To Kill the President: The most explosive thriller of the year

The car was now heading east on Military Road. There had never been so little traffic. Each time a stop light appeared, Frankel would pray that it would turn red. And as they crossed 31st it seemed destined to go his way. Surely it couldn’t stay green so long. But somehow it did.

The car barely slowed down. Only once did it draw so close to another vehicle that Frankel could see the face of the driver. He didn’t dare tap on the glass of his window – he thought that would count as the something ‘stupid’ that was punishable by a bullet in the back. But he did try to stare sufficiently hard that he might win the driver’s attention. If he could only make her turn around, he would mouth the word ‘Help!’ But she never turned her head.

Eventually they had reached Rock Creek Park and the driver brought the vehicle to a halt.

‘OK,’ he said, his voice light as he turned off the engine, even cheery. ‘Here’s our stop.’

It was then that Frankel felt the anxiety distil into panic and undiluted adrenalin. He was not a man given to rages; he shouted rarely, but now he heard himself. ‘I will not get out of this car until you tell me who you are and what is going on here! Who are you?’

The older man swivelled to look at him. ‘I’m sorry, doctor, but we can’t tell you that. Believe me, this will work out much better for you if you just do what we say. OK?’

‘No. It’s not OK. I insist you tell me who you are this instant. Otherwise I am staying put. You’ll have to shoot me if you don’t like it.’ He folded his arms, in a gesture of stubborn defiance he might have learned from his three-year-old grandson.

At that, the older man gave a nod to the younger one who got out of the car, closed the rear door and instantly opened the one by Frankel. At the same time, the other man got out too, closing his door and coming round so that the two of them – both packed with muscle – were looming over him, while he remained seated and inside. Now the younger man leaned in and in a single motion unbuckled Frankel and pulled him out, tugging him by the lapels of his jacket.

Then, in a movement that must have looked comic – a parody of the MGM dance routines his mother loved – the two men each took one of Frankel’s arms, threaded it through their own and marched forward, lifting Frankel clean off the ground. He heard the electronic sound of his Honda being locked and sensed the keys being returned to his pocket, and felt ridiculous, lifted so effortlessly by these two men. He could tell it involved no strain for them at all.

They advanced swiftly into the park, along its winding paths, their pace barely slowed by the soft, damp terrain. Eventually they turned off into a kind of dip, where the petals of that spring’s blossom had fallen and were turning into mulch. It was a gorgeous spot, lit only by the odd fragment of morning sunlight.

‘All right, here we are,’ the older man said, as he slowed down and lowered Frankel to the ground. ‘Gun, please.’

The junior reached into his jacket and produced a weapon which a second or two later the doctor recognized as his own. His wife’s Colt .25, a small automatic pistol, nickelplated for a more ‘attractive’ look, right down to the nickel coin embedded into the butt. That was the word she had used when she bought it: ‘attractive’. He had pleaded with her not to bring it into the house; he wanted nothing to do with it. Yet here it was. How on earth had these men got hold of it?

‘OK, so here’s how this is going to work, Dr Frankel. You’re going to do exactly what we say and make this clean and simple. If you don’t, if you make this messy, then you’re going to die anyway – but, after you’re dead, maybe in a few days’ time, we’ll go back and kill your wife and maybe one of your grandkids. Say Joey. Or maybe Olivia. She’s cute. Except, with them, we’ll make it last longer and be more painful. OK? Are we good?’

‘What? What are you saying?’

‘We’re saying you’re going to help us this morning, by taking this gun and putting it under your chin and pulling the trigger. Don’t worry, we’ll help. But it needs to be your prints, I’m afraid.’

Frankel felt his bowels straining. He was so confused, but he believed what these psychopathic men were telling him: that they would not hesitate to kill his family. They wanted this to look like suicide and he had no option but to co-operate.

And yet, such is the survival instinct, his body rebelled against the decision he had half-made. He began to wriggle, to resist. But the younger man simply tightened his grip as easily as if turning the screw on a vice. The doctor remained fixed in place, on this patch of earth, as he felt the older man open up his fingers and put the gun into his hand.

He wondered about accepting the weapon and using it against them, but there was no scope for that. They had him by the wrist; they had full control of the angle. And now, as easily as if they were manipulating a mannequin, or a child’s doll, they retracted his arm until he could feel the cold metal of the barrel on the soft skin under his chin.

Now he felt the latex fingers tugging at his own index finger, curling it around the trigger. He heard some shuffling as the two men got into position, ensuring they were out of the bullet’s path. And, aware of how feeble this was, how uselessly impotent he was, he felt his finger curl a notch tighter, a notch tighter, a notch tighter until he could feel no more.

8 (#ulink_1fef9869-bd56-5336-a4a0-9700ae2e5e34)

Washington, DC, Tuesday, 7.25am

She woke to a text message, her phone giving a perky little chime that did not even slightly reflect her mood. Maggie looked over at the other pillow to realize Richard had already left: his morning run, no doubt.

She reached for the device, aware in that small movement that she was mildly hungover. The memory of it came back to her now. She had started early yesterday evening, knocking back the Laphroaig on the phone to her sister who had told her that awful story. And then her sister’s words resurfaced. I cannot believe you work for that evil man, Maggie.

She used the Touch ID on her phone, pressing the pad of her index finger onto the circle at the bottom, which duly unlocked the device, and squinted to read the message.

It was from Crawford McNamara:

Need to see you urgently.

One thing Maggie had noticed about this man. His written communications were entirely free of the sexist banter, faux flirtation and borderline racism that made up his speech. In his emails and text messages, there was no gleeful breaking of the supposed taboos of political correctness. Smart operator that he was, he was careful to leave no trail that could indict him on page A1 of the Washington Post. He would not bequeath an incriminating email cache for WikiLeaks or anyone else to publish during the re-election campaign which, she had no doubt, he was already planning.

Maggie hunted around for some clean clothes, and was poised to revive a shirt from the laundry basket, when she found one still wrapped in dry cleaners’ cellophane. She didn’t like it, but it would do.

With no more than half a cup of coffee inside her, as well as the low throb of last night’s whisky, she was in front of McNamara twenty minutes later.

‘So here’s the deal,’ he said, before she’d even sat down. Once she had, he stood up, so that he could pace the room, circling around her, forcing her to twist her neck to maintain eye contact. She noticed a framed quotation behind his desk, rendered in the style of a New England sampler. ‘It is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.’ The line was unattributed, but she knew the source. Benito bloody Mussolini.

‘A runner – not your boyfriend, someone else – was out in Rock Creek Park this morning.’

‘OK.’

‘And she’s listening to the Gabfest or NPR or some other liberal shit in her state-of-the-art earbuds, when, guess what, she trips over a pair of legs. Turns out it’s a corpse.’

‘Right.’

‘She calls the park police, because she’s a good citizen, and they identify the body and you’ll never believe who it is.’

Maggie waited for the reveal, then realized McNamara was waiting for her. She briefly closed her eyes. ‘You seriously want me to guess?’

‘I thought it might be fun. Never mind.’ Now he sat himself on her side of the desk, so that his knees, exposed and hairy in his cargo shorts, were just a few inches away from Maggie’s face. He was wearing cologne, a fairly expensive one.

‘The dead man is none other than Dr Jeffrey Frankel, of these parts.’

‘The White House doctor? Jesus.’

‘The very same. Seems he blew his brains out early this morning.’

‘Christ. Why would he do that?’

‘I don’t know. And nor do you. And nor does anyone else. Not yet anyway. But I tell you what I do know.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That as soon as this death is announced, and I mean within ten seconds, maybe five, there will be two hundred different crackheads saying it was murder. Within ten minutes, there’ll be fully fleshed-out theories assigning guilt, motive and culprit. And by tonight, maybe tomorrow morning at the latest, every asshole in America will be linking to some five-thousand-word blog titled, “The Unanswered Questions about the Death of Dr Jeffrey Frankel”.’

‘And you know this because you—’

‘—because I am the king of this world. That’s right, Costello.’ He stood again. ‘I was once the master and lord supremo of this dominion. These people are my people. The lonely virgins living in their moms’ basements who never read a conspiracy theory they didn’t believe, and who never saw a corpse within twenty-five miles of the Beltway that died of natural causes – they are,’ and here McNamara raised his arms aloft, in the manner of a TV evangelist, to mimic a Southern preacher’s accent, ‘my people.’

‘They’ll be all over this.’

‘They will love it. This is gonna give Bill O’Reilly orgasms for the next six months. I know because it’d have done the same for me and my old comrades back in the day.’

‘Not that long ago.’

‘Yep.’ He adopted a baritone, as if doing a movie voiceover. ‘“The road from the wilder shores of the patriotic right to the White House proved shorter than any of them ever expected.” But I know you don’t hold that against me. I know you’re going to do your solemn duty.’