"British bitch!" bellowed the big correspondent.
"American swine!"
"Hello? Hello? Oh, God, I'm deaf!" The mortified cameraman looked as if he were trying to crush his own head.
"Shut up and start shooting!"
The cameraman didn't hear him.
The big-mouthed correspondent roared in frustration and manhandled the camera off his debilitated cameraman, shoving it at a man in a trench coat who just happened to be standing around.
"Point this in my direction for thirty seconds and I'll pay you a thousand dollars."
The man in the trench coat pretended not to see him.
"Asshole!"
"I'll do it." A passing construction worker, with a mortar trowel dangling from a loop on his overalls, took the camera. "Thousand bucks, right?"
"Yes, just start shooting—oh, shit!" The correspondent had lost his subject matter. The wounded senator had not stood around and waited. He was near to entering the Old S.O.B., and the limey pixie with the fingernails-on-chalkboard voice was doing her report!
"Come on!" The correspondent went at the British woman in a crouch, changed his mind at the last second and steered into her equipment assistant. The man made a croak of dismay as he toppled, his video camera landing hard enough to produce several shattering sounds.
"You miserable worm!"
Orville Flicker watched it all, live, his own cameraman getting it all on a digital camcorder with an uplink through a mobile broadband connection. Flicker's cameraman was just some kid from a community college, hired for a one-time job and instructed to keep his distance. Still, the banshee voice of the tiny British woman came through clear enough to vibrate Flicker's water glass.
Despite the screaming, the big correspondent positioned himself where the slow-moving senator would pass within the shot. The blue-collar man in the overalls jogged up and pointed the camera.
"Where did that son of a bitch come from?" Flicker demanded.
His assistant, Noah Kohd, talking on two mobile phones at once, started to answer.
"Shush!" Flicker said. "Where the hell is Rubin?"
"On his—" Kohd said.
"Oh, no." Flicker turned up the sound on one of the news feeds. "We're going live now to the our correspondent at the Old Senate Office Building...."
"This will ruin everything," Flicker complained through grinding teeth. "Whiteslaw can't be a media darling—he can't!"
"Under control, sir," Kohd said.
"Under control? Under control?" Flicker felt the pressure in his head become so great he thought his skull would open up violently.
"There, sir," Kohd said.
On the screen from his own video feed, Kohd saw the bricklayer with the video camera sprint away, taking the camera with him. The little British woman brayed viciously and hysterically. The big correspondent stood there for a long moment, not believing what he was seeing, then burst into sobs.
"In your miserable American face!" the British woman shrieked.
The sobbing man snatched her up by the neck while the senator and his escort entered the building unhurriedly. The Secret Service agents stood around acting as if there were nothing out of the ordinary taking place.
Flicker couldn't believe his luck. "Thank you, God," he breathed, going limp into a leather chair. They had just avoided a catastrophe.
"I hired him," Kohd said simply, nodding at the video feed. "The bricklayer. Paid him ten grand to disrupt the reporting."
Flicker nodded. "I see. Good move."
"No problem." Kohd was calm, unsmiling. He was always calm and unsmiling, one hundred percent of the time. He could have been a Secret Service agent.
Kohd was darn competent, as well. If tape of Whites- law hobbling bravely into his office had made it onto the networks, the senator would have become a hero. That would make him untouchable; killing a hero only strengthened the hero's cause.
Whiteslaw had gone from a thorn in the side of Orville Flicker to a poison pill. He was the man who could neuter MAEBE.
He had to die and he had to die today—before people started liking him for all the wrong reasons.
"Where's Rubin?"
"En route," Kohd said.
"Why wasn't he there to intercept Whiteslaw?"
"Rush-hour traffic. He'll be there in ten. They'll be staged for an assault within fifteen. Mr. Flicker?" Kohd nodded at one of the monitors, where the senator's ugly face floated over the left shoulder of a female news anchor.
Flicker unmuted it. The anchor was a blond, benign woman whom Flicker knew from his White House days.
She had failed to succumb to his charms. When he was President, that bitch would be one of the first to go on the blacklist.
She started talking about a press conference.
"...on the steps of the Old Senate Office Building in one hour."
"Those bastards. They're taunting me."
"Sir?" Kohd asked. He had just one phone against his head, which was about as much attention as he ever gave anyone.
"Look at all those Secrets around there. They didn't lift a finger. This whole scene was staged to draw us out. We didn't bite so they'll try it again, in the same damn place, just to make it convenient."
"Perhaps, sir. Another wrinkle has come to our attention, sir. The pair that escorted the senator inside? They match the descriptions we have from our losses in recent days. Chicago, Colorado, San Fran and today."
Orville Flicker became very nervous then, and began going back and forth over the video, which he had saved to his hard drive. He had been so worried about the reporters he had not paid much attention to the senator.
Over and over he replayed the footage of Senator Herbert Whiteslaw being assisted from the ambulance and walking slowly through the media turmoil and into the building. The senator's face was perfectly focused through much of the footage, and yet the faces of the men on either side of him were a blur the entire time.
"Electronic interference?" Flicker asked.
Kohd shook his head. "Creating a perfectly localized visual distortion? Never heard of such a thing."
"But it could be, right?"
"I'd say you're grasping at straws, but what else could it be?" Kohd clearly believed it was something else.
Flicker shook his head slightly, his insides growing colder. He was thinking back to the chaos he had witnessed at the Governor Bryant assassination. There were men who moved like flickering light, neutralizing his sniper and every other man in his Midwest cell in just seconds. Flicker was taunted on the radio by someone, and then there had been the glimpse of a brightly colored wraith drifting across the auditorium, searching for him. Could the wraith had been a man in a kimono, of all things?
Of course it could. Once you accepted the notion of a human being who floated with the speed of a shadow, why not put him in a kimono?
Even without a visible face it was clear enough on the video feed that one of the men assisting the wounded senator was a man in a long, golden robe with multicolored stitching. The other man was dressed just as unexpectedly, when you considered that he should have been a Secret Service agent. The man was in a T-shirt, of all things, and casual slacks.
Just minutes ago the worst enemy to his future had been a senator with an old grudge and a new bill. Now it was something new—these two.
"They are very special agents of some kind," Flicker said. "How come I never knew about them? The President told me almost everything."
"Maybe the President doesn't know about them himself."
"They've got presidential backing now. You've got to throw a hell of a lot of weight around to get the Service to fall in line. Only the President's got that kind of muscle. Unless—they're Secrets themselves."