Shadow Woman A Novel Page 0,2
shots had come from inside the suite.
The doors and locks were sturdy; Charlie had made several attempts by the time Laurel and Tyrone and a swarm of other agents had reached them. Tyrone positioned himself beside Charlie and said, “Now,” and they kicked together, the combined force finally crashing the doors inward. The agents went in high and low, weapons ready, rapidly sweeping the parlor for the threat.
The room was empty. She couldn’t hear anything, which was even more horrifying, but her heartbeat was thundering in her ears so maybe it was drowning out any sounds. To the right, the door to the First Lady’s bedroom stood open, but Laurel controlled her instinct to rush toward it. Right now, their priority was the President, which meant Charlie was in charge.
The door to the President’s bedroom, on the left, was closed. Charlie rapidly assessed the situation; until they knew where the President was, they could assume nothing. He pointed at Laurel and Tyrone and the rest of the First Lady’s detail, indicating they should check her half of the suite, while he and the others swept the President’s quarters.
His tactics were sound. The detail moved toward the First Lady’s bedroom in an endlessly rehearsed procedure.
The lamps had been turned off in the bedroom, but light from the open bathroom door streamed across the polished marble floor and plush Oriental rug. They rushed the room in precision, halting when they spotted Natalie Thorndike standing motionless on the other side of the sofa, her left side turned toward them.
Laurel had taken the left-hand position as they moved into the room, with Adam Heyes, the detail leader, to her right, and Tyrone to Adam’s right. Adam said sharply, “Ma’am, are you—”
Then they saw that someone was lying on the floor in front of the First Lady, someone with thick dark hair that had gone mostly gray: the President.
The next couple of seconds came in lightning-fast slices, as if time had become a strobe light.
Flash.
Mrs. Thorndike swung around, and that’s when they saw the weapon in her hand.
Flash.
Laurel had a split second, a frozen instant, to register the horrible blankness of the First Lady’s expression; then light flashed from the muzzle of the weapon and what had been only a “pop” from a distance was an endless blast of noise in the confines of the hotel room as the First Lady fired and kept firing, her finger jerking on the trigger.
Flash.
A huge force slammed into Laurel, knocking her backward to the floor. On some distant level she knew she’d been shot, even recognized that she was dying.
Flash.
She had another of those split seconds of sharp awareness: Adam was down, too, sprawled beside her. Her dimming vision caught Tyrone’s expression, set and grim, as he fired his own weapon.
Doing what he had to do.
Dear God, Laurel thought.
Maybe it was a prayer, maybe an expression of the horror she couldn’t fully realize. There were no more flashes. She gave a small exhalation, and quietly died.
The assassination of the President of the United States by his own wife, and her subsequent death at the hands of the Secret Service when she opened fire on them, killing one of the agents in her own protective detail and wounding another, was almost too massive a blow for the national psyche to take in. The country as a whole was in shock, but the mechanism of government automatically kept moving. On the other side of the country, the Vice President, William Berry, was sworn into office almost before the news of the President’s death hit the wire services. The military went on high alert, in case this was the beginning of a bigger attack, but gradually the pieces were put together to form a sordid picture.
The picture was literally a photograph, found in the First Lady’s luggage, of the President engaged in intimate relations with her own sister. Whitney Porter Leightman, four years younger than the First Lady and a power in Washington in her own right, immediately went into seclusion. Her husband, Senator David Leightman, had no comment other than, “The President’s death is a tragedy for the nation.” He didn’t file for divorce, but then no one in the know in the Capitol expected him to; regardless of the situation, his wife was still a member of the power Porter family, and he wasn’t about to cut his political throat because the President had been banging his wife.
A few people wondered what had made the First Lady snap, because