The Long Shot (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  “Anything for the cause?” the teenager asked. His accent was north Belfast, harsh and nasal, and he had the aggressive tilt to the chin that Joker had seen on countless teenagers standing on street corners in Northern Ireland, youngsters who used the power of the IRA as a way of intimidating others. They weren’t politically committed, they often had no idea what the ideas and the aims of the IRA were, other than that they wanted British troops out of Ireland, but by joining the organisation they could escape the boredom and hopelessness of the dole queue and gain some measure of self-respect. And a chance to skim a few pounds off the money they collected “for the cause”.

  Joker took out his wallet. Behind the bar, Shorty polished a glass and watched.

  “A dollar buys a bullet for the boys,” said the second youth.

  Joker put a five-dollar bill into the bucket.

  “Thanks, mister,” said the boy holding the bucket.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Joker, smiling.

  The two teenagers swaggered off and waved the bucket in front of the construction workers. Joker had seen such IRA fund-raising in Belfast drinking holes but had been surprised to see it so openly in the United States. He wondered if the Americans who poured cash into the IRA’s coffers knew where their money went. Irish-Americans had a romantic view of the IRA: freewheeling freedom-fighters battling an oppressive army which had no reason to be in their country. Joker knew what the flipside was. To him the IRA meant cowardly ambushes, bombs in crowded shopping centres and teenage soldiers shot in the back. Ceasefire or no ceasefire. He drained his glass and went to the bar for a refill. Shorty poured him another double Grouse and gave him a fresh jug of water. “I see you’re contributing to the cause,” he said conversationally.

  “Will the money actually get there?” Joker asked.

  “Oh, sure enough,” said Shorty, an evil grin on his face. “If they tried ripping off the boys in here, they’d lose their kneecaps before you could say Gerry Adams.” He chortled and put the clean glass back on the gantry. “I’ve been trying to place your accent. Where in Belfast are you from?”

  “I moved to Scotland when I was a bairn, and I’ve been in London for a few years,” said Joker.

  “Aye, I could tell that, right enough,” said the barman. “What brings you to the Big Apple?”

  “Spot of bother with the taxman,” said Joker. “I thought I’d see if I can get work here for a while, until things have cooled down.”

  “Yeah? What do you do?”

  Joker shrugged. “Bit of everything. I’ve been a brickie, I’ve done some bar work, I pretty much take what I can get.”

  “You got a Green Card?”

  Joker laughed and raised his glass in salute. “Oh aye, and a return ticket on Concorde.” He leant against the bar and chatted with Shorty, all the while keeping one ear tuned to the Irish construction workers.

  “How do I look?” Cole Howard asked, adjusting his tie in the dressing mirror.

  “Are you going to wear that tie, honey?” said his wife, standing behind him. Howard sighed. Obviously that had been his intention, but equally obviously Lisa didn’t approve. She went over to his wardrobe and pulled out a blue silk tie she’d bought for him several Christmasses ago. “Try this,” she said, handing it to him. Howard had to admit that she was right. It looked much better with the dark blue suit he was wearing.

  Lisa didn’t say anything but she stood next to the dressing table and waited for him to comment on her dress. It was a new one, pale green silk, low over the shoulder and cut to just below her knees. She’d fastened her long blonde hair back in a pony tail, a look which he knew her father preferred. Daddy’s little girl. Around her neck was a thin gold and diamond necklace, a present from Theodore Clayton. “Fabulous,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  Howard could never understand why Lisa was so insecure. She was beautiful, well-educated, a terrific mother to their two children, and the daughter of one of the richest men in the state, yet she constantly sought approval. “Really,” he said, stepping forward and taking her in his arms.

  She laughed and pushed him away. “You’ll mess my make-up,” she said.

  “You don’t need it,” he said, trying to kiss her again.

  She slipped out of his arms. “Later,” she said. “I’ll check on Eddy and Katherine.”

  Howard gave himself a final check in the mirror and then went downstairs where their babysitter, the teenage daughter of one of their neighbours, was watching Star Trek. “Hiya, Pauline,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr Howard,” she said, her eyes still on the screen. She was a pretty girl, but still at the gawky stage, knowing that men were looking at her in a different way but not sure how she should handle it. It would be another ten years or so before his own daughter reached that stage, but he was already dreading it.

  “What’s Captain Kirk up to?” Howard asked.

  Pauline looked at him, raised her eyebrows and sighed. “That’s Star Trek, Mr Howard. This is the Next Generation.” She shook her head sadly and turned back to the television, her skirt halfway up her thighs. The girl was fifteen years old and she dressed like a hooker, though Howard knew she was getting straight A’s at High School. Howard wondered how he’d handle Katherine when she began wearing make-up and high heels and wandered around the house without a bra. And the boys, standing on the doorstep with sweating palms, queuing up like dogs around a bitch on heat. So far Howard reckoned he’d done a pretty good job bringing up his two children, but they were still at the stage where they thought he was the bravest, smartest and kindest human being on the planet. Apart from their mother, of course.

  Lisa came down the stairs, one of her many fur coats slung over her shoulders. “They’re asleep,” she said to Howard. She gave Pauline the rundown on where they’d be, where the food was and what to do if there was an emergency, then went out to the Jaguar. The green XJS was Lisa’s, another gift from her father, but Howard drove. Theodore Clayton lived a half-hour’s drive away from their house, on an estate in Paradise Valley, to the north of Phoenix. Howard handled the car well, though he drove it only when Lisa was with him. She would have been quite happy for him to use it every day, but he never quite felt comfortable at the wheel. It felt too much like Clayton’s car, and he didn’t like being beholden to his father-in-law. As he drove he was aware of his wife looking at him. He smiled. “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Go on, say it. You were going to say something.”

  “Always the FBI agent,” she said.

  “But I’m right, right?”

  They sat in silence for a while, both watching as the Jaguar swallowed up the miles of road. “Daddy will probably ask again, you know?”

  “He does every time we go around,” agreed Howard. “He won’t take no for an answer.”

  “He’s used to getting what he wants,” said Lisa. She flipped the sun visor down and checked her make-up in the vanity mirror.

  Howard knew she was nervous, as she always was when she was visiting her father. Howard had learnt from experience that it was the worst possible time to start an argument with her. Eventually she broke the strained silence, and her voice was softer. “And if he does ask again?”

  Howard shook his head slowly. “The answer’s going to be the same, Lisa. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I like doing what I’m doing. I like being with the Bureau. I wouldn’t get the same satisfaction as your father’s head of security.”

  “You’d get a lot more money, though,” his wife said. It was a discussion they’d had many times, and they’d both expressed their views so often that they talked about it almost on auto-pilot, as if the words no longer had meaning.

  “I know, I know,” said Howard. “Maybe in the future; we’ll see . . .”

  “That’s what you always say,” said Lisa.

  “But at least I’m not saying never,” said Howard. “I’m just saying not right now.” Howard’s
stomach tightened as he drove off the highway and onto the single track road which led to the Clayton estate. White fences seemed to stretch for miles, enclosing paddocks where sleek Arabian horses stood proudly, their heads turning to follow the Jaguar. The first time he had seen the Clayton house he’d stopped his car and checked the directions Lisa had given him. He’d been going out with her for three months and while it was clear she had money she’d never given him any hint of the magnitude of Theodore Clayton’s wealth. They were both students – he was studying law and she was an English major – and most of their time was spent either in bed or hitting the books, and there had been little time for discussing their families. Howard had never forgotten how nervous he’d been the first time he’d driven his clapped-out Ford Mustang up to the front of the house, and how dry his mouth had been as he’d rung the doorbell. The wait for the door to open had been one of the longest in his life and it had taken all his self-control not to run back to the car and drive off. Even now, more than a decade later, he had the feeling that he didn’t belong and that the door would be slammed in his face.

  The house had been designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, a two-storey home which curved around a teardrop-shaped pool. The twelve-bedroom house was made from stone ground on the site which blended perfectly into the desert setting, and had huge windows that took full advantage of the magnificent views of Camelback Mountain. It was a short drive to the Paradise Valley Country Club, where Clayton was a leading light, and he was only minutes away from Arizona’s finest golf clubs. To the left of the multi-million dollar home were stables which were twice the size of Howard’s own house, and a garage which contained Clayton’s collection of old British sports cars.

  Howard parked the Jaguar next to Clayton’s Rolls-Royce as Lisa checked her make-up again. Jarvis, Clayton’s butler since before Lisa was born, opened the door for them and took them into the impressive drawing room where Theodore Clayton was waiting with Jennifer, his second wife.

  Lisa’s mother lived in Connecticut, supported by five-figure monthly alimony cheques. Howard liked the first Mrs Clayton, whose only mistake had been to grow old, and he and Lisa visited her with the children every few months. But he could see why the industrialist had traded her in for a new model. Jennifer had long blonde hair, perfect skin and the firm figure of a cheerleader. She was wearing a tight white dress, cut low at the front to show her ample cleavage and the large diamond pendant which nestled there. She was, Howard had to admit, absolutely gorgeous, but there was a cold, predatory gleam in her eyes. Often it appeared that she looked right through Howard, as if only men with net assets of more than a million dollars were visible to her ice-blue eyes. She would be absolutely amazing in bed, Howard decided, but her performance would be in direct proportion to the wealth of her lover. It was the money she’d make love to, not the man. Clayton and Jennifer made a perfect couple, and like the horses outside it was as if they were posing for the effect: he with his right hand in the pocket of his blazer, she with her head tilted to tighten her jaw and show off her flawless neck. Clayton stepped forward and hugged Lisa while Jennifer watched with flint-hard eyes. When Clayton released his daughter and shook hands with Howard, Jennifer and Lisa embraced warily with little warmth. They complimented each other on their dresses and their jewellery while Clayton watched them with obvious pleasure. After all, thought Howard, he had paid for it all.

  The rest of the guests arrived shortly afterwards: the owner of a local television station and his trophy wife, a white-haired oil man from Texas and a companion young enough to be his granddaughter, and a lawyer from Phoenix who, apart from Howard, was the only one there with a wife close to his own age.

  Dinner, as always, was perfect, cooked by Clayton’s personal chef and served in the dining room by Jarvis and two maids in black and white uniforms. On the walls were several of Clayton’s Navajo rugs, some of them more than a hundred years old. The best of Clayton’s collection was on loan to Phoenix’s Heard Museum and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Clayton took great delight in telling his dinner guests how both museums had recently asked him to lend them more. With the top quality rugs worth upwards of $75,000, Howard reckoned that the industrialist was as interested in their investment potential as he was in their artistic quality.

  Clayton loved Maine lobster and he took obvious pride in telling his guests that the crustaceans had been flown in from the East Coast on his private jet that morning.

  Over coffee the conversation turned to a recent court case where a serial killer had used a camcorder to record the gruesome deaths of his victims and had then sent the tapes to local television stations. Several had refused to show the grisly tapes, but others, including the station owned by the man at Clayton’s table, had aired them. When the subject came up, Clayton smiled and nodded at Howard as if to reassure him that he knew the tape of the snipers was to be treated as confidential.

  The lawyer suggested that the tapes were evidence of a crime and as such shouldn’t be made public as they could prejudice a later trial, an argument which Howard considered valid.

  Clayton screwed up his napkin and dropped it on the table in front of him. He nodded fiercely. “This is the video age, and I’m not talking about the rubbish they show on MTV. There are about twenty million camcorders in this country. We’re getting to the stage now where there’s a camcorder on every street corner. Every time there’s a major disaster the camcorders get there first, we’re seeing them at crime scenes, plane crashes, car crashes, street fights. They’re being admitted in courts as evidence and used in insurance claims, but no-one has really thought through the ramifications of what it means.”

  He lifted his wine glass to his lips and sipped. No-one interrupted. Clayton liked to sit and pontificate after a good meal, and his guests knew better than to try to spoil his enjoyment. Clayton slowly put the glass back on the starched cloth and gently ran his finger around the rim. He fixed his eyes on the lawyer.

  “Eyewitnesses can be cross-examined and their veracity can be challenged, and as you and Cole know, no two witnesses ever see the same thing. That’s all going to change. Before long everything that happens in public is going to be recorded on tape, and the video recording will take precedence over all other forms of eyewitness evidence. It started during the LA riots in 1992 and the wave of prosecutions which followed. The camcorder is the silent witness. If you can show a jury a video, they’ll believe that over everything else. It’s the old truism: a picture is worth a thousand words. When Kennedy was shot, there was one black and white film of it, lousy quality and taken well away from the event. When Reagan took a bullet there was a videocamera there to record it. The next time they try to hit a President, there’ll be half a dozen camcorders there, and that’s not including the networks’ Death Watch cameras. Imagine what that’ll mean. Imagine what the Warren Report would have looked like if there had been half a dozen camcorders close to the motorcade in Dallas. Cover-ups become impossible. That’s what the video age means. The age of truth.”

  He looked at Howard as if to make sure that he was listening. “But tapes can be altered, events can be faked,” he continued. “And the Government is only now beginning to realise the inherent problems in allowing juries to believe what they see. We’re one of several companies working on analysis of video tape, both in terms of improving the quality of recordings and in determining their fidelity.”

  Howard began to realise that there were other uses for the technology Theodore Clayton was developing. He knew how keen the CIA and FBI would be to use camcorders to identify trouble makers at civil rights demonstrations, and there were certain to be those in the darker corners of the Pentagon who’d love to be able to use phony videotapes in all sorts of covert operations. Howard knew how easy it would be to blackmail someone who was a threat to Government interests, or how the right sort of tapes could be used to usurp an uncooperative head of state. The hi-tech manipulation of videotape would work both ways: in the ha
nds of the unscrupulous it could become the greatest propaganda weapon of all time. It was already happening to a small extent in advertising, with Coca-Cola using images of long-dead Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Louis Armstrong to sell their products. It wasn’t too much of a leap to manipulate news broadcasts. Howard remembered the black and white videos he’d seen of ‘smart bombs’ seeking their targets in the Gulf War, released to the television stations to show how well US technology was performing. True or fake? Howard had no way of knowing, and nor did the viewers. But everyone believed what they saw. Clayton was predicting not an era of truth, but a time of deception and lies, when no-one would be able to trust the evidence of their own eyes.

  “So what are you saying, Ted?” asked the lawyer. “Are you saying that anything that’s captured on tape should be in the public domain?”

  “I think that’s happening already,” said Clayton. “The most popular shows on television are the so-called reality shows, the ones that follow around police and rescue workers doing their jobs, showing them making arrests and pulling victims out of car wrecks. The public can’t get enough of them.”

  “Maybe the public needs to be protected from its blood lust,” said Howard quietly.

  “And who’ll be the judges of what they should see?” asked Clayton. “Who’ll be the censors? The FBI? You want to go back to the Hoover days?” He raised his hand to silence Howard before he could reply. Theodore Clayton preferred to answer his own questions. “No, the floodgates have been opened, I’m afraid. There’s no going back.”

  “And what lies ahead?” asked the television producer.

  Clayton grinned. “Ah, Ross, if I only knew. If only I knew.” The two maids began clearing the table and Jarvis carried a large gold-inlaid mahogany box over to Clayton. It was his deluxe Trivial Pursuit set, a game he loved with a passion and which he insisted his guests play after wining and dining them. “Everyone ready for a game?” Clayton asked cheerfully.