CHAPTER 1

 

 

SENATOR JACK HODGES stood in front of the crowd and smiled, his handsome craggy face cracking open like a cave in a granite cliff. The high school gymnasium was only half full, perhaps 50 or so people sitting on a motley collection of chairs. Hodges had no doubt the school’s basketball team got a bigger crowd to watch their games than his faltering run for his party’s presidential nomination ever could. The gathering was mostly Iowa farmers, coming into the town on a bitterly cold November night from their frozen fields and isolated homes in this south-eastern corner of the state. They stared at him with hard eyes, almost daring him to convince them that they should vote for him. But he expected no less. Iowa audiences were always tough. They were long immune to the constant parade of candidates trooping through the vital state that voted first in the nomination contest. Each audience knew it had the power to make or break any candidate, but to Hodges this crowd looked especially hard. His staff had told him that Mount Pleasant was a college town. They said a smattering of students and teachers would show up: a key demographic that he desperately needed to boost his anemic poll numbers. But, as he surveyed the room, he knew the biting chill had kept them huddled in their cozy dorm rooms. Only the farmers never seemed to notice the cold. They always showed up.

Hodges waited patiently for the school’s principal to finish introducing him. He was a rotund, jolly man, whom Hodges met briefly just 15 minutes before. They had talked amiably enough, but Hodges sensed that even this man, whom his staff assured him was a locked-down supporter, was skeptical of his chances of ever winning the state. Or even that he could finish in the top five. Hodges listened to the man’s patter, skimming over the familiar details of his life, sketching out the warrior-politician meme on which his campaign pinned their fading hopes.

“Senator Hodges is now the junior Senator from Indiana, but he has a record of serving his country at home and abroad. He was a three-star General who helped win the Cold War. He later risked his life in Iraq and served in Afghanistan,” the principal said.

But Hodges paid little attention. He glanced backwards, just briefly, at his wife Christine, who sat on a plastic chair off to one side, looking dazzling in a white suit. He winked quickly at her and she smiled back. Hodges laughed inwardly, feeling a surge of fortune, as he became aware his cue was about to arrive. The principal was finishing up with a phrase that had become familiar but which Hodges increasingly doubted had any basis in reality. “I give you the next President of the United States! Senator Jack Hodges!” the man said, his loud enthusiasm far outweighing the smattering of polite claps from the crowd. Hodges strode forward and grasped the man’s hand firmly.

“Thank you, sir,” Hodges said. “Good job.” Then he turned to face the crowd. He paused, regarding them with a clear expression that quieted the room. He let the silence last just a second or so longer than was comfortable, building an expectation. Then he began, exactly as he had started a hundred speeches already, all across Iowa and New Hampshire and a dozen other states. He spoke simply, and directly, his passion never wavering one iota, always opening with the same words.

“Let me tell you how we’re going to save this country …” he began.

But then he stopped.

Perhaps it was the tiny but quick movement of the assassin’s head that caught his eye. Or else it was that strange instinct, shared by all animals, of an awareness of being watched, of being something else’s prey. He had felt it in Baghdad and Kabul countless times. But here in Iowa? Almost disbelievingly, Hodges, his skin crawling and with the hair on his arms standing on end, squinted up into the rafters of the gymnasium.

His eyes took a second to focus and then his mind took two seconds more to understand what he was seeing: up in the eaves a shadowed figure crouched, holding a rifle. The barrel was pointed directly at him. Even at this distance he thought he could see the assassin’s finger starting to squeeze the trigger. He felt frozen still, as if held in place by some invisible hand. Behind him he sensed Christine frown and follow her husband’s gaze up into the roof. Then she saw the figure too. But Christine did not freeze. She screamed.

“There’s a gun!” she yelled.

It was a sound that seemed to break a spell. The world around Hodges exploded into chaotic movement. Christine leapt to her feet, her chair clattering to the floor. He took a step toward her, glancing backwards to see the rifle tracking his movement. But now the stage was a frantic mess of running and shouting people. Hodges grabbed Christine and stepped in front of her, shoving her behind him, and he put up one arm, seeking to ward off whatever fire might come their way.

An explosion suddenly echoed around the gymnasium with an unearthly ear-splitting crack. Hodges felt the hot, scalding breath of something kiss his cheek as it sped by and he felt a spray of angry concrete chips from the wall behind him strike his back. Then he hit the floor, taking Christine with him, covering her with his own body. He waited for another bullet; his breath roaring like an enraged bull, his heart thumping so loud that he felt it would burst through his chest. But a second shot never came.

Up above, the assassin had dropped her rifle. She collapsed into a ball, curling up in fetal position, hugging her knees to her chest and muttering to herself something that sounded like a prayer in the rasping language she had learned at her mother’s breast. She repeated the words again and again and then thirty seconds later two overweight cops, screaming and sweating, guns drawn and ready to fire, clattered up the steel steps to her hideaway. They grabbed her and twisted her arms fiercely behind her back. One of them aimed a kick at the small of her back, crunching the toe of his boot into her spine. She fell silent now, not even grunting in pain at the blow. The two men shouted questions at her, pushing their faces into hers. But she looked away, twisting her neck in their grasp and closing her eyes as if in meditation. She did not speak again.