by Joseph Flynn
After he swallowed, he said, “If you don’t eat your food, I will, and my increasingly trim waistline might go into relapse.”
Sweetie applied her fork to her dinner and ate without any apparent joy.
“Okay, I know the shrimp isn’t the problem,” Putnam said, “and my sinful ways aren’t nearly what they used to be, so what’s the matter?”
“I heard from Byron DeWitt earlier.”
“The FBI guy, blonde and Chinese.”
Putnam paid close attention when listening to Sweetie.
“Yeah, him. He said it was a courtesy call, which took a leap of faith to accept.”
“The president told him to keep Jim McGill and you informed,” Putnam said.
“Sure, I got that, but government employees can find a million excuses not to follow the boss’s orders. Anyway, he seemed okay about sharing with me, and that caused me to start taking a new look at things. Realize the world is changing.”
“You’re not getting cold feet, are you, Margaret?”
She took his hand. “There was a chill, but it was my heart not my feet.”
Putnam couldn’t track that one. “Don’t tell me something has scared you. I don’t think I could believe that.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Sweetie said, “but I am human. I’ve been worrying about you, that you might be harmed or worse.”
Putnam said, “Yeah, it’s that worse part that’s the killer.”
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Sweetie released his hand.
“I’ve also been worrying that I might become Carolyn Enquist.”
“McGill’s first wife? What’s the connection?”
Sweetie told him the story of why Carolyn left Jim, how she worried about him being a cop, getting killed, leaving her a widow and the kids fatherless. She couldn’t kick the anxiety until they were divorced.
“But I’m not a cop,” Putnam said, “and you’re only sort of one.”
Sweetie agreed. “But I might be in danger and you might be, too, because of me.”
“You mean from this Damon Todd guy and the other two crazies?”
“Yes. Deputy Director DeWitt told me the FBI will probably find the driver who helped Todd and the other two get away. He said it should be a matter of days.”
“That’s good,” Putnam said.
“It’s a step is what it is,” Sweetie told him. “The file I read on Todd said the CIA was unable to crack his cover identity and they had three years to try. All the time they had Todd, they couldn’t get him to admit he was anything but a young boy.”
“So even if DeWitt’s people find the driver it might not lead anywhere, and Todd could be running around free for a long time.”
Sweetie nodded. “He could be patient. Wait until we let our guard down. Then maybe he tries to get at Jim through me or he tries to get at me through you, thinking I’d sacrifice Jim for you.”
“Whoa,” Putnam said. “You wouldn’t do that, though, would you?”
“No. I wouldn’t sacrifice you for Jim either.”
“That’s comforting, I suppose, but less likely than the other way around.”
“You see why I worry. But where did worrying get Carolyn?”
Putnam emptied and refilled his glass. Sweetie declined his offer of more.
“What we’ll have to do,” Putnam said, “is emulate Jim McGill’s second marriage. I don’t know any of the details, of course, but I imagine both the president and her henchman know something bad could happen to either of them on any given day. They accept that, live with it, make the most of the present moment. Really, any day we pick up our car keys, we grab mortality right along with them.”
He drank half his glass and added, “Que sera.”
“You have that much faith?” Sweetie asked.
“I do and you have more.”
“I used to think I did. You’d be all right if I wasn’t with you all the time?”
Putnam said, “We might get on each other’s nerves if you were. Besides, I’m going to Omaha, and no one would ever think to look for me there.”
Sweetie gave him a look. “Why are you going to Omaha?”
“While you were at Camp David, I called Darren Drucker. You may have heard of him.”
“The richest man in the country? The guy who thinks his taxes should be raised? Yeah.”
“I pitched my idea for ShareAmerica, the mutual lobbying fund, to him. He loved it, wants me to go out to Omaha and run it from there.”
“And when did you plan to share this news with me?”
“I wasn’t. I told him I’d think about the move but I couldn’t commit without talking to you. I was hoping you’d nix the idea, but after our little chat, maybe heading to the heartland would be a good idea. You can still veto the idea.”
Sweetie shook her head. “No, do it. I like ShareAmerica, too.”
“Patti Grant’s second term will go a lot better, especially if she wins as an independent, if I can help shape the Congress for her.”
“Absolutely.”
“And you and I can steal away for secret weekends in, say, Kalispell, Montana.”
“No one would look for us there,” Sweetie said.
“But we won’t let too much time go by before we go to Key West and get married.”
“No we won’t.”
“If there are still madmen loose in the world at that time —”
“Que sera,” Sweetie said, and downed her chenin blanc.
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — Bethesda, Maryland
The term splitting headache was usually thought of as something that cracked one’s skull. In the Reverend Burke Godfrey’s case, skull involvement was secondary — and literal.
What happened to him was a shredding headache, better known as a stroke, medically labeled as a cerebrovascular accident. A major blood vessel in Godfrey’s brain ruptured. The sudden increase in pressure caused by leaking blood began to damage brain cells.
The stricken Godfrey weakly exclaimed, “My God!”
No one was able to ask if he’d had a vision of the hereafter. He lost consciousness immediately thereafter as brain function quickly diminished. He was rushed into the operating room. The on-the-fly diagnosis, later proved accurate, was a malignant cerebral infarction, so named because the chances for a happy outcome were less than minuscule.
Nonetheless, the surgical team removed a section of Godfrey’s skull to relieve the pressure. The best hope at that point was that he would survive with significant disabilities. That hope was not realized. After the pronouncement of death, the detached segment of skull was put back in place, held there, pending an autopsy, by wires.
In short order, the surgical report was transcribed and transmitted to the White House.
Galia Mindel received it.
Without consulting anyone, she handed the hot potato to Mather Wyman.
Hart Senate Office Building — Washington, D.C.
Senator Howard Hurlbert, True South, Mississippi, was talking with old friends, fellow alums from Ole Miss and two of his bigger campaign donors, when Bobby Beckley rapped on his door and interrupted the conversation. Beckley was the only person on Hurlbert’s staff who would have dared to do that.
“Senator,” he said, “something urgent has just come up.”
One of the good old boys visiting Hurlbert asked, “Soviet Russia’s attacking?”
Beckley framed a thin smile. “Almost that bad. Senator?”
Hurlbert saw his chief of staff wasn’t fooling around.
He told his friends, “I’ll meet y’all for drinks at eight, if I can get away.”
With handshakes and pats on the back, the senator ushered his friends out.
As soon as the door behind them was closed, he told his chief of staff, “This better be good, Bobby.”
Beckley put on his campaign manager’s cap. “How about this? You’re gonna have two serious competitors, people with greater political stature, running a
gainst you to be president, and what just happened will let you hogtie at least one of them.”
Hurlbert smiled.
Beckley told the senator, “A nurse I know from down home works at Bethesda Medical Center. She called me with the news. Reverend Burke Godfrey just died.”
The senator looked stunned. Beckley was tempted to push his chin back up.
Before he could do anything so foolish, Hurlbert said, “That’s terrible.”
“For him, sure,” Beckley agreed. “For us, it’s Christmas come early.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“Howard, Burke Godfrey died in a federal medical facility. Mather Wyman put him there. After he raided Godfrey’s church compound. It’s automatic we blame Wyman for the reverend’s death. There’s only one question we’ve got to answer now.”
“What’s that?”
God, this guy was dumb, Beckley thought. If he could somehow get the senator elected president, he’d be the one running the country. That sounded good at first. You thought about it, though, if there was any job in the world that could kill you, it was corralling all the assholes in Washington you needed to get something done.
“The question is, Howard, how do we blame Patti Grant, too?”
The Oval Office
Mather Wyman’s first impulse after hearing from Galia Mindel that Burke Godfrey had died was to call the president and share the news. That thought was quickly elbowed aside by the realization that if Galia hadn’t called the president with the news before she’d told him she would do so immediately afterward. Deciding the optics would be horrible if there were any delay in sharing the news with the public — the government was trying to cover up its responsibility for Godfrey’s death — the acting president had Aggie Wu contact the TV networks and cable news outlets and say he would need five minutes of their time immediately before the evening news.
Politically, he had to be the one to pass the word. He’d ordered the assault on Salvation’s Path. The consequences that flowed from that were his to bear. Trying to pass the buck to Patti Grant would only look cowardly.
As it was, there would be reverberations affecting the president.
A fact that was not lost on her.
Two minutes before air time, a phone call reached the acting president in the Oval Office.
Patricia Darden Grant was on the line. “I trust you intend to be brief, Mather.”
“Yes, Madam President. Just the facts as we know them and a promise that all post mortem proceedings will be completely transparent.”
“Good. After you finish with that, please let the country know I’ll be back at my desk in the morning.”
Telling him he should be back at his desk in the East Wing by then.
“That’s good news, Madam President.”
“Thank you, Mather. Now, I have to squeeze in another call before you go on.”
“Madam President?”
Who else did she need to call, he wondered.
The president said, “Erna Godfrey needs to know, before the rest of the world does, that she’s lost her husband.”
Charlottesville, Virginia
“You understand Olin will kill you if you fuck me up,” Crosby told Damon Todd.
“I do,” Todd said.
“You won’t go easy,” Anderson said.
“I understand,” Todd assured them. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
The three fugitives were in their cabin in the woods. The sounds of the woodland’s nocturnal animals and insects were muted. The doors were closed and the windows were covered with black curtains. The only light came from a low-watt ceiling bulb that would soon be extinguished and an iPad on a desk stand.
Not two minutes after Todd had appropriated the tablet computer from Fletcher Penrose, Crosby had taken it from Todd and inside of an hour had found and disabled the GPS and “Find My iPad” features. No one was going to track them through the computer.
There was an air of ghost stories around a campfire in the room. The two rogue covert ops were the edgy kids; Todd was the guy who got to say boo. It was starting to look like the big bad CIA dudes just might be scaredy-cats.
Todd sat on the desk chair, crossed one leg over the other and sighed.
He might as well have yelled, “Pussies!” at the other two.
Crosby and Anderson exchanged a look, knowing they couldn’t back down. Todd had showed them that morning how a lame-ass civilian like him had already passed them by in hunt-and-kill skills. If any of their wet work buddies had seen that sorry exhibition, they would have put Crosby and Anderson out of their misery.
Come to that, Crosby and Anderson realized they were probably depending on Todd right now to evade recapture. Or death. Which didn’t seem all that glorious at the moment. Knowing they probably weren’t likely to inflict anything more serious than a stubbed toe on their pursuers.
Todd had said he could help them regain their edge. He said they’d have to be at the top of their games to get Jim McGill and he could help them get there. Then he offered to show them an example. He asked if they knew of the comedian, Tony Stone.
“Guy’s got a fucking filthy mouth but he’s funny,” Anderson said.
“We’ve heard of him,” Crosby said.
Todd told them, “He was a severely repressed young man when I met him. He was also filled with rage after a lifetime of psychological abuse from his father. He came to me when he was in college because he was afraid he’d start killing people in large numbers.”
Crosby and Anderson didn’t look at each other when they heard that. They knew guys like that, had worked with guys like that. They were guys like that. The only thing that had saved them — up to a point — was they had found a government approved outlet for their furies.
Todd said, “I’ll call Tony. He’ll take my call without hesitation. I’ll have him tell you a few of his latest jokes, and then I’ll have him speak to you as the young man I first met. Then you’ll see what I can do. Fair enough?”
Crosby and Anderson nodded. They had nothing to lose from listening to a demonstration and, damn, if it hadn’t gone exactly the way Todd had said it would. Tony Stone was blue from word one and hilarious, too. Then he became someone else entirely. His voice rose in register, became reedy and he sounded like he might either weep or scream. Maybe lose control altogether. Off himself or the first person he met. Then Todd calmed him down, brought the public Tony Stone back and everything was cool.
Except Crosby and Anderson were now afraid of just how good Todd was at his work. Who the hell knew what he could do to them? Turn them inside out. Make them his asswipes.
Todd knew that, of course.
“You two going to make up your minds or should I call it a night?” he asked.
“Do it,” Crosby told Todd.
Then he directed another look at Anderson, silently reiterating the command that Anderson make sure Todd died painfully if anything went wrong.
Todd, calm as could be, sat Crosby down at the desk, swabbed his left shoulder with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball and injected him with ketamine hydrochloride. The drug could be introduced into a body either intramuscularly or intravenously. Todd went with the former, reasoning his subjects would find that less threatening. He did, however, shoot Crosby up with twice the recommended dosage.
Induction of full surgical anesthesia would follow more swiftly that way; it would also last longer. In a matter of minutes, Crosby would feel as if he were leaving his body very far behind, floating off into the distance. To help Crosby along on that journey, Todd brought up an app on the iPad called Hypnotic Highway.
It was remarkably like the video he’d created years ago. The view was of an endless stretch of interstate highway at night as seen from behind a steering wheel. Low beams illuminated lane-divider stripes. One after another, after another, after another passed by.
Just as in Todd’s video there was the sound of a soft ceaseless wind rushing past
.
Then somebody had to push the production values a step too far and added a quiet flute to the soundtrack. Too artsy by half, but it didn’t seem to bother Crosby. Todd thought if anything should have been added it would be the hum of tires on a smooth road surface.
In a quiet measured voice, Todd said, “Keep your eyes on the road, keep your eyes on the road.” Normally, he didn’t need to repeat the instruction more than five times to induce the altered state of consciousness characterized by selective attention. In common parlance, a trance. The therapeutic values of working with someone placed in a trance included pain and stress management, control of anxiety and relief from nausea.
When Todd crafted a personality, he sought to heighten a subject’s natural strengths and have him derive deep satisfaction from the successes that would flow from their enhanced abilities. That and be forever grateful and subservient to Todd.
With Crosby, he thought three reminders to keep his eyes on the road might have done the trick, but he stayed true to form. When he got to five, he looked not at Crosby but turned his attention to Anderson.
Anderson wasn’t as far under as Crosby, but Todd had left a post-hypnotic suggestion with him from their aerosol-induced session. The suggestion: Keep your eyes on the road. Anderson was completely amenable to being injected with his own dose of Special K.
Before the night was over, Todd would own both men.
As promised, he would bring their skills to their upper limits. Just like the old army recruiting slogan, they would be all they could be. Better than that, they would die for Todd, and kill each other first rather than turn a hand against him.
Now, the challenge was to find the most effective way to turn them loose on Jim McGill.
State House Room 204 — Concord, New Hampshire
New Hampshire Secretary of State John Patrick Granby sat in his office well after the hour at which he usually went home to dinner. He was faced with an impossible task, was trying to accomplish it anyway and didn’t know whether his heart or his head would be the first to explode. He blamed Galia Mindel for his predicament.