You Can't Stop Me - By Max Allan Collins & Matthew Clemens Page 0,1

to press the famous flesh, or to get at least a closer-up glimpse of the President. Most were smiling, some looked confused, and some even afraid as the crush of people pushed toward the fence.

Then Harrow picked out a face—really, an expression—of anger. But all that watching had sent Harrow’s eyes sliding past before what he’d seen registered, and the DCI agent’s eyes darted back, scouring the crowd for the unhappy man.

Seconds crawled like minutes until he again located the face in the crowd. The man was dressed like a farmer—bib overalls, T-shirt, sunglasses, and a cap with CONTINENTAL PEANUTS stitched across the front.

Several things about the farmer made simultaneous blips on Harrow’s cop radar: The hat was for a peanut-seed company, one of the biggest in the country, but peanuts were a crop not grown in Iowa; the man was Caucasian and about forty; the sunglasses were not typical—the generation of farmers younger than Harrow’s father had learned the value of UV protection, but many farmers Harrow knew never wore sunglasses.

The loudest, biggest blip came from the soft, white skin of the man’s bare arms—not even a hint of tan, and a farmer who had not been outside by August was not a farmer at all. A glance at hands soft enough to belong to a perfume-counter clerk told Harrow this “farmer” had not done a real day’s work in his life….

Harrow’s processing of all this took a second or two, and then the fake farmer’s hand slipped into a pocket and came out with something that glinted in the sunlight. Harrow didn’t even have time to use the little communicator that ran down his arm inside his suit.

He yelled, “Gun!” as the angry face in the crowd lurched forward, right arm coming up. Harrow knew at once that the man’s hand held a small-caliber automatic pistol.

Harrow leapt from the stage, arms in front, feet splayed wide behind him, the faces of the people below etched in expressions of surprise, fear, and confusion as he flew over them, his only thought to get to the weapon.

Everything seemed to stop for a second or two, Harrow feeling he was hanging in air, watching as the would-be assassin slowly squeezed the trigger. The agent seemed able to see each fraction of an inch the trigger moved in its inevitable journey.

Just as Harrow grabbed onto the man’s arm, flinging it upward, the gun fired, the shot flying harmlessly over the barns of 4-H animals, creating a muffled but immediate symphony of whinnies and grunts….

As Harrow and the man crashed to the ground, the world went from slow motion to fast-forward as Harrow found himself suddenly aware of several things happening at once: People broke their fall, and the crowd separated like a welcoming gate only to dump them on the gravel-packed ground; panicked bystanders tried to escape the wrestling bodies and the sight of the gun that Harrow and the shooter still fought over even as several Secret Service agents crashed down.

A knee dug into Harrow’s back and fingers clawed not only at the shooter’s hands, but at Harrow’s, trying to pry the pistol free. Even under the pile of writhing bodies, Harrow managed to twist the arm back, the shooter screaming in pain and releasing the pistol into Harrow’s grip.

A Secret Service agent said, “I’ll take that,” and Harrow handed it over, as another agent asked, “You all right, buddy?”

“Yup,” was all Harrow could manage.

Final tally: one wild shot, and no injuries to the President.

Who was whisked away so swiftly that Harrow almost missed the moment where the most powerful man in the free world locked eyes with him and mouthed: Thank you!

Several Secret Service agents had received a few scrapes, and a handful of fairgoers did suffer injuries, the most serious a young woman who broke an arm in the panicked trampling that followed the gunshot. Harrow himself was unscathed but for a bruise on his back from that overzealous Secret Service agent leaping on him.

The would-be assassin, like the young woman, had a broken arm, thanks to Harrow, not that the perp received any sympathy from the crowd watching him get hauled away.

That was when Harrow found himself the center of attention, questioned first by the Secret Service, then by the national media, and, finally, by the Des Moines Register and local news crews before he was able to extricate himself for the drive home.

Though the outside temperature was only about seventy, the Ford F-150’s air conditioner ran full-tilt.