I worked hard, practiced late. Sometimes I'd come home to find Frank sitting in his armchair in the dark, watching a recording of the Zapruder film over and over, memorizing those twenty-six seconds. I'd always slide past him into my room. If it was anyone else, I'd think I'd gone unnoticed.
One night as I sneaked by, he paused the tape. "What do you see?" he asked.
I froze behind him. Lifted my eyes to the familiar rise of grass, the grainy limo, Jackie's pink hat.
"JFK's head getting blown apart?" I said.
He made a sad, thoughtful noise deep in his throat, and I felt like an asshole. He nursed his coffee-Frank loved his coffee. He used to drink bourbon, but he'd stopped drinking after he hooked up with my mom because he knew that the smell upset her.
Instead of continuing to my room, I walked around and sat on the couch. "Why, what do you see?"
"Clint Hill." "Who?"
He pointed. "Secret Service agent on the left front running board of the Queen Mary. The car behind the presidential limousine."
He clicked the remote again, and the limo coasted forward. The silent horror of the two shots, the mist by JFK's face. But this time I didn't watch the president. I watched Clint Hill sprinting toward the still-moving limousine. He leapt but missed his grip on the trunk, then stumbled a few steps behind, refusing to fall. The limo accelerated. Hill lunged again, grabbing on and tugging himself forward, one foot shoving the bumper. He seized the first lady's arm, forcing her down out of view, then pivoted to look back at the motorcade. The image shook in Zapruder's panicked hands, losing the procession. When the lens swung back, Clint Hill had wedged himself against the spare-tire compartment, trying to lie across the president and first lady. His body was rigid, braced to absorb a bullet, and it stayed that way until the limousine vanished under the Triple Underpass.
I'd never noticed him before, yet there he was, and his actions knocked the snot-nosed cynicism out of me.
The screen went black, and Frank turned off the TV. We sat in the darkness tinged with English Leather and Maxwell House.
"I was a kid when this happened," he said.
"You were older than I am now."
"I was a kid," he repeated in that same distant voice. "They got Jack, then Bobby and Martin Luther King."
"The same guys?" I asked.
His lips pursed, maybe amused, maybe distressed at my daftness. "No, not the same guys. But JFK had a protection detail. That"-he angled a finger at the dark screen-"can never happen again."
"Is that what you think about when you guard Caruthers?"
His chin rustled against his collar. "Every minute."
"Is he worth dying for?"
Frank thought about that awhile. "He is. If people can shoot our elected leaders, we don't have much of a democracy. I protect the Man to protect my vote. And everyone else's. Even the fifty percent of eligibles who don't bother showing up come poll time. But Caruthers, Caruthers is a little different. I respect him."
"Why?"
He took another slow sip of coffee. "Hard to say, really. It's not about platform or policies, though both matter. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people don't damn themselves in an instant, but with a thousand small decisions. One compromised choice leads to six more, and it goes from there. They decide they can cut a corner, or the ends justify the means, and then since they decided it once, they decide it again. All you can rely on is a man's character. Not what he says or promises, but what he does. What you do is the measure of a man. And Jasper Caruthers, I guess I like what he does. He could be a great man. He's got a shot at being president, too."
"What makes a great man?"
"The man himself." Frank smiled that half smile, but it faded when he took in my expression. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
He studied me. "We say what needs to be said in this family."
It was the first time he'd ever called us a family. My mouth twitched a few times as I tried to figure out what I wanted to say without embarrassing myself. "Why do you think Caruthers's life is worth more than yours? That just seems stupid to me."
He nodded gravely. "No one's life is worth more than anyone else's, not even the vice president's. Caruthers does what he does to serve the country, and this is what I do."
He got up, set down his empty coffee cup, and I rose to head back to my room. As Frank passed, he hugged me. I was stunned-my arms didn't rise from my sides. His shirt was warm with body heat, and I could smell the aftershave mixed with the sweat of a day's work, and I felt my throat close though I didn't know why.
He said, "Don't worry," then wiped his mouth and walked down the hall to his and my mom's bedroom.
That night I moved his picture in front of my dad's in the frame on my nightstand. He didn't say anything about it.
After that, things began to change. Over the next few months, Frank got more and more paranoid. He checked the phone lines for taps. He came up with different hiding places for various weapons so he'd never be caught defenseless. A K-bar beneath the trash-can flap, a. 22 in the ice maker. He said they'd taught him-in the military and in training-where to hide things, but who knows where some of it came from? For the first time, he missed a day of work. Then another. Callie and I confronted him once, worried, but all he said was, "There have been some unusual concerns at work." That was all we could get out of him, but one night I got up for a midnight glass of water and overheard him sitting in his truck in the garage, talking on his car phone about a threat to Vice President Caruthers.
A week later I caught Frank standing at the front window, two fingers through the curtain. His other hand rested on his hip-holstered Glock, and when I asked what was out there, the gun almost cleared leather. As he shook his head and moved past me, mumbling, I thought I heard an engine turn over and then a car drive away.
I wondered why a federal agent was creeping around his own house peering out windows, but I didn't say anything. Maybe I didn't want to think about the implications. Maybe I was afraid of what the answers would be.
What could be dangerous enough to scare Frank?
For a time I stood in the cold hall, looking at the master-bedroom door, debating walking over there and knocking. But I kept my mouth shut and my concerns to myself. I'd wait. Whatever it was, Frank could handle it.
He was dead within the month.
Chapter 4
The helicopter banked hard around a stretch of coastal hills, knocking me back to the present, and the giant nuclear power plant loomed into view. There were maybe fifty police cars, lights blinking. Army cargo trucks and Hummers, even twin tanks guarding the western perimeter, cannons swiveled to face the dark sky over dark water. Cops and agents had surrounded the containment domes and set up a perimeter outside the rectangular building housing the spent-fuel pond. Powerful spotlights illuminated the scene in broad swaths of yellow.
The trail of destruction left by the terrorist's SUV told a tale of its own. A smashed gate arm at the checkpoint, a path blazed through the brush, and an overrun section of chain-link fence, flat on the ground, aligned with a second, identical breach in a second fence. Curls of tire lay on the ground past the fallen concertina wire, just inside the compound. A clipped generator box continued to throw up sparks. Thirty yards of concrete scored by the Jeep's metal rims. And at the end of the trail, angled up the three broad concrete steps and embedded in the doorway as if of a piece with the building, was the red Cherokee I'd been watching on TV mere hours ago from the anonymity of my bed.
We descended into a typhoon of dirt and sand. Soldiers cleared the makeshift landing zone, squinting against the gritty wind. My left knee was bouncing. This couldn't be real.