Well, one thing was certain — the FBI and police were going to be thoroughly confused. That, Charon reflected, was more than he had hoped for.
It was also an opportunity.
He drained the cup and poured himself another while he thought about it. After a couple of sips he went to the window and stood looking down into the street. Not many people about this morning. A few empty parking places, though. Another gray day.
The FBI would be around before very long, either FBI or local police. They would be looking for terrorists and assassins, so they would be knocking on doors and asking questions. Nothing to fear there.
His mind went back to the Capitol. He remembered the office building just east of the Supreme Court. What was it, five or six hundred yards over to the Capitol?
Could he make a shot at that distance? Well, with the best of the rifles he had fired three shots into a one-inch group at a hundred yards, so theoretically at five hundred yards a perfect shot should hit within a circle five inches in diameter. Yet the impact point would be about fifty-six inches below the point of aim because the bullet would be dropping, affected by gravity. If he made a perfect shot. With no wind.
And the distance was precisely five hundred yards.
With the wind blowing and a fifty-yard error in his estimate of the distance, all bets were off.
Henry Charon didn’t have to review the ballistics — he knew them cold. And he knew just how extraordinarily difficult it would be to hit a man-sized target at 500 yards, especially since the target man would not be cooperating by holding absolutely still. It would be a real challenge.
He stood watching the passersby below and the bare branches being stirred by the breeze and tried to remember what the field of view looked like from the top of the office building.
He went back to the little living room and stood with the cup in his hand watching the television. The Vice-President was on his way to the Capitol, the announcer said. He would be there shortly. Stay tuned.
His mind made up, Charon snapped off the television. He turned off the coffeepot and the lights, grabbed his coat, and locked the door behind him.
“How many dead?” Dan Quayle asked the special agent who had greeted them and escorted them through the police lines into the building as reporters shouted questions and the cameras rolled. Quayle had ignored them.
“Sixty-one, sir. A couple more are in real bad shape and will probably die. Forty-three wounded.”
“Any idea who these people were?”
“Colombians, sir,” the agent said. “On a suicide mission. One’s still alive, barely, and he did some talking before he passed out from internal bleeding and shock. An agent who speaks Spanish took down what he could. Apparently these people were smuggled into the country this past weekend and told their target this morning.”
“Paid to commit suicide?” Dorfman asked in disbelief.
“Yes, sir. Fifty thousand before they left, and fifty more to the widow afterward.”
That stunned the politicians, who walked along in silence. The agent led them to a hearing room where seventeen men and women and the man who had killed them lay as they had fallen. The wounded had been removed, but photographers and lab men were busy. They didn’t look up at the gawking politicos or the Secret Service agents who stood with pistols in their hands.
Quayle just stood rooted with his hands in his pockets, looking right and left. Spent brass casings lay scattered about, bullet holes here and there, blood all over, bodies contorted and twisted.
“Why?” Quayle asked.
“Sir?”
“Why in hell would anybody take money to commit murder and be killed doing it?”
“Well, this one guy — the one that’s still alive — he said he has a wife and eight kids in Colombia. He used to have ten kids but two died because he couldn’t feed them anything but corn and rice and he couldn’t afford a doctor when they got sick. They live in a shack without running water. He had no job and no prospect of ever getting one. So when he got offered this money, he looked at the kids and figured it was the only way they were ever going to have a chance, so he took it. So he said, anyway.”
“Sixty-one people murdered,” Quayle muttered so softly Dorfman had to take a step closer to catch it. “No, that’s too nice a word. Butchered. Slaughtered. Exterminated.”
The agent led them from the room and down the hall toward the cafeteria. They passed several bodies in the corridors. Dorfman tried not to look at the faces, but Quayle did. He bent over each one for a second or two, then straightened and walked on. His hands stayed in his coat pockets and his shoulders sagged.
They were standing in the cafeteria when Gideon Cohen and General Land and several other military officers joined them. One of the officers was a navy captain, “Grafton” his name tag said, who took it all in, his face expressionless.
“This guy who’s still alive — he said he thinks there were other groups smuggled in.”
“How did they get here?”
“By airliner. They were met at the airport and taken somewhere and given food and weapons. This morning they were driven here in a van and dropped.”
“Where are the others? What are their targets?” Dorfman growled.
“He doesn’t know.”
Attorney General Gideon Cohen spoke for the first time. “Aldana’s lawyer says Aldana told him yesterday afternoon that he was responsible for the attempt on the President’s life. That’s confidential, of course.”
“Bastard’s lying,” Dorfman said forcefully.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Cohen rumbled. “Our people in Colombia are hearing rumors, too many rumors.”
Surrounded by Secret Service agents the group kept walking. “Let’s find a place to talk,” Quayle said. The Secret Service led them to an empty committee room — all the committee rooms were empty just now — checked it out, then stood guard outside the door.
Quayle dropped into a chair on the aisle. The others selected chairs nearby. As they were doing so the director of the FBI and another man came in.
“Did these people shoot down the President’s helicopter?” Vice-President Quayle asked to get the ball rolling.
“You mean these very men killed here?” the FBI agent who had been escorting them asked. “The survivor denied it, for whatever that’s worth.”
The director of the FBI nodded at the agent who spoke. “You may go back to your duties.”
The man rose, muttered, “Gentlemen,” and left.
The director addressed Quayle. “Mr. Vice-President, I’ve brought with me today Special Agent Thomas Hooper. He’s in charge of our antidrug task force and he’s been working with the team that’s looking for the people who shot down the President’s helicopter. Before we came in we spent five minutes talking with the senior people who are working on this …” He gestured vaguely at the room around him. “Hooper, tell them what you told me.”
Tom Hooper glanced around at the faces, some of which were looking his way, some averted. “What we’ve got here is a classic narco-terrorist strike. It was committed by people with a minimum of training, people you would classify as apolitical amateurs. It didn’t really matter how many people were killed or wounded here — the publicity the event would get would be precisely the same. This atrocity was a political act.
“The attempted assassination of the President was very different in several significant ways. That was meticulously planned, carefully prepared, all to take advantage of an opportunity if one presented itself. In other words, a professional assassin.”
“Just one?” someone asked.
“Probably,” Hooper replied. “We’ve found the spot where the missiles were fired — a little picnic area beside the Potomac — and it appears that only one man spent the afternoon there. His tracks are all over. He wore some kind of rubber boots, but he appears to be of medium height, weight about one hundred sixty or so. Those are just tentative conclusions, of course.”