by Bob Graham
Tony grinned. “If you really loved me, you’d invite me to come along.”
She matched him with a playful grin of her own. “I expect you to be waiting with dutiful devotion for my return.”
As she pecked Tony on the cheek, he caught another fleeting glimpse of the tiny rose.
Tony took twice the usual time to walk back to the Marshall wing, trying to sort things out with Carol. Had she purposely flashed the rose? Was she coming on to him at the end there, or just trying to make him suffer? Were they really back on again, or did she simply want his help on this project? Should he have forced the issue more, or be patient and wait for things to happen? She was hard to figure.
JULY 16
The Lakes, Florida
John Billington’s morning walk was his only daily exercise, and his first stop was always the same: three blocks from his townhouse in The Lakes. That was where his fourth daughter, Kendall, lived with her husband and two children in a one-story ranch home backing up to one of the artificial lakes that gave the town its name. Billington’s family had built The Lakes on its former dairy farm. It was one of the projects that had made the Billingtons among the prosperous in the Sunshine State and had laid the groundwork for John’s political career. As he rounded the corner, his granddaughter Eloise ran from her porch to greet him.
“Doodle,” she called, “come see our new puppy!”
From behind her, a bichon frise leapt out, its head up and tail wagging furiously. John reached down to take it in his arms as Eloise hugged his knees. “Eloise,” he said, “you are almost as cute as this puppy. What’s her name?”
“Milly,” the child announced. The puppy had been named after John’s wife, Eloise’s grandmother. “I have a storybook. Read it to me till the bus comes? Please?”
At eight, Eloise was the youngest of Billington’s granddaughters and the only one living in The Lakes. Her large black eyes and lush eyelashes gave her an exotic presence beyond her years.
When Kendall was Eloise’s age, John was running for governor. A lingering regret was his absence from many of the family’s special occasions in those tumultuous years. He pledged to be more a part of his grandchildren’s lives than he had of any of their mothers’.
Sitting on a bench in the front yard, with Eloise close beside and Milly in her arms, John opened On the Farm. He read about the cows and chickens and the family that cared for them. He couldn’t resist adding some of his own boyhood cow stories from his years on the dairy farm. Eloise giggled and flirted with her grandfather, running her fingers through his white hair.
The lumbering yellow school bus approached. Hand in hand, they walked to meet it, Milly bounding ahead.
“I love you, Doodle,” she said, as she climbed the steps. “Can we finish the story tonight?”
“And I love you very much. I’ll come over after supper.” John gave her a kiss.
Rolling her eyes in embarrassment, Eloise said, “Can we read two books?”
John was proud of The Lakes. From fifty years of vision and hard work, a new town had grown. The morning walk through the curving tree-lined streets was a chance to feel that gratification and monitor what was going on. “The palms are looking ragged. Check with the park super,” he noted in the small spiral notebook he always carried.
The turning point of his walk was a neighborhood shopping center. At the Food Spot, he greeted the regular customers and the female Bangladeshi clerk. Although he had been retired for three years, most of his neighbors continued to ask for his advice and help with their problems.
Dressed for his job as a roofer, Jose Rico was standing in line for his daily lottery ticket. “Senator,” he said, “my brother in Nicaragua, he is trying to get a student visa to study computers at Miami Dade College. At the embassy they told him no; could you help?”
John wrote the information in his notebook and promised to look into it.
With the New York Times and Miami Herald under his arm, he headed home. He could not deny he liked the attention. In retirement and out of the spotlight, requests for assistance gave him a reason to call the friends and agencies he had depended on over those years. It kept him in the game. The walk gave him time to think.
A typical south Florida midsummer shower interrupted. He turned off the sidewalk toward a portico-covered park bench to sit it out.
He reflected on the reaction to his op-ed piece. In the days after it ran in the Times, he had received a number of hostile emails and calls from a political officer at the Saudi embassy. Inferring that Billington had access to classified information, the man challenged him to disclose the source of his assertion that the kingdom was developing nuclear capability. Billington told him his access to that sort of information had ended long ago; his opinion piece had simply put two and two together. The Saudi seemed unconvinced.
As the rain intensified, Billington’s Samsung cell phone rang. He recognized Tony Ramos’s State Department number. “Everything okay?” Billington asked without any preliminaries.
“I’ve gotten clearance for the weekend,” Tony reported. Billington felt a wave of reassurance come over him.
“Would four o’clock on Friday, in your office, be okay?”
“Excellent, my friend.”
“Any material I should bring?”
“No. I’ll have a memo with some of my thoughts. That should be sufficient.”
“I’ll see you on Friday, Senator.”
Before he met with Tony, Billington wanted to have everything in order. He had already prepared a memo outlining his analysis of Saudi objectives, likely actions, and steps that needed to be taken. Each time he remembered something else, he jotted it in his notebook. As a backup, he had given a copy of the material to Mildred and asked her to deliver it to Tony if ... Well, it was just that a man of his age had to have plans made.
During and after the inquiry he had led on the performance of the American intelligence community relative to the 9/11 tragedy, John had developed a fatherly attachment to this young intelligence officer detailed to the inquiry by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He identified with Tony and admired the intelligence and determination that had brought him from an immigrant youth in Hialeah to his present position in politics and national security. Both men cultivated social graces and an interest in people. Both prized their private time as their most productive. Above all, John Billington felt a bond of shared values and commitment with Tony.
Toward the end of the 9/11 inquiry, a review of FBI files suggested that information on two hijackers living in San Diego was inconsistent between the files at the central office in Washington and those at the field office in San Diego. The bureau protested to Billington when he announced that five staff members were going to San Diego to look into it. It was a gutsy move, with the White House threatening his job at State, but Tony requested to be put on the San Diego team. His digging unearthed the support that Hamza al-Dossari, the cultural officer at the Saudi consulate in L.A., and Omar al-Harbi, whom the FBI had labeled a Saudi agent based in San Diego, had given two of the 9/11 hijackers. Tony was the kind of man you wanted by your side when conditions were toughest.
As the rain slackened, Billington crossed the dampened street and turned left. A five-foot concrete wall separated him from a row of townhomes. Halfway down the block, he became aware of a vehicle that seemed to be following him. He quickened his pace, looking over his shoulder. A rapidly accelerating black Ford F-150 pickup swerved from the far side of the street, throwing up trails of rainwater. It turned sharply and jumped the curb.
Billington ran, leaping as high as his seventy-one-year-old legs would lift him. The grill and headlight smashed into his thigh and abdomen, twisting and throwing him against the wall. His head snapped forward against the concrete. He slid to the sidewalk, blood hemorrhaging from his gashed forehead. The pickup scraped the wall, U-turned with a screech, and sped from the scene.
Ed Feathers and Jack Wells, friends and commuters who had become ac
customed to seeing Billington on his strolls, happened to be passing by and rushed to his aid. Ed called 911 on his cell phone. Billington was slumped on the sidewalk, his shoulder supported by the now scarlet wall. His dark-blue golf shirt was wet with blood and rain.
“Mildred,” he moaned, “Mildred.” Ed gently grasped Billington’s head and shoulders to lay him on the concrete.
Ed Feathers for many years had been the comptroller of the Billington family companies. He called Mildred.
In less than five minutes Mildred Billington was kneeling by her husband.
“John. What happened?”
No response.
“I love you so much; I’ll take care of you.” She leaned forward.
“I think I’m badly hurt.”
“The ambulance will be here soon; rest.”
“My back.” He dropped into unconsciousness.
The lime-green emergency van arrived with its red, white, and blue lights cycling and its siren screaming. Doors flew open as two emergency medical technicians launched themselves toward the victim. One reached into his red plastic case for a pressure bandage. The other looked down Billington’s throat. “Airway open.”
Tilting his head close to the senator’s mouth, he observed the quivering, irregular, shallow and rapid wisps. “He’s breathing.” He took his wrist. “There’s circulation, but it’s going south, weak and thready; pulse is 115. He’s in shock.”
Protecting the spinal column, the two attached a neck brace and gently secured Billington’s immobilized body to a backboard and taped small sandbags alongside his head. Though still unconscious, he winced.
Two minutes had passed by the time three paramedics arrived in an ambulance and took control. While one attached a cardiac monitor and oxygen mask, a second inserted IV lines into Billington’s arms and attached them to saline bags. The third paramedic opened a collapsible stretcher, then held the undulating bags above John’s head as the first two lifted him onto the stretcher and loaded him into the rear of the ambulance.
The vehicle rushed northward toward the Columbus Clinic Emergency Room. Mildred followed with Ed.
JULY 16
Above the Pacific ☆ Los Angeles, California
The Singapore Airlines A340 executed a three-degree deviation to the south as it passed over Amchitka Island, eleven hours into a sixteenhour flight from Singapore to Los Angeles. In the first-class cabin, Laura Billington interrupted her review of photo images and peered down at this spit of land and tundra that intruded on an otherwise undisturbed North Pacific.
With her bare feet curled under her and an iPad on her lap, Laura reviewed the first images of the shoot two days earlier in Bangkok. Eighty-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX of Thailand, surrounded by his family of three generations—thirteen men, women, and children—displayed the toothy smile of the genial grandfather rather than the imperial bearing of the longest-serving monarch in the world. She had been contracted to portray him for Vanity Fair. The palace had agreed. It was in the second hour in the stateroom of the royal palace that the king revealed the gravitas of the monarchy and the royal functions he had performed most of his adult life. Laura found the assignment surprisingly interesting and the king not only an accessible subject but also an avid amateur photographer.
“Ms. Billington,” the young Chinese flight attendant said, “we will be serving a meal in twenty minutes. Would you care for a drink before the lunch?”
As Laura turned in her seat, exposing an inch of skin between her Joe’s Jeans and a sweatshirt embossed with a golden Thai pagoda, her eyes fixed on the young woman with a mixture of incredulity and revulsion. Laura had perfected the ability, not uncommon among the more egocentric movie stars, of projecting the message with a single look that the onlooker was violating her precious and altogether entitled privacy merely by being in her presence.
“Thank you,” she said with a brittle smile and an air of great and magnanimously granted tolerance, “I’ll let you know.”
As the shaken young woman backed away, bowing at the waist, Laura refocused on the images. After forty-five minutes she had selected ten with the most promise to find their way into the November edition of Vanity Fair. On the memo pad from Raffles Hotel she jotted the names, titles, logistics, and individual idiosyncrasies that might support the captions accompanying the royal family in print.
Her thoughts turned to the next assignment. Every few months she would review her offers, select those that intrigued her, organize her acceptances into geographically convenient segments, and notify the clients. Laura realized her practice was becoming excessively political and royal, not producing the income necessary to sustain her lifestyle. So a year earlier, she had accepted an assignment from GQ to photograph the chief executive officer of the private equity firm Peninsular Partners, in his office in Long Beach.
From her travel bag Laura selected a briefing book prepared by her research assistant on Peninsular and its leader. She reread the sections that interested her:Peninsular was established in 1990 by former members of the administration then in office. The firm focuses on investments in the high-tech and oil and gas sectors. Peninsular is a top-tier private equity firm with a successful track record. Its most recent fund has just over $10 billion in capital commitments to pursue investments globally.
Since leaving his high position with the Department of Energy in January of 1993, Roland Jeralewski has served as the firm’s managing partner. That same year the headquarters of the firm moved from New York to Long Beach, California. In November of 2003 Fortune magazine recognized Jeralewski as one of America’s 100 most successful business executives. Known for his capacity to charm foreign leaders and his demanding leadership style, he was ranked two years ago as the 15th-highest compensated American executive.
Laura looked at the photograph attached to the memo: Jeralewski surrounded by men in white gowns and red-and-white turbans. Dressed in khaki pants and short-sleeve shirt, with his finger pointed at the apparent leader of the group, he was frozen by the photograph as a dominating figure amidst a group of supplicants. Laura repositioned her feet. She liked strong men. Her father had been her first experience with a dominant male. Although their relationship had deteriorated in her late adolescence, he still had her respect, if not her love. The first of a series, her break with her father had come when he tried to throw his rope around her rebellious neck. Laura applied for admission to Kenworth College in Colorado. He had objected to her selection, describing Kenworth as a ski resort posing as an educational institution for overindulged, snooty, and snotty kids. She enrolled in spite of his objection, and he consented to pay the $25,000 annual tuition. Her father’s forebodings were confirmed when as a sophomore Laura told him she had moved in with her “very understanding” boyfriend and that together they had volunteered in the reelection campaign of Senator Horace Volker of Colorado, whom her father considered the most ideological and intemperate of the right-wing neo-cons.
The final straw came when Laura revealed she was dropping out after three undistinguished semesters “to follow her heart” to the London School of Photography. That was when Billington unleashed the colorful vocabulary of profanity he had learned on the cattle farm of his youth. He said she could follow her heart to hell, “but not with my money.” For the last ten years father and daughter had hardly spoken.
As photography became a career, Laura had serial romantic relations. Many of the men had the characteristics she saw in the photograph of Jeralewski.
She reached for the pad of buttons above her and rang for the flight attendant. In moments she arrived over Laura’s right shoulder. With her eyes never turning to engage the young woman, Laura ordered, “I am now ready for my meal. First I would like a Maker’s Mark on the rocks, then the shrimp and scallop salad.”
Finally she looked up. The brittle smile returned as she said, “I trust this will not be as uninteresting as the dinner you served last evening.”
The attendant nodded and bac
ked away.
Laura’s advance man had emailed a description of Peninsular Tower locations. The warmest would be the Japanese garden in the rear; the most austere, Jeralewski’s penthouse office. GQ had requested shots that captured Jeralewski’s authoritarian demeanor. Laura selected the penthouse. Starting with location photos at sunrise, followed by interiors, she calculated the session should not last more than six hours.
The flight attendant arrived with the drink. Laura looked at it with the most abject disappointment and said, “I was so hoping for more youthful ice cubes; if the airline has any, that is.” Again, the attendant retreated.
The giant airliner touched down at Los Angeles International at 1:10 in the afternoon. Laura gathered her materials, purse, and shoulder bag and inserted her well-pedicured feet into Versace slippers. She exited through the first-class cabin door and awaited her staff of four at the end of the skyway as they emerged from the tourist section. The three men and one woman showed the consequences of a transpacific flight in tight quarters. Their faded jeans and T-shirts were rumpled and stained, and their faces were those of the sleep deprived. In silence, Laura led them down the terminal to the baggage claim carousel, where she was met by her limousine driver, her crew by a driver with a white Dodge van.
At curbside Laura said, “We’ll meet tomorrow morning at 5:30 at the Ocean Boulevard entrance to Peninsular Towers. Jaime, check that arrangements have been made for the office to be open. If there are changes, call me. Any questions?”
None coming from her bedraggled crew, she wrapped up: “It’s been a demanding three weeks, with one more”—Laura let a stutter slip out, a childhood characteristic she strove to contain—“day to go. We’ll celebrate when we get back to London.”