As I retrieved my pistol, then the revolver, I watched Lourdes touch his fingers to his face. “I didn’t do this. I was trying to rescue my family when I was burned. I was a child. ”
Sociopaths perfect multiple personalities as camouflage. Lourdes sounded childlike.
I started to warn “Don’t fall for it, Mr. President-” but Wilson silenced me with a look.
He took a step closer and studied the huge man’s face. It was a patchwork of skin and stitching. Cheeks, jaw, and lips were made up of rectangles and squares of varying colors, flesh sewn together over years by quack surgeons. It was a mosaic of brown skin, white skin, black skin, and pieces that were jaundiced.
The sections had been harvested from people he had murdered, stolen like scalps, then worn as medals. Finding a new face, a whole face, was a recent obsession.
Lourdes’s voice changed-now he was the good man wrongly accused. “You don’t understand. Ford attacked a woman here just a few minutes ago. She ran away screaming. Call the police; they’ll find her. I was just trying to protect her!”
Wilson’s expression changed. It was the wrong thing to say.
I tossed Lourdes’s revolver into the weeds as I pulled the semiautomatic from my belt. “Mr. President, I don’t know how you got here but you should leave now. Sir? Mr. President?”
Wilson brushed past me. He didn’t stop until he was a few feet from Lourdes. The pistol was pointed at the big man’s chest. “On the island, in Nicaragua. Why did you set fire to the plane? You had to know I wasn’t aboard. You murdered seven innocent people. Why? ”
“Fire? I didn’t-”
Wilson pulled the hammer back.
Lourdes made a quick personality change. “But it wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I can tell you who did it, though. Ford-”
Lourdes must have recognized something familiar in Wilson’s eyes-perhaps seen in a mirror-because he began to back away.
“Did you see my wife? Did you speak to my wife?”
Lourdes was nodding. “She was a nice lady. We talked! She got off the plane to stretch her legs and we talked. But the last time I saw her, or any of them people, she was getting back aboard. She turned, gave me a big smile and waved when she heard me yell good-bye. And then I left. And that’s the God’s truth.”
The president snapped, “My wife was deaf, you son of a bitch,” and backhanded him. He still had the fast hands of a Naval Academy boxer. The sound of skin hitting skin cracked like two boards slapping together.
Lourdes went into a rage if someone touched his face. The transformation was chemical and abrupt. His fingers explored the place where he’d been hit, eyes glowing. The monster resurfaced. “The bitch was deaf? Lucky her. Maybe she couldn’t hear herself scream -”
Before he got the word out, Wilson shot him three times. The Russian pistol made a plink-plink-plink sound, no louder than the clicking of a telegraph key, or the refrain of a sonata.
The President stood over Lourdes for a moment, his chest heaving. But then he took a long breath, back in control. He turned to Vue. “Let’s go. I need to change.”
He pulled off the sweatshirt as he started up the hill. There was a white dress shirt beneath, the collar starched. As he handed the pistol to Vue, Vue handed him a gray suit coat from his shoulder pack, then a tie.
My brain was trying to assemble an explanation. “Mr. President? Did someone intercept my son’s e-mail?”
“Your son? What’s your son have to do with this?” Wilson was fitting the tie under his collar.
“How did you know I was here? That Lourdes would be here?”
Wilson said, “I knew because I told you about the Orchid Walk, remember? Lourdes knew because Rivera fed him the information.” Wilson stared up at the tree canopy for a moment, took another deep breath, and released it. “Wray and I used to walk this trail every chance we got. She loved orchids.” He paused as Vue knelt to retrieve something-the badek knife, short but balanced, with its curved blade. It was still on the ground.
Wilson recognized it. “Mind if I take that with me?”
“Of course. But why?”
“I have a speech to give.”
I said, “President Wilson… do you have to go through with this? You killed Lourdes. Isn’t that enough?”
Who was next? Thomas Farrish? Clerics? I hated the idea of him risking it. I nearly used the Panamanian cops with their metal detectors to dissuade him, but then I remembered that former presidents are not searched.
Wilson said, “No, it’s not enough. There are all kinds of ways to destroy men and there’s more at stake than you understand. Did you open the envelope I gave you?”
I nodded.
“Then follow your orders, Dr. Ford.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You can, and you will.”
As he started up the trail, I said, “Kal… are you sure?”
“Absolutely certain.” Wilson took a last glance at the corpse of the man who had killed his wife, then caught my eye. He came as close as he could to smiling. “The shark and the barracuda,” he said. “You make excellent bait.”
27
At 1 p.m., I was sitting high in a tree, far from where Lourdes had died but close enough to hear the master of ceremonies announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome former president of the United States, Mr. Kal Wilson. He will speak in the absence of Ambassador Donna Riggs Johnson, who is unable to attend.”
The military band played the first bars of “Hail to the Chief” as Wilson strode across the stage toward the podium. Through the sniperscope, his face filled the lens. He paused only to salute another unexpected guest, General Juan Rivera. Rivera was wearing a white formal uniform, medals and ribbons clustered on his chest.
Wilson pointedly did not stop to shake hands with the four men seated to the right of the podium. Among them was Thomas Farrish, who controlled the canal through his company IS amp;P, and his mentor, Altif Halibi, the Islamicist cleric who had issued the fatwa against Wilson and offered the million-dollar reward.
The two men wore similar expressions on their faces as Wilson stepped to the microphone-uneasiness and contempt.
In the months that followed, I would listen to the former president’s speech many times, as did people around the world. Shana Waters, broadcasting live, got it all-so did New York. Via satellite. Digitally.
Wilson attached the microphone to his lapel, then spoke for less than five minutes. I expected him to talk about U.S. sanctions against Panama or instigators of the Apocalypse. Instead, he surprised everyone on stage, beginning: “I am not here in an official capacity. When I contacted the White House this morning, I was asked not to speak. Ambassador Johnson has also asked me not to speak. I am going to speak, anyway. But the words and the opinions are mine alone.”
As Wilson waited for his interpreter to translate, I used the telescopic sights to scan the stage, then the audience. Some listened, but gangs of protesters continued to chant slogans in the distance. From my post, forty feet above the ground, high on Ancon Hill, I could see other groups carrying signs, marching, near Balboa High School, and then Albrook Air Base just beyond, where Wilson had once been stationed.
The man really was revisiting places that had been important to him and his wife.
As Wilson resumed speaking, I returned my focus to the stage. I was using a tree branch to support the sniper rifle and I fixed the crosshairs on Wilson’s chest. It was a strange and sickening sensation. Unreal. Like swimming from the light of a coral reef over a drop-off where the ocean plummets into the darkness of abyss.
On the card I had burned Wilson had written: The presidency is sacred, and I will not risk disgracing the office because I have chosen to take a risk. If anyone attempts physical interference or restraint while I am on stage, shoot me. Shoot to kill.
Those were my orders. They came from a man who, I was aware, dreaded the humiliation of the disease consuming him but who also understood the power of symbols. If he allowed himself to be humiliated, the presidency would be debased.