He got nods and smiles for the next five minutes as he circled the arena, taking note of all law enforcement before heading inside. Cruz entered from the rear, farthest from a stage set in a rainbow of bunting.
Many of the seats off the floor were already taken. To get on the floor, Cruz showed badges identifying him as the Reverend Nicholas Flint of the First Baptist Church of Nebraska, part of a church group that included a choir from Omaha that was set to sing as part of the congress’s opening ceremony.
He showed his badges three more times, moving past television cameras, and soon found himself at the back of a throng of people, young and old, who were pressed up against barriers set well back from the stage. His glasses kept lightening in tint until they showed just a hint of gray.
Cruz reached up to adjust his collar and withdrew a sliver of translucent graphite as sharp as a sewing needle.
The assassin fitted it between his right index and middle finger, waited until more people filled in tightly behind him, then used it to prick the rear end of a young woman in front of him. She yelped, grabbed her butt, and spun around. Cruz looked at her through the glasses.
“I just got bit too,” he said. “Someone told me the place is infested.”
That made her frown. “Really?”
“Just heard it,” he said. “Can I get by? I’m supposed to get pictures of the choir. They’re in my group.”
She brightened. “Sure, Reverend.”
“Bless you, child,” he said, and he slipped past her.
Forty minutes later, the arena was packed, and Cruz was where he needed to be, one row of bodies off the front and to the far right of the stage behind a contingent of teenagers rallying around a sign that said FLORIDA. There were signs from fifty states and one hundred countries all over the arena.
Cruz kept looking around in wonder and awe, as if he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to be there. The stage began to crowd with dignitaries. The small church choir from Kansas filled the risers to stage left, almost directly in front of the assassin.
At 9:57 a.m., a silver-haired woman with a big smile on her face walked to the dais and tapped the microphone.
“Welcome to this year’s meeting of the World Youth Congress!” she cried, and the arena erupted in applause.
Cruz clapped his approval, keeping his eyes fixed on her, not glancing at any of the eight burly men wearing suits and earbuds with their backs to the stage who were scanning the audience.
When the clapping died down, the woman said, “My good young friends, I am Nancy Farrell, chairman of this year’s congress. Today, I have the distinct honor of introducing a new friend who will open your congress with an exciting announcement. Young ladies and gentlemen of the world and of the future, it is with great pleasure that I introduce the president of the United States, James B. Hobbs.”
Chapter 56
The U.S. marine corps band came onto the stage playing “Hail to the Chief.”
Secret Service agents came out from behind curtains at floor level, followed by President Hobbs, in office now less than two weeks. The president strode out, waving and smiling the way any good politician will when the crowd is sure to be on his side.
Tall, silver-haired, and lanky, Hobbs had grown up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. He had weathered good looks and a reputation in the U.S. Senate as a man of integrity and geniality, traits that had attracted the late president Catherine Grant.
On paper, you couldn’t ask for a better guy to lead the country, Cruz thought.
But as the president began to work the barricade, shaking hands with kids and adults, Cruz could see Hobbs was showing signs of being uncomfortable with the job, or at least with the way the Secret Service men moved in a tight protective phalanx around him on three sides.
Two tall agents walked behind Hobbs. Each of them had one hand resting gently on the president’s back and the other close to his weapon. Two more agents moved laterally off his left shoulder. The one closest to Cruz was scanning ahead.
Cruz forced himself not to look at the lead agent but beyond him and his partner to the president. The assassin grinned broadly as if one of the higher points of his life was coming his way.
He reached up to his hearing aid, pressed on it for ten seconds, then turned it off. He watched the nearest television camera, to his right about ninety feet. It appeared to be trained on the president. The green light on the front of the camera flickered and died. The cameraman’s head popped up, his expression puzzled.
Cruz looked around and saw the other camera operators doing the same.
He stood up on his toes and made a show of clapping as Hobbs and his entourage came closer. He glanced around, caught young person after young person’s excited eyes, and nodded to them, mouthing, Isn’t this incredible?
Still clapping, still up on his toes and delighted, Cruz saw how the lead agent was already peering past him and how the agent closest to the president was signaling when each person could reach out to shake Hobbs’s hand. Only then did the assassin glance beyond the president to the ramrod-straight man following the entourage.
Military bearing. Tight haircut. Gray business suit.
Those things instantly registered in Cruz’s mind before his happy attention snapped back to Hobbs, now less than six feet away, so close the assassin could hear him saying, “So glad to meet you. Wonderful. Wonderful to see you, young ladies.”
The three teens directly in front of him pressed forward. Cruz did too, saw the lead agent putting his hand on the arms of the kids. Still clapping, Cruz smiled, looked at the Secret Service agent, and raised his brows quizzically.
The agent held up a finger. Cruz nodded, glanced at Hobbs shaking the hand of a fifteen-year-old girl and then posing for a selfie with a pimply boy before moving directly in front of him.
The kids that separated them shook the president’s hands before the leader of the free world looked up and directly into his killer’s eyes. Cruz gave him nothing but heartfelt admiration as he reached over the heads of the kids and extended his hand.
Hobbs grabbed it, shook it, and winked at him. As the president released his grip, the assassin snapped his hand back and felt the thud of the air gun going off, felt it vibrating through his retreating forearm, no noise at all in that din.
The 90-grain graphite bullet hit the president square in the chest. Hobbs lurched backward, wild-eyed, not understanding what had happened as he collapsed into the arms of the bodyguards behind him.
Cruz reacted with immediate shock, drawing his head and upper body back with an exaggerated gape of disbelief as the agents grabbed the president and lowered him to the floor. Kids began to scream.
Hobbs’s assassin watched, mouth wide in puzzlement. He swung his attention to his left, hands to his head as if he wasn’t sure of what he’d seen. The crowd around him surged back as more agents and a doctor rushed to the stricken president.
Cruz saw the man with the military bearing, tight haircut, and business suit eight feet away, looking scared and incredulous. He was standing sidelong to the assassin, offering a narrow profile, not the broadside shot Cruz wanted, but Cruz believed in taking the first solid opportunity he had at a target.
He raised his left hand, snapped his wrist back. Again, he felt the thud but heard no report of it. The man twisted at the graphite bullet’s impact, spiraling, tripping, and sprawling onto the concrete floor.
People near him started yelling and ducking down. More in the crowd were trying to get away from the stage. Cruz went with them.
Then medics rushed in. As quickly as the hysteria had built, it lulled and died in the arena. All the assassin could hear was children crying as he kept slowly retreating, trying to act in fear and bewildered disbelief.