The Fourth Perimeter

  What Claiborne knew obviously disturbed Kurt a great deal, but as with everything else that had taken place, he was determined to proceed no matter what the cost. Anyway, for Kurt there was a clearly defined sense of destiny to everything that was happening. Even the way he had been able to escape his captor the night before suggested that his plan was somehow predestined to succeed. So he forgot about what Claiborne was or wasn’t thinking and got back to his own mission.

  An even more disturbing moment had come shortly after Kurt showed Morris and Claiborne to the garage. He immediately repaired to the veranda with a cup of coffee and the paper where he could carefully watch the Service’s activities. He was unmoved by their invasive swarm until he saw two agents make their way toward the boathouse. He knew they would search the boat, mainly for explosive devices, and he figured that unless someone was unusually suspicious, they wouldn’t be looking for false compartments under a tool chest. Still, he hurried down after them and casually walked inside just as they were about to go over the boat with a magnetometer.

  “I’ve got to check my rigging,” he explained. “I’ll just wait until you guys are done.”

  When the agents came to the tool chest, Kurt watched with a placid face that belied his anxiety. The wand emitted a shrill yelp. The cover was lifted, and an extremely embarrassing moment ensued as the agents extracted the two pistols. With shocked faces, they turned to Kurt, who smiled sheepishly.

  “They’re flare guns, guys,” he said with a foolish grin. “Don’t worry. If they bother you, take ’em out. I imagine if we need help today we won’t have to signal for it.”

  The agents smiled inanely. “Maybe I’ll just keep them at the command post until later,” the senior of the two said, looking the pistols over curiously. “Not for me, but you know how the supervisors can be, sir. I don’t want them coming down on me.”

  “It’s been a while,” Kurt said, “but don’t worry about me. It’s not a problem. I understand completely.”

  And then, to Kurt’s relief, after a cursory glance back in the chest at the remaining tools, the lid was shut. The boat was sanctioned clean. Kurt exhaled long and slow. Despite his calm exterior, that moment had been a difficult one.

  Now, unless Claiborne had some kind of bizarre resurrection of loyalties, the way was completely clear. All that changed in an instant, however.

  The entourage arrived at the dock, where the president posed briefly with Kurt. But when Kurt opened the boathouse door, his entire plan was put into peril as Mack Taylor announced he was going to accompany them in the fishing boat.

  CHAPTER 36

  T here were dozens of people around Kurt and the president, all of them awash in the summer sun. The media was bunched up behind a roped-off area on the grass. Agents scurried over the docks, loading themselves onto the two large chase boats, thirty-two-foot scarabs requisitioned from the New York State Police. Despite all that, Kurt felt like he was on a stage, in the glare of a spotlight with the entire world looking on in total silence. The players were himself, dressed in water shoes, a black knee-length swimsuit, and a beige polo shirt; the president, in golf slacks, shirt, and loafers; and Mack Taylor, standing rigid in a pair of khakis and a loose-fitting navy windbreaker that covered his own personal armament. The president was silent. The unspoken conflict was between Kurt and the vicious-looking agent.

  From his years of experience as a sophisticated businessman, Kurt quelled his instinctive urge to squash Taylor. The man had no right to insert himself into Kurt’s tête-à-tête with the president. It had all been prearranged. Kurt had already slipped his check for five million dollars into Butch Reynolds’s greedy hands, and in exchange the president had committed to take a three-hour fishing trip with just him. Kurt had been explicit with Reynolds about his requirements. Reynolds had consulted with Marty Mulligan, who had in turn spoken directly to the president. They had assured him that it would be just the two of them on Kurt’s boat.

  But Kurt knew there was no sense in looking to the nearby Reynolds. Taylor was savvy and his instincts were correct. A boating trip was the one situation in the Service’s protocol that substantially loosened the fourth perimeter by stretching it all the way onto the flanking chase boats. Taylor was a part of the fourth perimeter, and he wanted it tightened down, right there at the president’s side. There was only one man who could alter the agent’s intended course of action, and that man couldn’t be challenged on the terms of the deal that had been struck between Kurt and Reynolds. That man had to be subtly manipulated.

  “Mr. President,” Kurt said in a low but pleasant tone, “I understand Agent Taylor’s desire to get in on some of the best fishing in the world, but I have some things I need to talk to you about that are highly sensitive.”

  The president gave Kurt a practiced look of confusion, as if he couldn’t imagine that anyone, let alone Kurt, would have anything to say that needed to be kept private.

  “There are some technical aspects to my business, Mr. President,” Kurt softly explained, “that I had planned to reveal to you based on a purely confidential meeting. Of course, I know that a Secret Service agent is nothing if not completely trustworthy. The problem isn’t with Agent Taylor at all. It’s with me, with my own discomfort. I hope you don’t mind, sir.”

  The president looked at Taylor, who seemed to be staring back at him with unusual intensity.

  During the pause, Kurt put his hand gently on the president’s shoulder and said, “Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate your tolerance.”

  The president balked. Taylor began to speak.

  “Mr. President, I—”

  “No, that’s quite all right, Mack,” Parkes said, holding up his hand and cutting Taylor off. “I’ll be fine.”

  That was it. There was no arguing with the president. Kurt knew it, and Taylor knew it. The SAIC gave Kurt a malignant look, but did as he was told.

  “This way, Mr. President,” Kurt said, leading Parkes into the boathouse.

  Kurt helped the president on board and showed him to the high bench seat, which was even with the captain’s chair but on the port side of the boat.

  “How about a beer, Mr. President?” Kurt said.

  “That would be fine,” the president said. He was still a little stiff, but Kurt presumed that after a few drinks and some time out on the water, he would loosen up. Although it wasn’t always possible for a president to relax in the company of a major donor who he presumed was going to try to influence him on some legislative issue, Kurt was confident the uniqueness of the setting would prevail.

  Kurt served the president his cold Michelob Light and opened one for himself that was mainly for show. He backed the boat out of the boathouse and eased it around. As he opened the throttle, the two scarabs joined him on either flank like dogs on a leash. Soon they were out in the middle of the lake.

  “I thought we might troll for a bit, Mr. President,” Kurt said, eyeing his old friend Claiborne, who stood next to the scarab’s driver, sunglasses on, staring straight ahead like a robot. Kurt, wearing sunglasses of his own, was able to examine the president’s reaction without appearing to stare. Parkes wore the bland look of a man who wished he were somewhere else.

  Kurt felt the nasty hatred well up inside him and he fantasized about running right that moment to the stern of the boat, pulling out his pistol, and wiping the expression off the man’s face with a 9mm hollow-point slug. But he was too prudent to allow even the capricious vision to distract him from his carefully laid plan, and he pushed it from his thoughts.

  He left the wheel, and while the boat idled slowly forward, he tossed a pair of flame-orange planing boards off either side. After reeling out enough line for the boards to drift a good fifty feet from the boat, Kurt attached a line with a lure to a wire hoop and clipped it onto another hoop that drifted all the way down and out to the board. After repeating the process on the other side and setting the poles in tubelike holders that extended out away from the boat, he set up two
more rods on either corner of the stern that would drag lures directly behind them. In this way, they were able to troll four lures across a space of more than a hundred feet.

  The president watched, apparently without interest.

  “When the pole snaps up,” Kurt said as he retook the wheel, “that means we’ve got a strike and you just grab the pole, set the hook, and start reeling.”

  The president grunted and asked about another beer. Kurt got him one from the cooler and, after handing it to him, launched into his prepared pitch on the Internet tax. His argument was watered down substantially compared to what it would have been if he knew it really mattered, and his low-key approach seemed to be a relief to the president.

  Kurt finished by holding up his hand and saying, “Mr. President, I want you to know that I realize what your position is and I appreciate your willingness to take this opportunity to listen to me.”

  “I think it always makes sense to listen to industry leaders whenever new legislation is at hand,” the president said diplomatically. “Of course, my job is a difficult one. With every move I make as president, some people are happy, while others are concerned. But my job is to lead—that’s what the people elected me to do.”

  Here, Parkes looked pointedly at Kurt, his pale blue eyes blazing, and said, “People will look back for generations to come and understand that this moment in our country’s history was a crossroads. And they’ll understand that the difficult task of imposing a tax on the Internet is what will have preserved the government of this great country for the future. They’ll remember that Calvin Parkes, struggling against powerful interests in the technology industry, was able to assert his leadership and make a difference, preserving the very democracy that made the technological revolution possible in the first place.

  “This tax, Mr. Ford, will take the huge rewards from that revolution out of the hands of a few and redistribute it, through the federal government, to the many.”

  Kurt had no intention of going any further, but he was struck by the president’s vehemence, and he, like all billionaires, was quite accustomed to voicing his own opinions.

  “You sound very much like a Democrat, Mr. President,” he heard himself say.

  Instead of boiling, the president’s swarthy red face broke out in a broad white smile. “And therein, Mr. Ford, lies the greatness,” he said quietly. “Therein is the achievement. I will have gone beyond the restraints of traditional party-driven issues. Like any great leader who wishes to make a mark, my move is a bold one . . .”

  Kurt smiled grimly at the man’s prodigious ego. Clearly such a man wouldn’t hesitate to take the life of a young boy who somehow stood in the way of his own grand plan for permanent and personal glorification. Kurt was also suddenly aware that Collin’s death was somehow related to this issue. It was the kind of event that tilted the balance of fortune and power, and anytime you had that, you also had people who were willing to kill for it. Only something so monumental, Kurt believed, could so thoroughly corrupt the office of the president.

  “Not many fish in this lake, are there?” the president said, snapping Kurt from his reverie.

  “Would you like another beer?” Kurt asked in response. As he got it, he said, “I’ll try changing the lures, sometimes that works . . . I wish those scarabs weren’t so close.”

  The president eyed his men standing on post in the big white rumbling boats on either side of them. “Do they matter?”

  Kurt shrugged and said, “Probably. They’ve been drifting up and back pretty close to those lures on the planing boards. They spook the fish.”

  Kurt smiled to himself as the president popped out of his seat and shouted out across the water for Mack Taylor to give them some more space. Kurt had rigged the lines with lures that typically didn’t attract the lake trout that populated Skaneateles Lake. He knew that any person on a fishing boat, experienced or not, grew weary of not having a single sign of action after a while, and he bet on the president’s frustration to help him back the Secret Service boats off a ways. He knew that after a time the agents would grow comfortable with the space and probably maintain it throughout the afternoon. And for Kurt, even ten feet could mean the difference between success and failure, life and death.

  After two more beers for the president and some limited action on the new lures Kurt put out, he took a deep breath and flipped on his GPS. He wasn’t far from the city water intake. As he reeled in the lines, he apologized to the president and guaranteed him lots of action at their next spot. With the lines on board, Kurt moved slowly forward until he came to a stop over the intake. He idled ever so slightly upwind, looked hard over his stern, saw the underwater buoy, and dropped his anchor. The positioning of the boat would allow the president to simply drop his line over the port side and reel in fish.

  Kurt rerigged a pole with a bobber, baited the hook, and handed it to Parkes.

  “Just cast it out, Mr. President,” Kurt said, “and watch that bobber. You’ll get some action quick.”

  Parkes tossed his line inexpertly off the port rail, and within seconds, the bobber was popping in and out of the water.

  “Set the line,” Kurt cried, “and reel it in.”

  A minute later, Kurt used his net to scoop a two-pound bass out of the lake and into the boat.

  “A good one!” the president said excitedly.

  Kurt took the bass off the hook and held it up for the president to see. Parkes beamed at his fish, glad for some activity after what had started out to be three of the most boring hours of his life.

  The two of them kept fishing, and as they did Kurt noticed from behind his sunglasses the subtle shift in body posture that meant the Secret Service agents on the scarabs were growing more and more relaxed in the waning afternoon sun. The only men on the scarabs who appeared to be on the alert were Mack Taylor off the port bow and David Claiborne off the starboard stern. Each of them stood straight and stared steadily at Kurt’s fishing boat. A cool breeze rippled the water ever so slightly; that pleased Kurt because it would make it harder for anyone to see him once he went down over the side.

  Kurt took off his bobber and cast his line over the top of the intake valve. The president was sitting on the high padded seat directly behind the passenger seat. He was protected from the sun by the canopy, but was still able to have his pole jutting right out over the side of the boat. Kurt reeled in his own line. He caught the hook on what he knew was the cage, and snapped the line with a jerk.

  “Broke my line and lost my sinker,” he said, showing the president the straggling end of his empty line. “I think I need to take this reel apart. I’ve got a pair of pliers here somewhere . . .”

  Kurt felt like he was talking in an empty tunnel. His heart seemed to expand and the blood roared through his body. Time took on a new dimension and he felt as if he were moving in an atmosphere of molasses. He bent down and took the lid off the tool chest. The president pulled a fish right up into the boat with a pleasant yelp and watched it flop on the deck, waiting for Kurt to take the hook from its mouth as if he were a common boat hand.

  Kurt pressed down on both sides of the bottom of the chest. It clicked and sprang gently back up at him. He tilted it, removed the big Browning 9mm, and spun around, sitting firmly on the lowest step in the stern.

  When the president saw the gun, his eyes grew wide and fear stretched his mouth into a perfect circle. He dropped the pole to the deck and uttered a low involuntary moan.

  Kurt felt a tremble in his hands. He glanced briefly down at the gun. The shake felt worse than it looked.

  “I’m going to kill you, Parkes,” he said. His voice sounded steady and calm, but Kurt could feel his face quivering.

  The president’s eyes were crazy with fear, and Kurt absorbed it. He relished it.

  “These are hollow-point slugs,” he hissed. “I’m going to shoot you in the eye. The slug will expand as it passes into your brain and blow out the back of your skull.”

  Besid
es a face suffused with horror, the powerful posture that held Calvin Parkes upright was now gone. Confronted with the end of his life and no way to stop it, his big shoulders sagged. He glanced desperately to the boat off the stern.

  “No, no,” Kurt hissed. “Don’t move. Don’t say a word. That will just bring the end quicker. You want to live. Everyone wants to live, and as long as you do what I say, you get to live, even if it’s just a few seconds. You want that, don’t you?”

  The president choked and nodded.

  “Of course,” Kurt said. He was the spider, Parkes the fly. He wanted to watch him twist and turn. He wanted to drink his panic in long slow gulps.

  “Now, tell me why you had my boy killed,” he said through gritted teeth. “I want to know.” His glare bore down on Parkes and he saw the president’s shock. It was real. The words had hit the man like a truncheon.

  “I didn’t,” he blurted out. “I didn’t have anything to do with your boy. I didn’t! You’re making a mistake! Please, you’re making a mistake!”

  “You knew!” Kurt growled. “You killed them all! Every agent that was at that meeting! You made an off-the-record move three months ago. You went to Maryland in the middle of the night. My boy stood outside that house to guard you! To protect you! To give his life for you if he had to! And you, he saw you with someone he shouldn’t have. They all did and you had them killed. Now I want to know what— I want to know what it was that cost my boy his life, because now it’s going to cost you yours.”