kept a sharp eye out for her three tails, but saw none of them. Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, they’d moved on past this area in search of her.
Ten minutes later on the nose, a Yellow Cab pulled up out front. Using the muted brown scarf to cover her head and shoulders, she hurried outside to the cab and jumped in. “Thanks for getting here so quickly,” she told the driver.
He nodded in the rearview mirror. “Where to?”
She thought fast. If the Q-group was trying to make a political statement, they’d do it in front of the largest possible crowd, which meant the Mall and its teeming thousands of tourists. “As close to the Mall as you can get me,” she answered.
“Which end?”
Good question. The blasted thing stretched forever. How was she supposed to figure out where they’d mount their attack along its length in the next hour? Well, it wasn’t as if she had any choice but to just start looking. Gabe’s motorcade would probably enter the Mall from 15th Street beside…
“Take me to the Washington Monument.”
“You got it.”
“And could you drive conservatively so you don’t call any attention to us?”
The guy’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but he nodded. After all the rush to get here, he probably figured she was in some giant hurry. She was, but it was more important at the moment that her tails not spot her.
The foot traffic was heavy, and various streets were closed such that the cab could only drop her off a block north of the towering spire of the Washington Monument, but that was close enough. She paid the guy double the fare plus an extra twenty-dollar bill for his dispatcher and watched him pull away. She walked quickly until she hit the back of the crowd that was lining up ten people or more deep along Madison Avenue to watch the parade, which was due to start any minute.
A sea of faces spread out before her, stretching a mile or more to her right and wrapping all the way up Capitol Hill and around the Capitol building itself. The east end of the Mall was filling up fast with people, there to watch the inauguration ceremony and listen to Gabe’s inaugural address on the huge platform that had been erected on the Capitol steps.
Where would she go if she were planning to assassinate the President-elect, and when would she do it? Gabe would be standing still in the open when he took the oath of office and gave his inaugural speech. It would be easy to use a high-powered rifle and take a shot at him then. Except he’d be surrounded by bulletproof podiums and antisniper measures galore. The less likely option was to hit him in his limousine, which was heavily armored and protected by Secret Service to the hilt. He’d be invincible in the vehicle. C’mon, Diana. Think like a killer. How would she do it?
Everybody would believe he was safe inside the limousine. If the Q-group could pull off killing him there, the psychological blow to the country would be even greater. It would deliver a message that nobody was safe anywhere. After listening to these guys talk on the Internet for the last couple of months, that sounded exactly like the sort of logic they’d use. Okay. The limo it was. Now, where along the parade route would she try it?
She started to walk. Madison Avenue was a one-way street with traffic traveling west under normal circumstances. But today it was closed and the parade would move east along it. The cold air burned in her lungs and she breathed out a cloud of condensation as she walked quickly along the perimeter of the crowd, looking for something. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but it had to be here, somewhere. Some spot that was better than the next to make the hit. Some feature that made it the perfect place to kill a president.
The crowd continued to swell around her. Lord, there were a ton of people out here. She was so insignificant among them. One among tens of thousands. How was she supposed to make a difference? She couldn’t do it. She was going to fail. Desperation settled around her, constricting her lungs until panic began to set in. Relax. Breathe. The brain shuts down when panic hits. Keep thinking. But the demons had her in their grip. She fought to no avail against the drowning sensation that worsened with every step she took. The Smithsonian’s massive American History Museum loomed on her left, taking up a full city block. She walked even faster, nearly running past the Natural History Museum, which was no less enormous. The red brick of the original Smithsonian building loomed across the mall, ugly and factorylike.
Nothing jumped out at her. She had no earthly idea where Q-group was going to make its run at Gabe. Being out here wasn’t doing any good. A man jostled her. She looked up. Focused on his face. Round. Ruddy. Caucasian. Not her man.
Maybe instead of trying to find a place, she should look for the Q-group members themselves. She had their pictures in her purse. She looked around frantically, focusing on each face until they all blurred into a sea of disembodied features.
Gabe was going to die.
She had to get help. Tell someone! Not a policeman in sight. In the far distance, she heard a band begin to play. Oh, Lord. The parade was starting. By sheer force of will, she beat down the impulse to run screaming. She had to do this. For Gabe. She fixed his face in her mind. His intelligent, compassionate, laughing eyes. And gradually, her pulse calmed. Her breathing slowed down until the steel bands around her chest loosened. Better. Now think!
She looked up at the buildings clustering around the Capitol ahead. If the Q-group had snipers and high- powered rifles there, she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There were so many potential perches for a gunman atop the many buildings in the area or behind an office window, she’d never find the killer in time. She’d have to leave that one up to the Secret Service and the FBI, who were much better suited to foil that sort of plan than she could ever be.
Besides, the Q-group attack in Chicago relied on direct application of force. Blowing up Gabe’s car would be much more their style.
She looked around, trying to orient herself. In her panic, she’d lost track of where she was. Over there. The West Building of the National Gallery of Art loomed well ahead on her left. A huge banner down the side of the building announced an exhibit of paintings celebrating freedom and its many faces. The banner looked like a stylized American flag, and the thing was a good three stories tall. It would make a great backdrop for a video shot or a photograph.
Bingo. That was where they’d do it! They’d splatter Gabe’s brains all over a giant American flag. What could be more ironic or make more of a political statement than that?
She took off running toward the building, scanning faces as she went.
Somewhere nearby, among these throngs of people, was a small team of men intent on killing Gabe Monihan. And she had only a little while left to find them.
12:00 P.M.
S he reached the National Gallery of Art and its enormous banner. The sidewalk in front of the great structure was crammed with people packed in shoulder to shoulder. Nobody could move over there, let alone maneuver into position to kill anyone. No, the Q-group would have to operate on this side of the street with the relatively open Mall behind them.
The first band passed, a high-school drill team complete with a line of half-frozen girls in hot pants trying to smile and remember their routine. A sheriff’s posse from somewhere in Pennsylvania passed by on fractious horses. They didn’t like the cold any more than their riders did.
She scanned the sheaf of papers clutched in her hand and went back to watching the crowd. She moved slowly now, methodically observing everyone on this side of the street. She’d swept the area once and was making a second pass through. The faces in the pictures were burned into her brain, and this time she was trying to imagine them with disguises, either in the form of facial hair or clothes obscuring part of their features as she checked out the crowd. She had to spot one of them soon or Gabe was history.
The gnawing sense of doubt was growing in her gut again. She hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t cracked the code soon enough, hadn’t warned the right people in time. Gabe was going to die a horrible, bloody death because she’d let him down. For the third time, she scanned the crowd in front of the art gallery. Nada. Her panic, held at
