When Cox comes within two hundred feet of his gate, at the farthest end of the terminal, he sees several FBI agents, wearing their tacky windbreakers, standing around the gate’s counter. Panicking, Cox stops and reverses direction.
The shouts from farther up the concourse are immediate and emphatic. “Senator Cox! Stop!”
Looking over his shoulder as he runs, the sixty-three-year-old senator sees the FBI agents giving chase. They are young and athletic, while he is old and not. Engaged in a footrace he cannot possibly win, Cox looks right and left for other avenues of escape. The federal agents in pursuit continue to shout for the senator to stop. People in the concourse stop and stare at the old, white-haired man in the luxurious Burberry double-breasted cashmere coat staggering in one direction and then another, his face racked with dread, thwarted in his escape.
The seven FBI agents approach at a dead run. They are less than forty feet away when Cox almost collides into a Port Authority police officer just emerging from the men’s restroom. As the policeman begins to apologize to the clearly disoriented man, and before the FBI agents have again shouted for the senator to halt, Cox grabs the officer’s gun from his holster and turns it on the FBI agents.
“You stop! You stop!” Cox shouts somewhat childishly at the hard-charging FBI agents, who comply. All draw their service weapons and train them on their august suspect.
“Stop! Just stop!” Clearly, the senator has lost his senses, a complete disassociation from the great man he was only minutes earlier. His brain has mostly stopped functioning in a rational sense. Reality is fractured. The noise and thundering inside his head has made him utterly deaf to the shouted exhortations and demands of the FBI agents and Port Authority police officer. He spins in every direction, pointing the gun at whoever threatens to approach.
“Safety’s engaged! Safety is engaged!” The Port Authority police officer is shouting, but in the chaos and screams of passengers in the terminal, it’s doubtful the FBI agents hear him. The cop edges closer and closer to Senator Cox, reaching for the gun. More shouting. More screams. The FBI agents are almost within arm’s reach of Cox, who has been pulling on the trigger all the while, to no effect. He hasn’t fired a gun in more than thirty years, having been taken to a DC firing range by a lobbyist for his thirty-fifth birthday, but he realizes the problem with firing must be the safety latch and blindly disengages it, turning the gun on the man closest at hand, the Port Authority cop.
Before Cox gets off his shot, first one and then all of the FBI agents fire their weapons, killing the senator instantly with two shots to the head and five to the upper torso. The force of the fusillade throws Cox on his back, his arms and legs spread-eagled. He will be buried in six days back home in North Carolina, in a family plot next to his wife’s grave. His three adult children will attend. Members of the news media, quarantined outside the cemetery gate, will outnumber the mourners. Few words will be spoken over Cox’s grave. Not even the flag at the local US post office is lowered to half-mast for the dead senator. The woman who succeeds him in Congress is an ardent supporter of President Monroe and will be put on the short list of vice president contenders for the second term.
* * *
JAMES ODOM RECEIVES word of the mission’s implosion approximately seven minutes after Sinatra was shot dead by Hayley Chill. Intelligence has been his entire professional career, and he takes pride in his ability to gather it. He even knows it was Hayley Chill who not only killed his operative but also had inspired Asher Danes to expose the conspiracy to the FBI. Recalling his first impressions of the intern and his decision not to recruit her, Odom’s biggest regret is that he did not have her eliminated. Instinct is everything in the espionage business. His gravest error, then, was in this instance failing to act on his intuition.
He does not bother contacting the other conspirators. No doubt they will learn the truth on their own and in due time. Unlike Taylor Cox, the CIA deputy director has no intention of running. Attempting to assassinate the president was, of course, a calculated risk. The only honorable recourse is to accept the consequences with dignity. Naturally, Odom is aware of the senator’s attempt to evade arrest even before the authorities undertake pursuit of him. Odom isn’t surprised. The senator, like most politicians, is a weak man whose narcissism makes him far too predictable. His flaws outweigh his good qualities by too large a percentage. If only Odom’s fellow conspirators were made of the right stuff, perhaps the outcome would have been different.
Long after midnight, Odom walks through his stately old house in Falls Church, where he has lived for the past thirty years, pausing several times to examine the mundane personal objects that have defined his adult life. His wife sleeps, blessedly unaware of the tectonic shifts their lives will undergo in just a few, short hours. Framed pictures on the walls testify to an adventurous life filled with professional and personal achievements. All of these material objects will be scattered to the winds, but memory of this expansive life will remain foundational and intact.
He stops in the kitchen and spontaneously decides to make an omelet for himself. Pulling the ingredients from the refrigerator—eggs, mushrooms, green onions, cheese, peppers—the CIA deputy director gets to the pleasant work of preparing a delicious, simple meal. Halfway through the task, just when it all really comes together and timing is particularly critical, his wife appears in the doorway.
“Honey, what are you doing?”
“As you can see.” He is just sautéing the onions, peppers, and mushrooms, and they are at that perfect degree of doneness that requires addition of the eggs.
“It’s almost four a.m.,” she needlessly tells him.
“Are you hungry? This will be a spectacularly scrumptious creation.”
Odom’s wife laughs lightly, enjoying her husband’s rare carefree demeanor. “I am, actually. It smells delicious.”
Without pausing from the intricate operation at the stove, Odom gestures with his spatula. “Grab a bottle of chardonnay, the Mâcon-Villages should work nicely, and take a seat.”
She does as she’s told. Sitting informally at the kitchen island, perched on stools they’ve owned for almost four decades, Odom and his wife enjoy the aromatic dish he’s prepared and the wine while chatting pleasantly about this and that. They discuss banal items of household business, nieces and nephews, the weather and sports scores. They chatter about incidents from their past, health issues, and the flavor of mushrooms encased in lumps of fried egg. They talk about everything except the future. Artfully, the CIA deputy director steers their conversation away from anything having to do with the hours, days, and years to come. His wife’s heart brims with happiness. It has been years since they’ve felt anything more than a gratifying fondness for each other, and for many that is plenty enough. True intimacy had ended ages ago. With affairs of the heart, really could it not be so much worse?
When they have finished their meal, Odom clears the counter of their dishes, dumping them in the sink with the fry pan and cutting board. He wordlessly takes his wife by the hand and leads her back to their bedroom. While she lies back down and falls immediately halfway back to sleep, he goes into the bathroom and takes a pill from a barely touched prescription bottle purchased four years earlier. Returning to bed and lying beside his wife, Odom gently caresses her shoulders, neck, and back. She floats in that wonderful state of half-wakefulness. Before too long, Odom feels his cock stir and fill with lifeblood. His wife feels it, too, and surprised, turns to face her husband.