Sympathy for the Devil (36 page)

And she could do magic.

He had explored Ashley's abilities in several long conversations. No, she could not use magic to simply cause Stark's head to explode. No, she could not make Peters invisible - not to Stark/Sargatanas, anyway, and he was the one who mattered. No, she could not cause objects to appear out of thin air wherever she wished; Peters had been thinking of a hand grenade, pin already pulled, dropped next to Stark's sleeping form late some night.

But Ashley could, within limits, control elements of the weather - like wind.

Wind was the sniper's enemy. At extreme distances, a moderate breeze could blow a bullet as much as ten degrees off course - and that could make all the difference.

The Weather Channel had said the breeze in Richmond (at the last reading, anyway) was 12 miles per hour, with gusts up to 20. There were ways that snipers could overcome wind - that was one of the advantages of the mil dot reticle. You could calculate how the wind would affect your bullet's path, and compensate with the point of aim. But the wind could fuck it all up, if it changed on you. An erratic wind was the factor he'd been most concerned about. The shot was difficult, at best, and at 500-some meters, with the breeze variable, the odds against success would have made a Vegas croupier smile in envy.

But Ashley could, for brief periods, stop the wind. She had prepared magic in advance in order to do just that.

Without moving more than a few jaw muscles, Peters said, "Okay, baby, do it."

Behind him, Ashley began to chant in words that Peters didn't recognize - perhaps one of the more obscure dialects of the demon tongue.

Peters had been concerned about how he would know when the breeze dropped, assuming Ashley was successful. But his first look through the scope had given him what he needed.

Seated on the stage a few feet to Stark's right was a pudgy local politician sporting a comb-over, one of those ridiculous methods by which balding men try to hide their condition and only succeed in calling attention to it. But Peters was glad to see Mr. Comb-Over today. The ebbs and flows of breeze that blew left to right across the stage caused loose strands of the man's hair to rise and fall. Through the scope, Peters could see those dark hairs against the pale scalp clear as crystal, and he watched them now.

Behind him, Ashley chanted for almost a minute - then stopped.

In the scope, the little strands of Mr. Comb-Over's hair moved in the breeze - and then they stopped.

Slowly, Peters shifted the scope's viewpoint a bare inch, from Mr. Comb-Over to Senator Howard Stark, now caught up in the throes of oratory. He centered the reticule on Stark's forehead. With infinite slowness, Peters began to squeeze his hand, applying gradual pressure to the Remington's trigger. That's how you avoid jerking the trigger and throwing your shot off. "You should be increasing tension so gradually that you're surprised when the weapon goes off," Peters's rifle instructor had said at the Farm, all those years ago.

Peters was anticipating his surprise sometime in the next few seconds.

Libby Chastain didn't pay any attention to Stark's speech after the first few minutes. It was the usual political bullshit - full of applause lines and empty promises and utterly lacking any serious discussion of the issues. Libby was already in a bad mood from tension and lack of sleep; she didn't need any further aggravation.

She let her gaze wander over the scene in front of her. She couldn't see the crowd, being in the thick of it, so she watched a couple of squirrels chasing each other around the huge fountain, checked out the goods on several young policemen who strolled by, and wondered what on Earth she and Quincey were going to do if it turned out that Senator Stark did, in fact, reek of black magic.

And she made regular checks of a certain window on the fourteenth floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, some five hundred yards to her left. If the people standing nearby thought it odd that the woman near the rope line was periodically looking through the circles of her cupped hands as if they were binoculars - and in the direction opposite the speaker's platform, no less - nobody said anything.

Before leaving the hotel, Libby had told Quincey what she wanted to do in order to locate Room 1408 easily from the middle of Kanawha Plaza. In a corner of his suitcase, he had found a roll of black electrical tape, claiming utter ignorance as to when or why he'd put it there. It was exactly what Libby needed.

On her instructions, Quincey had gone up to her room and used the tape to make a big 'X' in the window that faced the Plaza. Since she knew her own room number, it had been easy to spot the 'X,' then count windows from there until she knew which one belonged to 1408. The angle to the hotel from where she stood meant she couldn't see into the suspect room, but at least she knew which hole in the concrete it was - for all the good that might do her.

Libby checked the exterior of Room 1408 from time to time, finding nothing amiss. If asked, she couldn't have said what she was looking
for
, but her witch sense told her something was not right about that room and its occupant, and that was a good enough reason for her to keep an eye on it.

At the moment, Libby was not looking toward the hotel. She'd noticed a bed of tulips that had been planted near the fountain. Too cold for them to bloom in New York, of course, but this was a different climate. Libby was watching the tulips wave back and forth in the breeze when suddenly they
just stopped moving
. She waited for the gentle swaying to resume - and it didn't. Libby hastily wet her index finger and raised it above her head, away from the crowd.

The breeze was gone. Utterly.

Mother Nature is a funny old gal, sometimes. She'll sneak up on you, usually with the wind or rain. You can be walking along, everything's quiet - then all at once you're either being blown off your feet or drenched. Like a well-tuned sports car, Nature has great acceleration.

But, also like a lot of sports cars, she doesn't have very good brakes. Stopping on a dime? Forget it. A breeze will die down, but it takes a little while. The wind doesn't just
stop
.

Except it just did.

Libby curled her hands and brought them up to her eyes at once. She located the fourteenth floor of the Crowne Plaza quickly by coming down from the top. After that, she found, it wasn't necessary to count horizontally. Room 1408 was almost certainly the one from whose window she could see what appeared to her as thin black smoke - the unmistakable sign of black magic in use.

Many people can think fast. Smart people think even faster. And smart witches are fastest of all.

Item:
the wind just stopped - dead.

Item:
black magic is currently being used in room 1408 of the Crowne Plaza.

Item:
the black smoke manifestation wouldn't appear as coming from the window unless the window was open.

Item:
windows of modern hotels don't open, to discourage suicides. To get one of those open would require either a strong blow with a heavy object, a small amount of explosives, or a great deal of time and effort.

Item:
a candidate for the office of President of the United States is about 500 yards from said building, orating.

Query[1]:
why would someone high up in a building go to considerable trouble to acquire an open window and stifle the breeze, while a prominent politician stood out in the open, some 500 yards away?

Query[2]:
do the names Kennedy, King, and Wallace have any relevance to the present problem?

Query[3]:
what behavioral intervention seems most appropriate?

Conclusion[1]
: intended assassination seems the most likely option.

Conclusion[2]:
you bet your ass they do.

Conclusion[3]:
ohhhhhh, fuck!

This calculation took Libby Chastain slightly less than one second, and it came along with the realization that she had only seconds left, if that.

One of the things Libby had prepared the night before had been an All-Purpose Voice Spell, which would allow her to do a number of interesting vocal tricks, if she had to. Knowing she was going to be in a crowd, outdoors, she'd thought the spell might conceivably come in handy.

It is also worth mentioning that Libby had never made a study of the procedures or jargon of the U.S. Secret Service. However, although she might not admit this to some of her feminist friends, she was a big Clint Eastwood fan. She had seen all of his movies, many more than once. This included the 1993 film
In the Line of Fire
, in which Eastwood had portrayed an aging Secret Service agent. If the movie had been correct, there was one word that would galvanize Secret Service agents like no other.

Libby muttered a few words in Latin under her breath to invoke the spell, then she did three things. She deepened and coarsened her voice so that it sounded like a man's. She projected her voice toward the stage, meaning it would be heard as if she had been speaking from up there. And then, in that male voice, she yelled a single word.

Bat Masterson didn't listen to Stark's oratory, either. Even if he had been interested in yet another political speech - which he wasn't - the job dictated that his focus be elsewhere.

Each agent in the detail had his assigned spot. Some were on the ground in front of the stage, others stood at the back of the structure, facing outward, still others were in positions near the speaker's podium. Masterson had positioned himself at the front, about thirty feet to Stark's left. He scanned the crowd restlessly from behind his Oakley sunglasses, looking for flashes of metal, for sudden unexplainable movement, for the one face that was not smiling or intent on the speaker's words.

Then a male voice from close by, one that Masterson didn't recognize, yelled "
Gun!
"

The result was immediate, as each member of the security team began moving, very fast indeed, in a pattern he had practiced many times.

Masterson's pattern took him straight at Stark, like a defensive lineman in football who's just found an open path to the other team's quarterback. He gave no consideration to the effect his tackle would have on Stark's body - as they'd drummed into him at the Secret Service Academy, "Better a couple of cracked ribs than a bullet in the brain."

It took Masterson a long time to reach Stark - at least two, maybe three seconds. He kept his eyes open the whole way, even at the moment of impact, just as he'd been trained to do. One of the last thoughts that Masterson had was to wonder why Stark's left hand, hidden from public view behind the podium, seemed to be making a cryptic sign of some kind in the air, while Stark said several words in a language that Masterson didn't recognize. Then there came the shock of the collision as he hit Stark, followed a bare instant later by an even greater shock, as the .300 magnum rifle bullet penetrated Masterson's rib cage and kept going, all the way through his body to exit on the other side.

Most of the agents, well-trained professionals that they were, got their own bodies between Stark and any potential follow-up shot, then hustled him off the stage, into their nearby car, and away. But Jerry Arkasian, second in command of the detail, had ordered two agents to stay with Masterson.

Like all Secret Service agents, the two who stayed behind were well-trained in emergency medical procedures. But despite their best efforts, Hugh 'Bat' Masterson bled out and died right there, five minutes before the paramedics could reach him.

Chapter 34

The killer some people called The Grocer's Boy knew that the best way to catch up with somebody was to get ahead of him. The news sources said that all the Republican candidates were concentrating on Virginia this week. The killer had read a great deal about how these things worked. The night of the primary, each candidate would throw a party for supporters at a hotel. Once the votes had been tallied, the politico would address the faithful - either basking in victory or vowing to do better next week.

The Leffingwell campaign's web site had the Senator's speaking schedule for the week, and all his engagements on Saturday were in Virginia Beach, the state's largest city. That meant he would almost certainly be staying in Virginia Beach Saturday night. Now the question was - where? The campaign website was not quite
that
helpful.

Fortunately, the Devil helps those who help themselves. It seemed that each state had its own Leffingwell campaign headquarters, staffed mostly by volunteers. The Senator's Virginia HQ was in Roanoke.

"Leffingwell for President, may I help you?"

"Yeah, hi. This is Harry Mason at Mason's Fine Wines and Spirits in Virginia Beach. We got a big order for Senator Leffingwell's party Saturday night, but whoever took the information didn't write down what hotel we're delivering to. Can you guys help me out? Like I said, it's a real big order, and we don't want to screw it up."

"Uh, sure, hold on a sec."

There was a soft thud as the phone was put down. The killer got to eavesdrop on the closest volunteer who was making calls encouraging Virginians to vote for Bob Leffingwell, the Man Who Can Make a Difference for America.

A couple of minutes went by before the campaign worker, a guy who sounded like he might be the age of a college student, came back on.

"Hi, sorry to keep you waiting. I had to find somebody who knew where it was."

"No problem at all, man. I appreciate it."

"Looks like you make your delivery to the Hilton."

"Which one?"

"It's the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront, on Atlantic Ave."

"That's great - thanks!"

"Show your gratitude this Saturday - vote for Bob Leffingwell."

"I aim to."

The Hilton Oceanfront's web site said the place had 21 floors, the top three of which were devoted to something called the Empyrean Club, apparently reserved for those with serious money to spend on accommodations. It was a sure bet that Leffingwell would be on one of those three floors come Saturday. The killer decided he would be there, too. Maybe he and the Senator could be neighbors.