Part 3
"He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine."
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
...
Michael rushed through the crowd, scrambling the closest he could get to the scene. People were shouting now and lying flat-bellied on the floor or running for the exit. But there were more than a few doing just what he was doing. Trying to get closer to the president.
The bodyguards and other security around her were lost for a brief moment of confusion. Michael could see that one of the bodyguards had thrown himself to the ground. What he couldn't see, right at this moment, was that he was dead, a bullet hole straight through his chest, and Sara was pinned under him on the Cathedral floor.
It was like trying to run in a dream where your legs melt into honey under your weight. Michael tried to push through the throng. He didn't mutter apologies or try to justify his conduct. There was only one thing he could see, one thing he could think of.
Getting close to her.
Putting himself between a hundred more bullets and Sara if they should come.
Wasn't it criminal that someone else should have died to protect her when he had been standing there, in the crowd, watching invisible from the shadows?
Jesus.
Was it possible he had come all the way to Washington just for this?
A shiver ran through his soul.
For a backstage seat at her assassination.
He had made it almost to the front row, now, but they were already moving her. Bodyguards formed a tight circle around the spot where she'd gone down. Men shouted into walkie-like phones. Outside, now that the window had crumbled into broken glass, there was a clear view of the street and nearby buildings, and some people were pointing at an assault rifle, still visible on the roof.
No one behind it.
But Michael didn't take it in. He didn't look at it and think, Seconds ago, the person who shot Sara was there, pressing the trigger.
He didn't think the shooter had fired just one bullet because he'd known exactly where Sara would be standing on that podium, that this had been premeditated and the culprit was now disappearing in broad daylight, concealed by the very chaos he had caused.
He only wanted to get to her.
Nothing mattered now, secrecy, politics.
Suddenly, Michael couldn't very well remember why he and Sara had been apart for so long. The causes behind it dimmed behind a mist, and he could only think of pushing forward, on toward the woman he couldn't see through a circle of bodyguards.
But then a hand was on his shoulder, a voice spoke into his ear. "Not now, Michael. Be reasonable."
He didn't turn to look at the man who had spoken. Right now, it didn't seem to matter that this stranger knew who he was, that he knew what he was trying to do.
"Let go," Michael said, his eyes still fixed ahead. Now, the men were carrying her away – his love, his president. Michael could see them taking her through some backway exit, though a rank of people visibly tried to shield her from the view of the public; possibly from another gunshot.
"I have to go," he said. "I have to –"
"If you take a couple more steps toward the podium, her men will gun you down, Michael. Put yourself in their shoes. You could be the shooter."
Michael pivoted and his blue gaze found the man who had approached him. An elderly face framed by pure white hair, and eyes that stared back into his with kindness.
Michael had never seen him before, though the man visibly knew who he was. "Who are you?"
"Later," the man said.
When Michael turned back around, he could see Sara had been taken away. The security men that remained in sight were now evacuating the church.
"Just do as they tell you," the man said. "We'll talk outside."
It felt to Michael the ground was sinking under his feet with each footstep.
All the excuses he had made for himself for moving to Washington crumbled and he knew immediately he had never really believed them in the first place.
He was a fool, he thought, in a brief moment of clarity as the haze of reality flashed him by, walking in line out of the cathedral, joining the crowd outside that was gathering and humming like a swarm of flies.
A fool, in every respect.
Why would he go to Washington to protect Sara, when he knew he could never do that, that her life and her safety would always be beyond his grasp?
He had not gone to take a bullet for her or die for her – it had never been clearer than now.
He had gone to be with her.
As impossible and inadmissible as the thought was.
And this whole year, he had denied the truth to himself, had worked on building a life here and doing good in what ways he could, in part so he could run from the crashing fact that he had gone to Washington because he wanted Sara in his life.
And he knew that, as sure as he had hidden from that fact for all this time, he would see her again tonight. Or go mad.
…
Kellerman rolled his ballpoint pen into his hand twice under the table. He'd picked up the habit ages ago, back when talking in front of an audience still made him nervous. His history teacher had been the one to share the trick with him. Now, close to forty years old, Paul repeated the familiar gesture without even remembering he had ever been a nervous teenage boy like any other.
Himself and another dozen advisors were sitting at the oval table in the cabinet room. Gretchen Morgan was just about done briefing the room on her latest trip to Israel.
This part was always a trial in patience for Kellerman, and in self-composure. Not really because he wished he had been the one to go. Lord knew, Foreign Secretary wasn't the job he would have hand-picked for himself, spending all that time away from Washington; from Sara. But it had been his job, a job Gretchen had replaced him at, which necessarily made it an ordeal to have to think of her filling his shoes.
It was a little after two.
Kellerman was waiting for Gretchen to finish, so he could have his turn.
"Thank you, Gretchen," Vice President Caroline Reynolds was the one to guide the meetings when Sara was absent. "Now, if anyone has anything to say about the report…"
Kellerman's eyes met Gretchen's from across the table and his lips widened into a crocodile grin.
It was always pleasant to find fault in a rival's work. "Well," he said, "there's one thing –"
The door slammed open.
It was so rare for cabinet meetings to suffer interruptions that Kellerman didn't even think of looking annoyed.
"Now what?" Someone said with an air of mild offense.
It was someone from the defense department; he looked breathless and oddly unceremonious. Kellerman never expected any serious news could come from so inadequate a messenger.
"Madam Vice President, you need to come with me."
Caroline's forehead wrinkled in surprise. "I am in the middle of a meeting."
"This is an emergency. The president has been shot."
A silence unlike any Paul had known before dropped into the room.
He was aware of the reactions of absolutely everyone in the cabinet room before he began to be aware of his own. How Caroline's heart started pounding although her face expressed nothing but shock, excitement vile and irrepressible flooding her system. There were still two years wanting in Sara's term. If she died, Caroline could have them, then run for two more terms and be one of those presidents who found ways of cheating the system that set the bar at eight years.
The silence was awed and subdued, everyone fearing yet wanting to break it.
All of us at this second are reacting not like people but like politicians.
Kellerman tried to resist this, for the sake of decency.
Sara was hurt. Maybe dead, or dying.
That was the single worst thing in the world that could happen in his eyes and yet, even when he searched for the man inside him, for his response, he found only the cool-headed reptilian politic, and his thoughts went to pragmatic matters.
"How bad?" He asked.
"She's been hospitalized. Just one bullet wound."
"Where the fuck were her bodyguards?"
"Stuart pushed her to the ground in time, but the bullet went through them both. He died on the spot."
Kellerman felt that piece of information commanded respect, but he was incapable of obliging.
He got to his feet. The rest of the advisors in the room did the same, and the Vice President, a little late. She looked shaken.
Inwardly, though, Kellerman could feel ambition taking like a lit match on a pool of gasoline.
By this evening, she would make them call her madam president.
The thought of Caroline Reynolds sitting inside the oval office imposed itself into Kellerman's brain, and he was taken by a sudden, almost irrepressible urge to grab a chair and throw it across the room.
Only then did he realize in how dangerous a state he was, and how uncontrollable things would get if the man in him took over the politician.
"We need to go," Gretchen said.
Though her voice didn't really betray concern, Kellerman felt soothed by it.
"We need to be near her."
"The public will want answers."
"The Press Secretary is already on it."
"No," Gretchen said, "I mean she needs to be surrounded. This isn't over. Whoever is behind this, once they found out the president is still alive, they'll want to try something, anything. The president is at her most vulnerable right now. She's wounded, and she's out of the White House. And whoever shot her must be willing to do anything to make sure she never gets out of there alive. In for a penny, in for a pound."
"You're right," Kellerman said.
At the moment, he had too important things on his mind to feel annoyed that he was siding with Gretchen Morgan.
"The finest of security's with her, of course," said the defense department agent. "Well, watching her. She's still in surgery."
Kellerman didn't wait for more before he headed for the door, not much minding that Gretchen was on his heels.
"You can't leave," the Vice President said with an air of disbelief, like he'd disrespected her. "There are things we need to take care of. As the president is vulnerable, so is the people. You have the country to think of, Paul."
Kellerman turned around, just briefly enough to glimpse the anger that burned in those blue eyes beneath Caroline's tame appearance.
"I'm loyal to my president first," Kellerman said, "to my country second."
He left without caring what the room made of that. Right at this moment, it made sense to think if anyone tried to quote him to the press, he'd kill them dead.
He went out of the White House and into a car whose driver he told to head to the hospital. Gretchen Morgan was with him, and he didn't think to tell her to get a different ride.
For a brief moment, their rivalry had ceased to matter.
Whatever he thought of her, Kellerman knew now that Gretchen was loyal to Sara too, above all, and for that alone, he could tolerate her.
…
Lincoln had been at home that afternoon, as he was on the evening shift. Veronica had a day off she'd reluctantly agreed to spend at his flat. "I have work to do," she'd said.
"Then I won't trouble you at all," he promised. "I'll just provide foot massages and coffee and snacks, and you'll be twice as efficient."
There had been a look of dubiousness in her green eyes that Lincoln couldn't in all good will resent. He had never really intended to keep that promise.
Veronica did bring work to bed, though, and spent a few hours going over some cases while he busied himself making lunch.
Along the past two years working at the Everest, he had picked up a few things and was getting to be a decent cook. Because he wanted to give Vee enough time to work, so she'd decide he could be trusted – at least a little – on her next day off, he threw himself in the preparations of a time-consuming meal. A complex recipe of vegetable lasagna, which included marinating some tomatoes and simmering eggplants for several hours.
Because they spent most of the morning in the bedroom, Lincoln got started late and was still in the kitchen at half past two.
He was just sprinkling a dash of basil leaves on the top of his nearly done lasagna when he heard Veronica speak from the bedroom.
"Oh my god."
Though she sounded serious, he couldn't resist teasing, "Your timing is wrong, Vee. The time for 'oh my god' was either when I was in there with you or when I brought you my incredible –"
But she interrupted with such coldness that his smile dropped instantly. "Turn on the TV, Linc."
Lincoln put down the dish of lasagna, forgetting to use a tablemat or to turn off the oven. Something about her voice commanded immediate attention.
There was something wrong, very wrong. He knew her voice by heart and had never heard it take such a shade of ice.
A meteor is looming over the country, he thought. Or a terrorist attack. Oh Jesus, don't let it be another 9/11.
By the time he got to the living room, Veronica was already there. Her phone was in her hand, her eyes glued to the screen. If she hadn't only been wearing his shirt, you could never have guessed that she had just indulged in a morning of lovemaking. For a reason Lincoln couldn't devise and which fascinated him, Veronica always looked pristine and professional, her hair was never disheveled, her cheeks never retained the colors of passion longer than an instant.
Right now, if she were dressed in a suit, she would look every bit as formidable as the lawyer she was in court.
"What is it?" He said.
There was an air of grief in her eyes when she looked up from her phone.
For a second, he thought someone from her family had died.
Then he remembered she had asked him to turn on the television. He grabbed the remote lying on the couch with a blind move, pressed the right button, and in an instant, images of Washington came alive on the screen.
"We can now confirm," a journalist spoke into a microphone, looking dazed, "that the president has been shot during a historic speech on gun violence at the Washington Cathedral."
Lincoln's insides seemed to liquify on the spot.
He stood, transfixed, incapable to look away.
There was footage of the shooting, the reporter said, as someone in the audience had been filming the speech with their phone.
The images switched from the journalist to the inside of the Cathedral, which showed Sara Tancredi standing before her audience, at the moment of the speech. Then the stained window burst suddenly and a bodyguard tackled her to the ground.
"Oh my god," Lincoln said.
"I can't believe it," Veronica said. "I don't – Lincoln, where are you going?"
Without thinking, Lincoln had grabbed his coat which he'd left to hang on the back of the couch. "I –" He said. "I need to go out for a bit."
What he had to do was call Michael, then get on a plane to Washington. Did Michael know yet? Probably. What state was he in, what could Lincoln possibly do to help? He couldn't begin to imagine what he would feel, if it had been Veronica getting shot on TV –
"No."
His brain was in such a turmoil, he could barely focus on what Veronica was saying until her tone became sharp enough to slice through his defenses, and her eyes were glowing, not only with the proper grief and shock of having the leader of your country attacked in front of you, but with anger.
"No, Lincoln, you aren't going."
"Look, I – there's something I need to do. I'll explain."
"Explain first."
Veronica sometimes had a way of putting things that left utterly no room for compromises.
"We're not doing this again, Linc," she said. "We're just not. Somebody just shot our president. If the place you feel you need to be right now isn't here with me, I want to know why, and you aren't getting out of this room until I do."
"Vee –"
"No! We've known each other – what? A year and a half? And all this time, I've felt in my bones there was something else you were tied to, something that would always come first. I've been patient, because I had to. Because I love you. But I've waited long enough, Lincoln. So you either tell me what secret you're keeping, or this is over."
Her words sucked the air out of his lungs.
His hands fell to his side, like he'd been punched in the gut.
The look in her eyes didn't soften at his distress. She was all iron. And it was her right, he thought. Her right to know the man she was with. After all, he could be hiding anything from her – a wife, three children, or a life of crime.
Uncertainty must be eating her up, and suddenly, he could feel it to, feel that it was intolerable.
And maybe he could trust her without betraying Michael a second time.
Lincoln dropped his coat back on the couch, without breaking eye-contact with her. "You know that 'Batman of lawyers', the vigilante who helps the helpless but takes none of the credit, the one you think is so dreamy?"
He didn't give her enough time to put the puzzlement on her face into words.
"I know him. He's my brother."
Again, it was better not to wait, to let it all out before he could think it over.
"And back in the presidential race of 2020, he was Sara Tancredi's lover."
…
Michael's brain was on fire when they were led outside. The brightness of the sun hanging high in the sky irreconcilable with the darkness eating at his soul, taking over his mind.
"Come, Michael."
The elderly man who had approached him inside the cathedral now led him away from the crowd and into a black car, which Michael entered without thinking.
It wasn't really recklessness that guided him.
But there was something about that man who knew his name, who maybe knew a lot more, that quieted him. Something he instinctively trusted.
This man will lead me to Sara.
"I'm sure at this moment you have a lot of questions. You must think me very mysterious. Really, I'm not," the man assured. "My name is Bruce Bennett."
Maybe this ought to have struck a chord of recognition, but Michael was in no state to rack his memory and pinpoint Bruce's precise place on the cobweb of political rivalries and alliances.
"I'm an old friend of Sara's."
"You don't work for her," that much, Michael could say for certain.
"No, no. In fact, I used to work with her father. I've known her long, long before she was anything other than a bright, ambitious little girl."
Bruce took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket.
For a moment, Michael thought the man was going to cry, which would fill him with terror.
Because this man had stopped him from getting himself killed by trying to go near Sara, Michael felt he must hold answers, must know things that somehow made what had happened only a long tunnel out of which there would be light and life.
If he broke down and Michael realized he had been deluded, he thought he might actually strangle the kind old man sitting next to him.
But there were no tears. He only pressed the handkerchief to his temples, looking very tired.
"You'll forgive me for this," he said. "Sara is the dearest thing I have in the world. What happened today was a tragedy."
The words seemed to set Michael's heart aflame in his chest. In a wild impulse, he slammed open the car door and motioned to leave.
"Michael –" Bruce protested.
"You know nothing. I'm wasting my time."
But that wasn't really what Michael meant. He meant he should be following wherever it was Sara's people were taking her. Right at this second, he didn't think just how he would do it, whether he would drive or run or fly. Probably, if he had thrown himself toward her at the cathedral as he intended her bodyguards would have shot him on sight.
So it was likely – really, almost certain – that this old man had saved his life.
None of that mattered. Just now, Michael would much sooner be dead and close to Sara than alive, sitting inside a car, wondering whether she was dead or going to die.
"You can't go after her." But Michael had already thrust himself outside the car, and he would have gone without turning around if the old man hadn't added, "Not without a plan."
Michael's eyes met Bruce Bennett's, and he saw the undeniable kindness in them. That this man cared for Sara was beyond doubt.
"What do you care," Michael said, "what happens to me?"
"I care because Sara loves you."
Even coming from a stranger, the words flooded Michael's head with dizzy heat, so he had to get back in the car and sit down, if only because of all the attention it would draw for him to faint right here in the street.
"Are you her confidant?" Michael asked.
"No," Bruce said. "Sara is much too careful a woman to trust her secrets even with an old friend like me."
"Then how –"
"I know what Paul Kellerman knows."
This was a name Michael hadn't thought of in years. At the beginning of his relationship with Sara, he remembered the jealousy he felt towards this man – her righthand man – who could go with her into the light and fight her battles with her, even for her sometimes.
But all this was distant, and grief and concern were so poignant in Michael's chest, every other emotion seemed pointless, swallowed by the great whirlpool that drowned them.
Bruce seemed to read these thoughts. "You can do nothing for her now, Michael. Trust me, I love Sara as much as a father could love his own child, and this is why I'm trying to help you. If she recovers from this to learn you've died shot by her own men – well, I do think if you can find the courage in you to keep her best interests at heart, even at such a time, you will do as I say."
With tremendous effort, Michael managed to keep the disastrous flow of emotion threatening to turn into an avalanche at bay.
Bruce resumed, "The reason I know so much about you, Michael, despite our having never met before today, is simple. Because we have both endured far too much today, I'll be brief. I don't trust Paul Kellerman. I never trusted him, even when he was Frank Tancredi's man and a colleague. Then, he became one of Sara's first converts, and visibly loyal to her. But I always kept an eye on him. I'll spare you the details of how I've done that through Sara's career, but last year he hired a PI who was close to a friend of mine, and he's managed to get his hands on all the information that this man had gathered for Paul Kellerman. This information concerned your brother, Lincoln."
Surprise dropped heavy into Michael's chest.
"And from Lincoln, Kellerman followed the thread back to you. As I have done."
Michael closed his eyes. The secret of his relationship with Sara was one that he felt he'd carried not for years but for centuries; like every fiber of his beings, from his blood to his bones and his skin, was shaped around that secret, which ached and throbbed inside him like a second heartbeat.
The idea that it might come out in the open now was absurd; and right at this second, it was beside the point. If Sara died, what would it matter that the world knew he had loved her while she ran her campaign as a single woman, two years ago?
That he still loved her now was surer than ever, and also beside the point.
"How could Kellerman – how could you know all this?"
"Once your brother came on our radar, it was easy to trace him to you, and to trace you back to her. You've worked at Charles Westmorland's charity center during the year of the campaign, where Sara volunteered herself. That this was only coincidence was unlikely, when some of the closest people to Sara knew she had had a lover precisely during that time."
Michael nodded. "And you're telling me all this why?"
"I thought you'd rather know. You look like the sort of man who appreciates warnings. I've been a little misleading, earlier – when I said I cared about your fate because Sara loves you. I do. But since I first heard about you, Michael, I took an interest in you quite separate from anything else. I admire what you do and why you do it. You're still a few years away from becoming a lawyer, but you could still do great things, as you have been doing, in the meantime. Yes, really. I can't think of a greater waste than your throwing yourself to the rifles of Sara's bodyguards."
"A warning," Michael repeated, leading the conversation backwards. "Do you think Kellerman poses a threat to me or Sara?"
Bruce shrugged. "Would I have kept him under such close watch all those years if I didn't think that? None of this matters to you now, though, I suppose."
Michael yearned to lean back, to lay his head into his hands. But if he let himself go now, if he even let himself slip an inch – who was to say how far he would go until he regained control?
Really. It made much sense to think he would lose himself forever if he let himself out of check now; that he would howl like a mad wolf and be lost to humankind till the end of times.
"Can you get me to her?" Michael asked.
These were the words he had wanted to speak from the beginning, since he had first followed Bruce into his car.
The old man seemed to acknowledge that. "She'll be closely watched," he said. "Now, you understand, more than ever."
"And you understand I need to see her. Now more than ever."
Bruce sighed, though Michael supposed he must have expected this. "Well, Michael." Already, he spoke his name like they were old friends, as if Sara's love for him had made him familiar to his own heart. "I can't make you promises. Even in my days as a politician, I hated to break them."
"But you will try?"
Bruce nodded with a solemn air. "I will try," he said. "That, I can promise."
…
End Notes: Please share your thoughts about the chapter in the comment section. I hope you enjoyed the quote from Wuthering Heights (one of my favorite books ever written). Initially I wanted another quote about politics for part three but this just seemed to illustrate the dichotomy between the shadows and the spotlight world of politics Michael and Sara respectively represent in this story. Can't wait to read your feedback! Take care!
