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FIFTY-ONE

Corridor traffic was sparse but purposeful. Within minutes, several doctors entered or left the president's operating suite, under the hard, evaluative eyes of agents. Occasional other hospital personnel passed by on unrelated business. Another agent arrived, relieving Gil Rogers, who left to be debriefed. Overall, the mood in the corridor was one of tense waiting.

The hospital lobby was briefly overrun by media people, until hospital management had the Metropolitan Police clear them out. Then thirty were allowed to return inside. About half an hour after the president had been wheeled in, Lois Haugen arrived, pale and thin, with Cromwell beside her. The eyes of the cameras followed them compulsively toward an elevator, and one team—cameraman and interviewer—moved to intercept. One of the Secret Service men stepped between and snatched the microphone.

"I ought to shove this up your ass," he said. Bitterly. And audibly. There was a patter of applause from people waiting in the lobby. The newsman, flushing, retreated, and the agent tossed the microphone after him.

Cromwell recognized the agent; he'd seen him on shift at the White House. Frank something. He'll probably get a reprimand from uplines for that, Cromwell thought as they got on the elevator. I'll write him a commendation. If I have to be president or acting president, I might as well get some satisfaction out of it. When they got out on the president's floor, he drew one of the other agents aside and learned Frank's last name, Shapiro. "Shapiro's a good man," Cromwell said. "Tell him not to worry about what happened in the lobby."

They were led then to a small sitting area near the operating room. To wait.

***

Stephen Flynn had hesitated to go to the hospital. Even in lay garb he might be recognized. He'd almost surely be recognized if he was with the first lady's party, and he could imagine what the media might make of that. "Priest with stricken president." But he wanted to be on hand, in case there was anything he could do. If Arne was dying...

So he called the hospital, that they'd be expecting him, then went by cab. Wearing his "camouflage"—a business suit. It was a bright still day with the temperature surely more than fifty degrees: God's earnest money on the coming of spring. Truly, Gurenko had turned off the winter machine. Flynn wouldn't have been surprised to see a robin on the hospital grounds.

None of the news people so much as gave him a glance. He showed his driver's license at the reception desk, where they checked by phone with the presidential party, then sent him up with an orderly to guide him. On the president's floor, an agent checked him out at the elevator, then using a little belt radio, called the agents in the waiting area. One of them came to get him, one who knew him; they were taking nothing for granted.

Lois met him with a smile. "They just told us," she said; "his condition's been upgraded to serious. He's going to be all right." She paused. Her eyes had welled, but her voice never quavered. "I thought he would. Because I'm going to be, and I don't believe God intends us to be separated—not for long anyway."

***

The debrief of the three Secret Service men who'd brought the president to the hospital uncovered the fact that Haugen had appointed Valenzuela vice president. Milstead was notified at once, and Milstead called Valenzuela, who then became acting president and was sworn in. Cromwell learned of it when he returned to the White House, and was surprised, almost dismayed, to feel a pang of disappointment before the wave of relief.

***

Radio, television, newspapers, all covered the situation closely and soberly. The president had been shot twice. One bullet had struck his raised left arm, fracturing the humerus but not touching the brachial artery, and one had struck his chest, penetrating an intercostal space; punctured the pleura and the left lung; broke a rib in back; then broke and holed the scapula, emerging much flattened. The most serious danger had been death from profound shock.

Two other people had been shot: Major James Jackson, Army Medical Corps, and a Secret Service man, Agent Wayne Trabert. Neither wound was critical, but Major Jackson's face would require reconstructive surgery; the bullet had had a hollow point.

There had been just one assailant. He'd carried press credentials and a Walther PPK 7.65 mm pistol whose seven-round clip he'd emptied in less than two seconds. A television camera woman had struck his arm upward in mid-burst, otherwise more people would have been hit. She'd also sunk her teeth into his jaw and hung on. Then a Secret Service man had slammed into them, bearing them to the pavement, where he covered the assailant with his body while others closed around them to keep people from killing the gunman.

The assailant's name was Crainey Branard. He was a TV newsman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a convert of the Stalwart in God Church of the Apocalypse. President Haugen, he said, was endangering the day of judgment, and the millenium during which Christ, after wars and terrible plagues, earthquakes, and meteor falls, was to rule on Earth for a thousand years.

The founder and head of the Church, Reverend Delbert Coombs, would appear on television that night to lead his five million followers in mass prayer for the president's recovery. To the network news team that interviewed him in his Cincinnati office, the reverend stated his belief that President Haugen would be one of those saved by the Lamb of God on Judgment Day. When asked what he thought the Lamb would do about the gunman, he said simply that he hoped people would pray for Branard too.

Branard, though he may have been insane, had done a very respectable job of planning and execution, even to having bought a Finnish pronouncing phrasebook and a Finnish-English pocket dictionary, and practicing a greeting to stop the president for a moment between hotel and limousine.

By midafternoon, the president, awake but sedated, was allowed a short visit by his wife. Afterward, when she left the hospital with General Cromwell, the television cameras showed her serene and confident, despite her unaccustomed thinness.

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Framed