11
Lockwood was late for his own inauguration because he had been watching Mallory on television. He had not broken away until 11:38, when the press began to ask Mallory questions. At about that same time, word had been brought to him that the members of Mallory’s party in Congress would boycott the inaugural ceremony and the luncheon afterward.
“That would have made great television,” Sam Clark said. “All those empty places. But I’ve got ‘em resetting the tables, so every chair will be occupied.”
Lockwood listened closely; in politics, appearances were everything. “Good work,” he said. “Nobody gives a rat’s ass if they don’t show up, as long as it’s not too noticeable. Let ‘em march around outside with signs.”
“Eleven forty-seven,” Agent Bud Booker said. “We’ll just about make it.”
Lockwood and his retinue were racing through the stone bowels of the Capitol in an effort to reach the podium on the west face in time to take the oath at noon.
As they proceeded, half-trotting to keep up with Lockwood, Clark monitored Mallory’s press conference on a pocket television receiver. Suddenly he seized Lockwood’s arm. “Jesus,” he said. “There’s been a shooting. Mallory’s down.”
Lockwood stopped in his tracks, and the hurrying procession in his wake accordioned as it tried to halt its forward momentum. “What do you mean he’s down?” he demanded. “Give me that thing.”
Clark handed Lockwood the miniature TV. He put on his reading glasses, and on the tiny screen, no larger than a business card, he saw Susan Grant lying on the snow with Mallory crouched over her motionless body as if to shield it. The rest of the people had sunk to their knees or lay flat on the ground. All were deathly silent; some writhed in agony. Yet the picture was oddly static, like an image from a sentinel camera left behind on another planet. Lockwood realized that the camera operators were down, too, and the networks were broadcasting images from a fixed camera that was on the equivalent of automatic pilot.
Lockwood, who had trouble operating any apparatus more complicated than a telephone, cried, “There’s no damn sound!”
Booker, standing on tiptoe, screwed the sound button into his ear, and he heard the half-tremulous, half-exultant voice of an anchorman describing what had happened. “Franklin Mallory is alive, and apparently unharmed,” he reported. “He has escaped.”
Suddenly a flying squad of Mallory security men, federal agents, and uniformed policemen flooded the beautifully clear color picture, surrounding Mallory and hiding him from view. There were cameramen in this group, too, and the first close-up of Grant, twisted on the snow as though her long, elegant body had been struck by something much heavier than pistol bullets, made it obvious that she was dead. A medical team surrounded her, inside a ring of armed men. Mallory, resisting at first, was hustled away by another squad of agents. Lockwood knew that they would carry him bodily inside the building. The entrance they would use was just beyond the east wall of the crypt.
As the broadcaster talked, his voice grew steadier, more gossipy, but also more resentful that the story wasn’t bigger. “Listen to that son of a bitch,” Lockwood cried. “He’s disappointed!”
Of course, Booker could not hear, and in any case all his senses were elsewhere engaged as he searched the crowd with his eyes and his finely trained instincts for a second assassin.
Lockwood turned around and faced the excited crowd behind him. He towered over most of its members, and when he raised a hand for silence, their babble ceased. “According to the TV, somebody has shot Susan Grant,” he said. “It looks like she’s dead. President Mallory seems to be all right, and they’re bringing him into this building. Now if you’ll please make way, I have to go to him.”
Booker stepped in front of Lockwood. “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” he said. “But you can’t go out there.”
Lockwood put his hand flat on Booker’s chest. “I know that, Bud,” he said. “But they’re right outside. And by the time we get to the door, they’ll be inside. Now get your ass in gear and take me where I want to go. That man used to be President of the United States.” He raised his voice. “The rest of you folks disperse. Go somewhere safe. The ceremony is delayed.”
Associate Justice Poole was right behind him. Lockwood looked at the cheap black drugstore watch he always wore. “Eleven fifty-seven,” he said. “Can you administer the oath right here, Mr. Justice Poole?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” said Poole. “I can.”
“Then let’s do it. Where’s Polly?”
Lockwood’s wife was already on the podium outside with the family Bible in her lap.
“Does anyone have a Bible?” Poole asked.
“We don’t need a Bible,” Lockwood said. “Just say the words, Bob, and I’ll swear to them in the name of the Lord.”
Sam Clark said, “Wait, there are no cameras.”
“To .hell with the cameras,” Lockwood said, again glancing at his watch. “It’s twelve o’clock, Mr. Justice Poole. Let’s do it.”
Poole recited the words of the oath in a mellow up-country North Carolina accent. Lockwood repeated them after him. As Mallory had reminded Grant only an hour or so before, these sepulchral rooms in the bottom of the Capitol were full of echoes, and Lockwood’s loud voice reverberated off the stones.
12
Lockwood found Mallory behind an unmarked door, in one of the hideaway offices reserved for leaders of the Senate. Four grim-faced agents armed with shotguns stood outside, but there were no cameras; at Lock-wood’s request, Sam Clark had penned up the news media in another part of the Capitol. Polly Lockwood had left the podium on hearing the news, catching up to her husband as he rushed along the Brumidi corridors with their sentimental murals depicting America as the new Eden. They walked the rest of the way holding hands. Before they went in, Polly handed Lockwood a Kleenex.
“Better wipe your eyes, love,” she said.
Lockwood took the Kleenex and mopped away the copious tears that wet his cheeks. All his life he had wept at significant moments, sad or happy. As an athlete, he had scored most of his winning touchdowns with tears in his eyes, and on their wedding night Polly had discovered to her surprise that he cried with joy when he made love. Each of his elections to office, all of them close, had set tears flowing. In this case his wife wasn’t sure whether he was weeping for Mallory in his tragic loss or because he had just taken the presidential oath under such strange circumstances—or because, as was usually the case, he sensed that nothing would ever be the same again.
Even before the murder of Susan Grant, there had been little chance that things would ever be the same again with Mallory, but in Lockwood’s mind, everything that had happened between them in their struggle over the presidency was just politics. He was a throwback to the age when American politicians were Christians first and ideologues second. Such men forgave and forgot; to them, politics was a game, not a religion. Lockwood had been Mallory’s friend for more than twenty years, and Mallory had been his. In spite of all the fouls on both sides, he was Mallory’s friend even now. Nothing could change this, and it was the Mallory he first took a liking to, not the implacable stranger who had taken possession of his friend’s body, whom Lockwood had come to comfort and console.
The door opened into an anteroom crowded with Mallory people who were talking in murmurs to each other and into telephones. Those who had been present at Grant’s murder were shaken by what they had witnessed and deathly pale as a result of convulsive vomiting. Their eyes were swollen and bloodshot from weeping and the effects of the CS gas. Two of Mallory’s young people greeted the Lockwoods; they, too, had been crying.
Polly, a maternal woman even if childless, took each of them by the hand. “How is Franklin?” she asked.
“He’s alone right now,” the young woman said. “But I know he’ll want to see you.”
She led them into the inner room, where Mallory stood, all by himself, in the center of the carpet. Like the others, he was d
rained and red-eyed. His hair was disheveled and the knees of his gray trousers were dark with moisture where he had knelt in the snow beside Grant’s body. Polly Lockwood had never before seen this man with a hair out of place. Even such insignificant untidiness as she now observed made Mallory seem lost, grotesquely not himself, as if he were drunk or under arrest.
Polly rushed across the room and put her arms around him and hugged him. Although she had scarcely known Susan Grant, she and Marilyn Mallory had been loving friends, bound together by their childlessness and their husbands’ ambitions. In early Senate days, the wives had gotten the two couples together for Scrabble (Lockwood always won), bridge (Mallory always won), and movies and barbecues. Polly knew that the two husbands had become mortal political enemies for all future time, but she too was calling on a past incarnation of Franklin Mallory. The sympathy she felt for him at this moment had as much to do with her own grief over his first wife’s death as with the present tragedy. To Polly’s astonishment, Mallory hugged her back, breathing spasmodically as if about to break down. He did not seem to be able to let go. Lockwood, who had been waiting his turn to comfort Mallory, saw what was happening and stepped forward, awkwardly throwing his long arms around both of them and resting his hard, heavy skull against Mallory’s.
Finally Mallory stepped back. “I’m glad you came,” he said. “It means a lot to me.”
“We’re just so sorry, Franklin,” Polly said.
Still close together, they looked into one another’s faces for a moment. Of the three, Mallory was the only one whose cheeks were not wet with tears. Unable to trust himself to speak, Lockwood bit his lower lip and nodded.
“It’s odd,” Mallory said. “But I feel just like I did when Marilyn died. Robbed. Women are not supposed to go first. And not this way.”
Polly shook her head. “We never imagine that we will. What will you do now, Franklin?”
“Go on,” he said. “Just like Frosty would.”
Lockwood said, “I hope I never have to.” He drew Polly against his side; new tears coursed down his cheeks. “Couldn’t go on,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Could not do it”
Mallory looked him in the eyes. “Oh, yes, you could,” he said.
13
Lockwood canceled the inaugural parade and the luncheon that Congress had planned to give him under the dome of the Capitol, and although Grant was not entitled to any such honor, he ordered the flags on government installations to be lowered to half-staff. In Statuary Hall, where microphones and cameras had been set up for his inaugural address, Julian Hubbard had a word with him.
“This is a terrible thing that’s happened, Mr. President,” he said. “But it has its up side.”
“Its ‘up side’?” Lockwood said. “What exactly would that be, boy?”
There was disgust in his voice. In all their years together, he had never before called Julian “boy,” his ultimate term of condescension. He had treated him like a favorite child, continually teaching, encouraging, and confiding. But something had changed since the night before. He had lost patience with Julian, and in every case involving other people that Julian could remember, this had always meant that he had first lost trust.
Julian said, “All I mean was, it gives us some breathing room. You don’t have to respond to Mallory’s charges today. You can go on the air and extend your personal sympathy, give thanks that Mallory was delivered from harm, and then give your original speech. The text will be on the TelePrompTer. We can deal with the mischief Mallory has made another day.”
“Mischief?” Lockwood said. “Is that your word for it? I’m just glad that son of a bitch in the white nightshirt didn’t kill him. Then you’d know what mischief is. You hear me?”
Julian nodded. Lockwood waited, eyes burning, as if expecting Julian to defend himself against some accusation that he, Lockwood, could not bear to make. But the younger man remained silent.
After the usual prayers and Sam Clark’s subdued introduction, Lockwood went to the bank of microphones. “I have seldom agreed with Franklin Mallory on questions of public policy, but I have always believed that he is a patriot and an honest man,” he said. “Today he has been the victim of a terrible tragedy, and my heart goes out to him and to the family of the fine young American, Susan Grant, who died today at the hand of a brutal and cowardly assassin. In light of what has happened, and because of the inclement weather, I have ordered that the celebrations planned for today will not take place.”
He paused and gazed into the cameras. “My fellow Americans, as you all know, my defeated opponent has made a statement charging that there were irregularities in the counting of ballots in three of our states in last November’s elections. As we all realize, this is a matter of the highest import, and I will respond to his statement in detail before long. But this is not the time to do so, except to say that I believe myself to be the people’s rightful choice as President of the United States, whose Constitution I have just sworn in the name of the Lord to preserve, protect, and defend. And so now I will speak to you of more enduring things.”
Then, as Julian Hubbard had counseled, Lockwood read his prepared speech, which shimmered on the translucent panels of the TelePrompTer as if written on air.
14
The day after the shooting, the authorities were directed by an anonymous phone call to a tiny apartment located in a violent neighborhood about a mile southeast of the Capitol. Although murder, rape, robbery, and drug traffic were hourly occurrences here, the police seldom ventured into these streets except to protect firemen when a major fire threatened to spread to more highly valued parts of town. This rarely happened because the prevailing winds blew toward the east, and everything the city government wished to preserve lay to the west. The apartment—a small, windowless furnished room equipped with a hot plate and a refrigerator—had been rented only six days before by a young person who gave his name as Abdul Ahmed Jackson.
According to the landlady, her tenant had paid the security deposit and one month’s rent, a total of six hundred dollars, with clean, new twenty-dollar bills. He had kept to himself. He was “a light-skinned, good-looking individual, not black exactly, but not a white man either, maybe an Arab, had that kind of a nose.” In any case he was dark enough to fit into the neighborhood. As she had talked to him only once, and he had said almost nothing on that occasion, she could not say whether he was an American or a foreigner. He had been suspicious of strangers. Everybody in that part of town was, but Jackson had seemed especially paranoid where women were concerned. “Girl smile at him or knock on his door, he be gone,” the landlady told Channel 7 News.
Abdul Ahmed Jackson’s apartment contained Near Eastern groceries, a well-thumbed copy of the Koran, books and pamphlets in Arabic by Near Eastern revolutionaries, fundamentalist Islamic religious tapes, also in Arabic, and a Baluchi prayer rug oriented toward Mecca by means of an arrow inked onto the floor. Although the arrow was pointed so precisely that it could not have been drawn without the aid of a compass, no compass was found, leading investigators to deduce that Jackson had not intended to return; they were proud of this bit of reasoning and made sure the news media reported it.
The authorities did find the familiar paraphernalia of the demented assassin: newspaper clippings about Mallory, pictures of him with targets drawn over his heart or with his face obliterated, a diary, written in a skewed, barely legible hand that listed his “crimes against humanity.” Among these offenses, the one that seemed to have bothered the alleged assassin most was Mallory’s campaign against abortion.
Before Mallory was elected President, his mechanism for good works, the Mallory Foundation, had financed research that made it possible, by pumping about a pint of saline solution mixed with antibiotics and blood protein into the uterus of a pregnant woman, to flush out a fertilized ovum eight days after conception. This technique, developed by animal scientists, had routinely been used since the mid-twentieth century by breeders of livestock,
especially cattle. The Mallory Foundation opened a string of free clinics in which the method was adapted for use by human subjects. A woman who had engaged in unprotected coitus and was nervous about the consequences had only to call the clinic on the morning after and make an appointment for an immediate pregnancy test and, if the results were positive, recovery of the fertilized ovum a week later. Inevitably, these clinics came to be called MACS, short for Morning After Clinics.
Mallory’s aim was to provide a safe, convenient, and painless alternative to the destruction of about two million fetuses a year by surgical or pharmaceutical methods, MAC clinics made it possible to reimplant a healthy embryo in the original mother at a future date, in case she changed her mind about bearing the child, or alternatively, to grow it to term in the womb of a different woman. In a few instances, when the natural or surrogate parents requested the procedure, embryos had been surgically divided under a microscope before reimplantation, a procedure that resulted in the gestation and birth of normal identical twins.
All embryos that were not transplanted within a few days were enclosed in a protective ampule and frozen in an amniotic atmosphere of liquid nitrogen at a constant temperature of minus 325 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no scientific reason why an embryo thus preserved could not be implanted and successfully gestated in the womb of a female born thousands of years after its original mother. As Mallory could not resist putting the matter in announcing the program, “This would be something like King Solomon, an unwanted baby adulterously conceived around the middle of the tenth century B.C. by King David and his paramour, Bathsheba, being born during the Kennedy administration to a surrogate mother.”
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