Jens said, “Vaughn?”
Naubek looked at Jens, quickly, sharply, then stepped off the curb, disappearing in the crowd.
The senator from Eatontown, having urged the crowd to vote and urge their friends to vote, brought his introduction to a climax: “And now, and now, and now I’d like to bring up a friend, a dear friend, a leader and a patriot, a man who needs no introduction, and will receive none further—”
Glancing at his notes, he introduced a congressman from Louisiana, who bounded up the stairs and launched into his speech, thanking Tommy Monahan, his lovely wife Irene, the mayor, the state rep, the state senator from Eatontown, God, and the good people of Louisiana and, of course, he added, veering from his blooper, other states as well.
“My friends,” the congressman began, his voice dropping an octave, growing grave, bouncing as an echo off the buildings in the square.
The motorcade had docked behind the stage by then, and Gretchen had her agents in position. She was standing by van one with Bobbie, Vi, and Tashmo. They would be the wedge. They would take the VP through the crowd. Gretchen drew this duty because she was never very far from the VP in a crowd. Bobbie drew it because Gretchen didn’t trust her to run her own position, a choke point or the stairs. Vi and Tashmo drew it because they had seen the screamer at the Marriott on Sunday night and might know the face if they saw it here today. They were standing in a loose diamond formation, Vi in front, closest to the crowd, Bobbie at Vi’s shoulder, Tashmo on the other, Gretchen a few steps to the back. They looked in their dark suits like a singing group with moves, the Pips or the Four Tops, left arms hanging loose, right hands at their belt lines as if covering their buckles. Gretchen was rechecking the perimeter. Vi heard it in her ear.
The snipers in the steeple said, We’re good.
The comm techs were ready to start jamming.
Herc said, My side A-Okay.
Elias said, We’re standing by.
The balloon wranglers gave Gretchen the thumbs-up.
“My friends,” said the congressmen again. “Today, we—no, you—will send a message—”
A cheer went up, spontaneous, unplanned, rolling from the back.
“No—no—no,” the congressman modestly refusing the acclaim.
The crowd was pressing to the front. Jens and Peta, moving through the tight-packed bodies toward the tabouli place, reached a point where further progress was impossible. They were near the volunteers, Jackie Kotteakis and the other Texas teachers, Tim the lawyer from Rhode Island, the tort reform zealots, the global warming Deadheads, the football kids from Maine, the stricken women from Mothers for the Truth—a Napoleonic square of volunteers, waiting, gripping signs, primed to give it up for the VP as soon as someone introduced him.
The congressman boomed through a list of the VP’s great achievements, his record of commitment, his deep belief in the binding causes of the day.
“He believes—as I believe—in the future.
“He believes—as you believe—in tomorrow.
“He believes—as you believe—in the family.
“He believes—as we believe—in the family and the future of the family in tomorrow—yes—and so I ask you, friends—I ask: what do we want?”
The phone-bank kids and volunteers whooped it up (they knew the chant). They shouted in two beats: “Re-form!”
“I can’t HEAR you,” said the congressman. “What do we want?”
The answer was disorganized—no answer, many answers, a buzzing in the square.
The congressman bore down: “What do we want?”
The volunteers were shouting—others picked it up: “Re-form!”
The chant was slowly building, louder and more unified each time.
“WHAT DO WE WANT?”
One voice now: “RE-FORM.”
“AND WHEN DO WE WANT IT?”
Gretchen banged on the van door. Vi saw a shoe, a sock, a pant cuff riding up, a flash of white ankle, and then the man himself, the vice president of the United States.
The vice president looked out at the screaming crowd, firmed his jaw, and said, “Crazy weather, huh?”
“Yes sir,” Gretchen said.
“Right here is where you want me?”
“Yes sir,” Gretchen said.
“Which way do I face?”
“The same way we are facing, sir.”
“—to join me in welcoming a hero of reform, a friend of education, a tireless battler for tort sanity—a great man and the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITE-IT STATES—”
The signs were dancing. The crowd was pressing in. The cops were linking arms. Vi was chewing gum, squinting at the steeple, casually unbuttoning her jacket.
Gretchen said, “All righty, Vi.”
It was Vi who led them in. The others followed, moving in formation toward choke gold. O’Teen and the troopers were drawing back the barriers, steel across the asphalt, opening a gate.
Vi hit the crowd and cleared a path, parting bodies with her hands, bulling with her shoulders, freely throwing elbows. The agents tried to stay in touch; they were literally touching, the tips of Bobbie’s fingers on Vi’s left shoulder, Tashmo’s hand on Vi’s right haunch. The VP, sandwiched between Bobbie and Tashmo, reached past and over them to shake the outstretched hands, reeling off his greeting, “Howyadoin, goodtaseeya, howyadoin.” Gretchen was behind him, forcing him toward the stairs up to the stage. The crowd surged around them and behind them, faces pressing in, hands reaching over arms to grab the VP’s hands. Some people couldn’t reach far enough and stuck their hands and wrists into the agents’ faces. Vi knocked these aside, scanning hands and faces, moving bodies.
She tried to stay in touch with the other agents, but the people shaking the VP’s hand were jostled from behind, and they lurched, pulling the VP a half step to the right or left, Tashmo’s side or Bobbie’s side, or pushing him back into Gretchen, and Vi, trying to plow a path, was also trying to hang back and stay in touch, but if she didn’t plow full force, two legs and both shoulders, she felt herself loose ground. She heard “Howyadoin, howyadoin, howyadoin,” and greetings from well-wishers all around them, yelled encouragement, applause, bluegrass music, grunts of shoving, Gretchen saying, “Move move move.” Just ahead, between the bodies, Vi saw a postal worker, who held some kind of helmet in his hand. Everyone was moving toward the VP or to the sides, or clapping, or yelling, or pumping a sign, except for this man, who wasn’t clapping or moving. This was all Vi noticed about the man until he opened his hand and let the helmet fall. It clattered in the street and someone kicked it into someone else’s feet and the helmet was kicked around at random until someone tripped on it, and nearly fell, and by then the postal worker had his hand inside his coat, and he brought it out with a magician’s flourish, like when the magician pulls a rabbit from the hat or shows you that the four of clubs has been in your ear the whole time. Vi tried to put the gun over the comm, but her hands were pinned below her shoulders by the force of bodies pressing in, and she couldn’t get her fist mike to her mouth, and the people were reaching and laughing and the VP was saying, “Goodtaseeya howyadoin reallygoodtaseeya,” and Vi went absolutely vacant—vacant even of her training—and she didn’t move. Tashmo shouted, “Gun gun!” and yanked the VP back toward choke gold, which felt to Vi like a great and sudden loss of weight at her back. Gretchen put in the comm, “Gun gun gun!” and Vi heard the SWATs and snipers take it up, Gun gun, like an echo falling off, and saw Bobbie, curling across the VP’s chest to block him from the shots, getting tangled in his legs as he tried to move. People in the crowd were starting to react, turning, screaming. Vi heard the snipers on the comm, barking something, what? Did they have a shot? She thought she’d see the man’s head explode from a steeple round, but the balloons bumping upward through the air were blocking the steeple.
The man seemed quite calm. Vi pushed her way toward him; the strange thing was that his head was sitting unexploded on his shoulders. She hit him half-running, c
ross-checking him, and he felt soft and yielding for a moment, but then he dipped a shoulder and threw out an arm, knocking Vi off-balance, and people, running now, hit her from two sides, and she fell to the street, and was kicked in the ribs and the face and the knee by running shoes. The man with the black pistol was standing over Vi, his gun arm out, but he wasn’t aiming or even looking at the VP. He was looking up, watching the balloons rise and disperse.
Vi was at the man’s feet when the shots hit. The first shot hit him in the back.
The second hit him in the head.
The agents ran the VP to the vans and evacuated Market Square. For the first few blocks, it was total pandemonium, sirens, squealing tires, aides and agents screaming, and every gun was drawn. Vi was bloody, face and blouse—was she hit? Was the VP hit? How many shooters was it? Did they get all of them, or both of them, or was there only one? The designated fallback for the rally was the parking lot of the public safety building on Hanover Street. They went there to regroup and assess the situation.
The VP wasn’t hit. He said he wasn’t hit and a careful check by EMTs found no wounds, no injuries of any kind except the cuts and bruises suffered when the agents had manhandled him to safety.
Vi was checked next. Gretchen found her sprawled out on the front bench of van two, shaking, pale, and groggy, splashed with blood and bits of bone, one shoe missing, her head in Bobbie’s lap. The EMTs came up, but Bobbie, fierce-eyed and protective, wouldn’t let go. Gretchen and Tashmo finally had to pull her off to give the EMTs some room.
Vi wasn’t hit. The mess on her clothes had been the splatter of the head shot when the snipers neutralized the gunman in the square. The EMTs gave Vi a blue cold pack for her jaw.
Gretchen turned away, hailing Boone Saxon, who was with the gunman’s body in the square. Boone said the scene was calm, the crowd dispersing quietly to the strains of bluegrass. He said it looked like two hits on the gunman, the head shot and a round through the chest.
Gretchen copied back. “You guys find a shoe? Lady’s, blue. Vi’s missing one.”
The snipers joined the team a few minutes later, bringing a few souvenir balloons, and Vi’s battered, flattened shoe, which Boone had found under a parked car.
The motorcade got rolling after that. The mood in the vans was oddly jubilant, Tashmo, Bobbie, and the others gabbing wildly, like a football team coming home from a big win, conducting a kind of group review of what they had been through, what each of them had done, or seen, or thought, or felt, at each unfolding moment in the square. Tashmo told the others how he saw the postal guy come out with the handgun, how he shouted Gun gun, which had started the alarm. The snipers picked the story up from there, how they heard Gun gun, waited for a break in the balloons, and took the shooter out. Bobbie told the others how she heard the warning, threw her body on the VP, helped run him toward choke gold, and so it went for twenty minutes in the van, stories and euphoria, and everyone took part, except for Gretchen, riding shotgun, and Vi, who held the cold pack to her cheek.
Behind the jubilation was relief and spent adrenaline, Gretchen knew. She thought it was best to let them play with the balloons and gabble on, and get it all out of their systems before the next ropeline. Gretchen thought they had a right to feel a little pride. After months of drilling, training, planning, and thousands of hours of gnawing, inconclusive tension on the ropes, they had finally met their Hinckley and defeated him. Gretchen knew her detail had never been especially close-knit, never had the semi-family feeling of some teams, no little pizza parties, no bring-the-kids-and-spouse cookouts at the chief-of-detail’s house. Part of this was Gretchen’s style, hard-nosed and remote. Part of it was Hinman, the great failure in the flood. After Hinman, the agents had gone their separate ways, or broken into cliques, as every losing team begins to fall apart. Gretchen listened to the snipers brag about their hits, and Bobbie laughing, and Tashmo bragging to O’Teen. She thought, well, here it is—we’re all together now, Market Square undid whatever Hinman did to us. She watched them work the next event, a quickie rope-line on a village green. They worked it well, fluidly and jitter-free, and it was good to see her people moving as a unit.
They were closing this event and fanning toward the vans when Boone hailed Gretchen from the square.
“Shooter’s name is Naubek, first name Vaughn,” reported Boone. “Resident of Portsmouth, single, lives alone, no link, repeat no link, to the U.S. Postal Service. He’s a computer programmer, laid off yesterday.”
Gretchen saw her people pausing on the green, listening to Boone. Herc was nodding at O’Teen. Tashmo, one foot on the runner of the van, was nodding to himself. Boone was confirming something of importance to the agents. They recognized Vaughn Naubek as your classic shooter type, a loser with job trouble, a Hinckley or an Oswald, a shithead misfit who is pissed that history is leaving town without him. The Service existed to keep this type outside the margins of the story.
“We have his gun,” Boone said. “Smith nine, no clip. Chamber’s empty too. It makes no sense.”
Gretchen wished that Boone had called her on the cell, rather than the comm, so that the detail would not have heard this. But it was too late now.
She shouted down the line of idling vans, “Move it, Herc. You too, Bobbie, get your rear in gear.”
“Another thing,” said Boone. “Naubek had a note in the pocket of his shirt. Snipers put a round through it when they blew his chest out, so what we’ve got is fragments here, I’m not even sure I’ve got the order right.”
Boone read what he had—
To Whom It May Concern…
…no choice but to…
…test against…
…so that my message could be…
…I am not a “crazy”…
…shuttle…
…O-ring…
…engineer…
…my mother and my sister Ruth…
Remember me.
Vaughn Naubek
The aides and campaign handlers kept up their bright banter on the village green, but the agents in their midst were frozen, blank-faced, listening. The meaning of the empty gun was plain enough: in service of some muddled protest, Vaughn Naubek had summoned his community, and the VP and his press crew, to watch and film a public suicide.
The vans got on the road and the bodyguards were silent for a time.
“I don’t buy it,” Tashmo finally said.
Everyone agreed and the talking started up again, the round-robin storytelling, how Tashmo saw the gun and put it on the comm, how Bobbie covered the VP, how O’Teen cleared the route back through choke gold. It was a righteous shooting, clean, proficient, necessary. It was their will against Naubek’s in the crowd. He had come to kill the VP; they had turned his will aside. The notion of the shooting as a suicide-by-Dome implied the opposite: Naubek had controlled them in the square.
“Probably the wrong gun,” Tashmo said.
“Or they lost the clip,” said Herc.
“That’s what happened,” said O’Teen. “The clip ejects when Naubek’s struggling with Vi. It gets kicks around in the confusion and now it’s down a storm drain and they’ll never find it.”
Gretchen said, “Forget about the clip. You did good work today.”
“I saw a clip,” said Bobbie. “Now that I think about it, yes.”
Tashmo said, “Me too. I remember it distinctly.”
Bobbie said, “Hey Vi, are you okay up there?”
Vi was in the first bench behind Gretchen and the driver. Vi’s jaw was absurdly swollen. She said with a thick tongue, “I’m fine.”
Bobbie said, “Did the clip pop out when you were fighting with that guy?”
“That’s what happened,” O’Teen said. “I took a class on crime scenes when I was in Crim. You reconstruct from data, see? The clip pops out and gets kicked down a storm drain. Did Boone even bother checking storm drains?”
Vi shifted the cold pack from her right hand to the left. She was trying to so
rt out what had happened in the square. She kept seeing the strange magician’s flourish with which Naubek had brought the pistol out, and remembering the way his body had felt when she finally fought her way to him, the slack weight, the passivity—a living man—more like an empty bag.
She said, “There was no clip.”
“Aw bullshit,” Tashmo said.
“You couldn’t see,” said Herc. “You were on the fucking ground—you couldn’t see one way or another, Vi.”
Vi turned to face the other agents in the back benches of the van. She made this movement slowly, gingerly, because her head was throbbing.
She said, “All we did today was fulfill a wish.”
The phrase was mincing, cruel, fulfill a wish.
They had left the coast by then, the string of village greens and ancient harbor towns. They were crossing through the mountains, sixty miles overland to Manchester. Halfway there, they encountered snow. The country disappeared into the gray of flurries and the darker gray of road. The vans slowed to a crawl. The agents, bored, turned their attention back to Vi who was facing front again and trying to nod off.
O’Teen said, “Yo Vi, let me ask you something, since you know so much—”
“She doesn’t know shit,” said Herc.
Bobbie said, “Don’t pick on her. She can be wrong if she wants to.”
Gretchen in the front seat thought, well, this is how it ends—we were almost all together for a minute there, but then they had to go and fuck it up.
“I’m not picking on her,” O’Teen said.
“Your tone is not what I’d call pleasant,” Bobbie said.
Tashmo said, “Oh please.”
Vi stared straight ahead, ignoring all of them.
O’Teen said, “I’m serious. I’ve got a forensic question here. This will shed some light. Yo Vi, let me ask you—Yo Vi, turn around.”
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