The note was hand-written. The contents seemed weird to her. She read it again. Then she looked up to see if her driver or bodyguard were paying any interest in what she was doing. They were not. She read the note again, for the third time.
“Your Excellency, very sorry I have to get to you by sneaking this note into your son’s bag when I visited his class today. I had to do it this way to protect you and me. The contents are for your eyes only. I am a serving military officer. I stumbled on a plot to assassinate you. The massacre at the James Town Police Station yesterday connects to the plot to assassinate you. Those behind the plot included persons within the Presidency and the National Security Secretariat. That is why I have to ensure nobody gets this message. If they knew I was privy to the plot, they would kill me. Please get a new phone and a new number that is not registered in your name and call me on 02998484556. Please keep this to yourself. Do not send any of your men to buy the phone or new number you will use to call me. Buy them yourself. I shall be expecting your call. Thanks”
The import of what the note was saying was not lost on the Vice-President. Somebody was trying to warn her there was a plot to assassinate her. She was sure such plots are an occupational hazard once a person becomes a President or Vice-President. That is why Presidents and Vice-Presidents all over the world always have elaborate security arrangements around them; to protect them from a would-be assassin.
She had read widely on the subject of assassinations of Presidents since she became Vice-President. She remembered some of the things she read on the issue. The United States of America had had four of its sitting Presidents assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, James Abram Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1897-1901) and John F. Kennedy (1961-63).
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died a week later from the gunshots.
The assassination of President James A. Garfield took place at 9:30 am on July 2, 1881, less than four months into Garfield’s term as the 20th President of the United States. Charles J. Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C. shot Garfield; he died in Elberon, New Jersey eleven weeks later, on September 19, 1881.
The 25th President of the United States, William McKinley, was shot and fatally wounded on September 6, 1901, inside the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was shaking hands with the public when Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot him.
On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas.
Elsewhere, Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated on 28 February 1986 in Stockholm, Sweden, at 23:21 hours Central European Time (22:21 UTC). Palme was fatally wounded by a single gunshot while walking home from a cinema with his wife, Lisbet Palme on the central Stockholm Street, Sveavägen. Mrs. Palme was slightly wounded by a second shot. The couple did not have bodyguards at the time.
In India, Sikh extremists held a campaign inside the Golden Temple, and Indira Gandhi ordered some 70,000 soldiers to purge the sacred space. More than 450 people died. On October 31, 1984, a trusted bodyguard, who was a Sikh, pulled out a .38 revolver and shot her point-blank.
The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the ex-Prime Minister of India and son of Indira Gandhi occurred because of a suicide bombing in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, in Tamil Nadu, India on 21 May 1991. At least 14 others died. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, also known as Dhanu, carried it out.
Vice-President Gertrude Mensah had also read about African Heads of States who died while in office, from President Muhammad Anwar El Sadat of Egypt to Ibrahim Mainassara of Niger. However, she was yet to hear that they had assassinated a Vice-President.
She tried to come up with just one reason anybody or group of persons would want to assassinate her but she could not find one. She tried to search herself to find if she had wronged any particular group, be it religious, ethnic, political, social or business group. She could not think of one.
She read the message again. She knew the right thing to do would be to report the matter to National Security but the message had warned her against that. She wondered who it was that had sent the message and why she must trust him. After a while, she decided to trust at least the Deputy National Security Coordinator himself – he would know how to handle the matter if he reads the message that she got from the anonymous soldier.