Together with two members of the President’s Cabinet and a crack team of security specialists, Franklin had just flown in on one of the President’s two specially configured Boeing 747-200Bs. In this contingent, Franklin was the only one who had been with President Foster on his fateful flight the night before, though he wasn’t offering any details, certainly not to Ed. Like Ed, the agent had not slept, so Ed decided that Franklin’s personal presence here meant all was not well with the President, and that his instincts only a few hours ago when listening to the Secretary of State’s press conference were correct.
Security in and around the hospital had blown out from locals leaning on the wall when Ed first arrived, to armed guards posted at every corner. The Secret Service had also set up outside the building a 100-feet, no-cross cordon, which was being enforced by police rushed in from all over the county and a few dozen more who’d come in from neighbouring counties even though they hadn’t actually been asked to. The journalists, cold, tired and cranky were pushed well back, with all the gawkers, hardly the kind of equal opportunity that they believed America stood for.
Manifold was crawling with police and emergency personnel and security checks, and police roadblocks covered all incoming land routes. Continually circling in the air were two 767 AWACS—airborne warning and control system aircraft—with their distinctive thirty-foot rotating radar domes mounted above their fuselage. F-15s and F-16s flashed and boomed across the sky. Apart from these authorised aircraft, the town’s airspace had been reclassified as a no-fly zone with a shoot-on-sight protocol, and the TV networks who’d pointlessly sent their news choppers were furious.
President Foster was alive and well? Yeah right, Ed sniggered as he glanced out of the hospital window at the frenzy. The media were thinking the same thing: if Foster was alive, why was Isabel Diaz getting all this, frankly, presidential treatment?
But those who knew the facts weren’t talking.
71
TEMPORARILY ALONE TO make the call on the secure phone she’d requested from the special agent, Isabel pondered the answer she’d just been given and edged her head toward the hubbub of security outside her window. She winced as she turned back for a sip of water, resting the phone on her chest so she could reach the glass with her good hand. Refreshed, she picked up the phone again and said abruptly, “Noted. That’s all from Isis.”
THE hospital staff and security personnel couldn’t help but notice Ed’s exclusion from Isabel’s room; and likewise George who, with Davey, was at the far end of the same corridor on their way back from an afternoon snack at the cafeteria.
“Why isn’t she being sworn in right here and right now?” Ed demanded. Finally given the chance to confront the Secretary of State directly, Ed was going to push it, his pug nose a mere three inches away from Bert Robinson’s as the two men faced off right outside Isabel’s hospital room. Invading personal space was precisely Ed’s objective. Isabel had been fully awake for two hours now and, for some unexplained reason, was conspiring with the recently arrived officials to exclude Ed from the discussions. Getting aggressive, he calculated, was the best way to insinuate himself back in, and he didn’t give a damn who might be tut-tutting about it behind his back.
Ed was convinced that President Foster was dead but also that, for whatever reason, the Administration—or what was left of it—was concealing that fact from the American public, and thwarting Isabel’s rightful elevation. What the hell were they up to? Ed pondered. Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in only an hour-and-a-half after JFK was pronounced dead in Dallas. The brief ceremony, Ed recalled from the famous photographs, had been held on board the presidential plane while it was still on the ground at Love Field.
Beneath his nose, Ed could see the Secretary’s hand clamped over a thick dossier. What Ed didn’t know was that it included those photos from 1963 as well as other, mostly classified, precedent material.
Ed noticed that the agent posted on duty at Isabel’s door had turned his head away from the skirmish with the Secretary. Perhaps he was onside and signalling to Ed that it was safe for him to come forward. Ed stepped around Robinson and managed to open the door just a crack.
“Isabel…,” Ed called through the small opening, pushing it wider but the agent blocked him from taking a step inside.
“Not now,” she snapped from her bed, declining to even look at him and lowering her eyes back to the files spread out on her lap. Her commanding abruptness threw all of them, Ed included.
She buried her head in the papers and, when the silence in the room forced her to look back up a minute later and she saw him still standing with his hand on the doorknob, she insisted that the agent close the door.
Ed put her gruffness down to her trauma, or maybe the drugs. What else it could be?
George knew. At least, he knew the part about Ed’s affair. He’d foamed when Isabel had told him. “Show me the damn video,” he said, strangely satisfied that all his contempt for Ed was now proved justified.