"What do you mean 'don't move?' What the hell kind of a way is that to talk to people, you bloodless Anglo-Saxon bastard? I'm going out to lunch."

"Oh," I countered. "And suppose I told you I'm looking at possible evidence that Muhammed Khaldun didn't shoot Forrester?"

Silence for an instant; and then: "Is that insane statement supposed to make me less hungry?"

"No, Max--"

"Because it isn't--"

"Max, will you shut up? We're talking about the murder of the President."

"No, you're talking about it. I'm talking about lunch."

I sighed.

I sighed. "How about if I bring the food?"

Twenty minutes later, Max and I were both sitting in front of a bank of computers that nearly covered an old desk in his office on 22nd Street near the Hudson River. As we stared at this main screen, we did our worst to a couple of vegetable burgers I'd picked up from the deli downstairs, so engrossed in what we were seeing--even the ever jaded Max--that we didn't even have time to engage in our usual nostalgia for the days before the devastating national E. coli outbreak of 2021, when you could still get a real hamburger at something other than the most careful (and expensive) restaurants in town.

On the screen in front of us was the by then deathly familiar scene of five years earlier: the podium in the hotel ballroom in Chicago; the impressive figure of President Emily Forrester striding up, wiping a few beads of sweat from her head and preparing to accept the nomination of her party for a second term; and, in the distance, the face, the assassin's face that had been enlarged and made familiar to every man, woman and child in the country since the discovery just a year ago of this private video footage taken by some still-anonymous person in the crowd. It was a face that, after only a two-month search, had been given a name: Muhammed Khaldun, minor functionary in the Afghan consulate in Chicago. Justice had been swift: Khaldun, constantly and pathetically shouting his innocence, was convicted within months, and had recently begun serving a life sentence in a maximum-security facility outside Kansas City.

Moreover--and how blind I was not to see the connection as soon as I viewed the disc!--diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan, already fragile, had been strained almost to the breaking point by the affair.

But Max and I had other problems to worry about that day, specifically the fact that on the disc given to me by Mrs. Price the images, instead of proceeding on to the scene of panic that usually followed the assassination, suddenly disappeared; the screen went black for a few seconds, then came alive again with a replay of the crime, one in which the area where the eye was accustomed to seeing Khaldun's face was a carefully delineated blank. Next the screen went black a second time, and finally a third version of the same sequence appeared; but in this go-round, the man wielding the gun in the background was someone entirely different: Asian, maybe Chinese, certainly not Afghan. MORE>>

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