The White House North Gate—June 21
Brady Sandlin, wearing a hat, walked through Lafayette Square. “Sandlin” was the name on the press pass; that is how he would think of himself today. He tugged on the beard. It held. He checked the putty on his nose. It was firm. The wig felt snug. He put on the sunglasses and crossed Pennsylvania Avenue. Control, he told himself.
At the guard booth, he waited. As the guard checked the credentials of a camera crew, he shifted back and forth on his feet. The drawer opened, and he placed the plastic card in it. The guard asked his birth date. He replied. The automatic lock clicked. He stepped into the booth. Another uniformed guard handed him an access pass on a chain.
“Walk through, please.”
The metal detector whined.
“Step over here.”
The guard waved a wand up and down his body. It screeched when it passed a jacket pocket.
“Empty it, please.”
He handed the guard a cassette player. The guard pushed the play button. The machine whirred.
The guard returned the tape recorder. Another lock clicked open. He left the booth, entered the White House grounds, and headed toward the West Wing. His left arm twitched. Stop it, he muttered under his breath. Give me half-an-hour.
The pressroom in the West Wing was filling with reporters. He moved past the technicians working on the lines for the television lights. No one noticed him. Sandlin was new to the assignment; he worked for a small regional wire service. He was not the type to draw much attention from the rest of the press corps.
He asked a cameraman for directions and found the steps to the basement.
He walked into the men’s bathroom. It was empty. In one of the stalls, he sat on the toilet. Strapped to his leg was a plastic composite .45 caliber gun. He ripped off the tape and placed the weapon in his lap. With a dime, he loosened the screws on the back of the tape recorder. He removed two bullets and the metal firing pin for the pistol. He inserted the piece into the gun and loaded the Kevlar-coated bullets. He put the gun in his coat pocket. Before he stood up, he noisily grabbed several sheets of toilet paper, wrapped them into a ball, dropped the wad into the toilet, and flushed. He washed his hands and returned to the main room.
All the seats in the first few rows of the pressroom were occupied. He pushed his way to an open spot in the middle of the ninth row. Never get too close, he once had been instructed. In one hand, he held a notebook. He took off the hat and placed it beneath his seat.
“Two minutes,” said a voice over the intercom.
Technicians hurried to their places. The lights went on. Television reporters stood with their backs to the podium, providing live introductions to their networks.
“In his weekly press conference, we expect the President will be asked questions about the China treaty, a possible Cabinet shuffle, and the use of the White House mess by a Hanover fund-raiser,” a reporter was saying into a camera.
This room’s much smaller than it appears on TV, he thought. Several aides entered the room. They passed out the written statement the President intended to read before taking questions. Five Secret Service agents positioned themselves near the platform, behind which hung a blue curtain bearing the White House emblem. He reached into his pocket.
Downstairs, in a room with no windows, Addis picked up the remote and turned on the television.
President Hanover strode into the press briefing room. The reporters stood. The man in the ninth row stood, too, feeling the weapon in his hand. He remembered the training: It’s an extension of you. Will the shot.
Hanover smiled at the familiar faces in the first row. He nodded toward a reporter with a leg in a cast: “Your editor do that for writing that positive piece on our economic numbers?” The journalists chuckled. The President moved to the podium. “Now, remember, this is on deep background,” he joked. The reporters laughed and began to sit.
Still standing in the ninth row, he kept his body stiff. He jerked up his arm. He fired twice. Two bullets slammed into the face of the President.
Done, the gunman thought. Done.
The room rushed toward him. Secret Service agents, weapons drawn, lunged into the crowd of reporters; others surrounded the President. The reporters to each side of the assailant pulled him to the floor. One grabbed the gun. He let it go. Other journalists had dropped to the ground, some
shouting to their camera crews to keep filming. Aides ran to Hanover and were pushed back by Secret Service agents. “No, no, no, no,” screamed the assistant press secretary. Blood spattered the blue curtain. The dead President was slumped over the podium.
A correspondent for a business wire service realized he was lying on top of the assassin. He felt Secret Service officers pulling at his back, trying to reach the shooter. In his hand he held the beard that had been attached to the assailant’s face.
“Why?” the reporter shouted at him. “Why the fuck why?”
The man answered.
The correspondent was yanked away by a female Secret Service agent. The fake beard was snatched from his hand. The Secret Service detail descended on the gunman. They kept him on the ground. One agent dug a knee into his back.
Nothing matters now, he thought. Nothing.
Handcuffs snapped around his wrists. Hands moved across his body. There was nothing to find. The White House emergency medical team was in the room. The lead paramedic had his hands covered in blood. The face was gone. He could find no pulse. He barked instructions he knew were meaningless.
Downstairs in the Situation Room, three amber lights turned on. The watch officer punched in a coded signal to the Secret Service team traveling with the Vice President in Dallas. “Recall the football,” he ordered an aide, “and activate the unit on Air Force Two.”
“And immediately secure Nighthawk and Foxtrot,” he said, referring to the First Lady and the Hanovers’ thirteen-year-old son, Jack.
The Secret Service was hustling the shooter out of the pressroom. Television reporters were shouting voice-overs. Live feeds were being transmitted.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” a network correspondent was screaming into a handheld microphone. “The President’s been shot. Been shot. In front of all of us, the entire world.” He pushed his hair from in front of his face. “Not me,” he yelled at the cameraman. “Him! Get the camera on him!”
One reporter tried to place a mike in front of the suspect. A Secret Service officer punched him in the eye. The CNN correspondent grabbed the business wire service man.
“Did he say anything to you? Did he?”
“You’ll have to wait to read it.” He hurried to his cubbyhole to call the bureau.
In his office, Addis shut off the television. He listened to the shouting in the hallway. He ignored the ringing of the phone. He picked up a yellow legal pad and went to find the chief of staff.
“Say something, you fuck.”
Clarence Dunne stared at the assassin. In the thirty minutes since the murder of the President, the fellow in the chair had been silent. He wouldn’t give his name, his address. Where did you come from? How did you get the gun. Did you make it yourself? Nothing. Who are you working for? Nothing. Who helped you? Nothing. Who else is targeted? Nothing.
And there had been nothing on him. Nothing in his pockets. Nothing up his ass. Every button was being examined. Every seam of his shirt, pants, and jacket was being ripped and probed. No legal niceties. They had thrown him into a pair of overalls. Fingerprints had been taken, and hair and blood samples collected. The putty had been scraped off his nose and saved for a laboratory examination. The wig placed into a plastic bag. It would all be traced—followed back as far as it could. What store sold such putty? Who worked there? Do you recall ever seeing a customer who resembles this fellow in the photograph? Did he say anything to you? Did you see anyone with him?
There was a tattoo on his chest—the letter M pierced by a dagger. He would not say what it stood for. There were scars, too. On his torso, on his stomach, on his thighs, on his arms. In each place the word HAPPY had been carved several times into the skin. With a razor blade or sharp knife, one of the White House doctors had told Dunne. Seventeen times. Jagged lines of scabs. The inscriptions on his abdomen were upside down. The man could look at himself and read the letters. Evidence, the doctor had said, that he had cut himself. Self-mutilation.
Why HAPPY? Dunne wondered. All over his body. What did it mean?
“Tell me, you sick fuck.”
Nothing.
As he hurled questions at his captive, Dunne silently cursed his own damn luck. The first African American to head the Secret Service unit at the White House; the first Secret Service man to lose a President in over three decades. No matter what, no matter what he got the assassin to say now, Dunne’s life was set forever: the man in charge on that day. Remember how you used to see this chunky black guy next to the President all the time? He had that weird gray patch on the side of his head. That was the guy who screwed up. No one was supposed to be able to waltz into the White House and on live around-the-world television plug the President of the United States. The three assassination attempts they had stopped this past year and kept secret—who would ever talk about those? Not even he would.
And the question: Why? This man in front of him, cuffed and restrained
thirty feet below the ground in the high-security White House crisis center, would not say.
“We’re going to find out your name. We’re going to find out every damn thing about your pathetic life. We’re going to interview every blue-assed grade-school teacher who ever had to look at your miserable mug. We’ll find everything.”
He sat stone-faced. He knew all the routines. He knew none would work. He had been trained. And these guys couldn’t use the most persuasive tactics. He could teach them.
“Waiting for a lawyer?”
Waiting, yes. His leg twitched, his foot tingled, as if it were going numb.
The other agents sat in the room watching Dunne. A vein on the side of his head throbbed. This was his only chance. He could not put the bullets back into the gun. He could only explain.
An agent entered the room.
“The Bureau is here,” he whispered to Dunne.
“Give me more time.”
“Can’t.”
Dunne looked at the assassin. The man in the overalls was in his mid-thirties. He had a strong build. A tooth was chipped. His hair was closely cropped, his face oddly shaped, angular. He sat stiffly. He was disciplined. Dunne could tell this fellow was silently talking to himself. Telling himself something over and over.
“Damnit, say something. Don’t you want the whole damn world to know why you did this?”
For the first time, the killer gazed directly at Dunne, not through him.
“No,” he said.
“Sir … ,” the agent said to Dunne.
That’s it. The pooch was screwed. Dunne waved his arms and nodded to the other agents in the room. They moved to undo the restraints and pulled the suspect out of the chair. The door opened and several men entered.
“Nothing?” one asked Dunne.
Dunne did not reply.
“Maybe we’ll do a little better.”
The assassin stopped as he passed Dunne. He wiggled his tongue over a rear molar and then bit down hard. He felt a spurt of liquid—then convulsions seized him. He fell to the floor. An agent ran for a medic. Dunne dropped to his knees and grabbed the shaking body. The man’s eyes were rolling upward. Dunne reached into the man’s mouth to keep it clear. The FBI agents shouted at each other. Someone pounded on his chest.
“Damnit!” Dunne yelled. “Don’t do this, you fucker!”
A medic pushed Dunne aside. The shaking was slowing down. The
pulse was slipping. The medic grabbed for a hypodermic. He jabbed a needle into an arm. He sought a pulse. There was none.
“Gone,” he said.
They stood over the still body.
Dunne looked at the Bureau man.
“You won’t do any better,” Dunne said.
“Mr. Dunne, that’s two today.”