“Thank you,” she finally managed. She received no reply but could hear the plastic cap being twisted onto the bottle. There were no departing footsteps; he remained in place in front of her.
“How long have I been here?”
“Awhile,” the male voice said.
“Where am I?”
No answer.
“Why am I here? Why are you doing this?”
No answer.
“When can I go?”
“It would be best if you’d just lay back down and sleep. The time’ll pass faster,” he said.
Megan’s face tracked back and forth, her chin upturned, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice. “I just—”
There was the sound of leather soles pivoting on cement, and then footsteps retracting into the distance.
“No, no, please…please…”She remained as she was, sitting up, slightly hunched over, her wrists twisted and bound awkwardly behind her by what felt like thin plastic straps. Was this it? Did life boil down to a moment like this? Perhaps she was destined to be just another statistic, just another young female who disappears from the face of the earth to never be seen again, justpoof —now you see her, now you don’t. Every post office in the nation had hundreds of photocopied faces pinned to their walls. Thousands every year. And one day that face doesn’t show up for school or for work, or hasn’t made it home by dark, and someone, maybe a guardian or a boyfriend or a mate or a work associate, starts getting a little worried. Then the phone calls begin.“Have you seen so-and-so, she should have been here by now and—” And within a matter of hours there’s panic, hysteria.
Cold shivers flanked out across and up and down her flesh. Her coat had been stripped off, and she was freezing. She could still smell him, cigarettes and pork on his breath, and that heavy cologne. The smell of her assailant. She worked her wrists against the cords, but there was no give. The outsides of her wrists were raw.
She thought of Vivian and Anna, Sister Catina and her mother. She thought of the apartment in London. But most of all she thought of Olin and the life together they’d never have. What a shame and what a waste it was to die at the age of twenty-two.
Was he already looking for her? They had agreed to meet at a little bar and grill in Manhattan for lunch. She didn’t know what time it was, but surely he had arrived and would be getting anxious the later it got. Had she been here an hour? Two? Was it evening already? Could it be Sunday or Monday by now? With the effects of the drugs still fuzzy in her brain, it was impossible to know how long she’d slept.
Olin would go to the police. He’d file a report and there would be a citywide search. Olin would find her. Did he have a picture of her? She didn’t think so. Olin wouldn’t let her down, that much she was sure of. She had lasted this long, she would hang on until he found her.
Sixteen miles outside of Rochester, the Subaru got pinched among a gaggle of semis. The trucks behaved surprisingly out of character, easing cautiously through the growing blizzard. Soon they had geared down to a leisurely fifty-five miles per hour. Brooke jammed her fist to the horn, but the whiny falsetto did nothing but attract brake lights. She pressed back in her seat, her arms out straight, elbows locked.
“ComeON!” she screamed at the scummy mudflaps of the eighteen-wheeler directly in front of her.“MOVE!”
There was no space on the shoulders of the interstate. Even if she thought there might be room to squeeze by, in the back of her mind she knew if she edged the Subaru off the visible pavement, it might be the last mistake she made today. It would have been equally unwise to attempt to shoot through the gap between trucks. The Subaru was tiny compared to these monsters, but the way those big rigs tended to sway back and forth in the lanes, they’d crush her and not even feel it.
In total there were five trucks ahead of and around the Subaru. The snow was thickening on the road and on the windshield. The wipers were having to work double-time to keep up. There was progressively less visible blacktop beneath the layer of white on the road. At every exit they passed she cursed the trucks for not pulling off. It was midafternoon, yet the sky was fading to ever deepening shades of gray.
As they approached an exit, a semi flashed his turn signal and eventually swung onto the exit ramp. She gunned the Subaru, filling the newly vacant spot in line. Still no room to pass.
A sign read: BUFFALO73.
Brooke slammed the heels of her hands against the wheel. Another hour and a half to Buffalo. Her flight out of Niagara Falls International departed in an hour and fifteen. As speed/time/distance calculations ripped through the lobes of her brain, the eighteen-wheeler cruising along beside her slowed a hair, opening a fissure between trucks about nine inches greater than the length of the Subaru. She held her breath, bit down on her lower lip, and punched the gas to the floor.
The Subaru wigwagged through a cloud of powder kicked up off the interstate by the huge rig in front of her. The wipers couldn’t swish fast enough. For a full twenty seconds, she drove blind, keeping the pedal to the floor, hoping and praying not to see taillights through the smudged haze on the windshield. In her rearview mirror, the rig she’d cut in front of looked the size of a farmhouse. She couldn’t have missed by more than the width of her head. He blasted his horn at her.
Brooke grinned to herself, pleased as punch to have nothing before her but open highway. She buried her nails into the foam of the wheel, squinting through the streaks made by the wipers. Buffalo was up there somewhere through all that endless white.
The vents in the dash blew nice hot air in her face. Brooke glanced at her backpack in the other seat. She put a hand on it. Twenty-four hours ago she’d been on the road, that same backpack at her side with that same videotape tucked inside. Now she was driving like a maniac, zipping through the storm, fighting to keep her mother’s car between the lines. She had an hour to get to Buffalo.
40
THE TALE BEGAN INSANDIEGO, EIGHTEEN MONTHS BEFOREthe election of Clifton Yates to the presidency and seven years before the death of James Ettinger. It began in the rest room at the rear of a greasy burger joint a quarter mile off the highway, with a paper bag stuffed with twelve thousand in cash being passed beneath the cheap wooden partition of a toilet stall.
The man’s name was Macky Warren. He was a truck driver out of Houston, and was in San Diego hard up for cash and looking for work. He found it through the grapevine.
A friend of a friend set him up a meeting that ended with a promise for twelve grand in cash. Three days later, Macky Warren was in Mexico, smoking pot and flashing the money around. A month later he disappeared. A Mexican prostitute claimed to have found his body with three bullet holes in his forehead, but that was never confirmed and quickly forgotten. Macky Warren’s diesel rig was dropped in a scrap yard and smashed into a cube the size a refrigerator.
At some point during those first three days, as Macky Warren sped south for the border, having earned his money, an emergency crew was pulling up the wreckage of a demolished Mercedes from the waves and rocks at the base of a cliff along a California highway. The car had smashed through the guardrail at a sharp curve, plunged to the rocks below, and exploded. The hunk of twisted metal the emergency crew hauled up the cliff had been reduced to shrapnel, blackened and burned out by the explosion. All that remained of the driver and passenger were two thoroughly charred corpses. They pulled the license plate and called it in. The Mercedes’ registration matched the identities eventually produced from the dental records of the pair. The driver was Lyndon Peel, Democratic senator from Illinois. The passenger was his wife, Deborah.
They had been on vacation, touring the scenic coast. It was a trip they’d planned for months and had very much looked forward to. It was their last chance for privacy before all the fuss of the campaign was to begin in the coming months.
At the time of his death, Senator Peel was sixty-seven and in perfect health. He was a legend in the nation’s capital. His thirty-five years in the Senate had thoroughly impl
anted him in the bedrock of Washington politics. He came from wealth and had built another fortune of his own. He came from a long line of out-spoken liberals, and in his youth had been a favorite of Jack Kennedy’s. He’d fiercely opposed the Vietnam conflict, supported the legalization of drugs, was more of a feminist than most women, and favored every sort of regulation of industrial pollution imaginable. In short, he was loved by the left and loathed by the right.
For the better part of three decades, his peers in the Democratic Party and many supporters of liberal causes had urged him to run for the presidency. But Peel was hesitant. He had a close-knit family, they were stinking rich, and the White House simply represented more anxiety and strain than the Peels felt obliged to weather. He remained astoundingly popular with the public.
The Republicans were more than happy to keep him in the Senate and out of the White House. It was hard enough working with the few bunglers the Democrats had gotten to the executive office, without having to deal with a monolithic figure like Peel. He was a magician with the public; they saw him as one of their own. For over three decades, he stayed put, and his liberal causes never came back to haunt him.
But times changed. Peel’s kids grew up and left the house. The family-oriented senator suddenly had time on his hands. There were whispers. Rumors circulated. The talk began.
In a secretly taped meeting with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Lyndon Peel acknowledged that he was indeed ready to take the plunge. Shivers of fear and dread coursed through the right wing. It was their worst nightmare realized. They were coming off a weak two-term Democratic president whose VP had no interest in filling his boss’s shoes. During those eight years, no one on the right or left stood out as a bold-enough presence to overshadow Peel. If Peel ran, he’d be a shoo-in.
Enter Julius Albertwood. Born in South Africa to British parents, he left home in his early teens and ended up in Hong Kong, where he thrived as a venture capitalist. His brand of commerce was the duck-and-weave art of coupling investors with high-yield opportunities. He made and lost many millions of dollars, for himself and for others.
On a Saturday evening in late June, he arranged a meeting with Clifton Yates, Republican governor of Mississippi. In Yates, Julius Albertwood saw a chance at the big score. They rented a beach house that overlooked the Gulf, grilled shrimp and lobster and drank imported beer, and watched fishing boats bob on the horizon while they talked. The meeting lasted several hours, and was attended by a handful of key players, among them, Clifton Yates’s attorney, H. Glen Shelby.
Yates had developed a reputation among the Republican movers and shakers of the region as a man who was going somewhere in the party. This get-together was a sort of meet-and-greet. Albertwood was feeling him out. A couple of months later, there were a series of meetings, far more serious in nature. The intent was to tap Yates as the next Republican candidate for the office of president of the United States of America. Albertwood had a financial backer lined up—more soft money than a thousand campaigns could even hope to spend. It would ensure Yates the presidency in the upcoming election. All he had to do was agree to play ball once in office. Yates was all-ears.
The man with the money was Bertrum Stott. From an island compound off the coast of Belize, he ran an empire. Chief among his profitable operations was the manufacturing and selling of military hardware, primarily tanks and antiaircraft artillery. He had the money and the manpower to accomplish anything under the sun. No one outside his closely guarded circle had seen Stott in at least two decades. Many believed he was dead, and he liked that. His age and physical appearance were unknown. If he ever left that island of his, he did so secretly and rarely. Eamon Desmond spoke for Stott at the meeting on the Gulf. According to Desmond, what Stott wanted from his prospective U.S. president was a guarantee that several hundred billion dollars would be pumped into the defense budget.
Governor Clifton Yates came to the bargaining table drooling like a hungry dog. He could suddenly almostsmell the presidency. He agreed to play ball. But no amount of money could sufficiently diminish the popularity of Lyndon Peel. He was a titan, and all he had to do to walk into office was stay awake at the wheel. Albertwood had the solution. And it would only cost their little consortium a few thousand dollars.
For their trip, the Peels had made reservations at several bed-and-breakfasts along their chosen route.
Macky Dean had followed them out of Del Mar. It was rainy, and that was good; it would be difficult to stop a skid on wet pavement. He rushed up on them on a straightaway that approached a hairpin curve. Senator Peel may have noticed the rig quickly filling his rearview mirror, but there was nowhere to go, and Macky Dean was flying. The impact lifted the rear tires of the Mercedes off the ground. He bulled them toward the guardrail for over a hundred feet. The Mercedes went tail up over the edge, rainwater spinning off the back tires. Macky Dean was around the curve and hammering down the hill when he heard the explosion. He smiled. But then, he was already dead, too, and didn’t even know it.
The accident was front-page news. The Democratic Party went deep into mourning. Their savior was dead. The Republicans couldn’t believe their luck.
The race for the presidency had suddenly taken a radical turn. Three weeks later, a relatively unknown governor from the state of Mississippi threw his hat into the ring, officially announcing his candidacy for president. Clifton Yates was suddenly a player. The country took notice in a hurry.
A Republican senator from California named James Ettinger had been approached early on by Albertwood’s consortium. They offered him the VP slot in the Yates administration. Thanks to pressure from Albertwood, Ettinger made certain that the investigation of the deaths went away in a hurry. Soon, the tragedy on the California coast was reduced to nothing more than just another footnote in American history. And for seven years, Ettinger was a faithful puppet.
Yates was elected without any real contest, and under his regime the U.S. beefed up its military to unheard of proportions. Stott made billions off defense contracts, and Albertwood took a cut from every nut and bolt purchased by the government.
All the players were set to coast to the end of Yates’s second term. The economy was strong, unemployment was low, and his approval rating was near 60 percent. Everyone was fat and happy. Everyone but Ettinger. The ghost of Lyndon Peel never left him.
41
THE WORDS PLAYED OVER AND OVER AGAIN INBROOKE’Smind as she drove. James Ettinger had laid it out piece by piece on tape. She thought about Senator Peel and his wife, their faces locked in terror as the semi plowed them forward off the edge of the cliff, seeing the land giving way to the empty blue horizon, then the lapse of seconds before they hit the rocks that reached up out of the Pacific.
The look on Ettinger’s face on the tape was so somber, so ridden with guilt. This thing—the knowledge of what they’d done for the sake of money, for the sake of power—had clearly eaten at him for years. Brooke ruminated on the last words of his confession…
what we did, the death—murder! thought Brooke—of Senator Peel, Clifton Yates and I accepted as a worthy sacrifice. And even now, looking back, part of me still understands how we rationalized such a barbaric act. To us, money was just a means to accomplish what we sincerely believed to be a necessity. To Yates and myself, Senator Peel became a threat, a threat to the safety of our nation. We believed that an expanded and well-funded military was vital for peace, and whatever means it took to ensure that peace was, in the end, for the greater good.
Her stomach turned. Such concepts seemed impossible for her to accept. Brooke knew and accepted the fact that she was still young and a bit idealistic, and perhaps even still quite naive, but was it possible for her to be so blind to the machinations of governments? Yes. She knew the answer was yes. She wondered how many events in history had been shaped by such horrific acts of arrogance and ego.
The car surged against the wind. Visibility came and went. The windows fogged and made kee
ping the car on the road a challenge. Brooke reached for the instrument console and switched the heater to Defrost. Gradual oval patches cleared away on the inside of the windshield, turning bad visibility to poor visibility. Thinking about the content of the videotape made it difficult to keep her mind on the road.
She was a half hour from Buffalo. Every fresh wave of snow turned the knot in her stomach. It pained her to think about how many scheduled flights out of Niagara Falls International might have been canceled because of the weather. Every few minutes she craned her head over the steering wheel, her eyes scanning for blinking airplane lights in the patch of dreary sky above the interstate. Every flashing red light up there in the endless gray and white was an answered prayer. The needle on the speedometer hovered just below ninety. The engine was howling. She feared it might blow but snuffed out that fear with several evengreater fears.
She envisioned the monsters pursuing her. Bertrum Stott. Julius Albertwood. Clifton Yates. H. Glen Shelby. Armies of men. Stockhouses of weapons and ammunition at their disposal. She only knew the faces of Yates and Shelby. The others were just names. But her imagination created villainous features for the others.
Chicago. Her plan was even more clever than she realized. And she’d done well, coming this far this fast. Based on the message she’d left on Darla’s machine, they couldn’t know for certain whether she knew what was on the tape. In fact, her message had only mentioned a “package.” Perhaps they imagined they could catch her at her parents’ house. But she had to figure that if they suspected she’d viewed the videotape, they would assume she’d make a mad dash back to New York and get the tape to NBC in a hurry.
At least that’s what she hoped they’d think. And if so, by now they’d have eyes all over Rockefeller Plaza, not to mention JFK and La Guardia. They wouldn’t let her within five hundred yards of the NBC studios. And they’d have her phone in New York bugged. Surely they had listened in on her call to the office this morning. So far though, her escapade down I-90 had gone undetected, and across the vast expanses of asphalt and snow and ice there had not been even the slightest hint of anyone keeping an eye on her.
The Greater Good Page 24