Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [85]
The rifle’s report was lost in the drums and wailing guitars, but its effect was clearly visible. Patty pitched face-first to the ground as the bullet tore into her back, between the shoulder blades, piercing her heart and killing her instantly. Her son fell, too, not from a gunshot but from the pull of his mother’s hand as she collapsed. He got to his knees and looked down at her. As he did, everything suddenly became silent; Harris had ordered the music be killed. The special agent in charge of the siege was now joined by a team of sharpshooters wearing helmets and flak jackets, and brandishing M-249 fully automatic weapons capable of firing more than a thousand rounds a minute.
It took a moment for Joe Harris to realize that the fleeing woman had been shot. “Who fired?” he yelled. No response from anyone within earshot. He immediately turned his attention to the boy, who was now on his feet, obviously in a daze.
“This way, son,” Harris called. To Jasper’s sentries at the gate he said, “Touch that kid and you’re both dead.”
The sentries turned and looked down the barrels of a half-dozen automatic weapons held in firing position by the sharpshooters.
“Come on, son, this way,” Harris shouted, trying to inject compassion and hope into his voice.
The boy looked back at the main house. A dozen people had come from it, shrouded in light as they stopped halfway to the gate. He looked at Harris, who had now come within ten feet of the gate and Jasper’s armed men. “You touch that kid and—”
To Harris’s relief, the sentries lowered their weapons as Patty’s eleven-year-old son ran in his direction, climbed over the gate, and was snatched into the air by two of the marksmen. Everyone slowly backed away from the ranch entrance to the forward surveillance post, where Harris crouched and placed both hands on the boy’s shoulders. “You okay, son?”
“My momma. Is she…”
Harris straightened, took the boy’s hand, and led him to the command post in the RV. Once inside, he sat him at a small Formica table and took the chair opposite. “We’ll do everything we can to get your mom out of there,” he said, knowing she was dead but not wanting to acknowledge it until having had a chance to question the boy about conditions inside the ranch: “How many people in there?” “How many men, women, and children?” “Does everybody have a gun?” “Did you see bigger guns, rockets, hand grenades?” “What does Mr. Jasper say about this situation?”
It was the last question that brought this response from the boy: “He says he’s goin’ to kill everybody. My daddy’s in there, too.”
“Okay, son,” Harris said, taking the boy into one of the vehicle’s three bedrooms and assigning an agent to watch him. “Don’t you worry,” he said as he left, “you’ll be all right.”
He returned to the living room, where the communications center had been established. “Get me the director,” he told a tech-support agent. A minute later he was on with Director Templeton in Washington.
“The situation’s changed, sir,” he said hurriedly, and went on to explain what had just happened.
“You’re sure none of our people shot the woman?” Templeton asked.
“Yes, sir.” Harris was confident in his answer, although he’d assigned an agent on his way back with the boy to question everyone at the site.
“Keep this line open,” Templeton said. “I’ll confer with the attorney general and the president; be back to you within the hour.”
“You did what you were told to do,” Zachary Jasper told the man who’d gunned down Patty. With them was her husband, who’d watched the slaying of his wife.
“My boy,” he said.
“He’ll be all right, don’t you worry.” What Jasper didn’t add was that if he’d been the one doing the shooting, he would have killed them both.
“That wife of yours would have told them everything about us,” Jasper said to the husband. “Put us all in harm’s way. We couldn’t have that, could we?”
“No, sir,” the husband replied, looking at the floor and fighting tears.
“Your boy hasn’t been here long enough to tell them much. Didn’t see much, was too busy playing. That’s right, isn’t it?