Presidents' Day

by Seth Margolis

  A car door slammed.

  Slowly he crouched down and placed the lit candle on the floor near where the puddle of gas began by the door. He stood up and pressed his back to the wall next to the door.

  Seconds later he heard a key in the lock, and then the front door swung open.

  Chapter 68

  Billy Sandifer first looked down at the candle, then across the cabin to the corner where Zach was supposed to be tied up. He took a step forward and Zach leapt at him, aiming low, for his knees. Billy lurched forward and fell face down into the puddle of gas. Zach kicked over the pot, covering Billy’s chest and gut with gas.

  He was tempted to go after the pistol in Billy’s right hand but stayed on plan.

  “Stop!” he yelled as Billy started to get up. “I’ll kick over the candle!”

  Billy rolled over and aimed the gun at Zach’s head. But his eyes took in the fact that Zach’s foot was touching the lit candle, which was an inch away from the puddle.

  “Shoot me and we both die,” Zach said. “Put down the gun.”

  When Billy didn’t move Zach nudged the candle even closer to the puddle with his right foot; it almost tipped over.

  “No!” Billy shouted.

  “Then put down the gun, now.”

  Billy appeared to weigh his options, his eyes darting between Zach and the candle on the floor. He looked less nervous than calculating. Finally, he dropped the gun.

  “Push it over to me,” Zach said.

  Billy complied. Zach wanted to crouch down to pick it up, but he’d have to turn his back and he worried that such a move would give Billy the chance to roll away.

  “Now the handcuff keys, the car keys, and my cell phone.”

  Again Billy hesitated, seemingly weighing the benefits of complying. Moving very slowly, as if fearful that he might knock over the candle himself, Billy emptied his pants pockets and slid the keys and the phone toward Zach.

  “Now what?” he said with a leering grin. “How you gonna pick up that gun, Zach? Or are you gonna light me on fire?”

  Billy was picking up on his indecision, and that could be fatal. Zach wanted more than anything to knock over the candle and get out of there but his foot felt paralyzed. He thought of Sarah, how she had urged him to shoot Billy from the boat off Saint Sebastian. He’d hesitated then, too. He could make up for that mistake with one small movement of his right foot.

  But he didn’t, and he hated the look of smug relief in Billy’s eyes as he watched Zach slowly crouch, his right foot still touching the candle, his back to the keys on the floor. His knees throbbed as he slowly, very slowly, lowered himself. Finally, he reached a squatting position and began to bend backward from the waist. Was it even possible, what he was trying to do, some strange yoga move that involved muscles and tendons he hadn’t known existed? He felt the key with his right middle finger. It was possible. Gently he teased it toward him until he could just feel it with his thumb. Another half inch and he’d be able to grasp it.

  At last he pinched it between his thumb and index finger. His right foot still touching the candle, he started to rise, fingers gripping the key, but about halfway up he felt his right knee buckle and he began to fall to the side, away from Billy, who seized the opportunity to spring at him. If Billy reached him before he could knock over the candle it would all be over. His life. Sarah’s life.

  As his shoulder hit the floor Zach kicked at the candle with his right foot.

  The candle holder seemed to teeter on one edge for a moment. In that long moment, Zach had one thought: he’d let her down again.

  The candle fell over. The puddle of gas erupted in flames. Billy, midlunge, seemed to disappear in a blaze of light as his clothes caught fire. He shouted something and fell back into a smaller puddle that hadn’t yet ignited.

  Billy was rolling around the floor, screaming from behind the flames. Zach sat up. Working as quickly as he could, he gathered the cell phone and keys. A small wooden chair caught fire.

  Billy managed to stand up and charged at Zach, who threw his entire weight into him, sending him back to the floor. The cabin’s floorboards had ignited, and sparks had lit one of the posters. Now completely engulfed in flames, Billy tried to stand up a second time but fell back, a hideous noise emanating from his mouth, something between a yelp and a moan.

  Clutching the keys and phone, Zach left the cabin and ran to the car. He turned his back to it and deposited the car keys and cell phone on the hood. Holding the handcuff key in the fingertips of his right hand, he carefully maneuvered it, and after several failed attempts he felt it slip into the keyhole on the left side. He twisted it, felt a dull click, and both arms fell to his side. Immediately he removed the other cuff, retrieved the phone and car keys, and got in the car.

  He drove off quickly, looking back in the rearview mirror just once. Flames jutted from the cabin’s windows and danced across its roof. The front door flew open and Billy Sandifer ran out, a shimmering meteor of fire. As Zach turned a corner, he saw a ball of flames rolling in the tall grass in front of the cabin.

  When he reached the road Zach stopped the car and dialed Sarah at the Nassau Hotel. Her cell phone was back in Saint Sebastian. The receptionist connected him to her room but there was no answer. He was connected to hotel voicemail.

  “Sarah, it’s me. Leave the hotel. Get out of there. Julian knows you’re there, he’s coming to get you. Call me as soon as you’re safe.” He gave her the number of his burner phone. “I’m coming to you. I love you.”

  He hung up, redialed the hotel, and asked for the number for the local police department. Moments later he was spilling out his story to the operator at the South Beach police precinct who, sounding equal parts annoyed and skeptical, connected him with a detective.

  “There’s a woman at the Nassau Hotel, room 506. She’s in serious danger. I tried to contact her. You have to get over there and protect her.”

  The police officer, a Detective Martindale, sounded as annoyed and skeptical as the operator, but Zach refused to hang up until he got his assurance that he’d go over to the Nassau and check out the story. Then Zach put the car in drive and sped off, heading south for LaGuardia Airport.

  Chapter 69

  “Talk about an October Surprise,” the CNN anchor was saying. “You won’t find anything more surprising than this. I must warn you, these images are difficult to watch. We strongly suggest that young children not view the footage we are about to show.”

  Julian used the remote to turn up the volume on the small television in the Gulfstream. They were still ascending to cruising altitude, but he hadn’t waited for the pilot’s authorization to turn on the TV. It was the weekend before Election Day, the race a statistical dead heat, as the pundits never tired of calling it, and violence erupting in Kamalia—he wasn’t about to let FAA regulations get in the way of monitoring a situation that he had largely created.

  On the small screen was a grainy black-and-white image of a large, two-story building of white stucco. “What you’re seeing is the American embassy in Villeneuve, about two hours ago,” said the CNN anchor. “The embassy is just a few blocks, we’re told, from the presidential palace, where earlier an attempted coup was brutally put down by the private security force that answers to President Laurent Boymond, or Le Père, as he’s known to Kamalians. Virtually all of the insurgents were killed in a small south courtyard to the side of the palace. On the right of your screen, you can see two men in military uniform. These are members of Le Père’s private security force. About two hours ago, some two dozen members of this force stormed the US embassy. We are told that the embassy is secured by two US marines, who were easily overwhelmed. No word yet on their fate. The intruders spent roughly fifteen minutes inside. Gunshots were heard, we have been told. As for the motivation for storming the embassy, there has been no official word from either Kamalia or the State Department. However, representatives of Agènce France-Presse, the French news organization, have reported that s
everal of the insurgents somehow got into the embassy as they fled the massacre at the presidential palace. The Kamalian government believes—and at this point we have no confirmation—that there was a preexisting plan for the insurgents to seek refuge in the embassy if the uprising failed. Whether the storming of the embassy was an act of retaliation or an attempt to secure these insurgents is not known. Now, watch this.”

  Julian leaned closer to the screen. The front door of the embassy opened. Two uniformed soldiers emerged. One held the hand of a white male adult, the other held a white woman. Between them were two young girls.

  “You’re watching the US ambassador, Ray Knapp, his wife, Paula, and their two daughters. As you can see, they are in great distress.”

  Somehow one of the girls, who looked to be about five or six, wriggled free of her mother’s hand and ran straight toward the camera, which Julian guessed was positioned outside a gate of some sort, probably the entrance to the embassy compound. Her parents screamed at her to stop, calling her name, Julia, over and over. Suddenly her father broke away from the guard holding him and went after her. He got halfway to her when he was shot down. Now the mother and both girls were shrieking. Paula Knapp charged at the guard who’d shot her husband. Julia tried to run back to her as her mother began to pummel the guard, the younger daughter clinging to her.

  Suddenly the picture went black.

  “We don’t know why we lost video. What we do know—it has been confirmed by Agence France-Presse—is that all four members of the Ambassador’s family, including…” His voice broke. “…including his daughters, are dead.” He touched the tiny audio feed in his right ear. “We are going to take you to Madison, Wisconsin, where Senator Harry Lightstone is about to make a statement. As you know, the senator has made the situation in Kamalia a centerpiece of his campaign, long before today’s events. It will be interesting to hear—okay, we’re taking you live to Madison.”

  Harry Lightstone stood in front of a low brick building—a union hall, perhaps, or school—a phalanx of reporters in front of him. His always somber face looked especially gloomy. “First of all, my condolences to the Knapp family on what appears to be an act of brutal savagery.”

  Julian listened with impatience, eager to get to the inevitable segue from outrage to politics, in which Lightstone would pin the tragedy on the Nessin administration and somehow, without directly saying so, imply that he had warned about such a situation. The segue occurred about five minutes into the speech.

  “In our global political economy, events like this one do not occur in a vacuum. They result from a complex mix of policies and personalities that transcend borders. Our president had refused to deal with the mounting crisis in Kamalia even as I urged him, from the floor of the Senate and from the campaign trail…”

  Julian flicked off the television. He liked the bit about “from the floor of the Senate.” Lightstone had never once mentioned Kamalia from the Senate, and wouldn’t have mentioned it as a candidate had it not been for Julian’s encouragement. Hypocrisy in full bloom—it was almost enough to put a smile on his face. Killing those two girls had not been part of the plan—only the ambassador and his wife were supposed to die—but it made for very effective TV.

  It distressed him, having to take care of the business in Miami on his own. He was accustomed to delegating. Ironic, in a way, that the most ambitious project of his career should involve just two people, one of whom was an ex-con. Perhaps he should have had Sandifer kill Zach, and then sent him to Miami to take care of the girl. But that would have been riskier than the current strategy, if not quite as unpleasant: Zach was the only link to Sarah, and if she should escape from the Miami hotel, she would, at some point, try to contact him. He absently ran his fingertips over the pistol in his jacket pocket. At least he wouldn’t have to trudge through a metal detector.

  He tried to focus on the job at hand, eliminating Sarah Pearlman, but his mind kept returning to that godawful cabin upstate. Should he have killed Zach? Why hadn’t he? He felt the contours of the gun under his jacket. Focus. Could it be that he didn’t want to be the one to kill Zach? That after all he’d done, that one act—firing a single bullet—made him uneasy? Was there, perhaps, some remorse left in him, some guilt? He shook his head, as if to expel it. Remorse, guilt—weaknesses that spawned muddled thinking and poor decisions. He’d built a fortune moving money from one investment to another. Actually running things was something he delegated to others. Now he was faced with doing something that couldn’t be delegated. Sarah Pearlman had to die. And he had to do it himself. Do it himself. A concept he was uncomfortable with. But it had to be.

  Focus. In three hours he’d end the life of Sarah Pearlman, by himself, and then make the call that would end Zach Springer’s life, too. And then he would watch the election returns.

  Chapter 70

  Zach sat in first class on an American Airlines flight to Miami from LaGuardia. He’d arrived minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart and there was only one seat left. As soon as the seatbelt sign was turned off he went to the bathroom and used his cell phone to dial the Nassau Hotel. Sarah was still not in her room. The pilot had announced that the weather in Miami was eighty-two degrees and sunny, which perhaps explained why Sarah wasn’t inside. He dialed the Miami Police Department and, after a long wait, during which someone rapped on the bathroom door, he was connected to the detective he’d spoken to earlier. He and a partner had gone to the Nassau Hotel. Yes, there was a Sarah Pearlman registered there. No, she wasn’t in her room.

  “Go back, make sure she’s okay,” Zach said.

  “We can’t protect someone who isn’t there.”

  “She’s in danger. I’m begging you…”

  “Listen, we’re busy down here, this election coming up, there’s talk of irregularities at the polls, a lot of us are having to watch polling places, not our usual beat.”

  “Please, just go to the hotel, tell her to get out of there.”

  “My partner and I, we’ll stop by again in an hour, how’s that? If she’s there we’ll tell her that…” He paused, as if reading a report. “That Zach Springer thinks she’s in danger.”

  Zach ran through the timing in his head, over and over. Julian had an hour’s head start and had taken a helicopter to his plane. Zach’s drive to LaGuardia had taken two hours. A half-hour sprint from the car to the plane, with a stop at the ticket counter. A three-hour flight. He figured Julian had a two-hour lead, maybe three.

  “Okay, thanks. But no later than an hour, it’s important that you get to her within the hour.”

  He hung up and consulted the New York Times a flight attendant had handed him. During takeoff he’d circled the paper’s general information number and the name of a reporter who was covering the election in Miami: Gordon Lewis. As the detective had pointed out, there were rumors of election fraud swirling around several swing states, including Florida. He got through to the reporter and quickly launched into his prepared pitch.

  “I have information about polling irregularities,” he said, back in the first class bathroom. “I’d like to meet you later to tell you what I know.”

  “You and half the people in Florida.” Gordon Lewis sounded skeptical and tired.

  “What if I had proof?”

  “Everyone has proof.”

  “I work for Julian Mellow. I know you know who that is.”

  “I’m on loan from the business section. I interviewed him once.”

  “Do most of the people who call you with tips work for one of the richest men in America? I mean, I’m guessing most of them don’t work at all, and don’t have homes, and don’t even speak coherently.”

  “You’re not exactly the most articulate person I’ve talked to today.”

  “Just let me come by late this afternoon. Give me five minutes.”

  There was a long pause, and then: “I’m working out of our Miami bureau this week. Call me from the lobby. If I have time, I’ll come down.” He
gave Zach the address. “But I’m warning you, I’m on deadline and the election this week means—”

  “I understand,” Zach said. He heard a flight attendant’s voice on the other side of the bathroom door. He hung up, flushed the toilet for effect, and unlocked the door.

  Chapter 71

  Sophie couldn’t summon the resolve to raise her head when she heard her name. She’d lost track of time: had she been in the small, windowless room, somewhere in the palace, for an hour? Two hours? Days? She didn’t know and didn’t care.

  “Come now, you must rejoice that you are alive, when so many of your comrades, nearly all of them, in fact, met a different fate.” Claude DuMarier lifted Sophie’s chin with his hand, which she swatted away. “Why so angry? I saved your life, you know.”

  She looked up at him for the first time. Instead of his customary military uniform he wore a white dress shirt and navy blazer. But the familiar leer was there.

  “You betrayed me, betrayed all of us.”

  “You would have failed with or without my help. I merely expedited things.”

  She leaped from her chair and flung herself at him. Two guards, who had been standing quietly behind her, pulled her off and shoved her back in the chair. DuMarier motioned for them to leave the room.

  “You will be punished,” she said, hoping it was true. “My comrades and I, we have supporters all over the world who will see to it that you don’t escape retribution, starting with Julian Mellow. Do you think you can betray a man like that and get away with it?”

  DuMarier’s laugh rocked his entire body. “Betray Julian Mellow? Oh, my dear, you are so naïve it is almost touching. Who do you think has arranged for the private plane that is waiting to take me away from this hellish country once and for all?”