“I have one further duty,” Will said, “before I slink into the ignominy of lame-duckhood. I must say that this duty gives me the greatest pleasure of my life — so far. It is my great honor to introduce to you a person who has already, in the many years of her public service, done more for her country than have most presidents, and done it quietly, behind the scenes in ways often brilliant, but necessarily concealed, that the public cannot know about for decades to come, who has always put her country first in her life and work, and who now seeks to come into the bright light of an election and seek the highest office in the land — one that she richly deserves.
“My fellow Americans,” Will shouted, “the next president of the United States, Katharine Lee!”
Kate walked briskly from the wings, clad in a red suit, setting off her blond hair. She stood at one side of the podium, then the other, waving, pointing at people she knew and those she didn’t, then she returned and stood quietly at the podium until the last of the applause died. She reached forward, pressed a button on the podium, and the thick glass security screen descended into the floor. Kate leaned into the microphone and said, “I never want anything between you and me but air.” And the crowd went crazy again.
Finally, after she had quiet, Kate began to speak, without notes or teleprompter, which had disappeared with the glass screen. “I stand before you a proud but chastened woman, for today I have learned what every nominee for the presidency before me has felt — that accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency is not something that can be taken lightly. It is a heavy responsibility, and I accept it. I accept your nomination!”
Much cheering.
“Next week, we begin this campaign in earnest, and when it is over, Governor Richard Collins and I will have visited every state and told their citizens what we plan to do in office, so I will not give you that long list now. Suffice it to say that we will continue the policies of my brilliant predecessor!”
Laughter.
“We will meet you at the center, where the work gets done!” This had been Will Lee’s campaign slogan. “We will use the Internet and social media to state our proposals in detail, since personal appearances are all too brief. I want every American to know what we stand for and what we won’t stand for!”
The crowd went wild yet again. When the applause petered out, Kate went on.
“But there is something I want every American to hear now,” she said. “The most important question any candidate is asked: ‘Why do you want to be president?’ I want to be president because my upbringing, my education in school, at university and law school, my work as an intelligence officer and my leadership as the director of Central Intelligence, my time in the White House, and my very close relationship with my president and my contributions to his policy decisions — all these have given me a unique set of qualifications, and I want to put those to work, as I have always done, in the service of my country. I want to heal old wounds and break new ground. I want to conduct the necessary and constant rebuilding of our nation while forging ahead in new domestic and foreign policy. And if elected, I want to do what Will Lee has done — leave my successor with a better country than when I started.”
Much applause.
“I ask of my countrymen more than their votes for me, I ask them to give me a Congress that is committed to our ideals as a nation and that will be ready to work hard every day for our people. If my countrymen will do that, then Dick Collins and I, with the support of a hardworking Congress, will give them an even better America!”
Kate stepped back from the microphone and waved to Dick Collins, who was in the wings, to come onstage. They embraced, then clasped hands and waved as the band began to play and the crowd cheered themselves to hoarseness.
Up in Stone’s skybox he and his guests poured champagne, toasted the new nominees, then sat down to dinner while the crowd below began to drift toward the exits.
36
In the predawn hours of the morning of the following day, Harry Gregg left his pickup truck in a parking lot adjacent to Santa Monica Airport and made the short hike down the road past Atlantic Aviation. He saw no one, and no one saw him.
He found a place where the chain-link fence surrounding the airport was concealed from the road by tall bushes, and scrambled between them to reach the fence. He took a set of short-handled bolt cutters from his backpack and made a three-foot horizontal cut of the fence near where the chain link disappeared into the ground, then another vertical cut alongside a fence pole. He peeled back the fence and let himself in, then pressed the chain link back into place. He stood quietly for a couple of minutes, listening for vehicles or footsteps. The airport was closed overnight, so there was no aircraft noise. Satisfied that he was alone, he walked over to the taxiway and began to move along the line of airplanes parked there. He saw two Citation Mustangs before he came to the one with the correct tail number.
Once again, he stopped and listened. Nothing. He knelt beside the nosewheel, took a small but very powerful lithium-powered flashlight from his pocket, and carefully examined the well into which the nosewheel would be retracted during flight. Once again, he stopped, looked around, and listened. Still nothing to disturb him.
He removed the explosive device he had built and, for the first time, connected the wire from the detonator to the cell phone that would activate it. He opened the clamshell phone and taped the top flap to the bomb, then he stuffed the bomb all the way up into the wheel well and taped it to the shaft of the nosewheel. He examined the installation carefully, then, satisfied that all was well, he switched on the bomb’s cell phone.
Several miles away, in a bar no more than a block from Harry’s Venice Beach house, a screenwriter named Aaron Zell sat on a stool and rattled the ice in his empty glass. “One more, Phil,” he said.
“Coming up,” the bartender replied. He filled a clean glass with ice, then filled it with the twelve-year-old scotch that his customer had been drinking since three A.M. and set it in front of him. “What’re you doing here alone tonight?” Phil asked. “Where’s your girl?”
“We had a fight,” Zell said. “I don’t even know what about.”
“I’ve had fights like that with women,” Phil said, fulfilling his role as sympathetic bartender. “You never know what’ll set ’em off.”
“Too fucking right,” Zell replied. He took his cell phone from his pocket and began to dial a number.
“So you’re going to fix things by waking her up in the middle of the night?” Phil asked.
“She never sleeps after a fight,” Zell said. “We once made a pact that we’d never go to sleep angry with each other.” The numbers on the cell phone were a little blurred, given how much he had drunk, and he got the number wrong. “Call failed,” the on-screen message said.
“Shit, dialed it wrong,” Zell said. He tried picking out the number again, and put the phone to his ear. This time, the phone rang once, stopped. “Now what?” he said.
Harry Gregg stuck his head as far up into the Mustang’s wheel well as he could, switched on his flashlight, and made a final inspection of his bomb. Then he heard something he had not expected. The cell phone that he had just taped to the explosive rang once.
Half a mile away, on the other side of the runway, at Santa Monica Airport, a sleepy security guard sat in his patrol car, smoking a cigar and watching the moon rise over Los Angeles. He was suddenly jolted fully awake by a brilliant flash across the runway, followed a millisecond later by the noise of an explosion.