Two Peasants and a President (47 page)

Gladys would live less than a minute longer, just long enough to re
c
ognize the reflection of the man behind her in the kitchen window.  It was the man who had murdered the senator’s maid. 

“You will not warn anyone this time, woman,” the man said in a voice distorted by his effort. 

Gladys’ hands dropped to her sides as her still beating heart forced waves of blood through the tear in her neck.  When the gurgling sounds had ceased, the man allowed her lifeless body to slump to the kitchen floor.  After wiping the garrote clean on the formerly cheery green, flowered smock that Gladys had laundered that very morning, he turned out the lights, disarmed the alarm system and headed to the house across the street. 

******

The officers stood in the hallway, shifting from one foot to the other, as though fishing for an invitation into the living room to sit in a comfortable chair.  None was forthcoming.  Molly emerged from the kitchen but paused in the hall doorway, stopping short of approaching and greeting the detectives.  Virgil was at first puzzled by this, but then remembered that like Ping, Molly had not always seen cops as friends and protectors. 

Molly, however, was not harkening back to a former life.  She sensed an inexplicable tenseness in the officers, as might be expected upon entering a drug house where every room could conceal an armed felon.  The possibility that someone had entered the house and hidden himself while they were at
dinner briefly crossed her mind, but the alarm system had still been armed when she and Ping turned it off.  While the officers could not know that, their demeanor seemed somehow inconsistent with the presumed safety of the living room of a United States senator. 

“What sort of suspicious activity?” Baines asked.

“A man was seen in the alley behind your house,” replied Detective Chambers. 

“By whom?”

“The lady across the street.” 

“Gladys saw someone in my alley?”

“Apparently.”

Baines was puzzled.  While Gladys was known to keep a pair of
bi
n
oculars handy and her vigila
nce was unquestioned, her view of the alley in this block from across the street would be obstructed at best, especially in the dark.  Given Doris’ murder, it was not surprising that Gladys would jump at shadows, but what seemed out of character was that she not only hadn’t called Virgil’s cell
phone as she had before, but she had apparently gone to bed ea
r
lier than usual, as if seeing a stranger in the alley and calling the police had made her suddenly sleepy.  It also seemed a bit odd that Baines had seen no marked cars or uniformed officers since arriving home. 

“Are there any patrol cars searching the area now?” he asked.  The detective seemed to hesitate, then said:

“There were earlier.”

“Did they see anything?”

“No, I don’t think so,” replied the detective. 

“You don’t think so?” 

“They would have informed us if they had found anyone in the alley,” his partner said, abruptly deciding to join the conversation. 

Something about the interaction was very off.  Both detectives seemed inexplicably ill at ease and while both officers held a radio, there had been no audible chatter or static or, for that matter, sound of any kind coming from either.  And the eyes of Chambers’ partner repeatedly flicked to and from the bulge under Baines jacket where he had tucked the .45.  Baines tried to tell himself that cops are usually a bit nervous around an armed citizen, but in the home of a senator who had every reason to be armed . . .
Molly turned slowly around and headed back into the kitchen where she had left her cell phone.

“Well, thanks for checking things out, Detectives,” Baines said, “If we see anything unusual, we’ll give you a call.”

“Oh, by the way, how is Lieutenant Roberts?” he added. 

“He’s fine,” replied Chambers, after a brief hesitation. 

“Oh, I meant to say his sick daughter,” Virgil corrected himself.  “Please tell him we hope she’s getting better.” 

Since he’d just invented both Lieutenant Roberts and his sick daughter, Virgil now realized that although his left arm was extended toward the door, as if to usher the men out, they had not budged an inch. 

“I’ll pass that along,” said the detective perfunctorily, but the look he gave his partner said they
both knew they’d just been had.

Virgil used the extra second that his ruse had provided to reach for the big Sig.  Chambers was slower and paid with a bullet in his eye socket.  But as Virgil swung the .45 toward the other man
, he could already see his gun
coming up.  The shots were nearly simultaneous but the 9mm hit Virgil in the gut just as his .45 exploded, the heavy 240 grain bullet striking the arm holding the 9mm causing it to release the pistol. 

An instant before the mental shock of the 9mm bullet entering his a
b
domen, Virgil fired three more times in quick succession at the figure before him.  The next two shots missed the man’s head, but the third shot entered one side of his neck and exited the other. 

Virgil crumpled, clutching his stomach, while the other man’s horrified look said that he well knew that his neck wound would soon be fatal.  He sat down hard on the floor, vainly trying to plug both holes.  Molly screamed at the first shot and rushed into the hallway, still clutching a cell phone that she had yet to realize was being jammed by a device in the pocket of a man now moving up behind her. 

Virgil raised a hand to warn Molly, but he could not coax a sound from his perforated diaphragm.  She was totally focused on him and had started to kneel down to help when she was brought up short by the wire around her neck.   Gagging, she felt herself lifted away from Virgil and dragged bac
k
ward so that she could not get her feet under her.  She did not have to see the man behind her to know who it was. 

Virgil’s gun had tumbled over an armchair and he was crawling toward it when the man launched a kick that hit him in the side of the head.  He rolled onto his back, stunned.  The man again devoted his full attention to the gar
r
ote and Molly heard him say in heavily accented English:

“No second chance for you, bitch!”

Then she heard a guttu
ral sound from behind them that at first she did not r
ecognize.  The garrot
e loosened slightly as the man abruptly twisted his head sideways toward the steps leading up to the bedrooms.   Ping was standing on the stairs holding Virgil’s 12 gauge shotgun.

“Let her go or I will kill you,” she said in Chinese. 

“Give me the shotgun and I will let you live,” he said and turned to face Ping as Molly slumped to the floor.

“I am not afraid of you,” she said.  “Men like you have already taken from me what I valued most.  Now I will take from you what you value most,” she said as the barrel of the 12 gauge moved from the man’s chest to his zipper.

The man’s hand had moved slowly behind his back where a pistol was tucked into the waistband.

“Don’t be a fool, old woman,” he said.  “If you shoot me, they will send you back to China and you know what awaits you there.”

“I have already been to hell,” she said.  “Let me know how you like it.”  As the man’s hand pulled the pistol free of his waistband, the muzzle of the shotgun exploded and the crotch of his pants and everything behind it di
s
appeared.  The man toppled forward clutching the shredded fabric that had once covered his manhood. 

Unable to use the disabled phones to call for help, Ping ran onto the porch, jacked another 12 gauge shell into the chamber and fired it into the front yard.  Then another and another until the tube was empty.  She dropped the shotgun and raced back into the kitchen to get some towels.  Kneeling over Molly she wrapped the towels around her neck and held them tightly to staunch the bleeding. 

“Please no die, please no die,” she said over and over as tears streamed down her face.   Molly had lapsed into unconsciousness.

6
2

Not since John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 had the shooting of a American politician caused so much outrage.  That the victim was a senator and not a president didn’t seem to matter; the nation had grown to trust Baines and many felt that he was the only man who could pull the country back from the abyss. 

Since the shooting occurred late in the evening, most Americans didn’t learn of it until the following morning.  Even then, details were sketchy and confusing.  Several media outlets, for reasons known only to them, ran with a headline that seemed to insinuate that the senator had shot two detectives before being shot himself.  Once again the opportunity to smear the senator, even temporarily, was too great to pass up for some of the denizens of the darker corners of journalism. 

Though in the first few hours there was little known about the assai
l
ants, it was clear they weren’t from the police department.  Aside from phony badges, they carried no identification whatsoever.  Ping verified that the third assassin was Chinese, but little else was known on the first day other than he was in the hospital clinging to life, part of his lower digestive tract as well as his manhood removed by
Ping’s
well-placed shotgun blast. 

By the next day’s evening news cycle, doctors had announced that both the senator and his companion were in grave condition.  The two imposters had yet to be identified, but the media was speculating that the assassin with the gar
rot
e was a Chinese hit
man, though there was as yet no proof of that.  But the mere rumor of Chinese involv
e
ment in the attempted assassination of a United States senator was enough to propel the story to the front page of newspapers around the world, except in China, where the story did not exist.

Citizens whose spirits had reached a new low were left to wonder who would rise to resume the charge against China and the proponents of big debt, big government.  The heart of the boycott had skipped a beat and the
e
conomy was on life support.  New start ups were desperately trying to fill the void, but banks were stingy.  Companies abroad, outside of China, had been shipping more each week, but the jobs they spawned on the US end were few.  Unemployment was still climbing due to the fallout from Chinese factories that had closed, many of which were all or partially owned by American firms.  And now, in a blow that some thought could be the coup de
grace for the boycott, a Chinese submarine had apparently sunk a container ship in another cowardly sneak attack. 

The sound of one hand clapping could have described what was em
a
nating from the halls of power in Beijing.  The Chinese premier had not been seen in public in several weeks.  Ma
Wen
was rumored to have died and Li
Guo
Peng
was poised to ascend to the presidency with apparently nothing to stand in his way.  In what was seen as the removal of the final impediment, mass arrests of dissidents were under way in cities across China.  The ‘Fo
r
bidden City’ had taken on new meaning as one of the greatest upheavals in Chinese history quietly unfolded behind its walls. 

While Western journalists were either excluded entirely or kept on a very short leash, video clips of demonstrations, some of them violent, had begun to filter out.  And in what was proving almost as troublesome, Chinese citizens and businessmen returning from abroad were increasingly smuggling tiny memory cards and thumb drives into the country.  The videos contained on those devices were quickly disseminated.  Speeches by Holly and Senator Baines were especially popular, but news coverage of the attempted assas
s
i
nation was a bombshell that Beijing certainly didn’t need. 

Beijing appeared to be on the verge of a nationwi
de crackdown on the scale of Tia
nanmen Square.  The question being asked on news broadcasts and talk shows around the world:  Could the West hang together long enough to outlast China? 

******

Ping had, for all extents and purposes, moved into the hospital.  No one employed there could have been unaware of who she was or the role she had played in events in China and in the senator’s home.  Though una
s
suming in manner, her inner strength somehow seeped into the air around her and was felt by all she touched.  Everyone pitched in to make sure she had plenty to eat in the cafeteria, and Ping responded by pretending that the cafeteria food was delicious. 

Molly’s wound had come very close to killing her.  Had the ambulance arrived just a few minutes later, she would not have survived.  As it was, the gar
rot
e had done considerable damage to her trachea and the blood vessels and muscles in her neck, and it would be some time before she would be a
l
lowed to speak or take sustenance through anything but a feeding tube.  O
f
ten, when she awakened, she would find Ping sitting there holding her hand.