by Rawlin Cash
He looked up. He’d done it. He’d crossed the Rubicon.
The response?
He waited.
Silence.
It seemed to go on for an eternity. No one was applauding. They were stunned. He sensed the mood of the chamber and knew he needed to keep talking.
“This is not a question of isolating a few recalcitrant governments. This is a question of standing up to global forces that are seeking, ever more vociferously, to isolate us. This is not a question of dominating the globe. This is a question of keeping our seat at the table. This is a question of putting our foot down and standing up to the forces around the world that hate us, before they overwhelm us.”
He stopped. He looked at the crowd. He’d done all he could do. If this failed, so be it. At least he’d be remembered for something. At least he’d stood for something.
Slowly, one by one, every man and woman in the chamber, every Republican and Democrat, every congress member and senator, every judge of the supreme court, every cabinet member, rose to their feet.
And then they began to applaud.
He looked at Emily. She nodded at him and in a rare moment of flamboyance, he blew her a kiss. The crowd grew even louder. He’d never been the darling of the media, he’d never had the cool factor that some of his opponents seemed able to harness at will, but in this moment, he knew he’d finally done it. He’d told the people, finally, after years of equivocation and dicking around, after years of business as usual, what they already knew to be the truth.
The world was a bad place.
The Russians and the Chinese were not their friends.
The formerly third world countries who were rapidly catching up were not their friends.
If the worst happened, the Europeans would not be reliable.
They needed to fight.
They needed to fight now.
If American didn’t stand now, it might never be strong enough to do so again.
He looked over the audience, the lights of the television crews, the flashes of the cameras, the applause of the entire nation, and then, a flash of light.
There was no mistaking it. It was different from the camera flashes.
He never heard it. He hardly felt it.
A seven millimeter, 175 grain, soft point bullet hit his chest at over two thousand feet per second. On impact, the bullet’s soft metal expanded with over three thousand foot pounds of energy and spread out to the size of a clenched fist. It was a hell of a gut punch.
The exit wound tore through his back and sprayed blood and flesh onto Gary Walker and Jennifer Blackmore, who also happened to be the first and second in the presidential line of succession. The blood on Jennifer’s virginal white dress created an image at least as memorable as the most famous photos of the Kennedy assassination.
President Jeremiah Eugene Jackson swayed and fell to the ground, dead before he hit the floor.
He never stood a chance.
Nine
Jeff Hale was in the wings of the chamber with other security personnel when the shot was fired.
When he saw the impact he didn’t believe his own eyes. He’d been rapt by the speech. The president, for once, was doing a good job of the delivery. The message was resonating. The American people, as Hale had long ago intuited, were chomping at the bit to stand up to Russia and China.
What was the point of being the most powerful nation on earth if you were afraid to face up to anyone?
He’d been getting live feedback of public sentiment from Fawn and his own SIGINT team. Audiences across all demographics were responding better than expected.
And then a bullet. From nowhere.
He never even heard it.
Hale looked instantly toward the gallery.
It was the only place the bullet could possibly have come from. But he didn’t understand how. At that moment in time, the State of the Union address was the most secure location on earth. All agencies were called in to do their part, intelligence and military, as well as the secret service and law enforcement.
Getting an unauthorized person into the chamber, never mind a firearm, was so difficult as to be almost inconceivable.
Shooting from the chamber floor was unimaginable. The shooter would have had to be one of the highest officials in the government, a holder of elected office, or their plus one. They would also have had to do it in plain sight. The seating was arranged in such a way that there was nowhere to hide. Television cameras, security personnel, not to mention the eyes of the president himself, were squarely on the guests on the chamber floor.
That only left the gallery. There were technicians up there, film crews, lighting guys.
A gun hidden in a camera or light? That was the only thing Hale could think of.
In the chaos that surrounded him, Hale climbed over seats, pushed past senators and congressional staffers, and got out to the antechamber where the gallery exited. Anyone coming down from the gallery would have to pass through that room. It was a long, open space with high columns and a white marble floor.
Two grand staircases swept into it, each from a different end of the gallery.
Hale stood halfway between the two of them, watching.
The room had been a staging area and was packed with media people, their wires and cameras, and those feather-covered microphones they used.
Secret service personnel rushed through the crowd with the president’s medical team. Hale knew they were already too late. No one was surviving that shot.
People immediately began coming down from the gallery. Hale searched for ushers or capitol police officers to manage the crowd but there was no one. They were all focused on the president.
The secret service were doing their job, but the capitol police protocol had failed. There should have been armed teams in the antechamber preventing people from leaving the gallery until they could be questioned and searched.
Hale strained to see the faces of the people rushing down the staircases. He glanced back and forth between them, looking at everyone, not sure what he was looking for. He’d know it when he saw it, he told himself.
He looked around again for security.
Where the fuck was everyone?
He pulled his phone from his pocket and called Fawn.
“The shot came from the gallery,” he said.
“Are you sure?” she said.
Of course he wasn’t sure. How could he be?
“I’m watching the stairs now. Can you send security to the west anteroom. Whoever took that shot is about to pass through this room completely unopposed.”
“On their way.”
“Jesus Christ,” Hale said, as people flowed down the stairs and out toward the rotunda where they’d mix with the main audience leaving the chamber. “There’d better be a fucking detail out there,” he said.
“The building’s already been sealed,” Fawn said. “Whoever it is, he won’t get farther than the rotunda.”
Hale grimaced. It was a mess.
“We’re running facial analysis on everyone in the gallery now,” Fawn said. “They were all screened a dozen times though. If we had anything, they would already have been flagged.”
“How many people were on that gallery?”
“I’ll find out.”
He knew there were hundreds, mostly press. He was watching the north stairs when something caught his eye. A man pushing through the crowd trying to get ahead.
Hale made for the staircase. There were so many people in front of him he had to shove his way forward. It gave away his approach.
The man on the stairs saw him. He turned to go back up.
“Hey,” Hale shouted, making his way up the stairs.
The man made slow progress, fighting against the flow of people. Hale gained on him, pushing his way forward. He was within arm’s reach when the man vaulted over the rail and leapt down to the marble floor below. It was a fall of over twenty feet but it was broken by a television crew below.
> Hale’s instinct was to leap after him but the height stopped him. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He’d get hurt.
He rushed back down the staircase, calling out for security, for anyone, to stop the man.
Hale had seen the man’s face. It was pallid, blank. He knew it was some sort of mask.
He pushed forward but the man was fast. Hale saw him disable three capitol police officers before reaching the rotunda and disappearing into a fresh crowd.
The building was on lockdown but Hale knew this man had an escape plan. If he was smart enough to get in with a weapon and get a shot off, he was smart enough to figure a way out.
Hale ran toward the rotunda. He was losing ground on the man.
“Call for backup,” he yelled at one of the officers as he passed.
He pushed into the rotunda but he didn’t know where to look. There were people everywhere, senators and congress members and their guests, their wives and partners, everyone in gowns and tuxedos, not a security officer to be seen.
He looked desperately in every direction.
Above him, the majestic dome of the capitol glowed like a beacon, oblivious to the violence just committed.
And then the power went out.
For a brief second, the entire capitol was in darkness. The golden interior of the dome went black. A hush came over the throng. There was a moment of silence, the briefest of seconds, and then the sound of frightened people calling out in the darkness.
Hale listened.
Then the emergency generators came on and the equipment rebooted back to life. The lights flickered on with a quivering of electrical current.
“Fawn?” he said into the phone.
“I don’t know what caused that,” she said.
Hale spun three-sixty. “He just passed through the rotunda,” he said.
“We have eyes but we don’t see him.”
“Watch the east and west exits from the rotunda. Man in a navy blue peacoat. Probably unarmed.”
“DC Metro have the building surrounded. They’re waiting at the steps.”
Hale looked toward both exits. The west led to the national mall. He could see the blue and red glow of the police cars flashing outside in the rain.
“Anything?” he said, but as he spoke, he saw a commotion at the security post.
“West exit,” Fawn said.
Hale ran for the exit. More capitol police officers were on the ground. Some were unconscious. The target was already outside the building on the front steps.
“He’s not getting out,” Fawn said. “I see him. DC Metro have the steps covered.”
“He’s dangerous,” Hale said, running for the doors.
He drew his sidearm as he approached.
He could see the target outside on the steps. About a dozen police vehicles were lined up on the street. Police officers, taking cover behind the doors of their vehicles, had their guns pointed at the man. Helicopters in the sky shone powerful spotlights on him. Even television crews, already there to cover the address, were capturing the scene and beaming it live around the world.
A hundred seconds after pulling the trigger, the assassin was already famous.
He looked around desperately. He was trapped.
Hale stepped toward the doors. They were automatic and kept trying to close before reopening.
A police officer with a megaphone told the man to put his hands in the air. The man looked up at the helicopters. He saw the red dots of laser sights on his body.
“Put your hands in the air,” the policeman repeated.
Hale raised his weapon and held it out in front of him.
The man put his hands in the air.
The police told him to turn around and he did so. He was facing Hale now.
Hale stepped forward.
The man’s face was unnatural. Someone had professionally applied a mask to trick the facial recognition systems. The clay gave the man a curiously blank expression, like he didn’t care he was caught.
Hale was about to step out through the doors when a metal canister fell onto the steps behind the man. It bounced along the ground about halfway between the assassin and the police vehicles. It had been fired from somewhere in the park beyond the line of police vehicles.
Hale didn’t think. He didn’t process the information.
He instantly leapt for cover, and a second later, an explosion shattered the glass of the doors in front of him and sent a shockwave through the rotunda. People fell backwards and Hale himself was blown back away from the blast.
He heard gunfire outside from the police but it stopped when more canisters landed on the steps and began releasing smoke.
Hale was dazed. His ears were ringing. His vision was blurred and his eyes stung.
He’d lost his gun.
He saw the silhouette of the assassin getting to his feet. The man had been flung back into the rotunda also and from the way he was moving, Hale could tell he was injured. He was struggling to get up, slowly regaining his bearings. He limped forward toward one of the disabled police officers and picked up his gun. Then he shot the officer in the forehead.
He took another few steps and executed another.
Then he came toward Hale.
In the dust and smoke, they could barely make out each other’s forms. They definitely couldn’t see faces. Behind the man, the police still hadn’t regrouped.
Hale could hardly see anything through the thick smoke, but he saw the man raise his gun and point it at him.
Hale didn’t have his gun, but he rose his arm in response, forming the shape of a gun with his hand and pointing his finger at the man, like a child playing at shooting.
The man pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked empty.
Hale thought the assassin said something then, but through the deafening ring in his head he couldn’t make out what it was.
Then the man was running again, directly through the rotunda toward the east face of the building.
Ten
Fawn Aspen was at the CIA Aerial Command Center in Langley, Virginia, heading the overwatch team. It was a delicate mission. The facility had been built to command overseas air strikes, drone strikes over Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria. Tonight, she was flying armed drones over Washington DC while the entire leadership of the nation was concentrated in a single building. Theoretically, she could issue an order to decapitate the entire chain of command, right down to the designated survivors.
Every decision she made over the next few minutes would be analyzed by hundreds of critical eyes at dozens of military and congressional agencies and departments. Even if she did everything right, this could very well end her career.
A wall of screens in front of her fed live satellite, drone, and closed circuit imagery to her team. She had access to Secret Service and Capitol Police body cams. Under the new regulations passed by President Jackson after the cartel crisis, she also had direct access to any available military and law enforcement resource she needed.
The screen she was most interested in was the high-resolution infrared feed from a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper. This hunter-killer drone was cruising over the capital at an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet and was armed with two AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, and two five-hundred pound GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bombs. No one imagined such heavy ordnance would ever be used domestically, but it was available nonetheless.
“Descend to strike altitude,” Fawn said.
On the screen, she could see the white and green shape of the target as he exited the capitol building from the east side of the rotunda.
“Get a facial on that guy,” she said. “I want to be sure.”
The system began analyzing data from cameras on the ground, trying to positively ID the attacker. It was obviously him, but she had to do this by the book.
“Match positive,” the drone operator said. “Identity confirmed.”
All that meant was that he was the same man who’d faced
off against the police on the other side of the building a minute earlier.
He was heading north through the grassy area between the capitol and the visitor center.
“Lock target,” she said.
She couldn’t order a strike where he was, he was still too close to the building.
The marker came up on the screen indicating a good lock. The man was running fast. He turned and made for East Capitol Street. The path would take him directly between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress.
The lock wouldn’t do her any good if he entered a building or went underground. The area was full of tunnels, underground parking lots, multiple subway stations.
She didn’t have much time before he disappeared.
“Who have we got on the ground?”
“Only DC Metro, ma’am.”
“Where the fuck are they then?”
There were dozens of police vehicles in the vicinity but no one was chasing the target. All she needed was one cop with good aim to clip this guy. If he could be taken out by law enforcement, it would save her from entering a minefield of political and constitutional controversy. Ordering a drone strike on a lone gunman in downtown DC, even if that man had just shot the president, was not going to win her points with the civil liberties groups.