Trail of the Twisted Cros Read Online Free PDF

could take a radio signal from his Secret Service guard, and was to be activated only during extraordinary
     emergency, which, in Ford’s case, had occurred twice before, courtesy of two armed California women with two separate missions
     to kill then-President Ford. With the pulsator, Ford could receive an alert before the Secret Service agents came bursting
     at him to “wrestle him to the ground,” as the newspapers used to describe it.
    Now, as he lay in half-sleep, his wrist tingled as the pulsator alarm sounded. He glanced quickly to his right, to see Betty
     slumbering peacefully at his side. Could she stand the shock of another assassination attempt? She’d been dry now for…
    Four agents moved swiftly through the bedroom door. In the half-light that shone through a slit between door and wall, Ford
     saw the bristling Uzi submachine guns. One of the agents, a man named Pete, whispered to Ford, “Mr. President, we’re on extra
     alert now. There’s been a threat on Mr. Nixon’s life, not yours. We’re covering the bases.”
    “Yes, I see,” Ford said.
    “Sorry, but we’ll have to stay until further orders.”
    “I understand.”
    The agents crept around the Ford bed, circling it, standing guard in the dark as Betty slept.
    Gerald Ford lay down. His head sank into the pillow and he tried to sleep. But sleep would come no more for him that day.
     He resented the exquisite prison in which he lived.
    MOUNT VERNON, Virginia, 6:35:00 a.m. EST
    It was one of his father’s later acquisitions that was giving him all the trouble lately. He had a lot of work to do with
     the old thing before the winter set in and made things infinitely more difficult, when it came to tinkering with antique automobiles.
    That was why Ben Slayton had gotten such an early start this morning in the garage, a cinderblock affair he had constructed
     on the farm, amidst a grove of hickories not far from the main house. Inside was his father’s collection of Hudsons, dating
     from the 1924 convertible to a ’54 Hudson Hornet special sedan equipped with the then-revolutionary 308-cubi-inch V-6 engine
     in the welded semiunit construction step-down design, one of the most popular cars of all time with stock car racers. Slayton,
     himself a stock car racer for a few years after he returned home from service in the Vietnam war, often thought of refurbishing
     the old Hudson Hornet special and bringing it out on the oval some day in exhibition.
    But it was the ’47 Hudson Commodore convertible, a fire-engine red beauty, that was on the fritz. Slayton had labored for
     weeks trying to locate the cause of the timing difficulty, to no avail. It would take him several more weeks, maybe, to find
     the trouble. A few years ago, when his father was still living, the two of them would have spotted the problem in a day or
     two.
    Slayton sipped a cup of coffee he had carried with him from the house to the garage while he collected tools from the spotlessly
     clean steel bench that lined one wall of his shop. He slipped a small ball peen hammer into his tool apron, which held an
     assortment of wrenches and a timer.
    He stopped in front of his newest purchase, the cream-yellow ’51 Packard 250 convertible. Slayton ran his hands lightly over
     the Packard cormorant, symbol of the late lamented automobile’s quality and strength. He wiped a bit of oil from the upper
     grille, a graceful chunk of chrome in the trademark archer’s bow shape.
    To Slayton, this large collection of what he called his “dinosaur cars” were nearly as important as his collection of paintings
     in the house. These cars were his “rolling sculpture,” evidence of an era of American industrial design that was deservedly
     the standard of the world. He often wondered why the ailing American automobile industry couldn’t simply revive the old designs,
     most especially those of the 1950s, instead of insisting that the pitifully weak offerings of “X” cars and “K”