A detail of Secret Service agents, along with backups from the federal marshals’ ser vice and the Drug Enforcement Agency, had effectively taken over the hospital. Armed federal agents stood at every hallway intersection, stairway, and elevator. Dean stayed close to the President, who, despite the pleas from his security detail, kept stopping to shake hands with nurses, aides, and doctors — and their accompanying Secret Service escort — as he made his way around to the emergency surgical center where Senator McSweeney had been taken.
* * *
Jimmy Fingers dug his hand deep into his pans pocket, finger-ing the trigger of his pistol.
All the years he’d spent getting McSweeney ready to run, then pulling off the masterstroke — the genius stroke, unprecedented in American history — that brought the senator from underdog to front-runner in one quick shot.
How was he ever going to find someone else to hitch his wagon to?
The short answer was, he wouldn’t. He was too close to McSweeney. If the senator went down, he went down.
Poof.
McSweeney gurgled something. One of the nurses jumped over, checking the monitors.
“Where am I?” muttered the senator.
“You’re at the hospital,” said Jimmy Fingers.
“What the hell are you doing here?” McSweeney asked.
“What am I doing?” Jimmy Fingers felt his anger rise.
“I’m watching out for you, the way I always do.” McSweeney shook his head.
I ought to kill you right now and be done with it, thought Jimmy Fingers.
Two large men in suits, obviously members of the Secret Service, parted the curtains at the front of the room.
“You’re Fahey?” one asked.
“I am,” said Jimmy Fingers. “What’s up?”
“The President is on his way.”
“What the hell is he doing here?” said Jimmy Fingers.
The agent couldn’t have looked more shocked if Jimmy Fingers had turned into a butterfly.
“We don’t want the President here,” said Jimmy Fingers.
“What are you saying, Jimmy?” asked McSweeney.
“Senator, the President is on his way,” said the Secret Service agent. “One of the chief of staff’s assistants should be here momentarily. The President will be along right after that.”
“We don’t want him here, Gideon,” Jimmy Fingers told the senator. “He’s using this for political gain.”
“The President can go anywhere he wants,” said McSweeney. “I’m touched that he’s concerned.”
“He’s not concerned,” snapped Jimmy Fingers. “Not about you. This is all part of some setup.”
“My God, Jimmy, give it a rest. Let the President come if he wants. I’m dying here.”
* * *
The president’s chief of staff had located the head of the surgical team that had operated on McSweeney. The doctor and two of his assistants were standing in a small waiting area just outside the recovery room.
“Mr. President, this is an honor,” said the surgeon. “I wish it were under different circumstances.”
“How’s your patient?”
“Doing very well, considering the circumstances,” said the doctor. “He’s conscious. Some of his people are with him.”
“Can I speak with him?”
“By all means.”
They started walking down the hall. Dean stayed close to the President, buttressed by two burly Secret Service agents.
There were armed federal marshals on both ends of the hall, and all the rooms in between had been vacated.
“Charlie, can you talk?” asked Rubens in his ear.
Dean took a few steps away and pulled out his sat phone, pretending to use it.
“Dean.”
“There’s a possibility that the person who set up the assassination on McSweeney was a member of his staff,” said Rubens. “It may have been his aide, James Fahey, also known as Jimmy Fingers. We’re in the pro cess of informing the Secret Service right now. Fahey may be at the hospital. If so, it would be a good idea to apprehend him there now. He needs to be questioned.”
“All right,” said Dean, noticing that the President was heading into the recovery room.
* * *
Jimmy Fingers had always prided himself on his ability to keep cool under difficult circumstances, but this moment was more trying than most. It wasn’t bad enough that Marcke had ended McSweeney’s career; now he was going to rub it in by using the assassination attempt to bolster his own image.
It was almost too much to handle. It was too much to handle, but Jimmy Fingers couldn’t do anything about it. He was trapped in the room as the President came in, surrounded by his bodyguards and aides.
Damn all these bastards, thought Jimmy Fingers. Damn them all.
* * *
Dean pulled aside Freehan, the Secret Service agent in charge of the presidential detail.
“Which one of these guys is James Fahey?” Dean asked.
“The senator’s aide?”
“We have to talk to him.”
“What?” Freehan put his hand to his ear, listening to a message. Then he looked back at Dean. “You sure about this, Dean?”
“Yeah.”
The Secret Service agent turned abruptly and strode into the recovery room. Dean followed. A short, wiry man stood near the senator’s bedside, glaring at the President, who was just bending over at the right side of the bed.
“Down!” shouted Freehan.
* * *
Jimmy Fingers realized the moment he saw the Secret Service agent’s glower that they had figured it all out.
Somehow, they had figured it all out.
And then they were rushing at him, and he did the only thing he could do under the circumstances — he pulled his pistol from his pocket.
* * *
Charlie Dean saw Jimmy Fingers start to pull something from his pocket. He launched himself at the man, flying through the air like a guided missile.
Something cracked below Dean about midway across the room, but he continued onward, elbow and forearm up. He caught Jimmy Fingers in the neck and they fell back toward the wall. There were two more loud cracks, and Dean felt incredible pain.
He flailed, unable for some reason to form his fingers into fists, unable to kick with his legs or do anything else but grind his upper body into the other man’s. There were shouts all around him, and another crack. Jimmy Fingers pushed up, and then his face exploded, a few inches from Dean’s.
“He’s down!”
“Go!”
“Go!”
“Dean? Dean?… Dean?”
* * *
The pain was so intense that it was impossible to tell exactly where it came from. It surged like a tsunami over Dean, pushing him beneath itself. Then suddenly he lifted free, spinning in a slow circle in the middle of the room.
Everyone was watching.
Not the Secret Service agents. Not the President. Not the senator or his aide. But everyone else.
Everyone. People he hadn’t seen in thirty years, back in the Marine Corps. His first business partner. Sal, the gas station own er who’d given him his first job.
Longbow stood silently next to him, his bolt gun over his shoulder.
“I missed you, Charlie,” said Longbow.
Dean couldn’t answer. The room filled quickly. He didn’t recognize many of the faces. Phuc Dinh was there — or rather, the man Dean had killed thinking he was Phuc Dinh.
Oh, thought Dean. Oh.
154
As soon as the Art Room told Tommy Karr what had happened, he commandeered one of the Secret Service cars and drove to the hospital. He knew the general location, if not the address, but he didn’t have to ask the Art Room for directions; half the city seemed to have turned out, trying to find out what was going on.
He li cop ter gunships circled overhead and every police officer who lived within a hundred miles of LA had been called in to work. Even with his credential
s out, Karr had a difficult time negotiating the roadblocks and the traffic; finally, with the hospital in sight, he abandoned the car and began jogging toward Dean.
Dean was still in intensive care when Karr arrived.
“Better get Lia here right away, what ever it takes,” Karr told the Art Room.
155
“How many things would you change?” asked Longbow.
“I don’t know,” said Dean. “Maybe nothing important.”
“Interesting,” said his old friend. “You mean you’ve made no mistakes?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Of course I made mistakes.
But how do you separate them from everything else?”
“Interesting.”
“You know we killed the wrong guy in Quang Nam,” said Dean. “It was his brother. He sent him as a decoy. Must suck to live with that.”
“You killed the wrong guy.”
“Yeah. He’d been tipped off somehow. But he was only on the list in the first place because the Americans who were paying him off stole his money and they were afraid he’d squeal.”
“Did he?”
“Eventually.”
“So that was one mistake you’d take back.”
“I don’t know. No. His brother was VC, too. Well, one thing I’d do differently — I wouldn’t let you go to fill the canteens.”
Longbow smiled. “Well, I wouldn’t have let you go in my place. The man who got me had circled below the ridge. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I even saw him before he fired. But I slipped a little — I missed my shot, Charlie Dean.
Isn’t that crazy? Whoever heard of a sniper missing his shot?”
“It happens.”
Dean thought of the mountain lion, the sudden surge of adrenaline. A moment that could have gone either way.
How many moments were like that, when you could change things? How many would he change, if he really had the power to do so?
Maybe he did have the power. Maybe that was what happened — maybe you got another shot at doing things right when you died.
* * *
Lia’s legs trembled fiercely as she walked down the hall of the hospital. Tommy Karr walked beside her. For the very first time since she’d known him, he didn’t crack a joke; he didn’t chuckle; he didn’t laugh; he didn’t even smile.
“This way, ma’am,” said the aide who was leading them.
They passed through a double set of doors into a large room.
Hospital beds were clustered around the room, each one surrounded by several carts of medical equipment. Monitors beeped; displays burned green; vital signs charted into un-dulating hills on the black screens.
Charles Dean lay in a bed next to the nurses’ station, surrounded by machines. Tubes ran to his face and arms. He’d been hit by three bullets. One had punctured his lung; one had severed an artery; a third had slipped against the outer wall of his heart.
“Charlie Dean,” gasped Lia. “Oh, Charlie.” a woman parted from the crowd. It was Qui Lai Chu, the woman who had been his guide and translator in Vietnam.
“You’ve come back, Mr. Dean,” said Qui. “Why?”
“It was my assignment. I didn’t come on my own.”
“You came to see the road you might have taken.”
“No,” said Dean. “You’re wrong.”
“Where will you go now?” asked Qui.
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you ready to die?”
Dean thought about the question for a long time. Finally, he said that he didn’t think it was up to him.
“No,” said Qui. “But you should know that you won’t be forgotten. You will not turn into a hungry ghost.” For some reason, that comforted him.
lia gripped dean’s hand and leaned close to his ear.
“Charlie? Charlie? Can you hear me?” He turned his head toward her. The nurse behind her waved to one of the doctors, motioning him over.
“Lia,” Dean said, without opening his eyes.
“Charlie?”
“I’d do it all again. Everything. Us.” Lia sank to the floor. “Oh, God,” she prayed.
“It’s all right,” said Dean, opening his eyes. “I’m going to be OK.”
“Charlie.”
“I’m going to be OK.”
“You want kids?” she asked.
“Yeah. Do you?”
“Yes.”
Dean smiled, then closed his eyes. “I’m tired. Real tired.” Lia looked up and saw the doctor staring down. “Is he going to be OK?” she asked.
“I’m going to be OK,” Dean said to her. “I’ll be walking out of here tomorrow.”
“You’re not walking out of here tomorrow,” said the doctor sharply.
“But he will be OK,” said Lia.
The doctor paused for what seemed the longest time, then nodded slowly.
“He’ll recover. But he has to take it slow. Very slow.”
“That word’s not in my vocabulary,” said Dean.
Lia put her hand against his cheek. “It is now,” she told him. “It is.”
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Conspiracy db-6 Page 37
