The Next President (4 page)

Timmons was on his feet, hefting the bulging duffel bag to his shoulder.

“That was cold, Cade. Real cold. Let’s blow.”

Coining from Donnel Timmons, cold was a compliment.

J. D. awakened from his dream with a start. The flight attendant was draping a blanket around him.

“I’m so sorry I woke you,” she said with a pretty frown, “but you seemed to keep saying you were cold.”

J. D. pulled the blanket tight around him. The flight attendant gave him a concerned look but thought it best to say nothing. In a moment he was drifting off once more.

He was back with Donnel in the army again. Setting up for his next kill.

Thirty Secret Service agents were guarding Del Rawley’s suite at the Chicago Hilton and Towers when campaign manager Jenny Crenshaw was ushered through the front door.

The candidate looked up at her from the sofa where he sat.

“Any news?

Have they caught the bastard yet?”

Jenny shook her head. She sat on a facing sofa to one side of Rawley’s chief political adviser, Baxter Brown. Jenny was as fair and slim as Baxter was dark and massive. The relationship between the two potential rivals was civil because they respected each other’s role. Jenny’s job was to get Del to the top of the hill; Baxter’s job was to keep him there.

Ultimately, though, Del Rawley was the arbiter of his own fate. A man with a good mind, an intuitive grasp of human nature, and four successful political campaigns behind him, he was subject to only one major criticism:

He sometimes made up his mind too soon, and when he did, he refused to accept further counsel. In other words, he showed the supreme selfconfidence of a natural leader—which rankled the hell out of people at times.

That was one reason why he kept his inner circle small. In addition to Jenny and Baxter, the only other people close to the candidate were Jim Greenberg, his pollster, and Alita Colon, his press secretary.

“Did Devree and the family get off okay?” Jenny asked.

“They should be landing in Madison just about now,” Del replied.

In the first hour after the assassination attempt, the candidate made two critical decisions: One, he would not let some sonofabitch with a rifle drive him out of the race. Two, he would not expose his family to the dangers he was willing to risk himself.

On the first point the Rawley family was unanimously agreed. On the

sec and, a private family conference was required before agreement was reached.

Jenny suspected that Del had threatened to reverse his decision to stay in the race unless his family acceded to his wishes.

“If nobody’s been arrested, what does the FBI know?” Del asked.

“Well,” Jenny sighed, “you wait through all the it’s-early-yet blather; you try to be understanding that the problem is difficult when half a million people were on hand and nobody saw a man with a gun anywhere; you tell them to knock it the hell off when they start pointing fingers back and forth with the Secret Service over failing to see the attempt coming… you do all that and what you come up with is they know the general direction from which the shot was fired.”

“That’s it?” Baxter asked, incredulous.

“Yeah. They said because the wind was swirling today, and because the shot had to be fired from a very long distance, it’s just about impossible to pinpoint where the gunman was. They think he most likely shot from one of the high-rise buildings along Randolph Street.”

“Makes you feel real confident, doesn’t it?” Baxter asked.

“Special Agent DeVito is being replaced as the head of your protection detail,” Jenny told Del.

“And, as you’ve seen, the number of agents around here has been doubled.”

The candidate put his feet up on the edge of a coffee table, folded his arms across his chest, and let his eyes lose focus for a moment. Then he shook his head and looked at Jenny and Baxter.

DeVito stays.”

“What?” Baxter asked.

“Why?” Jenny wanted to know.

“It’s probably good politics,” Jim Greenberg said, entering the room. The slim, balding pollster sat on the sofa with the candidate.

“It’s more fundamental than that,” Del told them all.

“If this man who tried to kill me is so damned elusive, I have to think he was able to make his attempt not because DeVito was negligent but because the assassin found some weakness in the overall protection scheme. Correct me if I’m wrong, but DeVito didn’t devise today’s security plan all by himself, did he?”

“No,” Jenny said.

Del tapped his right foot against the coffee table.

“So I don’t think he should be scapegoated. He’s done a conscientious job, as far as I can tell, and who could be more motivated to see that nobody gets another crack at me? I’ll call the secretary of the treasury and even my worthy opponent, the president, if I have to, but he stays.”

Jenny nodded.

“Okay… I’ll pass the word.”

“You did a nice job talking to the media, Jenny,” Del told her.

Baxter and Jim Greenberg agreed.

Shortly after the attempt on Del Rawley’s life, a rumor started to circulate that the assassin had been hired by white racists. By evening, talk radio had picked it up and it was the subject of contentious discussion from coast to coast. More than one black caller had talked about getting even.

Jenny had gone before the media and read a statement that Del had quickly written:

“As of now, nobody in authority knows who attempted to take my life to day or what that person’s motives were. Anyone claiming to have knowledge of today’s events has the legal obligation of sharing it with the FBI. Anyone who claims to have knowledge of today’s events and uses that claim to provoke violence against innocent persons is a fraud and is no friend of mine or of this campaign. Furthermore, be assured that when I am your president you may trust in me to use all my resources to oppose anyone who would foment racial violence under any pretext.”

“Reading that statement was the easy part,” Jenny said.

“I left Alita to field all the reporters’ questions.”

“Somebody talking about me?”

The press secretary entered the room, sat on the arm of the sofa next to Baxter Brown, and casually draped an arm over his shoulder. Alita was a small, well-turned-out woman, but she had three older brothers who were boxers, and they’d all given her lessons. She was not shy.

“Guy from the New York Post had a tidbit for me,” she said.

“What’s that?” Del asked.

“He heard Pee Vee was thinking about approaching the party chairman, wanting to know if you get plugged, does he automatically get the nomination?”

Congressman Peter Van Fossen of New York was Del’s running mate, the vice presidential nominee. He’d been chosen strictly to appeal to voters in the Northeast. He wasn’t shy, either.

Pee Vee the VP,” Del said, shaking his head with a bemused grin.

“I’m going to send that guy to a lot of funerals overseas.” He looked around.

“Doesn’t anybody have any good news for me?”

Jim Greenberg said in a neutral tone, “Your poll numbers are up ten points since the attempt. Even in the South.”

“Probably just a twenty-four-hour sympathy bounce,” Jenny suggested.

A deep laugh rumbled from Baxter Brown.

“Yeah, but if not, watch for the president to have someone take a shot at him.”

While the others laughed. Jenny said in a tone of mock disapproval,

“Baxter, the president has issued a statement deploring the attempt on Del’s life, and he promises no effort will be spared to apprehend the shooter.”

“While privately regretting that I dodged the bullet,” Del Rawley said with a sardonic grin. Then he sighed and asked, “So, madam campaign manager, do we stick to our original plan?”

Jenny nodded.

“Despite Jim’s new numbers, the president’s got the South locked up. You own the Midwest, and we leave Pee Vee at home to protect the Northeast. We make some courtesy calls in the Rocky Mountain states. Then we slug it out for fifteen rounds in California. That’s where this race is going to be decided.”

On a wooded ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains, straddling the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee, Beau “Dixie” Wynne sat next to a small, carefully built campfire. He’d finished his dinner of freeze-dried beef with dehydrated cinnamon-covered apple slices for desert. Now he was enjoying his daily cup of coffee laced with Irish whiskey as he listened to the radio.

Every news show he could pull in was going on about the assassination attempt in Chicago. But they all kept repeating the same three facts: The candidate had just come onstage, he hadn’t even started to speak, and bending over to accept a flower from a little girl had saved his life. Beyond that, nobody knew anything that amounted to a hill of beans.

Dixie had been up to Chicago once for a football game at that mausoleum next to the lake where the Bears played. He’d walked through Grant Park that weekend and could picture the scene where the shooting had happened.

He remembered all the tall buildings to the north and northeast of that band shell. Had to be ten thousand windows looking down on it; no way the Secret Service could cover them all.

He tried to imagine the one he’d have picked to do the job. Dixie was a career sniper—for the last twenty-four years with the Gainesville PD SWAT team, for five years before that with a secret army unit he’d never told anybody about.

Dixie thought the way he’d have done it would’ve been to find an office that was closed for the holiday, one that was right on the far edge of possibility so the Secret Service wouldn’t consider it too hard, and then make the shot.

Of course, if the goddamn target wasn’t going to cooperate, if the fucker was going to duck while your round was in the air, there wasn’t

a damn thing you could do about that. Maybe tell him, “Hold still now,” right before you squeezed the trigger.

That was just what Dixie had done two weeks ago. Told convenience store robber and hostage taker D’antron Nickels not to move a muscle when he gave himself up and came out of that Grab ‘n’ Go store. Dixie had actually just whispered the thought to himself, but D’antron seemed to listen like he’d heard the word of the Lord.

During the seventeen hours D’antron had held his hostages a twenty two-year-old male clerk, a nineteen-year-old single mother with her three year-old twin sons in tow, and a forty-seven-year-old minister he’d made a point of having each and every one of his captives scream in pain and/or terror over the telephone to the hostage negotiators.

Once the negotiators had coaxed D’antron’s name out of him, they’d discovered this was the third time he’d taken hostages while robbing convenience stores. The first time he’d been only thirteen and had done a year in a youth camp. The second time he’d been eighteen but had been so high on PCP that his lawyer had persuaded a brain-dead jury that he’d lacked the capacity to form criminal intent. The jury acquitted D’antron, but the judge remanded him to a locked drug therapy facility for all of six months. Now, at age twenty, here he came again. Terrorizing three adults and two tiny kids into lifetimes of nightmares before he figured out he better give himself up.

The reason D’antron stopped just outside the store wasn’t due to Dixie’s importuning or divine intervention; he stopped to pose and flash a smile for the TV cameras. Dixie Wynne shot him through his two front teeth.

Now Dixie was in trouble, suspended from his job and being investigated by internal affairs and the state attorney, because D’antron had happened to be a black sonofabitch. A bunch of troublemakers was accusing Dixie of being a racist. Which was a goddamn lie. By his own count, of the fifty people he’d killed in his various lines of duty, only four had been black, including D’antron. He shot people regardless of color.

He’d shot D’antron Nickels because he knew the little prick was going to keep right on robbing stores and taking hostages, and sooner or later he’d kill some innocent person.

Dixie’s lawyer had suggested to him that maybe after such a long, intense standoff he been tired and thought he saw something nobody else saw. Or maybe a muscle had twitched involuntarily. There were all sorts of reasons his rifle might have gone off accidentally.

Dixie wasn’t about to cop to some excuse that would force his retirement.

He told his lawyer to start thinking in terms of justifiable homicide.

When he saw the shyster had trouble getting behind that line of legal reasoning, he took off.

His plan was to hide out, live off the land, and listen to the radio every night to see if anyone was coming after him. But the only news tonight was about the assassination attempt in Chicago. He turned off the radio, policed the area, and put out the fire.

As he slipped into his sleeping bag, he thought again about that sonofabitch lawyer wanting him to say he’d shot D’antron by mistake. Hell. If he had taken that shot in Chicago, Senator Franklin Delano Rawley would be dead right now.

Jenny Crenshaw looked at herself in the bathroom mirror before going to bed. Her blonde hair was short enough that she could make it look neat simply by running her fingers through it. But her amber eyes were bloodshot and they didn’t have bags under them, they had cargo containers. She looked slim and fashionable in her clothes, but after stepping out of the shower tonight she’d seen that her ribs were beginning to show. She slipped on her cotton nightshirt and thought sarcastically, How sexy!

But who had the time or energy to get laid, anyway?

Her head had barely touched the pillow when the phone rang. She allowed herself a groan before answering.

“Hello.”

“Oh, my … I know that tone. You were sleeping.”

The voice in Jenny’s ear had the thin, rustling quality of autumn leaves crunching underfoot. Hearing it made Jenny ashamed of having indulged in even a second of self-pity.

“Don, how are you?”

“Still terminal, I’m afraid. But aren’t we all?” The sepulchral laugh that followed answered the question perfectly.

Donald “Hunter” Ward had been one of Jenny’s two political mentors, and now he had a malignant tumor inextricably embedded in his brain. Lee Atwater syndrome, he called it. Her other mentor, Thomas “Killer” Laughlin, had callously abandoned his friend and business partner of twenty-two years shortly after he was diagnosed. His legion of enemies said Tom feared that Don’s condition was catching.