James Grippando - The Abduction

She pushed the trash cans with all her strength, knocking him over. She raced down the alley, swallowing the pain that shot from her knee.

“Get her!” she heard him shout.

She was pumping her arms, running faster than she’d ever run before. She tried to scream, but she could barely even breath. Her eyes fixed on the streetlight that marked the end of the alley. Just a little further and she would reach the side street-freedom-but the footsteps behind her were drawing closer. She reached inside for more speed, but her legs didn’t have it. She looked back. The scary guy was after her. With legs so long he was gaining with ease. A side-stitch was tugging at her guts. Her twisted knee buckled, and she fell hard to the pavement.

He was on her in an instant, driving a knee into her back, pinning her to the ground. A big gloved hand covered her mouth. The cold steel gun barrel met the base of her skull. She tried to wriggle free, but it was futile.

“Don’t fight it,” he said in a hushed voice that chilled her. “No one escapes from me. ”

Allison received word of the botched arrest almost immediately, in a frank and somber phone call from a beleaguered Harley Abrams. Minutes later, the breaking news was reaching television and radio audiences across the country. It was inevitable that the media would jump all over the story, but a local sheriff who was quick to shift blame to the federal authorities had turned the leak to a flood.

Allison canceled her Saturday-evening campaign rally at the University of Florida homecoming celebration and headed straight for the airport. She had summoned the FBI director, the special agent in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, and others to a briefing in Washington to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. She would have preferred to reach Washington without addressing the media, but a barrage of hungry reporters was waiting for her at the airport, blocking her way to the gate.

A team of Secret Service agents forged an opening as swarming reporters completely encircled her. Microphones and cameras were thrust in her face. Blinding white lights hit her squarely in the eyes. Shouts came from every direction. The questions ran together, until a bruising, elbow-throwing rookie with a crew cut managed to plant himself beside her and get a microphone in her face.

“Ms. Leahy!” he blurted in a husky voice.

Allison kept walking, but it was impossible to ignore him. The guy was built like a college jock turned sportscaster, wired like a bodybuilder on steroids. It was as if some desperate newsroom editor had decided the only way to get this story was to send its biggest running back barreling over the goal line.

“Will Mr. Abrams be fired?” he shouted, just two feet from her eardrum. “Will he be pulled from the investigation?”

Allison started say “No comment,” but then it struck that the last time she refused to answer a question she’d been labeled an adulteress. It wasn’t fair to leave Harley twisting in the wind. “I’ve heard nothing to indicate that Mr. Abrams acted irresponsibly,” she replied.

Her response fueled the mob. Smaller but meaner seasoned journalists overtook the neophyte from Muscle Beach. A television reporter came out on top, shouting over the raucous crowd, “Ms. Leahy, do you believe the FBI is acting responsibly when it holds an innocent family at gunpoint in their own front yard?”

Allison stopped and shot him an angry glare. The traveling circus seemed to drop a few decibel levels in anticipation of her statement.

She looked directly into the nearest camera. “Law enforcement acts responsibly when the circumstances suggest that they must act quickly to save an innocent girl’s life, when they rely on the best information available to them at the time, and when they employ measures that allow mistakes to be discovered before a single shot is fired and before a single person is injured. That appears to be what happened here. Yes, I believe the FBI acted responsibly.” She looked away from the camera and pushed ahead.

The frenzy reignited. A square-jawed correspondent from one of the national networks was right in her face. “We hear reports that the family has threatened to sue.”

“That’s between them and their lawyers,” she said as she breezed past him and approached the gate.

He kept pace. “Is that the reason you’re justifying the FBI’s actions-because you’re afraid of being sued?”

She stopped short again, shooting an even more intense glare. “Never in my life have I let the threat of a civil lawsuit color my independent assessment of government action.”

“Does that mean you’re not afraid of being sued?”

“It means that as attorney general I take full responsibility for what took place today. That you can bank on. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”

A disheveled young woman with a broken heel on her shoe and mussy black hair popped from the crowd, looking as if she’d literally crawled to the front at ground level. A Secret Service agent grabbed her, but she shouted her question as he pulled her aside. “What about the pledge you made to the American people, Ms. Leahy? Your promise to suspend your personal campaigning and to make this investigation your primary responsibility?”

“I believe I kept that promise,” said Allison.

The mob swallowed the reporter, but the question rang in Allison’s ears. “Then why?” she shouted. “Why were you campaigning in Florida when what could have been the biggest break in the case was underway in Nashville?”

Allison continued toward the gate. A wall of security guards kept the press from surging forward. Allison ducked into the long tunnel that led to her plane, still focused on that lone voice in the confusion.

She heard it again. “Why were you in Florida?”

Her entourage whisked Allison on board. The flight attendant closed the door. The jet engines screamed. But that last question echoed in her mind. What was she doing in Florida?

She glanced out the oval window and stared at the runway. The answer escaped her.

General Howe was a blue suit in a sea of tuxedos as he left the historic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida. He knew the event was formal, but Buck LaBelle worried about how the average voter might respond to a candidate in such aristocratic attire just two days before the election. Better to be out of place at some swanky hotel, he figured, than to be out of step with the millions of viewers who might see him on television.

Outside the lower lobby entrance, members of the media stood shoulder to shoulder beneath a red canvas canopy with shiny brass poles. They surged forward the instant the door opened, shouting a collective, “There he is!”

The general maintained a serious, nearly somber expression, reminding himself to convey the proper level of concern over the FBI’s bungled invasion of the wrong house.

“General Howe,” someone asked, “are you angry about the news from Nashville?”

He kept walking as he talked, heading for his car. “Of course I’m angry. The entire nation should be angry.”

“Angry at who, sir?”

The car door flew open as Howe stopped at the curb. “It is my understanding that this invasion was approved by Ms. Leahy personally. All along she has insisted on controlling this investigation for her own purposes. The end result is the most ill-conceived plan of attack since the Bay of Pigs invasion. Apparently, her only goal is to bring this tragedy to an explosive conclusion on the eve of the election, which she hopes will whisk her into the White House.”

Another reporter jumped in. “We’ve just received word that she has taken full responsibility for today’s events. What do you say to that, sir?”