No Safe Place (5 page)

Watch it,
Kerry warned himself. But the crowd seemed almost giddy now.

He paused again, and then found the words he wanted. “It is every mother, father, son, or daughter who refuses to lose one more person they love to a coward with a gun …”

The crowd erupted.

Minutes later, Kerry was at last able to finish, with his signature line: “Give me your help and your vote, and together we’ll build a new democracy.”

Clayton Slade watched from one side of the platform.
Don’t do it,
he silently instructed Kerry. But, of course, Kerry did: stepping from behind the podium, he went down the steps from the platform and plunged into the crowd. As they fought their way beside him, the phalanx of Secret Service agents wore harried, tight expressions.

Damn you,
Clayton thought.

The energy of a thousand people cut through Kerry’s fatigue. He took each hand, each face, a moment at a time, looking into the eyes of the person in front of him. “Thank you,” he kept repeating. “Thank you.” To the Asian girl he said, “We’ll make it, I think”; finding the man in the union jacket, he touched his arm and said, “Thanks for staying up with me.” Next to him, the Service and the camera people and Kevin Loughery jockeyed for position.

“Senator,”
a young NBC correspondent called out, pushing
a microphone between two well-wishers. “Will Dick Mason’s new emphasis on abortion rights cause trouble for you in California?”

Intent on his supporters, Kerry ignored him.

“Senator,”
the newsman tried again. He twisted his body to thrust the microphone at Kerry and then, quite suddenly, fell.

Kerry felt an involuntary rush of fear. The crowd rippled with confusion; instinctively, Dan Biasi pulled Kerry away, shielding his body.

“It’s Mike Devore from NBC,” Kerry managed to say. “I think something’s wrong with him.”

Joe Morton positioned himself at Kerry’s back. Kerry could see the newsman on the floor; his head twisted back and forth, and his face was contorted in pain.

Kerry saw the swarm of agents look around them, refusing to be diverted. “I didn’t hear shots,” he heard Joe murmur.

Dan Biasi pushed the onlookers aside and bent over the fallen man. Dan felt the man’s leg and foot and then came back to Joe and Kerry. “Looks like he tripped,” Dan said. “I don’t know how, but he may have broken his ankle.”

“Get someone,” Kerry said. “Use the ambulance outside.” He did not need to add the rest:
the one you keep for me.

Dan shook his head. “I’m sorry, Senator. We can’t do that.” He pulled out his cell phone to call 911.

The paramedics were there in ten minutes, carrying a stretcher. They took the reporter away. Kerry resumed shaking hands, suddenly feeling tired and mechanical.

Clayton Slade appeared behind him. “Ready to roll,” he said crisply, and the Service convoyed them to Kerry’s limousine. Clayton did not mention the incident.

Lights flashing in darkness, the motorcade of black Lincolns rolled toward the airport. Kerry’s car was flanked by cops on motorcycles. There were two Secret Service agents in the front seat; Clayton and Kerry sat in back, staring into the formless night of a city that could have been anywhere.

Back in the bubble,
Kerry thought. Once more he marveled at the vortex he had created, of which the motorcade had become a symbol: a force that swept up thousands of people—politicians, volunteers, the press, the countless
strangers who
felt they loved him—in the hope he would serve their dreams, their aspirations, their cold ambitions. It was a world unto itself, sealed off from any other reality; Kerry had stepped into the crowd out of more than the need to prove to himself what he could never prove—that he was not afraid. He also needed to meet people one at a time, as he had in Iowa and New Hampshire, when far fewer of them seemed to care. The age of innocence, Kerry thought.

He turned from the window. “This debate,” he said. “What’s Dick up to?”

Clayton’s gold-rimmed glasses reflected the swirling red of flashing lights. His index finger grazed his salt-and-pepper mustache.

“I’m trying to work that one out,” he answered. It was all he said; it had become their shared trait to use no more words than necessary.

Kerry fell silent. “Ellen Penn called today,” Clayton said at last.

“What did she want?”

“To ask if you’ve lost your mind.”

Clayton did not need to elaborate. Ellen Penn was the feisty junior senator from California, the chairman of Kerry’s campaign there. Her support of abortion rights was as fervent as her barely concealed dislike for California’s senior senator, Betsy Shapiro, a preeminent politician who supported Mason. Ellen Penn had risked supporting Kerry from a complex mix of motives, all unspoken: idealism; a desire to best Senator Shapiro; the hope of becoming Kerry’s Vice President. In the new environment—a strengthening of pro-life forces in Congress, the continuing and corrosive war over late-term abortion, a surprising Supreme Court majority that threatened to cut back on abortion rights and thrust the issue to the forefront—Ellen Penn would see Kerry’s comments as worse than an embarrassment. And now there was Boston.

Kerry slumped back in the leather seat. It was nearly midnight; the flight to San Diego would take three hours. He hoped he could sleep.

In the lead press bus of the motorcade, Nate Cutler allowed himself to wonder what he was doing with his life.

He had been with the Kilcannon campaign since January. In three months on the road, he had seen his apartment in Washington only twice; headed for California, he still had his wardrobe from Iowa and New Hampshire, had not had a haircut for six weeks, and was down to his last set of clean underwear. Even by the standards of presidential candidates, Kerry Kil-cannon was hyperactive; sometimes Nate thought his own greatest skill was finding Laundromats in burgs too small to have a hotel with laundry service.

Nate looked around the bus. At thirty-nine, he was small, dark, wiry, and resilient, and this last was a good thing; his peer group in the national press was an energetic bunch, predominantly female and sometimes a decade younger. They were usually quite voluble, joking or exchanging gibes or information. Now, shrouded in darkness at the end of a long day, they seemed depleted by the effort of filing yet another story. They looked like rows of ghostly heads: some talked, keeping their voices low; others tried to sleep; still others stared into the darkness.

“Kilcannon was
on
tonight,” someone said behind him—Ann Rush of the
Times
, Nate was pretty sure.

“He always is when he believes it.” The voice belonged to Ed Foster of the
Globe.
“I think Mason pissed him off with the abortion thing. Kilcannon already thinks the guy’s a whore.”

Ann laughed. “Mason just cares about my reproductive rights.”

“We
all
do,” Ed answered. “But Kilcannon cares about your soul.”

That
was what Nate was doing with his life, he admitted to himself—chronicling the only interesting politician in the race.

For Nate and his colleagues, Kerry Kilcannon was a relief. The last years of the nineties had not been a heroic time—not for politicians and not for the press. The politics were smallbore, he often thought: petty men taking small chances for selfish reasons, trying to manipulate just enough of a cynical public to keep themselves in office. The depressing result for journalists was that they, too, had become less important, reduced to covering politics as if it were a horse race, their thought pieces demoted from the front page to a place well behind the coverage of the latest celebrity murder
trial. And just as
damaging for all concerned was the competition to report on personal scandal, warmed to a white heat by the tabloids and Internet gossip columns, which seemed to have diminished both the standards of reporting and the standing of politicians generally. So that both reporters and the politicians they reported on seemed smaller than their ambitions—except, perhaps, for Kerry Kilcannon.

Nate did not think that Kilcannon’s “lapse” the day before was a slip of the tongue at all; it was something Kilcannon needed to say, an act of rebellion against being packaged, a blow for his own authenticity. This element of surprise was what kept Nate sharp through the mind-numbing repetition, the sense that he and his colleagues had been hijacked by a process meant to ruin their lives and make them crazy. There might be a campaign book in Kerry Kilcannon, and if he won, Nate Cutler figured to be the next White House correspondent for
Newsworld.

Like most of his colleagues, he viewed Kerry Kilcannon with a mixture of journalistic detachment and personal regard. In his dealings with the press—the professional adversary of any politician—Kilcannon was honest, accessible, and often humorous, leaving the impression that he liked reporters and accepted their role. And Nate credited Kilcannon, more than most politicians, with the sincerity of his beliefs, a willingness to take risks.

Of course, Nate did not flatter himself that he
knew
Kerry Kilcannon; perhaps no one but Clayton Slade did. Kilcannon gave off a sense of inner complexity that was unusual in a politician. This was enhanced by his refusal to indulge in contrived self-revelations about personal traumas and familial tragedies; in fact, the biggest mistake a reporter could make was to press Kerry Kilcannon about his brother. The answer to what drove Kilcannon the man remained a puzzle.

Nate started. There was a vibration in the pocket of his sport coat. Tired as he was, it took him a moment to remember that he had put his pager there.

He took out his cell phone and called the sky-page center. The message was terse: Call Katherine Jones ASAP, at a San Diego number.

Nate sat back, curious. The only Katherine Jones he knew of
was the executive director of Anthony’s Legions, a group named after Susan B. Anthony and devoted to raising money for pro-choice women candidates. Nate had never met her; her call could only relate to the campaign.

Glancing around at his colleagues, Nate decided not to return the call until they reached the landing strip.

Kilcannon’s chartered plane was on the runway, a shadowy silver and black. The bus dropped them near the rear of the plane; a Secret Service agent stood by the metal ramp, ready to inspect the ID tags the press wore around their necks and to check their names against the security list. From experience, Nate knew that this process would give him the time he needed.

He walked out on the darkened tarmac so that no one could hear him and dialed the number he had been given.

It was the Meridian Hotel in La Jolla. Nate asked for Katherine Jones; after a moment, a brusque woman’s voice answered.

“This is Nate Cutler,” he told her.

“Good. I want to meet with you tomorrow morning, early. In confidence.”

Perhaps because of the hour, Nate found that her peremptory phone manner annoyed him. “On what subject?” he asked.

There was the briefest hesitation, and then the woman answered, “Kerry Kilcannon.”

Kerry Kilcannon’s voice rose. “We will protect our right to choose in the deepest and broadest sense. For it is not just
women
who deserve a choice; it is everyone who chooses to work for a better job and a brighter future …”

Rising from the edge of the bed, Sean Burke turned up the volume. His fingers felt awkward.

Now Kilcannon seemed to look straight at Sean. “It is every mother, father, son, or daughter who refuses to lose one more person they love to a coward with a gun …”

Sean’s hands began to shake. Abruptly, Kilcannon vanished from the screen, replaced by a woman reporter.

“Senator Kilcannon’s speech,” she began, “was an effort to confront the Vice President and put the choice issue behind him. But Kilcannon finds himself criticized by leading members of his church for his pro-choice stance, and now
some pro-choice leaders question yesterday’s remarks on when
‘life’ begins. This poses an uncomfortable dilemma for Kerry Kilcannon as he heads for California, where, in his party’s primary four years ago, women accounted for fifty-eight percent of the vote.

“In this increasingly volatile campaign, suddenly refocused on the issue of choice by today’s anti-abortion violence in Boston, a portion of the women’s vote may become volatile as well …”

He was not violent by nature, Sean told himself. He had never killed before today; he had not wished to shoot the nurse or the receptionist. But the lesson of history was that soldiers must kill aggressors and their tools so that the innocent might live …

The motel room seemed to close in on him, making Sean feel trapped and smothered, the two sensations he feared most. He got up and turned on both bedside lamps, the ceiling light, and the fluorescent tube in the bathroom. His stomach hurt again.

When he turned back to the television, Sean saw a body on a stretcher.

He flinched. Paramedics were hauling the body through the same glass doors Sean had entered that morning, now three thousand miles away. Staring at the stretcher, Sean wondered whether it was the receptionist, the nurse, or the abortionist; covered by the white sheet, the body could be any one of them.

Another newswoman was speaking. “The sole witness, a twenty-two-year-old woman who had come for birth control advice, told police that the unidentified assailant was slender, about six feet tall, with dark hair and blue eyes.”

Closing his eyes, Sean prayed that they would not find him.

“The Boston police are asking anyone with potential information about this crime to call 1-800-JUSTICE.” Sean returned to the bathroom, spat blood into the sink, and swallowed two antacid pills.

The television, he realized, was eroding his resolve, making him weak. He forced himself to turn it off.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Sean began listening for sounds.

He had done this when he was a small boy, covers pulled over his head, waiting for the echoes of his father’s rage—an angry voice, a slammed door, his mother’s cries. Now the
only sounds he could hear were the hum of car tires, the deep motor sounds of ponderous trucks, the unearthly whir of air-conditioning in a cheap motel room—strange noises in an alien city. Sean felt both scared and angry, a pygmy bent on his final, enormous task.