by Matthew Hart
I checked my phone. The first stories about the radiation chamber had already broken. The market had imposed another cease-trading order. I called Tommy.
“Nash is shorting Great Pipe,” I said. “It’s a short play.”
“Are you sure?”
“He didn’t confess it to me personally, Tommy.”
“Stop snarling,” he said. He was silent for a moment. “Technically, in the strictest legal sense, this is the market’s problem.”
“Technically, in the strictest sense, this is the problem of all the poor dopes buying that stock right now, Tommy. So call it. Use your newfound power as a big-time fed. Shut down Great Pipe now, or your name will be at the top of my report.”
“OK, OK,” he muttered. “I’ll call the exchange.”
As Tabitha and I were leaving, Dad put his hand on my arm. He grabbed the picture of my mother and me in the silver frame and made me take it.
“She loved you,” he said. His voice was hoarse. As we drove off, I watched him dwindling in the mirror, an old man getting older, until a bend in the drive swept him from view.
* * *
“I don’t even know what a short play is,” Tabitha said as we left the village and headed west along the North Fork in the gathering night.
I explained that a short play is a bet that a stock is overpriced. The short seller thinks, or in Nash’s case knows, that the stock will fall. If he has the right connections, he borrows the shares from a broker and immediately sells them. Then he waits for the market to come to its senses. When it does, and the share price falls, the short player buys the shares back at the lower price, and returns them to the broker he borrowed them from. He pays the broker a fee, and pockets the difference.
“And the Helsinki broker means it was Honey Li,” she said, “and Honey Li means Nash.” She thought for a minute. “One thing I don’t get, though. Lime’s murder. It brings the press attention, but the Pink was a huge story. The press would have found the lab anyway, and the radiation signs would have done the rest. Now there’s a murder investigation involving a presidential candidate.”
“Look at it from the oligarchs’ point of view. I doubt they’d have trusted Lime after they robbed him. He was on borrowed time. Also, they don’t care what happens to Nash. If he’s elected, could he deliver on sanctions relief? Not a chance. The oligarchs were planning on making a killing on the short.”
“That assumes they were in on it.”
“Trust me—they were in on it. And so was Honey.”
“Which means she drove over from Bridgehampton on purpose, to draw attention where they wanted it.”
“Yes.”
At Southold we stopped at a donut shop and got coffee, then sped out along the black highway.
I felt comfortable with Tab. When you thought about it, what did I have to complain about? They’d given me a spy for an assistant, and sure enough, she’d spied.
The miles unspooled and we settled into companionable silences broken by brief exchanges. Who was running Chuck, and was Tommy fully in the loop? Then, after a long silence she said, “How did your mother die?”
“Cancer.”
“Hard on a kid.”
A minute later she handed me a handkerchief.
“You keep these just for me?” I said.
“You’d better hope I don’t put it in my report.”
As we drew closer to the city, the attributes of night dissolved into the stream of headlights, the brightly lit freeway, and, miles away, New York City, blowing its volcano of light into the western sky.
21
And what’s so great is that it really is cursed,” Annie said, gazing at the famous jewel.
“Some of the people who owned it weren’t so lucky,” I agreed.
“They died horrible deaths,” she recited avidly, running her finger down a page of the booklet. “The diamond spread death wherever it went. One man drove off a cliff with his wife. Then Mrs. McLean—she went from being one of the richest women in America to one of the poorest. Her newspaper went broke. Her son died at the age of nine. Her daughter died of an overdose at twenty-five. Her husband ran off with another woman. He died in a mental hospital,” she added with relish.
Calamity was one of Annie’s passions, ranked just below clothes. Her ambition now was to be a designer. Tommy had introduced her to Minnie Ho. Minnie had taken a step back and cocked her head.
“I totally get the boots,” she’d said. “Let’s make something to go with them.”
Today it was a pink buckskin jacket spattered with sequins, black jeans, and the trademark cowboy boots. Her hair spilled over her shoulders in a tawny coil. We turned our backs on the Hope Diamond and made our way out of the Smithsonian Institution into a bright February, Washington day. I hailed a cab.
The dome of the Capitol blazed against the blue sky. We crossed the Anacostia River and headed southwest out of the city. Twenty-five minutes later we arrived at the gate of Joint Base Andrews. The MPs checked my ID and Annie’s carefully against a list, and summoned an Air Force car. It took us out across the runways to the corner of the field where Air Force One sat running up its engines. We climbed a gangway at the rear section of the plane.
A young airman blushed at Annie and led us forward through the empty press section to a small cabin. It was furnished with a pair of sofas and a writing desk. The airman went away, and returned with a tray. I helped myself to coffee and Annie poured a glass of orange juice. Five minutes later, we watched through the windows as a party of high-ranking officers assembled near the forward gangway. Soon the dark green shape of Marine One came clattering into view.
Ten minutes after takeoff the airman poked his head in the door. “The president will see you now, sir.”
I followed him forward, through a large cabin where staff were working at computers or busy on the phone. Flat-screen monitors carried newsfeeds from around the globe. The next compartment was the forward communications room, where air force personnel in headsets sat at a row of monitors, keeping the president in touch with American military commanders at bases around the world.
We climbed the staircase to the upper deck. Two Secret Service agents stood at the door to the executive suite. A marine lieutenant wearing the gold aiguillette of a presidential aide-de-camp rapped sharply on the door and opened it.
Matilda Bolt was sitting at her desk, the presidential seal mounted behind her on the wall. Her chief of staff, looking harried, was tidying a stack of papers.
“Have that done by the time we land, Bill,” she said. “I want to go over it before we get to the school.”
He shot me a glance as he hurried from the cabin. Bolt leaned back and gestured to the empty seat facing her.
Even in the plush cocoon of the president’s cabin, with its thick carpet and oversized chairs and acoustic paneling, the insistent din of the machinery of government never stopped. It clamored just beyond the walls. It hummed in the fabric of the plane. The urgency and might of the greatest office in the world.
“You’ve taken a leave of absence,” she said, pinning me with her yellow eyes. It was only two weeks after her inauguration, and already the burden of office had printed itself on her face. She had gray half-moons beneath her eyes and the lines around her mouth were etched more deeply. Her lips adopted the sardonic smile that was her natural expression. “I could use someone with your talents.”
When I didn’t reply, a ripple of malice twitched across her face. It faded quickly, erased by the relentless pressures of the presidency. In New York that morning, a deranged gunman with an assault rifle had shot his way into a school. She was on her way to the scene to console the parents and the nation for what was inconsolable.
Our own business was simpler: She needed to know that I wasn’t going to be a problem. She was the most powerful person on the planet, and I knew how she’d gotten there.
Others who knew pieces of the story had been swept up into the administration. Tabitha had an office
in the West Wing where she prepared the intelligence report called the President’s Daily Brief. The PDB is the most sensitive intelligence digest in America, so Tab’s future was assured.
In addition to running the department, Tommy had the rank of assistant deputy secretary of the Treasury. That gave him some extra weight to throw around. You couldn’t really buy Tommy’s loyalty, but like all lawyers you could rent it.
Chuck left the department and moved to DC, where he joined a high-powered K Street lobbying firm whose partners expected a stream of contracts to follow in his wake. Chuck had promised as much, hinting that it would be his reward for keeping his mouth shut about certain things he knew. But spreading it all over town that you are going to be keeping your mouth shut is sort of the opposite of actually keeping your mouth shut, and the line of Chuck Chandlers came to an abrupt end one afternoon when Chuck walked in the front door of his new house in swanky Chevy Chase and met a bullet coming the other way.
The two-star general got a third star.
As for Patrick, his father’s banking operation got a license. Any quibbles about how they’d amassed their capital had been brushed aside. For now.
That left me. I’d been expecting the summons. The problem, as Bolt would see it, was that she had nothing I wanted. This made me the i that didn’t have a dot. When she’d sent for me I’d already planned the trip to DC with Annie, so a pass arrived for her too.
It was a no-press flight to New York City. Air Force One takes off when the president boards and lands when it reaches its destination. The pale-blue 747 doesn’t circle waiting for a landing slot. It’s cleared before it gets there. A commercial flight from Washington to New York takes fifty-five minutes. On Air Force One you’re there in half an hour.
“We won’t waste time,” she said. “Harry Nash very nearly became president.” Her face tightened with distaste. “Fortunately he was destroyed by his own greed.”
We both knew that wasn’t true. Nash didn’t suddenly become greedy. Greed was his profession. In a world foundering in lies, the stark simplicity of Nash’s greed had seemed like a kind of truth. Guys, who doesn’t like to make a buck? Greed was the founding motive of Bolt’s deal with Nash. He provided the glitter of his name, the throat of Honey Li, and the diamond to hang against it. Bolt supplied political credibility; Nash was the glowing bubble of magnificence that would float them to the nomination.
“Nash was the package you picked yourself,” I said.
“Elections aren’t about ideas. I’d never even have got through the primaries,” she said. “Just look at me.”
It was as if her weariness had peeled off the armor and revealed the girl she’d been: a bony kid with serpent’s eyes and a cleaver for a nose. A life of playground jeers and, later, eviscerating editorial cartoons. She glanced out the window. A few hundred yards away, a pair of F-16s kept station on the plane.
“I didn’t know what Harry was planning. That’s why I reached out to you. My sources told me you were the only one who could figure out what he had in mind.”
“No,” I said, “that wasn’t why you contacted me. You didn’t care what the scam was. You only needed me because you suspected Nash was going to double-cross you.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Nash was never supposed to be president. That was always going to be you. Nash’s job was to get you as far as the nomination. He would pull out on a pretext at the last minute. Your party would have no choice but to hand you the nomination. Nash’s reward was whatever he made from the Pink. Yours was the presidency. You thought Nash had decided to take both. That’s the reason you wanted me to penetrate the bank in Jersey. It wasn’t to protect Nash. It was to give you the proof you needed to threaten him.”
I think in a way she was relieved to hear the truth plainly stated. For just that moment, she was not alone with it.
“It was my turn,” she said, looking out again at the F-16s. Her fingers curled into fists. “My turn. Time for the power to come to me. No one lets you have that power. You take it.”
Matilda Bolt would spend the rest of her life wrapped in a capsule of deference—protected, courted, privy to the world’s secrets. She’d paid a heavy price for it, but she’d made the first down payment long ago.
“So you threatened Nash with exposure and he came to heel.”
The plane shuddered slightly as the undercarriage went down.
“Where you’re going to have a problem,” I said, “is the murder of Lime. You’ve seen the stories. They can’t leave it alone. The reporters on the story—they’ll find out eventually how he died—his throat slashed so your running mate could cheat investors.”
We sat for a minute with our own thoughts. Nash had come out in front of the mansion to face the press, Honey beside him. He’d said how sorry he was investors had lost money. He blamed himself, didn’t think it was right to continue his campaign. And guys, I lost my best friend and partner, so I think I’ll leave it there for now. And he disappeared inside the house.
“Harry’s a cold-blooded man,” Bolt said, “but not a monster. He told me his plan had been for the police to be called to an illegal entry. The local TV channel would be tipped. Once they got onto the story, they’d discover the radiation chamber, and the stock price would fall. But the murder? That wasn’t Harry.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Let’s finish our business. You seized the Russian Pink as part of your investigation. I understand you’ve finished whatever tests you wanted, so please, give the man his bauble.”
“That’s part of the deal? He gets the diamond and the pardon?”
“The pardon is for the people. It clears away investigations that would have consumed the country. Now the nation can move on.”
“I’m glad there’s a happy ending.”
There was a knock on the door, and the chief of staff put his head into the cabin. “Madam President, we land in fifteen minutes.”
“Bill,” she said, “Mr. Turner’s daughter might like to come up for a look.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, closing the door behind him.
“I’m told you have a report but have refused to file it. I’m going to guess it’s one of those if-anything-should-happen-to-me-or-my-family situations?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You understand there’s a flip side to that.”
“I do.”
They must have brought Annie up earlier, because when the door opened this time she was right there, her eyes popping out of her head.
“Wow,” Bolt said, “that’s what I call color.” She came around the desk and fingered the western-style fringe of Annie’s jacket. “What do you call it?”
“Prairie Blush,” Annie whispered.
“Got a phone?” Bolt said, and she put out a skinny arm and hauled Annie in for a selfie.
“I hear you’re a designer,” she said, reminding me, in case it might slip my mind, even for a second, how easily she could find out whatever she wanted to find out. “Can you make me one?”
“Totally,” said Annie.
“Then I guess we’re cool,” she said. But it was me she was looking at.
* * *
The girl with the blonde crew cut had the front door open about one nanosecond before my hand touched the bell.
“Is that something they teach at butler school?” I said as I stepped into the marble vestibule.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “It’s right after the part where we learn how to deal with serious household emergencies, such as how to use the new remote.”
“You’re worth every penny right there.”
“You might not think so when I tell you they found the bug I put in it.”
We were passing through the long corridor that led to the back of the mansion. The pictures had all been packed away. The Nashes were moving to Singapore and selling the house.
“Do they suspect you?”
“Probably. They’re not stupid. They have t
he place swept for devices every month or so. It was only a matter of time.”
The butler agency had been Tab’s idea. She’d recruited the woman in charge of assignments and we’d put in our own agent.
“Any discussion of what happened to Lime?”
“Not in front of me. She was pretty upset when she got back to Bridgehampton after the drive to the lab.”
“She knew she’d be followed.”
“But not what she’d find when she got there.”
* * *
Nash and Honey Li were waiting on the patio. It was a clear day, and the enclosure made a suntrap so that even in February they could sit outside in coats and have their coffee in the sunshine.
Honey was draped in an ankle-length mink. Nash wore jeans and a camel hair coat. His Converse sneakers were parked on the wrought-iron table.
I put the brown parcel beside them.
Nicky floated in with a silver tray and placed a pair of scissors in front of Honey. She snipped through the Treasury seals, folded back the paper, and took out the box. She opened it, and the diamond splashed her face with rosy light.
She gazed at it with a desperate expression. “We think it’s worth even more now.”
“Even more than what?” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Nash said in his upper-class Boston drawl. “More than what it was worth before that nonsense that it was a fake.”
“And how much is that? You paid First Partners $40 million for it, which is what they paid Barry Stern. That’s supposed to be you getting the fabulous deal on a priceless diamond. But half the world thinks you got suckered by a fake and the other half thinks it’s you who faked it.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Nash said. “We have a certificate.”
He didn’t really look like Kennedy. His eyes never stopped darting. He was like a pickpocket with good teeth and hair who’d stumbled on Kennedy’s barber.
“The certificate is from one of the most respected diamond labs in the country,” he said. “It certifies that the Pink is a genuine pink, not artificially enhanced.”