Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

“Sinclair! Get down! Dad!

“He’s got a gun!

“Get down!

“They’re going to kill you!

“Get down!”

Molly!

How the hell did she get in here?

But there was no time even to think. The crew-cut guard froze, turned to his right, looked up in confusion, and now for an instant, for a split second, the target was clear.

— and at that instant, pointing the gun directly at the assassin, I fired.

It was not a bullet that I fired.

No, there was far too great a chance of missing with a bullet.

It was a specially configured .410 Magnum shotgun shell, containing one-half ounce of lead pellets. One hundred and twelve pellets.

A shotgun shell in a pistol.

The explosion filled the room, which was now a cacophony of terrified screaming. People were out of their seats, running for the exits, some of them throwing themselves to the floor, seeking cover.

In the two seconds before the guard leapt on top of me, slamming me into the wheelchair, I saw that I had hit the German whose cover was Miles Preston. He had thrown his head back, dazed, his left arm shielding his eyes but too late. Blood ran down his face as the high-velocity impact of dozens of lead pellets wounded him, maimed him, disabled him. It was like having a handful of hot broken glass thrown in your face. He was thrown off balance, off his stride. In his right hand he was holding a small black automatic pistol. It dangled at his side, unfired.

Sinclair, I could see, had been tackled to the floor by someone, presumably his bodyguard, and most of the senators were crouching down, the whole chamber a Babel of screams and cries, deafeningly loud, and it seemed that everyone was rushing toward me all at once, everyone who wasn’t running toward the exits, who hadn’t flattened themselves on the floor.

I struggled with the guard, struggled to get the Derringer out of his powerful grasp. I barely managed to tumble out of the wheelchair, but my legs, which I had been sitting on for the better part of an hour, would not support me. The blood had left them; they were suffused with a dull tingling; they would not work. I could not get to my feet.

“Freeze!” he bellowed at me, wrestling over the gun.

One more shot! I had one more shot! One shot, and this one, the only one left in the chamber, was a .45 bullet, and if I could just get the goddamned gun free, and get the gun cocked, I could kill Miles, I could save Molly’s father, but the guard had tackled me to the floor beside the wheelchair, and now others were upon me, and Miles, I knew for certain that Miles, that professional killer, wounded and maimed though he was, had his automatic pistol out, had it aimed at Harrison Sinclair, and had squeezed the trigger to silence him forever—

— and then came the explosion.

I was overcome with a cold terror as I gave up struggling against the guard.

First one shot, and then two shots, one right after another, in all three enormous explosions, thundering in the room, followed by a split second of stunned silence and then an eruption of horrified screams and shouts.

Miles had fired three rounds.

He had killed Harrison Sinclair.

I had come close to immobilizing Miles. I had almost stopped him. Molly’s diversion had almost stopped him. We had almost blocked the assassin from killing Molly’s father.

But he had been too resourceful, too quick, too professional.

And, pinned against the floor by a half-dozen security guards now, the .45 round unfired in my gun, which the guard had wrested away from me, I felt myself go limp with exhaustion.

Tears — of frustration, of fatigue, of ineffable sadness — came into my eyes. I could no longer think.

Our plan, our brilliant plan, had failed. I had failed.

“All right,” I said, but it was a broken, hoarse whisper. I lay back, my back hard against the cold floor, while all around me chorused the shouts of horror.

As the crew-cut guard whipped out handcuffs, slipping them first over one wrist and then the other, I stared unbelievingly ahead, in the space between the guard’s arm and his chest, at the front.

I did not believe what I was seeing.

The assassin, Miles Preston, was lying in a crumpled heap at the base of the witness stand, his forehead missing, along with most of the front of his face.

Dead.

Above him, watching in dazed incredulity, was the tall, lanky, somewhat disheveled figure of Harrison Sinclair.

Alive.

And the last thing I saw before they took me away, the last sight, extraordinary and wonderful, virtually a miracle, was Molly. Up in the camera niche, in that square hole in the wall, in which she had first begun screaming.

But she was holding in her extended right hand a matte black pistol, and she was looking at the gun with what seemed to be disbelief, and I am sure that I saw on her face the faintest glimmerings of a smile.

The Hart Senate Office Building last evening was the setting for one of the most amazing scenes to take place in the nation’s capital in recent memory.

During nationally televised hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into alleged corruption in the Central Intelligence Agency, at approximately 7:30 last night, Harrison Sinclair, the former Director of Central Intelligence who had been reported killed in a car accident last May, appeared without warning to give sworn testimony concerning what he said was a “massive international conspiracy” involving the present Director of Central Intelligence, Alexander Truslow, and the government of newly elected German Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel.

But as soon as Sinclair was brought into the hearing room by armed guards, gunfire erupted. One of the gunmen, who was killed, was identified only as a German national. The other assailant was reported to be Benjamin Ellison, 40, an attorney and former CIA operative. No other deaths were reported.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 — In the aftermath of the remarkable events in the Senate last month, the nation remains gripped by the spectacle of a CIA director once thought dead suddenly making an appearance on live television, and the equally astonishing assassination attempt that followed immediately on its heels.

But for all the headlines the Sinclair-Truslow matter occasioned, and the weeks of news analysis, much of the affair remains a mystery.

As is by now well known, Harrison Sinclair, director of the CIA until May of last year, faked his own death in order to escape the threat of death posed by those he was seeking to expose. It is also known that, for several hours following the traumatic incidents in Washington, Mr. Sinclair gave extensive testimony in closed session to the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, exposing the activities of Alexander Truslow and his colleagues.

But what has become of Mr. Sinclair since the bloodshed in the Hart Office Building last month? Intelligence sources speculate that he may have been killed, but refuse to comment on the record. Five days after the event, Mr. Sinclair’s daughter, Molly, and her husband, Benjamin Ellison, were declared legally dead, after the small craft they were sailing off Cape Cod was discovered to have capsized. Intelligence sources would not confirm allegations that the couple, like Mr. Sinclair, were murdered. The fate of the three remains a mystery.