I continued down another long hallway, and down still another track in my mind.
What about larger and more complicated conspiracies? Dallas and JFK? Los Angeles and RFK? Memphis and Dr. King?
Where did that insane and depressing line of thinking take me?
The list of possible conspirators was impossibly long, and I didn't have the resources to get at most of the suspects, anyway. The crisis group talked about conspiracies a lot. The Federal Bureau was obsessed with conspiracies. So was the CIA... but a powerful fact remained: thirty years after the Kennedy assassinations, no one was really convinced that either of those murders had been solved.
The more I delved into conspiracy theories, the more I realized that getting to the core was almost impossible. Certainly, no one had yet. I'd talked to several people at the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, and they had come to exactly the same conclusion. Or dead end.
I wandered into the hallway on the twenty-first floor, where the President was sleeping. I had a chilling thought that he might be dead in his room; that Jack and Jill had already struck and left a note, another poem for us to discover in the morning.
“Everything okay?” I asked the agents stationed just outside the door of the presidential suite.
They watched me carefully, as if they were asking themselves, Why is he here? “So far,” one of them said stiffly. “No problems here.”
Eventually, I made it full circle back to my room. It was almost four in the morning.
I slipped inside the room. Lay down on the bed. I thought of my conversation with Sampson earlier that night, hearing about the murder of Sumner Moore. Apparently, the Moore boy wasn't the Truth School killer. I tried not to think about either case anymore.
I finally dozed until six -- when the clock radio went off like a fire alarm next to my head.
Rock-and-roll music blared. “K-Rock” in New York. Howard Stem was talking to me. He had worked down in Washington years ago. Howard said, “The prez is in town. Can Jack and Jill be far away?”
Everybody knew about it. The President's motorcade through Manhattan started at eleven. Stagecoach was ready to roll again.
HISTORY was about to be made in New York City. At the very least, it was white-knuckle time. Definitely that. The game had ceased being a game.
Jack jogged at a strong, steady pace through Central Park. It was a little before six in the morning. He'd been out running since just after five. He had a lot on his mind. D day had finally arrived. New York City was the war zone, and he couldn't imagine a better one.
He observed the very striking Manhattan skyline from where he was running alongside Fifth Avenue, heading south. Above the tall, uneven line of buildings, the sky was the color of charcoal seen through tissue paper. Huge plumes of smoke billowed up from turn-of-the-century buildings.
It was pretty as hell, actually. Close to glorious. Not the way he usually thought of New York City. It was just a facade, though.
Like Jack and Jill, he was thinking.
As he ran alongside a blue city bus chargang down Fifth Avenue, he wondered if he might die in the next few hours. He had to be ready for that, to be prepared for anything.
Kamikaze, he thought. The final plan was deadly, and it was as surefire as these things could be. He didn't believe that the target could possibly survive this attack. No one could. There would be other deaths as well. This was a war, after all, and people died in war.
Jack finally emerged from the park at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth.
He continued to run south, picking up his pace.
A few moments later, he entered the formal and attractive lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in the West Fifties. It was ten past six in the morning. The Peninsula was a little more than twenty blocks from Madison Square Garden, where President Byrnes was scheduled to appear at twenty-five past eleven. The New York Times was just being delivered into the hotel lobby He caught the headline: JACK AND JILL KILLERS FEARED IN NEW YORK AS PRESIDENT VISITS.
He was impressed. Even the Times was on top of things.
Then Jack saw Jill. Jill was right on time in the lobby. Always on time. She was at the Peninsula according to plan. Always according to plan.
She had on a silver-and-blue jogging suit, but she didn't look as if she'd raised a sweat coming up from the Waldorf. He wondered if she had run or walked. Or maybe even caught a Yellow Cab.
He didn't acknowledge her in any way He stepped into a waiting elevator and took it to his floor. Sara would take the next elevator.
He let himself into his room and waited for her. A single knock on the door. She was on schedule. Less than sixty seconds behind him.
“I look terrible,” she said. Sara's first words. It was so typical of her self-effacing tone, her view of herself, her vulnerability Sara the poor gimp.
“No, you don't,” he reassured her. “You look beautiful, because you are beautiful.” She didn't look her best, though. She was showing the terrible strain of these last hours. Her face was a mask of worry and doubt, too much makeup and mascara and bright red lipstick. D day. She'd sprayed her blond hair, and it looked brittle.
“The Waldorf is hopping already,” she reported to him. “They think an assassination attempt definitely will be made today They're ready for it, at least they think they are. Five thousand regular New York police, plus the Secret Service, the FBI. They have an army on hand.”
“Let them think they're ready,” Jack said. “We'll see soon enough, won't we? Now come here, you,” he smiled. “You don't look terrible at all. Never happen. You look ravishing, Sara. May I ravage you?”
