“Just found this one. Funny place, but–” “Yeah, funny.” The agent lifted her camera and snapped a couple of pictures which would have the exact
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time electronically preserved on the frame. Next she took a pad from her pocket and noted the placement for body number four on her personal list. She hadn’t seen many for her particular area of responsibility. Some plastic stakes and yellow tape would further mark the site; she started writing the tag for it. “You can turn him over.”
Under the body, they saw, was an irregularly shaped piece of flat glass–or glass-like plastic. The agent snapped another photo, and through the viewfinder things somehow looked more interesting than with the naked eye. A glance up showed a gap in the marble balustrade. Another look around revealed a lot of small metallic objects, which an hour earlier she’d decided were aircraft parts, and which had attracted the attention of an NTSB investigator, who was now conferring with the same fire-department officer with whom she’d been conferring a minute earlier. The agent had to wave three times to get his attention.
“What is it?” The NTSB investigator was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief.
The agent pointed. “Check the shirt out.”
“Crew,” the man said, after putting them back on. “Maybe a driver. What’s this?” It was his turn to point.
There was a strange delicacy to it. The white uniform shirt had a hole in it just to the right of the pocket. The hole was surrounded by a red-rust stain. The FBI agent held her flashlight close, and that showed that the stain was dried. The current temperature was just under twenty degrees. The body had been thrown into this harsh environment virtually at the moment of impact, and the blood about the severed neck was frozen, the purple-red color of some horrid plum sherbet. The blood on the shirt, she saw, had dried before having the chance to freeze.
“Don’t move the body anymore,” she told the fireman. Like most FBI agents, she’d been a local police officer before applying to the federal agency. It was the cold that made her face pale.
“First crash investigation?” the NTSB man asked, seeing her face, and mistaking her pallor.
She nodded. “Yes, it is, but it’s not my first murder.” With that she switched on her portable radio to call her
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supervisor. For this body she wanted a crime-scene team and full forensics.
THE TELEGRAMS CAME from every government in the world. Most were long, and all had to be read–well, at least the ones from important countries. Togo could wait.
“Interior and Commerce are in town and standing by for a Cabinet meeting along with all the deputies,” van Damm said while Ryan flipped through the messages, trying to read and listen at the same time. “The Joint Chiefs, all the vices, are assembled, along with all the command CINCs to go over national security–”
“Threat Board?” Jack asked without looking up. Until the previous day he’d been President Durling’s National Security Advisor, and it didn’t seem likely that the world had changed too much in twenty-four hours.
Scott Adler handled the answer: “Clear.”
“Washington is pretty much shut down,” Murray said. “Radio and TV announcements for people to stay home, except for essential services. The D.C. National Guard is out. We need the warm bodies for the Hill, and the D.C. Guard is a military-police brigade. They might actually be useful. Besides, the firemen must be about worn out by now.”
“How long before the investigation gives us hard information?” the President asked.
“There’s no telling that, Ja–Mister–”
Ryan looked up from the official Belgian telegram. “How long since we’ve known each other, Dan? I’m not God, okay? If you use my name once in a while, nobody’s going to shoot you for it.”
It was Murray’s turn to smile. “Okay. You can’t predict with any major investigation. The breaks just come, sooner or later, but they do come,” Dan promised. “We have a good team of investigators out there.”
“What do I tell the media?” Jack rubbed his eyes, already tired from reading. Maybe Cathy was right. Maybe he did need glasses, finally. Before him was a printed sheet for his morning TV appearances, which had been selected
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by lot. CNN at 7:08, CBS at 7:20, NEC at 7:37, ABC at 7:50, Fox at 8:08, all from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where the cameras were already set up. Someone had decided that a formal speech was too much for him, and not really appropriate to the situation until he had something substantive to deliver. Just a quiet, dignified, and above all, intimate introduction of himself to people reading their papers and drinking their morning coffee.
“Softball questions. That’s already taken care of,” van Damm assured him. “Answer them. Speak slowly, clearly. Look as relaxed as you can. Nothing dramatic. The people don’t expect that. They want to know that somebody’s in charge, answering the phones, whatever. They know it’s too soon for you to say or do anything decisive.”
“Roger’s kids?”
“Still asleep, I expect. We have the family members in town. They’re at the White House now.”
President Ryan nodded without looking up. It was hard to meet the eyes of the people sitting around the breakfast table, especially on things like that. There was a plan for this, too. Movers were already on the way, probably. The Durling family–what was left of it–would be removed from the White House kindly but quickly, because it wasn’t their house anymore. The country needed someone else in there, and that someone needed to be as comfortable as possible, and that meant eliminating all visible reminders of the previous occupant. It wasn’t brutal, Jack realized. It was business. They doubtless had a psychologist standing by to assist the family members with their grief, to “process” them through it as best as medical science allowed. But the country came first. In the unforgiving calculus of life, even so sentimental a nation as the United States of America had to move on. When it came time for Ryan to leave the White House, one way or another, the same thing would happen. There had been a time when an ex-President had walked down the hill to Union Station from his successor’s inauguration to get a train ticket home. Now they used movers, and doubtless the family would fly out on Air Force transport, but go the children would, leaving behind schools and such friends as they had made, returning to California and
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whatever life their family members could reconstruct for them. Business or not, it was cold, Ryan thought while staring mindlessly at the Belgian telegram. How much the better for everyone if the aircraft had not fallen on the Capitol building . . .
On top of all that, Jack had rarely been called upon to console the children of a man he knew, and damned sure hadn’t ever taken their home away. He shook his head. It wasn’t his fault, but it was his job.
The telegram, he saw on returning to it, noted that America had twice helped to save that small country within a space of less than thirty years, then protected it through the NATO alliance, that there was a bond of blood and friendship between America and a nation which most American citizens would have been taxed to locate on a globe. And that was true. Whatever the faults of his country, whatever her imperfections, however unfeeling some of her actions might seem to be, the United States of America had done the right thing more often than not. The world was far the better for it, and that was why business had to be carried out.
INSPECTOR PATRICK O’DAY was grateful for the cold. His investigative career had stretched over almost thirty years, and this was not his first time in the presence of multiple bodies and their separated parts. His first had been in Mississippi one May, a Sunday school bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, with eleven victims. At least here the cold eliminated the ghastly odor of dead human bodies. He’d never really wanted a high rank in the Bureau–“inspector” was a title with variable importance in the sense of seniority. In his case, much like Dan Murray, O’Day worked as a troubleshooter, often dispatched from Washington to assist on touchy ones. Widely recognized as a superb street agent, he’d been able to stick to real cases, large and small, instead of high-level supervision, which he found boring.
Assistant Director Tony Caruso had gone along another track. He’d been special agent-in-charge of two field offices, risen to head the Bureau’s Training Division, then
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taken over the Washington Field Office, which was sufficiently large to merit “AD” rank for its commander, along with one of the worst office locations in North America. Caruso enjoyed the power, prestige, higher pay, and reserved parking place which his status accorded him, but part of him envied his old friend, Pat, for his often dirty hands.