No Safe Place (15 page)

“Oh, yes,” the voice answered promptly. “He reminds me of his brother.”

All at once, Sean felt relieved. “Would you like to vote by mail?” he asked. “We can send you a ballot.”

“Sure, Mr. Kelly. That would be just fine.”

It was strange, Sean thought; suddenly he was connected to this man. He took Walker through the questions and then, thanking him, hung up.

Kate Feeney looked up from her computer log. “A Kil-cannon voter on your first hit,” she said. “Not bad.”

Sean paused for a moment. Picking up the telephone, he felt more confident.

“Hello,” he began. “My name is John Kelly, and I’m with Kilcannon for President.”

After the plane took off, Kerry called two supporters, and then Kit Pace returned from the press section and sat across from him.

“Want to see a tape of Mason’s speech?” she asked.

Kerry smiled wearily. “I don’t know, Kit. Got
Forrest Gump
?”

“More or less,” she answered, and put the tape of Mason into the TV monitor.

Together, they waited—Kerry, Kit, Kevin, and two agents from the Secret Service—and then Dick Mason’s face appeared.

He looked somber, dignified, and his voice was quiet and measured. Kerry knew at once that Dick would find the right aura, the right tone.

“We have come to Boston,”
Mason began,
“to decry the tragedy which happened here—the death of three innocent people, a man and two women.

“The only greater tragedy would be to strip their deaths of meaning.

“In the deepest sense, it does not matter whether as individuals we favor or oppose the right to choose. What matters most is that we all agree that violence has no place in this debate, and that murder must end.”

The camera panned wider. Standing behind the Vice President was a slender woman in black—the widow of Dr. Bowe. Her face was pale, stoic. Kerry felt for her loss, and that her grief was on public display.

“Who but Dick would ask her?” Kerry murmured.

Kit shrugged. “Maybe she wanted to. Anyhow, it’s effective …”

“But
these
murders,”
Mason said with sudden sternness,
“did not happen in a vacuum. In a society whose laws protect the right to choose, that choice must be made in the privacy of our homes and in the depth of our hearts—with care, compassion, and, we hope, a due appreciation of all that is involved.

“But the time for public equivocation has passed. It is imperative that those in public life protect this private right—without hesitance, without apology, without exception—or we ourselves become responsible.”

“I guess that’s me,” Kerry said. “Hesitant, apologetic. I might as well have murdered them …”

“No more.”
Pausing, the Vice President gazed into the camera.
“In the name of those who died here, I say to the purveyors of terror and violence—no more. Not one more life, not one more woman deprived of her legal rights—”

Kerry stood, snapping off the monitor. Turning, he said, “I think I get the drift.”

Kit gazed up at him. “That’s the lead on the six o’clock news, Kerry. All you can do is stay out of Mason’s way.”

Kerry sat, feeling his anger become determination. “All I can do,” he said, “is go to Los Angeles and speak about battered women. Maybe some of it will filter through the lens.”

When they landed in Los Angeles, Nate Cutler saw a black stretch limousine waiting near the press buses.

Nate paused, letting his colleagues pass him. Debarking wearily from the rear of the plane, they straggled toward the press buses as if they were bound for a detention camp. As always, Kilcannon left from the front. The senator was a distant figure, shaking hands with local politicians, shepherding a congressman to a black Lincoln.

As Nate watched, the rear door of the stretch limousine opened.

Stepping onto the tarmac, the slender, dark-haired woman watched the candidate. She stayed quite still, Nate saw, until Kilcannon disappeared inside the Lincoln. Glancing at the press buses, Nate realized that the first two had filled.

Satisfied, he walked across the airstrip and boarded the last bus.

Sara Sax and Lee McAlpine were sitting in front. Stopping,
Nate said, “So what do you think?”

Lee shrugged. “So far, Kilcannon’s a little off—good but not great. Maybe he thinks Mason’s preempted him and this is a wasted day.”

Nate grimaced. “Not many days to waste,” he said, and walked to the back of the bus.

The tape in the PA system was playing “The Sound of Silence.” It seemed appropriate, Nate thought: he was stuck on a patch of asphalt on a hazy Los Angeles day, waiting to pursue a story that no one else imagined.

He felt tense, detached from the others. No one seemed to notice his withdrawal; they had been together so long that it was like a group marriage, with all the tacit understandings that make marriage possible. Silence was not a privilege but a right.

Checking his watch, Nate glanced at the door of the bus, but did not see her.

He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, listening to the desultory chatter around him: Mason’s speech; Kilcannon’s day; a reporter’s two-year-old son who had flushed about forty of her tampons down the toilet and caused a plumbing crisis that was driving her husband crazy. “David didn’t know they could
expand
like that,” Ann Rush was saying. “The plumber sent a probe with a miniature camera up the pipes, and now we’ve got a video David calls ‘The Tampon Dam.’ That and a water bubble in the wall of our dining room.”

Nate heard Lee McAlpine’s distinctive laugh. “It’s like Kil-cannon’s been warning us, Ann—the infrastructure in this country is going flat to hell.”

Nate felt himself smile, and then, quite suddenly, the bus became quieter. He opened his eyes.

Lara Costello stood at the front of the bus with her producer, looking for a seat.

Lee McAlpine got up.
“Lara,”
she said, and went to hug her.

Lara smiled, and the two women embraced, Lara several inches taller. “How
is
this?” she asked Lee.

“Terrible. One long list of human rights abuses—lost underwear, crummy sandwiches, sweatshop hours. It’s gotten so bad we’re looking at pictures of each other’s kids. You need to let the world know.”

Lara smiled again. “‘For three hundred dollars a day,’” she
paraphrased, “‘you can feed this girl. Please send money to Operation Chargecard.’”

Lee laughed; perhaps only Nate noticed that Lara’s eyes did not smile. They were cool, he thought, detached.

“Oh, well,” Lee said. “And here I thought I’d look so good on the side of a milk carton.”

“Maybe Ben and Jerry’s,” Lara answered, and gave Lee’s arm a quick squeeze. “I’d better find a seat. If we can ever make sense of this schedule, let’s have dinner, okay?”

Lara proceeded down the aisle. Now and then she stopped to say hello, but many of the faces, Nate realized, were ones she did not know: the press corps was young and turned over quickly. Nate thought that it must be strange to vanish, spend two years abroad doing God knows what amidst great suffering and privation, and then return suddenly famous, with a salary ten times that of everyone else here. The print media were not immune to resentment—of fame, of money, of greater access to the candidate, of the cachet conferred by network television—and some were inclined to see their TV colleagues as all surface and no substance. This would have been difficult for Lara even if she were not, as the notes in Nate’s pocket suggested, concealing a secret that could ruin both her and Kerry Kilcannon.

Then Lara saw him.

“Nate,”
she called. Her pleasure seemed quite genuine. When he stood, she hugged him fiercely, then leaned back to study his face.

“You look good,” she said, and then cocked her head. “Except for the haircut.”

Gazing back at her, Nate felt that same combination of deep liking and sheer male desire which, two years before, had made him feel uneasy in her company. But nowhere as guilty as he felt now.

“You never called,” he said lightly. “You never wrote. You barely said goodbye.”

She smiled a little, shaking her head. “It was a funny time for me. I took the NBC job and suddenly there I was, in the Balkans. Everything else—Washington, the Hill, the
Times—
felt like trying to remember the worst drunk you threw in college. Nothing seems quite real—” She stopped herself, then kissed
him gently on the cheek. “Anyhow, I’m sorry.”

She
was
sorry, Nate sensed. “No matter,” he said. “You look good too.”

But
not
the same, he thought. Lara appeared leaner, like a sliver of steel; her eyes struck him as older, more watchful. She seemed confident, quite self-possessed, and maybe a little haunted.

“Tell me about
your
life,” she said.

Nate shrugged. “Nothing to tell. No wife, no kids. My life is Kerry Kilcannon.”

Something flickered in Lara’s eyes, and then she smiled again. “Everyone’s life, it seems. At least until next Tuesday.”

Nate paused, trying to conceal his discomfort. “That doesn’t give us much time to catch up. Can I buy you a drink later on?”

Her face seemed to relax, and she touched him on the wrist. “I’d really like that, Nate.” He could hardly look at her.

Clayton Slade stood next to Peter Lake, the special agent in charge, waiting for Kerry’s last speech of the day.

They were on the campus of a junior college in Los Angeles, selected because of its outreach program for battered women. It was five o’clock; the sky was a cloud-streaked blue, the palm trees were deep green in the fading sun. The plaza where Kerry was to speak was set amidst a spacious lawn, which slanted upward on both sides; the knoll where Clayton and Peter were standing offered the best view.

To Clayton, everything appeared in order—the Service people siphoning the crowd through magnetometers; the volunteers gathered in front of the platform, holding two-sided “Kil-cannon for President” signs; the press bleachers set up on the other side of the plaza. There was only one three-story
building
overlooking the plaza: Clayton knew from experience that the Service had already secured the rooms facing the speakers’ platform and placed sharpshooters on the rooftop. The PA system worked: upbeat rock music pumped through the speakers, and a young Latina county commissioner had just assured the crowd that “the next President of the United States will be here in ten minutes.” The schedule was holding; with luck, Kerry’s speech would make both the early and the late evening newscasts.

“Seems like good advance work,” Peter observed.

“At least so far,” Clayton answered. “What’s funny is I couldn’t pick the advance man for this event out of a lineup—they’re always on to the next one. The only signs this guy is real are the charges on his credit card.”

Peter smiled. “Stiffing the campaign, is he?”

“Uh-huh. According to our chief of advance, his girlfriend dumped him for spending fifty-seven straight days on the road. He finally made it back to their apartment in D.C., and she put his suitcase in the hallway and told him that New Hampshire was due north. Now his only address is a sky page number and a bunch of room service bills for Roederer Cristal. I can’t even find the sonofabitch.”

Though Peter smiled again, Clayton noted that he never stopped watching his agents. But their interchange was cordial, even warm. Kerry Kilcannon was what the Service called a “high-risk protectee,” and Clayton felt fortunate that Peter Lake was running the detail.

At fifty-three, Peter had the stocky frame and broken nose of the linebacker he had been in college. But he was many other things—a lawyer by training, a reader of the classics, and a deeply religious man. He had first been drawn to the Service when, at thirteen, his father had taken him to see John F. Kennedy speak. His father had adored Kennedy, but what fascinated Peter was the Secret Service detail. “I guess I missed the point,” he’d remarked dryly to Clayton, but Clayton had come to know better. The desire to protect was the deepest part of Peter’s nature.

Sometimes this had led to conflict—it was in
Kerry
’s nature to be a Secret Service nightmare. What Kerry feared most was to look fearful: this drove him to plunge into crowds; to change
his schedule on impulse; to refuse to wear a Kevlar vest despite several requests from Peter Lake.

At length, Peter had told Clayton, “The senator’s a fatalist. My job is
not
to be one. I’m going to need your help.” This conversation had two results: Kerry Kilcannon’s Secret Service detail became as large as the President’s own, and Clayton made it his personal business to keep Peter informed.

Now, waiting for Kerry to appear, Clayton saw Peter scan the roofline of the three-story building. Outdoor events were the most dangerous, Clayton knew. The Service could control an auditorium, but there were too many ways to shoot a candidate in the open—from a building, a car, any vantage point that afforded a line of fire to a marksman with a high-powered weapon.
That
was what Peter Lake remembered about Jack Kennedy.

Peter had fifty agents assigned to Kerry Kilcannon, running in three eight-hour shifts, with teams leapfrogging California to cover each event. Planning Kerry’s protection was as stressful as the protection itself, and in this way, it was like advance work—one error by an advance man could ruin an event; one error by the Service, and Kerry might be dead. “The presidency is the biggest nut magnet in the world,” Peter had told Clayton. “And some of these would-be assassins don’t care about themselves. All they want is to get close enough.”

Now, waiting for Kerry, Clayton saw Dan Biasi and Joe Morton standing in front of the speakers’ platform, watching the crowd. That both wore sunglasses was a backhanded tribute to John Hinckley. After Hinckley shot Reagan, the Service had identified him in prior films of a speech given by Jimmy Carter, mingling with the crowd. When questioned, Hinckley had admitted planning to shoot Carter. What had stopped him was a Secret Service agent wearing sunglasses. Unable to see his eyes, Hinckley believed that the agent was watching him.