The Fourth Perimeter

by Tim Green

  Kurt felt the beast inside him stirring. Images of Collin and Annie cascaded into his consciousness against his will. He felt suddenly weary, weary beyond anything he’d ever known. He blinked and shook his head. He ran his hand over his face. They were gone. He had to stop thinking about them. He had to focus. He had to kill this man and he had to get away. If he wavered, he would fail.

  “It wasn’t me!” the president begged, his eyes wide with terror. “I promise you, whatever you think! I didn’t have your son or anyone killed!”

  The president spoke fast now, so fast he was nearly incomprehensible. “That meeting was nothing to me! It was with Alan Pimber! Alan Pimber, the vice president, and Brian Yale, the chairman of Global Software! They wanted to meet about the same thing you did. They wanted me to drop the Internet tax! It was nothing to me! If anything, it was them! Yale came out of the house and threatened me. I have nothing to hide from that meeting! You can ask David Claiborne. He set it up. You used to work with Claiborne. Ask him. Ask him. Don’t do this! Don’t!”

  Kurt’s face had grown tight as the president spoke, and when Parkes mentioned Claiborne, he jumped to his feet involuntarily with the gun still leveled at the president’s head.

  Cries rang out from all directions amid the deafening shots. Kurt dropped his gun as he dove over the side. The president went down hard to the deck of the fishing boat. In midair, Kurt’s body was spun by the impact of a bullet. He twisted in pain, splashed down into the water, and began to sink. Bullets rained down on the spot where he’d gone in and the water grew cloudy with blood.

  CHAPTER 37

  From the front window of Kabuki, a small but chic Japanese restaurant in the middle of town, Jill sat looking across the street at a swatch of grass: a village park alongside the lake. Birds flew in and out of a weathered martin house that sat atop a tall wrought-iron pole. The house, like many of the hundred-year-old homes of the village, was Victorian, painted white, with a high-peaked roof and decorative trim. Mottled chicks barked greedily as their harried parents delivered small insects and an occasional struggling dragonfly. Jill poked disinterestedly at her salad as she watched them, the dark purple males and the charcoal gray females, swooping to and fro over the water, returning like clockwork to the colony of nests and their young.

  Human families milled about on the grass below. Some sat on green park benches eating ice cream and gazing out at the water, while others had entire dinners spread out over their faded blankets. A majestic old tour boat, the Judge Ben Wiles, bursting with festive tourists, tooted sonorously as it backed free from its moorings for its nightly dinner cruise. The entire community, in fact, was festive. The first real visit by a sitting president somehow created an atmosphere that wasn’t unlike an amalgamation of the Fourth of July and Christmas.

  But Jill wasn’t feeling any of that. The knot in her stomach made eating a strictly mechanical function without taste or pleasure. Her brow was furrowed and the waiter who bubbled up to her table to ask her if everything was all right couldn’t help but frown defensively when he saw Jill’s face.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said wanly, then spun around in her chair to see the disturbance outside the window.

  The entire village suddenly erupted with sirens. Police cars and ambulances soon sped into the center of town, stopping traffic and scattering people in the park with two long lines of yellow tape that stretched from the street to the dock where the Judge Ben Wiles had embarked. An ambulance backed up over the curb and across the grass right up to the dock. Village police, sheriffs, and state troopers appeared and stood alongside their parked cars with their doors open and their radios filling the street with a cacophony of strident noise.

  Jill stood involuntarily, her napkin dropping to the floor. She rose in confusion, took a twenty from her purse, dropped it on the table next to a half-finished glass of Riesling, and walked out of the restaurant into the street. News that the president had been shot was in the air like the pervasive hum of crickets in an evening meadow. Everyone seemed to know. People on the now silent street spoke in hushed whispers. Jill’s attention too was drawn to the police scarab racing straight for town with its lights flashing and sirens wailing.

  She stood frozen on the sidewalk, craning her neck along with the older couple next to her to get a glimpse of the body the agents were unloading from the boat and into the ambulance. Men dressed as fishermen but bearing heavy automatic weapons climbed into the back. The doors were slammed shut and the ambulance raced up out of the park and into the street, where it was engulfed in a convoy of Secret Service Suburbans and police cruisers that as a group rocketed off through the middle of town.

  A low moan escaped Jill’s throat and she felt her feet carrying her steadily down the street toward the Sherwood Inn. Her strides became a lope and her lope a full run.

  “No, no, no,” she groaned, dashing for her car in the back of the inn.

  The tires of her Spider shrieked as she tore out into the side streets of the village. She found West Lake Road and punched the accelerator, pushing the little car until it began to shake. She was forced to slow as she passed the house, since police cruisers still lined either side of the road just outside the driveway. But once she was clear, she floored the little car again, pushing it for all it was worth all the way to Jeremiah’s farm.

  She turned off the road and rocks careened up into the undercarriage, shooting out from under the car like popcorn. A smoky trail of dust followed her up the hill. When she saw the house, she jammed on her brakes, flipped off the engine, and bounded up the front steps and in through the front door.

  “Jeremiah!” she screamed. “Jeremiah!”

  She raced through the house, knowing somehow that it was empty, but wanting to make sure. When she went out the back, the big barn gaped obscenely at her, its big doors yawning wide.

  “Jeremiah!” she cried, running across the grass and down the hill into the dark opening.

  Streamers of sun burst through the seams in the old barnboard walls, and motes of dust gyrated wildly in the stripes of light. In the sudden gloom, Jill saw nothing. Then, slowly, as her eyes adjusted, the dark picture revealed itself to her. The cruiser sat in the middle of the barn, its waning headlights burning faintly yellow. Teeth of glass glinted dully in the broken rear window and Jill’s eyes were drawn down to the large body that lay there, branded by pinstripes of light, lifeless on the dirt floor.

  She groaned and ran to Jeremiah. Something between a gasp and a scream burst from her mouth. A dark veil of bluebottle flies scattered from his face, revealing a dime-sized purple hole just above his left eye. The sticky crimson mask of blood that had erupted from his mouth and nose now mottled his face and his extinguished eyes stared blankly into space.

  The rank smell of death and ripe hay filled Jill’s nostrils and she vomited her salad out onto the dusty floor. Sobbing, she staggered back out of the barn, gasping for clean air. Even with her stomach empty, she continued to retch, sick with the sight of death, even sicker with the thought that Kurt could have done such a thing.

  CHAPTER 38

  David Claiborne was the first to draw and the first to fire. That’s because he knew all along what was going to happen. Reeves and Vanecroft belonged to him and they had given him the information that let him know everything was going according to plan—his plan. In the confusion of shots and the boats racing toward the president, he wasn’t absolutely sure if he’d hit Ford. He was confident, however, that Ford had done what he was supposed to do. He’d seen the president go down, that was for sure. And he had bet everything on Kurt Ford’s effectiveness.

  It was the same effectiveness that had never failed his old friend, the same effectiveness that had made Kurt a billionaire while he himself had toiled on as a government employee. Claiborne easily recalled Kurt’s irritating competence at every bend in the road. So it seemed quite fitting that the very thing that had goaded Claiborne from the beginning and left him in Kurt’s perpetual wake w
as the thing that would even the score.

  Claiborne knew better than anyone that of all the men on the face of the earth, none was better situated to carry out an assassination of the president of the United States. There were other retired Secret Service agents who could also have used their knowledge to penetrate the president’s protection. But even if such men were as capable as Ford, none were as rich, and none were as easily manipulated as the one whose own son was so closely connected to the president. It was a perfect plan and it had been executed to the letter.

  Claiborne knew well the vice president’s ruthlessness. The man was bereft of scruples. Claiborne had spent many hours in close proximity to Alan Pimber and had earned his trust over several years’ time by becoming the person the vice president could go to if he wanted things done outside the box. When the Internet tax issue was born, Claiborne saw his opportunity to finally cash in. He knew that billions were at stake and he knew the vice president had alliances with the one man who had the most to lose. Brian Yale was the reason Alan Pimber was in the office of vice president to begin with. With monumental fortunes in the balance, Claiborne knew that if he could come up with a plan to save them, he could extract a heavy price.

  Twenty million dollars, that was his take. Like Kurt Ford, Claiborne too had mechanisms in place that would allow him to disappear and spend his money with impunity. Unlike Ford, Claiborne probably wouldn’t have the NSA, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the CIA hunting him down for the rest of his life. Claiborne’s patron would be ensconced in the White House, the most powerful man in the world. He would veto the Internet tax, preserving the monetary power of Yale and others. The perfect plan would be complete.

  The scarab swerved up to the fishing boat and the agent at the helm reversed it hard, coming to a full stop. As the wake heaved the scarab up and down, Claiborne and two other agents jumped into the fishing boat. The president lay prone on the deck and Claiborne fought a wicked grin when he saw the copious puddle of blood pooling underneath his face. The two younger agents looked to him for the next move. None of them had a chance to do anything before there was a terrific thud and a new scramble of men as Mack Taylor launched himself into the boat from the other scarab and went straight for the president.

  Taylor scooped the body up as if it were nothing more than a suit bag and immediately made for the stern of the boat. The second scarab had secured itself alongside, and Taylor handed the president over to two waiting agents without a backward glance. When the president’s body was on board, he turned on Claiborne with a disdainful glare and said, “Did you get him? I saw blood in the water.”

  “I think I did,” Claiborne said.

  Taylor nodded and yelled back to Claiborne again as he hopped on board the scarab. “You stay back and tell the state police what you saw. I’m getting him out of here!”

  With that, the second scarab took off like a rocket for the shore, with Taylor barking into his radio, directing the motorcade to meet him in the village. With intense satisfaction, Claiborne looked down at the blood on the deck where the president had lain. He had a strong urge to dial up the vice president. His phone, the one he used to communicate with Reeves and Vanecroft, was secure. Instead, he turned to his men and said, “Tie up our boat.”

  The earpiece in his left ear was filled with the panicked cries of agents ordering other agents to move quicker, drive faster, and get the appropriate civilian facilities prepped for the president’s arrival. He knew they would be taking him to Community General Hospital. He’d done that advance work himself. He also felt confident from what he’d seen that none of that would matter. The president would arrive only to be pronounced dead. The body would be taken immediately to Air Force One and flown back to Washington.

  Claiborne dialed up Captain Shultz, his liaison with the New York State Troopers. He knew that while they would have to share this investigation with the FBI, the troopers would take the assassination as a personal failure. They would react fast and furiously.

  Shultz was surprisingly calm, but intense. He took all the information Claiborne gave him and paused for a minute to think before he began laying out for Claiborne his plan of action. He would dispatch divers from police helicopters to look for the assailant’s body. He would enlist the help of a nearby squadron of army Comanche helicopters to help his own aircraft scour the area in the event of Ford’s escape. He would set up a loose ring of roadblocks preliminarily, and then reinforce them if the body wasn’t found in the water. Finally, he had three other scarabs in the region as well as at least two sheriff’s boats he could borrow to get more men out on the water.

  Claiborne assured him that the scarabs the Service was using would be at his disposal as well. “We don’t have any jurisdiction over the investigation,” he told Shultz. “This thing belongs to you and the Feds.”

  It was only minutes before Claiborne saw a pair of police helicopters pop up over the horizon. They came screaming across the lake like missiles, then pulled up fast. Together they hovered in the air over either side of the two boats just ten feet above the water’s surface, blasting everything with wind and spray. The back doors slid open and divers in full gear appeared. One after another they dropped into the water, plunging down into the clear green depths until they were gone from sight.

  Claiborne knew that Kurt’s escape plan had something to do with underwater gear, but he had no idea exactly what. Reeves had informed him only that Ford had received a shipment of gear and taken it down to his boat, where he had proceeded out onto the lake. None of that had been Claiborne’s concern, but he wondered about it now. He certainly couldn’t inform the state police about what he knew.

  And even if he could, he wouldn’t. If Ford were to be killed during his escape, that would be the best thing. But if he did somehow survive, Claiborne certainly hoped he would get away. Kurt’s capture had the potential to complicate his own situation by linking him to Leena Ventone’s murder. And even though Claiborne was prepared for a quick disappearance, he preferred to fade out slowly, neat and clean.

  The second scarab soon returned from shore with Captain Shultz aboard. Claiborne talked quietly with him on the deck of his own boat before the captain vaulted back over the side and disappeared belowdecks with two of his lieutenants.

  Despite his mask of bereaved concern, time passed pleasantly for Claiborne as he stood alone out on the scarab’s broad bow taking in the late afternoon sun. He had escaped to the bow to be alone and out of the way of the frantic troopers. A mountainous range of clouds drifted in from the west, scattering the sunshine and bringing with it a breeze. The faintest hint of a farmer fertilizing his field was carried out over the water and the deep green hillsides glowed in patches where broad beams of sun sneaked through the thickening sky.

  It was a beautiful summer day, but Claiborne was the only man out there who could truly enjoy it. The rest of them, even the lowest-level agent and cop, were grinding their insides, trying to scrub away the guilt of having failed in their most important mission, and wondering what they could have done to prevent what had just happened. Finally, one of the divers from the police search-and-rescue team swished to the surface and pulled off his mask. Shultz burst up out of the cabin and leaned over the stern.

  “There’s nothing down here, sir,” the diver exclaimed. “We can’t find a body. We can’t find anything. The water intake valve is down here. I don’t know, maybe his body got sucked into it. There’s a hole in one side where it’s rusted away.”

  “Keep looking,” Shultz commanded sternly, then turned and disappeared back down into the cabin.

  Claiborne was tickled by the news. He imagined Kurt’s wounded body being sucked up into a giant water intake. That would finish him off neatly if there were anything left to finish.

  In his ear, he was surprised to suddenly hear Mack Taylor’s voice. “David,” the SAIC said gruffly, “the president would like to know if Ford was killed.”

  Claiborne staggered, slipped, and almos
t fell overboard. His insides gave a startling wrench and he felt certain he would retch. Dizzy, he told himself that he must have heard Taylor incorrectly.

  “The president?” he said weakly into his lapel. “Mack, I thought— Is the president all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Taylor responded curtly. “He got a concussion and broke his nose when he dove to the deck. He’s bruised and a little bloody, but he’s fine. We’re on our way to Air Force One and he’d like to know if Ford was killed.”

  “Ford?” Claiborne muttered in horror. “We don’t know . . .”

  CHAPTER 39

  Kurt was so cold the insides of his bones ached. For the first couple hours of his desolate journey, the evening sun had filtered faintly down through the glowing green water, but now the night was absolute. Only the dim glow from his GPS and the lighted display of his dive computer kept him from wondering if he hadn’t gone blind. The cruel cold and the vast darkness made him think of Collin. The last memory of his boy was his body being slid into the cold and the dark, a drawer in the morgue. But there had been nothing left of Collin, not really. Kurt, however, was very much alive.

  For how much longer he didn’t know. The bullet that had pierced his side left a wound that now throbbed like a diesel engine straining up a hill. He had no way of knowing what kind of internal damage had been done. He knew the bullet had passed through. When he stripped his shirt off underwater, replacing it with his wet suit, he could see the entry hole halfway down his rib cage on the left side of his body, pumping blood into the water in great clouds. He was also able to just feel the exit wound midway down his back where the slug had punched through the muscle. That was comforting anyway, that he wasn’t carrying the bullet around with him.