The President's Henchman

by Joseph Flynn

  Unless you knew Dark Alley.

  “I know where he’s going,” Welborn said of Cowan. “Where he wanted to go, anyway.”

  “Where’s that?” Leo asked.

  They were loafing along at 140 mph. Welborn had grown accustomed to the speed. Liked it actually. He was able to enjoy the velocity without worrying about g-forces messing up his inner ear. The navy blue Viper was a mile or so ahead.

  They didn’t have to worry about losing Cowan any longer.

  “He hoped to take the Beltway to Route 50. From there you go east, and you’re in Annapolis. Where Cowan has a lot of Naval Academy buddies. Or go west and you come to Landover. Where Colonel Linberg lives. Unless she’s moved out by now.”

  Welborn had given Leo an overview of his case earlier that night.

  “So which is it? The guys or the babe?”

  “He’s got to know he won’t get away. So if I was him —”

  “The babe.”

  “Colonel Linberg, definitely.”

  “Too bad,” Leo said. “He had his only chance for female company earlier tonight.”

  The fact was, Dexter Cowan was already caught. He just hadn’t given up spinning his wheels. His critical mistake had been getting on the Beltway. Acting with admirable speed, the highway cops in Maryland and Virginia had shepherded all other traffic to the shoulder of the road, or off it entirely, as circumstance allowed, and then the cops did what Leo said they wouldn’t. They set up roadblocks.

  At every exit and entry ramp on the whole of the I-495 loop.

  They didn’t use valuable police cruisers to do it. Oh, no. They brought in hundreds of out-of-service school buses and stacked them four deep across every ramp. They’d learn later that a pragmatic highway patrol officer working on the homeland security problem of how to trap terrorists driving a car bomb on the Beltway had come up with the idea. And it worked like a charm on a naval officer fleeing arrest. If Cowan wanted to end his days by turning his fancy car into a pile of scrap metal, more power to him.

  Welborn and Leo followed along to make the bust in case Cowan saw the light of reason.

  “I’ve been thinking about one or two things since all the excitement went out of the evening,” Leo said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “First off, that lady out in Falls Church, the captain’s wife.”

  “Arlene.”

  “I was wondering if what she did, prancing around up there in the altogether, maybe that was a signal for our boy to take off. Which he surely did.”

  “Most people would think the opposite. Come hither, you know.”

  “Well, yeah. But these two were getting a divorce. And what if even when things were good between them, she’d always liked to do it in the dark? He comes home tonight, sees her all brazen like she was, what’s he going to think?”

  Welborn thought even a bonehead like Cowan would figure out something was wrong. He’d take off. Which was exactly what he did. And Arlene had expressed to Welborn her regrets at betraying her mate. Damnit! But how the hell could he prove complicity? There was no way. So he was going to write it up that Arlene had cooperated. He owed her that much … he thought.

  So much of his job, it turned out, hadn’t been covered at Glynco.

  “What else are you thinking?” Welborn asked Leo.

  “Well, let’s say our boy hadn’t taken off. He goes inside, has his roll with the wife, she gets emotional as women are apt to do, and she confesses. Now we’ve got ourselves a hostage situation. What would you have done then?”

  Looking at the road ahead, Welborn said, “I think he’s slowing down.”

  “I believe you’re right. Out of gas most likely.”

  “If he’d taken Arlene hostage, I’d have taken his car hostage.”

  Leo grinned. “You think his car would mean more to him than his wife?”

  “The Viper is his new love.”

  “Good point.”

  “Hey, what the hell’s he doing?” Welborn asked.

  “That there’s called a bootlegger’s turn; it was nicely done, too.”

  Cowan had spun his Viper counterclockwise 180 degrees.

  He was headed straight back at the Chevy.

  Closing speed between the two vehicles was already over 200 mph and climbing.

  “Nurse, please.”

  Daryl Cheveyo had awakened from a nap and remembered everything: who he was supposed to see; who was in danger; who was the threat. Respectively, they were the Deputy Director of Intelligence; James J. McGill, the president’s husband; and Dr. Damon Todd, the off-center psychiatrist who wanted to join the CIA and start a program of crafted personalities.

  Todd had been casing McGill’s office building on P Street.

  The DD needed to know about that.

  The nurse entered his room, took one look at him, and said, “You’re feeling better, aren’t you? You look better. Let me get the doctor.”

  “Yeah, get him. But first get me the deputy director.”

  The nurse’s eyes narrowed. Maybe the patient wasn’t fully recovered.

  “Please,” Cheveyo said in a calm voice. “I’m rational. I know what I’m doing. He’ll want to talk with me. A very important person’s life might be in danger at this very moment.”

  Dark Alley taught that if someone came at you with a bat, you became a baseball. If you had room, you were a knuckleball, dancing crazily just out of reach while the batter took his cut and missed. If you didn’t have room, you were a fastball thrown at the batter’s head. That way he had to drop the bat and get the hell out of the way.

  McGill didn’t have room.

  He shot forward and thrust out the heel of his left hand. You didn’t want to use a bare fist against somebody’s noggin; too easy to break your knuckles. The meaty part of the bottom of the palm was perfect for slamming into someone’s forehead. Usually when that happened, the head snapped back, the brain ricocheted around inside the skull, and as often as not cervical vertebrae lost their structural integrity. Paralysis and death were not uncommon consequences.

  In this case, however, things didn’t work out quite according to form. The batter’s head didn’t snap back. He was knocked off his feet, landed on his ass with a thump, and lost his grip on the bat, which rolled away from him. But the blow wasn’t the decisive one it should have been.

  The assailant’s neck had been too strong to allow for a whiplash effect. Chances were that if someone had gone to the trouble of building up his neck muscles to that extent, he’d likely done the same with the rest of his body. It was enough to make McGill glad he still had his gun in his right hand.

  “Damon Todd?” he asked.

  He got no answer, but the man he’d knocked down got up. Wasn’t unsteady on his feet, either. Held his body like he was ready to try McGill again.

  “Pay attention,” McGill said. “I’ve got a gun in my hand.”

  The guy laughed. “The last asshole who pointed a gun at me, I choked to death.”

  McGill fired a round past the guy’s head. Just past it. Close enough to make him jump.

  “Thanks for the confession. Try me, and your choking days will be over.”

  McGill waited. Gave the guy a chance to make a kamikaze run if he wanted. Was just as glad when he didn’t. Perhaps the gunshot ringing in his ears had dropped his testosterone level a notch or two. For the moment, anyway.

  He said, “I’m going to back into my office now, and you’re going to follow me. You’ll keep the same interval we have now. You’ll take a seat in my guest chair. Once you’re seated, you’ll slide the chair back against the wall behind it. Any of this too complicated for you?”

  The guy grunted. Then he asked, “And if I don’t?”

  McGill fired another round. Just to the other side of the guy’s head.

  “I’ve got you bracketed now. Next one’s straight up the middle.”

  He took a step back; the guy took a step forward.

  McGill said, “Just so
you know, I’m firing steel-jacketed rounds. You try to dive to either side of the doorway, I’ll shoot right through the wall. I’ll get you. Long before my clip’s empty.”

  There was no dispute on that point. McGill backed around his desk. The guy followed into his office and sat down. The streetlight through McGill’s windows was brighter than the hallway light had been in the outer office. McGill could see who he was dealing with.

  “You’re Todd, all right.”

  A crazed hypertrophied version of the man he’d seen in the photo with Chana, but Todd nonetheless. A shrink who needed to be shrunk.

  “Push your chair back against the wall.”

  Todd did as he was told. He stared at McGill.

  The president’s henchman sat in his own chair and picked up his desk phone. He heard no dial tone when he brought it to his ear. Todd smiled as if he’d put one over on him.

  “You like music?” McGill asked.

  The smile on Todd’s face turned into a look of puzzlement. Which was all the answer McGill needed. The SOB hadn’t gone into A-Sharp Sound. If he had, he would have understood the question. Had something to say about Max Lucey’s recording studio downstairs.

  “Well, never mind about that,” McGill said. “You’ve disabled my office phone; I forgot my cell phone when I rushed out of the house. We’ll just have to sit here and wait until someone comes along, and I can ask them to call the cops. Might not be until morning, so relax.”

  McGill hoped help would arrive sooner rather than later. Max should have found Dikki on his doorstep by now. With any luck, Max was calling 911 at that very moment.

  But McGill wanted Todd to relax. Think he had all night to get out of his current predicament. Not try to force the issue until it was too late.

  It was all a question of whether Todd had bought his lie.

  Chapter 37

  The Obregon brothers, Alberto, Bartolo, Ciro, and Dario had just taken their Fountain 38 Lightning, El Matador, out to sea from the Cuban exiles’ base in Costa Gorda. The boat had twin MerCruiser 500-horsepower engines and a top speed of 88 mph. The fuel tank had been enlarged from 260 gallons to 400 gallons to make the trip to Miami nonstop.

  Best of all, El Matador had clearance from the Department of Defense to enter U.S. waters without hindrance from the Coast Guard. Those pendejos with their cutters and helicopters had been told to keep their hands off the Obregon boys and their boat. And why not? Weren’t they fighting to free Cuba from godless communism?

  Sí! The president himself had said so. Not the mujer who was in the White House now, but the president from before. Even the new one, though, let them continue to do their work.

  Part of which, as they saw it, was to take regular shipments of cocaine from Central America to Miami. After all, what was the point of freeing Cuba from Fidel if you couldn’t return as a rich man? Selling the load of powder they had aboard that night would allow them to reclaim all the land the Bearded One had stolen from their family so many years ago.

  Partly to celebrate that fact and partly to give them energy for the long voyage to Miami, the brothers had partaken of the wares that would make them rich men and aristocrats in their homeland once again. Their futures would be glorious. Any recalcitrant communist peasants who dared to defy them, they would crush like hormigas.

  Just as they had disposed of the rabble at the produce market they had blown up.

  To reach their destination with fuel in reserve, they needed to cruise at no more than twenty knots. But there was no fun in that. No manliness. Push the speed up to forty knots, and they would run out of gas a quarter mile from their slip at the marina … but their momentum would carry them the rest of the way. Let them jump up onto the dock and tie off their beautiful boat with a flourish. That was what men would do, and it was what they did.

  Their machismo, their honor, and the coke racing through their veins demanded it. Nothing could stop them. But then Dario, the youngest, looked ahead, and his eyes widened.

  “Madre de Dios.”

  His brothers followed his gaze, and they saw it, too. The fix might have been in with the U.S. Coast Guard, but the ship that had just come into view flew the Cuban flag.

  Apparently, somebody forgot to pay off Fidel’s navy.

  Then Alberto, the eldest, grasped the true significance of what they were seeing.

  “The communists attack our base!” he yelled. “Hermanos, a los brazos!”

  Brothers, to arms!

  “Skipper, the bogey has changed course,” the radarman on the bridge of the faux-Marti said. “It’s headed straight at us.”

  “A ramming course?” the captain asked incredulously.

  “Yes, sir. Unless it changes course.”

  “Light him up.”

  Radar-linked, hundred-thousand-candlepower searchlights cut through the night.

  “It’s a speedboat for Christ’s sake. Fiberglass. Can’t be more that forty feet,” the captain said. “Damn thing couldn’t chip our paint.”

  The Marti had tracked the radar blip from the moment it left port. The captain had been content to let it go on its way. But now that it was on an insane suicide run …

  A beadwork of white dots appeared from the onrushing craft.

  “Small-arms fire, Skipper.”

  These dumb fucks were starting to annoy the captain. And it occurred to him, times being what they were, that even a light craft could be loaded to the gunwales with high explosives. So he told his weapons systems officer, “Use the 30mm gun. Chew his ass up. Don’t let that sonofabitch impact our hull.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the officer replied.

  The 30 mm gun began to spit out fifty rounds per second, and the first second undoubtedly would have got the job done. The fiberglass hull of El Matador flew apart like a dandelion in a hurricane. Then the fuel tank exploded. A geyser of fire shot skyward as if a volcano had erupted from the surface of the sea. The shock wave from the blast rocked the Marti.

  The thunderous roar caused a sudden flurry of activity onshore; the exiles’ base had been notified it was under attack.

  “Cease fire with the thirty,” the captain said. “Now that we have everyone’s attention, let’s open up with the seventy-six.”

  Using its fire-control radar, and the national technical assets flying overhead, the Marti began to shell the base with its big gun. The navy personnel were skilled at their jobs. Base infrastructure would be destroyed, but no additional casualties would be reported.

  Heavy machine-gun fire opened up from the shoreline, but that came exclusively from the American advisors on hand in the camp, and they, too, had been ordered to cause no harm.

  It was said no battle plan survived its first contact with the enemy, but the president’s hope that no blood be spilled in the Costa Gorda Incident, as it came to be known, was very nearly achieved.

  Would have been if not for the assholes in the speedboat.

  Fucking Navy guy, Welborn thought. Just like one to try a ramming maneuver. USAF pilots didn’t fly their planes into things. It wasn’t the way an airman got things done. The Navy, on the other hand, had its own distinct traditions, seeing whose hulls and skulls were thicker being one of them. The navy blue Viper rushed at them like a bullet in one of those special-effects flicks. Where you could see it coming inch by inch. Even though you knew it was moving at incredible speed.

  Fuck. Welborn could see Dex Cowan’s face. Getting closer, closer, closer. Guy looked like he was wearing a death mask. His life was already over, and, as long as he was going, he thought he might as well take Welborn and Leo with him.

  A sidelong glance, the most Welborn would dare risk, showed him that Leo was looking mighty grim-faced himself. He had his hands set on the Chevy’s steering wheel at ten and two and showed no sign he planned to go anywhere but straight ahead.

  Welborn remembered Leo saying how big the debris field would be: three counties. But he didn’t think now would be the time to offer a suggestion because you never
knew, Leo might have something in mind. Please, Lord!

  Which, as it turned out, Leo did. He accelerated.

  The increase in speed, the sheer lunatic aggressiveness of the move, must have registered in Cowan’s brain because, for a split second, his own resolve faltered. He eased up on his headlong charge into oblivion. Not that there would have been any avoiding a crash if the cars had continued to travel a straight line.

  But when Leo saw Cowan’s hint of hesitation, he flicked his steering wheel just a hair to the right. The two cars streaked past each other without room for a gnat’s ass between them. For a second, it seemed to Welborn as if Leo would just keep going, make it impossible for Cowan to make another turn and catch them before he ran out of gas. But then they heard a resounding boom behind them. Leo brought the Chevy to a smooth stop in a shorter distance than Welborn would have thought possible and turned the car perpendicular to its lane.

  Looking through Leo’s side window, they saw shards of rubber flying a hundred feet into the night sky. The Viper’s front-right tire had just exploded. The sports car leaned in the direction of the missing tire, riding on its rim at well over a hundred miles per hour. A curtain of sparks shot into the air where metal carved the road surface. The light show continued for half a mile before the front axle gave way. The car leaned onto its right-front end and abruptly started to flip repeatedly, like a toy discarded by an angry child.

  Somewhere in all the horrific somersaulting, Cowan was thrown clear, and he began to cartwheel in the same fashion. As with the Viper, he didn’t stay intact either. The only consolation, if there was one to be had, was that he had to be dead before he was dismembered.

  Welborn took it all in without blinking.

  And thought: No woman was worth that.

  Leo’s focus was on the car.

  He said, “That tire that blew? Somebody fucked with it.”

  Contrary to SAC Crogher’s express order, the cabbie who’d departed with Holmes — aka James J. McGill — in his backseat hadn’t been located by the time the Secret Service boss landed at the White House helipad.