Promises to Keep [antikvár]

Chapter 1Dallas - 22 November, 1963The room was chaos.At the centre of it, a man lay on a grey metal emergency-room table. A starched white sheet had been thrown across his body and his eyes were closed. The man was John Trewlaney Cassidy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States.White-clad emergency-room personnel moved around him in anxious but restrained activity, responding even now as they had been trained. And at the fringes of the crowded room near the doors stood the reporters and the other frightened onlookers, all pushing and shouting, pressing nervously forward, fighting for a glimpse of the man lying on the metal table at the centre of the room.Next to the President stood his wife, Suzanne. She was wearing a bright-pink suit and fashionable matching hat, but there were fresh bloodstains exploded across the front of her jacket and traihng down dark crimson on to her skirt. She held the President's hand tightly in her own. Her eyes had the faraway look of shock in them.The President was dressed in a dark-grey, medium-weight wool suit, a white cotton dress shirt and dark-blue tie, but the emer-gency-room personnel had cut away the top of the expensive suit coat and then torn away the shirt to expose his neck and shoulders and chest. There was a single, small, neat bullet hole in his throat, a smaller wound in his upper back, and the side of his head was blown open, leaving a mass of blood and damaged flesh and broken, bare, white skull.