Under Siege Read Online Free PDF

yards away.
    He studied a posted map of the system, then bought one at a kiosk. Soon he was in a window seat on the yellow train.
    The second hotel he tried had a vacant single room. Charon registered under a false name and paid cash for a four-day stay. He didn’t even have to show his false driver’s license or credit card.
    With his bag in his room and the room key in his pocket, Henry Charon set forth upon the streets. He wandered along looking at everything, reading t sips and occasionally referring to a map. After an hour of strolling he found himself in Lafayette Park, the street from the White House.
    Comfortable in spite of the sixty-degree temperature, he sat on a bench and watched the Squirrel. One paused a few feet away and stared at him. “Sorry,” he muttered with genuine regret. “Don’t have a thing for you today.” After a few moments he strolled toward the south edge of the block-sized park.
    Four portable billboards stood on the wide sidewalk facing the White House. TW-O aging hippies in sandals, one male, one female, attended the billboards.
    Across the eight-lane boulevard, surrounded by lush grass and a ten-foot-high, black wrought-iron fence, stood the White House, like something from a set for Gone With the Wind The incongruity was jarring amid the stone-and-steel office buildings that stretched away in all directions.
    Along the sidewalk curb were bullet-shaped concrete barricades linked together at the top by a heavy chain, Henry Charon correctly assumed they had been erected to impede truck-bomb terrorists. Similar barricades were erected around the White House gates, to his left and right, down toward the corners.
    Tourists crowded the sidewalk. They pointed cameras through the black fence and photographed each other with the White House in the background. Many of the tourists, at least half, appeared to be Japanese.
    On the sidewalk, parked back-in against the fence, sat a security guard On his motorcycle, a Kawanki CSR 350, doing Paperwork-Charon walked closer and examined his uniform; black trousers with a blue stripe up each leg, white shirt, the ubiquitous portable radio transceiver, nightstick, and pistol. The shoulder patch on his shirt said PAM
    Another man standing beside Charon spoke to the guard: “Whatever happened to the Harleys?”
    “We got them too,” the guard responded, and didn’t raise his eyes from his report.
    Charon walked on, proceeding east, then turned at the corner by the Treasury building and walked south along the fence. Looking in at the mansion grounds he could see the guards standing at their little kiosks, the trees and flowers, the driveway that curved up the entrance. A black limo stood in the shade under the roof overhang, waiting for someone.
    He strolled westward toward the vast expanse of grass that formed the Ellipse. Tourists hurried by him without so much as a glance. Never a smile or a head nod. The little man who wasn’t there found a spot to sit and watch the people.
    Inside the White House the attorney general was passing a few minutes with the President’s chief of staff, William C. Dorfman, whom he detested. Dorfman was a superb political operator, arrogant, condescending, sure of himself. An extraordinarily intelligent man, he had no patience for those with lesser gifts. The former governor of a Midwestern state, Dorfman had been a successful entrepreneur and college professor. He seemed to have a sixth sense about what argument would carry the most weight with his listeners. What Dorfman lacked, the attorney general firmly believed, was any sense of right and wrong. The political expedient of the moment always struck Dorfman as proper.
    The real flaw in Dorfman’s psyche, the attorney general mused, was the way he regarded people as merely members of groups, groups to be manipulated for his own purposes. Over at Justice the attorney general referred to Dorfnan as “the Weathervane.” He had some other, less complimentary epithets for