Based on a true story
Chapter 1
October 1999
New York City
Glittering crystal chandeliers brightly illuminate the Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom as the sound of Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz sweeps through the room. Sipping cocktails, guests lightly applaud the MacDonalds as they glide around the center of the ballroom, the floor to themselves. Several dance partners stand at the edge, gathering courage to challenge the MacDonalds for the spotlight. At the tables, gossip is cheerfully exchanged, as, here too, they check on the MacDonalds from time to time. Standing off not far from the bar, spicy singles in their 20’s flirt, their eyes searching through the crowd for the opportunity to find a still better partner.
Strauss has been a great choice for tonight. Retro worked. It’s made the evening grand, not what the guests expected when they received their invitations.
Very high up in the vaulted ceiling, a sniper has positioned himself. He looks through his high-powered rifle, moving through the room, one table at a time. While the women have spent weeks preparing for tonight; putting the perfect shoes, hair, and make-up together with the right dress, they didn’t expect to be examined through a rifle’s telescopic lens. At the head table, the assassin’s sight focuses on one after another of the guests. He lingers on a matronly lady covered with serious jewelry, but tonight his goal is narrow. He settles on the MacDonalds as they return to the table. Mrs. Martin MacDonald is a stunning blonde in her thirties. The assassin’s only interest is her dance partner, Martin MacDonald, a silver-haired man with a jutting chin, and a physique chiseled at his club. Killing MacDonald is the whole purpose of the evening.
The rifleman is perfectly positioned in a utility room above the ballroom. Perched as high as he is, behind the glare of the chandeliers, his protruding telescopic rifle is a speck in the filigreed façade. Unnoticed, he will be able to proceed at a leisurely pace, carefully aiming without drawing the slightest attention. His escape plan should also go smoothly. He is dressed in a nicely tailored tuxedo. The sniper is confident that after he’s killed Macdonald his dapper appearance will allow him to easily disappear among the guests. He was born with good looks. He enjoys using them.
Joe Tolley, from Channel 2 News, gently clears his throat into the microphone. People eyes are drawn to the now lit up dais. This part of the evening is the reason they are here. Everyone returns to their seats. Tolley clowns a bit, gets some nice laughs.
“Our speaker tonight needs no introduction. He is a man of our age, a captain of our decade…
Applause. Tolley has prepared well. Leaving little to chance, in front of the mirror he practiced the casual smile he is now presenting during the extended applause. As it dies down he continues.
“Martin MacDonald is the personification of who we are and have become.”
Cheering.
This brings a smile to MacDonald. As he gets up from his chair, he bends forward over the table, and, whispering an imitation of Tolley’s voice, he captures his lisp perfectly. The men seated nearby find this funny. Not the women. They draw back from MacDonald’s meanness, an effect that MacDonald seems to regularly elicit from the fairer sex.
MacDonald winks at his wife. She returns an encouraging smile, which he doesn’t notice. He long ago stopped seeing her. Jauntily he dashes for the stage. Skipping up the steps he is soon at the lectern. With his reading glasses low on his nose, patterned after an image of John Adams he saw on TV, he shuffles his papers, looks over the audience from far left to right.
MacDonald is hot. Buoyed by increasing opportunities, at this point materializing daily, he, more than anyone, knows exactly what he has done to create his good fortune. He is proud of it. He looks upward, to his Sicilian grandfather in heaven. He wouldn’t be here today without him.
He smiles broadly at the audience, feeling among friends. They are completely captured. Who wouldn’t want in on MacDonald’s phenomenal profits? Who wouldn’t want the wife he has, beneath the glittering chandeliers at the Plaza.
Business Week ran a feature on MacDonald in its May issue. His story is quintessential 90’s. A startup in his garage, an office consisting of a file cabinet, desk, and telephone. MacDonald answered the phone himself. He did the filing. Later, as the business grew, he sweated through payrolls, wondering where he would find the money for his 12 employees. Today he’s unfazed by billion dollar figures. The one caveat? He went into the health insurance business knowing nothing about health insurance. Like so many of the new wave of CEOs his expertise is with numbers. As long as they work he remains the golden boy.
For CEO wannabes in the audience MacDonald offers magic. For actual CEOs he offers lessons in how to hit the bottom line out of the ballpark. He’s someone to study closely, figure out whether he’s doing what he claims to be doing. In not very long they will be expected to replicate Cambridge Health’s profit. If they don’t they’ll soon be gone, replaced by a CEO who will get the right numbers. Anticipating platitudes they don’t expect to learn much tonight. But just in case, Martin MacDonald has their total attention
It’s been 25 years since his graduation from Macalester College, in St. Paul Minnesota. He’s never lost his boy wonder quality. Probably it was the football. Being a second team All-American linebacker did a lot to shore up his identity. Thrown into the lion pit, he emerged a lion. He has kept the momentum going. He takes great pleasure smashing an adversary in his teeth. It has served him well. Winning is the only acceptable result in his encounters. When the need to fight his adversaries temporarily abates, he has fun. He is a wiz with numbers. There is special satisfaction when the numbers are large. Lately they have been huge.
Growing up he was hugely influenced by his mother’s scrappy Sicilian father and her two brothers, who lived nearby. A Sicilian style wouldn’t ordinarily work in the insurance industry. But MacDonald is also Scottish. On the face of it he seems an all American regular guy, a team player, a boy scout, very unlike his ruffian uncles, an insurance man through and through. Only savvy.
He saw his father, Robert MacDonald, only during the summer, but those summers powerfully influenced his persona. His father’s cheerful Scotch veneer is what others knew him by and respected. MacDonald’s adulation of his father made it possible to effortlessly emulate him. It also spiritually connected him to his father’s Scottish clan, one with a long tradition of money cleverness invariably bestowed on the eldest son. So his take no prisoners uncles from Sicily were well camouflaged.
He adjusts the mike, taps it with his finger a few times. Then, with a strong voice he begins.
“My thanks to the American Insurance Association. I am honored that you are having me here to tell you what you already know. We need to stick together. Stand as one. Be strong. We share the same mission, to put a stop to runaway medical spending, to deliver health care at a reasonable cost.”
Happily, the audience applauds.
Ever so slowly the rifleman scopes MacDonald between his eyes. A voice from inside him urges.
“Now!”
He can’t trust that voice, a hard lesson learned again and again when he made the mistake of trusting his impulses.
The sight is fogging up. He pulls his rifle back into the utility room, and wipes off the condensed vapor with his thumb. All the while he keeps an eye on MacDonald. (an unobserved target can disappear.) He double-checks that everything else is in order. Nervously his tightly gloved index finger rubs over the filed off serial number. That was item one in his plan. An identifier that had to be removed. He pulls at the ends of his thin leather gloves to tighten them still further. He cocks the trigger mechanism: cutting through the utility room’s silence, the sound of precision steel snapping into place with a bit of an echo. He repeats this a second time with military efficiency. He takes a cartridge case from his pocket and loads.
Soon enough he again has MacDonald’s forehead perfectly centered. Carefully, calmly–he can almost feel the bullet drilling in to the spot, into MacDonald’s skull. He can imagine the sweetness of that moment
There is a noise somewhere down the hall. The sniper freezes. He listens carefully for it to repeat. He soon recognizes the scratching of a busy mouse.
“Stay with this,” he commands himself. He must follow a series of steps that have been practiced so often, that when his eyes and trigger-finger have the target in sight, what follows is automatic. His finger tightens slowly. Slowly. He is almost there.
MacDonald’s wit is knocking the audience out. Laughter, cheers, happy shouts interrupt his talk. This has seduced MacDonald into letting it all out. The rhythm of a revivalist preacher rings out in the ballroom.
“Our fight is the good fight, our goal necessary…”
The audience’s enthusiasm pisses off the rifleman. That stops him.
During training they drilled it in. “Don’t act unless you’re emotionless.” Focus requires brain silence. The mind must disappear as the momentum of the plan closes in on the target. Anger is the natural emotion before and during a kill, but not for a professional. It undoes your skill.
He learned the hard way. In his first battle he got excited, terrified and furious at an adversary who had killed Arnie, his friend standing 3 feet away from him. He shot wildly, like he had never learned a thing. Fortunately, cool as a cucumber, one of his buddies shot the man dead.
It was the closest he came to getting killed. He had no trouble picturing himself as rotting flesh six feet under. That image subsequently, kept him completely professional.
Twenty-six years ago, at army sharpshooter school, the basic method of training was simple and absolute. Every step was repeated again and again, again, and again until nothing else is possible other than the next step. The final decision to kill doesn’t reside with the sniper. It is muscle memory.
That’s not happening now. The opposite. Normally obstacles to a plan, which inevitably arise, are quickly absorbed as interesting new wrinkles to be patiently overcome. Instead, unexpected events, like the sound of the mouse, rattle him. His concentration is shot. In the army, the sergeant sometimes fed the men greenies, amphetamines to improve their concentration. Given their level of stress it helped them even more than kids with ADHD.
His chin tight, “Focus,” he says to himself in a nasty whisper.
He began so determined. Righteous anger can move mountains. Or drive you crazy until you act. For months, unanswerable questions had wormed their way through his mind and exhausted him. First grief, then blame, endlessly assigning it to one person after another including himself.
Then that dissipated. His anguish completely disappeared once the specifics of his plan to kill MacDonald were thought out in detail. Setting it up took over. He went from inactivity, practically in a coma, to energy harnessed by having a purpose.
Getting things done their way. The army had taught him how to stay organized. Concentrate all efforts on the first step before going on to the next. He needed a well-camouflaged spot with complete vision of the target. As soon as he learned MacDonald was going to speak in the Plaza ballroom, he went through twelve utility rooms located in the ceiling before finding the perfect one. The next thing on his check list-finding a MacMillan Tac 50 rifle was easier than he expected. The Tac is extremely accurate and able to be broken down into a compact form. Fortunately, Marty, his pal at work knew exactly where to find one. It took only an hour and a half to find the guy. And contrary to the image he had, based on Hollywood versions of gun salesmen, the guy who sold it to him was a character, an educated friendly enough black man with a wicked sense of humor. Next he had to find the right size satchel. The first one that he bought was too small so he had to return it and try out another size.
No problem. The view of the dais was so perfect, like a gift from God, it energized all the other steps. Everything fell into place. It may have taken two times on one of the items, or ten. Didn’t matter. It got done.
His smile returned. At last justice would be done.
Except it isn’t happening tonight.
In truth, even in the army it got more complicated. At the beginning of his sniper training he had no difficulty pulling the trigger. He carried out three missions successfully without a second thought. He killed whom he was assigned to kill and took pride in his accomplishment.
His fourth assignment brought that to an end. He noticed his target’s red hair. That did it. His precision, so easily summoned a moment before, deserted him. There was no flow. His trigger-finger and eye were no longer one.
It wasn’t a morality thing, at least not that he was aware of. He had no specific thoughts about right and wrong. He knew it was right to kill this particular bad guy, with or without his red hair. There were no thoughts at all. But the red hair kept coming into his mind.
A therapist taught him how to shut that off. But it didn’t matter. He’d still miss his target again and again.
When the time came he didn’t reenlist. His sergeant more or less made clear that was to be his plan.
Once again the gunman pulls the rifle back into the utility room. We get a better look at him. He’s sweating. His face is alive with emotion. As opposed to our initial impression, he is anything but a professional.
“Take your time,” he commands himself. That does nothing. Drifting thoughts grab his attention, one after another, without rhyme or reason.
He had imagined the exact instant in detail. MacDonald, just after he’s made a clever observation, bathed in adulation, a split second before the applause erupts, the audience smiling, congratulating themselves for being there.
Bang!
Blood is the perfect punctuation.
A single shot.
Sweet!
Bang.
It will put them on notice. Someone’s watching. Someone
sees what you’re doing.
MacDonald ends his talk. Like a politician at a convention he waves to the audience.
As he returns to his table, the rifleman’s frantic.
He still has a good shot. Now!
He doesn’t pull the trigger.
The rifleman soon makes peace with the new facts. His fantasy about the precise moment of MacDonald’s death was self-indulgent. The joy of catching him at a glorious moment in front of the audience isn’t all that important. Reaching for a French fry, wiping off the ketchup from his lips, blowing his nose, trying to catch the eye of one of the attractive women at his table-any moment will be okay. Shot and killed is the main point. If the deed gets done, the meaning will be clear. Dead is dead.
This last thought enables the rifleman to cool off. MacDonald will remain in target range for at least an hour. Later will be fine.
Michael wipes the sweat off his forehead. He’s hot and clammy, his shirt and underwear are sticking to him. He takes off his tuxedo jacket, sits himself on the floor against a huge cable roll stored in the room. Trying to regain his composure, he closes his eyes and inhales deeply, filling his chest with air.
No luck. His clammy shirt is bothering him. He can’t seem to catch his breath. His mind is still all over the place. Doubts. More doubts. He closes his eyes, drifts through his memories…