“After he took out Nest One, he used their weapon.”
“He?”
Jimmy stopped, as if he had reached a piece of information so horrible, he could barely transmit it.
“What? What is it?”
He took a deep breath. “I know the press is talking as if there must have been a fleet of assassins. Dozens of them. But the sad fact is-both the FBI and Homeland Security agree it’s entirely possible there was only one.”
“What?”
“Granted, there must have been more people involved in the operation. They obviously employed sophisticated military reconnaissance of the staging area, not to mention advanced planning and intelligence gathering. Capturing Director Marshall just in time to extract the information they needed-but not so early we would become suspicious and alter our plans. Simultaneously killing Senator Hammond to delay the recognition that Marshall was MIA. But as far as actual assassins-there’s just no evidence of more than one shooter. And given the totally clean getaway, one seems more likely than twenty.”
“How is that possible?”
Jimmy’s eyes lowered. “What I’m about to say next…is not for public consumption. It’s only speculation. Homeland Security doesn’t want to hear it on Meet the Press. ”
“Get to the point. How could one person find, much less take out, the sniper nest?”
“You might as well ask how he got a bomb under Cadillac One. How could he have so much information about the president’s plans? How was he able to so brilliantly penetrate the Secret Service defense formation?” Jimmy sighed again. “Even assuming they were able to extract information from Director Marshall, there’s only one possible answer to all those questions.”
Christina looked at him levelly. “They had someone on the inside.”
“You said it, not me. But…”
“But it’s the only possible explanation.”
Jimmy drew himself up. “Christina, you know how many cases of Secret Service traitors there have been in the history of the Service? None. You know how many FBI agents have gone rogue? Exactly the same number. It just doesn’t happen.”
“Until it does,” Christina said quietly. “Until someone gets so fed up with our foreign policy, they can’t stand it anymore. Or someone gets to them, or gets to their family. Forces them to do something they would normally never do.”
Jimmy looked back at her solemnly. “Our intelligence forces are investigating all those possibilities. And there’s one other you haven’t considered yet.”
That caught Christina’s attention. She was relatively sure she had considered every possibility, even some that a conspiracy buff like their investigator Loving would find preposterous. “What would that be?”
“Remember, the ricin that poisoned Senator Hammond was delivered via a letter he received here in the Senate. In this very office building. We’re recommending that no one touch any mail without wearing gloves. Perhaps even a face mask.”
“I assume the Capitol Police have instituted some increased security measures in the mailroom.”
“That’s just the thing, Chris. They’ve been doing that for years.”
“How did that tainted letter get into Senator Hammond’s inbox if it didn’t go through the mailroom?” Her eyes widened suddenly as the answer came to her, as she realized where Jimmy had been steering her. “Someone hand-delivered it.”
Jimmy nodded solemnly. “Exactly. Not an outsider. Not a Middle Eastern demagogue. One of us.”
Christina escorted Jimmy to the door.
“Chris, much as I enjoy talking to you…I think my bosses would be happier if I could tell them I was giving my reports personally to Senator Kincaid. No offense, but-”
“None taken.” She thought for a moment. “When will you be around next?”
“Tomorrow morning, I assume.”
She nodded. “I’ll have him here.”
“That would be good. No one has seen him since the attack. But I kept telling them-she’s married to him, for Pete’s sake. She must know where he is. He probably checks in with her constantly.”
Christina chose not to mention that she hadn’t seen him since the attack, either.
“I’ll make sure he’s here for your briefing, Jimmy.”
“Great. So…you do know where he is?”
Christina tried to put on a brave face. “Yeah. I have a pretty good idea.”
4
Ben Kincaid sat, eyes closed, in the same chair he had occupied for so many days, it felt like a formfitting new pair of pants. It was almost embarrassing to stand; the cheap green vinyl retained the impression of his rear end long after he had risen. So he stayed in the chair, his head resting against the metal guardrail of the hospital bed.
There was not much to think about. The hospital room was not furnished at all, unless you counted the television mounted on the wall. Foliage filled the empty spaces. Ben had never seen so many plants in his entire life, outside of a nursery. All tokens of affection and concern. Funny, wasn’t it-you would send flowers to an ailing female, but never a male. Manly men got plants. As if it really mattered.
He opened his eyes and stared ahead, but he saw nothing, heard nothing of consequence. The only sound was the hum of the air conditioner, already forced to do double-time by the hot Oklahoma weather.
Mike’s eyes were closed, just as they had been every second since they pulled him from the wreckage. He did not move, not even a twitch.
For the first few days, Ben had read him poetry. Started at the front of The Oxford Book of English Verse and worked his way to the end, all the way from John Gower to Seamus Heaney. Bored Ben to tears, truth be told, but he knew Mike liked that stuff. The English major to the end. So there was at least a chance he might get some pleasure out of this marathon reading. There was a theory, still unproved, that patients in a deep coma, even those teetering on the very brink of life and death, could still hear and understand. Some said that the sense of hearing was the last to go and the first to recover. And so Ben read and read and read, waiting for some indication that he was being heard.
He never received any.
After a few days, his voice grew hoarse and he gave up the reading. But he remained in the chair, waiting for a sign, praying for the recovery the doctors said was unlikely, and wishing he had not been so stupid as to draw his best friend into the line of fire.
He blamed himself entirely. The attack had been a nightmare. A national nightmare, true, but one he had experienced firsthand and up close. His cheek still stung where the bullet had grazed him. But that was the least haunting memory plaguing him. All those men-dropping right before his eyes. He’d seen death before, even witnessed it-but not like that. Never like that. And the director of Homeland Security-gone. He couldn’t cry many tears about Senator Hammond. If the rest of the world knew what Ben knew about the former Senate minority leader, they would understand. But all those other people. All those public servants, all those innocent bystanders, children. And And after all the times Mike had stood by him, all the times he had pulled Ben’s fat out of the fire Ben repaid the debt by putting him in the intensive care unit, his right leg and arms broken, his flesh rent in more than a dozen places, his head so concussed that even if he did recover…the doctors were not sure it would be such a good thing.
A Hispanic nurse entered to take Mike’s vitals. She was on the short side, brisk, and efficient. No-nonsense
