No Safe Place (63 page)

Nate glanced at Lee, openly watching him now. “You know what
I
think?” Nate asked, more quietly yet. “Kilcannon didn’t want her to do it, and was willing to risk his career. So he’s not a hypocrite …”

“Maybe not. But maybe that’s why it keeps spilling over into his campaign.” Jane paused briefly. “The pressure’s building. We may decide to go with what we have, on Tuesday. Sheila’s got the first draft written.”

Lee and the last stragglers began filing toward the plane. “Talk to me first,” Nate said hastily, and hung up.

Sean found Rick Ginsberg standing outside the barriers on the edge of Justin Herman Plaza.

There was a platform now, a sound system, and, across the plaza, press bleachers. In the distance, buses full of volunteers had begun to arrive and were waiting in a holding area. But the plaza itself was eerily empty; inside the barriers, a few Secret Service agents with sleek dogs or metal detectors walked slowly through the area, eyes downcast, like archaeologists on a dig. Feverish, Sean felt the weight of the gun inside his jacket.

Ginsberg checked his watch. “Where’s Kate?” he asked.

Sean shook his head.

Ginsberg stared at him, openly worried. “She gave you a ride last night, didn’t she?”

This time, Sean nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

Ginsberg seemed to scrutinize him further, eyes briefly moving to his speckled jacket. “Did you get your Social Security number? I’m going to need it.”

Reaching into his back pocket, Sean withdrew a slip of paper and handed it to Ginsberg; in pencil, Sean had scribbled the number 486-24-2119.

Ginsberg glanced at it and, without comment, began to look for Ted Gallagher.

The agent was near the press bleachers, talking on a cell phone. At the edge of the barrier, Rick waited for him to get off the phone, then called out.

Sean watched helplessly.

Gallagher walked to the barrier and took the paper from Rick’s hand. Ginsberg inclined his head toward Sean;
Gallagher glanced over, nodding, and squinted at the numbers.

It was the Social Security number for Sean Burke.

Sean felt his fingers twitch as if he were fondling a string of beads. Fervently, he prayed that the check would be delayed, that Gallagher would not hear back for another hour and a half. Or that the name Sean Burke, whatever the Boston police might now suspect, would not yet appear on the computer system for the Service.

Holding the paper in front of him, Gallagher dialed his cell phone again.

Tense, Sean saw the agent seem to repeat the numbers.

Before Sean was aware of it, Ginsberg was at his side again. “Damn Kate,” he said impatiently.

It was the first time Sean had seen the volunteer coordinator fretful, and it increased his own agitation: he could not tell if this was the pressure of a last-minute event, or something else.

“What’s wrong?” Sean blurted.

Rick grimaced. “All their magnetometers aren’t here yet, and
you
can’t help them check our people through, not by your-self—you don’t know enough of them. So
I
need to vouch for them all.”

Sean hung his head, assaulted by the confusion of his roles: shame at not being valuable to Ginsberg; fear of the computer; shock at his frightening good fortune.

All their magnetometers aren’t here …

Then, across the plaza, Sean saw Gallagher walking toward them.

They know.

Sean felt his knees buckle. He stood there, unable to move, ignoring Ginsberg. Following his gaze, the volunteer coordinator turned to Gallagher. The agent’s last few steps, closing the distance, seemed unbearably slow.

He looked first at Sean, then Ginsberg. “We’re through with the sweep,” he said. “Time to start letting your people in.”

Sean swallowed.

Were they still checking? he wondered. How many minutes would it be until he felt Ted Gallagher’s hand on his arm? For a fearful instant, he wished for that. And then Gallagher gave him a staff pin and a tag to wear around his neck.

Turning, Rick Ginsberg put a hand on Sean’s shoulder, as if
to apologize for his curtness. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll get these folks checked through. You can hand out the signs.”

Sean followed him for nerve-racking minutes, circling the plaza, the complex scheme of barriers erected to thwart car bombers and filter the crowd through checkpoints. And then, for the second time in twelve hours, Sean was walking through the chute, as he had in the dark, with Kate.

In another hour or so, Kerry Kilcannon would pass through this same passageway—toward him, if somehow Sean had not been caught.

Two more agents in sunglasses waited at the rear end of the chute. In front of one were three boxes of signs with “Kil-cannon” printed on both sides.

Ginsberg took a checklist from an agent. “We’ll have all the magnetometers here soon,” the man told Ginsberg. “But for now, you have to vouch that these people match their name and number.”

Sean pulled out a sign. A trickle of volunteers—mostly young, some older, a cross-section of sizes and races, similar only in their eagerness—started through the chute.

Behind him, Sean could feel a crowd building, the people who had filled the buses now moving through the checkpoints. Nervous, he patted the gun inside his jacket.

Suddenly Sean saw two heavy-set men in suits hurrying between the volunteers. The first, large-framed and graying, wore the pin that identified him as a Secret Service agent. But it was the black man with him who made Sean freeze.

They’ve come for me,
he thought.

Rick stepped out to meet them. “Mr. Slade?” he said. “I’m Rick Ginsberg, the volunteer coordinator.”

The two men shook hands. Behind them, the volunteers had bunched, waiting. Sean stared at the ground.

“John,” Ginsberg was saying, “this is Clayton Slade. The senator’s national campaign manager.”

Clayton, glancing at Sean with shrewd black eyes, stuck out his hand. Limply, Sean took it. Then the agent with Slade shouldered between them, speaking to his colleagues. “We should have a magnetometer here,” he told them. “In about ten minutes.”

Clayton Slade regarded Sean for another moment. Then,
glancing at the volunteers behind them, Slade said to the agent, “I think we’re holding up progress here.”

Together, the two men walked through the checkpoint. Mechanically, Sean handed a sign to a smiling black woman, who thanked him.

Waiting for Kerry, Clayton stood with Peter Lake on the speakers’platform.

At their backs was a thirty-story office building with at least five hundred windows; the row of buildings to Clayton’s right had perhaps a thousand more. But Peter had been correct: placing the platform at the foot of this building had eliminated countless lines of fire.

Clayton was restless. He had preceded Kerry here this morning and still had no account of the meeting with Cutler. Based on the debate, the momentum was with Kerry now, and Ellen Penn was urging Clayton to buy all the airtime the campaign could afford. Clayton could find no graceful exit strategy: to lose the race, he thought wearily, was proving harder than he once had thought.

Next to him, Peter watched the crowd form; once more, Clayton noted with appreciation, the Service had secured the site, swept the area, closed the windows, identified the sight lines, made a car or truck bomb effectively impossible. “Sorry for the late notice,” he said to Peter. “But this was what we needed to do.”

Peter kept eyeing the crowd, the placement of his agents. “The senator helped us,” he answered.

There was a certain wryness in Peter’s voice. Clayton turned to him, asking, “For once, you mean?”

Peter smiled. But his only response was to say, “Nice crowd.”

It was. The volunteer coordinator had done well, and, it seemed, a number of the curious from local restaurants and the farmers market, slowly filtering through security, were helping to swell the audience. The plaza was filling; a banner floated over them, proclaiming “Kilcannon—The Woman’s Choice,” and volunteers with signs continued to trickle through the chute and take their places in front of the platform. At the rear of the
plaza, a few kids in jeans and T-shirts had climbed the twisted concrete sculpture to get a better view.

“Look at that sculpture,” Clayton remarked to Peter. “It’s Nazi Stonehenge.”

Peter gave a second, brief smile. Following his gaze, Clayton saw two sharpshooters positioned behind the clock tower of the Ferry Building, perhaps two hundred fifty feet away. “We just got notification from the FBI,” Peter said at length. “A possible suspect in those Boston shootings apparently flew out to San Francisco. Right after it happened.”

Clayton turned to him again. “Do they think he’s still around?”

Peter shrugged. “They don’t know. They’ve started to look, but it’s pretty low-profile—they don’t want to warn him. Still, they wanted to alert us, and Mason’s detail too. For a right-to-lifer gone insane, an event like this could be a lightning rod.”

Clayton gazed out at the barriers, the checkpoints, the sharpshooters, and thought again how dedicated Peter Lake was to his mission. “Two more days,” he said, “and they’re holding an election.
Then
what will you do?”

Peter rested a comradely hand on his shoulder. “I’m going snorkeling, Clayton, in the British Virgin Islands. With the woman who—as far as I know—is still my wife.”

For a moment, Clayton allowed himself to envision some unbroken time with Carlie, who was tending their now-empty nest. This made him think sadly, as he so often did, of Ethan. Then he had another thought: that Peter had not mentioned Lara Costello, either directly or by implication. And never would.

When Clayton looked at his watch again, it was close to eleven-thirty.

Sean glanced over his shoulder.

Perhaps twenty feet away, at the corner of the platform, Clayton Slade talked quietly with the gray-haired agent. They did not seem to notice him.

Sean passed out another sign. Next to him, Rick Ginsberg checked off names on the list, thanking each volunteer.

A magnetometer was on its way, and Sean was trapped here.

“Rick?” someone called.

Turning, Sean saw the sound specialist from the countdown
meeting, now wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and an expression of intense worry.

“Hold our people here,” Rick said to Sean, and went to the checkpoint.

From behind the two agents, the soundman said to Rick, “There’s a problem with the sound checks. The mult-box isn’t working.”

“What the fuck is a mult-box?”

“Never mind
what
it is,” the soundman said with equal impatience. “We need it to get good sound for the press and the TV people. I can have one here in fifteen minutes. The question is how my guy’s going to get
through
all this mess.”

Quickly, Ginsberg glanced at one of the agents. Narrow-eyed, the tall man told the sound specialist, “Have your man come to the head of the chute. We’re going to have to sweep him.” Then he turned to Ginsberg, asking, “Can you meet him up there? We don’t want someone new inside.”

Ginsberg faced Sean, nodding toward the head of the chute. “Wait for this mult-box guy, okay? Folks can grab their own signs.”

Swallowing, Sean nodded. “All right.”

He began sliding against the traffic, the stream of volunteers. Then the stream ceased altogether.

At the head of the chute, more volunteers waited for two Secret Service agents to install a magnetometer.

For long moments, Nate waited patiently with the rest of the cattle—the press corps, slowly filing through the checkpoint for the press platform. Next to him, Lee McAlpine clutched his sleeve. “Share,” she murmured. “After all, we’re friends.”

Nate merely smiled.

Soon someone else would sniff this out. That was the fear Jane Booth was feeling, and Mason’s veiled warning to hurry seemed to make the competitive pressures on her unbearable. He could imagine the fevered conference calls—Jane in Washington; the publisher and the managing editor in New York; perhaps others. Nate wondered how much difference it would make that Mason had plainly leaked the memo; while it mattered to Nate himself, and seemed crucial to the story, there had been no real chance to hash it out with Jane.

Lee still waited next to him. Then Nate passed through the checkpoint and climbed up into the bleachers, away from her.

It was hard to see this as just another event—Kilcannon’s effort to mend his fences with pro-choice women—when the theme itself was so resonant with irony, its painful subtext so near the surface. But Nate would try. He stopped to scribble on his notepad that it was a fresh spring day, a seeming metaphor for the new hopefulness of Kilcannon’s supporters. Climbing the bleachers, he stood on the uppermost board, pad in hand, satisfied that he had a clear view of the crowd, the signs, the speakers’platform.

“A beautiful day,” Kerry remarked to Ellen Penn.

They sat in the rear of Kerry’s limousine as it glided to a stop on Sacramento Street. The junior senator from California, dark-haired, diminutive, and feisty, answered, “This is San Francisco, Kerry, not some toxic waste dump near Passaic. There’ll be a good crowd too. All you have to do is tell them where you really stand.” Her grin was somewhere between cheerful and challenging. “Or do I have to remind you?”

This is San Francisco,
Kerry thought reflexively,
where Jamie died.
But last night the dream of his own death had not plagued him. He supposed that was the upside of sleeplessness.

“I know where I stand,” he assured Ellen with a smile. “Three steps behind you, like Prince Philip.”

Ellen gave a satisfied laugh. Then their driver turned to say, “About two minutes, Senator.”

Nauseated, Sean stopped short of the magnetometer.

The device was like the one he had passed through at Logan Airport, the nuisance that had made him leave a far better gun behind. Through the metal frame he could see the line of black Lincolns parked at streetside, waiting, then reporters and cameramen climbing from a large bus with a cardboard sign in its window marked “Pool.”