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  “Exactly. Put your man up against anything that has the capability of destroying him, and the shooter’s in a different ball game. Hell, why do you think every modern army in the world has switched to a machine-gun-type small arm? All you have to do now is point in the general direction and pull the trigger.”

  Norm Lewis spread his arms wide. “Thus endeth today’s lesson. Eagle-Eye Cory Williams is puteth in place.”

  “Uh huh,” Cory replied. “Give me a couple of seconds at my target, and I’ll hit it. The hell with other conditions.”

  “You think Ed’s full of it?”

  “I think training counts.”

  “Money where your mouth is.”

  “You name it.”

  “Ten thousand to your hundred.”

  Joe Page whistled. “You guys are nuts.”

  Norm folded his newspaper into a roll and pointed it toward Cory. “You know, old boy, if you really wanted to do us all a favor, you’d knock off the Pres when he comes to town next Thursday.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Norm smiled. “Too bad your old man isn’t still around. He would have made a better president than that turkey we’ve got.”

  “Dad didn’t have any ambitions in that direction.”

  “I know, but it’s still too bad he didn’t run. At least we would have known we had the best president money could buy.”

  It was an immediate reflexive action. Cory careened across the room; one hand grabbed Norm’s shirt, and the other was brought back for a blow to the face. Robinson and Page pinned his arms.

  Robinson’s voice was commanding. “Both of you! Knock it off!”

  Norm smiled. “Sorry, Cory. My apologies. Shake?” He extended his hand.

  Cory reluctantly shook and went back to the far end of the bar and sat before his drink. His anger was gradually replaced by nostalgia for long-lost things. The final and irrevocable line had now been drawn between him and Norm. Any pretense they might have maintained for the sake of older times was now dissipated in that hurting remark.

  “You still on for the wager?”

  Cory didn’t answer.

  “I have a way to test our argument.”

  “No more, OK, guys?” Ed Robinson grunted from across the room.

  Cory looked at his ex-friend. Their eyes met. The broker’s were a slate opaque color as the edge of his mouth curled in a faint grin. “Want to hear?”

  “I bite.”

  “We’ve already decided that the toughest game is man himself.”

  “We won’t even debate that old chestnut.”

  “But only if our adversary has the ability to return fire or otherwise protect himself by putting the hunter’s life in jeopardy.”

  “No argument there. Are you going to suggest that we have a dawn meeting by the old oak tree, at ten paces, with cap-and-ball muzzle loaders?”

  “I’m not risking my ass.”

  “Then?”

  “The President.”

  “Who?”

  “The President of the United States.”

  “Oh, Christ!” Robinson said and walked to the door. “It’s too heavy to shovel in here. I’m taking Ruth’s advice and grabbing forty winks before dinner.”

  Joe Page looked startled but curious.

  “I’m sick of games, Norm.”

  “Same money as I said before, and no one gets hurt.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “The President’s due in Deerford next week.”

  “On Thursday, for a fund-raising luncheon.”

  “I say you select your weapon and pick your spot. Before you do, I mount a camera on your rifle. I’ll seal the mounting so you can’t tamper with it.”

  Cory laughed. “The old pretend-to-fire but take-the-picture-of-the-game-instead game.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Except that there will be ten million secret-service and local cops on the scene. Guys who won’t know what game we’re playing. If they see me pointing a weapon at the chief, they’re not going to ask about my camera. I get blown away.”

  “That’s the testing, old top.”

  Joe Page laughed. “I think he’s called you out, Cory.”

  “A man would be a fool to take a bet like that,” Cory said.

  “You know it.”

  “Let me hear the ground rules again. You mount the camera on one of my rifles. I assume it has a viewfinder.”

  “It would be almost like looking through a scope. You line up the man in the viewfinder and push the shutter, except you snap a picture instead of sending off a round.”

  “And those are the only rules?”

  “You set up the rest of the situation yourself. The only problem is, if anyone sees you with the rifle and camera, it will look like the real thing.”

  “And they’ll shoot me before asking questions.”

  “That’s what makes it interesting.”

  Their eyes met again, and Norm gave Cory the same enigmatic smile.

  “You’re on,” Cory said.

  CHAPTER 2

  Thursday: 10:41 A.M.

  The motorcade was running late, which was not unusual. Cory had been in several as a young boy, with his father, and they never were on time. The rifle was on his knees; he got to his feet, holding the weapon, and walked to the window.

  There were men on the roof of the building across the way with binoculars.

  He stepped far back from the window in order to remain unseen and snapped the rifle to his shoulder. A quick glance through the viewfinder brought the men on the right into focus. His finger brushed against the safety.

  It would be an easy shot.

  Where was the damn motorcade? The waiting was making him nervous.

  Saturday night.

  He lay in bed staring at the dark ceiling and glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. Two. The day’s excessive consumption of liquor had jangled his nerves, and he couldn’t sleep. In guilt-warped concentration he thought about the afternoon’s conversation. He knew his reactions had been tainted, that he had been urged and manipulated into areas of false macho commitment that he usually avoided. Long-buried forces and feelings concerning his lost friend had allowed him to be goaded into a compromising situation.

  And yet he was tempted to perform the wager. If he won, Norm was good for the money, and God only knows Cory needed the money. He toyed with the idea. It wasn’t as if there were a moral dilemma involved. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He would only be placing himself in jeopardy. Of course, there was risk; that was the essence of the bet. There was always the possibility of his being seen and either shot or arrested … or perhaps both.

  The money hovered in the room like a dark specter. Ten thousand would allow him to get even with Vito. And Vito had become very impatient lately.

  Cory had been in nearly the same situation last year, and he had gone to his brother, Steve, for the money. They hadn’t written or seen each other since.

  Cory writhed on the bed as he thought about the last visit to his brother.

  “Five thousand for what?” His older brother stood before the open fireplace in his Wellesley, Massachusetts home and twirled an after-dinner brandy snifter.

  “Do I have to give you a balance sheet on my complete financial picture?”

  “No, of course not, but I’d like a hint as to what you want it for. Believe it or not, Cory, five thousand is still a lot of money to me. The girls are in college, and the upkeep on this white elephant is astronomical. You don’t even have dependents. How much do they pay you at the bank?”

  “Twenty-five per.”

  “Then what’s dragging you down?”

  “Three hundred a month car payments, another four for the apartment …”

  His brother’s silence meant his legalistic mind was calculating tax bites, net pay, and ordinary expenses for food and clothing. When the figures were allotted to their proper places, his brother frowned. “It can’t be a girl; even an abortion doesn�
��t cost that much these days. Are you involved in an investment scheme? For God’s sake, are we playing twenty questions?”

  “I’m in hock to my book.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “Bookie.”

  “Seriously, little brother.”

  “I lost forty-five hundred on the Series.”

  “You are serious.” His brother seemed transfixed at his place by the fireplace, and the swirling brandy lay still in the large snifter.

  He had gotten the money then at a cost of a lengthy lecture delivered in proper Bostonian legal platitudes. He had slouched back in the easy chair and listened. He had to listen, for he needed the money then as much as he needed it now.

  Cory was an inveterate gambler. He played the horses, the dogs, and bet on any type of sporting event whose results were published in the newspapers and for which his bookie had a line.

  They took his money. They took it with feigned reluctance. They occasionally called him on “sure things” that came in to give him a little back, but the money always returned to the hopper. It churned into losses as he played, and he played to the limit of his credit and then some.

  He had never been quite sure where the compulsion to gamble originated. His mother and father had been vigorous bridge players who occasionally played for a tenth of a cent a point. There didn’t seem to be gamblers in his New England heritage. Past generations of Connecticut Yankees were too austere, frugal, and hard-working to fritter away hard-earned money.

  His father only stole.

  In retrospect he had often wondered exactly when in his father’s twenty-two year sojourn in Congress he had begun to steal. The Congressional Ethics Committee hadn’t been so blunt. They had couched the charges in appropriate terms that were not nearly so harsh. As he recalled, the charges were: misappropriation of campaign funds, erroneous travel vouchers, and irregularities on the staff payroll. Friends had done their best to save his father from the debacle, but the evidence had been overwhelming.

  Cory had taken a leave of absence from his sophomore year at college in order to sit in the first row of the visitors’ gallery during the hearings. In the beginning he had been angry, furiously applauding his father’s defense, and during recess telling everyone available about the “smear” mounted against an honorable public servant.

  But the damning evidence had inexorably built a façade of petty pilfering. Cory watched his father age before his eyes.

  The night after the day Congress censured his father, Cory had received an hysterical phone call in their Georgetown home. The caller, one of the office irregulars, had nearly screamed for help, and finally managed to mumble her address.

  He had left the house without informing his mother and rushed to the young woman’s address to find his father naked in bed, dead of a heart attack.

  It had taken an hour to dress and move his father to his parked car. Then he called the ambulance.

  He had always hoped his mother never knew. He suspected that she did, but they had never spoken of it.

  He hadn’t been able to return to college, and the “bad” year had followed. It was ironic that guns had been his salvation. There had always been a dozen or more rifles and handguns around the Williams household. Connecticut manufactured more weapons than any state in the union, and his father’s antigun-control positions had produced a largesse of gift weapons.

  Cory’s early years of shooting had paid off in the army. He had been assigned to the infantry after firing the highest score ever recorded on his basic-training rifle range. He served as a rifle instructor for a short time at Fort Benning, Georgia, until entering Officer’s Candidate School. He graduated as a second lieutenant and he had been assigned to the Infantry Center’s Light and Heavy Weapons School, after he finished jump training.

  Although his orders to Viet Nam included potential assignment as an infantry platoon leader, he had spent his entire tour as a sniper instructor at a large reception camp outside Saigon.

  Cory had returned from Viet Nam a captain and had seriously begun to think in terms of a military career. A great many aspects of service life appealed to him: the social order, and he liked doing the one thing he did best—shooting.

  After the Viet Nam War, along with thousands of other junior officers of reserve rank, he had been “riffed.” The term was an army euphemism for being fired. At the cessation of hostilities, there were far too many young officers available, and his lack of college degree and direct combat experience had made him a prime candidate to be let go.

  How do you shoot the President without being caught?

  It had been said that the night before his assassination, President Kennedy had stated that any nut with a high-powered rifle who didn’t expect to get away could shoot any President.

  Cory expected to get away. He would have one advantage. There would not be an actual rifle shot. The nearly inaudible click of a camera shutter would be the only sound and would alert no one.

  He began to consider possibilities.

  The planning made him restless to the point where he slipped out of bed and pulled on a terry-cloth robe and soft leather slippers. He padded down the dimly lit hallway and stairs to the taproom. A distant light cast a swatch of illumination across the bar that was bright enough for him to find the cognac.

  He poured a stiff two fingers into a small snifter. The first swallow burned but seemed to relax his tense body.

  “You’re a fool if you don’t do it.”

  He whirled around to face toward a dark corner of the room where a cigarette glowed in the shadows. “Ruth?”

  “But as always, you’re playing the game by his rules. Turn it on him, Cory. Take it from me. I’m an expert.”

  As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he could see her huddled in the corner.

  “Pour me one, Cory.”

  He fumbled along a row of glasses suspended in the lattice-board ceiling until he found another brandy snifter. He poured and crossed the room to slide the glass across the table.

  Her hand appeared out of the dimness and curled around the stem of the snifter. “I knew he’d get to you and you wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

  “Where’s Norman?”

  “Sound asleep. He always sleeps well when he laughs so hard.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are. You’ve been had.”

  “I hadn’t realized.”

  “You will tomorrow when you’re sober and he asks you again to play his game.”

  “Maybe I will play. Would he pay off if I did?”

  “Norm may be a bastard in a lot of ways, but he would never welch. Sit next to me.”

  He sat on the cushioned bench in the corner and felt her thigh press against his. Her breath was gentle against his cheek as she turned to him. Her arms went around his neck. “Could you do it?”

  He laughed low. “Depends on what you mean.”

  Her voice was husky. “Do it! Do it and screw him! Don’t let him toy with you like he does with me.”

  “You could have married me.”

  “I didn’t want to spend the next twenty years of my life living in some Quonset hut on a hot army base.”

  “Norm’s money was more appealing.”

  “It seemed so at the time.”

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  She laughed. “That’s a long story that I’ll save for a cold winter’s night.” When she kissed him, her body turned so that they pressed together. Her hand ran along the back of his neck as his slid through a part in her gown to feel the round heavy weight of her breast. She moaned and pulled away. “You will?”

  “Uh huh.” He kissed her again. “There’s a small room in the basement.…”

  “I know the place.”

  She turned on the narrow bed covered with army blankets and touched him. He ran his hand over the smoothness of her slightly protruding stomach and over the curve of her hip. He laughed. “One problem, Ruth. We’re going to have to wait a few
minutes for the next …”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  He felt her hair brush over his chest and down across his stomach. She was right. It wasn’t going to take long at all.

  He must have dozed off, and awoke with a start. She was sitting up with her back against the wall and with a cigarette in her hand. The army blanket was pulled down over her hips, leaving her breasts bare.

  “Suppose I hadn’t been the one to come downstairs?” he asked.

  She took a long drag on the cigarette and let the smoke stream toward the ceiling. “Then I would have come to your room. But Norm hadn’t been playing with anyone else; you were the one lying awake thinking about the ten thousand.”

  “We had better get back to our respective bedrooms. I wouldn’t want Norm coming after me with a 12-gauge.”

  “You’re going to take his money?”

  “I think the odds are in my favor.” He jackknifed from the bed and slipped into his pajamas and robe. “I’ll go first.”

  “I’ll finish my cigarette to give you time to get upstairs.”

  He leaned over and kissed her. “You’re the best, Ruth.”

  “Call me?”

  “Yes.”

  Cory eased out of the small basement room and shut the door quietly behind him. A dim light at the far end of the cellar hallway burned with a low illumination as it swung from a naked wire. He made his way up the stairs and entered the taproom, where he picked up their snifters and put them out of sight under the bar. He went up the main staircase and slipped into his room.

  Tired, he lay back on the bed. She had become a caricature of her former self, but he still wanted her. Or was it another way to get back at Norm?

  He fell asleep thinking about Ruth Lewis.

  She finished the cigarette and stubbed it out against the bare wall. She peered down by the side of the bed to make sure that no embers still burned. It wouldn’t be appropriate to burn the club down … at least not yet.

  She sighed as the door opened.

  Norm Lewis stepped inside and looked down at his naked wife. “Well?”

  She nodded. “He’s going to do it. I guarantee that he really is going to do it.”