Behold a Pale Horse

by Franklin Allen Leib

  THAYER’S UGLY SECRETARY served coffee and withdrew, closing the big double doors behind her. Thayer handed the forty-page report across his desk, and Archer read each page, passing them to Callendar as he finished. There was no conversation at all until both had finished. “Where did you get this?” Zeke whispered. It was devastating. “I can’t tell you that. I’m not sure I would if I could, but I truly don’t know; it just showed up on Ms. Schwartz’s computer yesterday.”

  “It should be traceable,” Callendar said. “Nothing is ever truly erased; we have very good people—”

  “My people are also very good. They say it’s gone,” Thayer snapped. “Now, let’s get to the substance. Inevitably this’ll find itself into unfriendly hands. What are you going to do about it?”

  “We’ll … have to ask the president,” Zeke said. “And the First Lady.”

  “You won’t spin-doctor yourselves out of this one.”

  “We have to contain it, by whatever means,” Callendar said.

  “You’re assuming it’s true,” Thayer said flatly.

  There was no point lying to the man, Zeke thought. “All I know is that we did need a lot of money near the end of the campaign, and we got it. I know Jerry Earl and Susan McCray, who own Uvalde, have always been close to Clarissa.”

  “Damn!” Thayer pushed himself out of his big chair and placed his hands flat on his polished desk. “This will be worse than Watergate, and the party took years to recover from that.”

  “We have to think about the president,” Archer said desperately.

  “Yes, we do,” Thayer said, “have to think about the president.” He sat; the meeting was over.

  “Is this our copy?” Callendar said as he rose.

  “No. It’s the only one I know to exist, but when it surfaces again, we’ll all know it didn’t come from me.” He reached for it. Callendar reluctantly handed it back, and he and Archer filed out.

  EZEKIEL ARCHER SUMMONED a hasty meeting in his office. The White House counsel, Barney “Big Dog” Jonas, a lawyer and rancher who had been Justice’s Attorney General in Texas, and the First Lady were invited. Jonas showed up, big, red-faced, and rumpled; the First Lady sent her chief of staff, a hard-eyed woman in a severe gray suit named Mary-Kate Houston. Zeke was angered that the First Lady couldn’t be bothered to attend in person; Mary-Kate wouldn’t know anything useful.

  Zeke laid out the information he had received from Mavis Mills. Mary-Kate shrugged; said she’d ask Clarissa. Big Dog whistled. “If’n you think this is bad campaign stuff, you’re going to need a sharper knife than me.”

  “We need Clarissa’s input,” Archer said pointedly. “We need to know, know, whether this is corrupt or not.”

  “Well,” Mary-Kate said breezily, “I’m sure there’s no problem, but perhaps I could call Clarissa?”

  “Please do,” Zeke said, handing her his phone. Mary-Kate looked a bit miffed by the abruptness of his tone, but dialed a number and spoke a few soft words. She hung up and pushed the phone back toward the Chief of Staff. “She’ll be down in a minute,” Mary-Kate said triumphantly.

  THE FIRST LADY made her entrance, arms crossed over her ample breasts and a thoroughly pissed-off look on her face. “What?” Clarissa all but shouted. Zeke buzzed his secretary for refreshments while Big Dog and Mary-Kate looked at the carpet.

  “Little Cheyenne Development, Clarissa,” Zeke said, holding his temper. How I hate this woman, he thought. “A reporter is digging; looking for some connection to the president or his campaign, or both. What can you tell me?”

  Clarissa preened her glossy black hair. “That was years ago. I set up the corporation for Jerry Earl and Susan McCray, who, as you well know, own Uvalde Savings and have a lot of property in the area. I did some early closings when we were in Austin. I hardly remember it.”

  “You remember J J Early?”

  Clarissa did, but not with favor. He had, she knew, in addition to his other services to the governor, arranged trysts for Justice and a host of women of low degree. “Of course I do.”

  “He drove out there after hearing a rumor that the money collected had never gone into the ground. Apparently it hasn’t.”

  “Judas priest,” Big Dog whispered. “How much money?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I will,” Zeke said. “The information I do have suggests tens of millions.”

  Clarissa leaped to her feet. “I won’t be interrogated by you, Zeke Archer. My work on Little Cheyenne was over years ago, and completely proper.” She stalked out of the office, Mary-Kate scurrying behind.

  “How bad’s this going to be?” Big Dog almost whispered.

  “Bad, I guess. We better think about damage control.”

  “The president’s not flying too high right now.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Zeke rose from his chair and rubbed his aching back. “You know how to find the Mormon?”

  “Yeah, he’s technically on my staff. But he’s, well, close, to the First Lady.”

  “Find him anyway. We need to know what we can about a reporter, presumably from Washington but maybe not, named Charles Taylor.”

  Big Dog Jonas pulled his bulk from the chair with a sigh. “Why not use the FBI? They do this stuff better than the Mormon and his New Zealot thugs.”

  “Think about it, Big Dog.”

  “Right,” Big Dog said, after a momentary hesitation.

  “I’ll find Jim Bob.”

  2

  COBRA WAS MET at the airport in Lisbon by a man with a crudely lettered sign with the name from his Belgian passport. The handler was dressed as a limousine driver, and he did indeed have a dusty Mercedes waiting at the curb. Limo drivers were a favorite dodge in the intelligence business, because nobody noticed them around airports or hotels.

  The driver slid the big car into light early-morning traffic and soon deposited Cobra at the sixties-era tower that was the Ritz Hotel, to Cobra’s eyes the only ugly Ritz in the world. The driver took Cobra’s light case and his carry-on out of the trunk and handed them to a porter. He then climbed back into his car and drove away without having said a single word.

  Cobra had slept reasonably well on the plane as it flew all night over the dark expanse of West Africa, so he checked in, showered and changed, and went down to breakfast.

  He bought an International Herald Tribune and went into the nearly empty dining room. He ordered tea, fruit and a soft-boiled egg in passable Portuguese. The two lead stories in the paper concerned the continuing buildup of American military power in the Persian Gulf area, and an account of how two unarmed aircraft flown from Miami by a Cuban exile group had been shot down over international waters. On the inside was an excerpt from a speech by Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s grandson and successor, Ernesto, called by his people simply “Nieto,” made to the U.N. General Assembly hours after the crash. Nieto had called the flights “provocative invasions of Cuba’s sovereign airspace.” A smaller article said that one of the American carrier battle groups on its way home from the Mediterranean had been diverted toward the Florida Strait.

  Cobra turned to the worldwide weather page. Nothing on the map to indicate rains in southwest South Africa. He finished his breakfast and walked out into bright sunshine. He was about to ask the doorman for a taxi when the black Mercedes that had brought him from the airport slid into position in front of the hotel.

  Cobra would have preferred to be on his own, without watchers, but he figured he’d be less conspicuous in the limo than being tailed by it. Besides, he’d done nothing yet. He climbed into the backseat as the driver held the door, and described where he wanted to go: the old citadel for a view of the Portuguese capital, then the monument to Prince Henry the Navigator on the beach across the harbor from the busy commercial port, then on to lunch at the best fresh fish and shellfish restaurant the driver could find.

  The driver nodded, but didn’t speak. Cobra wondered whether he could.

  Cobra made an easy day, ended with dinner in t
he old city and entertainment by the Fado, a haunting, romantically sad but beautiful song style unique to Portugal.

  In the morning, he paid his bill with the Belgian’s credit card and asked for a car for the airport. One was waiting, the concierge said. He went outside; a different but similar Mercedes with a different driver. He had been handed off.

  When he reached the terminal for Air Portugal, where the driver had dropped him without instruction, he went to the men’s room. Using a very sharp pair of scissors he carried with his shaving gear, he cut up all the Belgian documents including the credit card into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

  He emerged as a Frenchman from Martinique, and walked the hundred or so meters to the adjoining terminal, where he checked in for his Continental Airlines flight for Washington/Dulles. He saw no one watching him, but he would have bet they were there.

  COBRA’S PLANE TOUCHED down at Dulles, fifteen minutes early. He took his bags from the overhead locker and filed off the plane. Immediately after he cleared customs and immigration with barely a glance at the French documents, he went down through baggage claim, where he was met by a uniformed chauffeur and another man in plain clothes. The limousine, a Lincoln this time, waited at the curb with a third man in the driver’s seat. Cobra tried to get a look at the license plate but was hustled into the car. The uniformed man got in front and the plainclothesman got in back and the car pulled out immediately into the vast parking lot of Dulles Airport. The plainclothesman wore a cheap and sweet cologne. He opened a briefcase and extracted a black hood. “Put this on, please. Normal security.”

  Cobra complied without protest. It was sound tradecraft; Cobra didn’t want to know these men.

  Moments later the car pulled over and stopped, and Cobra heard doors opening, low voices, and the doors slammed. Cobra was not touched. The limo accelerated onto a highway. Cobra had never been to Washington, but he knew the locals called the expressway that really went to Dulles and nowhere else, “the driveway.”

  The sweet cologne was gone. Cobra had been handed off again.

  After an hour, as best Cobra could guess, the limousine turned off high-speed roads onto a paved but rougher track. He had no idea where he was being taken, but he noticed he smell of flowering plants and trees, and the air, blowing in from the driver’s window, grew cooler.

  Mountains, he thought, thinking of home. Maryland? No, Virginia, he guessed, west of the capital. Cobra relaxed and dozed.

  3

  CLARISSA ALCOTT TOLLIVER was the daughter of a dirt-poor cotton farmer in the Nueces Valley of south Texas and a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl who had waded the big river. Neither of these details were in her official biography, but she wasn’t ashamed of her heritage. Her mother, Luz Ruiz, was beautiful until the hard work made her old before she was thirty. She taught her only daughter, made her go to church and study at school even though her father, a kindly man but nearly illiterate, would have preferred the child to work in the fields.

  Clarissa grew up fast. Her friends teased her for her “hot Mexican blood” because her breasts and hips grew round and womanly when she was barely twelve. Her father began to look at her in a different way, and to hug and fondle her more than he had when she was little. One day her mother caught the farmer stroking the girl’s breasts through her thin cotton T-shirt. Luz grabbed her daughter and hustled her to her room at the back of the shack, pulling the curtain behind her. Clarissa didn’t understand; wasn’t Daddy just being nice? Clarissa heard her parents’ loud argument through the thin wall, and the sound of blows and breaking furniture. Clarissa pressed herself into a corner of the tiny room and sobbed. The fight subsided but nobody came to let her out, and there was no supper that night.

  In the morning, her mother, with two black eyes and bruises on her arms and throat, packed Clarissa’s few belongings in a cardboard box and took the girl out to the dusty red pickup. Clarissa didn’t see her father. Luz drove the rickety old Ford faster than she should have to Loma Alta, where she and Clarissa went to Mass every Sunday. She left the child sitting in the nearly empty church and went off to find the priest.

  An hour later Clarissa was enrolled in the parish school as a boarding student. She wouldn’t know it for years, but Luz had given the priest the family’s life savings for tuition.

  Clarissa graduated at the top of her class and received a full scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. Her parents came to graduation. Clarissa’s mother wept and embraced her; her father shook hands stiffly and looked at his cracked boots.

  Clarissa stayed in Austin right through law school, going home only once for her mother’s funeral. Luz died at the age of thirty-seven from abuse and overwork. After the funeral, Clarissa never saw her father again.

  Even with scholarships and student loans, Clarissa had to work part-time to support herself. Despite her striking good looks—olive skin, perfectly smooth, her mother’s hair as black and shiny as a raven’s wing, her face set off by her father’s striking blue eyes—she made few friends; she had so little time. She passed the bar on her first try in 1986 and was recruited by the law firm of Henry and Villard, one of Austin’s best regarded. In 1990 she became the only woman and the youngest person ever to be made partner. Her specialty was real estate law, and one of her new clients was the Uvalde County Savings and Loan Society. She met and became friends with the freewheeling couple who ran the bank and its many subsidiaries, Jerry Earl and Susan McCray, who were often in Austin, doing deals with the state government. Susan introduced Clarissa to Rupert Justice Tolliver, a darkly handsome man who had done well for himself while preaching the word of the Lord. Susan whispered that Rupert had political ambitions and powerful backers, and would go far. Clarissa started to see more and more of Brother Justice, and when he told her of his plan to run for governor and maybe reach higher than that, she ended her longtime clandestine relationship with Henry and Villard’s married senior partner, and married the Hill Country preacher.

  CLARISSA WENT DIRECTLY from her meeting with Zeke Archer to the Oval Office. She glared at Jenna Carradine and demanded, “Who’s he got in there?”

  “The Secretary of Defense.”

  “Buzz him. Telling I’m here and it can’t wait.”

  Jenna did as she was told. Clarissa was the only person in Washington she truly feared. Clarissa paced like a caged cat for ten minutes, then the Secretary, Carolyn White, looking very upset, emerged and hurried away without a word. Clarissa shot past Jenna’s desk and into the Oval Office.

  BIG DOG JONAS waved the Mormon into his West Wing Office on the third floor of the White House almost directly above the Oval Office. “Sit down, Jim Bob. Coffee? No, of course not. Something else?”

  Jim Bob Slate helped himself to a glass of ice water from the stainless steel thermos on the sideboard and took a seat in front of the White House Counsel desk. “We got us a problem,” Big Dog continued. “How much do you know about Little Cheyenne development?”

  Jim Bob gulped. More than he cared to, was the truth. “Very little. Clarissa—the First Lady—did some legal work, way back.”

  Big Dog opened a large folder. “There’s been a reporter, we think from right here in the capital, down there looking at the land records. These are copies of what he had copied. See the signature where it says ‘attorney for the seller’?”

  Jim Bob leafed through the copies. The attorney for the seller was always Clarissa Alcott; she’d kept her maiden name for her legal work. “I see it.”

  “Look at the dates on these last few.”

  “October 2000.”

  “Not so way back, Jim Bob.”

  “No.”

  “No. Now we know what this damn reporter’s got. What do you suppose he can make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim Bob lied.

  “Zeke Archer got a call from a local banker. Republican bigwig, but no friend of this administration. Says money came into that development through Uvalde County Savings, that scoundr
el Jerry Earl McCray’s little bank. Big money, Jim Bob, right before the election and right around the inauguration.”

  The Mormon knew all that. He knew all the dirty tricks of the campaign; all the shady finances. He had been Clarissa’s errand boy; her bag man. “What’s this banker going to do?”

  “Nothing, we guess. He seems to see this as our mess and he’s concerned about the party if not about us. We’re more concerned about the reporter, and his source.”

  “You want this—looked into, Big Dog?”

  “Yes. The name the reporter uses is Charles Taylor. Nobody I know or Zeke knows, so he’s nobody big. But we don’t want any young gunslinger doing a Woodward and Bernstein on us.”

  Zeke Archer walked into the office and sat next to the Mormon. “Hello, Jim Bob. Big Dog explain our problem?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find the reporter. We’ll have to buy him or discredit him.”

  “What about the source?” Big Dog said. “I’m guessing the reporter has whatever the banker has; why else he hightail it down to south Texas?”

  “I have a thought about that,” Zeke said. “Should have come to me earlier, but here it is. J J Early—you know him, ran security for the president when he was governor—called me. Said he heard a rumor, so he drove out to Little Cheyenne and found two things: nearly no work done and none in progress, and this Charles Taylor snooping around. Asked J J where he got the rumor; he refused to say. But before he called, Mavis Mills, the County Clerk down Uvalde, called to tell me people been out to look at the land records. One didn’t identify himself; we make him Taylor. The other was J J, and someone Mavis thought might be his daughter. Ring any bells?”