Political Pressure

34

"What is this place?" Chiun demanded as the ambulance rolled to a stop.

"The Old S.O.B.," the ambulance driver said, then caught herself as the child-sized Korean became as stern as a gathering thunderstorm. "That's what they call the building," she explained hastily. "The Old S.O.B."

Chiun did not know whether to believe her. He lowered the window, and the nearest of the ridiculous army of Secret Service agents tried not to respond to him.

"Please do not say you are attempting to look like mere pedestrians," Chiun announced stridently, so that he could be heard by everyone within fifty paces. "You are all quite inept at passing yourselves off as anything other than Secret Service agents."

The nearby agent was in a panic of indecision. The orders had been odd enough—offer protection for the arriving senator but under no circumstances interfere with him or any who accompanied him.

The agent decided anything was better than allowing the old man to continue blowing their cover. "Yes, sir, how can I assist you?" He spoke out of the side of his mouth, sidling up to the ambulance as if he were merely another pedestrian in a trench coat, wing tips, sunglasses and a radio earpiece.

"What is this building called?"

"It's the Russell Building," the agent answered, confused.

"I see," the old man said, his voice as brittle as ice.

"Wait!" the woman at the wheel called. "Tell him the nickname!"

Now the agent was more confused.

"Most everybody just calls it the Old Senate Office Building," said Senator Whiteslaw himself as he and a thin man emerged from the rear of the ambulance, which seemed to have opened in virtual silence. "They call it the Old S.O.B. for short."

"I see," the Asian man repeated, and stepped out of the ambulance cab with a last, cold glare at the driver.

Remo was holding the senator by the shoulder. Whiteslaw was getting his first close-up look at the small Asian figure who had accompanied his strange new bodyguard, Remo. The Asian looked as if he predated the Wright brothers, but he didn't show any sign of infirmity.

The old Asian proved his fitness by putting his scrawny, ancient arms around Whiteslaw's middle and lifting him, apparently without effort. Between the young assassin, and the old one—yes, Whiteslaw was convinced this one was an assassin as well—they had him almost completely off his feet and perfectly balanced. Whiteslaw went through the motions of walking; the truth was that if he put any more weight on the soles of his feet he would scream in pain. His soles had taken the brunt of the blast and ignited the leather of his shoes. Only Remo's quick action had snuffed them out.

The attack had put the media on alert. They had never dreamed the senator would put in a show at his office, but there were production crews working the steps anyway, getting reaction from other senators and their staff and trying to get more facts behind the blossoming rumors.

When the news crews saw the victim of the attack himself arriving back at work less than an hour after the attack, obviously wounded, his feet covered in hastily applied bandage wads and perched on the shoulders of two oddly dressed assistants, there were cries of journalistic ecstasy.

Two camera crews stampeded toward the senator, the correspondents and cameramen pushing and shoving one another until both crews ended up in a brawl in the gutter. They were closely followed by two more crews who were just as ambitious but marginally less self-destructive.

"Start rolling now," screeched a waif of a woman in a brilliant orange jacket three sizes too large. Her camera operator started up the camera while he was running, and he stumbled on a sidewalk crack. The waif wailed. The cameraman fumbled the heavy unit and saved himself from collapse by steering into one of the thirty or so pedestrians who just happened to all be wearing trench coats, sunglasses and radio earpieces. The pedestrian pretended the brutal collision hadn't happened and hobbled away whistling, apparently admiring the architecture, while the cameraman started taping.

The correspondent composed herself, then spoke in a deadly serious cockney accent. "This is Sandra Chattersworthy at the Old Senate Building—"

"This is Derek Mueller in Washington D.C.," boomed the correspondent from a competing crew, drowning out the tiny woman. "Here on the steps of the Old Senate Office Building a brave man, Senator Herbert Whiteslaw—"

That was as far as he got before the small woman ran up and screeched at his chest, directly into his handheld microphone. The cameraman ripped off his headset and nearly lost his equipment as he danced with his hands to his ears.

"British bitch!" bellowed the big correspondent.

"American swine!"

"Hello? Hello? Oh, God, I'm deaf!" The mortified cameraman looked as if he were trying to crush his own head.

"Shut up and start shooting!"

The cameraman didn't hear him.

The big-mouthed correspondent roared in frustration and manhandled the camera off his debilitated cameraman, shoving it at a man in a trench coat who just happened to be standing around.

"Point this in my direction for thirty seconds and I'll pay you a thousand dollars."

The man in the trench coat pretended not to see him.

"Asshole!"

"I'll do it." A passing construction worker, with a mortar trowel dangling from a loop on his overalls, took the camera. "Thousand bucks, right?"

"Yes, just start shooting—oh, shit!" The correspondent had lost his subject matter. The wounded senator had not stood around and waited. He was near to entering the Old S.O.B., and the limey pixie with the fingernails-on-chalkboard voice was doing her report!

"Come on!" The correspondent went at the British woman in a crouch, changed his mind at the last second and steered into her equipment assistant. The man made a croak of dismay as he toppled, his video camera landing hard enough to produce several shattering sounds.

"You miserable worm!"

Orville Flicker watched it all, live, his own cameraman getting it all on a digital camcorder with an uplink through a mobile broadband connection. Flicker's cameraman was just some kid from a community college, hired for a one-time job and instructed to keep his distance. Still, the banshee voice of the tiny British woman came through clear enough to vibrate Flicker's water glass.

Despite the screaming, the big correspondent positioned himself where the slow-moving senator would pass within the shot. The blue-collar man in the overalls jogged up and pointed the camera.

"Where did that son of a bitch come from?" Flicker demanded.

His assistant, Noah Kohd, talking on two mobile phones at once, started to answer.

"Shush!" Flicker said. "Where the hell is Rubin?"

"On his—" Kohd said.

"Oh, no." Flicker turned up the sound on one of the news feeds. "We're going live now to the our correspondent at the Old Senate Office Building...."

"This will ruin everything," Flicker complained through grinding teeth. "Whiteslaw can't be a media darling—he can't!"

"Under control, sir," Kohd said.

"Under control? Under control?" Flicker felt the pressure in his head become so great he thought his skull would open up violently.

"There, sir," Kohd said.

On the screen from his own video feed, Kohd saw the bricklayer with the video camera sprint away, taking the camera with him. The little British woman brayed viciously and hysterically. The big correspondent stood there for a long moment, not believing what he was seeing, then burst into sobs.

"In your miserable American face!" the British woman shrieked.

The sobbing man snatched her up by the neck while the senator and his escort entered the building unhurriedly. The Secret Service agents stood around acting as if there were nothing out of the ordinary taking place.

Flicker couldn't believe his luck. "Thank you, God," he breathed, going limp into a leather chair. They had just avoided a catastrophe.

"I hired him," Kohd said simply, nodding at the video feed. "The bricklayer. Paid him ten grand to disrupt the reporting."

Flicker nodded. "I see. Good move."

"No problem." Kohd was calm, unsmiling. He was always calm and unsmiling, one hundred percent of the time. He could have been a Secret Service agent.

Kohd was darn competent, as well. If tape of Whites- law hobbling bravely into his office had made it onto the networks, the senator would have become a hero. That would make him untouchable; killing a hero only strengthened the hero's cause.

Whiteslaw had gone from a thorn in the side of Orville Flicker to a poison pill. He was the man who could neuter MAEBE.

He had to die and he had to die today—before people started liking him for all the wrong reasons.

"Where's Rubin?"

"En route," Kohd said.

"Why wasn't he there to intercept Whiteslaw?"

"Rush-hour traffic. He'll be there in ten. They'll be staged for an assault within fifteen. Mr. Flicker?" Kohd nodded at one of the monitors, where the senator's ugly face floated over the left shoulder of a female news anchor.

Flicker unmuted it. The anchor was a blond, benign woman whom Flicker knew from his White House days.

She had failed to succumb to his charms. When he was President, that bitch would be one of the first to go on the blacklist.

She started talking about a press conference.

"...on the steps of the Old Senate Office Building in one hour."

"Those bastards. They're taunting me."

"Sir?" Kohd asked. He had just one phone against his head, which was about as much attention as he ever gave anyone.

"Look at all those Secrets around there. They didn't lift a finger. This whole scene was staged to draw us out. We didn't bite so they'll try it again, in the same damn place, just to make it convenient."

"Perhaps, sir. Another wrinkle has come to our attention, sir. The pair that escorted the senator inside? They match the descriptions we have from our losses in recent days. Chicago, Colorado, San Fran and today."

Orville Flicker became very nervous then, and began going back and forth over the video, which he had saved to his hard drive. He had been so worried about the reporters he had not paid much attention to the senator.

Over and over he replayed the footage of Senator Herbert Whiteslaw being assisted from the ambulance and walking slowly through the media turmoil and into the building. The senator's face was perfectly focused through much of the footage, and yet the faces of the men on either side of him were a blur the entire time.

"Electronic interference?" Flicker asked.

Kohd shook his head. "Creating a perfectly localized visual distortion? Never heard of such a thing."

"But it could be, right?"

"I'd say you're grasping at straws, but what else could it be?" Kohd clearly believed it was something else.

Flicker shook his head slightly, his insides growing colder. He was thinking back to the chaos he had witnessed at the Governor Bryant assassination. There were men who moved like flickering light, neutralizing his sniper and every other man in his Midwest cell in just seconds. Flicker was taunted on the radio by someone, and then there had been the glimpse of a brightly colored wraith drifting across the auditorium, searching for him. Could the wraith had been a man in a kimono, of all things?

Of course it could. Once you accepted the notion of a human being who floated with the speed of a shadow, why not put him in a kimono?

Even without a visible face it was clear enough on the video feed that one of the men assisting the wounded senator was a man in a long, golden robe with multicolored stitching. The other man was dressed just as unexpectedly, when you considered that he should have been a Secret Service agent. The man was in a T-shirt, of all things, and casual slacks.

Just minutes ago the worst enemy to his future had been a senator with an old grudge and a new bill. Now it was something new—these two.

"They are very special agents of some kind," Flicker said. "How come I never knew about them? The President told me almost everything."

"Maybe the President doesn't know about them himself."

"They've got presidential backing now. You've got to throw a hell of a lot of weight around to get the Service to fall in line. Only the President's got that kind of muscle. Unless—they're Secrets themselves."

"Considering the duty they're pulling, that makes sense," Kohd stated. "A clandestine branch specifically for protecting the politicians in high-risk security situations. But their purview must include investigative duties. And assassination."

"Yes," Flicker said, staring at the blur of a face on a bizarre, short body in its colorful robe. The hands of the man were in focus, and they were wrinkled with age.

"Assassination is illegal," Kohd added. He was feeling uncomfortable. Flicker didn't notice. Kohd was uncomfortable because of the look he was seeing on his boss's face—a sort of excitement. Kohd added, "If they are what we think, these men represent an officially sanctioned but blatantly unconstitutional federal entity."

"Almost certainly with presidential knowledge and backing," Flicker said, smiling like a teenaged boy watching his girlfriend get naked. "They're my ace in the hole."

"Sir?" Kohd wasn't following and wasn't sure he wanted to.

"Call the airport. We're going to D.C."