The Fourth K Read Online Free Page B

told her he could not bear it if something were to happen to her.
    A detail of twenty men, spread over three shifts a day, guarded Theresa Kennedy. When she went to a restaurant, if she went to a movie with her boyfriend, they were there. They rented apartments in the same building, used a command van in the street. She was never alone. And she had to give her schedule to the chief of the security detail every single day.
    Her guards were two-headed monsters: half servant, halfmaster. With advanced electronic equipment they could hear the lovemaking when she brought a male friend back to her apartment. And they were frightening—they moved like wolves, gliding silently, their heads tilted alertly as if to catch a scent on the wind, but actually they were straining to listen to their earplug radios.
    Theresa had refused a “net security,” that is, security of the closest kind. She drove her own car, refused to let the security team take an adjoining apartment, refused to walk with guards alongside her. She had insisted that the security be a “perimeter security,” that they erect a wall around her as if she were a large garden. In this way she could lead a personal life. This arrangement led to some embarrassing moments. One day she went shopping and needed change for a telephone call. She thought she had seen one of her security detail pretending to shop nearby. She had gone up to the man and said, “Could you give me a quarter?” He had looked at her with shocked bewilderment, and she realized that she had made a mistake, that he was not her security guard. She had burst out laughing and apologized. The man was amused and delighted as he gave her the quarter. “Anything for a Kennedy,” he said jokingly.
    Like so many of the young, Theresa Kennedy believed, on no particular evidence, that people were “good,” as she believed herself to be good. She marched for freedom, spoke out for the right and against the wrong. She tried to never commit petty mean acts in everyday life. As a child she gave the contents of her piggy bank to the American Indians.
    In her position as daughter of the President of the United States it was awkward for her when she spoke out for pro-choice abortion activists, and lent her name to radical and left-wing organizations. She endured the abuse of the media and the insults of political opponents.
    Innocently, she was scrupulously fair in her love affairs; she believed in absolute frankness, she abhorred deceit.
    In her years abroad there were incidents from which she should have learned some valuable lessons. In Paris a group of tramps living under one of the bridges tried to rape her when she roamed the city in search of local color. In Rome two beggars tried to snatch her purse as she was giving them money, and in both cases she had been rescued by her vigilant Secret Service detail. But this made no impression on her general faith that man was good. Every human being had the immortal seed of goodness in his soul, no one was beyond redemption. As a feminist she had, of course, learned of the tyranny of men over women, but did not really comprehend the brutal force men used when dealing with their own world. She had no sense of how one human being could betray another human being in the most false and cruel ways.
    The chief of her security detail, a man too old to guard the more important people in government, was appalled by her innocence and tried to educate her. He told her horror stories about men in general, stories taken from his long experience in the service; he was more frank than he would ordinarily have been, since this job was his last assignment before retiring.
    “You’re too young to understand this world,” he said. “And in your position you have to be very careful. You think because you do good for someone they will do good for you.” Just the day before, she had picked up a male hitchhiker, who assumed that this was a sexual invitation. The security chief had