John Abbott - Scimitar

She looked at it and gasped.

Covered her face with her hands.

Nodded into her hands.

And turned away and ran out.

“Thanks,” Hogan said to the attendant, and followed her out to the corridor, where she stood sobbing in Geoffrey’s arms. “I’m sorry about this,” Hogan said. She nodded, kept sobbing. “I’d have given anything not to have...”

“I know,” she said, sobbing.

She was thinking that she’d been to bed with the man who’d killed her mother. She was thinking she would never go to bed with another man as long as she lived.

“Miss Randall,” Hogan said, “if you feel up to answering a few questions, I’d like to...”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m all right.”

“’Cause I’d like to get started on this right away,” he said. “I tried to reach Nichols and Dobbs,” he said, turning to Geoffrey, who’d met them yesterday, “but they’d already left for the island. Liberty Island,” he explained. “So what I want to know... is that drawing a good one? The composite? ’Cause if it is...”

“Not particularly, no,” Elita said.

“What I’m asking, if I had copies of that drawing messengered out to the island, would it help our people out there? Would they recognize this character from the drawing alone? When he pops up? If he pops up.”

“I don’t think so,” Elita said. “Not from the drawing alone. I know him, but I’m not sure anyone who didn’t know him...”

“Because what it is, we’re having trouble getting that hospital out there to cooperate. All we want is a photograph of the guy, but you’d think we were asking them to fax us his kidney or something. Which brings me to my next question. Would you recognize this character if you saw him again?”

“Yes.”

“Miss Randall, do you want to help us catch him?”

“Yes.”

“Would you be willing to come out to Liberty Island?”

“Why do you want her out there?” Geoffrey asked.

Hogan hesitated. He knew he’d be placing the girl in harm’s way, and ethics demanded that he tell her what she might be getting into. At the same time...

“It’s my guess he’ll be heading out there,” he said. “One way or another, he’ll get on that island, is my guess.”

“Why would he want to do that?” Geoffrey asked.

Hogan hesitated again. This kid was from the British Consulate. How much of this did he want going out over the international wire? He decided to level with them both.

“We think he’ll be trying for the President,” he said.

Elita looked puzzled. Geoffrey was already nodding.

“To kill him,” Hogan said. “He’ll be trying to kill President Bush.”

“I thought so,” Geoffrey said.

They all fell silent. A doctor in a white coat, a stethoscope hanging out of his pocket, came down the corridor, pulled open the heavy door to the morgue, and went inside. There was the sudden whiff of decomposing bodies as the door whispered shut.

“If the picture’s no good to us...” Hogan said.

“I know what you want,” Elita said.

“Just stay with us,” he said. “Point him out if he shows his face.”

She nodded.

“That way, we’ll maybe have a slight edge.”

She was still nodding.

“Will you do it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

“Good,” he said.

Heather Broward was positioning the Marine Corps Band on the level above the podium. Three musicians deep, fourteen musicians wide, a human wall of red, white and blue above the red-white-and-blue bunting draped on the wall behind the podium. The podium itself had been hung with similar bunting on its sides and above the Presidential Seal on its face, but nothing could disguise its primary function. A Coast Guard cutter was moving in a circumscribed circle out on the water, waving off any boats approaching the island, but its presence was hardly necessary; every precautionary measure had been taken to circumvent any water-borne snipers.

“Which one of you is the leader?” Heather called up through a bullhorn.

The leader, who happened to be a brigadier general, didn’t much enjoy being yelled at by a snip of a girl, but he raised his hand like a schoolboy asking permission to go pee.

“Could you stand just a bit forward of the others, sir?” Heather called, the sir mollifying him a bit, but not entirely.

Behind the podium, Ralph Dickens and his assistant were helping the television people set up their microphones. A technician from ABC accidentally banged into the CNN mike. Ralph caught it before it fell over completely, but he hit his elbow on the goddamn shield in the process. Muttering under his breath, he righted the microphone and scowled at the clumsy technician. Not three feet away, Heather was bawling into the bullhorn again. On such a nice day, too.

Ralph yawned and looked at his watch.

Ten forty-seven.

In about an hour and a half, it’d all be over and done with.

Sun dazzled the water, glinting like diamonds in the spray kicked back by the police launch. Against his better judgment, Hogan had allowed the Turner kid to accompany them. He would probably get all kinds of flak about this from the Chief of Detectives, but better to get the damn girl out to the island than to argue about it all morning with someone who could hardly speak the English language right.

“He took me out there, you know,” Elita said, shouting over the roar of the twin engines.

“Who did? What do you mean?” Hogan shouted back.

“Sonny. We went out there last Saturday.”

“What’d you do?”

“Walked around, took pictures.”

She was thinking of what they’d done afterward. In her mother’s apartment. In her mother’s white lingerie and red shoes. How could she have been so utterly stupid? A wave of guilt and shame washed over her, almost overwhelming her grief, followed instantly by a rage so fierce it virtually blinded her. In that moment, the spray hitting her face as she stood on the open sunwashed deck with Geoffrey and the police lieutenant, she wanted nothing more than to strike back at Sonny Hemkar, cut out his heart, eat his heart, hurt him, kill him, kill him.

Geoffrey saw the look on her face.

And shuddered.

In the darkness of the supply closet, the Walkman clipped to his belt, the earpiece in his ear, Sonny listened to the news while he knotted his tie, slipping the silk under the collar of the white shirt, looping it under and over, smoothing it on his chest. The black fedora was sitting on top of the camera bag. He moved it to the floor and flicked on the small penlight, but only for an instant, time enough to locate the FBI tag McDermott had fashioned for him.

He clipped the tag to his lapel, took the walkie-talkie from the bag, and slipped it into the right-hand pocket of the suit jacket. He had earlier removed the bulb from the basting tool; he now slipped the plastic tube into the left-hand pocket of the jacket, together with the two extra magazines for the pistol. Picking up the gun with its attached silencer, he tucked it into his waistband on the left-hand side of his body, easily accessible for a cross-body draw.

He had not touched the bottle of sarin since he’d placed it in the camera bag yesterday afternoon.

He turned on the penlight again.

He knew this was a risk; light might spill into the entrance alcove from the crack under the closet door. But the greater danger was to work with the bottle in the dark, risking a spill that would certainly kill him. Cautiously, his hand shaking, he peeled off the transparent tape around the nozzle, relieved when he saw that the nozzle was still turned to the OFF position. He would not turn it to the STREAM position until he was in place on the level above the President.