The Second Shooter (34 page)

The Frenchman half-grunted, half-mumbled something.

Jake couldn't make out the words. "What?" he said and lowered himself onto the knee of his good leg, so he was face-to-face with Favreau. The movement brought back the pain, a huge bolt of it, stabbing through to the center of the bone. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. Finally it passed. He opened his eyes. "What did you say?"

Favreau groaned as he pointed down the hall to the left.

Jake pointed the other way, to Favreau's right. "You said right."

"Not my right," Favreau said through a wet wheeze of breath. "The right side of the building. From the front. The street."

Behind Jake the elevator bell dinged. Favreau raised his pistol and fired. More shots erupted behind Jake. He spun and fired. The man from the lobby stood in the elevator shooting at them. The range was eight feet at most. Plaster exploded around Jake as the man's bullets struck the wall behind him. Several of Jake's and Favreau's bullets hit the man and drove him back against the rear of the elevator car, where he slumped to the floor. Favreau shot several holes in the call button panel.

The elevator door banged shut.

Jakes ears were ringing. "Are you hit," he shouted at Favreau.

"No more than I was before. Go. Go. Go."

Jake pushed himself to his feet and lumbered down the hallway, this time in the right direction.

***

The president's feet barely touched the ground. The scrum of Secret Service agents was half-carrying, half-dragging him down the long hallway that ran through the middle of the Administration Building. He shouted at the nearest agents, "Where's Mona? Where's Mona?" But they either didn't hear him or chose to ignore him. The agents were shouting themselves. Some into their sleeve microphones, others directly at each other. In the din and the rush and the press of bodies, the president could barely understand anything they were saying. Only, "Move!" "Clear a path!" and "Make way!"

Like a leaf caught in a fast-moving stream, the president just kept getting pushed along. He prayed that whatever was happening, Mona was all right.

***

Gertz exhaled and tightened his grip on the rifle. The sights were steady. He laid his finger lightly on the trigger. Any second now...

Behind him, Fluker blinked and his body twitched.

***

The agents in front of the president crashed like a wave against the glass double doors at the rear of the building. Noah Omar was surprised the glass didn't shatter. Amid a cacophony of shouting, the agents pulled and pushed him through the doors. He caught sight of the backup limousine, armored just as heavily as the primary presidential car. He twisted his head and caught sight of a second cocoon of agents rushing up behind them. That must be Mona, he thought.

***

Gertz squeezed the slack out of the trigger as he tracked the knot of agents that burst through the back door of the County Administration Building. The first .50-caliber bullet would mow a path through that cluster of agents and probably kill several of them and the president. The second bullet would blow the president's body apart just as surely as if he had swallowed a hand grenade.

Gertz exhaled another tiny bit of breath and pulled the trigger. And at that exact instant, he heard, from somewhere behind him, the muted sound of several dull pops, as if from a pistol firing.

The two incidents-Gertz pulling the rifle's trigger, and the dull popping sounds registering in his brain-happened so close together as to have almost no measureable span of time between them. Still, there was a chain of events. Bullets don't fire instantly. They only seem to. First, the M-82's trigger snapped, which caused the firing pin to strike the rear of the .50-caliber cartridge. Then the high-explosive primer detonated and ignited the main powder charge. Which sent the 661-grain, steel core, jacketed projectile rocketing and twisting down the barrel until it erupted from the muzzle amid a gout of flame and an earsplitting thunderclap. And somewhere during that chain of events, the shooter flinched.

Gertz knew he had missed before the bullet left the barrel. Twenty thousand precision shots had trained his senses to the point that he was almost part of the gun. He had felt his body twitch in response to the unexpected sound, and he realized even as his body betrayed him that the bullet would not strike the target. He also knew that as the heavy recoil rocked him backward, he had a decision to make and he had less than a single second to make it. His options were clear: he could turn around to locate the source of the sound-despite the earmuffs he already knew the sounds had been pistol shots-or he could reacquire the target, aim, and fire again, launching a second bullet even before the men downrange heard the first shot.

Gertz yanked the heavy rifle off the table and spun around.

***

As the top of the door exploded and sent chunks of glass, aluminum, and brick hurtling through the air, the phalanx of Secret Service agents collapsed around the president so fast and so hard that he tripped and lost his footing. He couldn't recover, so the agents lifted him bodily and carried him toward the limo. Then he heard it, a sonic boom like distant thunder, riding a shock wave that swept across the parking lot and crashed into the back wall of the County Administration Building. Except the boom wasn't thunder. It was much more menacing. He had heard the sound before, but only on military bases while visiting as commander-in-chief, during live-fire demonstrations put on for his benefit. Someone was shooting at him with a very powerful weapon. His guts felt like water.

Then the agents hurled him into the back of the limousine. Seconds later, the other scrum of agents shoved his wife into the car with him. Several agents followed, piling in on top of the president and the first lady, all of the agents shouting, "Go! Go! Go!" as the limousine roared out of the parking lot.

At the same instant that Jake Miller fired three 9mm bullets into the lock, he heard a tremendous explosion on the other side of the door. The blast shook the air and rattled the walls. The thought flashed through his mind that somehow his bullets had triggered a bomb inside the apartment. That's how loud the explosion had been. Then he slammed his shoulder against the damaged door, splintered the wooden frame, and burst into the apartment.

Across the den, next to the kitchen, a man was rising to his feet beside a small table. The table was pushed up against an open sliding glass door that led to the balcony. The man was turning, cradling an almost absurdly large black rifle in his hands. It was the kind of rifle whose report would sound like a bomb exploding.

This is the fucking guy, the sniper, the shooter, the assassin. Favreau was right all along. I am standing twenty feet from the man who just shot the president of the United States. And I'm too late.

The massive rifle was pointed at Jake before he could bring up his tiny pistol. The muzzle was a black crater, nearly the size of a cannon, and affixed to it was a flat horizontal brake designed to vent some of the blast up and to the sides to counter what must be an awesome recoil.

Jake dropped to the floor just as the man fired. The bullet passed a foot over Jake's head, its shock wave rolling him across the floor. His left eardrum shattered and sent a knife thrust of pain stabbing through his head. He kept rolling, the agony of his wounded leg gone, replaced by the new pain of the concussive blast wave smashing into his face and chest. He couldn't hear, he couldn't see, he couldn't breathe. So Jake just kept rolling until he crashed into something hard. The back of a leather sofa, it turned out.

Then another blast shook the room. The muzzle flash burned the air like a bolt of lightening and seared Jake's lungs. The second shock wave ripped apart the sofa and splattered its guts across the walls and ceiling.

Jake started crawling.

There was another flash of blinding light; then a bone-rattling crash of thunder filled the apartment. A huge chunk of wall behind Jake disintegrated and covered him with wood and plaster.

Jake reached the end of the sofa and was surprised to find his hand still clutching the Beretta 9mm. Beyond him was nothing but open floor all the way to the bedroom door some fifteen feet away. It might as well have been a mile. But he had to do something. So he pulled his good leg under him and got ready.

The Beretta had a fifteen-round magazine. How many were left in it, Jake had no idea. But the number really didn't matter. The only thing left to do was stand up and shoot until he got the bad guy, or the bad guy got him. The man had just killed the president, and Jake couldn't let him get away with that. Jake was going to go out like a G-man, like the TV heroes he had grown up watching on The FBI and The Untouchables.

***

There were two rounds left in the rifle. Even as he recovered from the recoil of the previous shot and leveled the heavy rifle again, Gertz was already thinking two steps ahead. The assassination had failed. There would be no second shot. The president and his protectors were already gone, racing away in the very same heavily-armored backup limousine that Gertz had been staring at all morning through his sixteen-power scope.

He had missed.

Now he needed to shift his entire focus to escaping. But first he had to kill whoever this was who had made him miss. Gertz pointed the big rifle at the end of the sofa. The man was there. The next shot would obliterate him. As his finger tightened on the trigger, Gertz saw movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to his left and his finger slid off the trigger...and then something hard and heavy smashed into the side of his head.

***

Jake rose to his feet behind the sofa and pushed the Beretta out in a tight two-handed grip. But what he saw was not what he expected to see. There were two men. The shooter with the rifle, and a second man with wild eyes. The second man cracked the shooter on the head with a brick. The blow didn't knock the shooter down, just staggered him, but it definitely turned his attention, and more importantly the muzzle of the rifle, away from Jake.

The shooter spun toward his new attacker and smashed the rifle butt into his face. The second man dropped.

Jake fired. The bullet hit the assassin on his right side, just below the armpit. His right arm fell and he dropped the rifle. He turned to stare at Jake. Then he reached up with his left hand and touched the wound in his side. "Scheisse."

The shooter stumbled toward the small table. Jake saw a pistol lying on top of it. He pulled the trigger on the Beretta. Nothing happened. He looked at his hands. The Beretta's slide was locked back on an empty chamber. The gun was empty. Jake was out of bullets.

The assassin grabbed the pistol and lurched toward the sliding glass door. Jake tumbled over the sofa. When he hit the floor on the other side his leg shrieked in agony, but he scrambled to the abandoned rifle and picked it up, shocked at how heavy it was. He looked at the unfamiliar weapon and realized he had no idea how to operate it. He assumed it had a safety, but where was it? And was it on or off?

The assassin stepped through the glass door onto the balcony, pistol hanging from his left hand. He glanced over the railing, then turned to face Jake. He raised the pistol. Jake raised the rifle.

They both fired.

The recoil of the rifle knocked Jake onto his back, but as he fell he saw, beyond the blast of fire from the muzzle, a liquid explosion of red on the balcony. He also felt a searing, bone-deep pain in his left forearm. But he was alive. The pain told him that much. Raising his arm, he saw a small puncture in the top of his forearm, halfway between his wrist and elbow. Then he turned his arm over and discovered with an odd detachment that there was a jagged bloody hole the size of a quarter ripped through the meaty underside of his forearm.

"Get away from that fucking gun," a shrill voice shouted.

Jake rolled his head around and saw that the apartment door was filled with cops-all of them pointing guns at him. He let his battered body collapse to the floor.

***

Max Garcia parked the Chevrolet Tahoe on South Austin Street behind the Greyhound bus station. He pulled his Samsonite briefcase out of the trunk and walked away.

Sprawled on the back seat of the Tahoe-hidden under a blanket Garcia had bought for twenty dollars from a homeless man-tied up, mouths taped, still drugged and unconscious, but very much alive, were Gordon McCay and Stacy Chapman.

Garcia walked east on Commerce Street to South Griffin and caught a cab to DFW Airport for a flight to Mexico City.

"In the end, I just got lucky."

***

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2013

Leaning on crutches, his right leg bandaged and splinted from hip to ankle, his left arm and hand encased in a fiberglass cast, Jake Miller stood on the apron at Love Field with Gordon McCay and Stacy Chapman. They were watching a motorized loader slide a simple aluminum coffin into the belly of an Air France jet.

"Are we sure he's in there?" Jake asked.

Gordon smiled. "Who's the conspiracy kook now?"

"I'm serious," Jake said. "I tried to open the casket, but the lid was screwed down."

"I heard he's being buried in a family plot," Stacy said.

A Learjet 60 that belonged to the FBI was standing by to take Jake and Stacy back to DC.

They stood in silence for a moment. Then Jake pointed to the tattered black and white composition notebook clutched in Gordon's hand. It was Andre Favreau's notebook, the same one the Frenchman had been scribbling in when Jake first met him at the diner. Something that seemed to have happened in another lifetime. "Where did he leave it?" Jake asked.

"In the motorhome," Gordon said. "It's the whole story, names, dates, locations. Everything."

"Are you going to write a new book?"

Gordon hesitated a long time before saying, "I don't think so."

"Why not?" Stacy asked.

"Those were bad times—JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby, Watergate, Vietnam—and in some ways this country is only just now starting to heal. I don't want to be responsible for knocking us back down."