No Safe Place (65 page)

Lara heard the sudden sucking sound, so loud and desperate that her hands flew to her mouth. From between the nurses, she saw Kerry’s chest shudder, trembling.

Deftly, the doctor removed the clamp and inserted a thin plastic tube through the bullet hole. Kerry’s body convulsed again.

“I have a pulse,” someone said.

Lara slumped against Joe Morton, watching the rise and fall of each new breath. It was some moments later when she learned what she had seen and that Kerry’s life still hung in the balance; minutes more until she knew what she must do.

Clayton and Kit could only wait.

The hospital had given them a cubicle near the emergency
room, equipped with a television. Until a doctor came for them, there was nothing for Kit to tell the press; the reporters waited outside the hospital, with one of Kit’s aides to tend to them. In the agony of helplessness, Clayton and Kit watched the screen: now NBC played a tape of the shooting—Kerry freezing, then abruptly pushing Clayton aside, mouth opening just before the bullet struck him. As Kerry fell backward, eyes wide with shock, Clayton looked away.

“Reporters at the scene,” a newsman’s voice said, “tell us that Senator Kilcannon appeared to see his assailant and to push his campaign manager out of harm’s way. By one account, he called out a name …”

“Did Kerry
know
him?” Kit asked with quiet incredulity.

With equal softness, like a story recited to a child that served also to distract a parent from his own heartache, Clayton offered his grim surmise.

“Jesus …, ” was all that Kit could say.

They sat there, silent in the sterile room, the harsh light, the first moments they had shared that were beyond ambition, calculation, the intense concentration Kerry’s quest had required. “He tried to save me,” Clayton said at last. “He’s seen me through so much …”

When his tears began, he did not try to stop them. Perhaps Ethan, and now Kerry, had taught him at least this much. And then Dick Mason appeared on the screen.

He looked diminished, the flesh somehow loose on his face, as though the persona of good cheer had vanished and left nothing in its place. The setting was a television station; his voice husky, Mason kept glancing at a piece of paper.

“I know that California and the nation,”
he began,
“share my horror at the tragic wounding of a gallant leader—my friend Senator Kerry Kilcannon. In these crucial hours, Jeannie’s and my prayers, and those of our children, join with the prayers of countless others around the globe—”

Abruptly, Kit stood, voice trembling with fury. “Fuck
you
,” she said to the electronic face. “
You
wanted this …”

“This terrible crime,”
Mason continued,
“has no place in a process based on ideas and on issues, openly expressed and fairly contested …”

“Issues,” Clayton said quietly, “like a lover’s abortion …”

As he thought it would, his comment, rather than inflaming Kit further, seemed to deflate her. He watched her body slump with the knowledge of her own helplessness, the pointlessness of unreasoned anger.

“She had to be with him, Kit.”

Neither the “she,” nor the remark itself, needed explanation. Kit kept watching the screen.

“Accordingly,”
the Vice President concluded,
“I am suspending all campaign activities until further notice …”

“As if you had a choice.” The quiet contempt in Kit’s tone matched Clayton’s now. Turning, she said, “We’re going to need Frank Wells here. If Kerry’s all right …”

Kit did not finish the thought. Nor did Clayton, as wounded as he felt, resent it. Kit Pace was not a religious woman; her practicality was a form of prayer for Kerry’s life.

“Get him on the phone,” Clayton answered, and closed his eyes.

Lara stepped inside the phone booth. Dialing the number, she observed through the glass two nurses gliding by, like silent ghosts in white.

Her bureau chief sounded startled, then angry. “Where the hell
are
you?” Hal Leavitt demanded.

Lara steeled herself. “At the hospital.”

Without explanation or apology, she told Leavitt what she had seen and that Kerry Kilcannon was still alive.

Leavitt’s own voice became a newsman’s, clipped and focused. “What about brain function?”

Lara’s eyes clouded. “I don’t know. I’m not sure
they
do.”

Leavitt was briefly silent. “They’ve sealed off the hospital,” he told her. “You’re the only one inside. I want you to go live, by telephone.”

It was what Lara had anticipated. “I’m ready now,” she said.

In shared astonishment, Clayton and Kit watched Lara’s photograph on the screen, listened to her reporter’s voice, as cool and factual as it had sounded from Africa or Bosnia, tell them what they did not know.

“As of ten minutes ago,”
Lara said,
“Senator Kilcannon was still alive …”

Kit gave a small gasp; silent, Clayton bit his lip.

“When he reached the emergency room,”
Lara continued,
“the senator was close to death. He had stopped breathing, his blood pressure was zero, and he had no pulse.

“He was suffering from a trauma called tension pneumothorax. My lay understanding is that the bullet wound closed up, and the air from the senator’s damaged lung could not escape.

“The result is a buildup of gases escaping from the lung into the chest cavity. When the pressure becomes too high, it collapses the veins to the heart, blocking the flow of blood and causing a massive cardiorespiratory collapse …”

“Jesus,” Kit murmured with distaste and fascination. “How can she do this?”

Clayton shook his head. “Think about it, Kit. She’s trying to save our ass.”

Intently, he listened, and then the door opened and a gaunt-faced doctor entered the room.

Finishing, Lara told the studio producer, “Give me Hal.”

Promptly Leavitt was on the line. “Nice—”

“Hal,” she cut in, “get someone else out here.”

“Why?”

“Because if he dies,” Lara said simply, “I won’t be able to report it.”

It was another hour before the Service admitted the press, under heavy security, to a hot and crowded room. The sole reason, given without explanation, was that Kit Pace would make a statement; filled with a sense of foreboding, Nate edged inside the room, flanked by Lee McAlpine and Sara Sax.

The podium was empty.

Speaking in hushed voices, the reporters sat in folding chairs or—like Nate—stood at the back of the room. He looked about for Lara, but could not find her. Then Kit appeared, advancing to the podium.

Nate felt the tension, his colleagues straining with him to read her face. All that he could observe was that her eyes appeared puffy.

Clearing her throat, Kit seemed to draw a breath. “As NBC reported earlier,” she began, “Senator Kerry Kilcannon is alive.

“The senator has undergone an emergency procedure to restore his respiratory functions. While his vital signs are stable, he has not regained consciousness and remains in critical condition …”

“As to life?” someone asked.

Kit drew another breath. “Within the next half hour,” she answered, “we’ll have medical personnel available to answer your questions more precisely. But the senator is young and fit, and I’m advised that the prognosis for survival is good.”

“What about mental functioning?” Sara Sax asked. “The trauma as you described it involves oxygen deprivation to the brain.”

Kit nodded. “What I can tell you is that thanks to the efforts of paramedics, the Secret Service, and this hospital’s trauma unit, there was a relatively short period between the loss and restoration of respiratory function. Obviously, that minimizes the prospect of brain damage.”

“If he recovers,” the
Sacramento Bee
asked, “will Senator Kilcannon continue his run for the presidency?”

Kit gave the woman a look of silent astonishment. “There’s been no opportunity to consider that,” she said in a flat voice, “and only the senator can say. Obviously, our first concern is for his life …”

“Kit,” Nate called out, “all of us saw Lara Costello of NBC attempting to reach the senator. We’ve now heard her report. Could you tell us why Ms. Costello accompanied the senator in the ambulance and was present for the efforts to save his life?”

Watching Kit, Nate could feel the others studying her intently. “Certainly,” Kit answered with professional calm. “Ms. Costello responded as a reporter, and we responded in kind.

“While all of us may deplore it, this will become part of our history. As you know, the violent deaths of public figures—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the senator’s own brother, James Kilcannon—have been accompanied by conflicting accounts, factual confusion, and a proliferation of conspiracy theories.

“The senator’s closest friend and campaign manager,
Clayton Slade, made the immediate decision that—should Kerry Kilcannon die—this confusion is the last legacy he would wish to leave us. Ms. Costello was simply the instrument at hand.”

It was the most artful “fuck you” Nate had ever received, a subterfuge so elegant that—amidst the sadness and tension of the hour—he almost laughed aloud. Instead, with equal professionalism, he asked, “Where’s Ms. Costello now?”

Kit shrugged wearily. “In the hospital
somewhere
, I’m sure. At the moment, I can’t be more precise.”

Kerry felt his eyes open.

He could not see. There was a frightening darkness—either blindness or a place so alien that he could not imagine it. He struggled to escape.

He felt paralyzed.

“Kerry …”

There was something gentle, fingertips touching his forehead, as they had when he was a child. Perhaps his mother …

He struggled to draw a breath, and then he saw her.

“It’s all right,” Lara told him.

His eyes filled with tears, just before he slipped away.

When Kerry next became conscious, he drifted in the twilight between sleep and waking, dream and thought. The images that came to him were from his deepest past—Vailsburg, his mother and father, Jamie, Liam Dunn. A small dark-haired boy, an angry man with a handgun. For a time, this confused him; he was in Newark again, and Anthony Musso had shot him. And then, quite suddenly, he was wholly awake.

There was a tube in his chest, and his throat was raw, swollen on the inside. He felt feeble, not himself; gingerly, he tried to puzzle out the relationship between his brain and his body. He raised one hand slightly, then another, then managed to move his head. Shivering, he inhaled.

His feet.

With a terrible effort, he moved his right foot. A searing pain ripped through his chest and ribs.

“Everything working all right?” someone asked. “No reason why it shouldn’t.”

Kerry turned his head slightly. Standing near him was a red-haired man in surgical scrubs. “I’m Dr. Frank O’Malley,” he said.

Kerry tried to pull his thoughts together. “Well,” he heard himself murmur, “at least you’re Irish.”

The doctor laughed. “And you still have a sense of humor. But I wouldn’t try playing the tuba just yet, or talking too much, either. You came by that sore throat the hard way: until about an hour ago, you’ve been breathing through a tube in your trachea, attached to a ventilator.”

Kerry swallowed once, painfully. “What happened to me?”

O’Malley folded his arms. “To cut to the chase,” he said with a studied bluffness, “you arrived here dead, and now you’re alive.” His tone softened. “You’re a tough man, Senator, and a lucky one. The bullet missed your spine, the major arteries, and—other than a lung—any vital organs. And they revived you very quickly, as the chat we’re having suggests.”

Kerry closed his eyes. A fathomless gratitude washed over him, which he lacked the strength to express; he felt too overcome by the knowledge that, hours before, he had stopped living.

“Barring the unexpected,” O’Malley continued, “you’ll be fine. In a couple of days, you’ll be standing; in a couple of months, you’ll be running. Including for President, if that’s what you want, though I’ve never understood why anyone would.” The doctor’s voice slowed again. “Even before yesterday.”

Kerry did not answer. He lay back on the bed and allowed his soul to catch up with his body. He was alive and his life, and his future, belonged to him again, perhaps more profoundly than before. But he had come too far to sort this out alone.

To Kerry, Clayton seemed slow, almost sluggish, like a man moving underwater. The sheen in his eyes revealed his emotions.

Kerry was so glad to see him that there were no words. Clayton took Kerry’s hand in both of his. “You meant to push me out of the way, didn’t you?”

Kerry managed to smile. “The plan was to duck behind Ellen Penn,” he whispered. “I was using you for leverage.”

When Clayton did not smile, Kerry exhaled. “It was a reflex, Clayton. There was no time to
mean
to do anything.”

“Then maybe,” his friend answered, “that was what happened before. Your ‘reflex’ was to protect John Musso.”

All at once, Kerry felt a terrible weight. In a guttural voice, he asked, “It was
him
, wasn’t it?”

Clayton took a chair from a corner and sat next to the bed, as if settling in for a hard conversation. “He was the Boston shooter,” he said at last. “They also think he killed a girl who worked for your campaign, the night before. Kate Feeney.”

Kerry’s stomach tightened. “Kate Feeney,” he said. “She was a strawberry blonde, wasn’t she?”

“You met her?”

“I think so, yes.” Kerry felt a fresh wave of horror, of pity. “God, Clayton, why did he do
that
?”

“They’re not sure. Maybe she found out who he was.”

Kerry lay back, the weight becoming despair, the memory of a boy coming to a wounded man in a hospital, much like this. “What did I do?” he asked. “God help me, what did
I
do?”

Clayton seemed to sort through his thoughts. “You tried to save him. But he’d already seen so much, sustained so much damage …”