Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

It was this measure that led to the discovery of the sniper's nest in the bell tower of the Chiesa Nuova on the Via dei Filippini, an incredible thirteen hundred yards away. The fact that the nest, the weapon and the Arabic coin had been discovered by accident only the day before didn't do much for Van Loan's already low expectations of Italian security measures.

He'd rented a limousine from a local agency and made the trip from the air base to the Vatican twice, instructing the driver to proceed at a steady sixty miles per hour while Van Loan carefully processed each likely ambush spot along the way, seeing nothing that really looked like a weak spot. A sniper taking out a seated figure like the Pope was one thing; hitting an armored limousine traveling at sixty miles per hour was something else again. The moving target was the one thing that had always bothered him about the Kennedy assassination. Shooting downward at such an extreme angle was difficult, but hitting a perfect head shot while the moving target negotiated a curve was virtually impossible for anyone except a very experienced and talented sniper. By the end of the day, Van Loan was satisfied that all the bases had been covered. He went back to his hotel for a well-earned drink and a decent meal.

The man who called himself Hannu Hancock, back in Rome after his meeting with his employer in Switzerland, stood atop the air-conditioning unit on the roof of the condominium building on the Viale America. Through a pair of binoculars he looked out over the reflecting pool to the Piazzale dello Sport, searching for a marker on the Via Cristoforo Colombo. He finally settled on a set of wide marble stairs leading up to the stadium parking lot.

The point of entry into Rome had been well chosen by the Secret Service. The four-lane roadway was split around the stadium, the nearer side stretching south, the farther side heading north into the city. Dividing the one-way strips was a deep, heavily treed berm of earth to cut traffic noise.

By his estimation, the range was about eight hundred meters, or a thousand yards, well within the weapon's eight-thousand-meter range, but he didn't need any accurate reading since the weapon ranged and sighted itself automatically.

His own escape plan was relatively straightforward. A well-dressed man in an Armani suit and driving a black Audi A8 luxury sedan certainly didn't fit most people's profile of a terrorist assassin. Just in case, he packed the trunk of the automobile with a large sample case of upscale Swiss jewelry findings, and of course he carried the proper ID to back up the facade. By his estimation it would take the police the better part of forty minutes to establish roadblocks around the city; by then he'd be long gone. At an average highway speed of seventy miles per hour he could easily be back in Switzerland by the late evening and out of the country on the red-eye to New York by midnight.

Standing on the rooftop and staring out over the prospective killing ground, he went over the plan of attack in his mind one more time. He saw no serious flaws. All he needed now was for his employer's people to provide him with the final detail and the small piece of equipment necessary to making the whole thing work. Satisfied, he dropped down from the top of the air-conditioning unit, then went down the utility stairway to the elevators on the top floor.

The President of the United States nodded to Mattie, his secretary, and quietly walked down the carpeted hallway to his chief of staff's office. He passed a mirror and noted once again the gray at his temples. It had happened to every president before him, but when he had entered office he thought he was going to escape it because of his youth. The First Lady said it made him look distinguished, but she was biased. It wasn't six and a half years of being the leader of the free world that aged you-it was having all those people who hated you.

An ordinary guy in his fifties had a few good friends, a bunch of acquaintances and maybe a few vague enemies. The President of the United States rarely had friends who didn't want something from him, no acquaintances at all and all sorts of enemies, from wacko heads of state with unpronounceable names to members of his own senate and congress, to half the population of the country that didn't vote for him.

He'd never once been hung in effigy while he was teaching law at Yale, but now it happened somewhere at least once a week. It was a very pissed-off world out there, and a lot of people, rightly or wrongly, thought it was all his fault.

He turned into his chief of staff's office at the end of the hall. He liked it better than the Oval Office. Morrie Adler kept it messy, with papers piled everywhere and the whole place stinking of cigar smoke. Morrie also got to put his feet up on his desk-a luxury not allowed to presidents, at least not without criticism. Morrie had a fishbowl full of miniature Mars bars, which he occasionally sent down to the kitchens to be deep fried in batter-a habit from his days at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. It was funny how things worked out. Morrie'd gone to Oxford right after their time at the Abbey School in Winter Falls, while he'd gone on a backpacking tour of Nepal, but he was the one who wound up being President of the United States. He smiled. He'd long ago learned that life and politics were a crapshoot; you never knew how it was going to all turn out.

The president gave a little knock on the doorframe and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. Morrie was reading the New York Times op-ed section. The president dropped down into the only other chair in the room, a Barcalounger that Morrie'd had back in their days rooming together and taking One L.

"Do I have to go to the Pope's funeral?"

"One of the Castros will be there. You want to be shown up by a graybeard commie commandant in his eighties?"

"I'm serious," said the president.

"So am I," said Morrie, putting down the paper. "Yes, you have to go. If for no other reason than protocol and tradition. The Prime Minister of Israel will be there. Muslims will be there. Even Tonto's going." Tonto was the Secret Service code name for the vice president. The president himself was the Lone Ranger. Morrie's nickname was Bullet, the Lone Ranger's faithful German shepherd, which was appropriate enough; they'd been best friends since high school.

"Speaking of Tonto…"

"I know," said Morrie. "I heard. The party isn't going to back his nomination. He's too old and he's too tired, among other things."

"He's also too stupid," said the president. "I mean, he's a nice guy and all, but if we hadn't needed Chicago so badly, he never would have been on the ticket."

"True enough," said Morrie.

"Any ideas who they'll pick?"

"Rumor says our esteemed secretary of state. A woman, maybe-there's that California senator. And then, of course, there's Senator Sinclair."

"You've go to be kidding," said the president. "Put that trigger-happy lunatic within a heartbeat of the big chair? Sarah Palin was a pussycat in comparison."

"Sarah Palin couldn't find Canada on a map of North America," Morrie said, laughing. "Choosing her was the last act of a desperate old man. Besides, Sarah Palin didn't have any money. William Sinclair does. Lots of it. And he's also got his mother."

"He's got to know I won't endorse him. He's the kind of knee-jerk, 'Take my assault rifle from my cold, dead hands' kind of idiot who gave us the hillbilly reputation that's been keeping us back for the past few years. He's a Glenn Beck, weep-for-joy wet dream. He's got to be weeded out."

"Kate Sinclair doesn't care and neither does the party. The other guys are putting together a slate of hardnosers and gun-toters, and that means we've got to do the same. In eighteen months you're old news as far as they're concerned."