The Next President (2 page)

Then he roared around a curve where the road turned west and the sun hit him squarely in the eyes. At that moment he heard a sharp crack

that might have been gunfire. He didn’t have time to worry about that possibility because just then a deer bolted out of the trees and directly into the path of his truck. He frantically cranked the wheel to the right, hoping the animal would clear his left fender. But it came to him with a shock that at the speed he was traveling, hitting a tree would be a far more certain way to die. Alvy swung the wheel back hard to the left.

His bumper caught the animal in mid bound The impact swung the deer up and around and its hindquarters smashed through the windshield. At that point, Alvy lost his grip on the wheel, but he managed to jam his foot on the brake. The pickup went into a sideways skid for a hundred feet or so and then the wheels tore free from the pavement and the truck flipped over three times, dismembering the deer and coming to a rest cab down.

By that time Alvy was roadkill, too.

Just the kind of death .I ONE Labor Day Monday, September 6, 2004

Upward of half a million people filled Chicago’s Grant Park chanting for the appearance of the man they believed would be the next president of the United States, blissfully unaware that the lectern at which he would speak was already targeted in the telescopic sight of an assassin.

For most purposes, the day was perfect. The sun shone from a cloudless sky, Lake Michigan glistened sapphire blue, and a breeze off the water moderated a temperature of eighty-two degrees. Streams of people continued to arrive on foot from all directions. Traffic on Michigan Avenue, Lake Shore Drive, and all the east-west streets from Randolph to Jackson was at a standstill.

Most motorists simply turned off their engines, stood outside their vehicles, and listened to the coverage of the event on their radios.

But no help was needed to hear the chant of the crowd. It rolled across the lakefront as if the city itself was calling out. Demanding the man who would make history.

“FDR, FDR, FDR …”

The throng pleaded for the appearance of Senator Franklin Delano Rawley of Wisconsin, who was already a historic figure by virtue of becoming the first black man to be the presidential nominee of one of the two major political parties.

Presently at the lectern, the city’s mayor was doggedly doing his best to finish his speech. A ripple of laughter raced through the crowd as a gust of wind almost carried off the final page of the mayor’s

oration. Sitting behind the mayor on the stage of the James C. Petrillo Music Shell were the candidate’s family and an elite selection of local, national, and party dignitaries. They looked out at the immense, expectant gathering with undisguised joy.

The polls said their man was ahead of the incumbent by only five points, scarcely more than the margin of error, but many of the pundits said this was an election year that would be unlike any other. Two hundred and sixteen years after electing George Washington as its first president, the United States was electrified by the possibility that it might elect Franklin Delano Rawley as its first black president.

“FDR, FD-“

The chant seemed to catch in everyone’s throat for a split second and then it changed to a roar as the candidate appeared.

Like rolling thunder, the multitude’s shout of approval reached the fifteenth-floor room at the southwest corner of the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

It was all the easier to hear because the small floor-level window panel to the left of the room’s heating and air-conditioning unit had been carefully removed.

The rectangle of thick safety glass and the fat black rubberized seal that had held it in place lay nearby, ready for quick replacement.

J. D. Cade lay in a prone shooting position just back of the empty window frame in the shadows of the darkened room. He’d registered at the hotel the day before under the name of Jack Tenant with his hair colored silver gray by a wash, brown contact lenses over his blue eyes, a well-groomed but newly grown beard, and two-inch lifts in his shoes. He’d checked out via the TV fifteen minutes ago, but a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the outside of the safety-latched door to his room. Now he watched through the scope of his McLellan M-100 sniper rifle, the barrel steadied by its tripod, as Senator Rawley arrived on the stage of the music shell some 2,950 yards away.

It had been almost forty-one years since John IF. Kennedy was killed by a sniper. The Secret Service hadn’t forgotten the lessons it learned from that tragedy, but in the manner of their counterparts at the Pentagon, they had prepared for the last war. The helicopters, the agents on rooftops, the entire security cordon were all positioned on the assumption that no current sniper rifle had an effective range beyond two thousand yards.

The exception to this limit was the .50 caliber McLellan M-100, which was used by the navy SEALs and had an effective range of three thousand yards. The round it fired was powerful enough to shoot down a large aircraft, not to mention kill a man. But the special agents protecting Senator Rawley—Orpheus, by his Secret Service code name—operated under the assumption that this weapon was the exclusive, tightly guarded property’ of the military.

Nevertheless, J. D. Cade had one, and the hotel room he’d obtained was beyond the security cordon. A picket fence of high-rise buildings on Randolph Street stood between the Hyatt and the park, but he had a clear field of fire, between the Aon Center on the east and the Prudential Plaza Building on the west, to the northeast-facing stage of the music shell.

Senator Rawley, known as Del on all but the most formal occasions, had just stepped onto that stage and was waving to the adoring crowd. He was already in J. D.‘s crosshairs, but at the moment the flags on the stage showed that a swirling wind was blowing. Over a distance of almost three thousand yards, a strong wind might move even a .50 caliber round far enough to kill someone walking along Michigan Avenue or sitting on a boat in the Monroe Street Harbor. J. D. had to be patient. When the wind died, so would his target.

Del Rawley was not a classically handsome man, but even seen through the narrow field of vision of his scope, J. D. could recognize the intelligence in the man’s eyes and the star power in his smile. Having studied his target, he knew that Rawley was a vet like himself, a former combat medic. He had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin, had been an educator and an author, had served in the House of Representatives and now the Senate, was a devoted husband, father, and grandfa The wind died, the flags went limp, and J. D. Cade squeezed the trigger.

The .50 caliber round flew at a speed of 2,500 feet per second, but it had to cover a distance of 8,850 feet. Travel time was 3.54 seconds.

Given the intervention of fate, that was long enough for the course of history to be changed.

What J. D. Cade couldn’t see outside the lines of his crosshairs was the man in front of the music shell stage lifting his young daughter, who in turn proffered a rose to the candidate. Del Rawley pricked his finger on a thorn, but bending over saved his life.

The round that should have torn his head off passed over him, streaked between the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois, who were seated behind him, smashed a hole the size of a beach ball through the back of the music shell, and expended its lethal energy by cutting down a six-inch-thick maple tree at its base.

J. D. Cade watched in disbelief through his telescopic sight, stunned that he’d missed. Del Rawley had already disappeared under a swarm of Secret Service agents. First they simply piled on him, but within seconds he was dragged from the stage inside a knot of bodies.

The idea of attempting a second shot never occurred to J. D. Now it was time for him to run. The M-100’s features included both a flash

suppressor and a sound suppressor, so his shot’s point of origin would not be obvious.

Nevertheless, his escape would depend on speed. As he swiftly replaced the hotel’s window he could see that the scene in the park below had changed from one of a political rally to bedlam.

He’d been careful to wear surgical gloves inside the room, and would continue to wear them for a few more seconds. He had his weapon broken down and stowed inside his suitcase within a minute. The lifts that had been in his shoes were already packed away. Before he’d set up for his shot, he’d shaved his beard but left the mustache. He’d covered the drains in the bathtub and the sink with nylon mesh and retrieved the hair he shed. Those signs of his presence in the room had been packed away, too. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses and exited the room. Now, as a final precaution, he flipped the hangtag on his door asking the maid to clean the room promptly.

Pulling off the surgical gloves and tucking them neatly into the inside pocket of his suit coat, he rang for the elevator with a knuckle. By the time he reached the lobby, news of what had happened in Grant Park was already common currency. Knots of excited people babbled about who might have tried to kill Senator Rawley; others were rushing to the hotel bar to see televised reports; even the staff behind the registration desk was crowded around a radio listening to a frantic reporter tell them what little he knew.

J. D. had to open the hotel door for himself, but he found a cab out front.

At first the driver wanted to stay right where he was and listen to the news.

J. D. said that was certainly his choice, but pointed out that if he remained where he was, he was bound to get stuck in the gridlock that would doubt less engulf the area in the next few minutes, and there would go a day’s fares.

The cabbie kept his radio on but asked J. D. where he wanted to go. Hearing the response, he executed a tight U-turn, made a right on Michigan Avenue and dropped his fare off at the corner of Fullerton Parkway and Lincoln Park West ten minutes later.

J. D. tipped generously but not conspicuously.

Still listening to the news reports, the cabbie bid J. D. goodbye by saying, “Jesus, this is awful!”

“It is a mess,” he agreed.

As the taxi disappeared, J. D. walked north through Lincoln Park, attracting no special attention. At Belmont Harbor he boarded a twenty-five-foot cabin cruiser called the Wastrel. Below deck he doffed his coat and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He’d chartered the boat in Milwaukee under the name Jonathan Helm, and though he’d paid for it through Wednesday, he’d be returning it in the four and a half hours it would take him to make the ninety-mile cruise north.

He eased the boat out of the harbor. Once out on the lake he ran the craft a mile offshore and then turned north. He proceeded at a steady twenty knots. Just above Kenosha, with no other craft in sight, he stopped long enough to dump the M-100, the surgical gloves, the shorn hair, and the phony credit cards, obtained from a computer hacker, which had financed his travels—all of which went overboard tied inside a black trash bag. According to the chart he’d studied, the water at this point in the lake was over four hundred feet deep. He also rinsed the gray coloring out of his hair and changed into casual clothes for his arrival at the Milwaukee Yacht Club.

He returned the boat to its home berth and, slipping on a blazer, he took a taxi to the private aviation terminal at Mitchell International Airport. Here a Citation executive jet waited for a client named Martin Byrd who was going on a gambling junket to Las Vegas.

Once he was aboard, reclining in a plush leather seat, he told the cabin attendant that he was a low-maintenance passenger. All he’d require would be a soft drink and a pillow for the nap he planned to take during the flight.

The woman smiled and said compassionately, “You do look a little tired.”

“It’s been one of those days,” J. D. agreed.

She brought the drink and the pillow, and promised no one would disturb him.

J. D. fidgeted, unable to get comfortable, as the executive jet climbed smoothly into the sky. He knew sleep wouldn’t come easily. He’d left his job unfinished today, and if he did get to sleep, it would still be waiting for him when he awoke.

Five hundred miles to the south of the climbing luxury plane, in Carbondale, Illinois, J. D. Cade’s son, Evan, opened the front door of the neat gray frame house on Lark Lane in response to the hammering of Officers Glenn Axton and Hoyt Campbell of the local police department.

Evan Cade, at age twenty-one, lacked his father’s height by an inch, but was easily taller than both the cops facing him. He had moderately long black hair, green eyes lit by a mocking intelligence, and a long, lean musculature that camouflaged a sturdy frame.

“There’s a doorbell.” Evan indicated it to the cops with a nod.

“No need to wear out the real estate.”

Officer Axton, a stocky blonde with a pugnacious face that looked at home atop his blue uniform, had eighteen months in with the department. Which made him the senior man over the slender, laconic Officer Campbell by six months. Axton asked, “Are you Evan Cade?”

Evan nodded. He saw that these two cops didn’t look a whole lot older than him, and they were nervous about something. They didn’t have their guns drawn, but each of them had his hand on the butt of his weapon. Evan wasn’t sure whether he should be afraid of these goofs or laugh at them.

What he did was memorize their names and badge numbers.

“Can we come in?” Axton inquired in a demanding tone.

“No,” Evan responded deadpan.

While the cops were busy frowning and formulating a response to this rebuff, an approaching female voice asked, “Who’s there, Evan?”

A still-vital woman of eighty appeared next to the young man. She had iron gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a ramrod posture that would have pleased any drill instructor in the land. She looked surprised to see two policemen on her doorstep.

“Are you the ones creating such a racket? I thought you were going to break my door down!”

Officer Axton knew enough to backpedal just a little.

“We’re here on a serious matter, ma’am. May we come in?”