I had taken off from Andrews sitting in the rear seat of an air force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet, as stunning and exhilarating an experience as I’ve ever had.
Mahoney had gone in a second one. With U.S. airspace empty, the pilots were free to fly near the Strike Eagles’ blistering top-end speed of more than eighteen hundred miles an hour. We covered the 1,624 miles to an air force base west of San Antonio in less than fifty-five minutes.
As the planes were coming in for a landing, Director Sanford told Mahoney that Kasimov had not arrived in London. Ned relayed the information to me over my headset.
“Where’d he go?” I asked.
“Toward North Africa,” Mahoney said. “Before he disappeared off the radar.”
“No,” I said as we touched down.
“Yup. His jet was picked up crossing Majorcan airspace, and then nothing.”
Was this an act of war? With Kasimov on the inside, choreographing the attacks from his suite at the Mandarin Oriental?
A Texas National Guard Apache helicopter flew us thirty-five minutes southwest of the air base over dry, broken country pocked with scrub brush to the remote Garand Ranch, reputed to be one of the Lone Star State’s finest quail-hunting lodges.
We flew in over harvested agricultural fields. Deer scattered and bounded from the stubble as we dropped in altitude and landed near a barn and a hacienda-style lodge.
A small contingent of local law enforcement waited for us along with an FBI forensics crew that had just arrived on the scene from the Dallas office. To my surprise, I recognized someone in the crowd right away: U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee looked shell-shocked when I walked up and shook his hand.
“What are you doing here, Lieutenant?”
Lee shook his head in disbelief. “Bill Johnston, Speaker Guilford’s usual body man, got sick, and I got assigned to come down and watch Guilford and the secretary of state take a much-needed break and hunt quail. First Betsy Walker and now Guilford, both on my watch? I…it makes me look—”
“Dr. Cross?”
I looked to Terrance Crown, the U.S. Diplomatic Service agent who’d been assigned to protect secretary of state Aaron Deeds and his wife, Eliza.
“I’m glad you’re here, sir,” Crown said, shaken. “I’ve heard you’re the best, and we need the best right now.”
Eldon Pritchard, a lean man in his forties with a waxed mustache who was wearing a white cowboy hat, boots, jeans, and the badge of a Texas Ranger, was also there, but he seemed thoroughly unimpressed by our presence.
They took us out on the terrace, where the bodies of the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state were still lying where they’d fallen, covered with clear plastic sheeting. It was warm in the sunshine, but they were in shade. Eliza Deeds, the secretary of state’s wife, had been medevaced to a hospital in Dallas hours ago.
“We haven’t touched a thing,” Lieutenant Lee said. “I insisted. And the staff is waiting to talk.”
“Take us through it,” Mahoney said.
We heard about breakfasts on the terrace in the morning sun, a Garand Ranch tradition even in winter. We heard about soft, distant thuds, and how the Speaker had been hit first and the secretary of state wounded and then killed with another shot.
Mahoney said, “And that was at roughly what time?”
Both Lieutenant Lee and Agent Crown agreed it was 7:28 a.m. local time when the shooting ended, plus or minus thirty seconds.
“Why did it take so long for word to reach Washington?” I asked.
Lee said, “This whole area is a dead zone as far as cell service. They usually have satellite coverage, but it was out too. We had to drive twenty miles on dirt roads to call it in.”
Mahoney said, “Which gave the other assassins back east time to act.”
“The coordination in this is breathtaking,” I said.
“Who knew the Speaker was coming?” Mahoney said. “And the secretary of state?”
Lee said Guilford’s wife knew about the trip, of course, and his two sons, his chief of staff, and his personal secretary. Other than that small circle, the Speaker tended to keep his hunting life quiet.
Likewise, Secretary of State Deeds had told few people that he and his wife were going off for a few days with the Speaker of the House. But Deeds’s bodyguard did say the secretary’s top tier of foreign policy advisers all knew he would be at the ranch.
“They were in a tizzy, afraid there would be no cell service,” Crown said. “I guess they were right.”
I said, “We’ll come back to that. Do we know where the shots came from?”
One of the FBI forensics techs said, “Haven’t gotten that far yet.”
Pritchard, the Texas Ranger, spat tobacco into a Styrofoam cup and said, “I already eyeballed it. They came from out on that bluff beyond the ag fields. I’m figuring five hundred to five twenty-five meters out.”
“You don’t know that,” the tech said.
Pritchard shot him a sour look as he smoothed his mustache. “Son, I promise you, I can walk you to within ten feet of where those snipers were lying.”
Mahoney said, “So you’ve been out there to look already?”
Pritchard smiled. “I may be a hick, Special Agent Mahoney, but I am not stupid.”