Atherton looked at the big box again. He leaned over it again, this time listening. If there was anything to hear, it was lost in the general din. The chamber was filled to overflowing now. The doorkeeper and his staff would shortly have to clear the aisles and get everyone to his or her proper seat.
“Mr. Vice President,” said the speaker once more. “You gotta do something about that sweat.”
Atherton took out his damp handkerchief and again mopped his brow and cheeks.
“Sorry,” he said. “I must be coming down with something.”
“It’s the season,” said the speaker, and turned to talk to someone else.
Narrowing his eyes, Atherton made another visual sweep of the chamber. Senator Rollins was in a far corner, engaged in earnest conversation with a younger man Atherton recognized as Rollins’s press secretary. Otherwise, none of the president’s men were to be seen. Like Meathead Dubarry, they were somewhere else.
And Rollins was standing right by a door.
The vice president lifted his gaze to the galleries, looking to where the First Lady usually sat. Daisy Hampton was not there, nor were Hampton’s two grown children. He saw them rarely, but they were always present on State of the Union night. Daisy might well be so tanked to the gills they dared not let her come, but it could be for another reason.
He could feel the sweat returning. The president’s entrance was due a scant few minutes away, yet there had been no word beyond the terse statement from Camp David that Hampton would make the speech as scheduled. If only Bushy Ambrose or David Callister or one of the others would make an appearance. Then Atherton might feel reasonably reassured.
He sat on his perspiring hands to keep them from shaking, hoping the speaker would not notice. He again gazed along the front rows of the gallery, but there was no one who even remotely resembled Daisy Hampton. Something, someone, caught his eye in a seat higher up. A bright blue dress. Blond hair.
He stared, puzzled, then sat back with a painful start. Madness was indeed upon him. He seemed to be seeing Madeleine Calendiari, as real as life.
No. He would not let this happen. The woman there was nothing to him, nothing to this event, only a hallucination. She did not exist. He existed. He was vice president of the United States. He would soon be president of the United States. It was all arranged.
Indeed, the woman in blue was leaving. Her back was to him, and she was climbing the steps to the exit. It could not be Madeleine Calendiari. It was someone else and if he did not get better control of his mind he was going to ruin the entire magnificent and unstoppable plan.
She was almost through the door now. In a moment she would be gone and he could rein back his fears and wild thoughts and concentrate on the scheduled events before him, concentrate on the plan, on his presidency to come.
But she stopped. Her head hung down a moment, as though in contemplation or some sudden remembrance. At once she turned around, looking at him. She came down the stairs, slowly, deliberately, with such purpose it seemed she might step out of the galleries and continue on toward him through the air. She didn’t. She stopped at the railing and leaned forward, her eyes fixed on him. Her face seemed close, magnified a hundred times, those large blue eyes, now all cold and hard and angry, looking into his. Directly.
All those around her appeared blurred and unfocused, but the clarity of her image was crystalline. He could see the sparkle of diamonds at her throat. He could look into those haunting blue eyes and see her mind. For the first time since the first body had fallen, Atherton felt accused. He felt guilt. He felt an all-consuming fear. She knew.
The door. Exit. Escape. Atherton looked once more to the large metal case, then lurched to his feet, shoving back his chair, pushing past the speaker, tripping over a cable, rising, plunging on toward the back of the chamber and the speaker’s offices. There was a corridor. He followed it, his shoulder bumping against the wall, knocking the paintings of past speakers askew.
Dresden was sitting in the press gallery seat assigned to him, amazed that he was there, from time to time snatching nervous glimpses of the two Secret Service men at the top of the steps behind him, fearful they might realize their mistake in letting him past. His seat was at one end of the chamber’s upper deck, giving a view of the speaker’s rostrum, but not a close one.
His attention was very much elsewhere in any event, devoted to the gallery across the way, where Maddy was sitting quietly and stiffly. Suddenly she was standing. She moved down the aisle and up the stairs. She was leaving the chambers, leaving his life. He rose from his chair. He wanted to call out to her. But it was not necessary. She came back. She stood at the railing and looked down. She was the most visible person in the whole enormous room.
The vice president abandoned his chair and was fleeing from the hall, out the back. Dresden did the same, taking up pursuit, ignoring the two security men as he hurried between them.
One grabbed his upper arm, so firmly the grip brought pain.
“Come on, man,” said Dresden, with feigned indignation but genuine anger. “I gotta keep a phone line open!”
There was a milling confusion of reporters behind him, pressing forward to see where the vice president was going. The Secret Service man gave him a quick, nasty last look and then released him, having other things to do. Dresden stumbled on, slowing to a fast walk as he went through the press working area, which was crowded with reporters watching the House’s closed-circuit television monitors.
He kept to his rapid walk, going out the door to the hallway and through the security checkpoint beyond. At the stairs, however, he broke into a run.
Though far behind, it was easy for him to follow Atherton. The man was the vice president and he was running, his passage leaving a wake of babbling excitement among the bystanders in the corridors, his forward progress marked by the first exclamations of recognition. There were security agents and Capitol police throughout the crowd. Dresden got past them by pretending to be running with, rather than after, the vice president. “Get help!” he shouted to one agent. “Get some men!” he called to another, squeezing by. He saw the man stare at him blankly, then reach for his two-way radio microphone.
Atherton was sticking to the main corridor, hurrying along the length of the Capitol toward the Senate end, his running footsteps echoing from the stonework as he clattered across the sudden open space that was the Rotunda and pressed himself through the phalanx of people massed in the hallway beyond, hesitating for just one quick look behind him.
It was enough. He saw Dresden. The recognition was instantaneous.
Unused to such exertion after his long confinement in the British embassy, Charley was losing ground, but salvation was in view ahead. The entrances to the Capitol were heavily guarded and barricaded. Anyone entering or leaving had to pass through metal detectors and revolving doors. The vice president would have to slow, probably enough for Dresden to catch up.
Atherton realized this. Drawing near the end of the corridor, he quickly darted into a side passage. With Dresden huffing behind, he followed it to another, and ultimately to a spiral stone staircase, which brought him down to the Capitol’s labyrinthine basement. Wheezing himself now, the vice president resumed his pell mell retreat, dodging around pillars and ducking through archways. There were few people down on this level, and no sudden shouts of recognition to guide Dresden’s way. He could only follow his prey by tracking the sound of Atherton’s leather heels striking against the stone floor. There were pipes overhead, leading in every direction. Black arrows painted on the yellow brick walls pointed to a confusion of possible destinations. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of Atherton, but the fading sound of the footfalls indicated the vice president was once again getting away from him.
All at once there was silence. The maze confronted Dresden with a cul-de-sac that had three narrower passages leading from it. He stood a moment, the sound of his own frantic breathing heavy in his ears. He had no choice. He had to keep moving. H
e took the passageway immediately to the left.
It proved a dead end. Retracing his steps, he tried the next. It continued on, making a sharp left-hand turn. Abruptly, it opened onto the wide main corridor again, by a sign with an arrow that said SENATE OFFICE BUILDINGS. Still, Dresden heard nothing. Groping along, he suddenly took a whacking blow to his shoulder and side and was sent sprawling. It was Atherton, come upon him from another passageway.
The vice president kicked at Dresden’s side, hard, then clattered on. “Stop, you son of a bitch!” Dresden shouted, pointlessly, then he pulled himself painfully to his feet and lunged after.
He knew only vaguely where he was. Judging by the signs and arrows, Atherton was making for the basement of one of the Senate office buildings. There were garages there. Maddy’s car was in one.
Dresden moved by dead reckoning, following in the direction marked by a sign that proclaimed RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING. He made as much noise as possible, shouting and bellowing, hoping to harry the vice president toward the huge garage from which he and Maddy and Graham Thompson had come.
It was working. There was a silence, and then running footsteps, moving the way Charley wanted to go. Pursuing, Dresden at length ducked under an archway on which had been painted SUBWAY TO RUSSELL BUILDING.
Elation increased his speed. He reached the subway platform just as the train carrying Atherton was pulling away. There was no one else on it except the motorman and a man and a woman sitting in a forward seat. Atherton was in the rear.
Pounding along the track, Dresden caught hold of the back of the car and jumped onto it, clinging to the metal, just as it began accelerating into the tunnel. Atherton, a terrified look in his eyes, shrank back and started climbing toward the front, then reversed himself and came at him, fist swinging, hammering down at Charley’s arm. The woman began to scream. The motorman ground the car to a shuddering halt. Atherton struck at Dresden one more time, slashing Charley’s cheek with a fingernail, then clambered into the driver’s cubicle, shoving the man out and slamming the speed control forward.
As they shot along far faster than the subway normally traveled, Dresden started to climb into the car, then halted. Atherton had abandoned the motorman’s compartment and was coming toward him with a large tool in his hand. Charley hung back, just inches above the track. He had no desire to be in the subway car. Unless someone took the controls, it was shortly going to crash into the Russell Building platform. Charley wanted to be on the tracks, here on this end of the tunnel. It was here, somewhere in the darkness, that he had dropped his gun, the .357 Magnum revolver that had caused him so much trouble and that now, if he was able to find it, he could at last put to good purpose.
He lowered himself as far as he could and then dropped, rolling. His shoulder cracked painfully against the concrete and his still healing knee was twisted wrenchingly. He rolled over one more time, coming to rest stomach-down on the opposite set of tracks. Looking their length, he could see nothing, only the distant movement of several men running toward them. Turning on his side, he looked the other way and saw a glint of metal on the otherwise smooth surface not many feet away. He rose just as the subway piled with a great crash into the bumper emplaced to stop it. Limping, his ears full of the woman’s renewed screaming, Dresden reached the pistol just in time to see Atherton drop from the side of the car and drag himself up the platform to the building escalator. Charley fired once, using both hands. He hit nothing, but the report filled the tunnel with the thunder of a cannon shot.
He hurried past the tilted subway vehicle, mindful of the woman’s crying but unwilling to stop. With his knee reinjured, he ran awkwardly, but Atherton, limping badly, was moving even more slowly.
The vice president vanished around a corner. When Dresden reached the spot he found a bank of gray-painted elevators and, across from it, two swinging doors with round, porthole windows. Their telltale residual movement showed which way Atherton had gone.
Beyond the doors, a corridor led to the garage. Charley stepped out into its flourescent lamp–lit vastness and stood and listened. He heard a grunt and caught a flicker of something moving off to the side. He pursued it, raising his pistol. At the sight of another quick blur in the opening between two cars, he fired an echoing shot that thunked into one of the automobiles but struck no flesh. Atherton skittered away, at length appearing at two swinging doors in the opposite wall and vanishing through them. As Dresden approached in a painful trot, he heard a muffled slam.
His pistol held before him, he pushed open one of the doors, finding himself in a stairwell. Nothing could be heard on the staircase. In front of him was a painted metal door with a brass knob. It was locked and would not yield. Dresden, longtime hunter in the California hills, was sure of his quarry. Aiming the Magnum just below the knob, he fired, the mushrooming bullet pulverizing the metal. The door opened to darkness. Groping for the light switch, he found it, illuminating a small storeroom. Atherton was hunched, cowering, in a corner beside a stack of folding chairs. His eyes were quite mad.
Dresden pulled him forward and threw him roughly onto the concrete floor. He jammed the pistol barrel into the man’s neck just beneath his chin and began cursing, spewing the vilest words he could bring to mind into the man’s whimpering face. The mad eyes became ghastly, frightened ones, peering down at the huge gun as Dresden hissed the names of Charlene Zack and Danny Hill and Atherton’s own wife.
Charley’s sense of power both frightened and thrilled him. A few weeks before he’d been just an oddball in a bar, talking back to a television screen and retreating before the threats of a man whose only claim to significance was that he owned a small television station in a small city in a far-off state. Now Charley stood before the ultimate authority of the United States government, and stood as master. His power was absolute, for it was the power of life and death. One small muscular contraction against a curved piece of steel and this flawed, evil mistake of creation would be erased. The vulgar whining would cease. The vice president would die as wretchedly as his victims. Charley would be a willing executioner, a fulfilled man. One shot and he could slip off into the darkness from which he had come—with justice done and no price to be paid beyond what he’d already paid.
Or was this gross vanity? If he shot the vice president now, would it not be just another sordid cruel killing in a chain of murders started by someone else? There’d be no guarantee that they would stop, that any of it would stop. He and Maddy would continue their flight and the long, dreadful nightmare would go on.
This was no fit retribution anyway. The vice president would pay no great price by dying now, dying as one day all men die. He must pay a public price. He must suffer, atone, and do painful penance. He must grovel and be smeared with his guilt. His obligation was not simply to Charley; it was to the law he had so arrogantly defied. The fit retribution must come from the law. Charley’s power was that he could see to that. Anyone could kill a man, but Charley would bring Laurence Atherton to judgment.
But first he would indulge himself. First Atherton had to suffer. Dresden dug the pistol barrel deeper into his flesh.
“You have no idea how much I hate you,” he said. “You have no idea how much I want to blow your brain into a sticky mess …”
But now he was sent reeling, a sharp blow to the side of his head numbing him. A big man he recognized from television as Senator Andrew Rollins grabbed hold of his coat and slammed him back against the wall.
“That is the vice president of the United States, sir!” Rollins said. “He is not to be harmed!”
Dresden edged back, noting two other men in the room. One, tall and bearded, was Walter Kreski, the Secret Service chief. The other was younger, neatly dressed and wearing a small Secret Service earphone in his ear. Charley could not recall having seen him before.
Retreating further, Dresden watched as Kreski opened one of the folding chairs and Rollins lifted Atherton to his feet and eased him into it. He put his face close to At
herton’s and set a hand hard on the man’s shoulder.
“This is how it’s going to be, Larry,” Rollins said, his voice so full of menace it caused even Kreski to look over at him. “You are vice president of the United States. You hold the second highest office in the land. You are going to go back in there and be there when the president makes his speech. You are going to serve your president and help keep this government and this country together. You are going to do everything you’re told.”
“As long as you do,” said Kreski, “no harm will come to you.”
“But he’s a goddamn murderer!” Dresden said.
The younger Secret Service man stepped in front of Charley.
“Give me that pistol,” he said. “Give it to me. You have no use for it now.”
Dresden did so, watching as the man slipped it carefully into his belt. The man then began pushing Charley sideways, toward the slightly open door.
“Listen to me,” he said, in a lowered voice. “There’s only time to say this once. Go now. You have only a moment. I know who you are. You’re in great danger. You were in hiding. Go back into it. Disappear. Now. Forever. Your life depends on it.”
Dresden stared into the man’s steady eyes. The face was expressionless, but he perceived the truth therein. Charley turned and walked away, through the doors and into the garage, limping past the many cars, past Maddy’s yellow Mercedes, past the people who were beginning to gather at the garage’s entrance, on into the dark and cold of the Washington winter night.
The ambassador was waiting beneath the porte cochere on the front step of his residence when Dresden arrived in “the British car”—a Land Rover with two embassy security men in it. They had driven, careening in zigzag fashion through side streets in a frantic effort to get clear of the area, reaching the embassy in twice the normal time. Maddy had not been with them. The men had no idea what had happened to her and refused Dresden’s demands to find out.
By Order of the President Page 51
