FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2013
A loud POP echoed through the motorhome and yanked Jake out of the fitful nap he had managed to fall into just past midnight. He sprang upright on the Winnebago's old sofa in time to see the headlamps illuminate a reflective green sign that read DALLAS 110. Then the sign disappeared as twin geysers of vapor and green fluid spewed up from under the hood and coated the windshield.
Stacy, who had been curled in the front passenger seat, woke up, startled. "What was that?"
Favreau, who had been asleep in a chair, was instantly alert and had a pistol in his hand.
"Is anybody hurt?" Jake said.
"I'm not hurt," Gordon said in an anxious voice as the motorhome started seesawing back and forth across the highway. "But I can't see."
"It's the radiator," Jake said. "Ease on the breaks and pull to the shoulder."
"I can't see the shoulder!"
Jake shuffled forward, bracing himself in the swaying cabin with anything he could grab hold of. "Keep straight, apply the brakes slowly, and turn on the windshield wipers."
Gordon did as Jake said and within a few seconds he had the motorhome back under control and was catching enough glimpses through the streaks of green goo between whacks of the windshield wipers to angle toward the shoulder. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the motorhome lurched to a stop.
When Gordon finally let go of the steering wheel his hands were shaking. He glanced over at Stacy. "Image the irony."
"What irony?" Stacy said, also a little shaken.
"Outside of the conspirators themselves, we're the only people in the world who know what's going to happen tomorrow in Dallas," Gordon said. "And outside of a handful of others, the only ones who know what really happened there fifty years ago. Imagine the irony if we had died tonight on an empty stretch of highway in a crash caused by a busted radiator hose."
"That's not irony, or karma, or any kind of cosmic juju," Jake said. "A bullet probably nicked the hose back at the trailer park. We're lucky we made it this far."
Gordon turned in the driver's seat to look back at Jake. "I think it's more than that." He smiled. "History is a jealous bitch. And she guards her secrets."
A few minutes later all four of them stood in front of the open hood as steam billowed into the air and radiator fluid poured onto the asphalt. After a cursory examination, Jake was able to determine that the radiator hose had not been shot, just worn through. Neglect, not bullets, had sprung the leak.
"Now what do we do?" Favreau said.
Jake looked at Gordon. "You got any duct tape?"
***
The call came at 2 a.m. and dragged Max Garcia out of his dream about sipping a Cuba libre on a beach. He picked up his cellphone. "Yes."
"Do you know who this is?"
Garcia recognized the smooth, bourbon drawl of Allan Chessman, the CIA's deputy director of operations. A man Garcia had known for thirty years. And sleep deprived or not, he also recognized the code phrase Do you know who this is? and knew it meant the line was not secure so no names were to be used. "Of course," was all Garcia said.
"Do you know why I'm calling?" Chessman asked.
Garcia sat up in bad. "Did you talk to him?"
"I did."
"And?"
"He was adamant," Chessman said. "Although, intransigent might be a better word to describe his position."
"Because of his campaign promise?"
"I think it goes deeper than that."
"To what?"
"This may sound like an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate," Chessman said. "The man does not take advice. No matter what the subject, whether it's strategy for a war or a Fed interest rate hike, he cannot accept that someone has a better understanding of the situation than he does."
"In this case, he might be right."
"He's a dilettante."
"Who happens to sit in the Oval Office."
"You've been out of the game a long time," Chessman said. "The rules have changed."
"Yet, you're using the same playbook we used fifty years ago."
"It worked then," Chessman said. "It'll work again."
"It ripped the country apart."
"That's not the way I remember it."
"How would you know?" Garcia said. "You were still in diapers."
"The VP is onboard."
"In exchange for what?"
"We promised to give him something he could walk back to the Taliban and AQ."
"Is that all he wanted?" Garcia asked, surprised the vice president's asking price for complicity in treason and murder hadn't been steeper. The man spent thirty-five years in the Senate, many of them on the Intelligence Committee. Garcia knew him well.
"We also promised to fund his campaign in 2016."
That sounded more like the man Garcia knew. "What are you giving him?"
"Not another 9/11," Chessman said. "But something on US soil. Enough to justify another troop surge."
"Jesus. For how long?"
"Well, if he wins in '16, it could be quite a while."
"This is going to be a disaster."
"Is that what you said last time?"
"As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I said."
"And history proved you wrong."
Garcia was tired of arguing. "What do you want from me?"
"Make sure the Frenchman doesn't fuck it up."
"Why do you think I'm here?"
"You're running out of time."
"I'll find him."
"Do it quick," Chessman said. "And then get out of town. They'll be a lot of blowback."
"You think?" Garcia said, hoping the sarcasm in his voice conveyed more than his words.
But Chessman had already hung up.
***
Gertz knelt on the balcony of the high-rise apartment as the sun was starting to peek above the horizon to his left. He rested a pair of 15x80 Steiner binoculars on the railing and looked south. He focused on the rear of a seven-story building a mile away. On the first floor, a pair of glass doors opened onto a short set of concrete steps that led down to a small parking lot. He estimated the angle of deflection from his balcony to the double doors to be about thirty degrees. The deflection had to be factored in, as did the wind, even with such a heavy bullet.
He looked up from the binoculars and stared across the mile of city between him and the building. "That's a very long shot," he said to himself in German. Then he pressed his eyes again to the precisely ground ocular lenses of the Steiner binoculars and refocused on the distant building.
The plan, already a complicated undertaking with a hundred moving parts, had gotten progressively more complicated in the eight weeks since Gertz had arrived in the United States.
He was a shooter, not an actor, so it had come as a surprise to him that in addition to establishing his residency and his routine in a leased high-rise apartment with a clear, if distant, line of sight to the target, and becoming an expert with a rifle that could engage targets at such a range, his employers had also wanted him to befriend the patsy, a brain-damaged ex-soldier named Ray Fluker, by playing the part of "George," a rich but generous American playboy. Something that had proved to be no simple task because Fluker, it turned out, was not an easy man to meet, much less become friends with.
It had taken Gertz three tries to accidentally "meet" Fluker, who lived in a dilapidated motel on the ragged outskirts of Dallas and who apparently did absolutely nothing other than shuttle between work and his motel room. Fortunately, the ex-soldier had a kind heart, so when he saw "George" trying unsuccessfully to change a flat tire on his Mercedes-Benz, he offered to help. It took some more time, but the reluctant Fluker had finally opened up.
And as if all of that wasn't enough to keep Gertz busy, there was the shot itself. When Gertz's employers had first approached him in Germany, they told him he would be positioned on an apartment balcony approximately twenty stories high and would fire at a stationary target at a range of one thousand meters. As described, that shot was going to be very difficult because it was at the outer edge of the performance envelope for most military-grade sniper rifles chambered for the .308, the .30-06, and even the 7mm Magnum.
Fortunately, Gertz wasn't going to have to rely on a weapon chambered for any of those rounds. He had insisted on, and his employers had agreed to provide him with, a Barrett M-82 .50-caliber rifle. Finding a place to train with the huge rifle had been yet another challenge. Even in a state as big as Texas, people tended to notice someone firing a bullet that was the primary armament for US fighter planes during World War II and Korea. Eventually though, after some diligent searching, Gertz had found a place to practice with the Barrett, but it was a hundred miles west of Dallas.
Gertz's biggest surprise, however, had come immediately after his arrival, during his first face-to-face meeting with his cutout, an American he knew only as Walsh.