The Next President (52 page)

“Cade, you perverse sonofabitch!” Townes yelled, standing up with the child in his arms.

“Do you see what you’ve done now?”

Hunter Ward gestured to Jenny to take the seat next to him, and she did.

“You brought me here tonight, didn’t you, Don? Tom never would have sent me those lilies.”

“Not before he’d managed to kill Senator Rawley, certainly,” came the ghostly reply.

Jenny turned to look at Killer Laughlin. She’d never been as close to him as to Don, but there had been a time when she’d considered him a friend.

“Why, Tom? Why do you want to kill Del Rawley?”

“It’s nothing personal,” he said offhandedly.

“It was Don’s idea originally.

Not that he had your precious Senator Rawley in mind, but one night Don and I were having drinks in my garden and he said that if you took what

we did to its logical conclusion, you’d have to run a covert campaign and guarantee that your man won by literally assassinating his opponent.”

Hunter Ward nodded.

“It was my idea, but it was all a game, an intellectual exercise.”

“He’d thought it out quite well, too,” Killer Laughlin agreed.

“He said you’d need some straitlaced loser to run the front campaign.”

“Like Ronald Turlock,” Jenny offered.

“Exactly. Then, in a real stroke of genius, Don figured out that the person you had to get to do your dirty work was some old CIA hand. Because if you found someone like that and things ever came unglued, any investigation would conclude it had all been some nefarious CIA plot. Think of what a brilliant gambit that is. The CIA has used any number of fronts for its dirty deeds, so wasn’t it time they got used for somebody else’s evil machinations?

They’re a perfect firewall. With all the blood on their hands, who would ever doubt that they weren’t the ones behind the assassination of a presidential candidate? Should I go on, Don?”

Hunter Ward nodded.

“As it turned out, Don had a neighbor who he suspected was ex-CIA, a fellow named Garvin Townes. We decided he should look into Mr. Townes’ history, and you know how good Hunter Ward was when he started investigating somebody. He could give those spooks at the NSA lessons in how to snoop on people. In fact, I wanted him to give me lessons before he dies, but he refused. Anyway, he found out not only had Townes been CIA, but he even had dirt on a sniper he’d been saving for half of eternity, and he’d stayed in touch with a half dozen or so burnouts who used to work for him.”

Jenny said intuitively, “The sniper was J. D. Cade.”

“Yes. Take a look at that file on the table there.”

Jenny picked up a manila folder from the coffee table that sat between her and Laughlin. She opened it to find three eight-by-ten black-and-white photos. The first showed a man who’d been grotesquely crushed when his pickup truck had turned over. The second showed a young J. D. Cade emerging from a forest with a rifle in his hands. The third showed J. D. removing a loop of rope from a dismembered deer’s neck. Jenny closed the folder.

Tom Laughlin told her, “Your friend Mr. Cade killed that fellow in the truck by getting that deer to dart in front of him at just the right time. What he didn’t realize was that his old commanding officer, Colonel Townes, was having him followed and photographed for reasons of his own. Best of all, when I visited the Rancho Durango Gun Club here in California to see if Mr. Cade might be useful, I discovered that he is still a crack shot.”

“That was as far as I wanted to take it,” Hunter Ward said in a whisper.

“It was just a game to me … to see if… I never thought…”

“People thought I left Don because he got sick,” Killer Laughlin said, shaking his head.

“I’d never do that. I broke with Don because he went soft. He’d created this wonderful scheme and then didn’t have the guts to use it.

Then a person who will have to remain nameless came to me and asked what I could do to help the president’s reelection effort. This astute person saw that Del Rawley would be a real threat to the president. I said I could guarantee the president a victory. For that guarantee, I was promised ten million dollars every year for the rest of my life. What with his brain tumor and his delicate sensibilities, that offer didn’t hold the same appeal to Don.”

“I’d never have done it,” Hunter Ward answered, the gun in his hands trembling. Keeping his eyes on Laughlin, Don told Jenny, “Tom has found out my plan hasn’t worked as well in real life as it did on paper. Garvin Townes has forced him to have Mr. Cade’s son kidnapped. Townes has become an independent actor, not the pawn he was expected to be.”

“Your plan also didn’t call for you to try to force Rawley to leave the race by digging up an adolescent love affair or saying that the assassination attempt had been a hoax,” Laughlin retorted.

“I was trying to save the man’s life, you evil bastard. Save him from you.”

“It was your plan, Don… and I still think it’s going to work.”

“It might at that,” Hunter Ward said with sorrow.

“And that’s why you’re here, Jenny. We’ll listen for any great outcry from down the hill. If we hear it, if it sounds like Senator Rawley has been shot, I’ll leave it to you whether I should shoot Tom.”

Killer Laughlin shook his head.

“Don, that cancer of yours must really have eaten away your spine,” he said with contempt.

“Trying to lay off the decision to kill me on poor Jenny.”

At that moment, they all heard the sound of a siren approaching along Mulholland. The police Jenny had called were on their way. Hunter Ward swung his head to listen… and Killer Laughlin rose from his chair to leap for the gun that was pointing at him.

Jenny saw him coming, knew what he was going to try from the moment he bunched his muscles, knew that this was the man who was most responsible for the attempt on Del’s life, and that if he ever got his hands on the gun, neither she nor Don would get out of that room alive.

She grabbed Hunter Ward’s hand and with his finger still on the trigger—and Laughlin’s eyes fixed on hers—she shot the Gardener right out of the air.

Before he crashed onto the table in front of them, Jenny heard the

sounds of horror Don had forecast: machine-gun fire and the screams of thousands of horrified people.

Roth decided his moment had come. He knew that ifTownes had been exposed, he would be, too, and neither a federal prison cell nor a lethal injection appealed to him. So he thought he might as well go out right now, but before he did…

Roth stepped out onto the stage brandishing his Uzi. At first, several terrified onlookers thought he was about to fire on Townes even at the risk of the child’s being killed. But two men knew better: J. D. Cade and Dante DeVito

The special agent reacted first. Even as Roth raised his weapon to shoot J. D.” DeVito was diving at him and yelling at everyone in the press section, “Get down, get down!”

DeVito couldn’t fire his own weapon at Roth without risking hitting the others on the stage. He saw Cade turn to look at him, amazed by what DeVito was doing. There was no time for words anymore, but the look that blazed from DeVito eyes seemed to say: Even for you.

He sent J. D. sprawling, and as a result, he did what every Secret Service agent was trained to do: He took the bullet. Many of them.

The effort of flinging Evan across the trailer knocked Blair McCray back onto the sofa. He’d barely landed against its cushions when he heard the Toad’s gun go off. For one soul-shriveling moment, all the Kentucky lawman could do was look at the two bodies on the floor—and then he screamed with rage and despair as he saw the bloodied Toad crawl out from under Evan’s limp form. Deena added her shout of fury to the din. It seemed as if their vocalized hate should have shredded the flesh from the Toad and left nothing more than a jumble of bones.

The Toad had lost his gun somewhere under Evan and seemed dazed by the collision, but he managed to stand and stagger toward the trailer’s door.

Blair roared again and, using his hands for leverage, pushed himself to his feet. He intended to kill the Toad by any means available—with his teeth if need be. The Toad had no trouble understanding that he was no longer the master of the situation, and he lurched outside.

Deena yelled to Blair, “Untie us, damnit! We’ve got a gun under the seat cushion, remember?” Blair sat back down and pulled at the knot binding his ankles, and when that was done he set about freeing Deena.

The Toad saw that the lights in the woods that he’d seen from the

trailer were considerably closer now. He got to his car, but in pulling the keys from his pocket he dropped them. There’d be no time, no way, to find them now.

The approaching dogs were howling madly now, baying, growling… and running. They had been set loose. The Toad whipped his head back and forth, wishing he could see clearly, wishing there was somewhere he could… He spotted the only possible place of shelter: the decrepit log cabin.

Moving as fast as he could, the dogs gaining ground, their howls raising the hair on his neck, the Toad scuttled toward the cabin, hoping the damn thing had a door he could slam on the dogs. Then he’d have to find some length of wood, some club, within the hovel that he could use to beat them off should they try to leap through the open window.

He reached the cabin mere seconds ahead of the frothing pack, and to his dizzying relief there was a door. He slammed it shut and it wedged fast in its warped frame. Even so, he leaned his weight against the door as it shuddered under the impact of the charging dogs.

He knew the animals might be stunned for the moment, but they’d soon sniff out the empty window frame. He had to find something with which to beat them back when they attempted to jump through the opening at him.

When the Toad turned to look for a weapon, he forgot all about the dogs.

He was confronted with a far worse terror. But in the darkened cabin, with his hopeless eyes, he couldn’t see it at all clearly. All he could do was remember what he’d seen before. The black fur, the merciless yellow eyes, and the great rending teeth.

Quaking with fear, the Toad bolted for the window, but he was seized in a grip that was implacably strong, and he was dragged back. Razor-sharp claws slashed into him. He dimly perceived the heads of the dogs peeking over the sill of the window. But even they turned away from what was about to happen and ran off whimpering. Then he felt a blast of foul breath on his face and tried to scream, but there was no longer time even for that.

Deena and Blair emerged from the trailer. Ben Cade and Sawyer Price stepped out of the woods, and Sawyer’s dogs crowded against his legs for comfort.

Three of the people present looked at each other, and tried to shut out the sounds of the carnage coming from within the cabin.

But Deena Nokes stepped forward with her eyes gleaming.

“Get him, Gorby,” she whispered fiercely.

“Get him for Ivar and me and everyone else.”

Arnold Roth emptied his clip and was going for another when Landers, his second in command, the agent DeVito had warned about Roth, was finally

able to get a clear shot. He took Roth out with one tight three-round burst.

One bad guy down, but Roth had been the easy one.

Garvin Townes had literally dozens of gun sights lined up on him as he made his way to the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, and that was part of the problem. Who had the best angle? If more than one agent opened fire, it was all but certain Senator Rawley’s grandchild would be killed. But the special agents were well trained and disciplined, and nobody shot.

Del Rawley and the president were still on the stage. The chief of the president’s protection detail was the ranking special agent. He communicated with all the others that if Townes took his weapon off the boy and pointed it at Primus—or Orpheus—he would take the shot. Everyone else was to hold their fire until the little boy was out of harm’s way.

But Townes knew that he was dead the second he pointed his gun anywhere else, and he kept it pressed against the squalling child’s head. He looked at Del Rawley. There were tears in the candidate’s eyes as he looked at his frantic grandson, but Del’s jaw was clenched hard enough to shatter diamonds.

“Step forward, Senator. Right up here.”

Del started to move, but several Secret Service agents interposed themselves.

“Get out of my way,” Del ordered in a harsh voice.

The head of the president’s detail nodded, and the agents stepped aside.

Del moved forward until he was ten feet away from Townes, who told him he was close enough. In the front row, the Rawley family was weeping openly, except for Devree, who regarded Townes with a look that by rights should have killed him.

Townes darted a glance to the press section that Roth had leveled. Most of those on the ground were simply doing the smart thing and keeping their heads down, but more than a few were bleeding, some of them mortally. The only thing that interested Townes, though, was the one figure who dared to stand: Cade.

Townes called out to him in a chilling voice: “Are you willing to sacrifice this child, too? If not, join the senator and me right now.”

As Blair McCray cradled Evan’s head in his lap, he pressed his fingertips to Evan’s neck and found a thready pulse. Ben had already punched 911 into his PCR and was telling the operator he needed an ambulance immediately for a gunshot victim.

Help was promised to be there within minutes. Deena said she would

meet the emergency vehicle out on the highway and guide it back through the trees.

Ben listened to instructions from the 911 operator as to what they might do to help Evan—to keep him alive until the paramedics arrived.

Tom Hayashi was up on one knee doing his best to keep the reporter who’d told him to shut up from bleeding to death. It looked to Tom like the man had been shot clean through his lower right leg. A broken bone jutted its jagged white edges through the man’s slacks. Tom was trying to stem the flow of blood manually, literally squeezing the blood vessels shut. Then a photographer crawled over and tapped him on the shoulder.