York City's Sheraton Hotel Convention Center, which would be followed by a triumphal motorcade down Fifth Avenue. Then he would make a speech near the atom bomb destruction area. The event had been scheduled three months before and had been well publicized. It was the kind of situation that Christian Klee detested, the President was too exposed.
There were deranged people, and even the police were a danger in Klee's eyes because they were armed and also because as a police force they were completely demoralized by the uncontrolled crime in the city.
Klee took his own elaborate precautions. Only his operational staff in the Secret Service knew the awesome detail and manpower that was used to protect the President in his rare public appearances.
Special advance teams had been sent ahead. These teams patrolled and searched the area of the visit twenty-four hours a day. Two days before the visit, another thousand men were sent to become part of the crowds that would greet the President. These men formed a line on both sides of the motorcade and in the front of the motorcade and acted as part of the crowd but actually formed a sort of Maginot line. Another five hundred men manned the rooftops, constantly scanning the windows that overlooked the motorcade, and these men were very heavily armed. In addition to this there was the President's own special and personal detail, which numbered a hundred men.
And then, of course, there were the Secret Service men under deep cover who were accredited to newspapers and TV stations, who carried newspaper photo cameras and manned mobile TV vehicles.
And Christian Klee had other tricks up his sleeve. In the nearly four years of the Kennedy administration there had been five assassination attempts. None of them had even come close. The would-be killers had been crazies, of course, and were now behind bars in the toughest federal prisons. And Klee made sure that if they got out, he would find a reason to put them back in again. It was impossible to jail all the lunatics in the United States who made threats to kill the President of the United States-by mail, by phone, by conspiring, by shouting it in the streets-but Christian Klee had made their lives miserable for them, so that they would be too busy preserving their own safety to worry about grandiose ideas. He put them under mail surveillance, phone surveillance, personal surveillance, computer surveillance. If they spit on the sidewalk, they were in trouble.
All these precautions, all these arrangements, were in effect this September third when President Francis Xavier Kennedy gave his speech at the political luncheon at the Sheraton Convention Center in New York.
Hundreds of Secret Service men were scattered through the audience, and the building was sealed off after his entrance,
On that same September third, Annee went shopping on Fifth Avenue. In her three weeks in the United States, she had helped move everything into place. She had made her phone calls, had her meeting with the two assassination teams that had finally made their way to New York as crewmen on one of Bert Audick's oil tankers. They moved into the two apartments prepared for them. These apartments had already been stocked with weapons procured by a special underground logistics team that had no part of the central plan.
Annee could not know that Christian Klee's FBI was picking up her phone calls in the very air, that every move she made was covered. And that the teams' phone calls to her in the public booths had been intercepted and read by Christian Klee.
What she had not confessed to anyone was her decision to turn this into a suicide mission.
Annee thought how strange it was that she would go shopping just four hours before what would be the end of her life.
Sal Troyca and Elizabeth Stone were working hard at the office, piecing together information that would prove Christian Klee could have prevented the explosion of the atom bomb.
Elizabeth Stone's town house was only a ten-minute ride away. So, at lunchtime, they spent a couple of hours in bed.
Once in bed, they forgot all the stress of the day. After an hour Elizabeth went into the bathroom to take a shower and Sal wandered into the living room, still naked, to turn on the TV. He stood in amazement at what he was seeing. He watched for a few moments longer and then ran into the bathroom and pulled Elizabeth out of the shower. She was a little frightened by his roughness as he dragged her naked and dripping wet into the living room.
There, watching the TV screen, she began to weep. Sal took her in his arms.
'Look at it this way,' he said, 'our troubles are over.'
The campaign speech in New York on September third was to be one of the most important stops in President Francis Kennedy's bid for reelection.
And it had been planned to have a great psychological effect on the nation.
First, there would be a luncheon at the Sheraton Convention Center on Fifty-eighth Street. There, the President would address the most important and influential men of the city. The luncheon would raise additional funds to rebuild the midtown area in New York that had been leveled by the atom bomb explosion. An architect, without a fee, had de signed a great memorial for the devastated area, and the rest of the acreage was to be a small park with a tiny lake. The city was to buy and donate the land.
After the luncheon, the Kennedy party would lead a motorcade that would begin at 125th Street and go down Seventh and Fifth avenues to place the first symbolic wreath of marble on the rubbled heap that remained of Times Square.
As one of the sponsors of the luncheon, Louis Inch was seated on the dais with President Kennedy and expected to accompany him to his waiting car, thus getting some newspaper and TV coverage. But to his surprise, he was cut off by Secret Service men who isolated Kennedy in a human net. The President was escorted through a door at the rear of the platform.
In the streets outside, huge crowds gathered. The Secret Service had cleared the area so that there was a space of at least a hundred feet around the presidential limousine. There were enough Secret Service men to protect the inner hundred feet with a solid phalanx. Outside that, the crowd was controlled by the police. On the edge of this perimeter were photographers and TV camera crews, who immediately surged forward when the advance guard of Secret Service men came out of the hotel. And then, unaccountably, there was a fifteen-minute wait.
The President finally emerged from the hotel shielded from the TV cameras as he rushed toward his waiting car. At that very moment the avenue exploded into a beautifully choreographed bloody ballet.
Six men burst through the police restraining line, mowing down part of the police wall and running toward the President's armored limousine. A second later, another group of six men burst through the opposite perimeter and raked the fifty Secret Service men around the armored limousine with their automatic weapons.
In the very next second eight cars swung into the open area and Secret Service men in combat gear and bulletproof vests that made them seem like gigantic balloons came tumbling out with shotguns and machine pistols and caught the attackers in the rear. They shot with precision and short bursts. In less than thirty seconds, all twelve attackers were lying in the avenue dead, their guns silenced. The presidential limousine roared away from the curb, other Secret Service cars following.
At that moment, Annee, with a supreme effort of will, stepped in the path of the presidential limousine with her two Bloomingdale shopping bags in her hand. The shopping bags were filled with explosive gel, two powerful bombs that she detonated as the car, too late, tried to swerve but hit her. The presidential car flew up into the air at least ten feet off the ground and came down a mass of flames. The force of the explosion blew everyone inside it to bits. And there was absolutely nothing left of Annee except tiny bits of gaily colored paper from the shopping bags.
One TV cameraman had the wit to swing his camera for a panoramic shot of everything that was visible. Thousands of people had flung themselves to the ground when the firing broke out and were still lying prone as if begging some unforgiving God for mercy. From that prone mass issued streams of blood that came from those who had been hit by the heavy fire from the assassination teams or killed by the explosion of the powerful bombs. Many in the crowd had suffered concussions and, when the terror stopped, rose and staggered in confusion. The camera caught all this for television to horrify the nation.
In the office of Vice President Du Pray, Christian Klee jumped out of his chair and cried out, 'What the fuck happened!'
Helen Du Pray stared at the TV screen and then said sharply to Klee, 'Who was the poor bastard who took the President's place?'
'One of my Secret Service men,' Christian Klee said. 'They were not supposed to get that close.'
