Wildcard. Rachel Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ and waiting for his next appointment with the psychologist.

      “Here’s what we have so far,” Kevin Willis said, standing at the front of the room with a notepad in one hand and a remote control in the other. “At twenty-two nineteen hours last night, someone fired three shots in the lobby of the Hyatt Harborside in Tampa. Two of those shots struck Grant Lawrence. The other struck a campaign staffer named Ellen Bates. Ms. Bates was wounded in the left arm and is in stable condition after surgery.

      “Senator Lawrence was not so fortunate. One bullet hit him in the chest, the other in the midtorso. He’s still in surgery. The doctors are saying fifty-fifty.”

      Tom saw Miriam’s face sink at that statement, although he knew she was already aware of Grant’s condition. Karen Sweeney had called within an hour after the shooting, and Terry was already on a flight to Tampa. Still, hearing it described in the cold, clinical language of a briefing had to be hard to bear.

      “Lawrence had just finished his victory speech after the Florida primary,” Kevin continued. “Apparently he’d gone out into the lobby to shake hands with staffers who couldn’t fit into the main ballroom. Powder residue on the victims and two bystanders put the shooter within three or four feet, but it was a tight crowd. So far, we haven’t found anyone who can identify the shooter or even give us a firm description.”

      Tom saw heads nod around the room. It made sense. In close like that, with bodies packed in tight, a hand with a gun could easily slip beneath the arm of someone in front. Pop-pop-pop. Victim goes down. The shooter slips away in the panic. It was the nightmare scenario for protective services, worse even than a sniper. It was the reason the president never waded into a crowd.

      “What happened to his security?” an agent in front asked. “Why’d they let him get into that situation?”

      More nods from others who’d had the same training and followed the same line of reasoning Tom and the questioner had. It wasn’t rocket science. This was a basic breakdown in procedure.

      “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Lawrence,” Kevin said. “He didn’t want the people in the lobby to feel left out. That fits with his profile. He’s the type who will stop and talk to people on the Capitol steps. I doubt he gave it a second thought. But his security team should have. We’ll need to talk to them, but you all know how the Secret Service is. They’re going to want to take care of their own.”

      Just like the FBI, Tom thought. Or any other police agency. It was a mind-set as old as the human species. You look out for your own kind, because they look out for you. When they didn’t, it got very ugly, very fast. As he knew from personal experience.

      “We did catch a break, though,” Kevin said. Fifty sets of eyes instantly became alert. “The hotel has good security, including video cameras in the parking garage and covering the sidewalk in front of the lobby. So we ought to have the shooter on tape. The guys in Tampa are trying to cross-match the news footage of the event with the video of people leaving the hotel. With any luck, that will leave us a short list of suspects. Then we’ll split them up among our teams and run them down.”

      The brute force method, Tom thought. Standard Bureau procedure. It reminded him of a joke about a collection of law enforcement types looking for a beaver in a forest. The NSA put a surveillance camera in every tree. The CIA sent in an agent dressed as a beaver, who returned a week later scratched, dirty, breathless and pregnant. The L.A.P.D. sent in two officers, who returned in ten minutes with a bloodied, beaten raccoon that was ready to admit it was a beaver. As for the FBI, they rounded up every animal in the forest and held them for six months while a forensic veterinarian examined their dental impressions.

      It had been the Bureau’s modus operandi since the reign of Hoover. Overwhelm the problem with manpower and science. It was effective. It was also slow. In most of the Bureau’s investigations, that wasn’t an issue. When you were going after a John Gotti or a Ted Kaczynski, whose crimes weren’t daily front-page news, you could afford to take your time and build a case brick by brick. But that wasn’t the situation here. The media, not to mention the attorney general, would be demanding daily briefings, with each one detailing new information and positive progress toward an arrest.

      The brute force method was not designed to achieve that. When it was misapplied toward that end, the Bureau inevitably ended up with egg on its face. Fifteen hundred Arab-American detainees were only the most recent case in point. Tom could see the writing on the wall, and the message wasn’t promising. He began to feel sparks of anger in the pit of his stomach. By sheer force of will, he battered them down.

      Willis continued the briefing, dividing the task force into teams, handing out assignments. Tom paid only cursory attention until Willis looked at Miriam.

      “Miriam, you and Tom will eliminate the wacko groups. I want to say we’ve left no stone unturned. Dig around on the Net. Get a list from our domestic surveillance guys. Crazies who’ve written against Lawrence. Run their files. I’m sure you’ll find a bunch.”

      “No doubt,” Miriam said. “He’s liberal, Catholic, handsome, single, a dad whose kids were kidnapped, running for president while dating a cop. Put it all together and he’s probably the darling of half the fringe organizations in the country.”

      “Probably,” Kevin agreed. “And it’s probably a waste of time. But I don’t want conspiracy nuts coming along to say we didn’t look. So look.”

      In short, Tom thought, he and Miriam were supposed to run down bullshit. On the case, but safely out of the way. It made sense. Miriam was too close to Grant to be in the middle of things. And Tom had no doubt where he stood in the Bureau’s hierarchy of competence.

      Then Willis spoke again, and this time his eye fixed on Tom. “I want everyone in this room to remember that at this time we are acting in a support capacity to the Florida offices, which are heading the investigation. If you find anything, it goes through me to them.”

      In short, no running off on your own. Tom gave Willis the nod he was looking for, but his neck felt as stiff as if it hadn’t moved in centuries.

      Watermill, Long Island

      “He might have been what?” The man tried to suppress his anger as he listened to the voice on the phone.

      “He might have been caught on videotape,” the caller said. “Word is the hotel had good security, and the FBI’s getting the tapes.”

      “And you can make sure that doesn’t happen?” the man asked, clearly expecting an affirmative answer.

      “No,” the caller replied. “I can’t. They know those tapes are out there. If the tapes vanished, that would just pile more shit on the doorstep. Besides, he can be sacrificed. We knew that from the start.”

      “So long as there’s no trail,” the man said.

      “I can handle the trail,” the caller replied. “I have that part covered. Don’t worry.”

      He hung up in disgust. What an absurd statement, after calling on his daughter’s wedding day, with two hundred guests arriving in an hour, to tell him an assassin he’d paid for might have been caught in the act on videotape, and then to say, “Don’t worry.” There was too much at stake for him not to worry.

      “Daddy, are you ready?”

      He turned and looked at his one and only daughter. This was the last afternoon that she would truly be his. In two hours, she would belong to another. СКАЧАТЬ