Nothing.
The door opened. A man about sixty, thick at the waist, in his shirtsleeves. He looked just like his photo last week in Newsweek magazine.
Well, Charon thought, this was luck indeed.
“Yes?” the man said, cocking his head quizzically.
Henry Charon shot him dead center in the chest. The gun made a popping noise, not loud, a metallic thwock. As he fell Charon shot him again. With the man lying in the foyer on his side, his legs twisted, Charon stepped over and fired a slug into his skull.
Then he pulled the door closed and walked for the car.
He heard voices now. “Dad! Dad!” A woman calling.
Seated behind the wheel, Charon saw lights in the second story come on.
He pulled the shift lever one notch rearward, into reverse, then looked over his shoulder and backed down the driveway toward the circle of warmth from the streetlight. No cars coming.
Henry Charon backed into the street, put the car in drive, and drove at twenty-five miles per hour toward the avenue. He glanced at his watch. Two-nineteen a.m.
At three-oh-five he took a ticket from the automatic device guarding the parking lot entrance at National Airport and wheeled the car back into exactly the same stall he had taken it from. He replaced the key in the cassette tray, locked the car, then walked toward the terminal to get a cup of coffee.
He would let about an hour pass before he drove his own car past the attendant and handed him the ticket he had just acquired driving in. No use giving the man two short-time tickets in the same night. The second time he might look at the driver. Not that he would remember me, Charon thought, wryly amused. Nobody ever does.
During the night Harrison Ronald awoke with a start. He found himself fully alert, lying rigid in bed, listening to the silence.
And God, it was quiet. Nothing! He strained his ears to pick up the slightest noise.
Fully awake and taut as a violin string, he eased the automatic from under his pillow and slipped from the bed. He listened at the door. Nothing. He put his ear to the door and stood that way for several seconds, listening to the sounds of his breathing but nothing else.
The fear was palpable, tangible, right there beside him in the darkness. He could smell the monster’s fetid breath.
Frustrated, listening to his heart thud, he glided noiselessly to the window.
He pulled the blinds back ever so slightly. The light on the pole between the trees cast weird shadows on the grass, which looked from this angle like the green felt on a pool table.
Too quiet. No wind. The tree limbs were absolutely still.
What had awakened him?
He held his wristwatch so that the dim glow coming through the gap in the blinds fell upon it. Three-fourteen a.m.
Not even a hum from the heating system. That was probably it. It was off.
In a moment the system kicked back on.
He felt the tension ebbing and walked back to the bed. He sat gingerly upon it and tossed the heavy pistol onto the blanket beside him. Rubbing his face, then lying full-length on the bed, Harrison Ronald tried to relax.
What was Freeman doing right now? Did he know?
Of course he knew. Or suspected. Freeman would be curious, with that alley dog asshole-sniffing curiosity that had to be satisfied, so he would take steps to learn the truth. He would talk to people and use money and sooner or later he would know. What then?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TUESDAY the world came unglued. Those were the words a senator used later to describe the day, and those words stuck in tens of millions of minds as the perfect description.
It started whenever you awoke and turned on your television to check on the President’s condition at Bethesda and found yourself staring at a stark image of a suburban two-story Cape Cod house surrounded by tall pines and lit by floodlights. In the gray dawn half light, the surreal image looked ominous.
The troubling thing about the picture was not the ambulances, the flashing blue-and-white beacons, the uniformed policemen and the clean-cut FBI types in Sears suits, nor was it the sobbing grown daughter and her two children home to visit Dad for Christmas. No. The troubling thing about the image was that the house looked like something from the set of an old “Leave It to Beaver” show. As you stared at it you could see that it looked exactly like the one in the ads for house paint for great American homes “just like yours”—the perfect distillation of the American two-story dream house in Hometown, U.S.A. And the owner had been assassinated, murdered, when he opened his door to a stranger.
The owner, of course, was Somebody, Congressman Doyle Hopkins of Minnesota, majority leader of the House of Representatives. He had been shot three times at point-blank range.
A better crime to push the panic buttons of middle-class America could not have been devised. The sanctity of home, neighborhood, and family circle had been savagely violated.
The television newspeople, no fools they, played that theme for all it was worth. “Why did he open the door?” one of them asked rhetorically, as if every suburban householder had not done the same thing dozens of times, as if the evil intent of Hopkins’ assailant had been written across his face so plainly it would have still been obvious in the stark shadows of the porch light.
But if you stayed glued to the tube long enough, eventually you were told that the President’s condition was unchanged. The doctor in charge of the President’s medical team held a morning press conference, but only a few minutes of that got on the air. The story of the hour was the killing of the House majority leader.
That was the story of the hour until nine a.m. Eastern time, anyway. At eight fifty-eight five heavily armed men walked into the rotunda of the Capitol building wearing heavy, knee-length coats. They shot the four security guards on duty with pistols before the security men could get off a shot, then extracted Uzis from under their coats and ran along the corridors shooting everyone they saw.
A reporter-camera team setting up to interview the Speaker of the House was the first to get this atrocity on the air, at nine-oh-one a.m., just in time to capture a gruesome vignette of one of the gunmen mowing down the woman reporter, then turning the weapon on the cameraman. As he was hammered into a wall with five slugs in his body the camera fell to the marble floor and was smashed.
A uniformed security guard near the Senate cloakroom was running toward the noise of gunfire with his pistol drawn when he rounded a corner and almost careened into one of the Uzi-toting gunmen. They exchanged shots at a range of five feet. In the roar of the Uzi on full automatic fire the report of the guard’s weapon was lost. Both men went down fatally wounded.
There were four gunmen left alive. One of them charged into a subcommittee hearing room where people were gathering and emptied a magazine into the crowd. The noise of the chattering automatic weapon was deafening, overpowering, in this room which had been recently renovated to improve the acoustics. Only when the trip-hammer blasts ended could those still alive hear the screams and moans, and then they sounded muffled, as if they were coming from a great distance.
The killer stood calmly amidst the blood and gore and groaning victims and changed magazines. He emptied the second magazine into the prostrate crowd and was inserting the third one into his weapon when a guard appeared in the doorway and shot him with a .357 Magnum.
The first two rounds from the revolver hammered the gunman to the floor but the guard walked toward him still shooting. He fired the sixth and last round into the gunman’s brain from a distance of three feet.
Sixteen people in the room were dead and seventeen wounded. Only three people escaped without bullet wounds.
Another of the gunmen was shot to death in the House dining room after he sprayed the diners with two magazines and used the third on the chandeliers. His weapon jammed. He was crouched amid a shower of shattered glass trying to clear the weapon when two guards standing at different doorways opened fire with their revolvers. The man went down with thr
ee bullets in him and was shot twice more as he lay on the floor.
One of the gunmen somehow ended up in the old Senate chamber which, mercifully, was empty. Didn’t matter. He stood near the lectern and sprayed two magazines of slugs into the polished desks and speaker’s bench. Then he threw the Uzi down, drew a pistol, and blew his brains out.
The only terrorist taken alive was shot from behind as he ran down a corridor on the second level. He had killed over a dozen people and wounded nine others before a woman guard leveled him with a slug through the liver.
Watching the pandemonium on television—every station in town had a crew at the Capitol within twenty minutes and two of them had helicopters circling overhead—White House chief of staff William C. Dorfman took the first report from the FBI watch officer over the telephone in his office.
“How many of them were there?”
“We don’t know.”
“Have you gotten them all?”
“We don’t know.”
“Casualties?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Well, goddammit, call me back when you know something, you fucking idiot!” Dorfman roared and slammed down the phone so hard the plastic housing on the instrument cracked.
These temper tantrums were a character defect and were doing him no good politically. Dorfman knew it and was trying to control himself. Still …
One minute later the telephone rang again. It was Vice-President Quayle. “I’m going over to the Capitol. I want you to go with me.”
“Mr. Vice-President, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Dorfman replied as he jabbed the button on the remote to kill the TV volume. “The FBI just told me that they don’t know if the guards got all the terrorists. The nation can’t afford to lose you to a—”
“I’m going, Dorfman. You’re coming with me. I’ll be at the Rose Garden entrance in five minutes. Have the cars brought around.”
The line went dead.
“Yessir,” Dorfman said to nobody in particular.
The administration was sitting on a bomb with a lit fuse, Dorfman realized, and the fuse was dangerously short.
Terrorists! Not in the Middle East, not in some Third World shithole that nobody had ever heard of, but here! Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States! The next thing you know wild-eyed lunatic ragheads will be blowing stuff up and slaughtering people in Moline and Columbus and Tulsa. My God!
At least Dan Quayle was smart enough to comprehend the gravity of the situation. That was undoubtedly why he wanted to personally view the carnage at the Capitol, console the survivors, and be seen by the American people doing it. That would help calm all those people from Bangor to L.A. who were right now beginning to feel the first twinges of panic.
Dorfman regretted his first impulse to advise Quayle not to go. Quayle’s political instincts were sound. He was right.
Dorfman called for the cars and had a thirty-second shouting match with the senior Secret Service agent on duty, who didn’t give a tinker’s damn about politics but did care greatly about the life of the Vice-President that was entrusted to his care.
He also took the time to call Gideon Cohen and tell him to meet the Vice-President’s party at the Capitol and to bring the director of the FBI along with him.
Dorfman shared the limo with the Vice-President, who had brought along his own chief of staff, one Carney Robinson, an intense blow-dried type who in his previous life had made a name for himself in public relations.
Dorfman apologized to Quayle for advising him not to go to the Capitol. “This is wise,” Dorfman said. Neither Quayle nor Robinson replied. They sat silently looking back at the people on the sidewalks looking at them.
After a bit Dan Quayle cleared his throat. “Will, use the phone there. Call General Land at the Pentagon and ask him to meet us at the Capitol.”
Without a word Dorfman seized the instrument and placed the call.
Henry Charon woke up a few minutes after ten a.m. at the Hampshire Avenue apartment and made himself a pot of coffee. While he waited for it to drip through he took a quick shower, brushed his teeth, and shaved.
Then he dressed, even putting on his shoes and a sweater. Only then did he pour himself some coffee and turn on the television to see what the hunters were up to.
He stood in front of the screen staring at it, trying to understand. A group of terrorists? The Capitol?
He sat on the sofa and propped his feet on the chair while he sipped the steaming hot liquid in the cup.
Well, one thing was certain—the FBI and police were going to be thoroughly confused. That, Charon reflected, was more than he had hoped for.
It was also an opportunity.
He drained the cup and poured himself another while he thought about it. After a couple of sips he went to the window and stood looking down into the street. Not many people about this morning. A few empty parking places, though. Another gray day.
The FBI would be around before very long, either FBI or local police. They would be looking for terrorists and assassins, so they would be knocking on doors and asking questions. Nothing to fear there.
His mind went back to the Capitol. He remembered the office building just east of the Supreme Court. What was it, five or six hundred yards over to the Capitol?
Could he make a shot at that distance? Well, with the best of the rifles he had fired three shots into a one-inch group at a hundred yards, so theoretically at five hundred yards a perfect shot should hit within a circle five inches in diameter. Yet the impact point would be about fifty-six inches below the point of aim because the bullet would be dropping, affected by gravity. If he made a perfect shot. With no wind.
And the distance was precisely five hundred yards.
With the wind blowing and a fifty-yard error in his estimate of the distance, all bets were off.
Henry Charon didn’t have to review the ballistics—he knew them cold. And he knew just how extraordinarily difficult it would be to hit a man-sized target at 500 yards, especially since the target man would not be cooperating by holding absolutely still. It would be a real challenge.
He stood watching the passersby below and the bare branches being stirred by the breeze and tried to remember what the field of view looked like from the top of the office building.
He went back to the little living room and stood with the cup in his hand watching the television. The Vice-President was on his way to the Capitol, the announcer said. He would be there shortly. Stay tuned.
His mind made up, Charon snapped off the television. He turned off the coffeepot and the lights, grabbed his coat, and locked the door behind him.
“How many dead?” Dan Quayle asked the special agent who had greeted them and escorted them through the police lines into the building as reporters shouted questions and the cameras rolled. Quayle had ignored them.
“Sixty-one, sir. A couple more are in real bad shape and will probably die. Forty-three wounded.”
“Any idea who these people were?”
“Colombians, sir,” the agent said. “On a suicide mission. One’s still alive, barely, and he did some talking before he passed out from internal bleeding and shock. An agent who speaks Spanish took down what he could. Apparently these people were smuggled into the country this past weekend and told their target this morning.”
“Paid to commit suicide?” Dorfman asked in disbelief.
“Yes, sir. Fifty thousand before they left, and fifty more to the widow afterward.”
That stunned the politicians, who walked along in silence. The agent led them to a hearing room where seventeen men and women and the man who had killed them lay as they had fallen. The wounded had been removed, but photographers and lab men were busy. They didn’t look up at the gawking politicos or the Secret Service agents who stood with pistols in their hands.
Quayle just stood rooted with his hands in his pockets, looking right and left. Spent brass casings lay scattered about, bullet holes here and there, bloo
d all over, bodies contorted and twisted.
“Why?” Quayle asked.
“Sir?”
“Why in hell would anybody take money to commit murder and be killed doing it?”
“Well, this one guy—the one that’s still alive—he said he has a wife and eight kids in Colombia. He used to have ten kids but two died because he couldn’t feed them anything but corn and rice and he couldn’t afford a doctor when they got sick. They live in a shack without running water. He had no job and no prospect of ever getting one. So when he got offered this money, he looked at the kids and figured it was the only way they were ever going to have a chance, so he took it. So he said, anyway.”
“Sixty-one people murdered,” Quayle muttered so softly Dorfman had to take a step closer to catch it. “No, that’s too nice a word. Butchered. Slaughtered. Exterminated.”
The agent led them from the room and down the hall toward the cafeteria. They passed several bodies in the corridors. Dorfman tried not to look at the faces, but Quayle did. He bent over each one for a second or two, then straightened and walked on. His hands stayed in his coat pockets and his shoulders sagged.
They were standing in the cafeteria when Gideon Cohen and General Land and several other military officers joined them. One of the officers was a navy captain, “Grafton” his name tag said, who took it all in, his face expressionless.
“This guy who’s still alive—he said he thinks there were other groups smuggled in.”
“How did they get here?”
“By airliner. They were met at the airport and taken somewhere and given food and weapons. This morning they were driven here in a van and dropped.”
“Where are the others? What are their targets?” Dorfman growled.
“He doesn’t know.”
Attorney General Gideon Cohen spoke for the first time. “Aldana’s lawyer says Aldana told him yesterday afternoon that he was responsible for the attempt on the President’s life. That’s confidential, of course.”
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