Truth Like the Sun Read Free

zeros, an ancient Swedish cannon thumps the air with a half pound of gunpowder followed by a twenty-one-gun salute. Then an old steam whistle sounds and ten thundering F-102 fighter jets shred the sky, joined by sirens, church bells, fireworks, car horns and just about every other noisemaker within a mile.
    Once the pandemonium subsides, the president’s nasal voice crackles through the speakers. “May we open an era of peace and understanding among all mankind,” he says by phone from a Florida getaway. Amazingly, it takes him just a dozen words to say what everybody’s thinking but nobody’s saying, that it’s a wee bit ironic to be throwing a party about the world’s rosy future in a city that’s building battleships, bombers and bunkers as fast as it can.
    “Let the fair begin!” Kennedy commands. The Space Needle carillon clangs 538 bells, and two thousand
See you in Seattle
balloonsrise into the clearing sky. Then the freak show really begins. Water-skiers in tutus slalom and flip in the huge oval moat around the field as Circus Berlin motorcyclists accelerate up a cable strung between the stadium roof and the Needle. He hears the crowd’s hesitancy, its collective disappointment.
Is this all there is?
    Roger floats out of the ceremonies with the exiting mob, his gut twitching over either the lackluster turnout or Kennedy’s words. From his vantage, the president just raised the stakes. The fair must not only entertain the world but
save
it. If this thing flops, Roger realizes, his knack for talking people into things will have backfired in the grandest fashion imaginable, and he’ll be the fall guy who brought ridicule and doom upon the city he loves.
    As the sun blasts through wispy clouds, he drifts past hundreds of pink begonias that the Belgians brought and watches men in dark suits and brown wingtips snapping pictures of their smiling wives in feathered hats while their kids cavort around the fountain with plumes of cotton candy bigger than their heads. Maybe the fair will help people step outside their lives, he tells himself. He looks up at the blazing newness of the Needle, and then at the Science Pavilion and the Coliseum too, everything stunningly new. He suddenly notices his face is wet. How long has he been crying? It’s gotta be the lack of sleep. Even a nap would help, but not yet. Go, go, go!
    A breathless assistant miraculously finds him in the mumbling horde and explains that one of the fighter jets that flew over the stadium crashed in a north Seattle neighborhood. He takes this omen in stride, as if expecting it, then jogs toward headquarters, sending iridescent pigeons into the balloon-freckled sky.

Chapter Two
APRIL 2001
    S HE WHEELED onto the shoulder, hopped out and broke into an exasperated jog, passing four lanes of idling vehicles, including two TV vans, as she approached the span, hoping like hell her photographer was already there to capture the bridge shrouded in this morning funk of fog and light rain that seeped into your bones no matter what anybody said or how well you slept or how much espresso you swallowed. Once she got to the orange cones, she saw cops pacing in the lane closest to this lanky young woman standing soldierly atop the narrow concrete railing, steady as a gymnast in black Levi’s and thick-heeled work boots.
    A quick scan of the crowd turned up a half dozen breathless reporters and photographers. God, she hated these gangbangs, everyone’s IQ halved in the frenzy to get the story, a story,
any
story. There was no getting out of this one, though. She was the closest reporter to the bridge when the “potential jumper” crackled across the newsroom scanner. So once again she was assigned to a story she wasn’t hired to do, though that increasingly seemed to be the paper’s MO, with younger reporters filling the news holes while veterans averted eyes, intimidated editors or feigned industry while playing computer solitaire or outlining novels about