NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) by Stephen Woodfin Read Free Book Online

government to a monument of death and destruction, where the fate of his country hung in the balance for three days in the summer of 1863.
    The four men looked like every other car full of tourists as they entered the battlefield at Gettysburg and began the tour. At the site where Lincoln, four months after the end of a fight that produced 51,000 casualties, delivered his famous speech at the cemetery, they stood quietly and listened as a park ranger provided details about the address, then recited it with the inflections President Lincoln had used.
    When the crowd began to break up at the conclusion of the speech, President Whitfield moved next to an old man wearing a turned-down fishing hat and wire-rimmed glasses with clipped on sunglass lenses. When Bass placed his hand on his shoulder, the old man turned and softly said, “It’s good to see you, Mr. President.”
    “Thanks for agreeing to meet me here, Professor Strube,” Whitfield said. “I was starting to get cabin fever.”
    “The symbolism of the location isn’t lost on me,” Strube said as he surveyed the cemetery.
    “I thought not.”
    President Whitfield nodded at BB as he and the old professor wandered off through the graves, lost in their conversation. BB and Nate flanked them as inconspicuously as possible and scanned the thinning crowds, searching for any signs of trouble.
    Leadoff walked next to BB, trying to act nonchalant, scared out of his wits.
    “I don’t suppose he mentioned the part about walking in an exposed public place in the middle of a crowd for a few hours, did he?” Leadoff asked BB.
    “He just told me to fill up my truck with gas, latch on to you and drive north ’til he told me to stop,” BB said. “But he has a point. No one seems to have even looked his way. It’s like he’s invisible.”
    “Let’s hope things stay that way. Otherwise, we may begin to feel like Grant on the first day at Shiloh,” Leadoff said.
    As they walked near a large oak, a little girl, her blonde curls flapping, her blue eyes full of mischief, approached them. In each hand, she held small flags wrapped on wooden sticks, the U.S. flag in her right, the Stars and Bars in her left. “My momma told me I should ask you to pick a flag,” she said to BB while she glanced over her shoulder at a beautiful twenty-something woman sitting in the shade on a blanket thumbing through a fashion magazine. When BB looked at her, she gave him a quick wink before glancing back down at the page.
    “Looks like you have a fan club,” Leadoff said.
    “Looks like trouble to me,” BB said.
    “Sweetie,” BB said to the little girl. “Tell your momma I was raised in Dixie, but I love Old Glory. Go on now.”
    They watched the cherub skip her way to her mother, twirling around a time or two, stopping to try to catch a butterfly that lighted on a tree leaf, stubbing her toe on a rock. When she finally made it to her mother, she just shrugged her shoulders when she asked what BB had said. The lady looked up and smiled at him. She watched as BB tipped his hat to her and walked away, never taking his eye off the president.
    After another ten minutes of nervous guard duty, BB saw President Whitfield shake hands with Professor Strube and give him a pat on the back. The old scholar walked off, deep in thought, while Whitfield strolled to BB’s truck and waited for the group to join him. Just as they began to get in the truck, Leadoff saw a man and a woman, tourists on a pilgrimage, on the other side of the drive. The woman had her sights trained on Bass. She poked her husband in the side causing him to look away from the historical marker he was studying.
    “What is it?” he said.
    “Look. It’s him. It’s the President,” she said pointing at BB’s truck.
    BB drove off without acknowledging the lady.
    “That was a close one,” he said.
    “I don’t think we’re out of hot water yet,” Leadoff said as they approached the main gate to the park.
    Ahead of them, on