Assassin Read Free Page B

nylon flying suit.
    Altitude also thins the atmosphere. This can lead to hypoxia, or oxygen starvation, which in turn causes blackouts. An unconscious man in a wing-suit will lose control and tumble helplessly down to earth like a stricken aircraft. Carver’s chute was set to deploy automatically at around two thousand feet, but if his body position was unstable his lines and canopy could wrap themselves around him like a spider’s web round a fly. And then they’d just be shrink-wrap for his shattered corpse.
    To combat hypoxia, Carver was using a personal oxygen supply. But the extreme cold can play havoc by icing up an oxygen mask, leaving the user blind and disoriented. That, too, can lead to a fatal loss of control.
    Buffeted and deafened by the air being forced around his body as he plummeted, and as numb with cold as a deep-frozen T-bone, Carver wondered how much difference blindness would make. If he looked straight down, there was nothing below him but the infinite blackness of the Atlantic Ocean. But then out of the corner of his right eye, he saw a sparkle of light, far beneath him, that expanded and brightened with every second that passed, and now he was able to get his bearings.
    He was travelling from east to west, towards the eastern seaboard of America, still so high that he could detect the curvature of the earth. To his left, a dusting of lights from roads and buildings and a faint line of pale grey marked the sandy shoreline of the Outer Banks, the ribbon of barrier islands that curved around the North Carolina coast, enclosing a great stretch of water between them and the mainland. To his right, looking north across the Virginia state line, the lights he had seen glittering against the black earth were the cities of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News.
    Few places on the planet held more concentrated military firepower than that coastal conurbation, packed against the shoreline where Chesapeake Bay opened out on to the Atlantic Ocean. The US Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force owned thousands of acres, given over to bases that housed hundreds of combat aircraft and massive fleets of warships: aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and nuclear submarines. But Carver was all alone in the sky, aiming for the man who was his target, the man all those armed forces were paid to protect.

6

    ‘See that picture over there?’ President Lincoln Roberts pointed at an antique photograph mounted in a stained-wood frame, one of a collection of personal mementos on the wall of the private study at Lusterleaf, his family home near Knotts Island, North Carolina. The monochrome print showed about twenty African-Americans gathered in front of a building made of crudely nailed wooden planks. A couple of them were grown men, the rest women and children, ranging in age from grandmothers to babes in arms.
    ‘Sure,’ said Harrison James. ‘You’ve had it there as long as I’ve known you.’
    ‘That’s right, but I never told you about it, I don’t think.’ The President grinned unexpectedly, his face lighting up with almost boyish mischief: fifty-six going on fifteen. ‘See, all those people there are slaves. The photograph was taken on the Gloucester Hall Plantation in Bertie County, across the sound from here, in 1860, maybe ‘61 - round about the time of the secession, anyway. Look at the woman in the middle, sitting on that bench, holding her baby. Her name was Hattie MacInstry. Some Scots folks owned the place, she took her name from them. The little kid on her lap is Adelaide MacInstry. Her married name was Roberts. I’m her great-great-grandson. Her dad was the plantation overseer, man by the name of Obadiah Jakes. White man.’
    His Chief of Staff whistled softly to himself, shaking his head. ‘My God, Linc, that’s a helluva story! From the plantation to the White House. I mean, that’s … that’s America, Linc, right there. What an image! Wish we’d had that in the