New York looked amazingly huge and imposing, capable of swallowing us whole. Anything can happen here, I was thinking, and I’m sure Don Hamerman and Jay Grayer were, too.
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
The three of us jumped forward in the backseat of the town car. I had my hand on my gun, ready for almost anything, ready for Jack and Jill.
We all stared in horror at the President’s car up ahead—Stagecoach. There was total silence in our car. Awful silence. Then we began to laugh.
The loud noises hadn’t been gunshots. They just sounded like it. They were false alarms. But it was chilling all the same.
We had passed over worn and warped metal gratings on the ramp coming off the bridge. Everyone in our car had experienced an instant heart attack at the sudden and unexpected noise. Undoubtedly, the same thing had happened in the President’s car.
“Jesus,” Hamerman moaned loudly. “That’s what it would be like. Oh, God Almighty.”
“I was there at the Washington Hilton when Hinckley shot Reagan and Brady,” Jay Grayer said with a tremor in his voice. I knew that he was back there once again, with Reagan and James Brady. Experiencing a flashback, the kind no one wanted to have.
I wondered about Grayer’s personal stake in this. I wondered about everybody on our team.
I watched the President’s car as it swept down onto the crowded, brightly lit streets of New York City. The American flags on the fenders were flapping wildly in the river breeze.
No regrets.
CHAPTER
79
THE PHOTOJOURNALIST had arrived early on Monday, December 16, for his work in New York.
He had decided to drive from Washington. It was much safer that way. Now he walked along Park Avenue, where the presidential motorcade would travel tomorrow morning, only a few hours from now. He was relaxing before the historic day, taking in the sights and sounds of New York City in the holiday season.
Kevin Hawkins had occasional flashes, and photos of memorabilia he had studied on the JFK killing, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, even the badly botched shooting of Ronald Reagan.
He knew one thing for certain: this particular assassination wouldn’t be botched. This was a done deal. There was no way out for Thomas Byrnes. No escape.
He was closing in on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he knew the President and his wife would be staying. It was typical for this president to go against the advice of his security advisors. It fit his profile perfectly.
Don’t listen to the experts. Fix what isn’t broken. Arrogant fool, useless bastard. Traitor to the American people.
The night was cool and fine, the light rain having finally stopped. The air felt good against his skin. He was certain that he wasn’t going to be spotted as Kevin Hawkins. He’d taken care of that. There were easily a couple of hundred NYPD uniforms around the hotel. It didn’t matter. No one would recognize him now. Not even his own mother and father.
The picturesque divided avenue outside the hotel was relatively crowded at this time of night. Some spectators had come in hopes of seeing the President shot. They didn’t know when the President would be arriving, but they knew the likely hotels in midtown. The Waldorf was a good guess.
The local tabloids, and even the New York Times, had run huge headlines about Jack and Jill and the ongoing drama. In typical fashion, the press had gotten it mostly wrong—but that would be helpful to him soon.
Kevin Hawkins joined in with the strangely noisy and almost festive crowd, several of whom had wandered over from holiday visits to the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. The unruly ambulance-chasers gathered outside the hotel told smugly ironic jokes, and he despised them for their big city cynicism, their attitude. He despised them even more than the useless president he had come to this city to kill.
He stayed at the outer edge of the crowd, just in case he suddenly had to move fast. He didn’t want to be around there too late, but the presid
ential motorcade was running behind the schedule he had, the schedule he had been given.
Finally, he saw heads and necks in the crowd craning to the far left. He could hear the roar of cars coming up Park Avenue. The motorcade was approaching the hotel. It had to be the motorcade coming.
The dozen or so cars stopped at the canopied entrance on Park Avenue. Then Kevin Hawkins almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The arrogant bastard had chosen to walk inside from the street rather than use the underground garage. He wanted to be seen—to be photographed. He wanted to show his courage to all the world… to show that Thomas Byrnes wasn’t afraid of Jack and Jill.