At seventy-nine minutes since O’Gara’s find, the CNN night desk noted the coverage. With a special reciprocal arrangement with Sky, an editor patched the signal to his uplink and alerted Atlanta of the events that were unfolding half a world away.
Eighty-three minutes. A hot quick lead was typed into the teleprompter, and the Atlanta anchor read what was put before her.
“Breaking news from Sydney, Australia, where it is five forty-three A.M. Approximately 1,100 guests and staff of the new 535-room Ville St. George Hotel are being evacuated. There are unconfirmed reports of an electrical fire or the failure of an elevator. For details, we join Sky Television News with live coverage.”
Far across the International Dateline, an overnight CIA officer at Langley, Virginia, monitored the news channels. Silvia Brownlee noted that CNN interrupted its domestic news for a story from Sydney. Using her remote, the fifteen-year veteran turned up the volume and jotted down the details.
Ville St. George. Sydney. Evacuation.
Brownlee added equal signs between the key words and then wrote a large question mark. She swiveled her chair to her computer and typed in the hotel name. Then she clicked on a password-protected file. As she suspected, one floor of the St. George had been designed and built to White House specifications.
Brownlee called upstairs. Her boss needed to know there was an alert at a Rip Van Winkle House. Although she didn’t know it, it was the most important phone call she ever made.
He wondered if anyone had stopped to think about the absurdity.
There it was, just on the other side of the chain-link fence: Rancho Golf Course. The home of the annual Los Angeles Police/Celebrity Golf Tournament.
Every spring the LAPD takes over the tees for a fundraiser that supports the Police Memorial Foundation. But Rancho Golf Course was also where O.J. Simpson used to play. That was the irony.
Simpson was on the greens as the jury deliberated his civil trial for the deaths of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. The case Simpson lost. He was also playing the day a single-engine plane crashed on the course just a few hundred yards away. One of the first things the two injured men heard as they were pulled out of their badly damaged plane was that O.J. was “over there.”
Nat Olsen almost laughed at the thought. The police and one of L.A.’s most notorious citizens sharing the same $18-a-day public course. But he didn’t laugh. That wasn’t part of his character…not as the jogger today or the man he might become tomorrow. He was focused and waiting at the Cheviot Hills Recreation Park that bordered the Rancho Golf Course.
Olsen wore loose-fitting black sweats and gray running shoes that he’d picked up weeks ago from a secondhand clothing store on La Brea. The only thing that distinguished him from any other jogger was a pair of thin leather gloves. They weren’t quite de rigeur for running, but they were definitely necessary for his particular line of work.
Affixed horizontally inside the zip-up top, at the small of the back, was a 4″-by-l” heavy duty, all-weather Velcro strip. It could self-adhere, but he’d sewn it into the fabric for extra reinforcement. Another strip of the hook and loop tape was stuck to his Sog Specialty FSA-98 Flash II serrated knife. The $39 switchblade is lightning quick. It opens with a simple press of a thumb. The blade is less than four inches and generally rated as a defensive slash-and-retreat weapon. But not in the hands of someone more experienced. Not in his hands.
Olsen certainly wouldn’t have used such a simple over-the-counter purchase for something more difficult, perhaps on a worthier target. But this was going to a simple matter, reflected by a smaller fee than he’d recently been earning. Fifty thousand.
His quote was normally much higher but so were the risks. Today’s job required very little planning, though he always did more than required. Where others screwed up, he never did. The sloppy ones forgot that it wasn’t just the kill, it was the exit that counted. He’d be as discreet in his departure as he was in his job.
To the normal passersby, he looked like a struggling and winded mid-to-late-forties jogger. He was neither struggling nor over thirty-five. If he chose, he could run for miles. But not today. With black hair extensions added to his closely cropped cut, dyed eyebrows, and a foam rubber gut that put on an additional forty-five pounds under his sweats, he easily passed as another middle-aged man trying to beat back the years.
He carried a Dallas license to prove he was Nat Olsen. He also created a convincing legend he’d share with anyone who stopped to talk. Nat Olsen was a nice guy, a Fidelity mutual fund trader relocating to Los Angeles. He was scouting a home for his family. There was nothing unusual about him — not a gesture or mannerism that would ever raise suspicion. He would pant, stop and start, double over, grab his sides, and shake his head and wish he were in better condition, just like so many others.
In reality, he barely taxed himself. Everything was completely planned out, rehearsed, carefully considered. Surprise would be on his side. However, he clearly understood that a daylight hit brought its own extra risks.
He had any number of ways to escape. Bicycles hidden both north and south of his intercept point. A car parked along a side lot off Motor Avenue. The Pico Boulevard bus. And his preferred method: simply joining a pack of other early evening joggers and going out inconspicuously.
He figured he had an hour more to kill. Funny how that sounds, he thought. Maybe he’d watch the golfers on the other side of the fence. He’d take his time and stay near his initial contact point. He’d politely nod to runners faster than him and stay behind anyone slower — like his target, who should be along well before dusk.
“Let’s go to the Midwest line. Hello, you’re on Strong Nation.”
“Hey, Elliott. This is Peter in Detroit. Long-time listener, first-time caller,” lied the voice over the telephone. He was in a six-week rotation, either playing up to the audience with an anti-administration rant or throwing in an incendiary left wing comment that would generate an hour’s worth of bitter conservative reaction. He was there, like dozens of others, because Elliott Strong didn’t count on his audience to provide enough controversy. The 52-year-old national syndicated talk show host, broadcasting from his home studio in the geographic center of the country — Lebanon, Kansas — had his ringers. They always helped.
Unseen to his millions of listeners, Strong took a sip of his hot Darjeeling tea and went through a quick set of mouth exercises that he watched in a mirror in front of him. This wasn’t just a physical routine. Strong liked looking at himself during his live broadcast. It added to his performance and inflated his ego.
Strong also always dressed for his shows. Tie and jacket, sometimes a suit. He resisted the urge to install web cameras. He felt that the magic of radio presented more opportunity than television. He held the historic Nixon-Kennedy debates as case in point. Over the radio to an unseeing audience, Nixon was the clear winner — concise, authoritative, composed. To TV audiences, however, Nixon appeared drawn, tired, and evasive. Strong would resist TV, even though he knew the offers would be coming. His ratings were growing too fast to be ignored.
In the control room, Strong’s engineer watched the meters, keeping them in the legal limits. Strong did less to modulate his opinion, openly criticizing public figures, while remaining vague about the details. He had only two other people on the payrolclass="underline" his wife, who served as his screener, and his web master, who constantly updated the StrongNationRadio.com website with right-leaning polls, editorials that supported his harangues, and links to like-minded Internet sites.