To Kill the President Read online

  And, Clare, obviously what is going to be on the minds of most Americans right now, and indeed people around the world – and of course we appreciate information is very sketchy at this stage – but what more can you tell us about the state the President was in when he arrived at the hospital there?

  Well, John, as you say, official information in very short supply just now, but I’ve spoken to some healthcare professionals here and what they have told me – and, again, this is not confirmed – is that the President was conscious when he arrived here. Different accounts of whether he was able to leave the limousine unassisted – one eyewitness says she saw a wheelchair used, another says he was supported by two aides – but the key point is that the President was, according to these unofficial reports, conscious on arrival. John?

  Thanks, Clare. Reporting live from the George Washington University Hospital, Clare Romine. And we’ll be going straight back there when we have that briefing from the Medical Director, which of course we’ll bring you live.

  Let’s just see what we can tell you about the alleged shooter. As you can imagine, just fragments of information at this time – lot of people in a state of grave shock and confusion. But social media moves very fast, as you know. For more on that, CBS News National Correspondent Kyle Chapman. Kyle, what can you tell us?

  John, obviously we are in the first few hours of this investigation and there’s lots we don’t know but if it is confirmed that the shooter was Jorge Hernandez, as has been reported, then what we can say is that this was not a man who hid his hostility to the President. His Facebook profile—

  And there, we can see that on the screen now.

  There we go, and you can see he identifies himself as a ‘patriot, militant and fighter’. And then goes on to say, and this was posted just a matter of weeks ago, ‘In the name of Jesus, stop the deportations!’ And then you can see, a very disturbing image of the President—

  And obviously some viewers will find this material distressing.

  That’s right, John, a very disturbing, doctored image of the President, the eyes kind of gouged out—

  Sort of Devil Eyes—

  That’s right and then there’s this quote: ‘He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus!’

  Gosh.

  But I think the one that is kind of chilling in the light of what happened today, this is from soon after the President’s inauguration back in January. Hernandez is posting an article about the President’s plan to build detention facilities for illegal migrants, but he introduces it with another quote from scripture. And as I say, this does look like some kind of warning, in the light of today’s event.

  Have we got that on the screen?

  Here it is. ‘It is mine to avenge. I will repay. Their day of disaster is near.’

  And, I suppose, there will be questions to the Secret Service about how they could have missed these very stark warnings. Kyle Chapman, for now, thank you.

  If you’re just joining this special CBS News update, let me say again that the President of the United States has been the victim of what appears to have been a failed assassination attempt. He was shot at 4.13pm today, at the United States Marines War Memorial. He is believed to have survived and is currently undergoing emergency medical treatment. Stay with CBS as we bring you all of the detail on this as it comes in.

  And there’s been a new development in the last few moments. Let’s go to that right now …

  41

  Washington, DC, Friday, 7.20pm

  She had failed. That was the only way Maggie could see it. She had been determined to stop this attempt on the President’s life, to find out who was behind it and stand in their way, but she had done no such thing. Today a man had shot the President – and she had been a matter of yards away when it happened.

  That he had survived brought little compensation, only confusion. In some ways, she thought, it meant the worst of both worlds. Now there would be all the division, fear and paranoia unleashed by an assassination attempt – including the risk of civil war, as one half of this divided nation believed the other had tried to murder its leader – but without the purging, curative effect of removing what her sister had called this ‘evil man’. He would still be there, more livid and bellicose than ever. Put more crudely than she would ever say out loud, America was about to get all the pain of a presidential assassination but none of the gain.

  And she had let it happen. If only she had got there quicker. If only she had made that taxi drive even a bit faster. If only she had been able to reach her contacts in the Secret Service. If only she had had better contacts. If only she had not made so many enemies. If only, if only, if only. This had been an evening of if onlys.

  Despite the chaos at the memorial, one of the Secret Service agents who had stopped her when she jumped out of the cab had had the presence of mind to apprehend her afterwards and demand she face an immediate interview. They had done it there and then, in one of the security tents.

  To the repeated question – how did Maggie know an assassination attempt was imminent? – Maggie offered the same, bland answer: that in her capacity as part of the office of the White House Counsel she had been proceeding with an investigation that related to the President’s security, the details of which could not yet be disclosed. She insisted that there would clearly be a full inquiry in due course and that she would, of course, co-operate with that. But for the moment, the information she had was classified at a grade that could not be shared with those who were interviewing her. Essentially she was engaged in a double-play, simultaneously pulling rank and blinding them with White House legal science.

  It worked. Once the Secret Service had confirmed her identity with the Counsel’s office – and, interestingly, there was no hint that she was off the payroll – they told her she was free to go, but that they would be in contact for a further interview in the coming days.

  As she finally headed away from the memorial, hitching a ride with a TV journalist she knew, she saw that Twitter was as confused and ambivalent as she was. The first wave of reaction felt obliged to observe the appropriate solemnity. There was a hashtag, of course: #PrayforUSA. A rush of celebrities issued the predictable pieties:

  Lord knows, I have my differences with the President. But I am praying for him tonight.

  And:

  Whether you’re red or blue, always remember this: we have more in common than divides us.

  A comedian who had been vicious about the President from day one bowed to the respectful mood.

  The guy’s a jerk – but even jerks have a right to life. #MyPresident

  But slowly, as the hours went by, and especially as reports filtered out of the hospital suggesting he was awake and had suffered no more than a superficial flesh-wound between his chest and shoulder, along with a broken rib, the forced decorum eased a little.

  JFK, MLK, RFK: all on target. The one time the shooter misses, it has to be this guy. #TooSoon?

  A leading foreign affairs analyst, strongly critical of the White House, tweeted:

  Sigh of relief for the First Family, of course. Rest of America and the world? Not so much

  That opened the door to a few more in that spirit.

  Of course this is not the way we do things, but this could have been a perfect way out of the N Korea crisis #justsayin

  And:

  Memo to God: so a guy who lies, cheats, steals and race-baits is somehow blessed with the best luck on the planet. How’s that work?

  Maggie switched off the screen and flung the phone onto the couch. None of it was helping. She’d had a missed call from Liz, but sensed that wouldn’t help much either. She suspected her sister would be cursing the missed opportunity. Whichever line Liz took, Maggie would somehow be on the wrong side of it.

  But her confusion was not just of the emotional or moral variety. Maggie was also puzzled by the facts of the situation. The same question had been going round her head as soon as
she heard the first news reports, even from the moment she saw that cluster of agents surrounding the President at the war memorial and sensed that he was down but not dead.

  How on earth had he come to be wearing protective armour? It meant that the Secret Service had had advance warning of the threat, but how?

  Maggie had said nothing of her inquiries to anyone. Actually, that was not quite true. Stupidly, she had told Richard about Kassian and Bruton’s late-night chat with Dr Frankel, which he was bound to have passed on to McNamara, but that was all.

  Unless that had been enough. Handed that one fact, had McNamara followed the same train of thought she had and reached the same destination? The sudden addition of a new event to the schedule would certainly have caught McNamara’s eye, especially if he was already suspicious. He was a vile, sexist, racist boor but he was not stupid. Far from it.

  But that only left a much harder question. If McNamara knew the President was at mortal risk, then the rational response was not to dress him in a bulletproof vest, but to withdraw him from all public events until the threat had been neutralized. What on earth was McNamara playing at, knowingly exposing the President to that kind of danger?

  She wanted to talk to Stuart. She needed to think this through with him, to hear his voice as they worked it out together. But then, from across the sofa, her phone lit up with a news alert. She grabbed it: a fresh tweet from the President himself. Once she read it, and then read it again, she had an inkling of an answer to her question.

  42

  The White House, Friday, 7.31pm

  ‘What the fucking fuck happened?’

  ‘I really don’t think we can have this conversation here, Jim.’

  Robert Kassian and Jim Bruton were standing in their regular spot in the colonnade, the open-columned walkway between the West Wing and the Residence. They had been summoned to see Crawford McNamara and Kassian hoped this looked like nothing more than a chance encounter of two officials arriving early for the same meeting. But Bruton looked far too agitated for anyone to be fooled by that.

  ‘I mean, somebody has to explain to me what in hellfire’s name went on here, because I sure as fuck don’t know.’

  ‘Jim,’ Kassian said, speaking steadily and quietly. ‘If anything, that’s a question for you. You were handling the operational side of this.’

  Bruton’s neck turned puce. ‘Nothing went wrong at my end. Nothing! Our guy was ordered to hit the target and he did. Bullseye.’

  ‘Is it possible he or,’ his voice dipped, ‘the other one mentioned something to someone?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just a heads-up? Maybe to a friend in the Service?’

  ‘Come on, Bob. You know these men. You know who they are.’

  ‘I know.’ He shook his head, a combination of both resignation and disbelief. ‘It’s just. I mean, the President doesn’t wear body armour. Except this one time. Which just so happens to be—’

  ‘Look, we did this right. Circle of trust was tight. Neither of those men would have breathed a word. Not ever.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And there is no record of any links between us and them. Total omerta on the men of that unit. No, something else happened here, Bob. I don’t know what, but something else. And in terms of us, no one knows anything. Don’t lose sight of that.’

  Kassian took a deep breath, drawing in the oxygen through his nostrils. ‘You’re right. And that’s our advantage now. No one knows. So long as we stay strong and stick to our story—’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That we know nothing and did nothing.’

  ‘And if he asks how come Hernandez knew about the memorial thing?’

  ‘He was a veteran. Grapevine.’

  ‘OK. And what about Frankel?’ Bruton was sweating.

  ‘We had nothing to do with that.’

  ‘I know. But the meeting? Costello knew we’d seen him. Why? Why were we there?’

  ‘Let’s tell the truth. We were alarmed at the President’s mental state.’

  ‘North Korea.’

  ‘Exactly. It was completely legitimate that we went to his home to discuss it.’

  ‘Not to seek a declaration of incapacity.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Just to get his assessment of the President’s stability and fitness. We were concerned.’

  ‘He was behaving like a nut.’

  ‘By his erratic behaviour, Jim.’

  ‘OK.’

  They paused, looked at each other and then looked outward, facing toward the Rose Garden, its glories hidden by the twilight. Kassian felt something he had not known in many, many years, not perhaps since that skirmish outside Tikrit: genuine, physical fear. He had been aware from the start that he was taking the most enormous risk, of course he had. But, strange as it was to confess this now, even to himself, he had never really contemplated failure. He had not forced himself to stare hard into the abyss, to imagine this moment: the President alive and he, along with Bruton, accused of ordering his murder. He had not pictured how it would play out: the initial accusation, the arrest, the subsequent trial, the conviction, the prison sentence, the disgrace. He felt himself descending into the pit.

  ‘Gentlemen?’

  It was McNamara’s assistant, a new one. Like her predecessor, she was young, slim and absurdly good-looking. The previous woman had left in a hurry. Kassian had been too swamped with other things to look into what had happened, though he suspected that if he had, he’d have found something ugly. The chances were high that McNamara, like his master, was a class action sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.

  It struck him that that was how it was with this presidency. A single one of the episodes that happened here daily – hourly – would have been enough to destroy previous administrations. But under this President, they came in such a torrent – the tweets, the lies, the grotesque misconduct, the conflicts of interest, the acts of unwarranted aggression, the self-harming threats to American national security – that the media, the Congress, the country itself could not keep up. Just when outrage was building at what he’d done on Tuesday, he’d done something even more appalling on Wednesday. It was like Stalin’s old line about a million deaths being a statistic. A single scandal could destroy a good president, but a thousand scandals gave a bad president immunity. The worse he behaved, the more he could act with impunity.

  They were ushered into McNamara’s office. Predictably, he did not get up but kept his shoeless, bare feet up and on the desk, showing them his calloused soles. He was not in shorts but jeans today, perhaps in honour of the solemnity of the occasion. He was watching TV, remote in one hand, supersized paper cup of Diet Coke in the other.

  ‘Hi guys,’ he said, as relaxed as if he were welcoming them to a Saturday barbecue, gesturing for them to take a seat in front of his desk. The optics, as he would have put it, were the principal’s study.

  ‘Hello, Mac. Terrible news.’ It was Bruton, determined not to be passive.

  ‘Terrible,’ Kassian agreed.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said McNamara. ‘But somehow I think we’ll pull through.’ He smiled. ‘I would offer you something to drink, but I don’t feel like it, d’you know what I mean?’

  His eyes remained fixed on the screen. It was Fox, with a live shot of their reporter outside the hospital, intercut with footage of a lightly bandaged and smiling President flashing the thumbs-up from his bedroom window an hour or so earlier. McNamara had the sound down, but the subtitles included the words ‘remarkable recovery’ and ‘superficial wound’.

  For a while, all three stayed looking at the screen. In silence. Eventually Bruton and Kassian caught each other’s eye and Kassian furrowed his brow. What’s going on?

  Finally, McNamara spoke, still paying attention to Fox News rather than to the two men in his office. ‘Either of you guys a lawyer?’

  ‘No,’ Bruton said. ‘My mamma thought I should aim higher. Had me clean out the sewers underneath the local whorehouse inste
ad.’ It was a practised line; Kassian had heard it before. Usually it got a laugh, but not today.

  ‘Pity. Thought one of you boys might be able to advise me on a legal problem.’ Boys.

  ‘Oh yes, Mac,’ said Kassian, willing to play ball if that meant avoiding a return to the silence. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘“Mac”? Did you say “Mac”?’ Finally he had shifted his gaze away from the TV screen. ‘Isn’t that what all the kikes round here would call supreme chutzpah?’

  Kassian made the mistake of looking puzzled.

  ‘Mister McNamara to you, don’t you think? Nothing “Mac” about this situation. Nothing “Mac” at all.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘I mean he can call me Mac.’ McNamara was pointing directly at Bruton. ‘He is, for the moment, the Secretary of Defense. But you? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Look, Mac—’ It was Bruton, seeking to take control. It was the only way he knew how to be.

  McNamara raised a palm in objection, which stopped him. ‘Shall I get to my legal query? I would ask the Counsel’s office, but you’ll soon see why that’s complicated. So, shall I?’

  Kassian and Bruton both nodded, a gesture whose implied deference seemed to increase by more than a factor of two for being doubled.

  ‘I want to know what the maximum sentence is for conspiracy to assassinate a sitting President of the United States. Either of you boys know that, perchance? I’ll take a ballpark figure.’ He started making the sound of a TV gameshow clock, loudly counting down to zero. He did a little jingle to mark the last second: de-der, de-der, de-de-de-der.

  ‘Let’s stop playing these chickenshit games, Mac,’ Bruton said. ‘I’m not in the mood. I suspect I speak for Bob on that too.’

  ‘Oh, I suspect you do speak for Bob on that. In fact, I suspect a whole lot of things when it comes to you two.’ McNamara was now on his feet, walking around to get closer to the two men, eventually placing himself directly in front of them, his rear end perching on the ledge of his desk.