Triggers

At last the car made the forty-five-degree turn onto New Hampshire Avenue, paralleling the longest side of the hospital, which was shaped like a right-angle triangle. After some deft maneuvering, the driver got the Beast up the ramp into the ambulance emergency bay. There was indeed a team waiting at the side of the curved, covered driveway with a stretcher.

Susan jumped out into the cold air, but by the time she was around to the other side, Darryl Hudkins and the two paramedics were heaving the president onto the stretcher. As soon as Jerrison was secure, they rushed him through the sliding glass doors. Susan put a hand on the stretcher and ran—experiencing an eerie echo of all the times she’d run alongside the Beast, holding on to it with one hand.

“Susan Dawson,” she called across the stretcher to the tall, handsome black man on the opposite side. “Secret Service special-agent-in-charge.”

“Dr. Mark Griffin,” he replied. “I’m the hospital’s chief executive officer.” He looked behind Susan at the president’s physician. “Captain Snow, good to see you.”

They hustled the stretcher into Trauma, which had two beds separated by an incongruously cheery purple, yellow, and blue curtain. There was a patient in the other bed—a white teenage boy, who, despite having a mangled leg, sat up to try to get a glimpse of the president.

“On three,” said one of the doctors. “One, two, three!” He and two other men transferred Jerrison to the bed.

“The bullet obviously missed his heart,” Griffin said to Susan, as a swarm of doctors, including Alyssa Snow, surrounded Jerrison. “But it looks like a major vessel has been clipped. If it’s the aorta, we’re in real trouble; the mortality rate for that is eighty percent.”

Susan couldn’t see what was being done to Jerrison’s chest, but a new transfusion bag had already been set up on a stand beside him; of course, they had Jerrison’s records on file here and knew his blood type. Four more pint bags were on a tray next to the stand, but she guessed he’d already lost more than that; the backseat of the limo had been sodden.

A DC police helicopter deposited a bomb-disposal robot onto the roof of the White House. Secret Service sharpshooter Rory Proctor was now on the far side of the Ellipse, along with a hundred White House staffers who had decided they had evacuated far enough; many others, though, had headed further south, crossing Constitution Avenue onto the Mall.

Proctor looked north across the grass at the magnificent building. He’d had binoculars with him up on the roof, and still had them: he used them to watch as the squat robot, visible through the columns of the balustrade, rolled on its treads toward the second chimney from the left. Listening to the chatter on his headset, he gathered that the original notion—just winching the bomb into the sky—had been vetoed, out of fear that there might be a switch on its underside that would detonate it as soon as it was lifted.

“Stand by, everyone,” said the calm male voice of the bomb-squad leader, who was operating the robot remotely from a police truck parked on the far side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which had also been evacuated, along with the Treasury Building and the buildings on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. “I have the bomb in sight…”

“Let’s get him into the O.R.,” said one of the doctors.

The trauma bed was on a wheeled base. Susan Dawson followed as they rolled it out of the room and down a corridor. They came to a metal door with a sign next to it that said, “Trauma Elevator—DO NOT BLOCK.” Susan made it inside with the president, Dr. Griffin, and two other physicians, and they rode up to the second floor. Dr. Snow—who wasn’t a surgeon—headed to the ICU to make arrangements for Jerrison, who would eventually be taken there if the surgery was successful.

The president was wheeled out of the elevator, down another corridor, and into an operating room. More Secret Service agents were already up here. Susan took a moment to deploy them. Rather than piling them all in front of the door to the operating room, she spread them out along the corridor; she didn’t want any unauthorized personnel getting anywhere near Jerrison. When Reagan had been shot, a dozen Secret Service agents had crammed into the O.R., but they’d gotten in the way of the surgical team and represented an unnecessary infection risk; protocol now called for only a single agent to actually go in—and she designated Darryl Hudkins, who had the most EMT training.

Susan pointed to two occupied gurneys a short distance away, one with a thin white-haired man in his sixties, the other with a plump younger woman; they were attended by a nurse. “I want them out of here.”