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.
Fifteen seconds later, when he’d moved far enough to see a clear path to an exit, he reached up to the hearing aid and pressed the on button three times.
Twelve seconds after that, the lights in the arena wavered, dimmed, and then died.