Jack & Jill

December ten. Exactly five A.M . Please don’t hang up on me. This is Jill. Yes,
the
Jill. I wanted to speak to you, to make this situation very personal for you. Are -we okay so far?”
    “It’s way past ‘personal.’” President Byrnes spoke calmly to her. “Why are you murdering innocent people? Why do you want to kill me,
Jill>”
    “Oh, there’s a very good reason, a fully satisfactory explanation for all our actions. Maybe we just like the power trip of frightening the so-called
most powerful people in the world.
Maybe we like sending you a message from all the
little
people you’ve frightened with your command decisions and almighty mandates from on high. At any rate, no one who’s been killed was
innocent,
Mr. President. They all deserved to die, for one reason or another.”
    Then Jill laughed. The sound of the electronically altered voice was almost childlike.
    I thought of Aiden Cornwall’s young son. Why did a nine-year-old boy deserve to die? At that moment, I hated Jill— whoever she was, whatever her motives.
    President Byrnes didn’t back down. The President’s voice was measured, calm. “Let me make one thing clear to you: you don’t frighten me. Maybe you ought to be afraid, Jill. You
and
Jack. We’re getting close to you now. There’s nowhere on earth you can hide. There isn’t one safe spot on the globe. Not anymore.”
    “We’ll certainly keep that in mind. Thanks so much for the warning. Very sporting of you. And you please keep this in mind—you’re a dead man, Mr. President Your assassination is already a done deal.”
    That was the end of the tape. Jill’s final words to President Byrnes, spoken so coolly, so brazenly.
    Jill the morning deejay. Jill the poet. Who are you, Jill?
    Your assassination is already a done deal.
    I wanted to interview President Byrnes again. I wanted to talk with him right now. I needed him in this office, listening to the sick, threatening tape with me. Maybe the President knew things that he wasn’t telling any of us. Someone must.
    I played the frightening taped message several more times. I don’t know how long I sat in the FBI office, staring out over the becalmed lights of Washington, D.C. They were somewhere out there. Jack and Jill were out there. Possibly planning an assassinationr But maybe not Maybe that wasn’t it at all.
    You ‘re a dead man, Mr. President.
    Your assassination is already a done deal.
    Why were they warning us?
    Why warn us about what they planned to do?

CHAPTER
61

    IT WAS PAST TEN-THIRTY, but I still had one more important stop I wanted to make. I called Jay Grayer and told him I was on my way to the White House. I wanted to see President Byrnes again. Could he make it happen?
    “This can wait until the morning, Alex. It should wait.” “It shouldn’t wait, Jay. I’ve got a couple of theories that are burning a hole in my brain. I need the President’s input. If President Byrnes says that it waits until the morning, then it waits. But talk to Don Hamerman and whoever else needs to be talked to about it. This is a murder investigation. We’re trying to
prevent
murders. At any rate, I’m on my way over there.”
    I arrived at the White House, and Don Hamerman was waiting for me. So was John Fahey, the chief counsel, and James Dowd, the attorney general and a personal friend of President Byrnes. They all looked put out and also very tense. This apparently wasn’t how things were done in the Big House.
    “What the hell is this all about?” Hamerman confronted me angrily. I had been waiting to see what his bite was like. I’d seen worse, actually.
    “If you want, I’ll wait until tomorrow. But my instincts tell me not to,” I told him in a soft but firm voice.
    “Tell
us
what you want to say to him,” James Dowd spoke up. “Then we’ll decide.”
    “I’m afraid that it’s only for the President to hear. I need to talk with him,
alone,
just like we did the first time we met.”
    Hamerman exploded. “Jesus Christ, you arrogant son of a bitch. We’re the ones who let you in here in the first place.”
    “Then you’re the ones to blame, I guess. I told you that I was here to conduct a murder investigation and that you wouldn’t like some of my methods. I told the President the same thing.”
    Hamerman stormed away from us, but he returned in a couple of minutes. “He’ll see you up on the third floor. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes of his time. It
won’t
take more