Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [52]
The center-aisle agent had reached the east wall’s aisle. Thirty feet away, the guard rotated his head in that direction, paused ever so briefly on the agent, then rotated back to the stage, where Andrea had moved into blocking position. His dad, noticing this, cast a brief glance in her direction but kept talking. He would know, of course, what Andrea was doing, Jack reasoned, but not whether there was a specific threat.
On the east wall, the guard also noticed Andrea’s movement. Casually, he took two steps down the aisle and bent over to whisper in an audience member’s ear. The woman looked up at the guard, surprise on her face, then stood up. Now smiling, the guard took her by the elbow and, stepping around to her right side, guided her down the aisle toward the exit by the stage. As they passed the fourth row, Andrea took another step forward, maintaining her blocking position.
She unbuttoned her suit coat.
The guard suddenly switched his left hand from the woman’s elbow to her collar, then sidestepped, moving sideways past the front row. The woman let out a yelp. Heads turned. The guard’s right hand slipped into the front waistband of his pants. He jerked the woman around, using her as a shield. Andrea’s gun came out and up.
“Freeze, Secret Service!”
Behind her, the other agents were already moving, swarming the former President, pushing him down and hurrying him toward the opposite side of the stage.
The guard’s hand emerged from his waistband with a semiautomatic 9-millimeter. Seeing his target moving out of range, the guard made the mistake for which Andrea was waiting. Gun coming level with the stage, he took a step forward. And a half-foot beyond the protection of his human shield.
Andrea fired once. At fifteen feet, the low-velocity hollow-point bullet struck home, punching into the guard’s head between his left eye and his ear. Designed for close-quarters, crowd-dense firing, the round worked as advertised, mushrooming inside the guard’s brain, expending all its energy in a thousandth of a second and stopping, as the autopsy would later show, three inches from the opposite side of the skull.
The guard dropped straight down, dead before he reached the carpet.
Andrea tells me you saved the day,” former President Ryan said twenty minutes later in the limousine.
“Just sent up the flare,” Jack replied.
The whole thing had been a surreal experience, Jack thought, but somehow less surreal than its aftermath. Though the series of events had been brief—five seconds from the time the guard had gotten the woman from her seat to when Andrea’s head shot had dropped him—the mental replay in Jack’s mind moved, predictably, he supposed, in slow motion. So shocked by the shooting was the audience that it had emitted only a few screams, all of those from the attendees before whom the assassin had fallen dead.
For his part, Jack had known better than to move, so he remained standing against the west wall as campus security and Andrea’s agents cleared the auditorium. His dad, at the center of the Secret Service scrum, had been offstage before Andrea had fired the killing shot.
“Even so,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”
It was an awkward moment that drifted into an even more uncomfortable silence. Jack Junior broke it. “Scary shit, huh?”
Former President Ryan nodded at this. “What made you go back there—to check on the janitor, I mean?”
“When I saw him, he was trying to take off the buffer pad with a screwdriver. He needed a crescent wrench.”
“Impressive, Jack.”
“Because of the screwdriver—”
“Partially that. Partially because you didn’t panic. And you let the professionals do their job. Eight outta ten people wouldn’t have noticed the buffer thing. Most of those would have panicked, frozen up. The others would’ve tried to move on the guy themselves. You did it right, from soup to nuts.”
“Thanks.”
Ryan Senior smiled. “Now let’s talk about how to break this to your mother. …”