Straight at Abe.
“Holy shit!” Abe took three steps back and raised something in his right hand. A tire iron.
“Get the hell away from me!”
Jack continued to race forward, gaining speed, blood spraying off him as he ran. Abe was backed up against the shelves and had no place to go.
Bert was transfixed, unable to turn away. Jack had so many lures stuck on him he looked like a decorated Christmas tree. He was four steps away from Abe… three… two…
Abe yelped and brought the weapon down, cracking it hard against the side of Jack’s head. Jack flopped to the ground like a fish. He twitched twice, and then was still. Abe dropped the tire iron and staggered away.
“I think I’m having a heart attack.”
Lincoln took three more steps and then fell to his knees. His hand clutched his chest, and his face was scrunched up in pain.
“Abe!” Roy hurried to him, grabbed his arm.
“Chest pains. Bad. That guy… Jesus.”
“Stay calm. I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Wait… wait… wait…”
Abe opened his mouth and let out an incredibly long belch.
“I’m okay. It was the francheesie.”
Roy left him to his heartburn. He went to the fallen ladder and set it up under Bert.
“I got you, buddy.”
“Hi, Roy. I thought you were dead.”
“Naw. Just went for a brisk swim.” Roy helped Bert get his feet onto the rungs. “Hey, Abe. Cut that rope.”
Abe was smacking his lips. “That sure didn’t taste too good the second time. Just a sec.”
“My ass. It’s killing me.”
“Mine, too. We’ll buy a couple of donuts. Try to stand up.”
Bert stared into Roy’s eyes. He saw deep concern. “You saved me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You’re welcome? You hit him with my entire life savings. You couldn’t find a brick, or a board or something?”
“Maybe I should leave you hanging there.”
The rope was severed and Bert’s arms came down. His legs were shaking, and Roy assisted him to the ground.
Abe came over with the knife and cut the rope tying Bert’s hands. There were bloody ligature marks around his wrists, but that paled next to the pain of his circulation returning. It was as if Bert had stuck both hands in a barbecue grill. He moaned.
“Are you okay?”
“Half a million dollars.” Bert looked around the warehouse, lures scattered all over.
Abe held up the knife. “We could, uh, get them back if you want.”
Bert winced at the thought. His eyes fanned over to Jack’s body. Moments ago, he didn’t think there was any worse way to die than being impaled. Jack just proved him wrong. A horrible death, for a horrible man.
“Leave them. I just lost my stomach for the lure business.”
“Well, your ass doesn’t look too bad.”
“Thanks, Roy. You’ve got a cute ass yourself.”
“I meant, I don’t think you’re gonna bleed to death.”
Bert laughed. “And just two minutes ago, I was hoping I’d bleed to death.”
Roy eyed the stake. “I bet. Nasty.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Tom. The transmitter. Shit, I should call him back. He doesn’t have our number. Abe, gimme your phone.”
Abe was squatting on the ground, picking up lures. “These things are really worth that much money?”
“The phone, Abe.”
Abe pulled the cell out of his pocket and tossed it to Roy. Roy pressed a few buttons. “It doesn’t work.”
“Hit it.”
Roy smacked it a few times. “Was that supposed to help?”
“Naw. Battery is dead. But don’t you feel better?”
Bert made himself look at Jack again. He felt many things—fear, revulsion, anger, even sympathy. He focused his eyes on the phone clipped to his belt.
“Jack’s got a phone.”
No one made any move to retrieve it.
“We should search him, anyway.” Roy scratched his chin.
“Abe, you’re closest. Grab his phone.”
“No way. I saw this movie before. I go near him, he comes back to life and grabs me.”
Bert made the decision. “I’ll do it.”
Roy shook his head. “No need, Bert. I got this one.”
“It’s okay. I don’t want to spend the next thirty years in therapy, whining about my fear. I’d rather face it now.”
Bert limped over to Jack, one hand pressed against the wound on his backside. With each step, he was less sure of himself. Deep in his psyche, Bert knew that confronting the horrific corpse of the man who almost killed him was somehow therapeutic. Shrinks talked a lot about closure. This was closure in spades. But it still scared the hell out of him.
He can’t hurt me anymore. Bert said it over and over in his head. A mantra. He stopped next to the corpse, leaning down, focusing on the goal, reaching out a hand…
“Don’t let him grab you!” Abe yelled.
Bert took the phone. Triumphant, he began to turn away, but something caught his eye. A piece of paper, sticking out of Jack’s back pocket. Abe tugged it out. A plane ticket.
“While you’re over there being brave, check his wallet.” Roy said.
“No fair,” Abe said. “I killed him, I get his wallet.”
“We’re looking for evidence, Abe, not robbing him.”
Bert patted down Jack’s pockets, careful to avoid getting hooked. He dug out a billfold, some keys, and a small plastic tube.
“You doing okay?” Roy had come up to him, put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine.” The case was black, about half the size of a pencil. It had a screw top. Bert shook the contents onto his palm.
“What is that? Drugs?”
“I don’t think so.”
The object was small, about two centimeters long. It looked like a miniature missile. Pointy on one end, tiny wings on the other.
“It’s a dart of some kind.” Roy carefully picked it up between his thumb and index finger and held it close. “Has some kind of mark. Squiggles, like Chinese writing.”
“YOU!!!!”
The three of them whirled to see Jack. Somehow, impossibly, he’d gotten to his feet and launched himself at the trio, one arm stretched out for a pointy and lethal embrace.
Roy shoved Bert to the side and put out his hand to hold Jack back. As soon as Roy touched him, Jack’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he gasped, falling to the ground. His body jerked twice, and then he was still.
Abe nodded smartly.
“I told you that was gonna happen.”
“Is he dead?” Bert asked. “What the hell did you hit him with?”
Roy shrugged. “I just poked him with the little dart thingy.”
Bloody froth foamed out of Jack’s mouth.
“It killed him that fast?”
“Apparently so. Let’s try to avoid those things in the future. Gimme the phone.”
Roy took the cell from Bert and pressed some buttons.
“Tom? Yeah, he’s safe. Jack’s dead. Okay, tell me.”
Bert watched Roy’s face. As Tom talked, it became grimmer and grimmer.
“Great. I was hoping this situation would become a lot more desperate. Jack had a ticket on him. Lemme see it.” Bert handed it over. “Tomorrow night, to DC. Yeah, it makes sense. I’ll break it to the guys, call you right back.”
“What is it?” Bert braced himself for bad news.
Roy pocketed the phone. “Well, Shakespeare was a bad guy. He’s dead. It looks like Stang’s plot goes beyond just killing all the clones. Way beyond. The stakes have gone up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently, the day after tomorrow, Stang is planning on assassinating both the President and the Vice President at the same time.” Roy let the words sink in. “And we all know who’s next in li
ne for the Presidency.”
“The Secretary of State?” Abe looked up from the pile of lures he’d been gathering. “The Attorney General? The Prime Minister? Don’t tell me, I know this. Oprah?”
“The Speaker of the House. Phil Jr.”
Bert’s stomach dropped. “If he becomes President, we’re all dead.”
“It’s a lot worse than that. He’s planning on blaming China for the assassinations.”
Bert followed the line of thought. “Oh no.”
“That’s right.” Roy’s face creased with worry. “Get ready for World War III.”
Tom clicked on the NEWS icon at www.whitehouse.gov, to check the upcoming events for the President.
“He’s in Canada for the next two days.”
Joan asked, “Where?”
Tom checked where the Prez was supposed to be tomorrow at 4:15—that was the time mentioned in Bill’s speech. At precisely a quarter after four, Eastern time, our nation lost two of its finest leaders…
“He’ll be in Montreal. He’s addressing the North American Energy Commission, whatever that is.”
“How about the Vice President?”
Tom couldn’t find any mention of him. “I guess he’ll be presiding over the Senate. Roy mentioned that Jack had a plane ticket to DC. They must be planning on murdering him while Congress is in session.”
“So we’ve got—what—twenty hours to try and stop a double assassination?”
“We can place an anonymous call to the Secret Service, tell them the plot, and they’ll take care of it.”
“They’ll want proof. Which we don’t have.”
“We’ll be real convincing.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Tom turned and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Do you honestly think that the President is going to cancel his speech because of an anonymous phone call? He probably gets threatened every day by nuts from all over the world. Suppose you got a call saying the mayor of Chicago was going to be killed at a speech. What would you do?”
Tom saw her point. “We’d beef up security.”
“But we have to assume Stang can already beat security. Hell, the Secret Service may actually be in on it, with all of Stang’s connections. Would the mayor cancel his speech?”
Tom shook his head slowly. “Probably not. He’d have faith in his security staff. Plus he’d want to prove that he’s not easily scared. Terrorists can’t push this administration around, that kind of thing.”
“So an anonymous call is out. If we tried talking to the Secret Service in person, and told them the truth about everything that happened, how far would we get?”
Tom knew how that would go. “We’d get detained, and possibly arrested. We might be questioned for days, even weeks. Without due process, if Homeland Security got involved. And Stang would deny it all, of course.”
Joan’s face scrunched up in thought. “What if we went to the speech, and tried to warn him in person?”
“We wouldn’t get within a hundred yards of him before the Secret Service swarmed all over us.” Their options were dwindling. “How about the media? Could we tell them?”
“Same problem. We’d have to convince someone really high up before the President would listen, and we don’t have any proof. Do you think Dan Rather is any easier to get a hold of than the President?”
“We have some proof. The speech.”
“Shakespeare is dead. How can we prove he wrote it?”
Tom tapped his fingers on the desk, thinking. “What’s left? Go after Stang?”
“Which one? Senior or Junior?”
“We probably couldn’t get to Phil Jr.—he’s protected by the Secret Service same as the President. But maybe we can pay Phil Sr. another visit, try to force him to call off his dogs.”
“And then do what? Say he calls it off. Say we even take the next step, and murder him. Within a week, his son would have us hunted down and killed. Then he’d go ahead with the assassinations anyway.”
This was ridiculous. The two most important people in America were going to die tomorrow, and there didn’t seem to be any way to stop it. The same system that protected the President prevented Tom from helping him.
“So what can we do? Warning the President won’t work. Showing up at the speech, if we can even get in, will just get us arrested.”
“Jack had a ticket to Washington, so he was part of this. Attila and Vlad are probably part of it as well.”
Joan let the implication of her sentence weigh on Tom.
“So, we wait for them to show up, and kill them?”
Joan folded her arms. “They’re coming here to kill us.”
“And you can handle this?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s more than just the President. To be honest, I don’t even like the guy. But if Stang becomes the leader of our country, he’s going to start a war with China. You read the speech.”
Tom nodded. To say the speech was inflammatory was putting it lightly. It blamed China for the deaths, and then made demands that the Chinese would never meet—the Communist government stepping down, a formal apology, restitution, the disbanding of the Chinese Army… This was more than just their lives and the lives of some politicians. There were millions, possibly billions, of lives at stake.
“What if this goes deeper than Attila and Vlad? We don’t know how Stang plans to do it. He could fire a missile from miles away, for all we know. Besides, if they are the trigger men, they’re already on their way to their destinations. A plane ride to Montreal is at least eight hours long.”
“Then we somehow have to get the President and the Vice President away from those areas by 4:15.”
They brainstormed for a few minutes, batting ideas back and forth. Some were bad, some were impossible, and a few were ridiculous. Joan chewed her lower lip.
“How about we fake an attempt? Like fire a few bullets into the air? Then they’d get the President out of there.”
“We’d probably be killed before we could even fire the first shot. Scratch that, we wouldn’t even be able to get a gun anywhere near him. Where is this thing happening, anyway?”
Tom did a search for North American Energy Commission and found their website. He clicked on upcoming events.
“It’s indoors. Invitation only, some kind of formal dinner. We couldn’t get in if we wanted to.”
Tom took out his cell and dialed Roy’s new number. Maybe they had some ideas.
“How about we get one of those planes that do sky writing?” Roy suggested.
“The speech is inside. Last I checked, the Senate holds session inside as well.”
“Maybe it’ll be a nice day, they’ll hold it on the White House lawn. Hold on, Abe has an idea.”
Tom listened to some mumbling in the background. When Roy came back on, he laid it out. Tom was impressed.
“That’s so simple it just might work,” Tom said. “Do they have tours?”
“Bert says yes. He’s been to Washington before.”
“Will you be able to get what you need? It’s a long time until the Fourth of July.”
“Abe has got that covered. Think this can work for you, too?”
“I doubt it. We probably won’t even be able to get in the building. Plus we don’t have Abe. I’m not as recognizable in the public eye.”
“Good luck. Call when you figure it out. We’re going to stop by Abe’s, then go to the airport. Good thing I took out the extra insurance on that rental car.”
Roy hung up. Tom related their plan to Joan.
“Abe will probably get arrested. They’ll put two and two together.”
“He knows. But they won’t be able to hold him for long.”
“It wouldn’t work for us.”
“I know. But maybe we can use the same principle.”
Tom sketched out an idea. Joan listened, and added to it. After bantering back and forth a few times, they had something that might actually fly.
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