To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  ‘And yet it remains true that this man poses a clear and present danger to the republic, to the Constitution and to the safety of the world.’

  That was enough for Bruton. As if that were his cue, he stood taller and straightened his jacket. He fixed the Chief of Staff in the eye. Kassian wondered if the Defense Secretary was about to salute.

  Instead Jim Bruton said in a voice at once quiet, but firm, ‘I’m satisfied we’ve exhausted all other means. As patriots, who’ve sworn an oath to defend this nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I believe we have only one option left to us. I believe it is our duty to kill the President.’

  10

  Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Washington, DC, Tuesday, 10.21am

  Maggie had thought of heading first to the Park Police who were handling the investigation into the death of Dr Jeffrey Frankel, but instinct told her that could wait. She hailed a cab instead for E Street, South West: the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

  En route, she noticed a huge mural on the side of a building. It depicted the President with fangs and devil’s horns and, in huge letters alongside it, the words, Not In Our Name.

  Once she’d arrived, she flashed her White House credential and asked to see the most senior person present. She was swiftly introduced to a woman, Dr Amy Fong, who led Maggie into an office, closed the door and asked if she was there to identify the body.

  Maggie had to think quickly. She had assumed a family member would already have done that. If they hadn’t, they certainly should. Surely it wasn’t right for her, who barely knew Frankel, to perform such a final, even intimate act.

  But she also intuited what giving the wrong answer might mean. If she said no, then why was she there? Why would this office give her any information or access? If, on the other hand, she said yes then, crucially, they would surely have to show her the body. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  They walked down one corridor, through a set of double doors, then another and finally into an examination suite. As they walked, Dr Fong explained that the identification would have to be done very quickly. ‘I’m afraid we’re under extreme time pressure. The family are hoping to have the funeral today. Jewish thing, I think.’

  And there, on a thick counter, lay the white, inert body of a man in his sixties. She only allowed herself a glance above the neck: enough to see that while much of the face was left, the back of the head seemed to have been reduced to a bloody pulp.

  Not for the first time, she reflected on the strange unreality of a dead body. It seemed to her like a waxwork or a movie prop, a fake. It was as if, once the breath of life was gone, a human body belonged to another realm altogether. Or perhaps that’s just what she needed to tell herself.

  Now the woman and the doctor doing the examination, who had, Maggie noticed, blood on his overalls and on his latex gloves, conferred briefly. The man then picked up a clipboard and pen, turned to Maggie, asked her to confirm her name, date of birth and address – which she gave as the White House – before asking her ‘to identify the deceased’.

  Now there was no hiding. Maggie had to come round to the doctor’s side of the counter and look properly at the face of the dead man.

  She had seen corpses before. A lifetime ago, during that mediation effort in Congo, she had been led to the site of a massacre: the leader of one of the parties to the talks refused to continue unless Maggie, as chair of the negotiations, had seen with her own eyes ‘what our enemies are doing to us’.

  On that occasion, though, she had not had to focus as intently – or closely – on one person, as she did now.

  As she had already glimpsed, the face was still mostly intact. But the skull was a mess, a congealed tangle of blood, brain and bone. The contrast between the front and back – between a face that still promised a person, capable of a smile or a glance, and a mess of gore that would make you wince if you saw it in a butcher’s shop – stopped Maggie short. It filled her with a queasy thought: that the distance between the human and the animal is much shorter than we like to think.

  And then she noticed something else. Two little indentations on the bridge of the dead man’s nose, the traces left by a lifetime of wearing glasses. And in a second she was back in Ireland: a child, sitting on her grandfather’s lap, fascinated by those same marks on his face, grooves indented by time that suggested the old man belonged with the rocks and cliffs, as ancient as geology.

  What had this doctor on the slab, perhaps the same age her grandfather had been when she was little, gone through that had led him to put a gun to his throat and pull the trigger? What had made him that desperate?

  And then, unbidden, came a different image. She saw the seventeen-year-old girl Liz had told her about last night. Mia. She imagined her hanging in her room, and all because she could not see a way out of a pregnancy that had been inflicted on her. A child herself with a child in her belly, she had been found by another child, her twelve-year-old sister.

  Involuntarily, Maggie closed her eyes. So much pain in the world. It seemed to be brimming over. As if the world had more sorrow than it could contain. And, there was no denying it, the man she worked for, the man she served, was adding to it. Each day, with his laws, his deportation squads, his insults, his bile and venom, he was adding to this overflowing volume of anguish. And there was Liz’s voice again, as loud as ever. I cannot believe you work for that evil man.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Costello?’

  She opened her eyes, only realizing at that moment how long she had kept them closed.

  ‘Are you feeling a little faint? Would you like a glass of water?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘It happens a lot here.’ It was Fong, passing her a paper cup filled with ice cold water.

  Maggie drank it down, then forced herself to give a smile. Then she answered the question the male doctor had asked her. ‘This is Dr Jeffrey Frankel, White House physician.’

  ‘Have you known the deceased for more than three years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how is he known to you?’

  The present tense made her pause. ‘We both work at the same place.’

  ‘And there is no doubt in your mind that this is Dr Jeffrey Frankel?’

  ‘No doubt at all.’

  ‘All right.’ And with that he reached for the sheet which lay at the bottom of the counter and pulled it upwards, covering Frankel’s shoulder and then his face. As far as he was concerned, Maggie’s work here was done. He gave a slight nod towards his colleague, as if to suggest Maggie should now leave.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Maggie said. ‘Can I just ask: on the basis of what you’ve seen, is there anything to suggest this was not suicide?’

  The woman spoke before her colleague could reply. ‘We’ll be issuing a full report in the regular way. Once the examination is fully complete.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s just I’ve been sent here by the White House. I will be expected to deliver a full report.’ Registering the woman’s unmoved expression, Maggie added: ‘To the President. He will want to know what happened to his personal physician.’

  The two officials looked at each other. Sensing an opening, Maggie pressed her case. ‘I will stress that what I am relaying are unofficial, interim findings, awaiting confirmation.’ And then: ‘I will put nothing in writing until we have had your official report.’

  That seemed to be the reassurance the woman was waiting for. In Washington, DC, the world capital of ass-covering, fear of the written record was the spectre that loomed largest.

  ‘All right, Ms Costello. You can ask my colleague one or two questions. But there are no guarantees he can answer.’

  ‘Of course. Doctor, have you seen anything that would make you doubt that what happened here was an act of suicide?’

  ‘Nothing so far.’

  ‘In terms of ballistics, residue or burn marks on the hands, position of the entry and exit wounds, all—’


  ‘All of that. It all points to suicide.’

  ‘He just put a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger?’

  ‘In or just by his mouth. Seems that way, yes. I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And you’ve seen the police report presumably?’

  The doctor looked over at his boss, who gave him a nod. ‘Yes.’ He raised his clipboard again. ‘And one of the officers was here with me. Just before you came.’

  ‘And what he saw—’

  ‘She.’

  ‘—she saw fits with a finding of suicide?’

  ‘Yep. The deceased was found with a gun in his right hand. Full match on the prints.’

  ‘Everything in the right position? Gun held the right way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The angle matching the wounds?’

  ‘Like I said. Yes.’

  ‘No anomalies or discrepancies at all?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Open and shut case? I can tell the Pres … my bosses that this is a tragic but straightforward case of suicide.’

  ‘That’s it, yes.’

  ‘OK,’ Maggie said, collecting herself as if to leave. ‘Thank you.’

  Maggie was nearly at the door before she turned and said, ‘You know what: belt and braces. I can predict exactly what my boss is going to ask me. There will be photographs from the crime scene. Could you just let me take a quick pass through those?’ There was a pause Maggie didn’t like. ‘So I can tell the White House how incredibly helpful the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has been?’

  ‘I already explained that we have very little time, Miss Costello. And, besides, this is police evidence. I really—’

  ‘I understand. Just the pictures of how Dr Frankel was found. He and the President had known each other a long time. They were close.’

  The woman didn’t even attempt to hide her reluctance, sighing as she tilted her head to suggest her colleague lead Maggie to the computer which was perched on a high table, close to the examination counter. He pulled up a stool on wheels and, with Maggie and Fong watching over his shoulder, he clicked several times until he had opened a folder of photographs. From the time stamps, Maggie could see they were taken at 7.12am today.

  There were dozens. ‘Can we just scoot through them?’ Maggie said, trying to keep it light.

  The first few showed Frankel lying in a shaded part of the park, perhaps six yards off the joggers’ track, among shrubs and underbrush. A swathe of trampled twigs and grasses was visible from the track to where the corpse lay.

  The pictures got closer now, focusing on the body. Frankel appeared to be wearing trousers and a sports jacket, with a shirt and no tie. Nicely polished leather loafers. Classic Washington, smart-casual attire. He had his glasses on.

  Maggie touched the doctor’s shoulder. ‘The glasses. Was he wearing—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When the body was brought here, the glasses were there. We removed them, along with his other personal effects.’

  ‘OK.’

  He carried on scrolling through. The police had photographed the dead man from every angle. They had also taken pictures of the ground nearby. Maggie saw several images of tree bark spattered with what she guessed was blood, bone and brain material.

  Something in the image she was looking at jarred, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  Finally, there were a dozen photos of a car: a Honda Civic, parked near Rock Creek. Frankel’s car: shown from all angles, both inside and out. She scrutinized it, trying to think herself into the shoes of a conspiracy theorist, trying to notice what they would notice. The exterior was unremarkable, no dents or scratches that she could see. The car looked worn and well-used, unflashy for a man who’d have had a decent income, but otherwise wholly ordinary. The interior was neat: she saw a couple of CDs in the slot near the handbrake, a bottle of de-icer held in the passenger door. She looked and looked, but that seemed to be that.

  Indeed, it was only after she had said her goodbyes, thanking Dr Fong and her colleague, and had hailed a cab and was sitting in the back, staring out of the window, returning to the White House that a thought struck her. Her eyes had skated over this one detail, but she had not absorbed its meaning – until now.

  11

  The White House, Tuesday, 6.16pm

  Ordinarily, Bob Kassian dreaded occasions like these. He would do his best to arrive late and leave early which, in his role as Chief of Staff, was not just possible but expected. Of course he was too busy to spend more than a few precious minutes at a reception, hobnobbing with diplomats and selected ‘business leaders’. (In the previous era, a party like this would also have included a few journalists and academics, specialists in the relevant region, but McNamara had decreed that he’d had ‘enough of experts’ and so that custom had been terminated. Kassian disagreed but said nothing: pick your battles.) If anything, it would look suspiciously low energy and low status if the Chief of Staff were present there too long. Official Washington would be disappointed.

  But tonight was different. Not the event itself: a reception in the East Room for the King of Saudi Arabia was as unappetizing as any other. But it provided a perfect opportunity to talk, discreetly and unheard, with the Secretary of Defense. If they had met in Kassian’s office in the White House, it would have looked too deliberate: a meeting, rather than a chat. Even more so if Kassian had made a special journey to the Pentagon. But grabbing a few moments to talk at a cocktail party? That was perfectly natural. Especially during a nuclear crisis, when discussion between the key players was around the clock. If someone spotted the two of them in earnest conversation, the most damaging interpretation would be that they were cementing an alliance that excluded the National Security Advisor: in other words a standard Washington turf war. No one would imagine they were plotting the assassination of the President of the United States. Hiding in plain sight: a tactic that had always served them both so well.

  They now picked up where they had left off earlier that day. Once they had made the core decision, establishing the objective, they had moved swiftly to method. They talked first about what he, Kassian, referred to as ‘direct’ options.

  Was there a way the two of them could kill the President themselves? The advantages were obvious. They would not be reliant on the discretion, or resolve, of anyone but each other. They could move fast, at a moment solely of their choosing. But could it be done?

  Could they get themselves alone in a room with him, perhaps with a syringe containing a drug that might simulate a heart attack? Where would they source such a drug, without arousing suspicion? Once administered, would it leave a trace?

  They were sure they could find answers to those questions. But as they went through the various scenarios, they found themselves running into the same brick walls. There was the simple fact that the President was almost never alone. On the contrary, he was the most closely defended human being on the planet. The Secret Service employed 6,750 people for the sole task of keeping him safe. There were agents in the Residence, agents in the office, agents wherever he travelled. Even if he were to demand a private, one-to-one chat with either his Chief of Staff or his Defense Secretary there was always a chance someone could join them at any moment. The one person who might have had a reason to be alone with the President, to demand complete privacy, with the time and space to do what needed to be done, was his personal physician. But that man was dead.

  Even if they had found a way around that particular obstacle, and neither Kassian nor Bruton could easily see it, they’d run into the other, more serious hurdle: the fact that any one of the ‘direct’ options would make them immediate suspects. Had, say, Jim emerged from a private meeting in the Oval Office, only for the President to be found dead a few minutes later, he would be the first one accused. Yes, they might be able to engineer a delay to serve as an alibi, but if the death were eventually exposed as murder rather than the result of natural causes – and any post-mortem would be extremely thorough �
� then the automatic assumption would be that this had been an inside job. It might not be either one of them who was identified as the killer, but there would be no doubting that the President had been murdered by someone with proximity to power.

  Neither needed to spell out what was obvious to the pair of them: that the personal consequences were not the issue here. Their fear was not that one or both of them might face justice and be made to pay for the crime of a presidential assassination. That was not why they needed to avoid any culpability.

  ‘If the finger pointed at you, Jim, can you even imagine it?’ Kassian had said. ‘The Secretary of Defense? It would be a military coup.’

  Plenty of people, he argued, including many millions who couldn’t stand the President, would nevertheless be appalled at the brutality of such an act and its apparent contempt for democracy and the Constitution. Given the divisions that had been exposed in the election, and the loathing this President had aroused since, they both believed such an outcome could split the country in two. You could imagine it: the newspapers, the cities and coasts, much of the intelligence community in one camp; the rural counties, law enforcement and the border agencies in the other. Each side with its own political party, its own sympathetic TV networks, its own colours: a civil war of red versus blue.

  America, they agreed, had always had the potential to do that again; the most lethal conflict the country had ever fought was against itself. An act of murder by the head of the US military would be the spark to relight the fire.

  This was why it could not be either one of them who wielded the knife directly. That they would have the physical courage to do it, and damn the consequences – even if that meant risking their own life and liberty – neither doubted. The focus of their conversation in this crowded room, as they waited for the desert king to enter, was not saving their own skins, but saving the republic.

  A man in a very expensive suit and with a head of thick, dark hair was hovering, waiting to introduce himself. Bruton turned and offered a handshake. ‘Good to see you,’ he said: the default Washington formulation, delicately insuring yourself against the possibility you had met before. Only a DC rookie ever made the mistake of saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’