Fanatics Read Free Page A

and her tongue felt as dry and rough as sandpaper. The mayor waited for her reply.
    She said, “To start with, please, Mr. Mayor, no public announcements. If we’re responsible for Cecil King’s life, we don’t want it public. The less potential assassins know, the better. Let them imagine an army protecting the senator. We won’t disabuse them. No leaks from our side.”
    “Absolutely no leaks from my ship,” the mayor said. “Guaranteed. You have my solemn word.”
    Which word, if prior performance was any indicator, Flo suspected to be worth about zero cents.
    “What about manpower?” she said. “Budget?”
    “Budget.” The mayor’s face fell like a failed soufflé. “It’s tight, Lieutenant, tighter than a clam’s ass. Commissioner, do what you can.”
    The commissioner stroked his twisted nose and nodded, his eyes expressionless, chin pugnacious, commitment unspecified.
    And Flo’s suspicions were confirmed. Thrown to the wolves. She and Frank Murphy and Senator-elect Cecil King were entirely on their own.

Double- A Defense
    7:43 A.M.
    Riding back to Brooklyn Police HQ, homicide detective Lieutenant Flo Ott needed no further explanations.
    She dreaded the next eight weeks.
    Cecil King had exactly that much time left in Brooklyn before he was sworn in as New York State’s next junior senator. Another two months before the United States Capitol Police would assume responsibility for his life at a date well after the announced deadline for Cecil King’s targeted demise, touted only three days before by a crackpot outfit new that year to the American television news cycle, the Aryan-American Committee for Defense of Homeland, Family & the Sanctity of Motherhood. Motto: “
Faith & Freedom
.”
    “The traitor Cecil King will die before Christmas. We have our quiver full of arrows…”
    …die before Christmas.
    The threat, the promise, the sworn oath was making headlines in papers and magazines across the country, now a 24/7 story on the television news, a topic on radio shout shows, where the hotheads sounded more pro than con when debating the issue of selective patriotic assassination…“It’s the death penalty and every traitor deserves it. A patriot’s duty.”
    The Double-A Defense Committee, as the wannabe patriots quickly came to be known, was taken seriously, at least in some quarters, and as well they might be, whoever they were, having already assassinated a gay congressman and a lesbian Episcopal bishop, as well as killing gynecologists working for Planned Parenthood, three professors of evolutionary biology, one each at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and the president of the American Civil Liberties Union. All since the previous Christmas.
    All murders announced in advance.
    All unprevented, though preventable.
    And all the perps still unknown.
    …
die before Christmas.
Who exactly, Flo and many others asked, was the Aryan-American Committee for Defense of Homeland, Family & the Sanctity of Motherhood? Though well within the homeland, the Double-A Committee’s victims received protection no more effective than they would have enjoyed in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other war zone.
    For Flo Ott, however distasteful she may have found the mayor’s role as presidential toady and messenger boy, keeping Cecil King alive loomed as a far larger anxiety, as much a personal challenge as it was a professional duty she would never think of refusing.
    Frank Murphy saw the assignment similarly.
    Together, to stop an assassination, they’d bring almost thirty-five years of combined experience investigating homicides
after
the fact. The difficulty was that neither of them ever had to solve in advance a publicly announced, targeted assassination, political or otherwise. Murders, in their long experience, were committed either for commercial reasons—narcotics, failure to repay usurious loans, eliminating a crime competitor, robbery—or simply for neurotic satisfaction, often in family disputes or