The Next President (33 page)

“Never saw a rear echelon motherfucker move like that before.”

J. D. only shrugged.

The doctor finished his work and stepped away. J. D. and Del Rawley looked at each other.

“I’m very grateful, Mr. Cade. Maybe I should have you managing my protection detail.”

J. D. shook his head.

“Not me, Senator. I’m ready to go back to the rear with the rest of the REMFs.”

“I doubt that.” Del extended his hand and J. D. shook it.

“Now if you don’t mind, I have to call my wife and tell her that I’m all right. That I’ve used up only two of my nine lives.”

Before the candidate left to make his phone call, he instructed Jenny,

“We keep as close to our schedule as possible.” Then Del looked at Clarke.

“I

know you’d prefer otherwise, but I’m sorry. Short of some sonofabitch actually succeeding in killing me, I’m going to live up to my word. This campaign will not be stopped.”

Raw-ley turned to J. D. “Right, Mr. Cade?”

“You’re a brave man, Senator,” J. D. replied.

“Stupid, stupid man,” Garvin Townes muttered to Arnold Roth.

Roth had called Townes at his suite in the Mark Hopkins Hotel. Townes was watching his television. A video camera had caught most of the important action in the Silk Trade Room that morning: J. D. Cade foiling the gunman;

wrestling with him on the table; the second shot going off. The sequence was being repeated endlessly. What wasn’t shown was Danby dying, but that piece of information had already been passed along by the anchorwoman.

“He did that on purpose,” Roth said venomously.

“Of course he did,” Townes agreed.

“I mean he shot Bill on purpose. He looked right at us while we were running toward him. Replay the tape in slow motion and watch Cade’s eyes.”

Townes switched the TV from live feed to replay. He rolled the sequence in slow motion from the television’s memory. He saw Cade dive at the busboy, knock his arm up, and grab on to the wrist of the gun hand.

Then somehow Cade managed to get his feet back under himself but couldn’t keep his balance. He wound up pulling the busboy down on top of him and they landed on the table. Cade’s head was bent back over the edge of the table and … he was looking at someone or something approaching him.

“Sonofabitch,” Townes muttered softly.

Cade forced the busboy’s gun hand directly in line with where he was looking. He wrapped his hand around the busboy’s gun hand. The busboy stopped struggling—went slack—for some reason Townes couldn’t see, and then the gun went off. The busboy’s finger was on the trigger, but the pressure on his hand from Cade was what squeezed off the round.

Cade hadn’t stopped there, either. He was lining up his next target—Roth.

Just before Cade could fire again he and the busboy were buried under a pile of Secret Service bodies.

“He knows,” Townes said in a quiet tone.

“He knows you and Danby were the ones watching him.”

“I told you that rock slide was no accident,” Roth said, hatred filling his voice.

“He’s had too much time. He’s hunting us.”

“Yes, he is.” Townes wondered if Cade could possibly have discovered his participation.

“I want to kill him,” Roth told Townes.

“As soon as possible.”

“Soon enough,” Townes said.

There was still one move to make before then. It was time to bring a far more direct threat against Evan Cade. Time to do what really should have been done in the first place.

The busboy who had tried to kill Franklin Delano Rawley was named Prentice Colter. He had no connection to any terrorist group. He had no political, racial, or social ax to grind. What he had was an IQ of 175 and an occasional aversion to taking the medication that kept his paranoid schizophrenia under control.

Prentice Colter thought he was supposed to become the country’s first black president, and Del Rawley had to be stopped from taking Colter’s rightful place in history.

Colter’s mother had called the SFPD from her home in Oakland as soon as she had seen on TV what had happened. All of the details she’d told the authorities about her son had been verified by independent sources.

Prentice had admitted that he’d carried the weapon into the room when he’d been sent out to fill water glasses, shortly before the guests had arrived.

He’d stuck the weapon to the underside of the table while kneeling down and pretending to tie his shoe. Then he went on filling water glasses and waited for his moment to arrive. The crazy fucker had planned and executed his assassination attempt to a fare-thee-well.

The only thing he hadn’t counted on was J. D. Cade.

Who had come and gone after telling his story three times to Clarke, DeVito and an SFPD cop, Inspector Osterman.

“Impressions, gentleman?” Clarke asked.

“That man saved everyone’s ass,” Osterman said, “the senator’s, yours, and mine. That’s my impression.”

DeVito nodded, grimly silent. By now he’d seen the tape of the assassination attempt.

“Any part of his statement of events seem off-key?” Clarke wanted to know.

Osterman shook his head.

“Not to me. Cade’s the odd man out at the table. He’s looking around. He sees what’s happening while everybody else is yakking. Then at the risk of his own life he does the right thing.”

DeVito That how you see it?”

“As far as the tape showed, yeah.”

The San Francisco cop got to his feet.

“Sorry about the man you lost. But for the rest of it, it’s just like I said. We all fucked up and got bailed out by Mr. Cade. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an appointment with the mayor to get my ass reamed. I imagine you gentlemen will be having your high colonics shortly.”

Osterman left and Clarke looked at DeVito

“You think Rawley will stick up for me the way he did for you?”

“What does it matter?” DeVito asked.

“We’re both finished.”

“The director’s en route to San Francisco as we speak. I have to meet him at the airport.”

“He say anything about me?”

“No.”

“So who’s in charge of the detail?”

“Arnold Roth.”

“Goddamn.”

“Yeah.” Charlie Clarke left the hotel security room looking exactly like what he was: a man who had to chauffeur himself to his own execution.

DeVito had thought there was no point telling Clarke that he’d found out Cade was a shooter—and he sure as hell wasn’t going to say a word about anything, to that cocksucker Roth.

What troubled him now was how the hell he was going to talk to Orpheus.

What could he say to the man?

“Senator, I strongly feel the man who saved your life in San Francisco is the same one who tried to take it in Chicago.”

How would he ever be able to explain that? He didn’t understand it himself.

Even as bewildered as he was by the idea of Cade as hero, even at the risk of alienating Orpheus, DeVito decided he had to see the man. Right now.

He ignored the chain of command completely—tuck Roth—and entered Orpheus’ suite and begged five minutes of his time. Alone.

Del heard the urgency that underlay DeVito request and granted it. He dismissed the other agents and the brain trust, Jenny leaving very reluctantly.

“Is this going to be about Mr. Cade again?” Del asked.

His tone told DeVito he’d be fighting an uphill battle if it was. So the special agent decided to leave Cade for later—if he brought him up at all.

“I do have a couple of other concerns, Senator.”

“And they are?”

“Did you ever get that gun? The one you asked Clarke and me for?”

“No, I didn’t.”

DeVito handed him a flat, compact semiautomatic. It was his personal weapon. He showed Del how to load a clip, chamber a round, and work the safety.

“It’s small enough, light enough to carry in your hip pocket. Nobody should notice.”

Del stared at the weapon he held in the palm of his hand, regarding it pensively.

“You think you would have used that this morning if you’d had it?” DeVi to asked.

The man who would be president looked DeVito in the eyes.

“I don’t know. Probably not. My first impulse was to find a hole and dive in.”

“That’s a sound impulse,” DeVito said in a neutral tone.

Del drew the obvious inference.

“But it wasn’t the kind of reaction that saved my life, Special Agent DeVito was it?”

“No, sir. Mr. Cade acted heroically today.”

“What was your other concern?”

“You’ve heard that the director has replaced Charlie Clarke?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Rawley said with an edge to his voice.

“I wasn’t consulted.”

“You’ll have to take that up with the director, Senator. I wasn’t consulted, either. My point here is that the new special agent in charge of your protection detail is Arnold Roth. He doesn’t know about the little present I just gave you.” DeVito nodded at the gun.

“Probably just as well we keep it that way.”

“Just as well for you or for me?”

DeVito laughed harshly and shook his head.

“Pardon me, Senator, but my career is over. The only other thing they could do to me now is shoot me.

And I don’t think I’d mind that too much. My point is, Roth is a real hardass. He can’t tell you what to do, of course, but if he learns that you have a weapon, I wouldn’t be surprised if you find you’ve misplaced it real soon.”

“You don’t trust this man, Special Agent DeVito

“Not one damn bit, sir.”

“And there is something else you want to tell me, isn’t there? Something about Mr. Cade.”

DeVito nodded.

“Very well. What is it?”

DeVito had decided that his best course of action was to leave his suspicions aside and just tell Orpheus the most salient fact he’d learned.

“I found out how Mr. Cade likes to relax.” The special agent saw a

wary expression appear on Orpheus’ face.

“No, sir, nothing like that. No drugs or hookers or barnyard animals.”

“What is it, then?”

“Senator, Mr. Cade likes to fire rifles. At targets over long distances. And he does it pretty well, from what I’m told.”

On that note, Del Rawley set off for another full-tilt day of campaigning.

Del’s speeches in Palo Alto and Monterey were electrifying. Coming so closely on the heels of the assassination attempt in San Francisco, the emotions of both audiences were raw. People laughed and cried and cheered.

More than anything else, they gave off a sense of overwhelming joy that their favorite was still alive.

Every line Del spoke was punctuated by a standing ovation. Handmade signs appeared: WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED! Crowds lined the motor route for miles. People stood shoulder to shoulder along the roadways as if to safeguard with their own bodies the man they wanted to lead the country. The experience was overwhelming.

As soon as the candidate was settled into his suite in San Diego that evening, he sent for Donnel Timmons. As with DeVito be met with Donnel alone. He even poured their drinks himself.

“The last time I got shot at so often, I just wanted to go home,” Del Rawley told Donnel Timmons.

“This time I can’t even do that.”

Del sat in an easy chair, Donnel on a sofa. Each man had his straight scotch resting on the coffee table between them. Neither drink had been touched.

Donnel put his left foot up over his right knee. He gave the impression he was relaxed, not at all uneasy that Del had summoned him for a private meeting.

“You think I did the right thing staying in the race?” Del asked.

“I thought so before… before that crazy busboy tried to kill you.”

“Devree felt pretty’ much the same way. She’s scared now, but she’s mad, too. She doesn’t want me to give in. Not just so I can be president, but so whoever wants to stop me will know they won’t be able to scare off good people in the future.”

“Devree’s a smart woman.” Donnel uncrossed his legs and picked up his drink.

“Your friend J. D. Cade did quite some number saving my skin, didn’t he?”

The shadow of a smile settled on Donnel’s lips.

“Didn’t think twice before he was on that sonofabitch.”

Del smiled, too.

“You know, I told Mr. Cade almost exactly that. Told him I never saw a REMF move like him before.” Del paused, then asked, “You PANIC boys ever see any combat?”

Donnel took a sip of his drink.

“Well, you know, sometimes our jobs took us into AOs that were pretty much Indian country, and you always had to watch out for Charlie wherever you were. But we didn’t do any actual fighting, no.”

“Who was your CO in that outfit?” Del wanted to know.

“Our commanding officer?” Donnel looked into his glass, as if for an answer.

“Yeah. You remember his name?”

“Was…” Donnel looked up.

“Was Colonel Garvin Townes.”

Del made no overt response to the name, just nodded. Like he’d committed Townes’ name to memory. The candidate put his feet up on the coffee table.

“If I had my way, Donnel, you know what my motto for the rest of the campaign would really be?”

“What?”

“It’d be “Let’s just get the fucking job done.”

” “Amen to that, brother,” Donnel replied.

Jenny had just left J. D. to do an interview with PBS—he’d declined to join her and she’d promised to see him later—and he was on his way to his suite when he passed the hotel gift shop and saw a newspaper headline that stopped him dead in his tracks.

He stopped in and, for camouflage, picked up a couple of magazines as well as the newspaper. Alone in his room, J. D. sat down to read. The newspaper was the Los Angeles Times. The reporter’s name was Tom Hayashi. The headline read, “Authorities Find Restricted Sniper Rifle in Marina Del Rey Apartment.”

The first paragraph told him everything he needed to know.

“A McLelland M-100 .50 caliber sniper rifle, a weapon supposed to be the exclusive property of the U.S. Navy SEALs, and the type of weapon suspected of being used in the assassination attempt against presidential candidate Senator Franklin Delano Rawley in Chicago, was found yesterday in a Marina Del Rey apartment by a strike force