The Shadow Game by Steve Lewis Page B

but it was also an opportunity. A desperately needed chance to hit the reset button. The assassin had done America a favour.
    There was a sharp rap on the door. 12.25 precisely.
    Webster grabbed one last look in the mirror, stroking his row of medals before opening the door.
    â€˜Sir Jack, would you follow me please?’

    â€˜This is a sad hour in the life of our great nation. Earle Jackson won America’s respect with his leadership, and he won our love with humility and goodness. He belonged to the people, and so to the people he will be returned, forever.’
    Washington National Cathedral was overflowing with nearly four thousand mourners, many of them foreign dignitaries who had come to pay their respects to the fifth US president to be assassinated while in office. They listened in silence as a black-clad Mikaela Asta paid respect to her predecessor.
    The capital was in the grip of a vicious winter, the plummeting temperatures adding to the bleak mood of a city with too much experience in burying dead leaders.
    For a week, the American people had mourned their commander in chief, who had been gunned down at a rally in one of Detroit’s blue-collar enclaves. Despite committing unprecedented resources to the hunt for the killer, the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies had made little headway in solving the case.
    In a nation prone to wild rumour, conspiracy theories abounded.
    Now the funeral entourage prepared to leave the grand cathedral, a motorcade waiting to carry the presidential casket on a five-mile route that would take an hour to complete. Jackson’s family had requested he be laid to rest at Arlington, the first president since John F Kennedy to be buried at the national military cemetery.
    In his seat fifteen rows from the front, Jack Webster dipped his head as the procession slowly followed the casket carried by sixsoldiers. He had just turned to join the trail of mourners when he felt a firm grip on his forearm. ‘Good of you to come all this way, Jack.’
    The man who had been sworn in as vice president was at his side. Morgan McDonald had been his close confidant for more than a decade.
    â€˜Of course I would be here, Morgan,’ Webster said. ‘America might have more powerful allies but it has no better friend than Australia.’
    Big Mac dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘I know. That is why we need to talk.’

    Big Mac knew that few of his fellow Americans mourned Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, and military hardheads still winced at the thought of America’s humiliation when embassy staff were taken hostage in Tehran.
    And he was also well aware that fewer still would recall Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. But Mondale was America’s first ‘modern’ vice president and the first to have an office in the West Wing of the White House.
    And it was in this office on the building’s western edge that Big Mac was holding court, albeit with an audience of one.
    â€˜These are dark days, my friend, dark days indeed.’ The vice president’s southern drawl slowly caressed each word.
    â€˜Wherever you look around the world the good guys are losing.’ He waved at a massive map he’d just had installed. ‘InAfrica, Boko Haram is on the rise, holding Nigeria captive. In the north, the Arab Spring has turned to a bitter winter that will last generations. The Middle East is aflame from end to end. Worst of all, Syria and Iraq are now at the mercy of those infidel butchers from Islamic State.’
    It wasn’t the first time Jack Webster had heard this speech, but he said nothing. He agreed with every word, and wanted to gauge Big Mac’s direction and purpose.
    â€˜Europe is a run by a pack of limp-wristed bureaucrats as a travesty of a state that provides false unity. In the north the Russian bear is waking; it smells our weakness and is testing its strength.’
    Big Mac