The Multiple Man

“It’ll be hard to explain a gunshot wound.”

“This doesn’t shoot bullets,” she replied. “Tranquilizer darts. They make the same puncture as a doctor’s needle.”

“You’re going to die of a fatal heart attack,” Jackson said, holding the syringe up beside his face. “The stairs were too much for you. You’re really not in good physical shape. All the excitement of the President’s impromptu meeting with the Neo-Luddites outside the Capitol… too much for the press secretary’s heart.”

“The day I die,” I said as evenly as I could, “my whole story gets published. Not only here, but overseas as well.”

“Wrong,” Jackson said. “We’ve already intercepted the two tapes you sent overseas. They’ve been destroyed.”

“I don’t believe you!” But I really did. Why else would they feel free to knock me off?

“And we have a good idea of where the third tape went,” he added. “The publisher of the Globe likes to think he’s a friend of Presidents. I’ll get the tape before any of your old cronies listen to it.

I started to reply, but clamped my mouth shut instead. “That leaves only your erstwhile bodyguard,” Jackson said, “who seems to have run off to parts unknown.”

“Nope. I’m right here.”

Hank Solomon’s voice!

“Y’all jes’ better line up along th’ railin’ there and put yer assorted instruments down on th’ top of it.”

Jackson spun around fiercely and tried to find the source of the disembodied voice. Hank’s twang echoed through the shadows. He might have been anywhere. Laura jumped to her feet and also peered into the darkness.

“Now lissen,” Hank said. “I got a regulation 7.6-millimeter pistol in mah hand. Nothin’ fancy. It makes a lotta noise, and it puts a big ol’ hole in yew. It’ll make a mess outta yer pretty white dress, ma’am. So put them instruments down. Y’hear?”

But Laura, instead of giving up, grabbed me by the collar and jammed her gun to my head. “I’ll kill him!” she shouted, and her voice shrilled off every corner and curve of the stonework around us.

I reacted without thinking. Instead of being scared, I was damned sore. I shoved Laura away from me and turned toward Jackson. Something went pop and I felt a sting in the back of my neck.

Jackson pushed past me and ran clattering along the gallery, heading for the stairs. I saw Laura glaring pure hatred at me. I took a step toward her, but my feet wouldn’t work right. I stumbled. She cracked me in the face with her goddamned popgun and down I went.

The marble was cold.

Somebody turned me over on my back. Hank grinned down at me. “Y’all got a buzzful of trank in yew, boy.”

“Get them,” I mumbled, feeling like my head was numb with Novocain. “Why dintcha shoot him?”

“Eighty Secret Service agents down there and yew want me t’ take a shot at the President?”

“You’ve got to…” I tried to get my legs working, tried to get to my feet.

“Stay there,” Hank commanded. “I’ll get him.” He disappeared while I was still doing an imitation of a beached flounder. The echoes! I heard feet running on marble as if they were racing in circles inside my head. Hard breathing. Whispers. Coughs.

I finally struggled to my feet and grabbed the balustrade. Leaning over it like a seasick tourist, I tried to peer into the gloomy shadows to find out what was happening. Couldn’t see a damned thing. And it was all wavering in front of my eyes, lurching up and down and sideways. Damned if I wasn’t seasick.

I looked down to the floor of the rotunda. A long way down. Tiny little people were slowly gathering down there, their heads craned upward. They had heard the sounds of a struggle coming from somewhere.

A shout. A pair of voices cursing. Then a body crashed through one of those flimsy railings, screaming all the way down to the floor. It hit with a solid thunk that ended its screaming forever. The body was wearing a light-colored mandarin suit. I threw up.

I must have passed out. The next thing I knew, Hank was bending over me, his face very solemn. “I got him,” he said simply. Then he helped me to my feet and we staggered downward, on those dark narrow stairways, toward the floor of the rotunda.

I heard the pounding of an army rushing up the stairs toward us. It turned out to be only a dozen or so Secret Service men. They looked grim, angry, puzzled, all at the same time. We passed the broken railing, and I glanced out toward the floor. A crowd of agents was surrounding the body. From this high I could see that Jackson’s fake mustache and beard had floated out of his pocket and landed almost on top of his grotesquely twisted body.

The agents with us didn’t ask any questions. They didn’t say a word. It was damned eerie. Silently they escorted us down to the floor.

Across the way, beside the huge Columbus Portal, stood the General, flanked by two agents. He looked old and bent. But when he saw us, he straightened.

“He killed my son!” he shouted, and suddenly grabbed the gun from the shoulder holster of the agent on his left.

Hank pushed me to the floor as the General fired. A long ugly gouge ripped up the floor inches from my face. I heard Hank’s gun go off, deafening, right in my ears. The General crumpled.

I looked up at Hank. He was smiling.

“That’s the one I was after. He’s the sumbitch that killed McMurtrie.”

EIGHTEEN

I woke up in a hospital room.

It was spinning around in circles, slowly, and refused to stop. I squeezed my eyes shut and then cautiously opened them again. Still circles. I didn’t remember being brought here. Didn’t remember a damned thing, in fact, since Hank had killed the General. Just his grim, death’s head smile as he let his gun drop to the floor and all the Secret Service agents in the world rushed him.

Gradually the room settled down. I expected to feel a monumental headache, but I didn’t. I felt foggy, but without pain. Kind of stiff, heavy-limbed. It was a real effort to lift my head and squint at the brightness outside the room’s one window.

Looked like midday out there. Maybe afternoon. I could see the double-tiered roadway of the Route 495 Beltway, and a forest of radio-TV antennas off among the checkerboard of neat little suburban houses that covered the once-green and rolling hills. Walter Reed, I realized.They’ve stashed me at Walter Reed Hospital.

Even if I’d felt strong enough to get up, I knew the door would be locked, and an armed soldier or two would be on the other side of it. Maybe Marines, in their flashy dress uniforms and theirthey shall not pass faces, with those neat little automatic pistols on their hips, the kind that can clean out a room in twelve seconds flat.

I wondered for a long while what had happened to Hank. And Vickie. And those tapes I’d sent overseas. And Johnny Harrison. I began to try to figure out how I could get word to Len Ryan about everything that had happened. It was quite a surprise when I looked out the window again and it was dark outside. I must have fallen asleep in the middle of my intense thinking.

A sweet-faced black nurse came in, all serious business in stiff white uniform and no chitchat with the patient. She raised my bed without asking me if I wanted it that way, looking as if she were afraid to exchange words with me.

“Will I live?” I asked.

She almost smiled, then caught herself. “The monitors are all in the green.”