The Fifth Assassin (43 page)

Seeing President Wallace delivered to him like this, the Knight knew his prayers were about to be answered.

The President was about to pass him. Leaning forward, the Knight reached into his pocket, palming the front of his plaster mask. At just the touch of it, as his fingers scraped against its chalkiness, muscle memory took over. Time froze. Life moved frame by frame as the two agents in front of the President seemed to float by like life-size parade floats. Two steps behind them, as the Knight
pulled the mask from his pocket, the President and his daughter floated by too. Same with the mil aide in back of them. As they passed, the Knight couldn’t help but grin. He was diagonally behind them all now. None of them had even noticed him.

They were all locked on their destination—on the group of kids across the chamber. As the President got closer, a few kids began to turn. One of them, a girl with big cheeks and brutal-looking braces, lifted her hand, beginning to point as she realized who was coming. Another began to mouth the President’s daughter’s name. One by one, the rest of the kids began to turn… began to look… began to smile. The Knight’s plaster Lincoln mask was firmly in place.

“Dad, lookit,” Nessie announced, pointing back at the Knight. “That guy… he’s actually dressed like Abraha—”

President Orson Wallace turned. So did the mil aide.

The Knight reached into his jacket pocket, where his gun—

No. His gun was gone. How could that—?

Pffft.

Something with burning teeth bit into the Knight’s lower back.

Grabbing at his own back and clutching at the pain, his finger hit a hole. In his back. There was a hole in his lower back.

He looked down at his stomach. It was soaked… and red… Blood. His
own
blood, seeping and spreading down to his waist.

He’d been shot. Someone… someone…

“Why?” a barbed wire of a voice growled closely behind him.

The Knight teetered, spinning to face his shooter, who was holding the Knight’s gun. The man wore a bright red scarf that covered the lower half of his face. But under the scarf… there was something wrong with the shooter’s skin. Like it was melted.

Cocking his head, the Knight felt his eyesight go blurry, then come back again. He knew the man—the man with the melted skin—the man who had just shot him and saved the President’s life: That was Marshall.

“
Why did you kill Pastor Riis!?
” Marshall demanded, reaching for the Knight’s mask.

The answer never came.

People were screaming, scattering in every direction.

“
Shots fired! Shots fired!
” someone yelled.

In a blur, undercover agents plowed into Marshall and the Knight. Both men went limp, their heads snapping sideways and backwards as they plummeted like tackling dummies. Yet as Marshall fell—the Knight could see it on his face—he was calm, unconcerned. It’s what made Marshall so dangerous. He didn’t care about himself.

As he hit the floor face-first, the Knight’s mask shattered. Half its pieces skittered outward; the other half chewed into the Knight’s face, peeling away the fake beard, finding blood, and revealing a man with a dimpled chin and a boxer’s nose.

Chestdown next to him, Marshall knew him immediately—from the shooting at Foundry Church: the pastor. The pastor who was shot… who fell to the carpet… and who lived. The same pastor who took the Christmas photo with the rabbi and the imam… and who was in the hospital chapel when both the chaplain and Tot were attacked.

“I didn’t do anything!” Pastor Frick yelled as they tore through his pockets. “
He
shot
me
!”

“
Knife!
” a Secret Service agent shouted from the dogpile that smothered Pastor Frick. From Frick’s pocket, he pulled out the hunting knife with the curly birch handle.

“
Go, go—move!
” an agent yelled across the chamber.

In the distance, a group of agents formed a human wall around the President, gripping him by the elbows, lifting his feet off the ground, and rushing him to the preselected saferoom. At the back of the statuary chamber was a door that led to the Park Police’s breakroom. Racing behind them, A.J. scooped Wallace’s daughter into his arms.

“Your dad’s fine. He’s fine,” A.J. whispered, following the group to the saferoom as, shaking, she sobbed into his chest.

Still pinned facedown, Pastor Frick let out a wordless howl as the Secret Service drilled their knees into his lower back—into his
wound—and cuffed his hands behind him. They didn’t care that he’d been shot—or that he couldn’t feel his legs—or that unlike the wound he’d so carefully inflicted on himself in his office, this wasn’t the kind of attack he’d walk away from. Marshall had gone for vital organs.

Across from him, under his own dogpile and with his own hands cuffed behind his back, Marshall didn’t struggle… didn’t say a word. Chin to the ground, he simply stared at Pastor Frick—his gold eyes burning with that first question he’d asked:
Why did you kill Pastor Riis?

Still on the ground, with his bloody cheek pressed against the bits and pieces of his mask, Frick could barely see anything. The world was still blurry, the edges of his vision ringed by a red circle that began to shrink and tighten, leaving only black. Frick tried to answer… he looked at Marshall and said the words:
Nico told me to.

Nico told me to!
he insisted.

But all that came out was a wet gurgle. It came up from Frick’s chest, up his throat, rattling like a bag of teeth.

Indeed, as the red circle continued to tighten and blackness filled his peripheral vision, Pastor Frick’s final thoughts were of the simple fact that, all this time, he had it all wrong.

For years now, Frick had heard the rumblings and rumors about the Knights and John Wilkes Booth. But it wasn’t until four months ago, when the church picked Associate Pastor Frick and put him
here
—right in Abraham Lincoln’s church—that he began to understand God’s message. Surely, this was fate.

And then, to get the call that President Wallace was coming to visit. Frick had known the President wasn’t a churchgoer. Wallace attended on Easter, on holidays… only when there was a camera around. But now, with the President coming, here it was. Every life exists for a reason. This would be Frick’s chance to bring faith to millions.

Yet what Wallace did on Christmas—using Frick’s church and Frick himself, bringing the rabbi and imam, then parading the
three of them together like cheap interchangeable toys, as if one size would fit all. For the millions watching, and for Frick himself, it
was
a blasphemy.

During those days, Frick understood the real reason why God had sent him to Lincoln’s church. Here in D.C., he could feel the church’s greatest threat raising its head once again. Every President has power; so too does the church. But to Frick, it was now clear why the balance between the two was shifting. Rather than looking to the church for moral guidance, the world watched as the President trivialized the name of Christ and everything it stood for.

Was it any wonder that congregations were shrinking, members were disengaged, or that some refused to believe altogether? Today’s church was being reduced to a community center where people were bribed with Date Nights and fruit smoothies. It was time for the pollution to stop, for the sacrilege to end, and for the pure church, with its intended purpose, to make its return.

The President didn’t even hide his goal—he said it right to Frick’s face: He would bring all three voices… Christian, Jewish, Muslim… the President would do everything in his power to bring the country together.
Like Lincoln! Like JFK! Like every king whose growing influence would challenge church power.
The church had lost so much lately. It couldn’t afford to lose more.

Frick knew he’d need help. He knew he couldn’t do it alone. That’s what made him seek someone with experience and inspired him to reach out to Nico. And then to learn that one of his congregants—that Rupert—that Rupert worked with Nico… And to hear Nico’s stories and all that had gone before…

Centuries ago, Vignolles created the Knights to protect the Name of God. But even Vignolles knew that what he was really protecting was the church’s power. When that power shifted between church and state, Knights like Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, and Oswald stepped forward to restore a proper balance. Now it was Frick’s turn. Someone had to stop this civil war and end this blasphemy.

With Nico’s help, it was all so clear. How could this not be Frick’s mission?
He thought he was chosen! Frick was the final Knight!
But
to look at it now, to look around and see the pieces that remained… No, now Frick understood: It was never
he
who was Chosen. From the start, he had it wrong. The Chosen One was always…

Nico.

Nico was the final Knight. And his mission was just beginning.

It was that final thought—of Nico and the mission still to come—that sputtered through Frick’s brain as the red circle shrank into a pinhole and the world went black. That and the fact that he’d been right about one thing: He wouldn’t survive this day.

Eighteen years ago

Sagamore, Wisconsin

I
t was a small funeral. Not by choice.

In a town as watchful and religious as Sagamore, judgments moved even quicker than gossip. Especially gossip like this.

At the close of the funeral, they called on Marshall as one of the pallbearers. His father too. But since a twelve-year-old and a double amputee can’t be relied on to lift anything heavy, he and his dad simply put their open palms on the back of the coffin as it was rolled on the metal scissor-cart out to the hearse.

That was this morning.

It was dark now, nearly ten o’clock. Yet for Marshall, who was sitting alone on the treehouse carpet, in the glow of one little lantern, glaring down through the Plexiglas window at the last few visitors leaving his house, that wasn’t even the hard part. The funeral was already a blur. It’d been nearly a week since his mother crouched down in her walk-in closet, prayed the rosary, then put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. At this point, filled with so much anguish and rage, he just wanted everyone to stop telling him that it would all be okay. Even twelve-year-olds know when they’re being lied to.

“Knock, knock, Marsh—you there?” his father called, rolling out to the treehouse when everyone was finally gone.

Marshall didn’t answer.

“Buddy, you okay? You been up there all night,” his father added.

Still no response. And unlike the past few nights, when Marshall insisted on sleeping in the treehouse, his father didn’t press. Plus, as Marshall knew, even if he did, it wasn’t like his dad could climb up and bring him down.

For that reason, twenty minutes later, Marshall sat up straight in his beanbag chair when he heard someone climbing the ladder rungs nailed to the tree.

“Whoever it is, I hear you,” Marshall warned.

No one replied.

“Beecher, if it’s you, get the hell out,” Marshall added even though he knew that while Beecher’s mom had let him attend the funeral, she had forbidden him to pay any more visits to the treehouse. It was the same with Paglinni. And the rest. No one told him directly, but after a week of sitting alone in a beanbag, Marshall got the point.

“You taking visitors?” a familiar voice asked.

From the ladder, Pastor Riis peered over the floorboards, his normally neat hair looking scruffy and overgrown in the dim light.

“Go away,” Marshall said, disgusted.

“It’s a hard day. I came to see how you’re doing.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Says who?” the pastor challenged.

Shifting in his beanbag chair, Marshall thought about it. He didn’t have an answer.

“I heard the funeral was…
uff
… I heard it was beautiful,” the pastor said, hoisting himself up and climbing into the treehouse.

“No one showed,” Marshall said, refusing to look up. “It was practically empty.”

“I heard. And I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. I really wanted to.”

Rolling his eyes but refusing to turn and face him, Marshall stared down at the worn and filthy carpet.

“Marshall, you know I couldn’t be there, no matter how much it hurt me. And I promise you, it hurt me.”

Hearing a crack in the pastor’s voice, Marshall looked up. Not out of concern. Or sympathy. Marshall was damaged goods, his
eyes filled with a darkness that came from getting a good hard look at what life eventually offers all of us. When Pastor Riis saw those eyes, he knew it was a darkness that Marshall would carry forever.

Riis took a seat on a nearby milk crate. When he was on the pulpit, the pastor stood tall and vibrant. Today he looked ten years older, hunched forward as he fidgeted with a stray thread that dangled from the wrist of his sweater.

“I heard they fired you from the church,” Marshall finally offered.

“They had no choice.”

Marshall nodded, though it still made no sense. What Paglinni saw, when he ran home and the word got out… He told his parents it was Pastor Riis and Marshall’s mom. But the pastor wasn’t even there. It was Riis’s wife who—Marshall closed his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell them the truth?” he said.

“She’s my wife, Marshall.”

“But she’s the one who—”

“She’s my
wife
. Bound by God. To care and protect,” he insisted in that voice that could keep an entire town quiet for hours at a time. “Nothing would’ve changed if people heard the truth. Not for any of us.” Pausing a moment, he added, “That includes your mom too.”

Grabbing the side of the beanbag chair, Marshall pinched it until he was squeezing just a single bean of foam between his thumb and his forefinger.

“I know you’re thinking something, Marshall. Just say it.”

Marshall squeezed the bead of foam even tighter.

“You want to know about my wife, don’t you? And what she and your mom—”

“Don’t talk about my mom,” Marshall growled.