By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Have you talked to him, Daisy?”

  She stared out the window. He wondered how many nights she had sat there like this. In normal times.

  “Daisy?”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said, with a slight sniffle. “Talked to Bushy. He called to tell me Henry’s all right and that Dr. Potter is there. He wants me to come up. I don’t want to, Larry. I want to stay here.”

  “Would you like Sally to come over?”

  “No. Thank you, but no.”

  He rose. He started to turn on a nearby lamp, but caught himself. “I have to go now, Daisy. I have to deal with the press.”

  “I know. You must carry on.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Have them bring me some more bourbon. And make sure they do.”

  He touched her shoulder again. She brought her own hand to his for a moment, then it fell limply away.

  “Take care of yourself, Daisy. I’ll look in on you as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t bother. They’ll be coming for me, Larry.”

  In the corridor outside, Atherton drew the First Lady’s chief of staff aside, and then close.

  “Mrs. Hampton is going through a very difficult time,” he said. The smaller man nodded vigorously. “She’s to have whatever she wants, and that includes some more Jack Daniels Black.”

  “But …”

  “I’m going to check on that.”

  “Yes, Mr. Vice President.”

  Shawcross, Neil Howard, four Secret Service agents, and two marines with carbines accompanied him on the short walk from the West Wing across West Executive Drive to the EOB. Howard had written up a brief statement, but Atherton just slipped it into his suit-jacket pocket. He was not a brilliant public speaker, but he always did better on his own.

  Stepping into the bright lights and noise of the EOB auditorium, he thought of martyrs entering the arena of the Colosseum of Rome. His entourage moved with him to the podium, a praetorian guard. Still, the mob of reporters surged around him. A storm of questions assaulted him. His ear could make sense of only a few: “Are we going to war, Mr. Vice President?” “Why are you treating us like prisoners, Mr. Vice President?” “Will the president live?” “Are you arresting Hispanics on sight?”

  Finally, Neil Howard jumped up on a chair and began to shout them down. “Let the vice president speak! If you want to hear him, you’ll have to be quiet! Shut up, everyone! Shut up! Let him speak!”

  Howard’s unexpected and uncharacteristic rudeness served its purpose. The din subsided. In a minute or so there was relative quiet, but the tension was explosive.

  “I, I have a brief statement to make,” Atherton said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’ve just come from the First Lady. As you may know, the president is at Camp David. He’s been wounded, but apparently not badly. The surgeon general, who is also President Hampton’s personal physician, is attending to him. Mrs. Hampton is doing well, under the circumstances. She’ll be joining her husband shortly, I imagine.”

  The heat from the lights was unbearable.

  “There’s still a lot of confusion over what’s happened,” he continued, trying to avoid looking long at any one reporter. “The assassin, the would-be assassin, was killed in an exchange of gunfire. There were arrests made in New York, where I was, and in Chicago, where the secretary of housing and urban development was. There were some arrests here. I believe the situation is now well in hand.

  “I think I speak for President Hampton in saying that the horrible accident up at Gettysburg, in which so many innocent people were killed and injured, friends of yours, friends of mine, was one of the saddest things, one of the worst tragedies that could befall any administration. We’re all just terribly, terribly sad and sorry. Our hearts go out to everyone who’s suffered. We’re going over everything and will make a full report as soon as possible, as soon as we know just what occurred.”

  One of the younger reporters began to interrupt with a question but was silenced by the fierce glares of those around him.

  “As is necessary in an emergency like this, our armed forces around the world were placed on a high state of alert,” Atherton continued. “We now see no immediate threat of hostilities, and the alert’s being relaxed. Everything is under control. We’re doing everything we can to bring things back to normal.

  “Now I’m sure you’ll understand that I have an awful lot to attend to. If you could just hold your questions until next time …”

  The silence was broken by a detonation of shouted words. As Atherton withdrew behind his phalanx of aides and security men, he heard himself called Bonnie Greer’s murderer. And there was someone shouting, “What about the coup?”

  Allen Wilson, the attorney general, was waiting outside. “Back to normal, eh? Not anytime soon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Colonel Ambrose—I mean, the president of the United States—has federalized the National Guard.”

  “Here? In D.C.?”

  “Here? Everywhere! Every military unit in the continental United States is now technically under the direct command of the president—and Colonel Ambrose.”

  Autopsies were not Walter Kreski’s forte. He had served a few brief years as a policeman while completing law school, but little violence had come his way. In all his career, he had seen the body of someone shot to death only twice. Now, in the crowded Adams County Morgue, he was making up for that with a vengeance.

  He had looked first at the body of the suspect Huerta, what there was of it. They had all but shoveled the man’s remains into the body bag. His right hand seemed to be the only part of him untouched by bullets. There were ink stains on the fingertips. Copley had had the fingerprint check done immediately. The FBI director was the better cop.

  He had gone next to Al Berger’s remains, and wished he hadn’t. The purpose of this ghoulish perusal was to examine wounds, to imprint their images firmly on his mind for when he would be able to read the autopsy reports, which otherwise might be perfectly meaningless to him. But when they rolled Berger over on his stomach to expose the holes in his back, Kreski knew he had asked too much of himself. Berger had long been his friend. Kreski had fought hard to secure the man the post of head of the White House detail and had every hope Berger would succeed him as director when he retired, as he intended to do when he made thirty years the following summer. Berger’s son was dating Kreski’s daughter. It would fall to him to talk to that son, but here he was looking at the boy’s father as though at some laboratory specimen.

  Kreski turned away, inhaling deeply, trying to ignore the gaze of the Pennsylvania state trooper standing opposite him. Then he forced himself to the sight of Berger’s back, glancing over it quickly to get the grim business done. There was the red stripe of a cut or burn across the left shoulder that might have come from a bullet. In the left lower back was a large, jagged hole from a bullet that had taken out much of the man’s chest in exiting. That was all.

  He stepped back, nodding. He wanted to light his pipe, but feared he might gag. There were more bodies to see. The next one he went to proved to be Bonnie Greer’s. They had left her eyes open, still staring in pain and wonder. Her lower jaw was gone. Clenching his fists, his nails digging into the flesh of his palms, he held himself in place as the attendant continued to pull down the sheet to reveal her chest and the second navel that had been created in the side of her breast—a neat, round hole, unlike the rougher one in Berger’s back.

  “That’s enough,” Kreski said.

  He had made a point of attempting to interview Agent Schultz as soon as he had arrived at Gettysburg—a useless undertaking, for the man was nearly catatonic, muttering something about a horse. It was well Kreski had done that first. If he were left alone with Schultz now, he would probably kill him.

  “Seen enough, Walt?”

  He had been joined by a man wearing a Burberry raincoat, blue blazer, gray flannels, black loafers with tassels, a white button-down s
hirt, and a striped college tie. Steven Copley never let you forget he had gone to Princeton.

  “Yeah, I surely have.”

  The FBI director had a very youthful face. Some said he had dyed his hair its snowy white so he would look sufficiently mature for his job.

  “Let’s take a walk, Steve. I can’t stand the smell in here any longer.”

  The air outside was cold, but clear and clean. Kreski filled his lungs with it, then, exhaling as they started down the walk, reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch.

  “I’m going to have to arrest your man Schultz,” Copley said.

  “I know.” In the cold, crisp, oxygen-rich air, Kreski soon had his pipe glowing red.

  “If we don’t, the Pennsylvania authorities will lock him up here. He hit a twelve-year-old boy with one of those rounds.”

  “Yeah. He did do that.”

  “Walt, can you survive this all right, politically?”

  “You tell me.”

  Copley said nothing. As they walked along past the old nineteenth-century houses, his leather heels rang out sharply against the pavement, echoing. It was as though the little town was again its quiet self, asleep on an autumn night—not crowded with police and government agents going about a grim business.

  “The Congress will want public hearings,” Copley said. “The White House will be looking for a scapegoat. You’re going to have a rotten Thanksgiving.”

  “I’ll probably have to resign. I was going to do it this afternoon.”

  “But you only have a few months to go before you qualify for early retirement.”

  “The Secret Service has never before disgraced itself like this.”

  “Walt, the president’s alive. Your guys did their job. So did you.”

  “A lot of people aren’t alive.”

  “Al Berger. But that was his job. The others were an accident. You’re not to blame.”

  There was an odd, distant sound. Kreski listened to it a moment, then recognized it as a faraway trailer rig, speeding somewhere through the night, the driver busy with his own problems, knowing little of theirs.

  “Walt, what kept you from resigning this afternoon?”

  Kreski puffed on his pipe before speaking. “Because, if they’ll let me, I want to help find who did this.”

  “Agent Schultz …”

  “Not just that. This whole thing. I want to find out who made it happen.”

  “Well, the pieces are certainly falling together, but your participation in the investigation is something I’d hate to do without. I’ll do whatever I can for you, Walt. I’ve made some friends here and there.”

  It was an understatement, and Copley wasn’t noted for them. He was one of the few people in Washington with close ties to both the president’s and vice president’s factions.

  They reached a large, white, turreted house on a corner, and, in unspoken decision, turned and began to head back.

  “Steve. Al Berger had a funny wound. Huerta was shooting from above. The bullet that hit Al struck low and exited high. And it wasn’t fired from the direction of the tower.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another shooter there, firing at the president. This is turning out to be a pretty large conspiracy.”

  “You’ve made a lot of arrests.”

  “We could well end up making more than a hundred. We’ll have to let a lot of them go. Except for the illegals. But I think we have most of the principals. I can’t think of a case where we’ve had so many informants.”

  “You didn’t get whoever it was who fired that second shot at Berger.”

  “No. All we have here in Gettysburg is the remains of that bastard Huerta.”

  “Whoever it was, that second shooter wasn’t anywhere near the tower.”

  “We don’t know where he might have been. And we won’t until we can determine all the trajectories. That won’t be easy. What we really need is the prime piece of evidence, but that’s at Camp David.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The president’s limousine. From the tapes, I gather it took a number of rounds. We could string trajectories all over the battlefield if we had that car.”

  They walked on, Kreski staring down at the darkened sidewalk ahead of him. A local police car drove by, slowing as it passed them, then hastening on.

  “You made that fingerprint ID on Huerta very quickly,” Kreski said.

  “First thing I had done. As soon as I heard ‘male Hispanic,’ I had them run the prints not only through our computer files but through Immigration’s. Got them back first bounce. The man was arrested earlier this year in Florida and sent back to Honduras.”

  They were nearing the morgue.

  “Steve, I’ve not much taste for going back in there.”

  “I don’t blame you. I’m going to be seeing what’s left of Bonnie Greer’s face the rest of my days.”

  Kreski took a last puff, then knocked his pipe against the heel of his shoe, red coals scattering into the shadows.

  “I’m going to go to Camp David now, Steve. I want to see the president.”

  “I was going to do the same thing when we’re cleaned up here. I might as well go now. We can ride together.”

  “I don’t have room for you in the chopper. It’s one of those three-place Bells and I have to keep a communications man with me.”

  “I wouldn’t take a helicopter down there in any case. They just issued a NOTAM. Because of the emergency, any aircraft flying within a nautical mile of the Camp David perimeter will be fired upon. They have all kinds of surface-to-air stuff on that mountain. Bushy’s back in his element.”

  “I want to go to Camp David.”

  “Then drive. Just like they did.”

  “Ambrose has ordered the Special Function Force in,” Kreski said. “They might blow us off the road before we can identify ourselves.”

  Copley tightened the belt of his raincoat against the increasing cold. “Walt. You’re the director of the Secret Service. I’m the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is the United States of America.”

  It was late afternoon, the time of day when Charley Dresden could escape the taco stands, shopping centers, bowling alleys, and cheek-by-jowl housing developments of Santa Linda, and transform his life, however temporarily, by turning his car down a side street off Morelos Boulevard and heading west through an old section of the city into the hills. When he reached the top of the high ridge separating the crowded Santa Linda valley from the still wild and open Heather River valley and the Santa Cruz mountains beyond, the transformation was complete. In some sunsets, it was as close as he came anymore to a religious experience.

  The state and county were talking again of building a four-lane expressway through this valley from Santa Linda, to connect with another to run south from Almaden and San Jose. That dreadful prospect made him press harder on the accelerator, as though to escape it.

  Dresden owned two cars, the old black MG roadster he was driving and an ancient Armstrong-Siddeley saloon that now spent most of its time immobile in his garage, waiting for parts or the wherewithal for extraordinarily expensive repairs. He had bought the old British sedan on impulse years before, to impress a Santa Linda State College girl he was then dating, a rich, blond sorority girl—Kappa Alpha Theta.

  Her name was Madeleine Anderson. Her family was socially prominent for the very California reason that her father had been the largest Cadillac dealer in the Santa Linda valley. She had done some modeling in college, and they had used her in some commercials filmed at the television station. She was the blondest girl Charley Dresden had ever met—a Scandinavian princess.

  Maddy read poetry, and had written a considerable lot of it, some to him. She knew Russian, and fancied Aubrey Beardsley prints. Altogether, not a girl for Santa Linda. She had moved to San Francisco after graduating, and there, in an airy old balconied apartment near
Twin Peaks, had provided Dresden with, among other savored memories, the finest morning of his life.

  He had been thinking of Maddy that afternoon—because of her husband. The man she had married instead of him was now the junior United States senator from California.

  He turned on the car radio and searched for music, but found only continuing news accounts of the assassination attempt and snapped it off. Someday he would find a place to live where no one cared who was president or what happened to him. He thought he had found such a place when he moved to Tiburcio.

  Approaching a crossroads marked only by a stop sign and a shack of a Mexican beer bar, he slowed and then swerved to the left, following a blacktop highway that climbed along the skirts of a steep, tree-covered mountain for a few miles, then fell abruptly into what was called the Tiburcio canyon, a narrow valley containing Malchiste Creek and the village of Tiburcio. The town had just two roads, running along either side of the creek.

  Dresden’s house was on a back road, but he drove first to Cooper’s Tiburcio Saloon and Grocery, which was also the town post office, an adobe brick building with bars on the back windows that had been built in 1848. He picked up his mail in the grocery and then crossed through a curtained doorway to the saloon. He didn’t need to order the bourbon and water that Cooper set on the bar for him. It was ritual.

  Cooper—no one ever used his first name except his sister, Belinda, when she was angry—had been a Coast Guard patrol boat skipper until he’d tired of it and taken an early retirement. A weathered, muscular man with some ten years more of life than Dresden, he had a face as worn as an old rug, a gruff and simple friendliness caught up in its folds and lines and grizzle. Normally, they would have shared recountings of each other’s day, but this evening Cooper was absorbed by the bar’s television set, usually the least used appliance in the establishment.

  The local news was on—Santa Linda’s Channel Three. Jack Laine, a failed nightclub singer before he turned to television, was still the anchor.

  Dresden began to hurry through his drink, glancing over the mail. The large, bulky envelope would be a screenplay he had sent to an agent in Los Angeles, doubtless rejected. It was a script for a police melodrama in which no one was killed, injured, or beaten, and no automobiles sailed through the air.