The Road to Omaha: A Novel

by Robert Ludlum

  “Again, Sis, what can you really do in Boston?”

  “Break a retired general’s ass, little Brother, and everyone else’s around him.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll know better when I find them, but I suspect it’ll be something as outrageous as the lunacy in their own ballpark.… Say a conspiracy mounted by the enemies of democracy to bring the honorable giant to its knees and destroy our beloved America’s first-strike capabilities worldwide. Then tie in legal terrorism with racist undercurrents by trumped-up depositions tracing the cabal to fanatical Arabs and resentful Israelis in concert with the hard-liners in Beijing along with the Reverends Moon, Farrakhan, and Falwell, joined by the Hare Krishnas, Fidel Castro, the peaceniks on Sesame Street—and God knows what else. This planet abounds with rotten fish and perceived rotten fish that provoke instantaneous and passionate reactions. We’ll guarantee in pretrial examinations to throw the whole spectrum at them.”

  “Pretrial …?”

  “You heard me.”

  “This is all positively nuts, Jenny!”

  “I know that, Charlie, but so are they. Anyone can sue anybody in a free society, that’s both the insanity and the glory. It’s not the litigation that’s important, it’s the threat of public exposure.… Good Lord, I can’t wait to get to Boston!”

  10

  Desi the First knocked sharply on the hotel door for the third time, shrugging as he did so at his comrade-in-arms, Desi the Second, who shrugged back in reply. “Maybe our loco man, the great heneral, has taken a poof-powder, no?”

  “Wa’ for?”

  “He owes us dinero, yes?”

  “I don’ think he’d do dat—I don’ wanna think he’d do it.”

  “Neither do I, man, but he tol’ us to come back in an hour, no?”

  “Maybe he dead. Maybe that even more loco gringo who yells all the time put him and the liddle old man away.”

  “Then maybe we break the door down.”

  “And make so much noise the gringo police come after us and we eat the lousy gringo food again for a long time? You make good plans, amigo, but chu got no mechanical abilities, y’know wad I mean to say?”

  “What mecánico?”

  “Hey, man, we promise each odder, we speak h’English, no?” replied Desi-Two, removing a small, many-bladed contraption from his pocket, a penknife-type instrument that defied description. “So better we can ‘h’assimilate,’ waddever that means.” The jump-starter of Chevrolet automobiles approached the door, briefly glancing up and down the deserted corridor. “We don’t gotta break down no door. Dese liddle plástico locks no problem—dey got a liddle white plástico release.”

  “How chu know so much about hotel doors, man?”

  “I work lotsa times as a waiter in Miami, man. The gringos call for room service and by d’ time you got the tray there, they too drunk to find d’ door an’ if you bring the tray back, you get yelled at in the kitchen. Ees better to know how to open doors, no?”

  “Ees good school you go to.”

  “Before that I worked in d’ parking lots. Madre María, they are universidades!” Desi the Second, ebullient, twisted a white plastic blade in the vertical lock space and slowly opened the door. “Señor!” he exclaimed at the figure inside. “You h’okay, man?”

  Sam Devereaux sat trancelike behind the desk, his glazed eyes fixed on the pages in front of him. “Nice to see you again,” he said quietly, the words in no way connected to his concentration.

  “We almos’ knock the door down, man!” cried Desi the First. “What’s wrong wid chu?”

  “Please don’t knock me down again,” came the all but monotonic reply. “I possess the weight of the legal world on my person—I don’t need you.”

  “Hey, come on, gringo,” continued D-One, approaching the desk. “What we done was nudding like personal, man. We jus’ follow orders from the grande heneral, y’know?”

  “The grande general has hemorrhoids in his mouth.”

  “That h’ain’t nice to say,” D-Two rebutted, joining his companion as he closed the door and put his indescribable break-and-entry tool back into his pocket. “Where’s the heneral and the liddle fella?”

  “What … who? Oh, they went to dinner. Why don’t you join them?”

  “ ’Cause he tol’ us to be back here in one hour and we are good soldados!”

  “Oh … yes, well, I can’t comment on that because my office was not the instrument of instruction.”

  “Wad chu saying?” asked D-One, squinting, looking at the attorney as one might a deformed Paramecium under a microscope.

  “What?… Hey, look, guys, I’m kind of involved here, and you’re right, I don’t take anything that’s happened personally. Believe me, I’ve been where you’re at.”

  “Wad does dat mean?” D-One said.

  “Well, Mac’s a pretty strong person; he can be very convincing.”

  “Wad’s a ‘mac’? A piece of meat can talk?”

  “No, that’s his name. MacKenzie—I call him Mac, for short.”

  “He not short, man,” said Desi-Two. “He one big gringo.”

  “That’s part of it, I guess.” Sam blinked several times and leaned back in the swivel chair, arching his neck as if to briefly relieve the pressure he felt. “Big, tough, rough, and all-powerful—and he makes men like you and me march to his cymbals when we should know better.… You two, you’re street smart, and me, I’m law smart, and still he beats us down.”

  “He don’ beat nobody!” said D-One emphatically.

  “I didn’t mean literally—”

  “I don’ give a shit how you mean it, man, he makes me and my amigo here feel better, so wadda you say about that?”

  “I can’t think of a thing.”

  “We talked while we ate the rotten tacos made by some blond-haired gringo down the street,” added D-Two, “and we both say the same thing. The loco man’s h’okay!”

  “Yes, I know,” said Devereaux wearily, focusing his eyes back on the pages in front of him. “You really like him, that’s fine.”

  “Where does he come from, man?” asked Desi the First.

  “Come from?… How the hell do I know? The army, where else?”

  Desis One and Two exchanged glances. The former spoke, addressing his companion. “Like we saw in the window with the pretty pictures, right, man?”

  “Get the name spelled out good,” said D-Two.

  “H’okay.” Desi the First turned back to the preoccupied attorney. “You, Señor Sam, do like my fren’ says.”

  “Do what?”

  “Write out the grande heneral’s name.”

  “What for?”

  “ ’Cause if you don’, man, your fingers h’ain’t gonna work so good.”

  “Delighted to oblige,” said Devereaux quickly, picking up a pencil and tearing off a page from his legal pad. “There you are,” he added, writing down Hawkins’s name and rank. “I’m afraid I don’t have an address or a telephone number, but later on you might check the penal institutions.”

  “You talkin’ dirty about the grande heneral?” asked Desi the Second suspiciously. “Why you don’ like him? Why you run h’away and yell at him and try to fight him, huh?”

  “Because I was a bad person, a terrible person,” cried Sam plaintively, his hands outstretched in supplication. “He was so good to me—you saw how nice he talks to me—and I was so selfish! I’ll never forgive myself, but I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’m trying to make it up to him by doing this work he wants me to do—needs me to do.… I’m going to church tomorrow morning to ask God to forgive me for being so awful to a great man.”

  “Hey, Señor Sam,” said Desi-Two, God’s forgiveness in his voice, “nobody’s all a time perfect, you know? Jesus, He unnerstand dat, right?”

  “You can bet your beads on it,” replied Devereaux under his breath. “There’s a nun I know who’s got to stretch even His compassion.”

  “Wad chu say, man?”
<
br />   “I said the well-known compassion of nuns beads in on what you say—that’s an American expression meaning you’re right.”

  “Dat’s cool,” interrupted Desi the First, “but me and Desi-Two got some heavy t’inkin’ to do, so we gonna vamos an’ accept the word of a religious man that the grande heneral is h’okay like we say.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “The grande heneral owes us dinero—”

  “Money, you mean?”

  “Dat’s wad I mean, gringo, an’ we wanna trust him, but we gotta be positivo, you know? So you tell the grande heneral dat we’ll be back here tomorrow for our dinero, h’okay?”

  “Okay, but why don’t you wait for him—outside, of course?”

  “ ’Cause, like I say, we gotta t’ink and talk … an’ also we gotta know we can trust him.”

  “To be perfectly frank, I don’t understand you.”

  “You don’ have to. Jus’ tell him what I say, h’okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come on, amigo,” said Desi-One, extending his left wrist beyond his sleeve, revealing the three wristwatches. “I tell ya, ya can’ trust nobody no more! Dis lousy Rolex is a phony!”

  With these cryptic words, Desi the First and Desi the Second left the suite, both waving cordially to Sam as they closed the door. Devereaux shook his head, sipped his brandy, and returned to the sheaves of papers on the desk.

  Dawn broke over the eastern skyline of Boston, Massachusetts, to the extreme annoyance of Jennifer Redwing, who had forgotten to pull the window drapes. The harsh rays of the early sun penetrated her eyelids and woke her up.… Forgotten, hell, she had been too damned tired to think of them when she staggered in from the airport at two in the morning. Four hours of sleep was not enough even with her energy, but circumstances precluded staying in bed. She got up, partially closed the drapes, turned on the bedside lamp and scanned the room-service menu, finding what she hoped she would find: twenty-four-hour availability. She picked up the phone, ordered a Continental breakfast and thought about the day ahead.

  Everything carne down to short-circuiting a son-of-a-bitch former general, MacKenzie Hawkins, and whoever the scum were behind him. And she would short-circuit them, blast them into the electrified legal grids, no matter what it took, no matter the avenues of legal deceit she had always abhorred. Today was different. Although forever grateful to her tribe and her people—that gratitude acknowledged by her overseeing their investments and contributing a third of her income to their accounts—she was furious that outsiders would attempt to take advantage of the tribe’s admittedly checkered history and naïveté solely for profit. Her little brother, Charlie, was right, although he misinterpreted her anger. She wouldn’t merely “ream” him out, she was going to ream all of them out—right out of their unconscionably corrupt ballpark!

  Breakfast arrived, and with it a degree of calm. She had to concentrate. All she had was a telephone number and an address in Weston. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning. Why didn’t the hours pass faster? Damn, she wanted to get started!

  It was five-thirty in the morning and Sam Devereaux, his eyes close to bleeding, had finished the Wopotami brief and made thirty-seven pages of notes on his legal pad.

  Oh, God, he had to rest, if only to find some sense of perspective, if there was any in the whole insane mess! His head was bursting with hundreds of relevant and irrelevant facts, definitions, conclusions, and contradictions. Only a period of calm would restore his oft-praised faculties of reason and analysis, which at the moment were so diminished he doubted he could handle kindergarten recess, much less talk Sanford somebody-or-other out of beating him up when they were both six years old during one of those periods on the playground. He wondered whatever happened to that outsized bully; he undoubtedly ended up a general in the army, or a terrorist. Not unlike “Madman” Mac Hawkins, who was currently asleep in the hotel suite’s guest bedroom, and who was responsible for bringing two-hundred-odd pages of unmitigated disaster to the attention of Aaron Pinkus and Samuel Lansing Devereaux, who now conceded that he would never wear the judicial robes—except perhaps as a last wish before being shot in the cellars of the Pentagon by the combined orders of the President, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the DIA, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. And Aaron—poor Aaron! He not only had to face Shirley-with-the-freeze-dried-bouffant over a little matter of a missed art show, but he, too, had read Mac’s brief, in itself a veritable invitation to oblivion.

  Christ Almighty, the Strategic Air Command! If the goons on the Court gave even partial credence to the appeal—and it was an appeal to conscience as well as legality—whole segments, if not all of SAC, would be the property of some minuscule, indigent Indian tribe with the half-assed name of Wopotami! The law was specific: All subsequent structures and materials found on usurped or stolen real estate belonged to the injured party or parties. Holy shit!

  Rest—maybe even sleep, if he could manage it. Aaron had been right when he and Mac had returned around midnight and Sam had bombarded Hawkins with what he had to admit were relatively hysterical questions and accusations.

  “Finish it, my boy, then get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow. Nothing’s accomplished when the strings are too taut to find the proper notes; and to be perfectly honest with you, gentlemen, I face a discordant coda for the evening when I see my darling Shirley.… Why, oh why, Sam, did you ever mention that infernal art show to me?”

  “I figured you’d be mad at me when you found out I didn’t go to it with one of our richest clients because his wife keeps trying to feel me up. Also, I didn’t tell Shirley.”

  “I know, I know,” Aaron had said in defeat. “Would you believe I told her because I thought it was amusing, and pointed up an honorable aspect of your character? A minimum of five hundred attorneys I know would be in intimate contact with the lady at the slightest provocation.”

  “Sam’s better than that, Commander Pinkus,” MacKenzie Hawkins had insisted. “The lad’s got principles, although they’re not always so apparent.”

  “General, may I suggest once again that you remove yourself from Samuel’s presence for the reasons we discussed at dinner? You’ll find the guest bedroom most accommodating.”

  “Has it got television? I like to find those war movies, that’s what it’s all about, you know.”

  “You don’t even have to get out of bed. Just aim the remote and shoot from a comfortable foxhole.”

  Jesus, he was exhausted! thought Devereaux, as he got out of the chair and ambled his way into the master bedroom, only vaguely aware that Aaron had had the courtesy to turn on the bedside lamp. He closed the door—firmly—and concentrated on his shoes—which should he take off first, and how? The conundrum was solved when he reached the bed and fell down on it, his shoes intact, his eyes closed. Sleep was immediate.

  Then, from distant halls of complete vacuum, a jarring, incessant alarm reached him, growing in volume until his personal galaxy was shocked into successive explosions. He reached for the telephone, noting that the crystal bedside clock read eight-forty. “Yes?” he mumbled.

  “This is Scratch Your Assets, you lucky, lucky person you!” shrieked the voice over the line. “This morning we’re calling hotels picked at random from our revolving bowl by a member of our great audience, and then a room number from the second bowl picked by the most recent grandmother from our great, great audience, and you’re it, you lucky person! All you have to do is tell me what tall, bearded President gave the Gettysburg Address and you win a Watashitti clothes dryer from the Mitashovitzu Company, who just happens to own this great station! What’s your answer, you terrific person?”

  “Fuck off,” replied Sam, blinking at the sunlight that streaked through the windows.

  “Cut the tape! Somebody get the juggling dwarfs and go out to the audience—”

  Devereaux replaced the phone and groaned; he had to get up and read his notes, and the prospect was not appea
ling. Nothing at all was appealing in his foreseeable future, which was filled with black holes that would swallow him up and endlessly deep crevices through which he would fall, spinning in agony for an eternity. Goddamn Hawkins! Why did the maniac military son of a bitch have to come back in his life?… Where was Hawkins? It was not like the drill-happy war-horse to greet the morning with less than a full-throated battle cry. Maybe he had died in his sleep—no, some things were too good to be hoped for realistically. Mac would go on forever, terrifying succeeding generations of peaceful innocents. Still, silence and MacKenzie Hawkins were a dangerous combination; nothing good ever came from a quiet predator. Sam rose from the bed, surprised but hardly astonished that his shoes were still on his feet, and walked unsteadily to the door. Cautiously he opened it, only to see Von Maniac seated behind Aaron’s desk in a bathrobe, looking for all the world like a kindly old grandfather, peering through metal-framed glasses at that ill-begotten, nefarious brief.

  “Your morning reading material, Mac?” asked Devereaux sarcastically, walking into the suite’s sitting room.

  “Well, hello there, Sam,” said the Hawk warmly, removing his glasses as though he were a retired elderly academic of gentle disposition. “Have a good sleep? I didn’t hear you get up.”

  “Don’t give me that little old winemaker routine, you conniving python. Outside of the telephone, you probably heard every breath I took, and if there were trees in here and it was dark, I’d have a garrote around my throat.”

  “Now, son, you really do misjudge me, and let me tell you it pains me sorely.”

  “Only a megalomaniac could make such an appeal referring to himself three times in one sentence.”

  “We all change, boy.”

  “The leopard has spots when he’s born and he has spots when he dies. You are a leopard.”

  “I guess it’s better than a python, eh?… There’s juice and coffee over on the table, also a couple of Danish. Have some; it keeps the morning blood sugar up—damned important, you know.”