“Sophie!”
The two Knapp girls, Sally and Julia, daughters of the ambassador, ran up to her. She’d met them at various events over the years.
“How pretty you both look.” She leaned over and kissed them both twice, in the French style, which they always enjoyed. “And you’ve grown! How old are you two now?”
“I’m seven,” said Sally.
“I’m five,” said Julia.
She asked them about their classes at the International School, about their dolls, about their last trip back to America, while they stared up at her with adoring eyes. They knew she’d once been a famous model.
“Do you know what I’ve always wondered?” she asked them. “Where your groceries come from. I can’t believe that deliveries are allowed through the front gate.”
The girls shook their heads solemnly.
“Never,” said Sally.
“There’s a back entrance,” said Julia.
“Really! I’ve never seen that.”
“Would you like to see it now?” Sally’s eyes widened, as if proposing a daring adventure.
They led her through the vast embassy kitchen, where it felt ten degrees warmer and a small army of sweating Kamalians were assembling canapés, then along a back hallway and out into a small concrete yard.
“That’s the gate,” Julia said triumphantly. She pointed to a forbidding-looking metal door in a concrete wall that had to be ten feet high, topped with razor wire. The front of the embassy faced the rue de la Paix, the grandest boulevard in Villeneuve, and was just one block from the president’s palace; it declared America’s august stature and welcoming disposition (though two armed Marines stood by the gate at all times). The back projected a much less friendly demeanor.
“There’s a buzzer,” Julia said.
“And intercom.”
“What in the world are you doing here?” Paula Knapp stood in the back door, arms pressed against the jamb, as if she alone were holding up the entire edifice. Tall, thin, and blond, she looked like the house itself: not fashionable but expensively put together, and not quite bearing up under the stifling and humid heat. Her husband, Ray, ten years her senior at age fifty, had worked his way up through the State Department; Kamalia was his “reward.”
“Hello!” Sophie said as cheerfully as she could.
“It’s nice to see you, Sophie,” Paula said a bit icily. Sophie hadn’t been on the official party list, and in fact hadn’t been invited to the embassy since the Boymond takeover, when she’d become controversial. She wondered how DuMarier had arranged for sanctuary in the embassy, given the official American neutrality to the dissidents’ cause.
“Your beautiful daughters were giving me a tour,” she said.
“She wanted to see where the groceries get delivered.”
Paula Knapp flashed her a look of hostile skepticism.
“We were talking about all the food for the party and…” Sophie shrugged.
“Come, let’s rejoin the party. People have been asking for you, girls. Let’s not disappoint them.” She shot Sophie a don’t rock the boat look as they all reentered the house. Sophie wondered if she’d thaw at all if she and her comrades were forced to take refuge in her home, and she wondered how soon DuMarier would signal that certain vulnerabilities had become apparent.
Chapter 40
Harry Lightstone’s address before the Business Roundtable was covered live by C-SPAN. Julian Mellow watched it from the library of his Fifth Avenue apartment. Lightstone wasn’t a bad public speaker, but neither was he very exciting; he tended to impress the policy wonks more than the people, with his somber delivery and habit of explaining things in a pedantic singsong more appropriate for an audience of middle school students. It had been the same in the debates: the “experts”—professors, former campaign advisers, columnists—had declared him, not Paul Nessin, the winner of all three, but every poll showed that voters gave higher marks to the president. Likability was far more important than intelligence in US elections, and Lightstone had a rather chilly demeanor in public, while his opponent, with a slippery grasp of the issues even after four years in office, looked like the kind of guy with whom you’d be comfortable sharing a beer and football game. The incumbent was the nation’s buddy, the challenger its school principal.
Julian watched the speech with rising irritation. Lightstone hit the usual issues the audience of CEOs wanted to hear, presenting himself as both business friendly and a champion of the middle class. He touched on foreign policy only briefly and said nothing about Kamalia. Perhaps he’d come back to it. He moved on to education, fighting terrorism, scientific research, trying to sound distinctive but basically parroting the incumbent’s policies. He closed with a reaffirmation that big business would have a champion in Harry Lightstone.
Julian stood up and went to his desk, where he picked up the phone. Lightstone would be kissing CEO butt for another hour at least. He couldn’t wait that long.
“What the hell was that?” he said after Marcella Lightstone answered her cell phone.
“Hello, Julian. I thought he did well, didn’t you?” He caught the insolence in her voice.
“Where was Kamalia?”
“Where it’s always been—in Africa. Nobody cares about Africa and nobody cares about Kamalia. There will be no further mentions of Kamalia, Julian. The entire staff agreed.” She pronounced staff as if referring to her household help.
“That’s bullshit.”
“That’s reality. Now, kindly stay out of the campaign, and do not contact me or my husband again. Goodnight, Julian.”
He stood there, phone in hand, for a few paralyzed minutes. Power had shifted—she knew it, and he knew it. The video he had was worthless now that Harry had won the nomination. Releasing it would doom his candidacy, but from the Lightstones’ perspective it was already doomed. And if things got ugly, and it appeared that they had nothing more to lose, they might implicate the source of the video. If Harry should achieve the Oval Office, the video would reacquire value—at that point Harry would have everything to lose. But for now they were calling his bluff and he needed to play with a different hand.
He dialed a second number.
“Mr. Franklin?”
“I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number,” Billy Sandifer said before hanging up.
An hour later, at the bandshell in Central Park, beneath a dark, starless sky, Julian gave his instructions.
“I’d like you to take a ride up to Saint Andrew’s tomorrow, first thing,” he began. “I believe you know the place.”
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16
Chapter 41
Back when Billy Sandifer used to hurl rocks and bottles at policemen during demonstrations, it was images of places like the Saint Andrew’s School and all that they represented that fueled his anger. Not that the poor cops he assaulted had any connection to an elite boarding school, but in Billy’s mind they were part of a long and sinister chain-link fence drawn around the privileged elite of America, keeping low-born types like him out. Since Rebecca had been diagnosed his anger had turned at once specific (toward anyone or anything that stood in the way of his caring for her) and amorphous (toward fate, life, biology, God, the gods). As he walked around the brick-and-ivy Saint Andrew’s campus, twenty miles west of Hartford, he realized that it felt good, after all those years, to carry an anger that was bigger than him but still aimed at an actual, reachable target. The young faces he passed beamed with privilege; they shone with a confidence in the future that only those sheltered by money and pedigree and history could possibly possess. He hated them, every single one of them, hated their school, their parents, their ancestry, the elite colleges they would attend, the investment banks and law firms they would join, the privileged children they would spawn, their pasts and their futures. He hated their country.
He’d been to Saint Andrew’s several months ago, before the New Hampshire primary, at Julian Mellow’s behest. Lightstone had had no Secret Servic
e protection then, and neither did his two sons, Alan, an eleventh-grader, and Brian, a freshman. It had taken a few hours of asking around to locate “his nephews’” rooms, and then he’d broken into them while the entire dorm was at class. Brian’s room hadn’t yielded anything of interest, but Alan’s had.
He found the dorm he was looking for, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and knocked on a door at the end of a long corridor.
“Hold on,” came an adolescent’s croaky voice. He knocked again, only louder. “I said, hold on!”
Spencer Thornburgh was a pale, scrawny kid, wearing a white T-shirt and boxers covered in Red Sox logos. His hair was greasy, red pimples covered his cheeks, and his eyes glistened with a rheumy unhealthiness. Still, the way he looked at Billy, at once fearful of an adult’s unexpected presence and utterly confident that nothing, in the long run, could harm him, suggested that Spencer Thornburgh was no scholarship kid.
“Spencer Thornburgh?”
“Yeah…” His hand never left the edge of the door, as if he were prepared to slam it shut. Taking no chances, Billy stepped forward, forcing the hand off the door by pressing his body into the boy’s arm.
“Hey, what the—” Billy slammed the door behind him and shoved Spencer Thornburgh across the small, cluttered room and onto his unmade single bed. “What the hell do you want?”
Billy began opening drawers and tossing out their contents. Clothes, papers, condoms, cigarettes.
“Get up,” he said, and when Spencer, eyes wide with fear, did nothing, he grabbed him by the shirt and flung him onto the floor. Then he lifted the mattress and tossed it against the wall.
“Not very original, Spence.”
Lying on top of the bed’s platform were about ten or twelve small bags of white powder, as well as what looked to be several thousand dollars in cash, neatly rubber-banded into wads of twenties and tens.
“It’s not mine,” he said quickly. “I had no idea that was there. Seriously, I don’t know how that—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Still sprawled on the floor, Spencer skittered a few feet away.
“Why do you do it, Spence?”
“I told you, I…”
Billy reached down, grabbed a fistful of white shirt and jerked Spencer to his feet. Then he slammed him against the wall, feeling the kid’s warm breath gust out of his mouth.
“Why do you do it?”
“You have to believe me, I—”
Billy pulled Spencer toward him, then slammed him back into the wall.
“A simple question…”
“For the money, okay? For the money.” He started to cry.
“Your father is a partner in some big-ass law firm in Boston, Spence. Plays golf with the mayor. You need money?”
“You know my father?” A new depth of terror had taken hold.
“Old man doesn’t pay you enough, is that it?”
“You try living on a hundred bucks a month.” Resentment added some vigor to Spencer’s voice.
Billy looked around, taking in the new, top-of-the-line MacBook, the iPad, the Bose speakers, the big-screen television, the multiple pairs of $300 sneakers strewn across the floor. Killing Spencer at that moment would have been the easiest thing he’d ever done.
“Don’t your folks wonder where you get this stuff?”
“Like they visit?”
Billy released the kid’s shirt. Warily, Spencer circled him and sat on the bed.
“You a cop?”
“Not important. There’s something I want you to do for me. Do it, and you’ll never see me again. Don’t do it, and your father gets a call.”
“You want money? Coke? Here.” Spencer grabbed a few wads of bills and an envelope.
Billy swung at his face, remembering at the very last instant to open his fist. Nevertheless, the slap sent Spencer onto his side, and when he righted himself he was sobbing. “What do you want from me?” he wailed.
“Tomorrow, I want you to sell some of this shit to Alan Lightstone.” Spencer started to say something, then his mouth slackened. Billy could see it suddenly dawn on the kid that he’d gotten himself into something way bigger than selling drugs to friends to satisfy his electronics and footwear cravings.
“But he’s the—”
“I know who he is.”
“Anyway, he doesn’t use this stuff.”
Billy had found evidence to the contrary on his last visit to Saint Andrew’s.
“I don’t like it when people lie to me, especially rich punks like you.”
“Okay, maybe once in a while. I mean, why are you…who are you…”
“Not your concern. Your concern is doing what I say and staying out of trouble.”
“But Alan—Al, he’s my friend, and his father…”
“You’ll call him, tell him you have a new shipment, make him an offer, a good offer. Something he can’t resist. And I want you to make sure he samples the goods.”
“And then what, you’re going to bust him or something?”
“Don’t worry about me. And you won’t be involved in whatever happens. Just set it up.”
“I can’t do that.” His face was a mess of tears and snot.
“Come here,” Billy said in a gentler voice. He took the boy’s hand and pulled him off the bed. “Look, I understand that this isn’t easy for you,” he said gently when Spencer was standing. Then he bent back the index finger on the boy’s left hand until he heard it snap. “But you’ll find a way.”
The boy howled as he danced from one foot to another.
“You’ll need to see a doctor about your finger. Here’s my cell number.” He handed him a slip of paper. “When you have an appointment with Alan…Al…you’ll call that number and tell me when and where. I want at least a few hours’ notice. Make it for today or tomorrow. No later.”
He walked toward the door but turned back just before leaving. “If you say anything to anyone, or fuck this up in any way, telling your father that young Spencer is a drug dealer will be the least of what I do. A broken finger will feel like a mosquito bite. You understand that, Spence?”
His face was so wet and mucusy it looked battered. He was staring at the broken index finger, transfixed.
“I asked you a question, Spence.” Billy moved toward him.
“Yes, I understand,” the boy whispered.
Billy opened the door, found the hallway deserted, and left.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17
Chapter 42
Emerging from the small, dark house into the harsh Caribbean sunshine was always a shock, physical and mental. The eyes felt the assault first, then the skin, and quickly even the nose picked up the dry, vaguely sinister scent of heat. But it was the mind that had the hardest time adjusting, even after nine months on Saint Sebastian. The astonishing aqua blue of the sea, framed by tall, arching palm trees on either side of the cove and by a sky whose blue was an embarrassingly pale cousin to the water below, was something you never really got used to. There was no tone in the mind’s palette that came close to such brilliance.
Or perhaps it was simply the shock of remembering, each morning, after a dreamless tropical sleep, where he was. Zach Springer stood before the small, dark house and let his eyes adjust to the light. Then he did what he did every morning. He walked thirty yards from the house to the edge of the water and let the small waves lap over his bare feet. Yes, it was real. He was there.
Each morning, even after all these months, he had to trace the course of events that had brought him there, just to reassure himself that he hadn’t been washed ashore from a passing freighter—or dropped from above by a spaceship. It always began the same way, with a tap on his rear bicycle tire, then a plunge down a cliffside that never ended, as far as he could recall, an onrush of green that grew thicker and denser and finally darkened to black. He’d awakened in a hospital room, one arm in a cast, bandages covering cuts on his face and legs, but otherwise okay. Then the call on his cell from Sarah, h
er voice almost unrecognizable.
“Zach, someone killed Jessica, Jessica Winter, in our apartment, she was in our apartment to walk Guinevere, and someone killed her and now the police—”
He became aware of a deep pain at the very center of his brain. It took everything he had to stay focused. “Where are you, Sarah?”
“In front of our building, they won’t let me up, they thought it was me, they thought I was the one who was…where are you, Zach?”
“Listen to me, Sarah. You need to get out of there. Walk away, just walk away.”
“There are police everywhere, they want to talk to me, they thought I was the one up there, in the apartment.”
“Sarah, listen to me. Someone tried to kill me. The same person tried to kill you, too, only he got Jessica. When he realizes you’re still alive he’ll come after you again. You have to get out of there.”
“Someone tried to kill you?”
“I’m all right, Sarah. But I’m not safe, and neither are you. You need to walk away from there.” He gave her the address of the man in Washington Heights who’d helped him create Arthur Sandler. She’d need to become someone else too. “Just meet me there,” he said when she started to ask why.
“The police will protect me.” She sounded more scared than convinced.
“Not for long.” He briefly thought of going public with what he knew, but he’d sound like a lunatic, accusing the richest man in America and a candidate for president of some ill-defined conspiracy that began with the murder in San Francisco. Besides, Julian Mellow owned the media, or a big chunk of it. They needed to disappear, at least for a while.
“Go to Washington Heights, right now.”
There was a pause, then: “What about Guinevere?”
“She’ll be okay,” he said. “She’ll be taken care of. We’ll be back soon, Sarah, I promise, as soon as I have a plan, but right now we need to get away.”
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