe just enough to miss over this distance, a little more than a quarter mile. Maybe enough to throw the bullet ten or twelve feet off.
He thought about it as he turned the horizontal filament adjustment knob to compensate for bullet drop.
Okay. It’s going to take a lot of luck to make this shot. A lot of luck.
What he really needed was a practice shot. Well, when you thought about it, he had had a lot of those. Thousands over the years. This one would have to do the trick.
Aha! The announcer. “Here is the VicePresident now.”
Henry Charon straightened and worked the bolt, chambering a round. He snicked off the safety. He flexed his shoulders, set his feet, then settled the forearm of the rifle onto the tripod and grasped the junction with his left hand. He snuggled the butt into his shoulder and got the stock firmly in place under his cheekbone.
Now he swung the rifle toward the door of the Capitol. Someone had arranged a battery of microphones. The VicePresident ignored them and walked down the steps amid a phalanx of Secret Service agents carrying submachine guns in their hands. There was a corridor of sorts between the cameras and the people.
Behind Quayle-who was that? An army officer. And a naval officer, three or four civilians. Charon tried to steady the rifle on the civilians, who were coming toward . him down the steps. He couldn’t shoot when they were moving: they were just too small at this distance. And until they stopped and stood still he couldn’t even be sure who they were.
At the bottom of the stairs, right beside a limo, the Army officer stopped to talk to Dan Quayle. Okay, the civilians were joining the group. They were close together. Who are they?
Dorfman! One of them is Dorfman. He’s on the list. Who is the other? Aha! That’s Cohen, the attorney general. Also on the list. Quickly now. Breath deeply, exhale slowly, relax and
squeeze, slowly and steadily. Steady… steady … Damn tree limbs-swaying around… Squeeze slowly, gently, allow for the wind, keep the crosshairs cen … The rifle fired.
The report in the closed room was deafening, like two sticks of dynamite. Part of the window glass blew out.
Jake Grafton heard an audible thwock and turned, just in time to see Gideon Cohen spin half around and fall to the pavement.
The Secret Service agent roared, “Everybody down,” and the two agents closest to the VicePresident physically pushed’him headfirst into the back seat of the limo. One of them dove in on top of him while the other slammed the door.
“Get down Everybody down!”
Jake crouched, his eyes on Cohen. Was it just his imagination or did he really hear the report of a rifle several seconds after Cohen fell?
Cohen’s groans were audible above the screams and shouts of the panicked onlookers, who were scattering or lying facedown on the steps and pavement. An agent was on top of the attorney general, bracing himself with his hands and knees so that none of his weight rested on the injured man.
“My God!” someone roared. “They tried to kill the VicePresident!”
“Get that fucking car outta here!”
The Secret Service agents pointed their Uzis at the crowd, mmhing. They were still standing this five seconds later when the driver of the limo stomped on the gas and made the rear tires squeal as he accelerated away.
Three or four men were examining Cohen. Jake tried to see but couldn’t.
Where? Jake rose to his knees and tried to look for the spot where the shot had come from. All he could see was the backs of Secret Service agents. He stood.
“Goddammit, get back down here, Grafton,” General Land growled. “Never stand up in a firefight. were you born yesterday?”
As he came out of the stairwell into the lobby Henry Charon bumped into a woman. He reached out and caught her and steadied her on her feet. “Sorry,” he said, and headed for the door to the sidewalk. “Did you hear that explosion?” she called.
“Upstairs, it sounded like,” he told her over his shoulder and kept going for the door.
That’s odd, she thought, staring after him. He’s wearing surgical gloves.
Out on the sidewalk Henry Charon walked north at a brisk pace, but not too brisk. Just a man who knows where he’s going and wants to get there. He reached the corner and crossed, then paused and watched an unmarked car with a blue light on the dash and a siren wailing round the corner and screech to a stop in the middle of the block, just fifty feet past the building he had just come out of.
Charon wheeled and walked east. He passed a man jogging in the other direction, toward the Capitol. “Somebody tried to kill the VicePresident,” the man shouted, pointing at a small transistor radio he carried.
Charon nodded and kept going. Behind him he could hear more sirens.
At two that afternoon Billy Enright, one of Mcationally’s lieutenants, who had been watching television, went into the next room and woke Freeman Mcationally. Freeman got out of bed and padded in to watch and listen. Someone had taken a shot at the VicePresident, and the feds were calling out the National Guard.
Freeman called T. Jefferson Brody at his office. Normally he never used the phone here for business, since it was
tapped, but now he was calling his lawyer. “It’s
Tee. You hear the news?”
the Capitol this morning? Holy damn! I heard all right.”
con’The National Guard. Quayle’s calling out the Guard.” ‘Oh, that! Just to stand around at public buildings and stuff.” The problem with Brody, Mcationally told himself, was that he had no understanding of how things worked. “That’s just the start,” he told the lawyer patiently. “You talk to our friends, Tee. This Guard shit ain’t good.”
“How heavy do you want me to get?”
“Lay the wood to ‘em, man. This Guard shit is really bad. Those soldiers ain’t going to spend all their time shining their shoes and strutting around in front of the public library. Once they’re here, they’re going to try to shut down the business. I can feel it.”
“You want me to go all the way if I have tor” “,Ml the way.” Mcationally hung up and went back to the television. In a little while he went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee.