The Art of the Devil by John Altman Read Free Book Online Page A

guard rail was steep and rocky, appropriately treacherous. A scenic overlook half a mile away would function as a fine staging area. Traffic was thin out here, which meant time in which to operate without witnesses.
    Parking back at the scenic overlook, he moved through the woods on foot, avoiding the knurliest roots which threatened to trip him. After twenty minutes of blundering through dense foliage he was rewarded by the discovery of a copse of white birch which, perched above a sharp turn in the road, suited his needs to a T. A shot from this rise through the windshield at night, killing the driver, might be beyond his ability – the oncoming headlamps would blind him – but he could easily enough shoot out a tire. Disabled, the automobile would slew into the turn, hitting the guard rail. Perhaps it would go through of its own accord. If not, Hart would leave his hiding place, descend the hillside, and finish the job at close quarters. Perhaps he would throw an open bottle into the car, just to help investigators along.
    Inside the Buick again, he turned back toward the setting sun. Isherwood’s rendezvous with Max Whitman – and hence with Richard Hart, and hence with fate – was still three days away. Before then, Hart had business in Gettysburg.
    He felt almost sorry for Agent Francis Isherwood, whom he had never met, and who would never know what hit him. The man was a fellow veteran. But war required sacrifices. And despite the lack of uniforms or conventional battlefields, this was definitely war. The theaters were not trenches or beaches but country clubs, like the one in which Eisenhower had ingested an insufficient quantity of succinylcholine (the doctor who had misestimated the dosage, now deceased, would not find the chance to repeat the mistake), and grassy rises overlooking presidential motorcades outside of Washington … and rocky ridges above twisting, hazardous mountain roads.

FOUR
    GETTYSBURG: NOVEMBER 14
    S cowling, Isherwood closed the newspaper.
    For a few moments, he looked emptily at nothing. No denying, he reflected: the simple small-town America in which he’d grown up was a quickly fading memory. Once upon a time, all a boy could ask for was a cool glass of lemonade, a jazz quartet on a bandstand, and a pretty girl in a flowered skirt. But now scientists had identified a new peril called ‘smog’. Soviets were perfecting an improved hydrogen Bomb, capable of destroying the world two hundred times over. Doctors had found strontium-90 in children’s baby teeth. Fallout shelters were being urged to stock cans of pineapple juice, for treatment of radiation burns; unrest roiled South America, the stock market had tumbled fourteen billion dollars in the wake of Ike’s heart attack, and Formosa festered like an open wound. Khrushchev’s saber rattled, Israel agitated for Gaza, and the Warsaw Pact challenged NATO …
    He tried to push it all away. The coffee was hot and the week was new. He had seventy-plus hours of sobriety beneath his belt, and today he would try again to call his wife.
    With a sigh, he let his eyes drift shut. Waiting in the darkness were the days leading up to Omaha: a bunch of wiry, scared kids, training and fooling around, with a slightly older man – Isherwood himself – supervising, cigarette burning jauntily between fingertips. He saw in a flash Dick Harrison, playing cards and grinning. And then another flash, quick as heat lightning at night: Dick Harrison three weeks later, gutshot on the beach, begging for water, bubbles of red frothing from the corners of his mouth. Here was Freddy Penworth, laughing with tears streaming down his face as he jammed a fresh clip into his Greaser. Here were Germans raking the gray sand with terribly organized parallel lines of Schwarzlose machine-gun fire; and Isherwood, tangled in barbed wire and soaked with the blood of his fellows, returning fire blindly, fruitlessly. Here were the