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GORDON STEVENS
Kennedy’s Ghost
Kennedy’s Ghost is a work of fiction. All of the events, characters, names and places depicted in this novel are entirely fictitious or are used fictitiously.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Copyright © Gordon Stevens 1994
Gordon Stevens asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006490029
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219352
Version: 2016-09-21
To Art Kosatka,
for introducing me to Washington DC
through the back door
and without whom this book
would not have been possible
CONTENTS
It was the sort of day you remembered. Where you were when you heard and what you were doing; who you turned to and who you telephoned.
The assassin was in position at eleven, the cars which would steer the Lincoln into the killing zone at eleven-five. The truck which would break down in the left lane of the traffic lights, ensuring that the Lincoln would move to the right-hand lane, at eleven-six. The yellow sedan which would stall in front of the Lincoln by eleven-seven.
The senator’s flight from Boston was on schedule; his Lincoln, plus the man who would accompany him, already waiting. Twenty-five years before, Donaghue and Brettlaw had been undergraduates together at Harvard.
At eleven-fifty Donaghue would join his wife and daughters in his room on the third floor of the Senate Russell Building on Washington’s Capitol Hill. At one minute to twelve he would walk with them along the marble corridor to the historic setting of the Caucus Room. And at midday exactly, with his wife at his side and Brettlaw in the wings, Senator Jack Donaghue would formally announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America.
It was eleven-fifteen. In the Caucus Room the television cameras were in place and the lights ready, the cables running to the scanners outside. The walls of the room were marble, the slim Corinthian-style columns rising to the ceiling, and the ceiling itself was exquisitely decorated with four large chandeliers hanging from it. The windows on the side of the room facing the dome of Capitol Hill were wall-height, arched at the top and draped in purple. On the wall opposite them, on either side of the door leading into the hallway beyond, two plaques listed some of the events to which the Caucus Room had born witness: the 1912 enquiry into the sinking of the Titanic, the 1941–42 commission into the World War Two National Defense programme, the 1966 Fulbright hearings on the Vietnam War, the 1973