By Order of the President Read online

  In the first of the press pool cars, there was laughter, much of it coming from a bountiful, blond young woman named Bonnie Greer, White House correspondent for the nation’s largest satellite news network. Her laughter, among other amiable responses, was provoked by the irreverent banter coming from the man seated beside her, a celebrated news magazine correspondent with whom she had slept on past campaign trips. When the ceremonies were concluded and the president safely within the secure confines of the Camp David compound, they planned to meet for dinner and renew the relationship. In the car with them was a middle-aged newspaper columnist who had once gotten very drunk at a campaign stop in Philadelphia with Bonnie Greer and kissed her in an elevator in the Barclay Hotel. He was secretly ecstatic to be assigned to the pool with her, and secretly devastated when it became obvious she had forgotten his name.

  In the communications station wagon, the air force colonel with the “football” stared ahead as he always did, bored almost to the point of trance. If he had, as they said, the most important job in the American military, it was also the one with the least to do. Some liberal academic theoreticians had proposed that the key to the “football” and its computer codes be imbedded in the chests of the colonel and his colleagues so that the president would have to cut them open before waging nuclear war, and thus be reminded of the human price that would have to be paid. Thoughts of that, at least, kept the colonel awake.

  In the rear-facing seat of the station wagon, the Secret Service agent with the Uzi cradled in his lap kept looking to the low hills in the west. He was from southwestern Wisconsin, and the distant blue ridges rising from the yellow-brown November meadows reminded him much of home. Having worked without break the last full three weeks of the congressional election campaign that had just ended, he, too, was tired. But he didn’t need gory thoughts of chest incisions to stay alert. It was his sworn and sacred duty. He kept reminding himself of that. Still, the radio voice in his earpiece caught him by surprise. It was the agent in the lead car.

  “Arrive, arrive,” he said. “Arrive, arrive.”

  Before the president’s limousine had pulled to a stop, Special Agent Berger was out of his own car and running to the president’s door.

  The ceremonies surpassed all the hopes and plans of young Greene, C. D. Bragg, and Bushy Ambrose, not to speak of the president. Though a misty haze remained in the air, the rain had ceased. The speaking platform had been carefully placed so that the cemetery grave markers appeared just over Hampton’s shoulder. The array of television cameras before him included those from the big three networks, the largest cable and satellite networks, and two Philadelphia stations. Because of the looming and detracting presence of the huge battlefield observation tower, the best cutaway shot was a view of the battlefield that incorporated the president’s profile. Color material abounded—the somber martial music, old flags, marching men in Union blue, barking cannons and billowing smoke, sad-eyed veterans old and young, small boys in souvenir foraging caps. The audience was made up of equal parts of townspeople, tourists, schoolchildren, and veterans groups. They cheered and applauded at every opportunity and joined with great enthusiasm when Hampton led them in a singing of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The middle-aged newspaper columnist, glad for material wherever it came from, spotted a black veteran with tears in his eyes among the spectators and exclaimed to a colleague that Hampton was at last making inroads with black voters. Bonnie Greer succumbed to tears. They came welling forth in a great flood at the very end, when a golden shaft of dying afternoon sunlight slanted through the lower limbs of the trees to crown the president’s head. From his place near the parked limousines, Jerry Greene thought it almost enough to make him religious.

  Then the glorious moment ended, shattered by the Marine Band’s striking up “Hail to the Chief” once more. Shaking hands, Hampton followed Berger and his pushing agents back to the motorcade, pausing a few final steps from his limousine to wave to the crowd. Then, as Berger snapped open the door, President Hampton turned and spoke a few words to Ambrose.

  The first two shots came in quick snaps, followed by a cacophonous, continuing blare of gunfire. Ambrose, frantic, looked right and left, his peripheral vision catching finally the bursts of gunfire from the observation tower. The president was being pushed into the limousine by Berger, who then stood up and took one or more splashing bullets in his back. Ambrose snatched up Berger’s big revolver with its short, three-inch barrel, and pointlessly began to return fire. Many others were doing the same.

  Ambrose had a more compelling duty, an all-consuming duty. He lunged, pulling Berger’s body off the president, then heaved and shoved Hampton all the way inside the car. Clambering in after him, he slammed shut the heavy door with such surprising force it rattled. Schlessler, dutifully, was behind the wheel, looking more terrified than he had ever been in Vietnam.

  “Get out of here!” Ambrose yelled. “Go, go, go!”

  Schlessler jammed the limousine into drive and, with tires churning angrily through the dirt and gravel, spun onto the road. He hit the switch that simultaneously locked all four doors, and then the one that turned on the shrill, warbling siren. Within twenty seconds, he had the big car up to sixty and climbing.

  In the communications station wagon parked near the speaking platform, the agent in the rear-facing seat had snapped awake from his reverie of the autumn colors of Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Half rising, he brought his Uzi up to bear, not at the tower, but toward the equestrian statue above the cemetery grave markers where he had seen two quick flashes of gunfire almost the instant the shooting had begun, gunfire aimed at the motorcade, at the president. Lacking a clear field of fire, the agent slammed down the station wagon’s tailgate and stepped out on it, rising for a better view. Unfortunately, his foot slipped on the rain-damp surface. More unfortunately, his finger was on the Uzi’s trigger. As he fell, an arc of bullets stuttered out of his weapon and whipped into the press section.

  The CBS White House correspondent, keeping her wits about her enough to begin describing the macabre scene into a microphone, was standing too far to the right to be hit. The NBC reporter was in the line of fire, but he dropped to the ground at the first shots and so escaped a spinning round that would have caught him in the clavicle. Bonnie Greer, still standing, was struck in the breast and then the chin, the latter bullet carving an enormous mouth in her face and erupting from the back of her falling head in a fountain burst of blood. The newspaper columnist, standing just behind her, caught her flung body full in the chest, along with the second bullet to strike her. He died with her lying on top of him, her blood flowing over his face.

  People were dropping, rising, running, screaming, falling. They ran in panicked little mobs, stumbling into one another and shrieking, hurling themselves on and away in all directions, their cries and wails sweeping back and forth as though blown by vicious and capricious winds. In all, eighteen people were struck by bullets, six of them dead. There was now gunfire from every quarter, as Secret Service men blazed away in an increasing concentration at the tower, a blizzard of sparks scattering from the struck metal, the human figure there surely dead but kept in a frantic, spastic dance hanging over the rail by the converging torrents of bullets. There were no more flashes from the statue. Finally, there was no more gunfire toward it.

  One of the White House helicopters circled tightly, madly, over the clearing, the Secret Service man in the right-hand seat recording the savage, surreal ballet below with a videotape camera that was among his equipment. There was a gunport in the Plexiglas and he had an Uzi, but he was fearful of hitting people in the fleeing crowd. Besides, the sniper was more than dead. The streams of bullets had nearly cut his body in two.

  In the president’s limousine, Schlessler kept the accelerator to the floor. “Where?” he said. “Where do we go?”

  “Anywhere!” Ambrose shouted. “Just get the hell out of here. Go south. Yes. South. Go back the way we came!”

 
The speedometer reached seventy-five, then eighty, then eighty-five. A helicopter roared over them, then slipped away to take up moving station in pace with them to their left. In the distance behind them, twin sets of tiny, twirling red lights popped onto the highway and began an accelerating approach. Schlessler kept snatching quick looks back at Ambrose.

  “The president,” he said. “How is the president?”

  Ambrose looked down at the sandy-gray head he cradled so tightly against his lap.

  “The president is fine,” he said. “He’s fine. It’s OK. Everything’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I said he’s fine, damn it! He’s hit. He’s out. He caught it in the side of his neck. We’ve got all hell breaking loose, Pete!”

  “Where do we go? Where’s a hospital?”

  The speedometer was pegged, functionally useless. The red lights behind them were closing rapidly. The helicopter pilot, talking into a microphone, was edging closer and closer to them. Schlessler turned on the security radio and it exploded in voices. Ambrose hugged the president’s head.

  “No hospital,” he said. “We’ll go to Camp David. Get us to Camp David. We don’t know who did this, Pete! We don’t know who we can trust! Camp David will be secure. Get there. Never mind anything else.”

  “It’s twenty-five minutes to Camp David, even if I howl all the way!”

  “Howl. Keep it to the floor. Keep going! We need friends, Pete. We need military.” He lifted his hand from the president’s head to pick up the radio telephone. “I’m going to call in marines from the chopper squadron at Bolling. I’m going to call in a battalion of the Eighty-second Airborne from Bragg. I’m going to call in the Special Function Force.”

  Unlike Ambrose, Schlessler was paying attention to the loud tangle of voices on the Secret Service radio.

  “They want me to pull over!” he said. “They’ve got a paramedic for the president!”

  “Fuck ’em, Pete! The fucking Secret Service let this happen! Keep going! Just get us to Camp David! Go!”

  2

  Vice President Laurence Davis Atherton lay on his bed in his underwear and expensive black Brooks Brothers socks, contending with a rare moment of complete inactivity. He let his mind wander where it would, from the volume of the steady rainfall outside his window to the girls he had dated here in New York—and taken to this hotel—during his years at Princeton. But his thoughts all came back to the White House again, and his wretched role as presidential front man and alter ego. According to the schedule, Henry Hampton was to meet with the Honduran ambassador that night, doubtless to discuss another turn in the war. Atherton, who knew ten times more about Central America than Hampton or anyone in his entourage, was relegated to addressing a Catholic political dinner at the Waldorf. That was one of Atherton’s political advantages for Hampton: Atherton was Catholic. As a congressman, he had had a fairly liberal voting record on domestic issues, if not foreign affairs. The party had taken a thoroughgoing pasting in the fall congressional elections in the Northeast, and Atherton was being sent in to help repair the damage.

  He looked at his watch. Even if they adhered strictly to the schedule, he wouldn’t be home until at least one A.M. He kept the face of the gold Rolex before his eyes, following the resolute sweep of the second hand. He had an impulse to fly back to Washington that very moment.

  He hadn’t slept with his wife for three weeks. He’d not slept with any woman for five days. The following afternoon he was supposed to fly up to Cape Cod and defend the administration there, attempting to make the locals happier about Hampton’s leases for off-shore oil drilling in Nantucket Sound. Atherton’s unsuccessful campaign for the presidency had taken two years, three months. After becoming Henry Hampton’s running mate, he had campaigned hard for their ticket for another four months. He might as well have been on a campaign ever since he took his oath of office as vice president. That fall, he’d performed at more than twenty-five fund-raisers on the East Coast alone.

  He’d come to look forward to the funerals that were the other major function of his office. He could do with one now—one for a dead Italian. A few days in Rome would be a restorative for his nerves; a long afternoon spent pondering the Etruscan wall paintings in the Villa Albani, an evening with dry wine and the pollo alla Nerone at the Cecilia Metella.

  But not that night. The welfare of the Republic, as construed by his party, came first.

  He stretched out his long legs until the muscles were taut. The newspapers had called him the handsomest man ever to run for the presidency. He had small, soft, almost feminine features—the newspapers called them “Ivy League”—but a dark complexion, with dark hair and eyes and an incandescent smile. It was his greatest political attribute. In college, twenty years before, it had kept his bed warm with sweet young things. It still did. His wife had come to hate it.

  Atherton had money, more money than all of Hampton’s Coloradans put together. On his Italian-Mexican mother’s side, his family was one of the oldest and richest in California. His WASP father, a San Francisco entrepreneur who was said to have invented the term “venture capitalist,” had merely trebled the fortune, growing hugely wealthy on everything there was money to be made from in California—cotton farms, ranches, wineries, banking, shipping, and, most particularly, real estate.

  His father had been deeply disappointed when Atherton chose to go east for college instead of to Stanford, and furiously angry when his son abandoned the family interests for a career in politics. He’d been won over only when Atherton eventually persuaded him that a family business that had become an international conglomerate needed one of its own in Congress.

  Atherton was thinking of the presidency even then. It was something his father could never attain, something Atherton could achieve largely on his own. He’d made a good run for it. After he’d won the New York primary, the political writers began calling him the man to beat—for about a month. But the shrewd Hampton once again positioned himself in the exact center of the mainstream, playing the moderate against the backdrop of Atherton’s “liberalism” and the fiery right-wing radicalism of the party’s conservative champion, Senator Davis.

  Atherton’s primary victories and delegate strength had been enough to compel Hampton to enter into a complicated deal at the convention, but now he was free to dump him and was giving every indication he intended to do so. He’d told a number of political writers he was thinking of letting his party choose his ticket mate when he ran for reelection—leaving Atherton with the prospect of becoming a vice presidential has-been at the age of forty-three. Few vice presidents ever became president. None had who’d been dropped from the ticket after a single term.

  He heard the muffled sound of a telephone ringing, and then loud voices. Soon they were quite near, inside the sitting room of his suite just beyond the door. His own telephone began to ring. He’d been scheduled for two hours’ sleep. He looked again at his watch.

  Aside from his wife, Sally, and the president of the United States, only three people were permitted to walk in on Vice President Laurence Atherton unannounced: Richard Shawcross, his chief of staff; Neil Howard, his longtime press secretary; and Mrs. Hildebrand, his chief secretary and dragon lady. It was Howard who entered, not speaking until he had closed the door against the din outside.

  In public, he called his boss “Mr. Vice President.” Alone, it was as it had been when Howard had gone to work for Atherton in his first term in Congress.

  “Larry,” he said, his voice subdued, his eyes stricken with more than his usual hangover. “There’s been an assassination attempt on the president.”

  Atherton abruptly sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He rubbed his eyes. It was raining so hard outside, the windows were opaque with sheets of water. For the longest time, he said nothing.

  “My God.”

  His voice was so quiet he could barely hear it himself. He stood up, feeling absurd in
his underwear. To his amazement, his hands were shaking. He was trembling all over, and suddenly perspiring.

  “Larry?”

  “Is he all right?”

  “That’s not clear,” Howard said. “Bushy Ambrose took him off in the limousine. To Camp David, not a hospital. Agent Berger’s dead. There’s no Secret Service with the president, except Schlessler. There were a lot of people hit.”

  “Camp David? Where did this happen? I thought the president was going to Gettysburg today.”

  “He did. He was hit just after his speech. It’s not very far from there to Camp David.”

  “God.” Atherton stared at the window. He clenched his fists to stop the trembling, and took a deep breath. “It’s finally happened.”

  “Larry.”

  “What?”

  “Larry, we have to get going. We have to get back. At once.”

  Atherton sighed, glancing down at his stocking feet, then over at his suit coat draped on the chair. There were five people who carried the plastic laminated “Gold Codes” card with the number sequences needed to authorize the Pentagon war room to launch a nuclear strike—the president, vice president, secretary of defense, deputy secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Atherton had always worried about Hampton’s. His own was in his wallet, just as though it were another credit card.

  The “Gold Codes” card could only authorize an all-out nuclear assault. For anything more selective, the array of “Emergency War Orders” in the thick briefcase that constantly accompanied the president was needed.