By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  There was a squeaking whine as the pilot of the escort ship started his engine. Ambrose raised his hand in protest and the noise abruptly ceased. The pilot sat waiting, chagrined.

  “You’re sure he’ll do it?” Ambrose said to Jerry Greene, the president’s media adviser. “You’re sure he won’t foul this up?”

  “Hell yes. I told you. I’ve had the man to my house. I know him. After we had him at the inaugural he even switched political parties. This’ll be an ego trip for him. He’ll be with us all the way.”

  Columnist David Callister, licking his lips in an irritating habit, intruded upon the conversation, as he intruded upon everything. Ambrose tolerated him only because he was one of the president’s closest friends and because he was a powerful news media figure. And the media were of paramount importance at this juncture.

  “We shall simply overwhelm him,” Callister said, with his Westchester County drawl. “Greene shall appeal to his friendship, and I to his patriotism and sense of history, such as he may possess.”

  “Does it really have to be done in New York?” said Ambrose. He was standing with legs at parade rest, arms folded tightly across his chest.

  “If it’s to be done exactly right,” Greene said. “It’s going to take several days to get set up here.”

  “Very well,” Ambrose said, “but when you’re done, bring him back with you.”

  “He might not want to come.”

  “Give him no choice. I don’t want anyone who knows what we’re doing wandering around the goddamn city of New York.”

  “You shall have to make an exception for me, laddy buck,” said Callister. “I have to tape my television show tomorrow and my wife is counting on me for a dinner party tonight.”

  “I’d prefer you came back here with the others,” Ambrose said coldly. He disliked being told whom he had to make exceptions for, he disliked being called “laddy buck,” and he disliked very much having silly dinner parties made a factor in his calculations.

  “Bushy, a person as constantly visible as I simply can’t disappear mysteriously. And my television program is going to be a great help to us in this. Next week I’m having the good Dr. Kissinger on. International terrorism and kindred compelling topics.”

  “All right. Get back as soon as you can. And don’t let yourself get cornered by reporters.”

  Callister sniffed, eyelids lowered and brows raised. He strolled off toward Marine One looking much the English gentleman off on a shoot. After a nod from Ambrose, Greene and the four-star general who was accompanying them followed. Ambrose then turned to Peter Schlessler.

  “Go with them. Prevent trouble. Keep Callister in line.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When they were aboard, Ambrose raised his arm and gave the pilots a flight deck “start engines” signal. The twin whines that followed grew to galloping roars and then merged into a single overpowering din. He loved that sound dearly, much as Hampton hated it.

  The flight path of the two New York–bound presidential helicopters crossed that of Kreski’s machine as it approached the Pennsylvania border not far from the Camp David mountaintop, the aircraft separated by six hundred or seven hundred feet in altitude and perhaps a mile in distance. In the bright morning sunlight the white and olive presidential colors were clearly visible, though Kreski was at first unsure.

  But he had seen these helicopters in flight a thousand times, identifying them from even greater distances. What had given him pause was the possibility of the wounded president being aboard one of them, perhaps being taken to a hospital. Yet they did not seem to be moving with enough urgency for that. Judging by his conduct thus far in the crisis, Ambrose would not be moving the president about in this manner without several squadrons of helicopters flying escort.

  The marine aircraft were obviously on some other mission, and it was very unlikely—indeed, impossible—that the president was aboard. Kreski thought of calling them on his radio, or better, discreetly tagging along behind to learn their destination and possible purpose. But he hadn’t time for that. His duty lay with the investigation on the ground, with the picturesque little town of Gettysburg that soon rose to greet them from the winter yellow hills. As they landed, it occurred to him he might have been mistaken about the two other machines. Many helicopters, official and civilian, bore similar markings. He was more tired than he could remember ever having been. Instead of going to bed upon reaching his home the previous night he had sat up listening to Mahler, thinking, sipping but not finishing a glass of wine.

  Hammond had come with him to Gettysburg and for a moment they were alone, the gusting wind swift over the hard, cold ground, chasing among the grave markers. Even without them, it would have seemed a place of death.

  “It’s so different now,” Hammond said. “You’d almost think nothing had happened.”

  “Dick, I’ve not even been able to dream that nothing happened.”

  Some men were advancing toward them from the roadway opposite, U.S. Route 140, the Baltimore Pike. Most were state and local policemen, but among them Kreski recognized Special Agent Gibby, whom Copley had put in charge of the FBI field investigation. Kreski could have done without him this morning. He wanted to walk about the area on his own, looking at what he wished, free to talk to himself if need be. Free to think.

  “Good morning, Director,” Gibby said. “Did you get some sleep?”

  “Some.” In the bathroom mirror that morning, he had looked much the survivor of a prisoner-of-war camp.

  “What can we help you with today?”

  “Not too much just yet. I want to take a good long walk around the scene. I’ll probably have some questions afterward.”

  “We’ve photographed the area from every angle. We have photographs of every vantage point that had a view of the president’s speaking stand.”

  “I was sure you would, and I’d be grateful if we could have copies of them, later. But right now I need to do some solitary wandering.”

  He glanced about, then went to where the president’s limousine had been, the deep ruts from its spinning wheels preserved in the hardened ground. The president’s, Berger’s, and Ambrose’s footprints were preserved as well, though it was difficult to tell which was which.

  Gibby and Hammond had followed behind him.

  “You’ve taken impressions of these?” Kreski asked Gibby.

  “Yes, sir. And others. From all around here. If you read our report, sir, you’ll note we also have aerial photos of the entire area and tape-recorded interviews with just about the entire Gettysburg population. We’ve been very busy, director.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I’m just thinking aloud, reminding myself of what I might want to look at later.”

  Kreski went slowly, solemnly, to stand where the president had stood. He gazed silently at the tower platform for a very long time, then let his eyes travel along the horizon, pausing briefly at various buildings, monuments, statues, trees, and stone walls visible from this point. They were too visible. Any shots from a second gun would have come from cover.

  Or would they have? The grassy knoll in Dallas was a highly visible position. But everyone was looking at the stricken President Kennedy, their attention distracted by the shots from Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun.

  “Dick,” Kreski said to Hammond. “May I have that clipboard?”

  Atop the sheaf of papers attached to it was a finely drawn map of the scene, including the positions of all the principals. Kreski paid particular attention to the locations of all the Secret Service agents assigned to the detail at the time the shooting had begun. Still pondering the map, he set off on an examination of each of their positions, looking to see everything they could have seen from where they had stood.

  When he got to the tower he swallowed and coughed, looking at the large depression made by the falling body of Agent Pribble. Everyone had forgotten about that poor devil. Huerta, rising from his hiding place beneath the tower floor, had shot the agent once. It w
as not a fatal wound, but the impact had knocked Pribble over the railing, into a twelve-story fall. Striking a very muddy patch of ground, Pribble had lived, but only by the barest of margins. He had suffered a fractured skull and broken the bones of every limb; had ruptured his spleen and damaged other organs. He was in a coma at the local hospital.

  The agent was a heavyset man and the depression in the now frozen earth looked like a shallow grave. Kreski moved on.

  Since news of the assassination attempt had first crackled onto his office radio monitor, Kreski’s every thought and action had been made and taken in urgency, or at least with a guilty appreciation of the need for urgency. He put all that from his mind now, taking his time, staring at broken twigs on the ground and studying the fall of shadows from the morning sunlight. Walking at a stroller’s pace from each place marked on the map to the next, he replayed from his memory the televised events that had taken place, in sequence—trying to imagine how they must have looked from each position, how much of the violence, how many of the victims could have been seen by each agent. The only point of reference visible to all was the tower.

  At length, he moved along the outer perimeter of what had been the Secret Service security cordon, his path taking him along the shoulder of the Baltimore Pike. There had been four agents stationed in the vicinity: Evans, Ajemian, Ballard, and Storch. Retracing his steps, he decided that Ballard had the clearest view of the president at his limousine, but that Ajemian had the best sight of the buildings, monuments, and forest cover that might have harbored a second assailant.

  Returning to Ballard’s spot, he turned back to face the death scene and waved his arm at the assorted policemen and officials still gathered there to watch him. Hammond and Gibby broke from the crowd and began walking, then trotting, toward him. A half dozen uniformed policemen hurried behind. Kreski grimaced. He hadn’t meant for everyone to come.

  “I’d like to have someone standing exactly where the president stood when the firing began,” Kreski said to a nearly breathless Gibby when the special agent arrived. Kreski looked to Hammond, handing him back the clipboard. “I need a rifle.”

  “I’m sure one of the state troopers has a shotgun in his car.”

  “No. A rifle. A deer rifle with a scope. I’ll wager the first house you come to has one.”

  It proved to be the fourth house. The owner was at first terrified that he was being arrested. He then became surly when asked for the loan of his gun, but finally cooperated. The weapon was only a .22 caliber, but it had a scope and would suffice.

  Leaving the others behind, Kreski cradled the rifle in his arm and started back up Baltimore Pike toward the center of town. At the Jennie Wade House, in Civil War days the home of a young woman who had taken a fatal bullet in the great battle, he stopped. This was the northern limit of the field of fire. It was also adjacent to the tower. The second shot would not have come from here. It would have had to have come from someplace between the tower and the southern limit of the field of fire, a structure a mile down the road from him housing a tourist enterprise called Fantasyland.

  For the next hour or more, much to the mystification and, sometimes, consternation of the townspeople, Kreski clambered over rooftops, hunkered down behind walls, lay flat in depressions in the ground, each time bringing the borrowed rifle to bear and sighting through the scope at the distant policeman standing in for the president. Even with a scope, the assailant must have been a near perfect shot.

  Working his way steadily south, Kreski remained dissatisfied. All the firing points he tried were either too exposed or offered no clear shot. The roof of the battlefield military museum at Baltimore Pike and the National Battlefield Park’s Slocum Avenue provided the clearest shot of all, but it had been open for business and full of tourists.

  Though not when the president was speaking. When the president comes everyone rushes to see. The building might well have been completely deserted. Kreski walked slowly around it, looking up at the rooftop. An ideal site, except that the shooter might easily have been seen by Agent Storch, if not Ballard, and would certainly have been seen by both trying to escape. The ground around the building was all cleared, parking lot and grass. It was a hundred yards to the nearest trees and brush, and Ballard would have had an open view of the entire distance. There was a large equestrian statue nearby, but the intervening space would also have been visible to both Ballard and Storch.

  Kreski went to the sculpture, looking first at the chiseled name and then up into the stony eyes of General Henry W. Slocum, whose troops had given way to the Confederates on this ground in what initially had appeared to be the crowning southern triumph of the Civil War. From here, it was just a short dash into the trees. Kreski moved to the rear of the statue’s base. The platform of the pedestal was just a few inches above his head. Sliding the rifle up onto it, he found handholds on the pedestal rim and a leg of the general’s bronze horse. With a quick and painful pull of arm and shove of feet, he was flat on his belly next to the rifle, feeling very stiff and middle-aged.

  Lying exactly in the center of this cold platform, he found he could not be seen from any of the positions that had been occupied by his agents. The statue was situated on too high a level. Raising his head and the rifle as the sniper might have, he had a glimpse of where Ajemian and Storch had stood. Ballard’s post was directly in front of him. If the sniper had used the Slocum monument, he would have fired over Ballard’s head.

  But one or two quick shots, squeezed off just as the other gunfire erupted, might have been possible. They would have had to have been well-rehearsed snap shots, the work of a highly trained marksman.

  Schultz had muttered something about horses—about a horse.

  Kreski centered the standing policeman in the scope’s crosshairs and mentally killed him several times. He tried it again with quick pop up, pop down shots. He had difficulty, but it could be done. What was the sniper to do after that?

  He turned about and peered over the rear of the platform. They weren’t perfectly defined, but there were two depressions in the ground just below, toe deep, as would be expected landing backward from a jump. Kreski took up the rifle and slid down the side of the base, careful to avoid stepping on any of the footprints.

  There was a portion of a third footprint, just behind the other two and somewhat perpendicular to them, the mark of someone pivoting. More marks led off toward the trees, disappearing in higher, drier ground just short of them. He searched carefully, but could find no shell casings, just some marks and scuffs in the ground alongside the statue that might have been made by feet. Yet would a sniper have paused to snatch up expended shells when it would have made him so visible to Ballard and Storch?

  Kreski took out another map, a larger one showing the entire town and battlefield. Roads led out of Gettysburg in the manner of spokes in a wheel, a graphic depiction of its tactical importance as a key crossroads in General Lee’s invasion of the North. Between the Baltimore Pike and Pennsylvania Route 116, the Hanover Road, to the north, was a long, heavily forested pie slice of territory that included Culp’s Hill and other landmarks of the battle. A lone man could easily have made his way through it undetected. He might even have driven out of it in a car he’d hidden in the trees.

  Kreski had left his two-way radio with Hammond so as not to be disturbed. Rifle and clipboard in hand, he began a slow walk back to the others.

  Charley Dresden again awoke early, though not because of worry or alcoholic overindulgence. His wakefulness was born of sheer anticipation. Rubbing his eyes, he went to the rear door opening onto the kitchen porch, the only part of the house facing the road. As usual, the morning copy of the Santa Linda Press-Journal was not on the porch but on the driveway beneath. Though he was completely naked, he went immediately to fetch it. The light was still faint and, in any event, his few neighbors had seen many more startling sights about his house over the years. In Tiburcio, one accepted things.

  Back in the kitchen, he wis
hed Zack were up. He and Charlene had spent most of the evening in a long session of lovemaking by his small fireplace, and his skin was still atingle with memories of her body. He wanted the touch of her now, cuddling from behind, her breasts pressing against his back. But she had never been much for morning nudity. She liked sex only in the night. Mornings for her were created for sleep.

  Restraining an impulse to turn immediately to Bremmer’s column, he took the newspaper to his bar, laid it out carefully on the mahogany top, then opened the pages to the second section and began to read. He read every word of Bremmer’s column. Not one of them was about him, or his idea, or even about the assassination. He glanced over the long column one more time, then smashed his fist down on the bartop and swore.

  “What’s wrong?” said Zack unhappily, from the bedroom.

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “Well, be quiet about nothing. And everything.”

  He sat down on the cold wooden stool. Perhaps they had sent him the previous day’s paper. He turned to the front page. It was the correct date; the final edition. Bremmer had backed out. So much for fifteen years of friendship. Dresden went to the phone. What was ghastly dawn for the likes of Charlene Zack was a normal hour for the father of school-age children.

  Bremmer’s wife was a long time fetching him.

  “I’m shaving, old buddy, what is it?”

  “The item’s not in your column,” Charley said.

  “It isn’t? I put it in. Two long graphs.”

  “I have the final edition. There’s not a word.”

  “I made it in time for the edition before that. It was the lead item. There was a headline that went with it. ‘Tape Shows Hampton May Be Dead.’”

  “Well, it’s not there.”

  “Sorry, old buddy. I’ll find out what happened and get back to you. Right now I’m standing here wearing shaving cream and nothing else.”

  “Excuse me, Paul. I just got a little upset.”

  “You always do. But no sweat. I’ll be back to you.”