The President's Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t have him listed.”
    “Any reservation for him?”
    It took a moment. “I don’t show a reservation for him either.”
    Denny wasn’t surprised. Maybe he was using a phony name, too.
    At dinner, he dawdled over salmon braised in red wine and studied the faces in the hotel’s crowded dining room. Most of the men were in their fifties and sixties, but none of them bore any resemblance to the man in the web photo. After finishing his chocolate mousse, Denny went out to the hotel’s tiny bar and sat sipping beer and watching the hotel guests come and go until midnight.
    During the next two days he haunted the lobbies and bars and dining rooms of both hotels. There was no one who resembled Ahmed Nidal. Every now and then he called the Atwood desk. The response was always the same. No one with that name had registered.
     
    “Nothing?” Lott asked. “No sign of him?”
    “No.”
    Lott shook his head and stared up at the car’s rearview mirror as he changed lanes. “We’ve been trying to get the goods on that son-of-a-bitch Nidal for months.”
    They were riding up and down the quiet residential streets of South Orange, a pretty, affluent suburb near Millburn. Huge maple trees lined both sides of the streets.
    Lott had picked him up as he walked along Wyoming Avenue, a wide, shady street not far from his apartment. It was one of the rendezvous procedures they had worked out.
    “Okay,” Lott said. “To hell with Nidal. There’ll be other opportunities to nail that bastard. I got something else we need you to do.”
    He said SIG was concerned about two gun-owner groups, one in New Jersey and one in Michigan. In Michigan, they’d used threats to try to intimidate a Congressman who wanted to impose a new federal tax on the sale of all firearms and ammunition.
    “They’re dangerous.” Lott said. “We’ve got an informant in Flint, a pretty reliable source. He says a couple of hotheads from the group here were out in Michigan a few weeks ago. They seem to be working together. You know Jack Stewart?”
    The name was only vaguely familiar.
    “He’s a New Jersey Congressman,” Lott said. “Has an office over in Livingston. They’ve been picketing the place because Stewart is pushing for a ban on the use of lead bullets for hunting.”
    The group called itself the New Jersey League of Gun Owners. It was small but getting more militant, apparently frustrated because nobody was paying any attention to it.
    “We don’t really want to get involved in this crap,” Lott said. “It’s the kind of thing the FBI does. But we need a little information. Then we’ll turn it over to them. So we want to get you inside this outfit. Infiltrate them, so we can find out just how serious these assholes are.”
    It sounded like an opportunity to redeem himself.
    “Great.”

TEN
    The outraged letter-to-the-editor was Lott’s idea.
    “Use strong words,” he said. “Make it sound like you’re really pissed.”
    Denny had never paid much attention to the gun-control issues that had been hotly debated for as long as he could remember.He loved the outdoors and had hunted deer and small game all his life. As long as he was free to do that, he was happy.
    So he spent several hours online studying the issues. Then he went to work on the letter, arguing that gun-control fanatics were trying to demonize anyone who wants to protect their Constitutional right to own a gun. The gun violence that upsets them, he said, is fostered by the glorification of violence on television and in video games and movies. That’s where reforms are really needed.
    Many of the worst outbursts of gun violence in this country have occurred, he argued, in places with the most stringent gun-control laws. And it’s clear they don’t prevent mass shootings.
    When he finished the letter, he went over what he had written, ratcheting up the rhetoric with insulting references to bleeding-heart judges, head-in-the-clouds college professors, and boneheads