Free Lethal Expedition (Short Story) by James M. Tabor

down. “Stay there for a while,” he gasped. “We’ve called the paramedics.” He looked around. “What the hell happened here?”
    She looked left and saw Ely lying on the kitchen floor, his head in a dark red pool. “He dead?” she croaked.
    “Yes.”
    “How?”
    “I shot him,” Luciano said, going from red to white.
    “It was a right shooting,” Scott said. “That hammer was on its way down. Another half second and …”
    “Why … why are you here?” Hallie’s throat felt like she had a bad case of strep.
    “We have a warrant for your arrest.”
    “On Sunday morning?”
    “The law never sleeps, Dr. Leland. And judges move at their own chosen speed. When one signs, we go.”
    “That man tried to kill me.” She pointed at Ely.
    “Yeah, we saw. Why?”
    She started to explain, but then remembered. She sat up straight. “Can you communicate with the Secret Service?”
    “Of course. Why?”
    “You need to call them. Now!”
    Luciano helped her stand. He patted her shoulder. “You need to take it easy, Dr. Leland. It’s obvious that—”
    Something in Hallie snapped. She shoved his hands away.
“Listen to me! The president may die unless we alert the Secret Service. NOW, goddamnit!”
    His eyes went vague and she knew he was looking down the long road of his career, maybe ten years done, ten to go. It could be an easy cruise to a sweet pension and a West Palm condo. Or he could embarrass the Bureau and end up chasing Eskimos in Juneau.
    He looked at Agent Scott, and she could almost feel the gears clicking in their heads. Luciano’s eyes went blank. A siren, approaching. “I think the medics are here,” he said, and started to turn away.
    She had one last shot. “What if President Laning dies? Can you live with that, Agent Luciano?”

30

    The petite pregnant woman put a hand to her ear and went wide-eyed. She vaulted over the back of Laning’s pew, knocking the president aside, and tackled Henry Backer, pinning his arms. The Bible fell from his hand.
    “Do not touch the book!”
the clandestine agent screamed. She hooked her heel behind Backer’s leg and dropped him, smacking his head on the marble floor. He was unconscious even before other agents swarmed over him. The female agent’s bun was in disarray, but otherwise she was fine. She stood up, shed the prosthetic belly, and turned to apologize for hitting the president on her way over the pew.
    Too late. A wall of bodies already surrounded Laning and her family. An agent shouted,
“Go!”
and the whole mass moved like a great centipede, not to the distant main entrance but to a designated door behind the choir gallery. In practice drills, the fastest they had managed this emergency extraction with a presidential stand-in was nine seconds. This time, the last agent cleared the door in seven point four.

Aftermath

    “So the Pakistanis wanted revenge for the death of al-Harani. Eye for an eye,” Hallie said as Agent Luciano poured them both fresh cups of coffee. It was Thursday of the week after Easter and she was in his office at FBI headquarters. She still had a painful egg on the side of her head and blue-and-purple bruises striping her neck. An ER doctor had irrigated the ice-pick wound, given her a tetanus booster, and told her not to run for two weeks. She thought one would do it.
    “Yes.”
    “And we know what Ely told me. What about Backer?”
    “He’s a New Patriot. So was Ely. They call themselves libertarians, but the truth is, they’re anarchists. They want to destabilize the government any way they can. Ely used Backer to get close to the president.”
    She sipped the coffee, which was more appreciated than good. “So I was set up from the beginning.”
    “We think so. CSI people found containers in Backer’s wastebasket with traces of the same pathogen that was on the Bible.”
    “The fake battery Ely put in my pack. And took from my house.”
    “Right.”
    “Ely said the pathogen came from