Under Siege (43 page)

Aldana snorted. Then his lips curled in a sneer. “You’ve got twodaughters, right? What are their names-let me think-oh yes! Susanna and Lisa. Now listen very, very carefully, Mr. Thanos Liarakos, rich American lawyer with the clean white hands. You tell these people that if they don’t send me back to Colombia, many more Americans will die. You silly people have been living in a dream world. I’m going to show you the hard, naked truth. And if you double-cross me, if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you won’t have two pretty little daughters anymore.” Aldana snapped his fingers. “Do you understand me, Mr. Thanos Liarakos?”

“Guard! Guard! I’m ready to leave.” Ilarakos pounded on the door. He wiped his palms on his trousers.

“You had better pay attention, Mr. Liarakos,” Aldana hissed. “If you think I can’t reach you or your daughters, that will be your last mistake. I got to George Bush. I can get to anyone on this planet. Do you understancp”

The door opened then and Liarakos went through, but not without looking back over his shoulder at the round, sneering face of Chano Aidana.

As he walked down the corridor he wiped his hands on his trousers again, then swabbed his face with his sleeve. He saw the sign on the door that said mENOUGH and ducked in. Suddenly he had an overpowering urge to urinate.

The prosecutor, William Bader, and Thanos Liarakos twisted uncomfortably in their chairs across the desk from Attorney General Gideon Cohen. LiaTakos had gone directly from the cell to the prosecutor’s office, and the two of them had come here, to the Department of Justice. Liarakos bad just finished his tale.

“What does he expect the American government to do?”

asked, his eyebrows high in disbelief

“Send him back to Colombia,” Liarakos said curtly. “I told you that.” “No.”

The attorney general leaned back in his chair and stared at Liarakos. Liarakos stared back.

“I want protection for my daughters,” Liarakos said at last. “Send them to their grandparents.”

“Don’t give me that crap! These people ran reach anywhere! I believe the son of a bitch. I want protection!”

“Two FBI agents.”

“Around the clock. In school and in the head. Every minute of every day.”

“For a while, okay.” Cohen nodded. “But we’re going to hold Aldana incommunicado. You are the only human who talks to him.”

Liamkos snorted. “You wish. The jailers will see him. We have to feed him. They’ll tell him what’s happening. He’ll threaten and bribe them. How are you goinp to stop t”…@.”

‘Quantico,” Bader suggested. “Let’s let the Marines hold him in their brig down there. Move all the other prisoners out.”

“Any objection, counselor?” Cohen asked. “Do it.” Liarakos stood.

“Not so fast,” Cohen said, straightening in his chair. “I want you to talk to the FBI. He claims he’s responsible for four murders and the attempted assassination of the President. He’s threatened other people. You’re going to repeat this word for word in a sworn deposition.”

“No, I’m not. Attorneyclient privilege.”

“Waived,” Cohen shot back.

“Like bell! I do a deposition like that and you’ll have to find another to defend the cocksucker and Judge Snyder will have a pound of my ass. I’ve told you what my client wanted me to say. That’s it. You tell the FBI and the White House and anybody else you care to. This hot potato

is all yours. I’m done. And I’m leaving.” Liarakos walked out.

Cohen was on the phone to the FBI before the door closed behind the defense lawyer.

At midnight Henry Charon locked the door to the Hampshire Avenue apartment and went down the stairs to the street. He walked the block to his car, unlocked it, maneuvered it carefully from his parking place, and drove away.

The evening was chilly and humid. Much colder and it might snow. He was dressed for the weather. Long underwear, hiking boots, a sweater and warm coat. Under his thin leather gloves he wore a set of latex surgical gloves, just in case.

Scrupulously obeying the traffic laws, Henry Charon drove to National Airport and parked in the long-term lot. He put the entry ticket in his shirt pocket and sat behind the wheel scanning the lot. It took him about three minutes to decide on the vehicle he wanted. Just as he was about to get out of his car, another car drove in. He waited until the driver had exited the lot, then got out and carefully locked his door and put the keys in his trouser pocket. The car he had selected was a Toyota. Getting in took about half a minute. Charon slid a thin, flat metal shim down between the driver’s window glass and the felt seal and fished carefully until he got the notch in the shim in the right place. Then he pulled. The door lock button rose with a click.

Inside the car he felt under the mat. No luck. Not that he really needed a key, of course. He could hot wire the car with about five minutes of work, but a key would be nice. He looked in the ashtray and the glove box and the little compartment for cassette tapes. A spare key was wedged in there under a Grateful Dead tape.

The car started on the first crank. Half a tank of gas.

Charon gave the attendant the ticket from his shirt pocket

” d a dollar on the way out. The attendant had a portable going, a news-talk station. As the attendant glanced at

ticket and rang it up, Charon heard a voice on the radio on Dan Quayle. As the wooden arm in front of the car Charon fed gas. The attendant hadn’t even looked at him.

It took an hour to find the house he was looking for in Silver Spring, set back among tall, stately maples and some really large pines. No cars on the street. He drove down to the corner and out to the main avenue, memorizing the turns, then turned around and came back.

As he eased the car down the driveway he examined the house for lights. One was on behind drapes in a downstairs room-he could just make out the glow.

Charon left the engine running and slipped the transmission into park. He pulled off the leather gloves and laid them on the seat beside him.

The automatic was in one coat pocket and the silencer in another. It took about six twists to screw the silencer into place. He didn’t check the magazine or chamber-he knew they were ready.

He opened the car door and stepped out, then pushed the door closed until the interior light went out.

A brick stoop, a little button for the doorbell. He could hear the tinkle somewhere in the house.

The breeze was chilly and the wind in the pines made a gentle moan. It was a sound he had always liked. Now he shut that sound out and listened for others, car doors or engines or voices.

Nothing.

The door opened. A man about sixty, thick at the waist, in his shirtsleeves. He looked just like his photo last week in Newsweek magazine. Well, Charon thought, this was luck indeed. “Yes?” the man said, cocking his head quizzically. Henry Charon shot him dead center in the chest. The gun made a popping noise, not loud, a metallic thwock. As he V fell Charon shot him again. With the man lying in the foyer on his side, his’legs twisted, Charon stepped over and fired a slug into his skull. he pulled the door closed and walked for the car.

He heard voices now. “Dad! Dad!” A woman calling. Seated behind the wheel, Charon saw lights in the second story come on.

He pulled the shift lever one notch rearward, into reverse, then looked over his shoulder and backed down the driveway toward the circle of warmth from the streetlight. No cars coming.

Henry Charon backed into the street, put the car in drive, and drove at twenty-five miles per hour toward the avenue. He glanced at his watch. Two-nineteen a.m. At three-oh-five he took a ticket from the automatic device guarding the parking lot entrance at National Airport and wheeled the car back into exactly the same stall he had taken it from. He replaced the key in the cassette tray, locked the car, then walked toward the terminal to get a cup of coffee.

He would let about an hour pass before he drove his own car past the attendant and handed him the ticket he had just acquired driving in. No use giving the man two short-time tickets in the same night. The second time he might look at the driver. Not that he would remember me, Charon thought, wryly amused. Nobody ever does.

During the night Harrison Ronald awoke with a start. He found himself fully alert, lying rigid in bed, listening to the silence.

And God, it was quiet. Nothing! He strained his ears to pick up the slightest noise.

Fully awake and taut as a violin string, he eased the automatic from under his pillow and slipped from the bed. He listened at the door. Nothing. He put his car to the door and stood that way for several seconds, listening to the sounds of his breathing but nothing else.

The fear was palpable, tangible, right there beside him in the darkness. He could smell the monstees fetid breath.

Frustrated, listening to his heart thud, he glided noiselessly to the window.

He pulled the blinds back ever so slightly. The light on the pole between the trees cast weird shadows on the grass,

looked from this angle like the green felt on a pool table. quiet. No wind. The tree limbs were absolutely still. What had awakened him?

He held his wristwatch so that the dim glow coming through the gap in the blinds fell upon it. Three-fourteen a.m. Not even a hum from the heating system. That was probably it. It was off.

In a moment the system kicked back on.

He felt the tension ebbing and walked back to the bed. He sat gingerly upon it and tossed the heavy pistol onto the blanket beside him. Rubbing his face, then lying full4ength on the bed, Harrison Ronald tried to relax.

What was Freeman doing right now? Did he know?

Of course he knew. Or suspected. Freeman would be curious, with that alley dog asshole-sniffing curiosity that had to be satisfied, so he would take steps to learn the truth. He would talk to people and use money and sooner or later he would know. What then?

Tuesday the world came unglued. Those were the words a senator used later to describe the day, and those words stuck in tens of millions of minds as the perfect description.

It started whenever you awoke and turned on your television to check on the President’s condition at Bethesda and found yourself staring at a stark image of a suburban twostory Cape Cod house surrounded by tall pines and lit by floodlights. In the gray dawn half light, the surreal image looked ominous.

The troubling thing about the picture was not the ambulances, the flashing blue-and-white beacons, the uniformed policemen and the clean-cut FBI types in Sears suits, nor was it the sobbing grown daughter and her two children home to visit Dad for Christmas. No. The troubling thing about the image was that the house looked like something from the set of an old “Leave It to Beaver” show. As you stared at-it you could see that it looked exactly like the one in the ads for house paint for great American homes “just like yours”-the perfect distillation of the American twostory dream house in Hometown, U.s.a. And the owner had been assassinated, murdered, when he opened his door to a stmnger. . The owner, of course, was Somebody, Congressman Doyle Hopkins of Minnesota, majority leader of the House of Representatives. He had been shot three times at pointblank range.

A better crime to push the panic buttons of middleclass America could not have been devised. The sanctity of home, neighborhood, and family circle had been savagely violated.

The television newspeople, no-fools they, played that theme for all it was worth. “Why did he open the door?” one of them asked rhetorically, as ifevery suburban householder had not done the same thing dozens of times, as if the evil intent of Hopkins’ lant had been written across his face so plainly it would have still been obvious in the stark shadows of the porch light.

But if you stayed glued to the tube long enough, eventually you were told that the President’s condition was unchanged. The doctor in charge of the President’s medical team held a morning press conference, but only a few minutes ofthat got on the air. The story of the hour was the killing of the House majority leader.

That was the story of the hour until nine am. Eastern time, anyway. Al eight fifty-eight five heavily armed men walked into the rotunda of the Capitol building wearing heavy, knee-length coats. They shot the four security guards on duty with pistols before the security men could get off a

shot, then extracted Uzis from under their coats and ran along the corridors shooting everyone they saw.

A reporter-camera team setting up to interview the Speaker of the House was the first to get this atrocity on the air, at nine-oh-one a.m., just in time to capture a gruesome vignette of one of the gunmen mowing down the woman reporter, then turning the weapon on the cameraman. As he was hammered into a wall with five slugs in his body the camera fell to the marble floor and was smashed.

A uniformed security guard near the Senate cloakroom was running toward the noise of gunfire with his pistol drawn when he rounded a corner and almost careened into one of the Uzi-toting gunmen. They exchanged shots at a range of five feet. In the roar of the Uzi on full automatic fire the report of the guard’s weapon was lost. Both men went down fatally wounded.

There were four gunmen left alive. One of them charged into a subcommittee hearing room where people were gathering and emptied a magazine into the crowd. The noise of the chattering automatic weapon was deafening, overpowering, in this room which had been recently renovated to improve the acoustics. Only when the trip-hammer blasts ended could those still alive hear the screams and moans, and then they sounded muffled, as if they were coming from a great distance.

The killer stood calmly amidst the blood and gore and groaning victims and changed magazines. He emptied the second magazine into the prostrate crowd and was inserting the third one into his weapon when a guard appeared in thdoorway and shot him with a .357 Magnum.

The first two rounds from the revolver hammered the gunman to the floor but the guard walked toward him still shooting. He fired the sixth and last round into the gunman’s brain from a distance of three feet.

Sixteen people in the room were dead and seventeen wounded. Only three people escaped without bullet wounds.