Split Second

Clyde Ritter's assassin was a professor at Atticus College. Professor Arnold Ramsey was not a prior known threat and had no ties to any radical political organization, although it was later learned he was an outspoken critic of Ritter. He left behind a wife and daughter. Some legacy to leave behind for the kid, Michelle thought. What was she supposed to do when talking about her family? Hi, my dad was a political assassin, like John Wilkes Booth and Lee HarveyOswald. He was shot to death by the Secret Service. So what does your dad do? No one else had been arrested in connection with the assassination. The official conclusion was that Ramsey acted alone.

Finished for now with the paper trail, she picked up the video that was part of the official record. She popped it into the VCR underneath the TV and turned it on. She sat back and watched as the scene from the hotel meet-and-greet during the Ritter campaign materialized on the TV. This video had been taken by a local television crew filming the Ritter event. It had put the final nail in King's coffin. Despite taking great pains to make sure such a mistake was never repeated, the Service had chosen not to show this video to its recruits. Perhaps out of embarrassment, Michelle thought.

She stiffened when she saw the confident-looking Clyde Ritter and his entourage enter the packed room. She knew little about Ritter other than that he had started life as a TV minister and made a considerable fortune. Thousands of people from across the country had sent him money, in amounts large and small. There'd been claims that numerous wealthy older women, mostly widows, had given him their life savings in exchange for his promise they'd go to heaven. Yet there was no hard evidence of that, and the furor died down. After leaving the quasi-religious life he ran for and was elected to Congress from a southern state, though she didn't know which one. He had a dubious voting record on racial and other issues of civil liberties, and his brand of religion was over the top. Yet he was beloved in his state, and there were enough voters in the country dissatisfied with the direction of the major party platforms that Ritter had run for president, as an independent. That grand ambition had ended with a bullet in his heart.

Next to Ritter was his campaign manager. Michelle had looked him up in the file too. He was Sidney Morse. The son of a prominent California attorney and an heiress mother, Sidney Morse had been, strangely enough, a playwright and stage director before turning his considerable artistic talents to the political arena. He earneda national reputation managing large political campaigns, turning them into media-driven extravaganzas with emphasis on sound bites and perception over any kind of substance, and his win rate was astonishingly high. That probably said more for the gullibility of the modern voter than the high standards of the modern candidate, Michelle thought.

Morse became a troubleshooter for hire, crossing the political aisle when the money and situation were right. He joined the cause when Ritter's campaign really started to take off and the candidate needed a more seasoned helmsman. Morse had the reputation for being brilliant, crafty and, when called for, ruthless. All sides agreed that he helped Ritter run a damn near perfect campaign. And from all accounts he enjoyed the hell out of rocking the establishment with his third-party juggernaut. However, Morse had been a political outcast after Ritter's assassination, and his life had been in a downward spiral. Over a year ago Morse, his mind gone, had been committed to a state mental institution where he'd probably live out the rest of his life.

Michelle stiffened again when she saw Sean King directly behind the candidate. She mentally counted off the agents in the room. There weren't that many, she realized. She'd had three times that number on her Bruno detail. King was the only agent anywhere near Ritter. She wondered who'd come up with that lousy plan.

As an avid student of her agency's history, Michelle knew that the Secret Service's mission had evolved over time. It had taken the tragic deaths of three presidents, Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, for Congress to act substantively on the issue of presidential security. Teddy Roosevelt received the first real dose of Secret Service protection after McKinley was gunned down, although things were far less sophisticated back then. As late as the 1940s Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt's newly elected vice president, didn't even have a Secret Service agent assigned to him until one of Truman's aides argued convincingly that a person who was a single heartbeat awayfrom becoming the most powerful man in the world was damn well entitled to at least one professional lawman with a gun watching over him.