The Book of Fate - Brad Meltzer [9]
I still see the milky pink puddle seeping out below him as he lay there facedown, his face pressed against the pavement. I hear the doors of his ambulance slam shut like a bank vault . . . the sirens fading into a muffled black hole . . . and the gasping, stuttering sobs of Boyle’s daughter, struggling to get through the eulogy at her father’s funeral. That was the one that cut deepest, and not just because her voice was shaking so much she could barely get the words out. His daughter, barely entering high school, had the same intonation as her dad. Boyle’s whistling s’s and short Florida o’s. When I closed my eyes, it sounded like Boyle’s ghost speaking at his own memorial. Even the critics who once used his father’s arrests to call him a moral black eye on the administration kept their mouths shut. Besides, the damage had already been done.
The funeral was televised, of course, which for once I appreciated, since the surgeries and the damage in my face meant I was watching it all from my hospital room. In a warped way, it was even worse than actually being there, especially as the President stood up to deliver the final eulogy.
Manning always memorized the opening lines of his speeches—better to look the audience in the eye. But that day at the funeral . . . That was different.
No one else even saw it. At the podium, the President had his chest out and his shoulders back in a conscious display of strength. He looked out at the reporters who lined the back walls of the crowded church. At the mourners. At his staff. And at Boyle’s wife and now-bawling young daughter.
“C’mon, boss,” I whispered from my hospital room.
The Cowardly Lion pictures were already published. We all knew it was the death of his presidency, but at that moment, it was just about the death of his friend.
Hold it together, I begged in my own silent prayer.
Manning pursed his lips. His velvet-gray eyes narrowed. I knew he’d memorized the opening line. He memorized every opening line.
You can do it . . . I added.
And that’s when President Manning looked down. And read the first line of his speech.
There was no gasp from the audience. Not a single story was written about it. But I knew. And so did the staff, who I could see huddling imperceptibly closer whenever the cameras cut away to the crowd.
That same day, to add another knife in our necks, the man who killed Boyle—Nicholas “Nico” Hadrian—announced that although he had taken multiple shots at the President, he never intended to hit him, and that it was just a warning for what he called “the secret Masonic cult intent on seizing control of the White House in the name of Lucifer and his hordes in Hell.” Needless to say, one insanity plea later, Nico was institutionalized at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remains to this day.
In the end, Boyle’s death was the worst crisis we’d ever faced . . . a moment where something was finally bigger than the White House. The communal tragedy pulled everyone closer. And I watched it alone in a hospital room, through the one eye I could see out of.
“He’s quite funny,” says the Malaysian deputy prime minister, a man in his fifties with a slight acne problem. He sounds almost surprised as he joins me and Mitchel, one of our Secret Service agents, backstage. He eyes Mitchel, then cuts in front of me, turning back to study the profile of the President at the podium. After all this time as an aide, I don’t take it personally.
“You’ve worked with him long?” the deputy prime minister asks, still blocking my view.
“Almost nine years,” I whisper. It sounds like a long time to be just an assistant, but people don’t understand. After what happened . . . after what I did . . . and what I caused . . . I don’t care what my counselors said. If it weren’t for me, Boyle would’ve never been in the limo that day. And if he hadn’t been there . . . I clamp my eyes shut and refocus by visualizing the oval lake at my old summer camp. Just like my therapist taught me. It helps for a second, but as I learned