The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Lockwood, under a pile of bodies, struggled and heaved, trying to get free.

  “Polly!” he cried. “Polly!”

  The microphones picked up Lockwood’s muffled voice. Amplified, his cry of anguish was replayed. There was a blurred shot of Julian rushing to the President’s wife, who still stood erect and by some miracle unstained. Julian’s great body shielded Polly Lockwood’s; he carried her to the ground and covered her. She was wearing a pink suit; the bouquet of roses she had been handed was caught between Julian’s upper body and her own. Polly’s face was badly scratched by the thorns.

  The crowd broke apart and ran. The last panning shots by the television cameras showed the plaza before the Alamo deserted except for the dead and wounded and the stain, bright red but really quite small, that the terrorist had left in the dust where he had been standing.

  4

  Lockwood insisted on remaining in San Antonio for the evening. Only that morning he and Polly had walked along the river followed by a mariachi band. Lockwood had eaten a burrito. A whole nursery school of Mexican children had skipped along behind him as if he were the Pied Piper. Here, as everywhere, the poor people loved him.

  In the hotel, after the bomb went off, Lockwood and the others who had been soiled took off their clothes and washed themselves—all except Julian, who was too busy finding out what had happened; the facts. The White House physician had been deafened by the blast, but he insisted on examining Lockwood. He could hear nothing that was said to him, but he listened attentively to the President’s chest with his stethoscope. Lockwood, lying naked on a hotel bed, let the doctor do as he wished. Julian, still in his stained clothes, watching, realized that the President himself was in shock.

  Finally Julian went away to change and shower. Before he did anything else, he tried to call Emily, but the phone on O Street was hooked up to the automatic recording device. “I’m not hurt,” Julian said to the tape. “The President is all right.” He hung up the phone. He saw himself in the mirror. He said aloud, as if he were still speaking to Emily, “Have mercy on us.” The words of the General Confession, unspoken by Julian since boyhood, ran through his mind. He saw himself again in the mirror. There was blood all over him.

  That evening, inside a phalanx of Secret Service men and police, Lockwood visited each bereaved family. All but one of the dead, a girl who had been photographing the terrorist for a local newspaper at the moment of the blast, were blacks or Mexicans.

  The President insisted on walking through the wretched streets. He went into the matchwood houses, filled with wailing, in which the victims had lived. As he walked, from one house to another, people came out and surrounded him, angry faces turned outwards to the world.

  “An army of the poor, protecting President Lockwood,” said Patrick Graham, following with the cameras; he had arrived that morning, to cover Lockwood in the last days of his campaign.

  Later, airborne in the presidential jet, Lockwood said, “All those folks are dead.… But wasn’t it something, the way they came out and walked with us this evening?”

  Julian had had no chance to talk to Lockwood. The President had refused to listen to him, or to anyone. All his concern was for the dead and wounded. Now he began to talk about them again: the houses, the widows and orphans and bereaved mothers.

  “In every single one of those houses there was the smell of cooking,” Lockwood said. “There’s something strong about people like that. That they should cook on the day of a death, a horrible death in the family. And the way the Mexicans all made me have a drink. …”

  Both Julian and Polly had been with Lockwood in those houses, but he was turning the visit to the barrio into an anecdote for them. Julian looked very closely at him, and then at Polly. Did Lockwood not remember what had happened at the Alamo? Julian wasn’t sure that the President knew what had occurred, that he saw its significance; that he made the connection. Julian himself had been blind to it until he talked on the telephone to Philindros.

  “Frosty,” Polly said. The President stopped talking, swiveled in his chair, and sipped his bourbon; his hand trembled, but only slightly. “Frosty,” Polly repeated, “you ought to hear what Julian has to say.”

  Lockwood put down his drink and turned his attention to Julian.

  “You’re all right, aren’t you, Jolly?” Lockwood asked. No one but Lockwood had ever called Julian “Jolly.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Julian. “But we haven’t talked. I wonder if you understand exactly what happened today.”

  “Somebody threw a bomb.”

  “No. A man exploded his own body.”

  “Did what?”

  “He was dressed in one of those white Bedouin robes like the one Ibn Awad always wore. He carried a sign that said, in English and Arabic, ‘Remember Ibn Awad.’”

  “Exploded himself?”

  “Explosives had been surgically implanted in his body. He set them off himself.” Julian paused. “Like the terrorists in the airplanes over Palestine. It was the Eye of Gaza.”

  Lockwood looked hard at Julian. Taking Polly’s hand, he gazed for a long moment at the windowless bulkhead as though he could see the endless Great Plains, brown with the stubble of the harvest, that flowed beneath the aircraft.

  “Do you think they wanted to kill me?” he asked.

  “No,” said Julian. “Not yet.”

  5

  At Andrews, the crowd beyond the fences was strangely quiet. A ripple of cheers, but not the usual bellow of welcome and affection, ran through the waiting people as Lockwood emerged from the airplane door into the glaring television lights. Though his image was broadcast in all its natural color, Lock-wood’s person at this moment was, to the naked eye, bleached by the klieg lights as white as a ghost. His landing in Washington was, as Patrick Graham told the audience, like a return from the dead.

  Julian went down the rear steps of the plane. A car was waiting for him in the shadows there. It was not his usual White House vehicle, and he had to be led to it. Inside the black car, Philindros waited. He drove expertly, making a long, smooth turn, and then going straight across the aprons between parked warplanes and through a gate that Julian had never used before. There was no music in the car, and of course Philindros didn’t speak, so that the only sound came from the grip of the tires on the concrete and the monotonous scream of the diesel engine.

  Julian said, “We’ve already agreed on the phone that this episode is a Foreign Intelligence matter. I want to know what you know, in detail.”

  Philindros reported in his usual unhesitating way. “There’s no question that the bomb carrier was a member of the Eye of Gaza,” he said. “We’ve matched his photograph with a file picture of a known member of Hassan’s organization.”

  “They’ve issued no statement claiming responsibility.”

  “I don’t think they will. They want mystery, speculation. If they kill the President, then they’d have something to gain from confessing the murder. They would have avenged Awad.”

  “Then what is the point of what happened today?”

  “The same as it always is. Horror show. We estimate they’ll do it again, probably several times.”

  “On what basis?”

  “We knew that seven members of the Eye of Gaza have entered the United States in the past two weeks. Now we know why.”

  “You knew they were in the country?”

  Philindros said, “All that was reported.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the Secret Service.”

  “I was never told. Didn’t they take you seriously?”

  Philindros, defending a sister service, spoke sharply. “They take everything seriously. But how can they take one potential threat to the President more seriously than another? Some psychopath with a cheap rifle is as dangerous as Hassan. More so—we know Hassan when we see him.”

  Julian told Philindros to stop the car. They were moving down a narrow street lined with ginkgo trees. Philindros braked and th
en backed smoothly into a short parking space. He left the motor running and kept an eye on the mirrors. Julian wondered if he was armed. No doubt he was.

  “There’s more to this than just a horror show,” Julian said. “If it’s the Eye of Gaza, they have a purpose.”

  “Obviously they didn’t want to kill the President today.”

  “What, then?”

  Philindros turned his body and slid towards the door. Julian’s bulk in this confined space made him uncomfortable.

  “To humiliate Lockwood publicly, literally cover him with blood. That picture will be on every television set in the world tonight, and in all the newspapers tomorrow, everywhere.”

  “We have to know more. Catch them. Question them.”

  “Everyone is trying to do the first. Nobody has ever succeeded in the second. They kill themselves.”

  “For the love of Christ, Jack! What good are you guys?”

  Philindros took this rebuke in silence. It was remarkable that Julian was as collected as he was. Another presidential assistant might have been shrieking.

  “We’d like to be better, but nobody—not Mallory, not you people—ever gave us the resources,” Philindros said, “so these people have just been beyond us as a target. Only Horace touched them. Years ago he had an agent inside the Eye, but only for a short while. I don’t know how to stop people who make a religion of dying a horrible death. No one does.”

  “Do they want the President to die a horrible death?”

  “Not yet.”

  Julian had spoken these same words to Lockwood. Now, with Philindros, he searched for their meaning. He hardly knew himself; the feeling he had about what was happening was strong but he didn’t yet see the details.

  Julian said, “They’re trying to influence the election.”

  “Possibly. Yes.”

  Julian’s eyes burned with the obvious question. He said, “O. N. Laster?”

  “Hassan Abdallah doesn’t care who’s President of the United States. Mallory’s as much an enemy to him as Lockwood.”

  “But it was Lockwood who killed Awad. Therefore they want to punish him—humiliate him, as you say. Publicly.”

  “Yes. ‘That’s part of the profile. From now on, whether he wins or loses, he’s under a threat. What happened at the Alamo can happen again—anywhere, anytime.”

  “And if he loses the election, he loses most of his protection. Retired Presidents, unless they’re rich like Mallory, are only lightly guarded.”

  Philindros saw in Julian something rare in his experience: a man truly frightened for another man, and frightened by the things his intelligence revealed to him. Julian was beginning to know that there would never be any escape for Lockwood. Philindros let Julian see that he did not much want to say what he said next.

  “To be realistic, the situation is this,” said Philindros. “If President Lockwood is elected again and has the full protection of the American security apparatus, he’ll be reasonably safe for four years. It’s even possible we could penetrate and break the Eye of Gaza in that period. We’ve never put our mind or our money into that job.”

  “And if he loses?”

  “Then he’ll be a much easier target. Hassan might strike on Inauguration Day or he might wait years. But he’s decided to kill Lockwood, Julian.”

  “Hassan himself could die.”

  Philindros nodded. “He knows that. That’s why a baby is being born to replace him somewhere today, and another will be born tomorrow. And they’ll beget sons like that fellow at the Alamo before they die.”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  Philindros put the car in gear. “

  Stay inside,” he said. “Pray.”

  6

  Naturally Lockwood would not stay inside. As soon as he woke the next morning Julian told him what Philindros had reported. Lockwood received the information impassively. His mind was already leaping into the future as it always did.

  “What happened in San Antonio is in the past,” he said to Julian. “We’ll go on to something else.”

  “No, sir. We’ll go on to more of the same. Cancel the tour.”

  Lockwood shook his head emphatically. He wouldn’t be driven into hiding.

  “If I let them scare me, Julian, we’ll lose. There’s not the width of a door crack between Mallory and me now. I’ve got the momentum. We’ve got to keep driving.”

  In New York, Susan Grant, returning a telephone call from Patrick Graham, heard his voice asking if the explosion of human bombs was what she meant when she had said that a lot could happen in a week.

  Susan hung up the phone without responding to the question.

  Polly Lockwood flew to Live Oaks. She took Elliott and Jenny Hubbard with her; Emily refused to go. The farm, protected by its ring of electronic devices, was, even more than the White House, the safest place in America. Two companies of Marines were flown in to reinforce the Secret Service; they camped in a woods beneath camouflage netting and patrolled the farm’s perimeter.

  Emily asked Julian to take her with him for Lockwood’s last appearances of the campaign.

  “It’s mad to ask that,” Julian said. “Don’t you know what people are capable of?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  He refused her. But if Julian was going to die, Emily wanted to be with him. That night she phoned the editor of a woman’s magazine in New York and got an assignment to cover the last week of the campaign from the point of view of the wife of a man in danger.

  “Twenty-five hundred words,” said the editor. “Just tell the reader how you feel, all of it, moment to moment.”

  The next day, at noon on the field at Gettysburg, Julian looked into the knot of journalists and saw Emily among them. She wore her glasses and a Burberry coat, stained from much use and travel. Her hair was hidden beneath a scarf. She wore that intensely interested look which she always wore when on assignment. She was scribbling on her pad.

  Lockwood spoke on Little Round Top, with the thin crowd below him. It wasn’t a crowd at all in the sense that it was packed together; groups of people who knew each other stood separated from other groups by yards of open space. Five or six outlandish young people carried placards with the message “Remember Ibn Awad”; they were herded together and moved to the far edge of the crowd and there surrounded by a ring of Secret Service men. Lockwood had forbidden arrests or even body searches. Two cameras stayed on this group. Another nosed the crowd, resting for a moment on one lone man, then trotting nervously to another.

  A chill wind blew; the warm weather was over. That morning the battlefield had been white with frost, and the grass was cold and brittle still under the feet of the onlookers.

  Julian’s eyes kept straying to the journalists. Emily was watching, making notes. Once she smiled at a colleague who said something to her. She was as safe among the reporters as it was possible to be. Terrorists lived by the press; they would do its members no deliberate harm.

  Lockwood quoted Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “‘The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’”

  At the end of the speech, the crowd went quietly away in the wintry sunlight among the monuments and the graves. The cameras watched them go and the microphones recorded, for somber moments, the deep hush that lay over the battlefield.

  “Lincoln must have heard this same deep silence when he spoke here,” said Patrick Graham to the audience. “There is always this stillness on old battlefields. Even the terrorists must fear to break it. Perhaps if they did, the brave men who died here, all so very young, would wake and ask them why.”

  In Times Square, noontime crowds watched Lockwood’s speech on television sets in store windows. The same scene was repeated across the nation, and television crews photographed the crowds in New York
and elsewhere. The watchers saw themselves on the tube and waved. When they dispersed in Times Square at the end of the speech, a young woman on crutches detached herself from the crowd and swung her body through the honking stream of taxis to the central island between the two parts of Broadway.

  In a voice that afterwards seemed enormous to those who heard it issue from her small body, she shrieked, “Remember lbn Awad!” The crowd, which had been walking away from the television sets in the store windows, shivering in a mixture of relief and disappointment that nothing had happened in Gettysburg, broke and ran. Some threw themselves to the pavement like people who had heard the whistle of an incoming shell.

  The girl waited for the television cameras to find her. Then she repeated her cry and blew herself to bits.

  No one else was killed or wounded, though a taxi driver, blinded by the blast, ran over the curb and struck a newsstand, scattering papers and magazines in a sort of sympathetic explosion.

  Neither the FIS nor any other agency in the world was able to identify the girl. She had had long blond hair. The autopsy established that it wasn’t dyed.

  Almost certainly, thought Philindros, she had been got on an American mother.

  It snowed at Valley Forge on the day Lockwood spoke there. The crowd was very small but the television audience was enormous.

  Here the President quoted Washington. He spoke of the terrible winter, the loss of hope, the eventual triumph. His voice had never been stronger, but he spoke briefly: exactly twenty-two minutes.

  In the twenty-second minute, in Union Square in San Francisco, a young man in a white jibba stepped out of a car and ran, limping painfully, to the middle of the park. A crowd of early shoppers and commuters had gathered round some street musicians: a boy in a curly wig, dressed like Shirley Temple as a child, was tap-dancing. The youth in the jibba ran straight into this group. The dancer and two policemen in plain clothes who had been pursuing the terrorist were killed in the ensuing explosion. The scene was recorded by a television camera with a long lens, shooting from the window of a room on a high floor of the Saint Francis Hotel, and within moments the crowd was able to see a replay of the explosion on television receivers flickering in the windows of the shops surrounding Union Square, and everywhere else in America.