Under Siege

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tuesday the world came unglued. Those were the words a senator used later to describe the day, and those words stuck in tens of millions of minds as the perfect description.

It started whenever you awoke and turned on your television to check on the President’s condition at Bethesda and found yourself staring at a stark image of a suburban two-story Cape Cod house surrounded by tall pines and lit by floodlights. In the gray dawn half light, the surreal image looked ominous.

The troubling thing about the picture was not the ambulances, the flashing blue-and-white beacons, the uniformed policemen and the clean-cut FBI types in Sears suits, nor was it the sobbing grown daughter and her two children home to visit Dad for Christmas. No. The troubling thing about the image was that the house looked like something from the set of an old “Leave It to Beaver” show. As you stared at it you could see that it looked exactly like the one in the ads for house paint for great American homes “just like yours”—the perfect distillation of the American two-story dream house in Hometown, U.S.A. And the owner had been assassinated, murdered, when he opened his door to a stranger.

The owner, of course, was Somebody, Congressman Doyle Hopkins of Minnesota, majority leader of the House of Representatives. He had been shot three times at point-blank range.

A better crime to push the panic buttons of middle-class America could not have been devised. The sanctity of home, neighborhood, and family circle had been savagely violated.

The television newspeople, no fools they, played that theme for all it was worth. “Why did he open the door?” one of them asked rhetorically, as if every suburban householder had not done the same thing dozens of times, as if the evil intent of Hopkins’ assailant had been written across his face so plainly it would have still been obvious in the stark shadows of the porch light.

But if you stayed glued to the tube long enough, eventually you were told that the President’s condition was unchanged. The doctor in charge of the President’s medical team held a morning press conference, but only a few minutes of that got on the air. The story of the hour was the killing of the House majority leader.

That was the story of the hour until nine a.m. Eastern time, anyway. At eight fifty-eight five heavily armed men walked into the rotunda of the Capitol building wearing heavy, knee-length coats. They shot the four security guards on duty with pistols before the security men could get off a shot, then extracted Uzis from under their coats and ran along the corridors shooting everyone they saw.

A reporter-camera team setting up to interview the Speaker of the House was the first to get this atrocity on the air, at nine-oh-one a.m., just in time to capture a gruesome vignette of one of the gunmen mowing down the woman reporter, then turning the weapon on the cameraman. As he was hammered into a wall with five slugs in his body the camera fell to the marble floor and was smashed.

A uniformed security guard near the Senate cloakroom was running toward the noise of gunfire with his pistol drawn when he rounded a corner and almost careened into one of the Uzi-toting gunmen. They exchanged shots at a range of five feet. In the roar of the Uzi on full automatic fire the report of the guard’s weapon was lost. Both men went down fatally wounded.

There were four gunmen left alive. One of them charged into a subcommittee hearing room where people were gathering and emptied a magazine into the crowd. The noise of the chattering automatic weapon was deafening, overpowering, in this room which had been recently renovated to improve the acoustics. Only when the trip-hammer blasts ended could those still alive hear the screams and moans, and then they sounded muffled, as if they were coming from a great distance.

The killer stood calmly amidst the blood and gore and groaning victims and changed magazines. He emptied the second magazine into the prostrate crowd and was inserting the third one into his weapon when a guard appeared in the doorway and shot him with a .357 Magnum.

The first two rounds from the revolver hammered the gunman to the floor but the guard walked toward him still shooting. He fired the sixth and last round into the gunman’s brain from a distance of three feet.

Sixteen people in the room were dead and seventeen wounded. Only three people escaped without bullet wounds.

Another of the gunmen was shot to death in the House dining room after he sprayed the diners with two magazines and used the third on the chandeliers. His weapon jammed. He was crouched amid a shower of shattered glass trying to clear the weapon when two guards standing at different doorways opened fire with their revolvers. The man went down with three bullets in him and was shot twice more as he lay on the floor.

One of the gunmen somehow ended up in the old Senate chamber which, mercifully, was empty. Didn’t matter. He stood near the lectern and sprayed two magazines of slugs into the polished desks and speaker’s bench. Then he threw the Uzi down, drew a pistol, and blew his brains out.

The only terrorist taken alive was shot from behind as he ran down a corridor on the second level. He had killed over a dozen people and wounded nine others before a woman guard leveled him with a slug through the liver.

Watching the pandemonium on television — every station in town had a crew at the Capitol within twenty minutes and two of them had helicopters circling overhead — White House chief of staff William C. Dorfman took the first report from the FBI watch officer over the telephone in his office.

“How many of them were there?”

“We don’t know.”

“Have you gotten them all?”

“We don’t know.”

“Casualties?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“Well, goddammit, call me back when you know something, you fucking idiot!” Dorfman roared and slammed down the phone so hard the plastic housing on the instrument cracked.

These temper tantrums were a character defect and were doing him no good politically. Dorfman knew it and was trying to control himself. Still …

One minute later the telephone rang again. It was Vice-President Quayle. “I’m going over to the Capitol. I want you to go with me.”

“Mr. Vice-President, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Dorfman replied as he jabbed the button on the remote to kill the TV volume. “The FBI just told me that they don’t know if the guards got all the terrorists. The nation can’t afford to lose you to a—”

“I’m going, Dorfman. You’re coming with me. I’ll be at the Rose Garden entrance in five minutes. Have the cars brought around.”

The line went dead.

“Yessir,” Dorfman said to nobody in particular.

The administration was sitting on a bomb with a lit fuse, Dorfman realized, and the fuse was dangerously short.

Terrorists! Not in the Middle East, not in some Third World shithole that nobody had ever heard of, but here! Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States! The next thing you know wild-eyed lunatic ragheads will be blowing stuff up and slaughtering people in Moline and Columbus and Tulsa. My God!

At least Dan Quayle was smart enough to comprehend the gravity of the situation. That was undoubtedly why he wanted to personally view the carnage at the Capitol, console the survivors, and be seen by the American people doing it. That would help calm all those people from Bangor to L.A. who were right now beginning to feel the first twinges of panic.

Dorfman regretted his first impulse to advise Quayle not to go. Quayle’s political instincts were sound. He was right.

Dorfman called for the cars and had a thirty-second shouting match with the senior Secret Service agent on duty, who didn’t give a tinker’s damn about politics but did care greatly about the life of the Vice-President that was entrusted to his care.

He also took the time to call Gideon Cohen and tell him to meet the Vice-President’s party at the Capitol and to bring the director of the FBI along with him.

Dorfman shared the limo with the Vice-President, who had brought along his own chief of staff, one Carney Robinson, an intense blow-dried type who in his previous life had made a name for himself in public relations.

Dorfman apologized to Quayle for advising him not to go to the Capitol. “This is wise,” Dorfman said. Neither Quayle nor Robinson replied. They sat silently looking back at the people on the sidewalks looking at them.

After a bit Dan Quayle cleared his throat. “Will, use the phone there. Call General Land at the Pentagon and ask him to meet us at the Capitol.”

Without a word Dorfman seized the instrument and placed the call.

Henry Charon woke up a few minutes after ten a.m. at the Hampshire Avenue apartment and made himself a pot of coffee. While he waited for it to drip through he took a quick shower, brushed his teeth, and shaved.

Then he dressed, even putting on his shoes and a sweater. Only then did he pour himself some coffee and turn on the television to see what the hunters were up to.

He stood in front of the screen staring at it, trying to understand. A group of terrorists? The Capitol?

He sat on the sofa and propped his feet on the chair while he sipped the steaming hot liquid in the cup.

Well, one thing was certain — the FBI and police were going to be thoroughly confused. That, Charon reflected, was more than he had hoped for.

It was also an opportunity.

He drained the cup and poured himself another while he thought about it. After a couple of sips he went to the window and stood looking down into the street. Not many people about this morning. A few empty parking places, though. Another gray day.

The FBI would be around before very long, either FBI or local police. They would be looking for terrorists and assassins, so they would be knocking on doors and asking questions. Nothing to fear there.

His mind went back to the Capitol. He remembered the office building just east of the Supreme Court. What was it, five or six hundred yards over to the Capitol?

Could he make a shot at that distance? Well, with the best of the rifles he had fired three shots into a one-inch group at a hundred yards, so theoretically at five hundred yards a perfect shot should hit within a circle five inches in diameter. Yet the impact point would be about fifty-six inches below the point of aim because the bullet would be dropping, affected by gravity. If he made a perfect shot. With no wind.

And the distance was precisely five hundred yards.

With the wind blowing and a fifty-yard error in his estimate of the distance, all bets were off.

Henry Charon didn’t have to review the ballistics — he knew them cold. And he knew just how extraordinarily difficult it would be to hit a man-sized target at 500 yards, especially since the target man would not be cooperating by holding absolutely still. It would be a real challenge.

He stood watching the passersby below and the bare branches being stirred by the breeze and tried to remember what the field of view looked like from the top of the office building.

He went back to the little living room and stood with the cup in his hand watching the television. The Vice-President was on his way to the Capitol, the announcer said. He would be there shortly. Stay tuned.

His mind made up, Charon snapped off the television. He turned off the coffeepot and the lights, grabbed his coat, and locked the door behind him.

“How many dead?” Dan Quayle asked the special agent who had greeted them and escorted them through the police lines into the building as reporters shouted questions and the cameras rolled. Quayle had ignored them.

“Sixty-one, sir. A couple more are in real bad shape and will probably die. Forty-three wounded.”

“Any idea who these people were?”

“Colombians, sir,” the agent said. “On a suicide mission. One’s still alive, barely, and he did some talking before he passed out from internal bleeding and shock. An agent who speaks Spanish took down what he could. Apparently these people were smuggled into the country this past weekend and told their target this morning.”

“Paid to commit suicide?” Dorfman asked in disbelief.

“Yes, sir. Fifty thousand before they left, and fifty more to the widow afterward.”

That stunned the politicians, who walked along in silence. The agent led them to a hearing room where seventeen men and women and the man who had killed them lay as they had fallen. The wounded had been removed, but photographers and lab men were busy. They didn’t look up at the gawking politicos or the Secret Service agents who stood with pistols in their hands.

Quayle just stood rooted with his hands in his pockets, looking right and left. Spent brass casings lay scattered about, bullet holes here and there, blood all over, bodies contorted and twisted.

“Why?” Quayle asked.

“Sir?”

“Why in hell would anybody take money to commit murder and be killed doing it?”

“Well, this one guy — the one that’s still alive — he said he has a wife and eight kids in Colombia. He used to have ten kids but two died because he couldn’t feed them anything but corn and rice and he couldn’t afford a doctor when they got sick. They live in a shack without running water. He had no job and no prospect of ever getting one. So when he got offered this money, he looked at the kids and figured it was the only way they were ever going to have a chance, so he took it. So he said, anyway.”

“Sixty-one people murdered,” Quayle muttered so softly Dorfman had to take a step closer to catch it. “No, that’s too nice a word. Butchered. Slaughtered. Exterminated.”

The agent led them from the room and down the hall toward the cafeteria. They passed several bodies in the corridors. Dorfman tried not to look at the faces, but Quayle did. He bent over each one for a second or two, then straightened and walked on. His hands stayed in his coat pockets and his shoulders sagged.

They were standing in the cafeteria when Gideon Cohen and General Land and several other military officers joined them. One of the officers was a navy captain, “Grafton” his name tag said, who took it all in, his face expressionless.

“This guy who’s still alive — he said he thinks there were other groups smuggled in.”

“How did they get here?”

“By airliner. They were met at the airport and taken somewhere and given food and weapons. This morning they were driven here in a van and dropped.”

“Where are the others? What are their targets?” Dorfman growled.

“He doesn’t know.”

Attorney General Gideon Cohen spoke for the first time. “Aldana’s lawyer says Aldana told him yesterday afternoon that he was responsible for the attempt on the President’s life. That’s confidential, of course.”

“Bastard’s lying,” Dorfman said forcefully.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Cohen rumbled. “Our people in Colombia are hearing rumors, too many rumors.”

Surrounded by Secret Service agents the group kept walking. “Let’s find a place to talk,” Quayle said. The Secret Service led them to an empty committee room — all the committee rooms were empty just now — checked it out, then stood guard outside the door.

Quayle dropped into a chair on the aisle. The others selected chairs nearby. As they were doing so the director of the FBI and another man came in.

“Did these people shoot down the President’s helicopter?” Vice-President Quayle asked to get the ball rolling.

“You mean these very men killed here?” the FBI agent who had been escorting them asked. “The survivor denied it, for whatever that’s worth.”

The director of the FBI nodded at the agent who spoke. “You may go back to your duties.”

The man rose, muttered, “Gentlemen,” and left.

The director addressed Quayle. “Mr. Vice-President, I’ve brought with me today Special Agent Thomas Hooper. He’s in charge of our antidrug task force and he’s been working with the team that’s looking for the people who shot down the President’s helicopter. Before we came in we spent five minutes talking with the senior people who are working on this …” He gestured vaguely at the room around him. “Hooper, tell them what you told me.”

Tom Hooper glanced around at the faces, some of which were looking his way, some averted. “What we’ve got here is a classic narco-terrorist strike. It was committed by people with a minimum of training, people you would classify as apolitical amateurs. It didn’t really matter how many people were killed or wounded here — the publicity the event would get would be precisely the same. This atrocity was a political act.

“The attempted assassination of the President was very different in several significant ways. That was meticulously planned, carefully prepared, all to take advantage of an opportunity if one presented itself. In other words, a professional assassin.”

“Just one?” someone asked.

“Probably,” Hooper replied. “We’ve found the spot where the missiles were fired — a little picnic area beside the Potomac — and it appears that only one man spent the afternoon there. His tracks are all over. He wore some kind of rubber boots, but he appears to be of medium height, weight about one hundred sixty or so. Those are just tentative conclusions, of course.”

“Who hired the assassin?” Dorfman asked.

“No idea, sir,” Hooper said. “Guesses are three for a quarter, but I wouldn’t bet against you if you thought the same people are behind all of this.”

“Aldana,” Dorfman said as if the very name were poisonous.

Dan Quayle spoke slowly, seemingly feeling his way: “The question is, what are we going to do to prevent any more of these slaughters?”

“We’ve got to find these other Colombians,” Dorfman said.

“Heavy guards around all public buildings and likely places,” somebody added.

“That won’t stop these people.” The words were spoken quietly but with force. Everyone looked at the speaker, Captain Jake Grafton. He continued, “All these people are after is an atrocity. They want publicity, fear, terror, to force the government to do their will. They’ll find a target regardless. In Colombia they’re blowing up department stores and banks and airliners. We’ve got all that plus shopping malls and these boutique emporiums, like the ones at the Old Post Office and Union Station. This close to Christmas …” His voice tailed off.

“I want to call out the National Guard,” Quayle said. “We’re going to have to guard the public buildings regardless, and as many of the shopping areas as we can find people for. And we can use the troops to search for these Colombians.”

“Are you talking martial law?” General Land asked.

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“Troops will never find these terrorists, even if they’re here,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs protested. “We can’t have troops going door to door, searching every house. They aren’t trained for that. That’s what the FBI and police are for.”

“FBI, what do you say?” Quayle directed his question at the director.

“These aren’t ordinary times. We need quick results. To get quick results we need a lot of people. Yet when this is over the American people are going to hold the FBI and the military accountable if innocent people’s rights are trampled on, injustice done. That’s inevitable.”

William Dorfman jumped in with both feet. “The American people will hold us accountable if these murdering swine aren’t caught and caught damn soon. We’ve got to move heaven and earth to stop this slaughter or this country will come unglued. That’s the first priority. Better to jail some innocent people and turn ’em loose later than let the guilty stay free.”

“How about innocent people shot by nineteen-year-old kids with M-16s?” General Land asked Dorfman.

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Dorfman retorted. “Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you can’t do the job we’ll—”

Dorfman had the sense to shut up just then, for the look on Hayden Land’s face would have boiled water. Jake Grafton doubted if there was another man living who had ever had the temerity to tell the general to his face that he was a damn fool.

The silence that followed Dorfman’s outburst lasted for a long moment.

“Why not use regular troops?” Gideon Cohen suggested with a glance at General Land. “Handpicked noncoms and officers? This is the federal district. I think that would be legal. Certainly justifiable. Even if it isn’t legal, it’ll be a while before a judge says so.”

“No,” Dan Quayle said. “National Guard.” He stood. “When I get back to my office we’ll announce it and prepare an order. In the meantime all nonessential government buildings should be evacuated, the employees sent home.”

Quayle left the room first, surrounded by Secret Service agents.

Walking the corridors of the Capitol with General Land, Jake Grafton felt profoundly depressed. General Land apparently was in a similar mood. They paused by a body draped with a sheet that the forensic people had yet to get to and stood for a moment. Holes and blood in the wall, pieces of plaster and plaster powder on the floor. The toe of a woman’s shoe was just visible under the edge of the white cloth.

She had been somebody, with a family and a job, ambitions and a future. Now she was a hunk of meat to be diced and sliced, mourned and buried.

We’re all victims, Jake mused, the living as well as the dead. The America that had given birth to this woman and made her what she was would soon be changed in unforeseeable, incalculable ways by the white-hot fury of the forces that had been unleashed here this morning. The transformations caused by war — make no mistake, this was war — would be irrevocable. And Jake knew that the changes so wrought would not be welcomed by most Americans, himself included.

God damn these terrorists. He said it to himself as a prayer.

He was walking down the sidewalk carrying the toolbox in one hand and a four-foot length of ducting balanced on his shoulder when he realized that there were men on the rooftops. Henry Charon stopped at the corner and took a quick look upward at the tops of the buildings while he shifted the duct pipe to his other shoulder.

He had driven in from the east and had no trouble finding a place to park. A lot of people hadn’t come to work today.

Keeping his gaze on the sidewalk, he proceeded to the entrance of the old office building and climbed the stairs. In the lobby he set the toolbox on the floor and punched the elevator button. The lobby was empty. Now if that office still was …

In the elevator he pushed the button for the top floor. The contraption wheezed and moaned, then with a hum rose slowly for several seconds. It lurched to a halt and the door opened.

The woman standing there gasped when she saw him and started.

“Oh, my God!”

Henry Charon smiled.

Horror contorted her features. “Oh, I’m sorry! Oh, my heavens, I am so sorry.” The door started to close, but she popped in, beating it.

“What floor?” he asked.

“Five, please.”

Charon pushed the button as she continued breathlessly, “I just didn’t expect anyone to be in here. I’m so jumpy. All these terrorists and murders! My God! I should have stayed home. I am so sorry. What you must think.”

“Forget it.”

She gave him a big, embarrassed smile and got off at the fifth floor. He grinned at her again as the door closed.

The top floor was the seventh, and Charon got off there. The hallway was empty. He walked over to the door labeled STAIR and pushed at it. It opened. Satisfied, he went to the door at the rear of the hallway and laid down the duct pipe and toolbox.

The lock took half a minute. He sat the box and pipe inside, surveyed the empty room, then locked the door behind him.

Through the tree branches he could see the northern half of the Capitol’s grand staircase that led up to the main entrance, which led into the Rotunda. The marble steps were covered with people. That was the door those suicide pilots from Colombia went in this morning. But Charon could see only half the stair. The other half was obscured by the Supreme Court building.

The window was dirty. He wiped the inside of the glass with his sleeve. Some of the dirt came off. Out of the corner of his eye he picked up a man on the roof of the Supreme Court building.

This would have to do.

Luckily it was winter and all the trees on the Capitol grounds had lost all their leaves. In summer the vegetation would obscure the scene from here.

The scoped rifle was carefully packed inside the duct pipe and padded with bubble wrap. He removed the weapon and the three long sticks that were also there. These had a piece of rope carefully wrapped around all three sticks, near one end, so when he spread the sticks apart the contraption became a tripod.

He loaded the rifle and laid it on the floor. Then he used a squirt bottle of window cleaner and a rag on the inside of the window glass. He did the entire window as he scanned the Capitol parking lot and every roof he could see.

Four men in sight on the roofs. Hundreds of people over there around the Capitol.

He had one of the radios in the toolbox. With the earpiece in his ear, he turned it on and played with it until he found the audio broadcast frequency of a television station. In fifteen seconds it was plain that the announcer was on the Capitol steps.

Listening carefully, Charon rigged the tripod and braced the rifle upon it. He turned the scope magnification to its highest setting, adjusted the parallax ring, then settled the rifle on the tripod.

He stood well back from the window, near the middle of the room. Swinging the rifle through the narrow field of view provided by the window sash, he was agreeably surprised at how much he could see. He was looking between tree branches though, and the breeze made them sway. The back-and-forth motion of the limbs made it more difficult to hold the reticle steady on target.

The announcer informed his audience that the Vice-President’s party would soon be leaving the building. He didn’t say how he knew.

If Charon made this, it would be one hell of a shot. Listening to the television audio, moving the crosshairs from person to person, he thought about some of the more memorable shots he had made. None of them had been this iffy, he decided. He wondered if he should really try this one. The images in the scope danced uncontrollably as the instrument’s nine-power magnification exaggerated every twitch and tiny jiggle.

He settled the scope on a cop and took a deep breath, then exhaled smoothly and concentrated on holding the crosshairs of the reticle as steady as humanly possible on the center of the man’s chest. Still, they moved around in a little circle. It was all he could do to keep the two filaments between the man’s armpits. Just when he thought that was good enough, the man moved unexpectedly.

How long after he pulled the trigger would he have to clear the building? Sixty seconds? Less?

And the flight of the bullet would be affected slightly by the window glass. He couldn’t open the window — an agent on a roof might see it and send someone to investigate. So he’d shoot through it. Impossible to say how much the glass would deflect the bullet. Maybe just enough to miss over this distance, a little more than a quarter mile. Maybe enough to throw the bullet ten or twelve feet off.

He thought about it as he turned the horizontal filament adjustment knob to compensate for bullet drop.

Okay. It’s going to take a lot of luck to make this shot. A lot of luck.

What he really needed was a practice shot. Well, when you thought about it, he had had a lot of those. Thousands over the years. This one would have to do the trick.

Aha! The announcer: “Here is the Vice-President now.”

Henry Charon straightened and worked the bolt, chambering a round. He snicked off the safety. He flexed his shoulders, set his feet, then settled the forearm of the rifle onto the tripod and grasped the junction with his left hand. He snuggled the butt into his shoulder and got the stock firmly in place under his cheekbone.

Now he swung the rifle toward the door of the Capitol. Someone had arranged a battery of microphones. The Vice-President ignored them and walked down the steps amid a phalanx of Secret Service agents carrying submachine guns in their hands. There was a corridor of sorts between the cameras and the people.

Behind Quayle — who was that? An army officer. And a naval officer, three or four civilians.

Charon tried to steady the rifle on the civilians, who were coming toward him down the steps. He couldn’t shoot when they were moving: they were just too small at this distance. And until they stopped and stood still he couldn’t even be sure who they were.

At the bottom of the stairs, right beside a limo, the Army officer stopped to talk to Dan Quayle. Okay, the civilians were joining the group. They were close together.

Who are they?

Dorfman! One of them is Dorfman. He’s on the list. Who is the other? Aha! That’s Cohen, the attorney general. Also on the list.

Quickly now. Breath deeply, exhale slowly, relax and squeeze, slowly and steadily. Steady … steady …

Damn tree limbs — swaying around … Squeeze slowly, gently, allow for the wind, keep the crosshairs cen …

The rifle fired.

The report in the closed room was deafening, like two sticks of dynamite. Part of the window glass blew out.