The Templar Conspiracy

32

Chief Randy Lockwood sat in his small office in the Municipal Building, hemmed in by the three mongooselike agents who'd been glued to him since eight o'clock that morning. Dotty had told him to wear the dress uniform out of respect for the president, but he felt a little ridiculous. Besides the fact that typically it only came out for cop funerals in other towns, it also happened to be freezing cold outside and beginning to snow, and the wind blew through every stupid brass buttonhole. If that weren't enough to make him extremely uncomfortable, he found all the medals and citation bars a little embarrassing.

Only one of the agents, Special Agent in Charge Saxby, spoke to him. The other two were apparently there to watch Saxby, or maybe even Lockwood himself; he still wasn't sure. "It's all unnecessary," snapped Saxby. "Someone should talk to them."

"I didn't have anything to do with it," said Lockwood. "The headmaster at the Abbey School suggested it to the principal at the high school and they extended the invitation jointly to the president."

"Nobody checked with us, no one checked with Homeland and no one said a word to the Secret Service," Saxby grumbled. "The stupid son of a bitch drops a puck and the operation costs the taxpayers over a million dollars and takes us away from what we should be doing, which is tracking terrorists, not escorting lame ducks on junkets into the damned bush."

"Don't blame me," said Lockwood. "I didn't vote for him."

"After the attack in Virginia the current threat level is Orange. You know what that means?"

"Sure," said Lockwood dryly. "It's like ordering a Venti White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks. Defcon One and Broken Arrow and Bent Spear and all that James Bond-coded bull puckie terminology you guys throw around. It's a big deal, right?"

"You can call it what you want, Chief Lockwood, but it means there is a high risk of terrorist activity in the homeland at the moment. That's something we take very seriously. You should, too."

"I'm old-fashioned, Agent Saxby. What my dad used to call a bonehead, a practical guy. So listen up when you're in my town, all right? I was a quarterback in football because I wanted to impress the girls. When I went to Vietnam I realized the idea wasn't to kill Vietcong; it was to survive the tour. When I went back for the second tour it was to get rank and up my pension.

"When I came back here it was to give out parking tickets and go fishing. The last murder we had in Winter Falls was twenty-five years ago when one of the cottagers found out her husband was screwing a girlfriend back in New York. She got off with provoked manslaughter and three years' probation. She's one of the school trustees to this day.

"I'm not going to get all hot and bothered about your Code Reds or whatever you call them. The game is being played on the Abbey School rink, not the World Trade Center, and the president will only be here for a couple of hours. If you can't spot a jihadist in this crowd, then you don't deserve your job."

Saxby gave him a sour look. "Do you know why those planes flew into the Trade Center towers, Mr. Practical Policeman?"

"Why don't you tell me, SAC Saxby?"

"They were a target, Chief Lockwood," said Saxby. "And they were easy. The two tallest buildings in New York City. They were also arranged so that when you looked at them from due north or due south, which was how they were attacked, they looked like a solid slab. Even with that the first one almost missed. A practical target. And that's what you are, parking tickets or not, fishing or not. This place, with the president in it, has a target painted on its back whether you like it or not. You're the safest town in America with the President of the United States in the bull's-eye. Osama bin Laden couldn't have had a better wet dream."

"Let's hope you're wrong, Agent Saxby," he said. "I've done the best I could under the circumstances. I've got both shifts of my men out; I've given half of them to the Secret Service guys and your people to pair up with. Everybody knows everybody else in town. Strangers stand out like sore thumbs.

"It's not like its summer, with tourists coming and going all the time. They brought in sniffer dogs to check out the seats at the rink for bombs; they've put up metal detectors anywhere His Honor will be going. They've cleared a landing spot for the chopper in the park in front of the Municipal Building, there's two Secret Service Escalades waiting that arrived this morning and your guys have had that little helicopter of yours buzzing around all day, looking for snipers on rooftops. I'm not sure there's not a hell of a lot more we can do."

Suddenly Saxby's expression changed. From sour it went to worn and barren. He looked as though the weight of the world was bearing down on him, grinding him down, making him old before his time. "That's always the problem, Chief Lockwood. You always do whatever you can, you cover every base, you look in every nook and cranny but it's never enough. Most of the time this kind of thing is the most boring duty in the world.

"You read all those Tom Clancy books and watch all those hard-ass shows on TV but it's all a load of crap; looking for terrorists is a lot of crap. I've been doing this job for thirty-two years and seven months. Five months away from mandatory, and from day one it's been nothing but nerves because sometimes it's just never enough, and sometimes you overlook something, and sometimes before you know it, the whole thing blows up in your face and you're half a second too late. You oooh when you should have ahhhed, you go left when you should have gone right, and for thirty-two years and seven months my nerves have been cocked like a loaded gun, just waiting for that one mistake."

He paused. "My insurance agent once told me that everyone has a freight train and a railroad crossing in his or her life and you never see it coming until its too late."

"Nice, uplifting insurance agent you have," said Lockwood, trying to lighten things up. But he knew exactly what the gray-haired FBI man meant. You never knew where the bullet that hit you came from. One of these days he could stop a rowdy summertime DUI and find himself looking down the barrel of some punk's Saturday-night special and wind up in the uniform he was wearing right now, except flat on his back in a satin-lined wooden box. Outside the front of the building a big Sandri Sunoco fuel truck rumbled by on its rounds. The wind was rising and the snow was falling even more heavily. It was going to be a nasty night in Winter Falls.

Saxby gave a twisted little smile. "I just want this whole thing to be over and the ex-president to be on his way, and then, Chief Lockwood, maybe you and I can find a place to have a cold beer and a big steak and tell each other old war stories."

"Amen to that," agreed Lockwood.