Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

“He told me enough,” Beck said. He decided to try to bluff his way out of this. It had to be worth a shot. “And we told Graham. His superiors know he was coming here. The police will be here any moment—”

“No, they won’t,” Pierce said. “Really, Dr. Beck. We know they’re still looking for you. Your friend was willing to hide you, to try to keep you safe. And look what you did to him in return. You got his brains blown out the back of his skull. Now. Can we please try again?”

Beck shut up. Bluffing didn’t work. There didn’t seem to be any point in pretending he knew what was going on anymore. So he asked an honest question.

“Why are you working with Damocles? Why are you doing any of this?”

Pierce looked at him like he was an idiot. “Because I want to be the president, of course.”

Susan couldn’t restrain herself, either, apparently. “But you’re winning,” she said.

Pierce smiled. “No,” she said. “At the moment, I’m the distraction. I’m the challenger who’s interesting. Who brings up some issues, and makes the race competitive. I make the ratings go up, and I give the TV people something new to talk about. But none of the big donors have broken my way. The overall machinery is still firmly on Martin’s side. And when I’m not fresh or entertaining, I’ll be written out of the script. It happens almost every election. It’s just my turn.”

Beck was starting to put it together now. “And Damocles came to you with a proposal.”

Pierce snorted. “No. I had to go to them. Repeatedly. For a company that kills people on a daily basis, they were surprisingly squeamish about getting their hands dirty. But after I pressured them a bit with those hearings, they came around. You’d be surprised how many former Damocles employees there are in the Secret Service.”

Beck couldn’t help looking up at Morrison when she said that. Morrison caught his eye and shrugged, as if to say, Hey, it’s a job .

“Kevin Scott was supposed to be the distraction tonight. He was going to trigger an explosion. And while everyone panicked, a sniper would open fire on the debate stage, wounding both of us.” Pierce allowed herself a smile. “Tragically, only one of us would survive.”

“And you’d ride that wave of sympathy right into the White House,” Beck said.

Pierce nodded. “We’ll blame some Middle Eastern country, and Damocles will have a new war to fight. Everybody wins.”

“But Scott wouldn’t go along with it,” Beck said.

Morrison spoke up. “He had an attack of conscience,” the agent said. “He wanted his wife to be proud of him.” His tone was scornful.

“And you were worried he’d told me about the whole thing.”

“You know, if you’d just cooperated with my agents and told them that Scott didn’t say anything to you, none of this would have happened. You could be at home, waiting for that tumor to kill you. That’s right—I know you’re dying. I know everything about you. You might have helped a few more patients.”

Beck had to admit, she had a point.

“So you lost your bomber,” Beck said. “And you had me running around loose.”

“It could have gotten really ugly,” Pierce said. “Fortunately, you showed up just in time. You really thought you were going to protect me, didn’t you?”

Beck shrugged. He wasn’t usually this wrong about people. He wondered, if he’d had a chance to meet Pierce in person before this, would he have known she was a sociopath?

“Well, you can still help me, Dr. Beck,” she said. “And you can help Dr. Carpenter as well. Even if it is the last thing you’ll ever do.”

That was why she’d explained everything to him. And that was why Morrison and Howard strapped a vest with twenty small bricks of C-4 to his chest.

Because he was a part of the plan now. Now he was one of the bad guys, too.

Chapter 28

Beck waited in line and wondered if he had the guts to sentence Susan to death.

He was outside the auditorium on the Georgetown campus, along with a few hundred other people waiting to go through the metal detectors at the entrance. Like everything else in the contest between the president and Senator Pierce, the location of the debate had been argued back and forth for weeks. Pierce’s people wanted it in New York or Miami, one of the bigger media markets with more primary votes. President Martin’s people had argued that the president was too busy actually running the country to make the trip—and they didn’t want to raise Pierce’s profile any more than necessary. They both backed out of the debate several times before finally agreeing on Georgetown. It was a small space, which limited the candidates’ exposure to the public. Tickets were given to only select lucky citizens, including Beck.

Beck had seen the bickering in the media. He never thought it would mean anything in his life.

Now it looked like they were choosing the place he was going to die.

The question was, how many people was he willing to take with him?

A small radio inside Beck’s ear—almost invisible to anyone else—began speaking to him. “You’re doing fine, Doc,” Agent Howard said. “Remember, we can see everything you’re doing. Just stay calm, and it will be over before you know it.”

Beck wondered where the cameras were, or if Morrison and Howard had agents following him. Probably both. He had no doubt they could see him.

Back at campaign headquarters, they’d cleaned him up as best they could before they sent him out. They gave him a fresh shirt out of a box kept inside one of the staffer’s desks. They put his suit jacket back on him, over the suicide vest. To cover the bulk, they wrapped him in one of the special oversize raincoats that the Secret Service used while they were carrying shotguns and automatic weapons in public. It made him look normal, at least at first glance.

Then they clipped an all-access pass to his coat. It had the senator’s campaign credentials stamped on it, along with a photo they’d snapped of him and printed onto the badge.

He had a trigger for the vest inside the pocket of his suit, but Howard had disconnected it—it was just a piece of plastic now. The real trigger was a code that could be sent at any time from Morrison’s or Howard’s phone.

And for leverage, they had Susan.

“Remember, Doc,” Howard told him in the car as he was dropped off. “You deviate from our instructions in any way—talk to anyone, try to warn the president, go anywhere near a cop—and you will end your girlfriend’s life, as well as your own. It will be quick for you, but not for her. Understand?”

Beck understood. He just had to decide if he could do it anyway.

He saw uniformed security at the metal detectors. They were checking everyone. Campaign staffers had to surrender their phones. Big-name donors had to put their $20,000 Rolexes and Fendi purses into little buckets and send them through the X-ray machine. Beck even saw the secretary of state being patted down. As usual, they were taking no chances when it came to the safety of the candidates.

Beck knew he could stop the plan right there. He could tell the nearest security man he had a bomb, and they would immediately take him down. With luck, it would start a panic and people would scramble to get away from him. Even if Howard detonated the vest remotely, fewer people would die out here than inside the auditorium.

And Damocles’s sniper would never have a chance to kill the president. Pierce’s twisted scheme would fail. On balance, more lives would be saved than lost.

But it would mean Susan died. Probably in the most horrible way possible. Beck didn’t fool himself about Howard or Morrison. They would do their worst, if only for revenge against him, even if he were dead.