Bahmad let go and stepped back, allowing Walker to slump to the floor. The captain’s legs twitched, and his eyes blinked furiously as his face turned purple. Bahmad thought it was funny and he smiled. Killing a man this way was silent, but it took a good bit of time. Not only was his spinal cord severed, but his windpipe was crushed so that his airway was cut off at the same time his heart stopped.
After a while the captain stopped twitching and Bahmad set about wiping down everything he had touched with his bare hands and searching the yacht for anything incriminating. He thought about finding the yacht’s diving gear and retrieving his equipment, but that would take too much time, not only to find it and bring it up, but to clean it and dry it all off. He decided to leave it at the bottom of the harbor. The captain’s body would be found sooner or later, but he didn’t think that anyone would go diving beneath the boat until it was too late to make a difference. He would get new weapons.
He would get a hotel room tonight and in the morning he would fetch his things from storage and catch the early flight to Los Angeles. Just a few more days now and he would be free. He found that he was looking forward to his retirement with a great deal of relish.
“How are you doing, sweetheart?” President Haynes asked his daughter.
She looked up, a sweet smile on her face. “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “The clouds look like castles this morning.”
Haynes looked out the window. They were over Iowa enroute to San Diego at about 30,000 feet, and the cloud formations did indeed look like castles. Like the one at Disneyland where they were going tomorrow. The International Special Olympics’ opening ceremony was three days from now, and Haynes was making a sweep through California in support of Governor S. Howard Thomas who was up for reelection in November. It was going to be a hot contest with a lot of major issues, not the least of which was abortion, which Haynes was against, but had to support publicly because of his party’s position; a ban on smoking in all public places including beaches, parks and even streets, something he thought made some sort of sense but was a ridiculous infringement of people’s freedoms by a heavy-handed government; and the elimination of the state income tax, even while Florida was grappling with the creation of a state income tax and Haynes himself was proposing the end of federal income taxes in favor of a flat-rate sales tax. Whatever position he took, there would be a hundred different voices opposing it, five dozen powerful lobbyist groups clamoring to get the attention of Congress and at least twenty talking heads on weekend morning television analyzing and dissecting every single move he and every other politician made. And it brought a smile to his face. This was what American politics was all about. The almost constant bickering, the dissentients, the name-calling and sometimes even mudslinging, the attempts at bribery and influence-peddling, the investigations and sometimes even impeachment proceedings; the give and take of compromise. All of it was working exactly the way the designers of the system had meant it to work. There was no dissolving of Congress or of the government, no tanks coming up Pennsylvania Avenue in another military coup, no President and his cabinet fleeing the country, no armed revolution pitting one people against another, leastways not since the Civil War.
“The clouds do look like castles Haynes said. He looked into his daughter’s eyes. She seemed very happy. “Are you looking forward to the Olympics this weekend, sweetheart?” She was always so open and straightforward that he could tell what she was thinking and how she was feeling.
“I’m nervous, but I was thinking about something,” she replied.
“What’s that?”
“Just about everybody else is going to be just as nervous as me. Mom says all I can do is my best and don’t worry about anyone else, ‘cause they’ll be trying to do their best. I hope. But I’m still nervous. Is it okay?”
Haynes glanced up as his chief of staff Tony Lang came around the corner. He looked nervous. Everybody aboard did. Haynes gave his daughter a peck on the cheek. “It’s okay to be nervous, but not scared.”
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded, her pretty blue eyes lighting up and a smile brightening an already impossibly bright face. “Gotcha.” She looked like a cross between a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian beauty and a mysterious, almond-eyed Siberian.
Haynes studied his daughter’s round face for a moment, and his heart suddenly hardened. God help the sorry sonofabitch who ever tried to harm so much as a hair on her head. He felt a genuine sorrow and guilt for what had happened to bin Laden’s daughter. He wished that he could somehow make it right, or at least explain to bin Laden how it had happened. But he could not. What he could do was protect his own child, while at the same time protect the freedom of the United States.
“Gotta go,” he said, but his daughter was already looking out the window again. She could grasp some fairly complex ideas, but usually not more than one of them at a time. She was in some ways lucky, he thought.
He joined Lang and they went forward into the corridor separating the family’s space with the President’s private study and conference room.
“Henry would like to go over a few things with you, Mr. President, and Sterling wants to know if you’ll agree to an off-the-record chat with the media sometime this afternoon before we touch down.”
“Tell Henry to come up, and I want you to sit in on it too, because I have a few ideas — assuming he’s talking about security for the games in San Francisco.”
Lang nodded. “He’s running into some brick walls, and he’s probably going to ask you to pull your daughter out of the ISO.”
Haynes’s jaw tightened. “Not a chance. And you can tell Sterling that I’ll talk to the media, but the issues will be limited.”
“Anything but the games?” Lang asked.
“That’s right,” Haynes said angrily. He went forward, pausing at the open curtain to his wife’s office. She was in conference with her press secretary and they looked up and smiled.
“Did you talk to Deb?” his wife asked.
“Just now. She’s a little nervous, but she’ll be okay.”
“Would you like me to come back later, Mrs. Haynes?” the First Lady’s secretary asked, starting to rise.
The President waved her back. “No. Henry wants to go over the arrangements for San Francisco, so I’ve just got a minute.”
“Are we going to be okay up there?” The President’s wife asked.
“We’re going to make it okay, Linda, by covering all the bases, not by hiding,” the President told her firmly. He held her eye for a moment, and a silent message of reassurance passed from him to her. She visibly relaxed. “I wouldn’t take the games away from her for anything.”
“It’s been two months and nothing has happened,” she said. “Do you want me to touch on it in my talks?”
Haynes thought about it and nodded. “It might not be a bad idea. But use a light touch, and maybe you’d better run it past Marty.” Martin Schoenberg was the President’s chief speech writer.
“Sure.”
The President went to his conference room. He pressed the button for his steward, who appeared instantly. “How about some coffee, Alex?”
“Coming right up, sir.”
Haynes was in shirtsleeves; not as informal as Clinton had been, but a lot less tense than Nixon. He set a hardworking but relaxed tone in his administration, and the people he’d gathered around him thrived in the atmosphere.
His coffee came in a large mug bearing the presidential seal, and a moment later Lang showed up with Kolesnik.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” the chief of the Secret Service Protective Division said.
“Morning, Henry. Tony said you had something for me.”
“Yes, sir, but I’m afraid that it’s not very, good news. San Francisco is a mess. There’s just no way that we can guarantee your safety or that of your daughter in the games. It’s as simple as that. We’d like you to pull your daughter out and cancel your part in the opening ceremonies.”
“We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”
“Sir, a lot of those athletes are coming from Muslim countries. Their families are coming with their moms, dads, brothers, uncles. At least men who claim to be brothers and uncles. And there’s just no way we can check all of them. If bin Laden wanted to send an army to San Francisco, he could do it easily.”
“But he’s not going to do that”
