tone of a defeated man.
“We’ll get there,” said Marcke.
Then he turned to Dean.
“Do you know what the most important moment of the Reagan presidency was, Mr. Dean?” asked the President.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“The moment he joked with his doctors after being shot.
Now most of the accounts of that are apocryphal, but even so, it was the sign of strength and vitality that the country needed. They rallied to him. His approval ratings soared after that, and his image was sealed forever. It allowed him to accomplish a great deal.”
Dean nodded.
“People want to believe in their leaders,” said Marcke. He turned back to Cohen and Freehan. “Let’s get this show back on the road.”
“Give us a few minutes, Mr. President,” said Freehan.
152
The first ten thousand or so letters were a little interesting, but even with the computer doing 99.9 percent of the work, Gallo found the comparisons beyond boring. He had to me-chanically queue each batched correspondence file with the e-mailed threats so the computer could compare them. An hour into the project and he was falling over the keyboard, half-asleep. He tried drinking a Coke, standing rather than sitting, kneeling rather than standing, punching things in with his left hand rather than his right. But it was still dread-fully dull and routine.
His work was made harder by the fact that the files that the FBI had created during its investigation of the threat occasionally contained mistakes, like adding correspondence and in several cases memos from the senator’s office, which threw off the analysis. Gallo had to inspect each file and strip that material out. Fortunately, he quickly learned that the files that were most likely to be “polluted” were large ones, and he zeroed in on those, stripping out the correspondence and memos, then resaving the file and running it through the tool.
He had just found a particularly large file, complete with several letters and three staff memos, when an instant message blipped on his computer screen from Angela DiGiacomo asking if he wanted to have dinner.
Well, yeah!
Whoa.
But how did he feel about a woman taking the initiative?
Like he should’ve said something himself weeks ago.
He shot back a message, asking when she wanted to go.
Waiting for her reply and seriously distracted, he managed to delete the wrong material from the file before inserting it into the tool.
The funny thing was, the tool came back with an 87 percent match — the best hit of the night, by far.
“
And it really was a yelp. Rubens thought Johnny looked as if he was in physical pain, his hands twisting together.
“Read the memos!” said Johnny. “Note: uses colon.
E-mail threat: uses colon. Likes to use the word ‘now.’ No serial comma. Perfect spelling.”
“Well, that could be spell-check,” said Gallo.
Rubens studied the documents and the report from the textual analysis tool, which purported to have discovered the author of the death threats among McSweeney’s staff. While in general Rubens was a big believer in technology, he had his doubts about this tool — there were too many vicissitudes involved in writing even something as simple as an e-mail note or memo.
He turned to Gallo. “What do you think, Mr. Gallo?”
“Looks like it’s a match,” said Gallo. “But the guy is on the senator’s staff.”
Rubens turned toward the front of the Art Room. “Ms.
Telach, where is Mr. Karr at the moment?”
“He’s at the house where Senator McSweeney was shot, talking to the Secret Service people.”
“Tell him to locate James Fahey. Tell him to watch him carefully.”
“Fahey is with his boss,” said Telach. “At the hospital.”
“Charlie Dean’s on his way there with the President,” said Rockman. “They’re just pulling up.”
153
Jimmy Fingers sank into the steel hospital chair, his body de-flating into a worthless pile of skin and bones.
McSweeney lay a few feet away, recovering from emergency surgery. The doctors had removed the bullet swiftly and without major complications; the prognosis for recovery was excellent.
But McSweeney wasn’t going to run. Jimmy Fingers didn’t know exactly what had been dragged out of his closet but knew it was serious. According to one of the campaign people, Ball had been ranting in the ambulance, going on and on about how McSweeney had cost him his life in Vietnam. McSweeney, he said, had made him steal government money in Vietnam.
A nut job, obviously. But one who wasn’t going to be easily dismissed.
Especially since what he said tracked with what Dean had told McSweeney.
The ambulance people had heard it, and Jimmy Fingers would just bet one or both of them were on the phone right now with some reporter somewhere, selling tomorrow’s headlines.
The Secret Service agent who had headed the investigation into the threats, John Mandarin, had come to the hospital but wouldn’t talk to Jimmy Fingers at all. That, the aide concluded, was the worst sign of all.
I oughta blow the bastard’s head off, Jimmy Fingers thought to himself. He wasn’t sure which bastard he meant, though — Mandarin, Ball, McSweeney, or Marcke.
Police lines had been set up blocks from the hospital, blockading traffic, but several television crews and a number of reporters had been allowed through and were camped about a block from the front entrance. The Secret Service brought the President to a side entrance near the laundry, blocking off access from the rest of the complex and getting Marcke in before the reporters knew what was going on.
A detail of Secret Service agents, along with backups from the federal marshals’ ser vice and the Drug Enforcement Agency, had effectively taken over the hospital. Armed federal agents stood at every hallway intersection, stairway, and elevator. Dean stayed close to the President, who, despite the pleas from his security detail, kept stopping to shake hands with nurses, aides, and doctors — and their accompanying Secret Service escort — as he made his way around to the emergency surgical center where Senator McSweeney had been taken.
Jimmy Fingers dug his hand deep into his pans pocket, finger-ing the trigger of his pistol.
All the years he’d spent getting McSweeney ready to run, then pulling off the masterstroke — the genius stroke, unprecedented in American history — that brought the senator from underdog to front-runner in one quick shot.
How was he ever going to find someone else to hitch his wagon to?
The short answer was, he wouldn’t. He was too close to McSweeney. If the senator went down, he went down.
Poof.
