PART 3
THE PHOTOJOURNALIST
THE PHOTOJOURNALIST was the last piece in the complex puzzle. He was the final player. He was working in San Francisco on December 8. Actually, the photojournalist was playing the game in San Francisco. Or rather, he was playing around the outer edges of the game.
Kevin Hawkins sat in a scooped-out, gray plastic chair at Gate 31. He contentedly played chess with himself on a PowerBook. He was winning; he was losing. He enjoyed it either way Hawkins loved games, loved chess, and he was close to being one of the better players in the world. It had been that way ever since he'd been a bright, lonely, underachieving boy in Hudson, New York. At quarter to eleven he got up from his seat to go play another kind of game. This was his favorite game in the world.
He was in San Francisco to kill someone.
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As he walked through the busy airport, Kevin Hawkins snapped off photograph after photograph -- all in his mind.
The prizewinning photojournalist was outfitted in his usual studied-casual manner: tight black cord jeans with a black T-shirt, tribal bracelets from several trips to Zambia, a diamond stud earring. A Lcica camera was looped around his neck on a leather strap decorated with engravings.
The photojournalist slipped into a crowded bathroom in Corridor C. He observed a ragged line of men slouched at the urinals.
They are like pigs at a through, he thought. Like water buffalo, or oxen, taught to stand on their hind legs.
His eye composed the shot and snapped it off. A beauty of order and sly wit. The Boys at the Bowl.
The urinal scene reminded him of a clever pickpocket he had once seen operate in Bangkok. The thief, a keen student of human nature, would snatch wallets while gents were in midstream at a urinal and were reluctant, or unable, to go after him.
The photojournalist couldn't forget the comical image whenever he entered an airport men's room. He rarely forgot any image, actually. His mind was a well-run archive, a rival to Kodak's vast storehouses of pictures in Rochester.
He peered at his own image, a rather haggard and pasty-white face, in one of the cloudy bathroom mirrors. Unimpressive in every way, he couldn't help but think. His eyes were war-weary, an almost washed-out blue. Gazing at his eyes depressed him -- so much so that he sighed involuntarily.
He saw no other mind pictures to take in the mirror. Never, ever, a picture of himself.
He started to cough and couldn't stop. He finally brought up a thick packet of despicable, yellowish paste. His inner core, he thought. His animus was slowly leaking out.
Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred.
He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.
He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth.
Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch.
He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.
He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called "Rock the Casbah." He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The "walking" suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.
The red-on-black digital clock over the airport passageway read 11:40. A Northwest Airlines jet from Tokyo had landed just a few minutes earlier. It had come into Gate 41, right on schedule.
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Somepeople just know how to fly. Wasn't that Northwest's tag line?
The gods were smiling down on him; Kevin Hawkins felt a grim, humorless smile of his own. The gods loved the game, too.
Life and death. It was their game, actually.
He heard the first strains of a noisy commotion coming from the connecting Corridor B. The photojournalist kept walking ahead, until he was past the point where the two wide corridors connected.
That was when he saw the phalanx of bodyguards and wellwishers He saw no other mind pictures to take in the mirror. Never, ever, a picture of himself.
He started to cough and couldn't stop. He finally brought up a thick packet of despicable, yellowish paste. His inner core, he thought. His animus was slowly leaking out.
Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred.
He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.
He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth.
Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch.
He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.
He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called "Rock the Casbah." He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The "walking" suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.
The red-on-black digital clock over the airport passageway read 11:40. A Northwest Airlines jet from Tokyo had landed just a few minutes earlier. It had come into Gate 41, right on schedule.
Somepeople just know how to fly. Wasn't that Northwest's tag line?
The gods were smiling down on him; Kevin Hawkins felt a grim, humorless smile of his own. The gods loved the game, too.
Life and death. It was their game, actually.
He heard the first strains of a noisy commotion coming from the connecting Corridor B. The photojournalist kept walking ahead, until he was past the point where the two wide corridors connected.
That was when he saw the phalanx of bodyguards and wellwishers.
He clicked off a shot in his mind. He got a peek at Mr. Tanaka of the Nipray Corporation. He clicked another shot.
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His adrenaline was flowing like lava from Kilauea in Hawaii, where he'd once shot for Newsweek.
Adrenaline. Nothing like it.
He was addicted to the stuff.
Any second now.
Any second.
Any nanosecond -- which, he knew, is to a second as a second is to about thirty years.
There was no X-marks-the-spot on the terminal floor, but Kevin Hawkins knew this was the place. He had it all visualized, every critical angle was vivid as hell in his mind's eye. All the intersect points were clear to him.
Any second. Life and death.
There might as well have been a big black X painted on the airport floor.
Kevin Hawkins felt like a god.
Here we go. Cameras loaded and at the ready. Lock and load!
Someone going to die here.
WHEN THE SEMIOFFICIAL ENTOURAGE was approximately twelve feet from the busy corridor-crossing, a small bomb detonated.
The explosion sent a cloud of gray-black smoke into Corridor A. Screams pierced the air like whining sirens.
The bomb had been inside a dark blue suitcase left next to the news and magazine kiosk. Kevin Hawkins had placed the innocent-looking suitcase directly in front of a sign that advised travelers to WATCH
YOUR LUGGAGE AT ALL TIMES.
The deafening, booming noise and sudden chaos startled the bodyguards surrounding Mr. Tanaka. It made them erratic, and therefore predictable. Security teams, even the best of them, could be fooled if you forced them to improvise. Travelers and airport personnel were screaming, seeking cover where there was none to be had. Men, women, and children pressed themselves to the floor, faces hard against cold marble.
People haven't seen real panic until they've witnessed it in a large airport, where everyone is already close to the edge of primal fears.
Two of the bodyguards covered the corporate chairman, doing a half-way-decent job, Hawkins saw.
He clicked another mind photo. Stored it in his photo file for future reference.
This was good stuff, valuable as hell. How an excellent security team reacted under stress during an actual attack.
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Then the efficient, if uninspired, bodyguards began to hurriedly move their "protected person" out of danger, out of harm's way. They obviously couldn't go forward into the smoky, bombed-out corridor.
The security team chose to go back- their only choice, the one Kevin Hawkins knew they would make under duress.
They pulled along Mr. Tanaka as if he were a large, ungainly puppet or doll, which he pretty much was.
They almost physically carried the important businessman, holding him under his arms so that both his feet left the floor at times.
Mind photo of that: expensive black tasseled loafers skipping across the marble floor.
The trained bodyguards had one goal: get the "protected person" out of there. The photojournalist let them proceed about thirty feet before he pushed the detonator in the shoulder bag housing his camera gear. It was that easy The best plans were one-button simple. Like a camera. Like a camera suitable for a child.
A second suitcase he had left alongside the corridor near the men's room exploded with double the thunder and lightning of the first, causing more than twice the damage. It was as if an invisible missile had been guided directly into the center of the airport.
The destruction was instantaneous, and it was brutal. Bodies, and even body parts, flew in every imaginable direction. Tanaka didn't survive. Neither did any of the four diligent and highly underpaid bodyguards.
The photojournalist was tightly wedged in amidst the rushing wall of men and women trying to escape toward the airport exits.
His was just another terrified face in the stormy human sea.
And, yes, he could look very terrified. He knew more than any of them what fear looked like. He had photographed uncontrolled fear on so many faces. He often saw those awful looks of terror, those silent screams, in his dreams.
He held back a tight, grim smile as he turned onto Corridor D and headed toward his own plane. He was going to Washington, D.C., that evening and hoped the delays caused by the murder wouldn't be massively long.
The risk had been a necessary one, actually. This had been a rehearsal, the last rehearsal.
Now, on to far more important things. The photojournalist had a very big job in D.C. The code name was easy enough for him to remember.
Jack and Jill.
"THE EIGHTEEN-ACRE ESTATE around the White House includes many diversions: a private movie theater, gym, wine cellar, tennis courts, bowling lanes, rooftop greenhouse, and a golf range on the South Lawn. The house and property are currently assessed at three hundred forty million by the District of Columbia." I could almost do the spiel myself.
I showed my temporary pass, then carefully drove down into the parking garage under the White House.
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overall the White House looked just fine to me.
My head was not so fine. It was uneasy Filled with chaotic thoughts. I had slept only a couple of hours the night before, and that was becoming a pattern. The morning's Washington Post and New York Times lay folded on the car seat beside me.
The Post headline asked Who's NEXT FOR JACK AND JILL? It seemed like a question directed right at me. who's NEXT?
I thought about a possible attempt on the life of President Thomas Byrnes, as I walked from the small parking garage to the elevator. A lot of people were extremely high on the President and his programs.
Americans had clamored for change for a long time, and President Byrnes was delivering it in large doses. Of course, what most people want "change" to mean is more money in their pockets, instantly, without any sacrifice on their part.
So who might be angry and crazed enough at the President to want him murdered? I knew that was why I was at the White House. I was here to conduct a homicide investigation. In the White House. A search for a couple of killers who could be planning to murder the President.
I met Don Hamerman in the West Wing Entrance Hall. He was still acting extremely high strung and anxious, but that seemed to be his persona. It also fit the times. The chief of staff and I talked for a few minutes in the hallway He went out of his way to tell me that I had been handpicked for the investigation because of my expertise with high-profile killers, especially psychopaths.
He seemed to know an awful lot about me. As he talked, I imagined that he'd probably gotten the coveted brownnoser award in his senior year at Yale or Harvard, where he had also learned to talk with a whiny, upper-class drawl.
I had absolutely no idea what to expect that morning.
Hamerman said he was going to line up some "interviews" for me. I sensed some of his frustration in trying to organize an investigation like this inside the White House. A murder investigation.
He left me alone inside the Map Room on the ground floor.
I paced around the famous room, absently checking out the' elaborately carved Chippendale furniture, an oil portrait of Ben Franklin, a landscape painting titled Tending Cows and Sheep. I already had a busy day ahead. I had appointments set up at the city morgue and with Benjamin Levitsky, the number two at the FBI's intelligence unit.
I continued to be frustrated about the Truth School child murders.
For the moment, that was Sampson's concern. Sampson's and our part-time posse of detectives'. But I couldn't keep it off my mind.
Suddenly, someone entered the Map Room along with the national security advisor. I was taken by surprise. I was blown away, actually. No words could possibly describe the feeling.
Don Hamerman stiffly announced, "President Byrnes will see you now."
"GOOD MORNING. Is it Doctor or Detective Cross?" President Thomas Byrnes asked me.
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I had a sneaking suspicion that Dr. Cross would serve me much better at the White House. Like Dr.
Bunche, Dr. Kissinger, or even Doc Savage. "I guess that I prefer Alex," I said to him.
The President's face lit up in a broad smile, and it was the same charismatic one I had seen many times on television and on the front pages of newspapers.
"And I prefer Tom," the President said. He extended his hand and the two of us shook off our surnames.
His grip was firm and steady. He held eye contact with me for several seconds.
The President of the United States managed to sound both cordial and appropriately serious at the same time. He was about six feet tall, and he was trim and fit at fifty. His hair was light brown, trimmed with silver-gray He looked a little like a fighter pilot. His eyes were very sensitive and warm. He was already known as our most personable president in many years, and also our most dynamic.
I had read and heard a lot about the man I was meeting for the first time. He had been the successful and much-admired head of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit before he decided to go for an even higher executive office. He had run for the presidency as an Independent, and true to the polls of the past few years, the people had voted for fresh, independent thinking -- or maybe they were just voting against the Republican and Democratic Parties, as some pundits believed. So far, he had shown himself to be a contemporary thinker, but a bit contrarian, a genuine maverick in high office. As an independent mover and shaker, the President had made few friends in Washington, but lots of enemies.
"The director of the FBI highly recommended you," he said.
"I think Stephen Bowen's a pretty good man. What do you think?
Any opinion of him?"
"I agree with you. The Bureau has changed a lot in the past couple of years under Bowen. We work well with them now. That didn't used to be the case."
The President nodded. "Is this a real threat, Alex, or are we just taking wise precautions?" he asked me.
It was a tough, blunt question. I also thought it was the right question to ask.
"I think the concern of the Secret Service is definitely a wise precaution," I said. "The coincidence of the names Jack and Jill being the same as your code names with the Secret Service, that's very disturbing. So is the killers' pattern of going after famous people here in Washington."
"I guess I fit that damn description. Sad but true," President Byrnes said and frowned. I had read that he was an intensely private man and down-to-earth as well. He seemed that way to me. Midwestern in the best sense. I guess what surprised me the most was the warmth that came from the man.
"As you have admitted yourself, you're 'shaking up the toy box." You've already disturbed a lot of people."
"Stay tuned, there are a lot more major disturbances to come.
This government badly needs to be reengineered. It was designed for life in the eighteen hundreds. Alex, I'm going to cooperate in any way I can with the police investigation. I don't want anyone else to be hurt, let alone die. I've certainly thought about it, but I'm not ready to die yet. I think Sally and I are decent Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/ab*.html
people. I hope you'll feel that way the more you're around us. We're far from perfect, but we are decent.
We're trying to do the right thing."
I was already feeling that way about the President. He had quickly struck a good chord with me. At the same time, I wondered how much of what he'd said I could believe. He was, after all, a politician. The best in the land.
"Every year, several people try to break into the White House, Alex. One man succeeded by tagging onto the end of the marine marching band. Quite a few have tried to ram the front gates with cars. In ninety-four, Frank Eugene Corder flew a single-engine Cessna in here."
"But so far, nothing like this," I said.
The President asked the real question on his mind. "What's your bottom line on Jack and Jill?"
"No bottom line yet. Maybe a morning line," I told him.
"I disagree with the FBI. I don't see them as pattern killers.
They're highly organized, but the pattern seems artificial to me.
I'll bet they're both attractive, white, with well above normal IQ. They have to be articulate and persuasive to get into the places that they did. They want to accomplish something even more spectacular. What they've done so far is only groundwork.
They enjoy the power of manipulating both us and the media.
That's what I have so far. It's what I'm prepared to talk about, anyway."
The President nodded solemnly. "I have a good feeling about you, Alex," he said. "I'm glad we met for a couple of minutes here. I was told that you have two children," he said. He reached into his jacket and handed me a presidential tie clasp and a pin especially designed for kids. "Keepsakes are important, I think.
You see, I believe in tradition as well as in change."
President Byrnes shook my hand again, looked me directly in the eye for a moment, and then left the room.
I understood that I had just been welcomed to the team, and the sole purpose of the team was to protect the President's life. I found that I was powerfully motivated to do just that. I looked down at the tie clasp and pin for Damon and Jannie and was strangely moved.
"SO DID YOU get to meet the royal couple yet?" Nana Mama asked when I entered her kitchen about four that afternoon.
She was making something in a big gray stewpot that smelled like the proverbial ambrosia. It was white bean soup, one of my favorites. Rosie the cat was prowling around on the counters, purring contentedly Rosie in the kitchen.
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Post. A book of her word jumbles was also out in view. So was No Stone Unturned -- The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn. Complicated woman, my grandmother.
"Did I meet who?" I pretended not to understand her crystal-.
clear and very pointed question to me. I was playing the game that the two of us have had going for many years, and probably will until death do us part somehow, sometime, someway.
"Meet whom, Dr. Cross. The President and Mrs. President, of course. The well-to-do white folks who live in the White House, looking down on the rest of us. Tom and Sally up in Camelot for the nineties."
I smiled at her usual high-spirited and occasionally bittersweet banter. I looked in the fridgc. "I didn't come home for the third and fourth degree, you know. I'm going to make a sandwich from this brisket. It looks moist and tender. Or are looks deceiving?"
"Of course they are, but this brisket is moist and you could cut it with a soup spoon. Seems as if they work very short hours over at the White House, considering all that they have to do.
Somehow, I suspected as much. But I could never prove it until now. So who did you meet?"
I couldn't resist. I had been going to tell her this much anyway.
"I met and talked with the President this morning."
"You met Tom?"
Nana pretended to take a punch in the manner of the heavyweight boxer George Foreman. She did a stumbling stutter-step back from the counter. She even cracked a tiny smile. "Well, tell me all about Tom, for heaven's sake. And Sally. Does Sally wear a black pillbox hat inside the White House in the daytime?"
"I think that was Jacqueline Kennedy. Actually, I liked President Byrnes," I said as I commenced making a thick brisket sandwich on fresh rye with bib lettuce, tomatoes, and a dab of mayonnaise, lots of pepper, a whisk of salt.
"You would. You like everybody unless they kill somebody," Nana said as she began to slice up some more tomatoes. "Now that you've met Mr. President, you can get back on the Sojourner Truth School case. That's very important to the people in this house. The Gray House. No black people care very much about the President and his problems anymore. Nor should they."
"Is that a fact, Mrs. Farrakhan?" I said as I bit into my sandwich.
Delicious, as promised. Cut it with a soup spoon, melts in the mouth.
"Should be a fact, if it isn't. It's close to a fact, anyway. I'll admit that it's a sad state of affairs, but it's the sad state we all live in. Don't you agree? You must."
"You ever hear of mellowing with age?" I asked her. "Your brisket is terrific, by the way."
"You ever hear of getting better, not getting older? You ever hear of taking care of one's own kind? You ever hear about teeny-tiny, darling black children being murdered in our neighborhood, Alex, and Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/ab*.html
nobody doing enough to make it stop? Of course the brisket is excellent. You see, I am getting better."
I reached into my trouser pocket and took out the clasp and pin that the President had given me. "The President knew I had two children. He gave me these keepsakes for them." I handed them over to Nana.
She took them, and for once in her life, she was speechless.
"Tell them that these are from Tom and that he's a fine man trying to do the right thing."
I finished half of my overstuffed sandwich and took the remaining half With me out of the kitchen. If you can't stand the heat and all that. "Thanks for the delicious sandwich, and the advice. In that order."
"Where are you going now?" Nana called after me. She was winding up again. "We were talking about an important matter.
Genocide against black people right here in Washington, our nation's capital. They don't care what happens in these neighborhoods, Alex. They is them, and them is white, and you're collaborating with the enemy."
"Actually, I'm going out to put in a few hours on the Truth School murder case," I called back as I continued toward the front door, and blessed escape from the tirade. I couldn't see Nana Mama anymore, but I could hear her voice trailing behind me like a banshee cry, or maybe the caw of a field crow.
"Alex has finally found his senses!" she exclaimed in a loud, shrill voice. "There's hope after all. There's hope. Oh, thank you, Black Lord in Heaven."
The old goat can still get my goat, and I love her for it. I just don't want to listen to her annoying rap sometimes.
I beeped the car horn of my old Porsche on the way out of the driveway. It's our signal that everything is all right between us. From inside the house, I heard Nana call out: "Beep back at you!"
I WAS BACK on the mean streets of inner Washington, the underside of the capital. I was a homicide detective again. I loved it with a strange passion, but there were times when I hated it with all my heart.
We were doing all that could humanly be done on both cases.
I had set up surveillance on the Truth School during the day and also had day and night surveillance on Shanelie Green's gravesite.
Often psycho killers showed up at victims' graves. They were ghouls, after all.
The circus was definitely in town.
Two of them.
Two completely different kinds of murder pattern. I had never seen anything like it, nothing even close to this chaos.
I didn't need Nana Mama to remind me that I wanted to be out on the street right now. As she had said, Someone is killing our children.
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I was certain that the unspeakable monster was going to kill again. In contrast to Jack and Jill, there was rage and passion in his work. There was a raw, scary craziness, the kind I could almost taste. The killer's probable amateur status wasn't reassuring, either.
Think like the killer. Walk in the killer's shoes, I reminded myself.
laborating with the enemy."