The leader, who happened to be a brigadier general, didn’t much enjoy being yelled at by a snip of a girl, but he raised his hand like a schoolboy asking permission to go pee.
“Could you stand just a bit forward of the others, sir?” Heather called, the sir mollifying him a bit, but not entirely.
Behind the podium, Ralph Dickens and his assistant were helping the television people set up their microphones. A technician from ABC accidentally banged into the CNN mike. Ralph caught it before it fell over completely, but he hit his elbow on the goddamn shield in the process. Muttering under his breath, he righted the microphone and scowled at the clumsy technician. Not three feet away, Heather was bawling into the bullhorn again. On such a nice day, too.
Ralph yawned and looked at his watch.
Ten forty-seven.
In about an hour and a half, it’d all be over and done with.
Sun dazzled the water, glinting like diamonds in the spray kicked back by the police launch. Against his better judgment, Hogan had allowed the Turner kid to accompany them. He would probably get all kinds of flak about this from the Chief of Detectives, but better to get the damn girl out to the island than to argue about it all morning with someone who could hardly speak the English language right.
“He took me out there, you know,” Elita said, shouting over the roar of the twin engines.
“Who did? What do you mean?” Hogan shouted back.
“Sonny. We went out there last Saturday.”
“What’d you do?”
“Walked around, took pictures.”
She was thinking of what they’d done afterward. In her mother’s apartment. In her mother’s white lingerie and red shoes. How could she have been so utterly stupid? A wave of guilt and shame washed over her, almost overwhelming her grief, followed instantly by a rage so fierce it virtually blinded her. In that moment, the spray hitting her face as she stood on the open sunwashed deck with Geoffrey and the police lieutenant, she wanted nothing more than to strike back at Sonny Hemkar, cut out his heart, eat his heart, hurt him, kill him, kill him.
Geoffrey saw the look on her face.
And shuddered.
In the darkness of the supply closet, the Walkman clipped to his belt, the earpiece in his ear, Sonny listened to the news while he knotted his tie, slipping the silk under the collar of the white shirt, looping it under and over, smoothing it on his chest. The black fedora was sitting on top of the camera bag. He moved it to the floor and flicked on the small penlight, but only for an instant, time enough to locate the FBI tag McDermott had fashioned for him.
He clipped the tag to his lapel, took the walkie-talkie from the bag, and slipped it into the right-hand pocket of the suit jacket. He had earlier removed the bulb from the basting tool; he now slipped the plastic tube into the left-hand pocket of the jacket, together with the two extra magazines for the pistol. Picking up the gun with its attached silencer, he tucked it into his waistband on the left-hand side of his body, easily accessible for a cross-body draw.
He had not touched the bottle of sarin since he’d placed it in the camera bag yesterday afternoon.
He turned on the penlight again.
He knew this was a risk; light might spill into the entrance alcove from the crack under the closet door. But the greater danger was to work with the bottle in the dark, risking a spill that would certainly kill him. Cautiously, his hand shaking, he peeled off the transparent tape around the nozzle, relieved when he saw that the nozzle was still turned to the OFF position. He would not turn it to the STREAM position until he was in place on the level above the President.
On the radio, a news commentator was saying that the Presidential jet had just landed at La Guardia airport.
Dobbs listened while the girl told her story.
Good-looking kid, he was wondering how she’d managed to get mixed up with an assassin. No question now about what Sonny Boy was or what he planned to do. Green scimitar tattoo on his chest, he was one of Quaddafi’s chosen. Took her here to the island last Saturday, innocent boy and girl on a day trip, while meanwhile he’s shooting pictures of everything in sight, planning his attack. He’d be here again today, no question about that, either. If he could get past them. Dobbs couldn’t see how. He looked at the pencil drawing again.
“What color are his eyes?” he asked.
“A sort of greyish-green,” Elita said.
Not a bad-looking man, Dobbs thought, but who said a killer had to be? The guy who’d chopped up all those people in Milwaukee was handsome as hell.
“How tall is he?” Nichols asked.
Didn’t like feeling left out, Dobbs thought. If they nailed this guy, the CIA would take all the credit, no question about that, either.
“Around six feet?” the girl said. “More or less.”
Dobbs hoped he wouldn’t get physical.
“Ever take you to his apartment?” Nichols asked.
“No,” she said.
“Then you wouldn’t have seen a weapon...”
“No.”
“Anything he might use as...”
“No.”
Nichols looked out over the water. Wondering if Sonny Boy planned to come in that way, Dobbs guessed. The Coast Guard boat was still maneuvering out there. Nichols nodded, still wondering. His walkie-talkie went off. He took it from his belt and put it to his ear.
“Nichols,” he said, and listened. “Yeah,” he said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Got it, thank you.” He tossed back his jacket, hooked the walkie-talkie to his belt again.
“The chopper just left La Guardia,” he said.
Dobbs looked at his watch.
Twenty-five to twelve.
The girl seemed nervous.
He didn’t know what to say to her, so he just let it go.
Sonny waited.
The radio was telling him nothing new. Local news, information about tonight’s fireworks displays, traffic and weather conditions, but nothing further about Bush. His speech was scheduled to begin at twelve noon. Was there some problem?
Alvin Rhodes was beginning to smell.
Effluvial odors emanated from his distending organs.
Sonny tried not to breathe too deeply.
His digital watch read eleven thirty-seven.
The chopper came in over the water at a quarter to twelve, zooming out of the sun like an attack machine, the Presidential Seal painted on each of its sides, its big blades whirring furiously. From where Dobbs stood with the others, he could see it circling in toward the flagpole on the other end of the island. Hovering on the air now, virtually motionless, and then sinking lower and lower, below the treeline and out of sight.
He could not see the President when he disembarked.
He knew he would be surrounded by his own Secret Service people from Washington, who would rush him here to the base of the statue.
Sonny flipped through the dial.
One of the news announcers was saying that the president’s speech would begin as scheduled in ten minutes.
He took this to mean that Bush was already on the island.
He was handsomer in person than he appeared on television, a tall, rangy man with the look of an outdoorsman, sporting the suntan he had acquired on his recent vacation to Kennebunkport, smiling affably as he approached Heather, his hand outstretched.
“’Morning, Mr. President,” she said.
“’Morning, Heather,” he said.
Knack of his. Called everyone by his or her first name, never forgot a face or the name that went with it.
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
“Gorgeous, Mr. President.”
“They look terrific up there,” Bush said, indicating with a wave of his hand the Marine Corps Band lined up on the level above. “Everything looks terrific.”