by Sydney Bauer
His first mistake, he had to admit, was failing to call John the moment he had hung up from the Caspian woman. He honestly believed . . . no, he knew he could control the situation and delay sharing the information with her until it was neatly contained.
So, why had he still not dialled the number? Because he knew she would be irritated . . . no, more incensed, livid, irate.
This was the first time he had let her down, the first time one of his brilliantly conceived plans had gone awry and, worse still, he was not 100 per cent sure exactly what had gone wrong or how he could contain it. He suspected King, of course, but this was fast work, even for him, and he was hoping beyond all hope that there was another explanation for the failure of the Caspian woman and her daughter to make their scheduled appointment.
His more primal urges wanted to cut a swathe through the adjoining office wall, grab King by the neck and demand to know what meddling piece of crap he had put into action. He knew King was a traitor, his phone log told him as much – why else would he be receiving calls from Sara Davis, the defence counsel’s second chair? His only comfort came from the knowledge that as soon he was established as the leading law enforcement official in the country, he would banish the man to the dungeons of FBI hell, and he wasn’t just thinking demotion, more entrapment, dismissal and a fucking iron clad strategy of frame him up and shoot him down – going, going, gone.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Right now he had to concentrate, not hesitate, on locating the Caspians and their God-damned prescription repeat, before they had a chance to communicate with anyone else. And before he did that, he had to call her.
He took a deep breath and forced his large strong fingers to punch in the number, and had to wait only three rings before she picked up.
Maxine Bryant was furious. How could this have happened? She honestly believed she was on a road that guaranteed her the power she had always craved. Now, an unlikely adversary – a peripheral ‘character’ she never dreamed would be a problem – had threatened to take it all away. And perhaps it had all gone too far for her to stop?
No, Maxine was many things but she had never been a quitter. There was too much at stake – personally, professionally, patriotically. Perhaps it was time to reassess who were her friends and who were her enemies. She could make some initial enquiries herself and . . . then perhaps . . .
Call him, she said to herself. In the very least, track him down, keep him on notice. He may be your only chance. There was no other solution, she told herself, for the consequences of leaving this to fate could be catastrophic.
Without further hesitation she buzzed her personal assistant who was at her door within seconds. ‘Gina, I need you to find someone for me. I need to schedule an urgent meeting, quickly, quietly.’
‘Certainly, Mrs Bryant,’ said the efficient Gina. ‘Whose office do you want me to call?’
‘CIA Director Ryan’s.’
‘All right – and will the President be involved in the meeting also?’ asked Gina, assuming the ‘issue’ was of national significance.
‘No. No, Gina,’ said Maxine. ‘In fact, the meeting may have to be after hours – late tonight, after everyone else has gone home. If the Director has a problem with that, tell him it’s urgent and it is in his best interests to attend.’
Gina Corso did not bat an eyelid, she was used to all the cloak and dagger stuff that went on in the White House and smart enough not to ask questions. ‘Sure, Mrs Bryant. Just let me know if there is anyone else you want to include.’
‘Thanks, but that won’t be necessary, Gina. This one is just for me.’
Ironically, three minutes later, just as Gina Corso picked up her phone to try the CIA Director’s list of contact numbers, Dick Ryan, muted cell phone in pocket, was sitting mere metres away in a private conference with the most powerful man in the country. Ryan had deliberately delayed this meeting, wanting to be sure of his information before he took it to his exhausted superior. But now he knew what he knew, and with time running short, he had made the call and requested the utmost of security for this top secret rendezvous.
There they sat – in the seclusion of the President’s residence, Latham’s cigar soon forgotten and spilling dense grey ash on the thick pile carpet of his private library floor, as Ryan told his story from beginning to end. But if Ryan thought he was the only bearer of surprises that evening, then he was sorely mistaken. For President Latham, now dry-eyed and ashen-faced following Ryan’s shocking disclosures, had a revelation of his own, one that took Ryan’s theory – the same one shared by Mannix and McKay and their team back in Boston – and shattered it into a million tiny pieces.
‘How could I have been so wrong?’ said Ryan at last.
‘How could I have been so selfish?’ replied Latham.
They looked at each other then, two men fooled by a woman driven by an insatiable hunger for personal advancement.
‘She tricked us all, Dick,’ said Latham. ‘She played it like a true professional – right under our politically experienced noses.’ Latham stopped then, finally taking a draw of his seriously diminished Cuban. ‘But enough is enough, she wanted into this game so now she has to play it. It’s time we gave her a run for her money, Dick, and showed her that perhaps she isn’t as clever as thinks.’
‘Yes, Mr President,’ said Ryan, feeling a new level of respect for his elderly but spirited leader.
‘But first I need to get dressed, for if what you say is true – and I have no doubt it is, Dick – then I really need to see it for myself.’
52
The following night
‘US Chief of Staff Maxine Bryant will be named as the new US Vice President within days, according to several reliable White House informants,’ read Sara, for the third time, from Marc Rigotti’s headliner on the front page of today’s Boston Tribune.
‘Sources from Congress, Senior Governmental Departments and influential lobby groups, said that Bryant, a loyal devotee to President Latham’s administration and mother-in-law to the late Vice President Tom Bradshaw, was “odds on” to secure a majority vote in both Houses of Congress “as soon as possible” given the impending November Federal elections.
‘It is believed Mrs Bryant spent most of yesterday behind closed doors with the President – and was later joined by her daughter Melissa Bryant Bradshaw, who, it is said, gave her support to the nomination.
‘News of the impending announcement was met with a generally positive response, despite the expression of some critics who cited Bryant’s age and somewhat cool demeanour as her two major drawbacks.
‘“Maxine Bryant is sixty-one,” said a prominent Southern Senator who declined to be named. “Admittedly she’s a healthy, intelligent, energetic sixty-one, but given President Latham is seventy-five and in less than perfect health, we’re looking at one very senior administration which doesn’t exactly spell ‘future’.”
“Bryant is probably Latham’s safest bet,” said a Midwestern Congresswoman. “But safe isn’t always smart and sometimes it lacks energy and promise. What do the public need? What do they want? They need, they want, another Tom Bradshaw, someone young and enthusiastic, charismatic and warm – basically everything Maxine Bryant is not.”’
‘It’s no wonder she is trying to manipulate Congress,’ said Leo King, accepting another Bud from Myrtle McGee’s Proprietor, Mick McGee. ‘With critics like those she needs all the help she can get.’
‘Not that it makes any difference,’ said Mannix, downing his second beer. ‘These so-called sources don’t start shooting their mouths off unless they’re sure what they’re speculating on is a done deal.’
‘You’re right,’ said Sara. ‘But the true irony lies in their assessment of her as “safe”. If only they knew.’
They sat in silence for a moment, taking it all in.
‘So how long before they . . .’ David began.
‘Announce it?’ finished Simba. ‘Any day is my guess. The woman is a shoo-
in. All that we’re waiting for now, are the official bells and whistles.’
‘You Americans and your bells and whistles,’ said Mick who had agreed to meet them at his ‘breakfast and lunch only’ Harbourside café at the late hour of 9pm, to assure his four friends the privacy they needed. ‘Speaking of which, I’m more than willing to heat up some dinner for you sad and sorry lot but don’t expect any “bells and whistles” on the menu tonight. Strictly basics only. The chef’s long gone and I have to get ready for the morning breakfast rush. As for the beer however,’ continued Mick, who was well aware of his lack of liquor licence, ‘that, I am pleased to say, is available in abundance – so long as my detective friend here promises not to report me.’
‘What beer?’ said Joe, taking another sip from his imported brown bottle. ‘I thought this was ginger ale.’
‘My point exactly,’ said Mick before returning to the kitchen. ‘Just holler when you’re hungry.’
‘Thanks, Mick,’ said David.
It had been a long twenty-four hours. Sara had spent another sleepless night in her North End brownstone. She had only spoken to David briefly since their meeting with Montgomery yesterday morning, having spent the rest of the afternoon and all of today researching a list of non-detectable sedatives at Boston Public Library.
She had made a decision to try and put the ‘note’ behind her. She reasoned, hoped, it could only have been Ramirez or one of his ‘flunkies’, trying to get to them through her – and she was determined not to give him the satisfaction. The past few days had had her doing a lot of soul searching – a lot of trying to determine how she really felt about David – and how he felt about her. In the end she knew that she trusted him, for besides his editing of the truth to protect her, he had never given her any reason not to. Sometimes you had to take a leap of faith, she told herself. That was what love was all about, after all.
David and Mannix had spent much of the past twenty-four hours with Leo King, who, after telling them about Kate and Eleanor Caspian and their imminent arrival in the US, had sat with them running and rerunning Pieter Capon’s original hotel video. They were right in that the missing four minutes contained extra footage of Ramirez and of Maxine Bryant – who apparently was at the hotel prior to her ‘official’ arrival. It showed Ramirez re-enter the Vice President’s suite at 8.03, and leave again four minutes later, only to meet with Bryant in the corridor, but it did little towards providing them with any proof of Bradshaw’s real killers, and with this morning’s speculation about Bryant’s imminent nomination, time was running out.
‘Maybe we’ve looked at this thing too many times,’ said David, turning to Sara and rubbing his now deep purple bruised forehead. ‘But we just can’t get our heads around a logical chain of events. Ramirez edited the section between 8.03 and 8.07 when he entered the suite and then exited again to meet Bryant in the hallway. That gives him opportunity to administer the OxyContin but throws our sedative theory out the door. As for Bryant,’ he went on, ‘she was only ever in the corridor and never entered her son-in-law’s suite. And there is no audio on the tape so we have no idea what they were discussing.’
They sat there for a minute watching as Sara, the only person who had not watched the new tape, took it all in, her furrowed brow indicating the depth of her concentration.
‘The problem is,’ said Mannix, ‘that what we have here is completely explainable from the prosecution’s point of view. We may have Ramirez entering the suite for a second time but only for four minutes. And let’s face it, he had every right to be in and out given he was the top FBI man on the job.’
‘Joe’s right,’ said King, choosing a coke from the collection of cold drinks on the table. ‘And there’s no reason why Maxine Bryant shouldn’t have been there either. She can justify her presence with a million and one logical explanations. If Montgomery is right and Bradshaw was sedated, then we still can’t piece together who or how or when. I hate to admit it, but the tape doesn’t give us a damned thing.’
‘Yes it does,’ said Sara, contradicting them all, ‘because if it didn’t, Ramirez wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of cutting it down in the first place. This tape tells us everything. It has too.
‘Look,’ she said, taking in the three exhausted faces before her. ‘You three have been at this all day. Why don’t you set me up and then go get some supper. I can watch this on my own. Besides, the last thing I need is three hungry men who haven’t showered in the past twenty-four hours looking over my shoulder.’ This in the very least brought a small laugh from the other three.
‘Seriously, you guys, go eat!’
And so, David, Joe and King set up Mick McGee’s dusty twelve inch set and VCR in one of Mick’s corner booths, with Sara grabbing a napkin to clean the scratchy glass as much as possible before Joe inserted the tape. They watched as the time code came up on the top left hand corner of the screen – starting at 7.25pm, exactly one hour before Melissa Bradshaw discovered her husband’s body – with the camera positioned high, from the left, looking diagonally down on the Presidential suite door and the two secret service agents posted by the entrance being the only constants.
‘I wish we could ask those two guys what they saw,’ said Sara, pointing at the secret service twins as she fast forwarded through the initial minutes of inactivity.
‘Impossible,’ said Simba. ‘The Secret Service don’t open their mouths without approval from their superiors and in this case there is no doubt they’d go straight to the FBI. Besides, this gives us as good a view as any.’
‘Okay,’ said Sara. ‘I’m fine. I don’t mean to be rude but you guys can . . .’
‘. . . take a hike,’ finished Mannix with a smile. ‘Thanks, Sara.’
‘I can sit with you if you like,’ said David, obviously still worried they had not had the time to talk properly about their own problems.
‘No. Go get something to eat,’ she smiled, taking his hand and squeezing it, trying to let him know that she understood – that everything was going to be all right. ‘I’ll call when I’m done.’
‘Okay,’ he smiled back, and squeezed her shoulder before heading towards the front counter.
David took a seat on one of Mick’s lime green stools, scanned the menu and sent Leo and Joe out back to check what Mick meant by ‘basics only’. Then he took advantage of the short moment of privacy to look over at her again; a surge of emotion now flooding through him with overwhelming clarity.
Look at her, he said to himself as he watched her perch even further forward on her bench seat, her eyes squinting as if willing the truth to jump from the screen, a look of intense concentration on her beautiful face. She is so smart, so amazing, so . . . And then, mixed in with this swell of love . . . respect . . . pride, came a new wave of guilt – for Monday night’s harsh words, for basically ignoring her for the past twenty-four hours, and most of all, for the woman who was still hiding in his apartment.
I don’t deserve her, he thought, despite knowing he had spent the past two nights on his living room couch. I should have told her, but then he realised perhaps it was better if she didn’t know, given everything that had happened in the past two days and that Karin had promised she would move into another hotel and be gone by the time he got home tonight.
Finally, as he heard Joe and Simba call out that they were setting up a table in the kitchen, he made himself a promise. He would tell her, tonight. And he would apologise for his dark moods and snap judgements and for generally ignoring her over the past few days – and he would promise that he would never hide anything from her again.
Their dinner conversation was scattered; a mishmash of little details between mouthfuls of re-heated shepherd’s pie and vegetables. There were so many unanswered questions and a serious lack of plausible scenarios. Their only hope was to try to place themselves in the minds of the killers on the night Tom Bradshaw was killed, and work through the chain of events step by step.
Leo King told them Hackenbac
ker’s man at Quantico had come up blank on the thirty quarters left at Toovey’s apartment, which was exactly what they had expected.
‘Croker ran a check on the coins in Doyle’s pocket and came up blank as well,’ said Mannix. ‘It’s no surprise. The guy is just too smart.’
‘I know,’ said Leo. ‘But Ramirez has to slip up some place – and we have to be there when it happens.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said David. ‘We will be.’
David looked at his watch. Ten minutes, too early to check on her yet. His mind was racing, ticking off minor details as he finished the rest of his dinner. He wasn’t hungry, but knew he needed the sustenance.
The problem was, they had so many balls in the air and they weren’t even sure which ones were worth catching. Everything had to be considered, everything had to be followed through. He had worked enough criminal cases to know the truth was always in the details, and this was often where the prosecution fell down. Their predisposed assumption of a defendant’s guilt often blinded them to other possibilities, and that was a major weakness which often resulted in their failure to second guess the defence’s strategy.
Strategy, he thought. What damned strategy? All they had was a montage of possibilities, a collection of disjointed ideas and assumptions, with no idea how in the hell they could pull them all together. Which made him think of his friend Tony Bishop, and another hard task ahead.
‘When will Ryan finish his background check on James Bishop?’ he asked.
‘Tomorrow hopefully,’ said King. The CIA Director had suggested he undertake a thorough investigation into Tony Bishop’s brother before David approached his law school buddy with what he knew would be the shocking news of his brother’s apparent drug addiction.
‘He wants us to have as much information as possible before you go to his brother,’ Simba went on. ‘He’ll try to find out exactly what his drug of choice is – how it may be affecting his work.’