The Coalition: A Novel of Suspense

by Samuel Marquis

  Jennifer stared blankly at Locke and the three people kneeling next to Susan’s motionless body. All but the Christian leader watched her fearfully, as if she might unleash a storm of lead at the slightest twitch. The moment seemed suspended in time, like a slowly unfolding nightmare. Though she had done nothing wrong, she felt as if she were a cold-blooded murderer, a pariah. It sickened her to think anyone could believe her responsible for this disaster. It went against everything she stood for.

  She saw the blood on Susan’s clothes, and her legs began to move forward down the walkway, slowly, tentatively.

  Before she had made it ten steps, a pair of police cruisers screeched to a halt in the parking lot. Four guns quickly locked onto her.

  “Drop your weapon—now!”

  For the second time of the day, Jennifer felt her life flash before her eyes. Her head began to spin and her knees threatened to buckle beneath her. It was the same sickening sensation she had felt when her father had triumphed over her.

  “Put the gun down now—or we will fire!”

  Jennifer dropped the gun to the pavement.

  The next thing she knew she was knocked viciously to the concrete and handcuffed. As she was being roughly handled, she felt as though the rest of the world had gone stark raving mad and she was the only sane person left on the planet.

  This is unreal. How can they think I’m the killer? Don’t they know they have the wrong person?

  Finally, her mouth moved by a will of its own. “I didn’t do it,” she protested. “There was a man, a policeman. He did it. He killed everyone. I hit him and he dropped his gun and ran.”

  Without responding, the cops jerked her to her feet and forced her toward a police car. An ambulance pulled to the curb as three more police cruisers raced toward the scene.

  When Jennifer saw Susan’s body up close, she shook her head. “I am so sorry, Susan,” she said tearfully.

  The cops tightened their grip and shoved her toward the cruiser as a pair of paramedics rushed forward with a stretcher.

  “Susan!” Jennifer cried, but she could see the girl was dead.

  And then Benjamin Locke was right there in front of her. He looked violently angry and tragically sad at the same time, with big fat tears in his eyes and his huge chest pumping like a piston, as only a parent can look who has lost a beloved child and desperately needs someone to blame.

  “You murdered my daughter in cold blood,” he snarled.

  “I didn’t do it. I was here for Susan, not to hurt anyone.”

  “No, you killed her all right. You brought her here and you killed her just as Cain slayed his own brother Abel.”

  “No, that’s not true!” she pleaded. “That’s not how it happened!”

  A Channel Nine news truck screeched into the parking lot. A Hispanic female reporter and pony-tailed cameraman scrambled from the vehicle and sprinted towards them.

  When Jennifer reached the police car, she turned to look back at Susan one last time, but Locke and the paramedics blocked her view of the body. The illustrious Christian leader—a giant, hulking, tragic figure in the amber morning light—was appealing to Almighty God and openly weeping now.

  Then she was shoved into the cruiser with the Channel Nine news camera rolling.

  CHAPTER 101

  AT PRECISELY ELEVEN A.M., a metallic green Buick LeSabre with U.S. government tags pulled to the curb at the corner of Seventeenth and Welton in downtown Denver. An attractive woman, who looked ten years younger than her actual age, climbed into the back seat before the light changed. She wore a conservative gray business suit with a black tie. Dark stockings plunged down to a pair of ebony high heels. Her brunette hair was elegantly coiffed, and the eyes beneath her clear, normal-vision glasses were jade-green like a feline’s. She had Fortune 500 written all over her, a high-powered businesswoman out for a power lunch. But then again, she should have had the glow of money about her; only this morning an additional two million dollars had been quietly deposited into her numbered Geneva bank account, and by tomorrow, the amount would be doubled.

  The door closed and the car turned right onto Seventeenth, quickly merging with the traffic. The man sitting next to Skyler opened a large suitcase so new it smelled of fresh leather. Without saying a word, she examined the contents: a navy-blue, one-piece SWAT-style uniform with a matching cap and jacket (the standard uniform of the FBI Critical Incident Response Group); a bullet-proof Kevlar vest, Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol with spare magazines, and Saber two-way radio (also FBI standard-issue); a pair of Leica laser-range-finding binoculars; an official CIRG controlled-access badge, pictureless and non-laminated; and a sealed manila envelope containing operational instructions. Skyler checked the badge to make sure the name was the same as last time; she would insert a picture and laminate the badge later. Confident she had everything required, she snapped the case closed.

  “Any last minute changes?” Skyler asked.

  The man looked down his nose at her. He thought she was an unimportant pawn, a middle-woman whose sole job was to run interference for Gomez. Though it nettled her, she knew it was best this way. The less he knew of her identity and role in the assignment, the better. But there was something else in his eyes, a salacious gleam. She wasn’t important in her own right, but he still wanted to fuck her. That, more than his condescending air, pissed her off.

  “Just one change—the firearm,” he replied. “The Remington 700 is a no-go. It’s to be a Winchester 70 instead.”

  Skyler frowned. You’ve never fired a 70T. “What kind of scope?” she asked, as the LeSabre turned right onto Broadway.

  “Unertl 8X, externally adjusted. The rifle’s been zeroed for five hundred yards.”

  You can fine-tune the setting in the field with the range-finder. “What about the stock?”

  “Standard sportsman’s,” he said, eyeing her legs hungrily.

  She ignored the indignity. “Suppressor?”

  “Look, the details are in the packet,” he said, tiring of her questions.

  Skyler found his impertinence offensive and was tempted to smack him to show him some manners. But he was nothing more than an errand boy and she would be wasting her time. Besides, she had more important concerns on her mind—like the assignment.

  She was not happy about the new conditions, but Plan A was still a damned good plan. True, there was now an added element of uncertainty since she would be using a rifle she had never fired before, and a model with which she was unfamiliar. But dropping a soft target from five hundred yards was not a difficult task for a shooter of her caliber. She would just have to make do.

  “What about the cartridges?” Skyler asked.

  “Explosive-tipped. Don’t ask me what kind.” He tapped on the suitcase. “It’s all in there. Just get it to Mr. Gomez. He’ll know what to do with it.”

  Skyler bit her lip to suppress her growing fury. “Will the target be wearing Kevlar?”

  “Won’t know until tomorrow.”

  The car turned onto Colfax, passed the Civic Center Plaza on the left, and took a right onto Fifteenth. “So it may take a head shot,” she said, thinking aloud. “That will make things difficult.”

  “Not my problem,” he said, looking at his watch. “Your guy’s supposed to be the best. He can figure it out.” His face took on a pernicious smirk. “And while he’s doing that, why don’t you and I go out tonight. I’ll show you a good time—a real good time.”

  This was too much for Skyler to take. Turning her thumb into a weapon, she jabbed him in the eye.

  He jerked back, groaning in agony.

  The driver jerked his head around. “What the fuck is going on back there?”

  “Nothing! Shut up and keep driving!”

  He did as instructed.

  She turned to the wounded man. “You must learn to treat women with respect.”

  “Jesus Christ, you could have blinded me!” he wailed, holding both hands over his eye.

  God, you’re pat
hetic. That was the thing about men: they could dish it out but they couldn’t take it. As soon as a woman stood up for herself, men inevitably cried foul and exaggerated their own suffering. If only they knew how lucky they were, how much harder it was to be a woman—every day dealing with boorish, lecherous, overbearing men.

  “Stop your whimpering—you’re acting like a child,” she scolded him.

  He sat up and looked at her sheepishly, still covering his eye.

  “I have one last question for you, and it’s in your best interest to answer it honestly,” she said, as the LeSabre turned onto Welton. “Who is my field contact—the same as last time?”

  “That’s need-to-know.”

  Skyler cut him a menacing look. The man’s eyes flashed fearfully.

  “Okay, okay. I’m dead serious—it really is need-to-know. Everything they want you to know is in there.” He pointed to the suitcase again.

  She squinted at him through disapproving eyes and called out to the driver. “Stop here!”

  The car pulled to the curb. Skyler picked up the suitcase, opened the door, and stepped out. Before closing the door, she leaned in, her look hard and narrow.

  “If I were you I’d learn better manners. That’s no way to treat a lady.”

  And with that, she quickly vanished into the crowd.

  CHAPTER 102

  SHE HIT SEVENTEENTH and headed to her hotel. She was staying at the Brown Palace, the Mile High City’s most historic lodging. It was built in 1892 when silver was king and the dusty old cowtown of Denver was a mere thirty-four years old and working mightily to live up to its new moniker as “The Queen City of the Plains.” Soon the grand, triangular-shaped building came into view: nine stories of granite and red sandstone blending the ruggedness of the West with the sophistication of the East Coast Gilded Age.

  Skyler crossed at Tremont and a dapperly dressed doorman opened the brass-handled door for her. Stepping inside, she walked past a small news shop and threaded her way through the soaring atrium lobby. Though lavishly appointed, it still exuded a certain rustic charm. Nine stories up, a stained glass canopy sparkled overhead. Important people had stayed here often, beginning in 1905 with Teddy Roosevelt. Inside the hallowed walls resided the whispered secrets of numerous presidents as well as powerful entrepreneurs, emperors, rock stars, and gods and goddesses of the stage and screen.

  Skyler headed for the elevator carrying her suitcase in her right hand. She took the elevator to the eighth floor and walked down the hallway to her room, carrying herself with an air of importance befitting a high-level executive.

  After securing both locks, she set the suitcase on the bed and took off her high heels. She pulled out her coded mobile and called Anthony at home. She longed to tell him how she felt about him, how all this would soon be over and they would be together again. She had spoken with him early this morning when she had touched down at DIA, but she needed to hear his voice again. She had already tried him twice today, but he hadn’t been in.

  The phone rang four times with no answer. She didn’t want to leave her voice on Anthony’s answering machine, so she hung up and decided to try again later.

  She went to the bed and opened the suitcase, pulling out the uniform, raid jacket, cap, pistol, CIRG badge, and binoculars and setting them on the bed. Over the next few minutes, she affixed a color photograph of herself to the badge and carefully sealed the ID with colorless, self-laminating plastic. Then she pulled a Florida driver’s license from her bag and compared it to the badge. Both ID’s bore the name Carey Firestone and showed a physically fit, thirty-something woman with close-cropped, platinum-blond hair and a small scar on the chin. Both pictures also bore a striking resemblance to a certain female FBI agent from the Miami field office. Except the real Carey Firestone had no scar.

  With the picture IDs in order, she donned the full uniform, including her false FBI creds, also in the name Carey Firestone. Examining herself in the mirror, she was pleased with the masquerade. She looked the part of a CIRG spotter perfectly. She would have no trouble making it through the checkpoints to her sniping position on the roof of the Denver Tribune Tower. The uniform, the binoculars, the creds—they made her look so official, so authorized.

  Tomorrow I will be Carey Firestone from the Miami field office.

  Of course, she would have to carefully alter her physical appearance to complete the transformation. After last night, the FBI would have put together a halfway decent sketch of her, or a computer-generated image of a female John Doe, although she had seen nothing on the Net or in the news yet. But changing physically—not just clothes but hair, eyes, and overall appearance—was never difficult for Skyler. Facial features could be altered with a simple actor’s kit. Height could be added or taken away, as could weight, through the clever application of padding. Though she preferred wigs, hair could be manipulated through coloring, combing, or cutting.

  From years of experience, she knew how to alter her appearance dramatically to achieve the desired effect. Male or female? Full-figured or slender? Old or youthful? Clothes were definitely a big part of it, but Skyler liked to think her facial expressions, contrived accents, and mannerisms were just as critical. Though people saw what they wanted to see in a person, she preferred to think of herself as an actress given the unenviable task of winning over an audience while handicapped with a horrendous script. She took pride in her own ability to become someone else, to transform herself and fool those around her with sheer skill and cunning.

  It was a part of the game she would miss.

  CHAPTER 103

  DECIDING TO RECON the target area before lunch, she took off her uniform, put everything back neatly in the suitcase, and placed it under the bed. Then she put on her green jogging outfit and running shoes. Before going out, she tried Anthony once more, but he still wasn’t in.

  My God, have the police picked him up?

  With this new source of worry weighing heavily on her mind, she took Welton to the Sixteenth Street Mall, hung a left, and jogged to the Denver Tribune Tower. The sky was dull pewter broken in places by white, wedge-shaped clouds with gray rims. The temperature had climbed into the midforties. She followed the walking ramp along the south side of the building until she reached a paved courtyard overlooking the Civic Center Plaza.

  She stopped to study the line of fire from the Tower to the speakers’ platform at the west end of the plaza, in front of the City and County Building. Five hundred yards plus, over trees, with a slight left to right crosswind if she made the shot today. It was unfortunate she had to use an unfamiliar rifle, but five hundred yards was five hundred yards. She could score ten-shot groups in a six-inch diameter circle, the equivalent of a head shot, with a .22 at that range—as long as the wind wasn’t too strong. Wind was the one critical element, for humidity, driving rain, and rising heat waves were not in the forecast for tomorrow. A lot depended on whether Fowler wore Kevlar. If she had to make a head shot in a fierce crosswind, tomorrow could prove one tough assignment.

  Resuming her jog, she headed south across Colfax, crossing at Lincoln. She passed a reddish-brown column with a sharp white point, the state’s war memorial for veterans of modern wars. There was an eclectic assortment of people in the plaza: nattily-clad business drones, homeless people, joggers like Skyler, state employees heading off for two hour lunches, and the occasional out-of-place-looking tourist. Skyler headed through a copse of trees where squirrels foraged about and chased one another. Overhead she saw a squadron of geese, flying south in tight formation, a symmetrical V against the pewter sky.

  Despite the chill, she was sweating now and her legs had found a pleasant rhythm. Soon she saw the newly erected platform where tomorrow Katherine Fowler would address a sorrowful nation. Standing in the same spot where William Kieger had fallen, Fowler would not only pay tribute to him, but defiantly protest the assassination. She would make a bold political statement, but Skyler knew it would be her last.

  She stopped runni
ng to check out the platform. She had to do so from a distance because the area was cordoned off. There were a dozen cops and several plainclothed law enforcement people who looked like Secret Service. Bomb-sniffing German shepherds were being led to the platform. Banks of magnetometers were set up at all the entrances to the enclosed area.

  Her mind drifted into the shooter’s netherworld—to holding patterns, crosshairs, mil dots, and windage adjustments. She flashed back to last Sunday, to Kieger’s exploding chest, to the spurting blood. She saw it clearly through her scope, as if he was standing right in front of her.

  And then a totally unexpected thing happened.

  She was suddenly overcome with lightheadedness. The world began to spin around her and she lost all sense of balance. Her mind went black and she swooned, falling hard to the pavement.

  When she came to minutes later, there were three strangers standing over her, a businesswoman and two policemen.

  “Are you all right there, miss?” one of the cops asked her, shaking her gently.

  She had no idea where she was. “What?” she mumbled, trying to blink away the fog.

  “Are you okay? You just fell down.”

  “Oh,” she said, and then she remembered fainting. “I was jogging and...I…I just collapsed. My blood sugar must be low.” She started to get up.

  “Here let me help you,” the other cop said, and he reached down to lift her up.

  “Thanks,” Skyler said, rubbing the back of her head. “I’ll be fine—I just need to get some food.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” the businesswoman asked.

  “In perfect working order,” Skyler said, giving an appreciative smile. “Thank you for helping me.” Without saying anything more she walked off.

  Heading towards Colfax, she wondered what was happening. Am I totally losing it, or just having second thoughts because Fowler’s a woman?