To Kill the President Read online

  The older man spoke first. ‘Miss Costello?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Some problem down here with your pass?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘OK. Please, come with us.’

  Maggie smiled with relief. ‘Thank you. Thanks so much.’

  ‘Sure. We’ll see if we can’t get this straightened out.’

  Maybe it was the tiredness or the headache from the whiplash or just everything that had been building up, but Maggie began to babble. As the three of them headed west in the direction of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, past another knot of protesters waving placards – all of them wearing masks of the President’s face – Maggie straining to keep up, she began telling these men how she was sure this was some kind of mistake, that her pass had always worked before, that no one had indicated to her that there was any kind of problem, and that she was sure if her access terms had needed to change, someone would have informed her and it’d been quite a day, in fact she’d been in a car crash, actually, not really a crash, more of a near-miss but still it felt …

  Only now, as they found themselves in a delivery bay behind the EEOB, walking down a ramp into some kind of underground storage area, did she pay attention to her surroundings. Scolding herself for dropping her guard, she sought to regain her poise. ‘All right, I see what’s happening,’ she said. ‘Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going—’

  In that instant, and with astonishing speed, the younger of the two men put his hand on her mouth and, at the same time, shoved her backwards and into a pillar. ‘Now, why don’t you shut the fuck up?’

  She stayed like that, pinned against the column. His hand was not only gagging her mouth; the ridge made by his fingers was also blocking her nostrils. She couldn’t breathe.

  She could hear the older man speaking. His mouth was close to her ear. ‘Listen closely. No more games now. We know what you’re doing and we want you to stop. So why don’t you be a good little girl and stop poking your Irish bitch face where it doesn’t belong? Do you understand me?’

  Maggie was wriggling, but the man who was gagging her mouth was also using his left foot to stand on her feet while his right knee was pressed against her legs, keeping her jammed in place. She was desperate to breathe.

  Now the older man was shouting. ‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’

  Maggie’s focus was elsewhere, on the hand covering her mouth. With a small instinctive movement of her jaw, she managed to open her lips just enough to bare her teeth and catch part of one finger between them. She bit down hard, gratified to realize that she was reaching not just skin and flesh but bone too.

  The young man sprung away, yelping in pain. Maggie gasped for air as she ran up the ramp, heading for the outside. She had covered two, maybe three, yards when she felt a hand around her ankle, pulling her down to the ground. She landed hard, on her knees. Now she felt the weight of a man’s body – the older one, she felt sure – on top of her. In an instant, his hands had encircled her wrists, ensuring she stayed pinned to the ground, face down.

  Now his mouth was by her ear. ‘You’re making this a bit too much like fun, Maggie. There’s no one here. Just the two of us – and my friend.’

  ‘Get the fuck off me.’

  ‘Why would I do that? This party’s only just getting started.’

  Maggie closed her eyes. The pain in her neck was so intense. The grip around her wrists was getting tighter.

  She sensed the man adjusting his weight. It gave her the opening she needed.

  In that instant, she used her now-unguarded right arm to press hard into the ground, levering herself up just enough to turn over. She had only half-completed the move, but it generated enough momentum to break his grip on her left wrist. Now she could move her knee upward, doing it with sufficient force that it landed squarely in his balls.

  Both his hands went to clasp his groin and now she was back on her feet. The younger man, still nursing a finger spurting blood, was coming towards her when she heard three loud beeps, followed by the sound of an engine. All three of them looked round to see the red brake lights of a truck reversing down the ramp. Maggie staggered towards it, aiming to get in sight of its wing mirrors.

  The two men looked at each other, made an instant calculation and ran in the opposite direction, into the darkness of the storage area. Maggie drew level with the cab of the truck, lifted her hand in acknowledgement of the driver and staggered onto the street. The driver began to open his door, as if about to come to her aid, but she waved him away, semaphoring her insistence that she was OK. She hoped he didn’t see that her tights were in tatters, her knees bruised and bleeding. Finding a doorway, she peeled them off and dumped them in a garbage can.

  Bruised, shaken and stone-cold furious at the attack – how dared they do that to her? – there was also room for thinking. First, she raised with herself, and then dismissed, the notion of going to the police. What would be the point, when she already knew more about this case than they ever would? Given who and what was involved, they could hardly protect her. Besides, the amount of time it would take, the explanations she would have to give, the information she would have to reveal: she would end up removing herself from the battlefield. She didn’t know who had done this to her, but the last thing she was going to do was reward them with her surrender.

  The second thought that struck Maggie now, as she walked unsteadily towards home, was that her tormentors had made a mistake. They might not have realized it, but she had. In the process of pursuing her, they had revealed themselves. They had pointed a sign at their lair – and she had seen it.

  35

  Centreville, Virginia, Thursday, 4.37pm

  The Bull Run Shooting Center was just off the I-66, surrounded by parkland. There was a waterpark for kids nearby, though it was all but deserted on this school day. There was an archery area and some corporates doing an afternoon of clay pigeons, but none of that was of any interest to Julian Garcia. He wanted to be outside, in the green and facing the trees.

  To someone from New York, say, this would probably look like a golfers’ driving range. A mixed crowd, as many women as men, each in their own lane, facing a big stretch of grass that eventually yielded to forest. But instead of a set of clubs, each paying customer was set up with a gun.

  Some had several, held in a rack: trying them out, seeing which one they liked best. Garcia clocked a bossy husband, demonstrating different weapons for his wife. He overheard the man talking to the rangemaster: ‘All these protests going off now – riots and all – I reckoned it was about time the lady got saddled up to protect herself. Just in case.’

  Garcia was here on different business. He had paid his $30 to the men at the counter – all of them armed – and taken his own ammunition and weapon, the Lapua .338s and the Savage, to the end lane. The lane next to him was empty too, which was how he liked it.

  He set himself up on the table, extending the bipod legs on the rifle so that it rested evenly. He opened his backpack and pulled out the rest of the kit: ear defenders, shooting glasses, spotting scope. This hour would be the most critical in his preparations so far.

  He watched the amateurs having their fun, as he waited for the signal from the rangemaster. To his irritation, they were using zombie targets: instead of a generic human figure, each target was decorated with some skeletal, undead creature, most with a red dot at the centre of the skull or chest inviting a bullet. It made the exercise more fun, Garcia supposed, more like a coconut shy at the fair. But on some level he had never needed to articulate, it offended him. If he’d had to spell it out, he’d have said that war was not a game, shooting was not a sport and all the people he’d had to aim at had been human rather than zombie. But those thoughts remained unformed.

  Now came the klaxon and the voice over the loudspeaker announcing that it was time for ‘All shooters to change their targets.’

  Garcia had already aimed his rangefinder at the target, letting its la
ser tell him that it had been placed one hundred and seventy yards from the barrel of the weapon. Now he lifted the target and, without asking permission, carried it much further back. At intervals, he stopped, put down the target and pointed the rangefinder, as if it were a TV remote, back towards the table where his weapon, unloaded, remained in place. Three hundred yards. Still not far enough. He kept walking until he had reached the distance he required. Exactly three hundred and forty-five yards. He noticed the other shooters noticing him. No problem with that at all.

  Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a handwarming pouch he’d picked up at a camping store on the way over here. Filled with a clear gel, with a metal disc suspended inside, you simply had to break the disc for the pouch to become warm. Given what he’d been told about the location for this job and how his subject would be defended – the distance involved and, above all, the degree of visibility he would have to work with – a headshot, which required a clean line of sight, was out of the question. And so he broke the metal disc and pinned the pouch to the middle of his target, over the red dot covering the zombie’s heart.

  Now he paced the way back to his station, feeling the rounds in his jacket pocket. Once returned, he sat himself at the table, loaded the rifle, and then looked through the thermal scope. There it was, the pouch’s warmth registering in the sight as a small circle of white, enough to guide the first shot or two until it was obliterated. He checked through the iron sights on the rifle and, once he was sure all was in line, he fired.

  He sat back, then consulted the spotting scope to discover that he had gone nearly three inches awry at eleven o’clock. The handwarmer was still in place. He adjusted the sight and took aim again. Then back to the spotting scope. The pouch was gone now, but there was still more work to do.

  On he went, firing dozens of rounds, each one followed by a series of ever more tiny micro-adjustments. This weapon was new to him; he had allowed for spending this amount of time. And if he looked purposeful, deliberate – like a man engaged in a very specific job of work – then that was all to the good.

  The rangemaster’s klaxon went three times, each one announcing a change of targets, before he was satisfied. In the session that followed, he made only one small tweak, right at the start. After that, the spotting scope revealed that he had hit the red dot – located in the chest of a drooling, rotting zombie, its hands dripping blood and outstretched as if seeking fresh flesh – every single time. Each red dot, like the handwarmer, had been pummelled and perforated into oblivion.

  Given the bullets he was using, he reflected as he packed up and walked back out through the shop, with its holsters and its gun cleaning kits, his target would have been dead the very first time. But on this day at least, he had the satisfaction of knowing he had gone one better. He had killed the President many times over.

  36

  Washington, DC, Thursday, 8.22pm

  Maggie had made it back to the apartment. It felt like reaching safe harbour. But it seemed emptier than usual. It was back, she understood, to being a place for one.

  She glanced over at the couch, which still bore the indentations of two people. To think that had only been last night. She had sent Richard a holding text, which he had answered several hours later with an equally holding reply – Jammed just now. Talk later? R x – but that was all that had passed for contact between them.

  Maggie wanted to shower, to rid herself of everything that had happened in the last, hellish few hours. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The concealer had worn off, leaving the shadows under her eyes dark and grooved. She looked like a hunted animal. The thought of giving her pursuers that satisfaction appalled her. Squaring her shoulders, Maggie ran a hand through her hair and stalked into the kitchen.

  Listlessly, she tried having something to eat. But she could not relax. It was clear she was being tracked, if not ‘eyes on’ then virtually. Doubtless they were watching her here too. But this was her terrain; there were steps she could take to protect herself.

  For the dozenth time, she assessed her situation. They had known when she was in her car; someone had sat at a computer, following her movements and then controlling them, attempting either to kill her or to send a mortal warning.

  And they had known when she had tried to enter the White House, alerted no doubt by her failed attempt to use her security pass: that must have been the signal which summoned the two thugs to come and find her. Were their orders to kill her – or simply to leave her so scared she’d back off? She suspected the latter.

  Still, that was only a calculated guess on her part. That they had planned to kill her, and would have done so had they not been interrupted by that delivery truck, remained at least a possibility.

  The fact that her White House pass had been mysteriously voided was a body blow in itself. To be shut out of her place of work, where she had felt so privileged to serve these last few years, to have the door slammed in her face: it was a humiliation. Had Kassian fired her, was that it? If he had, what possible reason could he give that would not constitute blatant obstruction of justice?

  It was irrational, she knew, but she also felt plain hurt. A matter of months ago, she was deemed indispensable by the White House and by the previous president. Now she was so unwanted, they wouldn’t even let her in the building.

  Focus, she told herself. Put your emotions to one side. The important thing was that her failed attempt to use her pass had brought out her assailants, and that confirmed that this was an inside job. Her enemy, whoever it was, lay within that building.

  Did that mean, perhaps, that Richard had realized that Maggie was now aware of his secret dialogue with McNamara, and the two of them had decided to put the squeeze on her to ensure she kept this knowledge to herself? Something about that didn’t quite add up. Sure, it would be devastating for Richard to be exposed as a liar, a cheat and a closet racist and bad for McNamara to be caught talking like a drooling, sexist predator (though, Lord knows, you could say the same of the President and that hadn’t stopped him getting elected). But surely there was nothing in that correspondence so radioactive that it warranted the murder of Maggie Costello just to keep it hidden, was there?

  If anything it was Bob Kassian, backed by Jim Bruton, who had the clearer motive. In her meeting with the Chief of Staff that morning, Maggie had all but accused him of involvement in the killing of Dr Frankel. Hushing that up alone was sufficient reason to get her out of the way. But if her calculation was right – and the two men were planning the assassination of the President – then that was all the more reason to ensure her silence.

  There was a chime from her phone. A text. Was that Richard, at last? What if he invited himself over? That was the trouble with messages: there was no way to ignore them, without it being obvious that you were ignoring them. At least with a call, you could screen it and claim you were tied up …

  It wasn’t from Richard, but her sister.

  Hope you’re OK, Mags. Didn’t like the way you rang off so suddenly before – and you were in your car too. Stay safe. I’m off to bed now – early, I know, but I’ve got a horrible headache coming on. Don’t worry about ringing tonight. And don’t worry about me. I’ll get a job soon enough. If not, there’s always the convent ;) L x

  She reached for the iPad, a hand-me-down from Liz, as it happened, who had, as always, upgraded to the latest thing. Maggie used this machine only rarely, for personal things; it was the only device she had that was completely disconnected from the White House system. Of course, Liz being Liz, it was loaded with state-of-the-art encryption software. Maggie had teased her about it: ‘And what exactly is it you have to hide, Liz, that would so interest the world’s spy agencies?’

  ‘You see, that’s the exact mentality they rely on. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” I’d expect better from you, Margaret.’

  ‘Ooh, it’s Margaret now, is it?’ Maggie had said, making a face towards the children, who began
to laugh. ‘Margaret. Boys, you’ll always know I’m in trouble – that Auntie Maggie has been very naughty – when your mother starts calling me Margaret.’ She wagged her finger. ‘Naughty, naughty Margaret.’ The older boy, Callum, not yet four, had loved that. Maggie and he had spent the rest of the afternoon deciding what his naughty name should be.

  She switched on the machine, and opened up the browser. She had no idea what she was looking for. She went to whitehouse.gov, clicked on the ‘Briefing Room’, then on ‘Latest News’ and then ‘The Schedule’. She opened it up but, as she feared, it only listed events for ‘Today’. No detail on what the President’s diary held.

  She thought about contacting Eleanor, but hesitated. If they had electronic tabs on Maggie’s car, they were certainly monitoring her phone. They would know the instant she called a White House number. Mind you, she could call from Skype using this iPad. They wouldn’t see where that—

  Hold on, something was happening. The cursor was moving across the screen of its own accord, without any direction from her.

  Maybe this was what happened when you left a machine unused for too long. She would follow the one bit of technical advice she’d absorbed from Liz. She was about to turn the machine off and on again, when she realized that the cursor had opened up an app which now filled the screen. It was, of all things, the one that controlled the thermostat in the room, operating the central heating.

  This was odd. The big dial in the centre showed the temperature set for thirty degrees Celsius. The dial was glowing orange, which was its way of telling you the system was fired up, the boiler fully on.

  But there was no way she would have the heating on now, in the warmth of a Washington spring that was already turning into early summer. Had someone been in the apartment since this morning?