Jack & Jill

my suit jacket. The star was color-coded for the day. It identified me as part of the Secret Service team. The day’s color was green. For hope?
    Jack and Jill had kept all their promises so far. They could have found a way to get weapons inside. There were at least a thousand handguns, but also rifles and shotguns inside the huge amphitheater. The police and other security guards had them.
    Any one of them could be Jack or Jill.
    Any one of them certainly could be Kevin Hawkins.
    Don Hamerman was at my side, but it was too loud for us to talk in anything approaching normal tones. Occasionally, we leaned close and shouted into each other’s ear.
    Even then, it was difficult to hear more than an isolated word or phrase.
    “He’s taking too long to walk to the stage!” Hamerman said. I
think
that’s what he said.
    “I know it. Tell me about it,” I shouted back.
    “Watch the crowd movement,” he yelled at me. “They’ll stampede if they see a gun pulled. President’s spending too much time out in the crowd. Is he taunting the killers? What does he think that he has to prove?”
    The chief of staff was right, of course. The President seemed to be daring Jack and Jill. Still, we might get lucky with the trap inside the crowded hall.
    Suddenly, the crowd did start to stampede! The crowd began to part.
    “Kill the son of a bitch! Kill him!” I heard the shouts a row or two ahead. I moved quickly, pushing, clawing my way forward in a hurry.
    “Watch it, you bastard,” a woman turned and yelled in my face.
    “Kill him now!” I heard up ahead.
    “Let me through!” I shouted as loud as I could.
    The man who was causing the scene up ahead had shoulder-length blond hair. He wore a baggy black parka with a black backpack attached.
    I grabbed him at the same time as someone else from the other side of the aisle. We brought the blond man down hard and fast His skull crunched against the cement floor.
    “New York police!” the other guy holding the blond man yelled.
    “D.C. police, White House detail,” I yelled back. I was already patting down the suspect The New York cop had his gun in the suspect’s face.
    I didn’t recognize the blond as Kevin Hawkins, but there was no way to tell for sure, and absolutely no way for us to take a chance on him.
We had to take him down. There was no choice about that.
    “Kill the bastard! Kill the President!” the blond man continued to scream.
    He was absolutely crazy, everything was, not just this asshole on the floor.
    “You hurt me!” he started to yell at me and the New York cop. “You hurt my head!”
    Madman?
I wondered.
    Copycat?
    Diversion?

CHAPTER
89

    KAMIKAZE ATTACK! It was coming any second now. A killer willing to commit suicide. That was why this couldn’t be stopped. It was also why President Byrnes was the walking dead.
    Kevin Hawkins hadn’t experienced any problems getting into a prime position in the noisy, crowded auditorium. He had used his imagination and visual skills to create an unusual identity for himself.
    Hawkins was now a tall brunette woman dressed in a dark blue pantsuit. He wasn’t a very good-looking woman, he had to admit, but he was much less likely to draw attention because of it.
    Hawkins also had a Federal Bureau of Investigation ID, which was authentic down to the stamp and thickness of the paper. It identified him as Lynda Cole, a special agent from New York. The photojournalist stood at Lynda Cole’s seat in the sixth row and calmly observed the crowd.
    Snapshot.
    Snapshot.
    He took several mind photos, one after the other, mostly of his competition. The FBI, the Secret Service, the NYPD. Actually, he didn’t believe that he had any real competition.
    Kamikaze. Who could stop that? No one could. Maybe God could. And maybe not even God.
    He was impressed by the sheer numbers of the opposition, though. They were serious about trying to derail Jack and Jill this morning. And who knew? Maybe they would succeed with their superior numbers and firepower. Stranger things had happened.
    Hawkins just didn’t believe that they could. Their last real chance had been
before
he’d gotten inside the building—not now. The photojournalist versus the FBI, the Secret Service, the U.S. marshals, and the NYPD. That seemed reasonable enough to him. It seemed like a pretty fair game.
    Their elaborate preparations struck him as being ironic. He waited for the target to appear.
Their game plan was an essential part of his.
Everything