Jack & Jill

be. They seemed to like President Thomas Byrnes a lot, enough to take a bullet for.
    “My mind is up and running, fur sure,” I said and managed a smile. “Probably do a couple of marathons before morning. You okay? Need some coffee or anything?”
    Camille shook her head and kept her serious face on. Watchdogs can be female, too. I’d met my share of them. I saluted the diligent agent, then kept on walking.
    A few thoughts continued to plague me as I wandered inside the eerily quiet hotel. My mind was running way too hot.
    The murder of Charlotte Kinsey was one disturbing puzzle piece. That murder might have been committed by somebody other than Jack and Jill. Could there be a third killer? Why would there be a third killer? How did it fit?
    I continued down another long hallway, and down still another track in my mind.
    What about larger and more complicated conspiracies? Dallas and JFK? Los Angeles and JFK? Memphis and Dr. King? Where did that insane and depressing line of thinking take me? The list of possible conspirators was impossibly long, and I didn’t have the resources to get at most of the suspects, anyway. The crisis group talked about conspiracies a lot. The Federal Bureau was obsessed with conspiracies. So was the CIA… but a powerful fact remained: thirty years after the Kennedy assassinations, no one was really convinced that either of those murders had been solved.
    The more I delved into conspiracy theories, the more I realized that getting to the core was almost impossible. Certainly, no one had yet I’d talked to several people at the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, and they had come to exactly the same conclusion. Or dead end.
    I wandered into the hallway on the twenty-first floor, where the President was sleeping. I had a chilling thought that he might be dead in his room; that Jack and Jill had already struck and left a note, another poem for us to discover in the morning.
    “Everything okay?” I asked the agents stationed just outside the door of the presidential suite.
    They watched me carefully, as if they were asking themselves,
Why is he here?
“So far,” one of them said stiffly. “No problems here.”
    Eventually, I made a full circle back to my room. It was almost four in the morning.
    I slipped inside the room. Lay down on the bed. I thought of my conversation with Sampson earlier that night, hearing about the murder of Sumner Moore. Apparently, the Moore boy wasn’t the Truth School killer. I tried not to think about either case anymore.
    I finally dozed until six—when the clock radio went off like a fire alarm next to my head.
    Rock-and-roll music blared. “K-Rock” in New York. Howard Stern was talking to me. He had worked down in Washington years ago. Howard said, “The prez is in town. Can Jack and Jill be far away?”
    Everybody knew about it. The President’s motorcade through Manhattan started at eleven. Stagecoach was ready to roll again.

CHAPTER
86

    HISTORY was about to be made in New York City. At the very least, it was white-knuckle time. Definitely that. The game had ceased being a game.
    Jack jogged at a strong, steady pace through Central Park. It was a little before six in the morning. He’d been out running since just after five. He had a lot on his mind. D day had finally arrived. New York City was the war zone, and he couldn’t imagine a better one.
    He observed the very striking Manhattan skyline from where he was running alongside Fifth Avenue, heading south. Above the tall, uneven line of buildings, the sky was the color of charcoal seen through tissue paper. Huge plumes of smoke billowed up from turn-of-the-century buildings.
    It was pretty as hell, actually. Close to glorious. Not the way he usually thought of New York City.
It was just a facade, though. Like Jack and Jill,
he was thinking.
    As he ran alongside a blue city bus charging down Fifth Avenue, he wondered if he might die in the next few hours. He had to be ready for that, to be prepared for anything.
    Kamikaze,
he thought.
The final plan was deadly, and it was as surefire as these things could be.
He didn’t believe that the target could possibly survive this attack. No one could. There would be other deaths as well. This
was
a war, after all, and people died in war.
    Jack finally emerged from the park at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth. He continued to run south, picking up his pace.
    A few moments later, he entered the formal and attractive lobby of