It was mayhem. Others were wounded far worse. Three killed. For these men, the tropical island of Grenada was no paradise.
Ed tugged at his ear, marvelling yet again at the cosmetic surgeon’s work. Hardly a blemish.
On three separate occasions, he had delicately tried to press Isabel into getting the same doctor’s magic to fix the scar that carved across her throat, but she always put up a brick wall.
“It’s my memory,” she’d say simply, then change the subject.
6
THE WESTERLY WIND hurled fragments of London’s distant Big Ben’s chimes up to the 14th floor. Lucky snapped off his cell phone and looking outside said, “Hey, I can see MI6 from up here.”
Jax was thrown, and not just by Lucky’s American twang, tight, like a crab was pinching his lips. “No w-way can you see it,” Jax spluttered, realising too late that contradicting this guy was not smart, even if he knew for a fact that MI6 was behind several bends as the river threaded west, so you couldn’t possibly see it from up here, not at night, not even in daylight.
“Sure you can,” said Diana abruptly, any pretence of her own fake English accent discarded. “I’ll show you.” She twisted Jax’s arm with a grip Lucky would be proud of. “What a view,” she said, manoeuvring Jax over the floor lip onto the windy terrace. “Best view in London,” she added, but oddly she seemed to be looking down the Thames in the opposite direction.
“Who are you g-guys?” Jax flared, trying to twist out of Diana’s grip.
She maintained her grasp and smiled.
“Wh-who are you, d-dammit?” If only he could get Diana to release her hold he could get the hell away from them.
Diana edged him closer to the railing. “We’re y-your f-friends,” she smirked.
To Jax, Diana suddenly appeared like a swooping hawk to a chicken the moment before the talons crush its neck. His heart was pumping faster than the supercomputers he’d done most of his simulation work on. With his free hand he took out of his pocket the remote control the nightwatchman had given him and pressed it so all the lights on the floor came blaring on full, including the bright spots above their heads on the deck, and he prayed someone in one of the other buildings would notice.
“Gimme that,” screeched Diana who snatched the remote away from him. After checking her fingerpads were still fastened, she pointed it in various directions but it made no difference. She hadn’t seen the switch on the back that Jax had flicked to the lock position. “Fix this, you Aussie fuck,” she said, shoving it back at him. “We haven’t got all night.” To make her point, she kneed him in his groin.
Hunched over, Jax slid the switch to unlock and flicked all the lights off at once but, while Diana and Lucky’s eyes were adjusting to the instant blackout, he tossed the remote over the railing and made a dash for the fire stairs.
It would have been easy for Jax to hop over the half-inch drainage lip at the terrace doors even in the dark, if only he had remembered it was there, but he tripped over his shoelace and sprawled out face-down onto the cold concrete floor inside. While he was scrabbling to his feet, Lucky picked him up by his belt and hoisted him back outside, with Jax kicking and punching the air. Then, in one long parabolic sweep, he hurled Jax over the railing.
“Let ’er rip,” was all Jax could hear in the hot wind-rush.
Diana and Lucky peered over… two hundred feet straight down.
Jax’s eyes did all the screaming for him.
With his torch, Lucky lit Diana’s steps back to Jax’s laptop. “Got his disk?” she asked Lucky, and checked her finger pads again. After his affirmative, she deleted the copy on Jax’s hard-drive, careful to empty it out of the computer’s trash can as well. Then out of her back pocket, she slid out a DVD and slotted it into Jax’s drive, running the clean-up program off it so no cleverdick could recreate on the laptop what she’d just deleted.
As Jax plunged, the sweeping copper entrance awning loomed up at him at a sickening speed, and he slammed into it with a force that fortunately he could no longer feel. It bounced his body face-forward over the canopy’s edge into the air, in a belly-flop dive that skewered him with a sickening thook onto the bronze spike of Robbie Burns’ quill. The twenty-five-foot sculpture of Scotland’s most famous poet had been installed on-site only the day before and, even though Jax should have been working, he had watched almost the whole show. Now he was part of it.
While the clean-up disk was running, Diana came back out onto the terrace to check on Jax. She couldn’t tell, but felt sure his blood and other bodily fluids were inking their way down Burns’ pen, writing their own ending.
DIANA had a couple more tasks before she was finished. She switched off Jax’s wifi connection and located the clock on the laptop’s system. Once she reset the computer’s time backwards to 4 AM, she clicked open the second file on her DVD.
She scrolled through Jax’s suicide note one last time: it was sad… pathetic. It was perfect even with the Australian English spelling, yet she hadn’t met him when she’d composed it. After she block-copied the text onto the computer’s clipboard and closed the original, she created a brand-new document, one that would forever record its time of creation as… she checked the screen’s corner… 4:03 AM. She pasted the copied text into the new document, saved it on his computer, and ejected her DVD slipping it safely back into her pants. As her thumb withdrew from her pocket, the button scraped at the protective pad almost peeling it off, but she felt the glue unsticking and tamped it back down.
She checked the computer’s automated properties for the suicide note to double-check her time trick had worked… It had. “Created at 4:03 AM.”
Leaving the laptop on the floor with the suicide note open, she called to Lucky, “It’s go time.” From out on the terrace where he was relishing his handiwork, he came inside and, as they started across the room to the elevator, a crease of annoyance smeared across Diana’s forehead. “Damn,” she said, and sprang back to the laptop to set its clock back to the right time, and reconnect its wifi.
BURSTING out of the revolving entranceway, what hit her was how light the breeze was down here. And the silence. The wind had petered out; at least down here on the ground it had.
Lucky’s legs were shorter than hers, so she easily strode ahead to the statue of Robbie Burns.
“I hope Jax liked poetry,” Lucky said from behind her.
Diana’s lips curled a little. “So the pen is mightier than the sword,” she said, and began to hum Auld Lang Syne.
She unzipped her side pocket and took out her phone and a small grey box. She was about to jam them together when Lucky interrupted her.
“It’s only midnight on the east coast,” he said.
She didn’t respond and kept walking, and humming. No matter what the time was, she knew that their leader, code-named Isis, expected a report on the mission.
Diana bent her head as she passed under the monumental sculpture, careful to avoid the drops of Jax’s fluids still dripping, and without lifting her eyes. She stepped over Jax’s jam-jar glasses, rammed the scrambler/voice masker onto her phone and keyed in the dialling shortcut.
While she called, Lucky stopped to check his work, enjoying the composition of Jax skewered through the stomach and flopped limp, like a frankfurt suspended on the tip of a knife. Lucky licked his lips. Wet work made him hungry.
A reflection sparked up from Jax’s lenses on the ground and Lucky crushed them beneath his steel-capped boot.
Diana heard the crunch and, with the phone at her ear, turned toward him. “Idiot,” she fumed.
“What did you say?” said a brusque female voice on the line, sounding a lot like actress and singer Bette Midler.
“Nothing, er, Isis,” said Diana into the mouthpiece. “Hey, nice voice you got there. Maybe you should croon your way into the White House.”
Isis was weary of Diana’s jokes about the voice-masking software they used to change a speaker’s voice randomly using a stock menu of celebrities. “You
r report?”
“Mission accomplished,” she said, words that would be as premature as they’d been for a former president. The line went dead. Even with scrambling, Isis didn’t prolong calls longer than necessary.
The duo strode along Thames Path, heading east on the riverbank, steering clear of the battery of security cameras at the Canary Wharf River Dock. Though the sun was doing its best to rise, the waterway was still dull and leaden apart from the glow of the single white anchor light coming from the boat mid-river.
Diana keyed another number into her phone. “Now,” was all she said before flipping it closed.
7
ELIA CACOZ CHECKED her watch and adjusted her hair elastic. The TV current affairs researcher pulled back her hair so tight that the smooth, shiny blackness emphasised the Asian hints she’d inherited from her grandmother as well as the smudges under her eyes.
“You’re working late, Mr Mandrake,” she said, seated at her desk as Mike Mandrake walked up behind her. She still couldn’t believe he wore a suit when he wasn’t on-air. No one in LA did that. She was in a simple black T and black skirt. But Mandrake was from Washington, the new front-of-camera talking head who’d just joined the line-up on Close-up, the network’s national Sunday-night political program.
It was 9 PM, and Elia had only half-eaten the tuna sandwich that dribbled mayonnaise on her desk. With hours of work still on her plate for this fly-in show-pony, she took civility off her menu. She knew she should have bitten her lip but she steamrolled on. “No Hollywood starlets for dinner tonight?”
In her two years in this business, Elia had observed many strange things, the latest being this guy, Mandrake. Those who said they knew better, i.e. her bosses, claimed Mandrake’s glittering newspaper credentials were perfect for Close-up. The network president’s all-staff email had almost shimmered out of her screen: how Mike Mandrake was a Pulitzer Prize-winner; how Mike had covered Washington in-depth for fifteen years; how Mike’s both-sides-of-the-street stints at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as Newsweek and The Washington Post gave him an unparalleled breadth of experience; and how, while this was his first TV gig, he was a natural for the medium.
“A natural?” she’d squealed at the water cooler. “With his pseudo beard and chintzy smile? With a head like his,” she told anyone who’d listen, “the only electronic media he’s a natural for is radio.”
She seethed about Mandrake, and as soon as she could phone her boyfriend Simon without anyone eavesdropping in the open-plan, she gave him the picture. “When the arrogant shit got here,” she whined, “he tilted his chair back, slapped his faux mountain boots onto the desk and lectured how his trip here to LA was real hush-hush. That he’s doing some,” she made air quotes with the fingers of her free hand, “deep, deep background on Isabel Diaz.” Elia knew this would grab Simon’s interest since like many former runaway kids he owed a great personal debt to the candidate.
Mandrake’s segment would be on air in a couple of weeks, she told him, but it wasn’t going to be the usual gloss, or dross. “He’s chasing some new angle.”
“Is it that Karim Ahmed terrorist thing?” Simon asked.
“Can’t say,” said Elia, pissed off that Mandrake hadn’t admitted her inside the tiny circle of those in the know.
In the team meeting earlier, Mandrake had held up a printout of the latest nationwide voter approval chart, clocking Isabel Diaz at an extraordinary 70 percent. “At that level, a Diaz White House looks a certainty, but you can never tell what might jump out of the woodwork,” he winked.
Yet he wouldn’t disclose even a glimmer of his focus to her, instead selecting individual team members, Elia being one, for seemingly unconnected tasks.
But now, with only the two of them left, and with him leering over her shoulder as though he was checking whether she was wasting time on net porn, Elia’s fuse finally blew. “What’s your damn angle?” she demanded, swivelling her chair around, her penetrating eyes only inches from his.
Mike’s face flushed almost as red as his tie. She suspected it was because the loner was finding this teamwork thing tough going. But the truth was he had been running on bluster. He hadn’t found his angle, not yet. All he had was an idea, and a lead. It was a great lead, but only that, so far. He stiffened his back and swung his head around, double-checking that they were alone. “It’s the truth about Diaz… about her parents.”
Elia’s face screwed up as if she’d sucked on a lemon and, though it was too late, she grabbed her tuna and mayo sandwich as cover. This guy won’t last, she told herself as she took a bite. And if he did, well, her backpack was already stuffed with written job offers from FOX and Sports TV, the latter job reporting on her real passion, baseball.
Here goes nothing, she decided, glancing at her bag for security and swallowing quickly, “Hello-o-o!” Elia knew she was risking her job but, as her dad used to say, if you don’t make a splash, you don’t get wet. “What more does the world need to know about that doped-out lard-factory George Hicks? Or his wife, what was her name… Annette? Yeah, Annette… Anyway, she died years ago.”
What was Mike Mandrake thinking? For a Pulitzer winner, Elia thought he was acting like a pretty big schmuck.
“Not her diner parents,” he said, his eyes flicking nervously around the floor. “Her real parents.”
Elia paused, weighing the sandwich on her palm as if it were one of the baseball gloves she sensed she’d be seeing lot more of. What could this guy have up his sleeve? She had to admit that no one had ever gone very far down the “real folks” track, mainly because it was so long ago, Bolivia was so far away, and frankly it wasn’t likely to be interesting once told. But then, she paused, what about all that birthist crap about Obama? His Kenyan father, his Indonesian stepfather, and whether he was a Muslim, or had really been born in Hawaii… All that had all blown up into a huge storm of a story. So why couldn’t this?
In her head, Elia sped through what the whole world already knew: Isabel was born in Newark to a destitute Bolivian mother, spent her childhood being dragged from trailer park to trailer park until… yada, yada. What more could Mandrake have?
“Okay… so why LA? Why are you here?” she asked him, intent on taking it as far as she could. “Last anyone heard about Isabel’s natural mother was in New Mexico almost three decades ago, right? And her dad? He died in Bolivia before she was born.” She rubbed her chin. If any clues were out there waiting for Mandrake to find them, she thought, they’d be in East LA. Hispanic central. Not, she smirked to herself, where he was swanking it up in his four-room hotel suite, three heel-clicks off Rodeo Drive where pretty much the only Latinos were the housemaids.
Mandrake held her stare. She guessed he was debating with himself whether to bring her into his circle which, from all the hush-hush, she knew was a tight one.
“Look,” he said eventually but softly. “I’ve tracked down the guy who ran that trailer park she ran away from. He lives here in LA, and I’m meeting him tomorrow.” He’d have savoured the sight of Elia’s mouth dropping more if she had swallowed all the tuna. “So,” he added, getting to why he’d come to her desk, “have you dug out her birth certificate for me yet?”
As Elia kicked her chair back, rolling herself backwards to the printer, Mandrake ticked off the prep he’d done so far: “This guy is the best lead I’ve got. He’s the only one I could find from her New Mexico days. You wouldn’t believe who I’ve spoken to… folks from Half Moon Bay, early BBB workers, members of her campaign team, kids from her runaways charity, grown-ups who’ve graduated from it…”
Elia considered telling him her boyfriend was one of those graduates but, certain he’d ask her to fix him up with Simon for an interview, she kept silent.
Mandrake went on to explain he’d done all the hunting and all the interviews himself so far. It was the print media way, not the TV way, he said. “I know all of you are cheesed off with me. You think I don’t trust you which, to be honest,
is true. But frankly, I should have let you do the pre-interviews.” If Elia could have read his mind, she would have known it wasn’t because he’d just had a revelation about the value of the team, but because none of those interviews had gone anywhere.
Mandrake was mentally shaking his head that if he had to sit through one more jerk-off repeating the same sickeningly sweet accolades about Isabel, he would gag: decent, intuitive, insightful, loyal, empathetic, committed to the common good, having the drive and organisational skills to achieve goals, compassionate but decisive, a practical visionary, blah, blah, blah.
Bor-fucking-ring.
No way was his first TV piece going to be about some namby-pamby Little Goody Two-Shoes. The network hadn’t lured him from the peak of the print world for that. Close-up only did controversy.
Typing was Mandrake’s preferred way to think. “Who is the real Isabel Diaz?” his fingers had tapped out on his laptop days earlier. “Mary fucking Poppins?” He hadn’t been able to find one bastard out there with a bad word to say about her. Even how she was dealing with the Karim Ahmed scandal showed her in a depressingly positive light, despite the Democrats trying to whip it up as her Trojan or rather, Arabian horse. Mandrake had been weighing up tossing in the whole story when he had stumbled over the whereabouts of the trailer park manager.
Elia pleaded to have first shot.
“Not this time,” he said. Mandrake had a gut instinct about this one. He was going to change the course of history. It was why he won his Pulitzer. And he badly wanted another one to prove he hadn’t lost his magic just because he had sold out to television.
8
“ANOTHER MARGARITA,” MANDRAKE winked to the bartender for the third time, “and another Wild Turkey for my friend. How ’bout a double this time, eh?” The wink was a coded conspiracy against Mike’s drinking pal, a signal he’d agreed earlier with the barman to hold back the tequila from Mike’s own drinks so he’d stay clear-headed while the former trailer park manager spilled his increasingly well-lubricated guts.
Born to Run Page 3