Presidential Deal (8 page)

Chapter 12

“…now give you our First Lady, Ms. Linda Barnes Sheldon.”

It was Monroe Fielding at the podium, finishing his enthusiastic introduction. The band just below the risers where Deal and the others were seated burst into a reprise of “Gonna Fly Now,” and the sound would have been loud enough without the amplification that sent it roaring out of massive speakers hanging behind the makeshift stage.

Deal turned one ear from the speakers, tried holding a finger to the other, but it didn’t do much good. Both were still ringing from the opening processional that had had them all marching down the central aisle of the ballroom in the eye of several spotlights while the music blared and the crowd, which must have numbered five hundred or more, roared and applauded as if they were a bunch of pro footballers returning with the Super Bowl trophy.

Onstage now, he leaned close to Roland Wells, where Deal had planted himself despite the organizer’s attempt to keep the group lined up in alphabetical order, tried to make himself heard above the music. “The President
and
the First Lady?” he said.

Wells shook his head. “Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?” Deal said.

“Fielding made an announcement in the waiting room, before you showed up, I guess. President was called away. The First Lady’s a stand-in.”

The music died away at “stand-in” and Wells’s phrase sounded loud enough to carry to the first rows of the audience. A couple of shushing noises came from in front of them, and Deal straightened back in his seat. Maybe it was just as well Isabel hadn’t come. Though he was just as willing to accept his accolades from the President’s wife, he wasn’t sure what kind of weight first ladies carried with the second-grade crowd.

There was no such question in the ballroom, however. Outspoken Linda Sheldon might have cut a controversial figure in the press, but here she was among friends. Her ascent to the podium was buoyed by the stroboscopic effect of hundreds of cameras flashing and a wave of thunderous applause. Even as the applause began to fade, there came whistles and shouts of approval, and a burst of laughter when someone in a foghorn voice called out, “You the wo-
man
.”

A regular political rally, Deal thought, not a bad showing for a liberal president in a town that had come to be dominated by political thinkers who found Genghis Khan a bit too far to the left. While he’d been offered a half-dozen tickets for his own use, Deal had heard that most of the invitees to the ceremony were party regulars who were expected to cough up a thousand dollars for the privilege of seeing him and the others decorated.

The stuff of an election year, he mused. And if not for that fact, the President would never have come to Miami, and Deal and the others would be in the Rose Garden, sweltering in the summer heat of Washington, and his daughter would have been there…and if and if and if, he thought. If the dog hadn’t stopped to take a leak, he would have caught the rabbit, too, that’s what his old man would have said.

Deal glanced out at the audience, wondering briefly if Valerie Meyers were out there somewhere, going down her checklist of heroes to turn into movie-of-the-week subjects. And it also occurred to him, with a curious pang, that were his old man still alive, he’d certainly be out there with a score of fellow movers and shakers and their wives, holding court in the hotel he’d built himself and toasting his heroic son.

Deal, who expected a fair amount of the blah-blah-blah associated with any speech to be delivered at a quasi-political event, had drifted into a state of moderate awareness, a part of him wondering why he’d ever come here, another part noting that the First Lady was not only taller but also considerably more attractive than she seemed on her television appearances. Her brownish hair, lit here and there with highlights of blonde, was cut at shoulder length and fell naturally away from a face that seemed less broad and more intelligent in this light. And while her eyes were keen, he could see that the smile she’d given the heckler in the audience was nothing manufactured, but danced steadily at her lips as if she were actually at home doing this dance.

Maybe it was because he was always seeing her in the midst of being grilled about something or another on the television news, he thought—her call for increased spending for the aged, for revamping the workings of the United Nations, for a toughened congressional code of ethics—but here she seemed far more at ease, almost unguarded. He shifted slightly in his seat and satisfied himself even further: the First Lady also had a nice pair of legs.

“She’s already spoke for,” Roland Wells’s whisper sounded at his ear.

Deal turned, shaking his head at Wells.

“She
is
,” Wells whispered more insistently. “I know the guy, too.”

Deal would have laughed but for the circumstances. One of the borough cops had turned to fix a hard stare on them, and Deal nudged Wells, who widened his eyes and made his gun-shooting gesture at the cop.

Deal turned back to the First Lady, who, he realized, was not going to indulge her audience with the usual opening banalities.

“Something has gone terribly wrong with our world,” she announced, her chin coming up to underscore her statement. “I don’t like to say it, and you don’t like hearing it, but if you’re anything like me, it’s something you’ve probably said yourself, or at least thought about, every time you pick up the paper or turn on the news and hear about another act of terrorism, another heinous crime, another senseless act of violence.” There was a murmur in the audience and Deal thought that even his fellow guests of honor had shaken off a bit of their finger-food- and soft-drink-induced torpor, were suddenly leaning a degree or two further forward.

“Even if you have never been a victim, and there are fewer and fewer among us who can say that these days,” she continued, “these events cause so many of us to feel unjustly threatened, defenseless, even helpless. It is understandable to be diverted by those who propose quick fixes: more prisons and longer prison terms, widespread use of the death penalty, monumental increases in our spending on intelligence gathering and antiterrorist measures.”

She paused to brush back her hair and glance about the crowded room. Rapt faces, Deal thought. Also, a uniformed officer with automatic weapon in shoulder sling at every doorway, a score of Secret Service men scattered about.

“More moderate voices call for attention to the social conditions and the inequities that foster criminal behavior.” She hesitated once again, seemed to make a decision. “I could take this opportunity to address my husband’s array of solutions, but I will not.” She turned to regard the group seated on the stage behind her, and Deal felt the force of her gaze momentarily. Not a woman content to go to tea parties, he thought. No wonder the establishment press was always sniping at her. He’d cast a write-in vote for Harry Truman, last presidential election. Maybe this time, he’d give it to Linda Sheldon.

“Instead, I want to speak to you today about something even more important,” she said, “something more essential than a political platform, no matter how worthy I believe it to be.” Deal noted that Monroe Fielding, who’d taken a seat just behind the podium, leaned to whisper something to John Groshner, the dour special advisor to the President who’d opened the ceremony with a brusque explanation of the President’s absence. Groshner stepped unobtrusively down from the stage, bringing a cell phone to his ear. Deal could imagine the message being relayed:
SOS to the President—there she goes again!

“I think that all of us, no matter how we feel, no matter what remedies we might propose…”

She gripped the podium tightly now, leaning forward to drive her words out into the audience. “Irrespective of our politics, every one of us is familiar with that ground-zero response to bombings and sabotage and senseless murder, the shudder in our emotional underpinnings which is an assault upon a sane and rational existence itself.”

Deal stole a glance at Roland Wells, who seemed as absorbed in her words as he was. The audience too seemed caught up, though he wasn’t certain whether it was involvement or outright stupefaction. He couldn’t imagine that this was the speech any American president would have intended to make before a group of backslappers.

“When I was growing up,” she said, “we were aware of such a lurking presence of doom. The Bomb, we called it, and we spoke of how man had created the possibility to annihilate the world. When the Cold War ended, it seemed that this shadow had vanished, and that we had embarked upon a new course—that we could bend our efforts toward the making of a better world.”

She paused, and when she began again, her voice was quiet. “Now this. A wave of crime, violence, terrorism on our doorstep, so much of it as to have been inconceivable only a few short years ago. So much of it, in fact, that the very concept of the value of human life erodes before our eyes, the very concept that makes democracy possible vanishes, the very concept that undergirds the notion of civilization itself threatens to disappear into some awful void.”

The murmur had grown in the audience and she raised her voice again in response.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes this ceremony today so very important. For we have gathered to celebrate a group of fellow citizens, of everyday people like you and me, whose actions remind us not only of the sanctity of human life, but show us—compel us to realize, in fact—that we can combat these forces which assail us, that there is hope, that each of us can have a profound influence on the workings of the our world.”

Applause broke out in the audience then, a smattering at first, then growing to a solid roar punctuated by shouts. She waited, then turned to indicate their group with a gesture.

“Despite what a listing of their feats might suggest, not a soul up on this stage is wearing a cape, not a one of them is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…”—she paused before concluding with a sweep of her arm—“but every one of these individuals is as powerful in deed and in spirit as any superhero ever was. And I am as proud to be in their presence as you are!”

At this the audience rose and roared its approval. The band had struck up again, and he turned to Roland Wells with a questioning look—forget being heard over this clamor—wondering if it was appropriate for
them
to applaud as well.

Wells was wearing the grin Deal had first seen in the waiting room, the slightly bemused expression that said that even though they hadn’t asked for any of this, they might as well enjoy it…

…when something suddenly changed. Wells jerked backward abruptly, as though some huge hand had reached from the curtains behind him to grasp him by the collar and yank. As Deal watched, Wells flew forward again, his eyes gone glassy and sightless. A dark round dot had appeared high on his cheek.

Deal flung up his arms to catch him as Wells pitched into his lap. He stared down, uncomprehending, at the unrecognizable mass of tissue that had been the back of Wells’s head.

“Roland?” he said dumbly, though the crowd was still roaring, and the sound would never be heard.

Deal raised his hand and stared at the sticky redness that covered it. He felt the warmth of Roland Wells’s blood bathing his lap, soaking through the wool fabric of his suit, beginning already to trickle down his legs.

“Roland!” Deal repeated, still stunned. Finally he turned, crying out for help.

The borough cop also seemed to realize something was wrong. He was standing, half turned toward Deal, when an invisible force slapped the side of his face and a spray of red wetness enveloped everything. In the next instant, the big cop toppled backward, taking Deal over as he went.

Deal’s grip on Roland loosened as he fell. The big cop’s shoulder crunched into him, driving his breath away as they struck the floor of the stage, where he lay gasping under the cop’s inert bulk.

The band had stopped playing and the applause and shouts of the crowd had turned to screams, curses, a steady roar that Deal realized was the sound of automatic gunfire. Chairs crashed about him as the others who’d been seated onstage dove for cover. A shoe clipped his forehead, another foot trampled his leg.

Deal struggled out from under the cop, pulled himself to one elbow, stared in disbelief at the scene before him.
Impossible
, his brain insisted.
Absolutely impossible
. And yet it was happening.

The uniformed officers who’d been manning the doors had unslung their weapons and were methodically spraying fire as they advanced toward the front of the room. Audience members ran in blind panic, some toward the stage, only to fall before the withering fire. A woman in a white gown turned as if to protest to the advancing police and the back of her dress blew away in a scatter of cloth and blood.

What in God’s name were they doing? Deal wondered. Advancing like some kamikaze unit on whoever had started this…how could you possibly justify…

His thoughts careened in another direction then as he saw one of the Secret Service men lying prone in the firing position near the toppled podium at the front of the stage, his weapon jolting repeatedly as he fired at the approaching cops.

It was the cops
, Deal realized then, and now it suddenly was beyond nightmare.
It was the goddamned cops
.

There was an explosion of splinters at the front of the stage and an awful clatter as slugs tore through the metal struts of the risers underneath. The Secret Service man who’d been firing at the advancing cops was flung backward, his body jerking as he rolled over the surface of the stage. But it was the other invitees assembled onstage who seemed to be the focus of the attack. They were cut down in waves as they ran and dove from the stage for cover.

One of the thin, long-haired men whom Deal had marked as an undercover narcotics officer had taken cover behind a clump of potted palms at one corner of the stage. He was bent into a crouch, looking ready to jump down to the auditorium floor, when the clay pots exploded as if they’d been mined. The man disappeared in a froth of black earth, palm fronds, and gore.