The Book of Fate (3 page)

I looked down at my palm, seeing that my chest and right shoulder were soaked. Not by water. Thicker . . . and darker . . . dark red.
Oh, God, is that my—?

Another flashbulb went off. It wasn’t just the red of my blood I was seeing. Now there was blue . . . on my tie . . . and yellow . . . yellow stripes on the road. Another flashbulb exploded as knives of color stabbed my eyes. Silver and brown and bright green race cars. Red, white, and blue flags abandoned in the grandstands. A screaming blond boy in the third row with an aqua and orange Miami Dolphins T-shirt. And red . . . the dark, thick red all over my hand, my arm, my chest.

I again touched my cheek. My fingertips scraped against something sharp. Like metal—or . . . is that bone? My stomach nose-dived, swirling with nausea. I touched my face again with a slight push. That thing wouldn’t budge . . .
What’s wrong with my fa—?

Two more flashbulbs blinded me with white, and the world flew at me in fast-forward. Time caught up in a fingersnap, blurring at lightspeed.

“I’m not feeling a pulse!” a deep voice yelled in the distance. Directly ahead, two suit-and-tie Secret Service agents lifted Boyle onto a stretcher and into the ambulance from the motorcade. His right hand dangled downward, bleeding from his palm. I replayed the moments before the limo ride. He would’ve never been in there if I hadn’t—

“He’s cuffed! Get the hell off!” A few feet to the left, more agents screamed at the dogpile, peeling layers away to get at the gunman. I was on the ground with the rest of the grease stains, struggling to stand up, wondering why everything was so blurry.

Help . . . !
I called out, though nothing left my lips.

The grandstands tilted like a kaleidoscope. I fell backward, crashing into the pavement, lying there, my palm still pressed against the slippery metal in my cheek.

“Is anyone—?”

Sirens sounded, but they weren’t getting louder. Softer. They quickly began to fade. Boyle’s ambulance . . .
Leaving . . . They’re leaving me . . .

“Please . . . why isn’t . . . ?”

One woman screamed in a perfect C minor. Her howl pierced through the crowd as I stared up at the clear Florida sky.
Fireworks . . . we were supposed to have fireworks. Albright’s gonna be pissed . . .

The sirens withered to a faint whistle. I tried to lift my head, but it didn’t move. A final flashbulb hit, and the world went completely white.

“Wh-Why isn’t anyone helping me?”

That day, because of me, Ron Boyle died.

Eight years later, he came back to life.

2

Eight years later
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

S
ome scars never heal.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the
ex
-President of the United States, Leland Manning,” our host, the deputy prime minister of Malaysia announces. I cringe as I hear the words. Never call him
ex.
It’s
former.
Former
President.

The deputy prime minister repeats it again in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Malay. The only words I understand each time are: Leland Manning . . . Le
land
Manning . . . Leland
Manning.
From the way Manning tugs on his earlobe and pretends to glance backstage, it’s clear that the only words he hears are
ex-President.

“Here you go, sir,” I say, handing him a letter-sized leather box that holds the pages of his speech. I’ve got a 101 fever and just stepped off an eleven-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur during which I didn’t sleep a minute. Thanks to the time difference, it feels like three in the morning. It doesn’t slow Manning down. Presidents are built to run all night. Their aides, however, aren’t. “Good luck,” I add as I pull the burgundy curtain aside, and he bounds out from the right-hand side of the stage.

The crowd rises to a standing ovation, and Manning waves the speechbox in the air as if he’s got the nuclear codes in there. We used to actually have them. A military aide would follow us everywhere, carrying the codes in a leather briefcase known as
the Football.

These days, we don’t have a mil aide . . . or the Football . . . or a motorcade . . . or a staff of thousands who will fly fax machines and armored limos around the world for us. These days, beyond a few Secret Service agents, I have the President, and the President has me.

Four months after the assassination attempt, President Manning lost his bid for reelection, and we all got tossed from the White House. The
leaving
was bad enough—they took everything from us . . . our jobs, our lives, our pride—but the
why
. . . the
why
is what haunts.

During the congressional investigations after the assassination attempt, Capitol Hill nitpickers were all too eager to point out every possible security flaw made on the racetrack trip, from the Secret Service agent in the local Orlando field office who had been stopped for a DUI two days before the President’s visit . . . to the unexplainable holes that allowed the gunman to sneak through security . . . to the fact that the President’s personal physician had accidentally ordered the wrong blood type for the ambulance on the day of the event. None of those mistakes mattered. But there was one that did.

After John Hinckley took a shot at President Reagan in 1981, Reagan’s approval ratings shot up to 73 percent, the highest they reached during his eight years in office. After that day at the speedway, Manning’s approval ratings kamikazed to a dismal 32 percent. The only thing to blame is the photo.

Pictures endure after every crisis. Even in the midst of the chaos, photographers manage to click their shutters and snap a shot. Some photos, like the one of Jackie Kennedy at the moment of JFK’s shooting, show unapologetic terror. Others, like the one of Reagan, caught mid-blink during his shooting, show just how little time anyone has to react. It’s the one thing politicians can’t spin. They can manipulate their policies, their votes . . . even their personal backgrounds—but photographs . . . photographs rarely lie.

So when we heard about the photo in question—a crisp digital print of President Manning in mid-yell . . . standing behind the NASCAR CEO’s wife . . . his hand on her shoulder as he was tugged backward by the Service . . . and best of all, trying to help push her out of the crushing crowd—we thought we’d have Reagan numbers. America’s Lion in mid-roar.

Then we
saw
the photo. So did America. And they didn’t see Manning pushing the CEO’s wife
forward
, out of the way. They saw the President pulling her
back
, in front of him . . . cowering down behind his own personal shield. We trotted out the CEO’s wife, who tried to explain that it wasn’t how it looked. Too late. Five hundred front pages later, the Cowardly Lion was born.

“Roar,” Manning whispers into the microphone with a wry smile as he grips the sides of the podium onstage.

When former President Eisenhower was lying on his deathbed, he looked at his son and one of his doctors and said, “Pull me up.” They propped him up in bed. “Two big men,” Ike groused. “Higher.” They propped him even more. He knew what was coming. He died minutes later. All Presidents want to go out strong. Manning’s no different.

He roars again, this time even softer. It took three years before he could make that joke. Today, it gets easy laughs and applause, which is why he opens every paid speech with it.

It’s okay to make jokes now. The public even expects it—they can’t get over it until you do. But as I learned during my first week on the job, just because the President is laughing doesn’t mean he’s laughing. Manning lost far more than the presidency that day at the speedway. He also lost one of his dearest friends. When the shots were fired, the President . . . myself . . . Albright and everyone else— we all went down. Boyle was the only one who never got back up.

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 Fl
o
rida
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 in the hospital, it doesn’t change the truth.

Eight years ago, when Boyle was yelling in my face, I
knew
the President would never be able to meet with him during a four-minute limo ride. But instead of taking the verbal lashing and simply rescheduling him, I avoided the whole headache and threw him the one bone I knew he’d go running for. I was so damn smug about it too. Dangling the President in front of him just to make my job easier. That decision took Boyle’s life. And destroyed my own.

The only good news, as always, came from Manning. When most aides leave the job, they have half a dozen job offers. I had none. Until Manning was kind enough to invite me back on board. Like I said, people don’t understand. Even out of the White House, this is still a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“By the way, Wes,” Mitchel interrupts, “you ever find out if they got the honey for the President’s tea? You know he needs it for his throat.”

“Already on it,” I reply, wiping my forehead with the palm of my hand. Between the heat from the lights and my fever, I’m ready to pass out. Doesn’t matter. The President needs me. “It should be waiting in the car when we’re done.” Double-checking, I pull my satellite phone from my pocket and dial the number for our Secret Service driver outside. “Stevie, it’s Wes,” I say as he picks up. “That honey get there yet?”

There’s a short pause on the other line. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Is it there or not?” I say, deadly serious.

“Yes, Wes—the all-important honey has arrived. I’m guarding it right now—I hear there’s a gang of bumblebees in the neighborhood.” He pauses, hoping I’ll join him in the joke.

I stay silent.

“Anything else, Wes?” he asks dryly.

“No . . . that’s all for now.”

I can practically hear his eyes rolling as I hang up the phone. I’m not an imbecile. I know what they say about me. But they’re not the ones who still see the puddle of blood under Boyle every time I hear an ambulance pass. Manning lost the presidency and his best friend. I lost something far more personal. It’s no different than a trapeze artist who takes a bad fall during a triple backflip. Even when the bones are healed and everything’s back in place . . . even when they put you back in the big top . . . you can swing as hard as you want, but it takes time before you’ll ever fly as high again.