George Hicks, Isabel’s substitute father, had flown over from California to stay a few weeks to help with Davey while the campaign was in full swing. Ed wasn’t thrilled about it, but tolerated him, which was not exactly hard in this house. Ed and George didn’t see eye-to-eye on anything, apart from Isabel. And Davey.
Working his hands in American Sign Language, Davey had been begging George to cook up some of his famous ricotta hotcakes with honey. It was Davey’s favourite BBB breakfast treat, which George falsely claimed he’d invented at the original Big Bad Burgers diner even before Isabel had walked in on the scene. Unlike Ed, who had mastered ASL, and Isabel who was adequate, George was totally inept so the boy turned his request into a kind of charades.
Davey loved it when George laughed—his teeth stuck out even further and his wiry grey ponytail flailed round so he looked to Davey like both ends of a horse. His bucktoothed grin was where George’s nickname ‘Buckets’ came from; at least that was Isabel’s child-friendly explanation. George had laughed when she told the boy that little lie. It had been the summer of ’64 and George was on security for the Rolling Stones’ first US tour. In those days George was always overflowing—with booze, drugs, whatever—and it was one of the Stones, Brian Jones, who bestowed the nickname on him. (Brian was the wild blue-eyed boy who ended up at the bottom of his swimming pool and, even then, people said he looked better dead than fellow Stone Keith Richards did alive.)
George, now in his seventies, hadn’t done drugs or alcohol for decades, often joking he got the same effects these days just from standing up fast.
He was about to head off to make the flapjacks when Davey tugged at his shirt to stop. The boy turned to Ed and after asking him to act as interpreter for his new joke, he made the sign for “big” and thumped his chest.
“A big gorilla,” said Ed, his grin widening.
Davey then put his finger to his mouth and his ear.
“Ah, a big deaf gorilla.”
Davey nodded and continued.
“A big deaf gorilla… King Kong,” Ed said, “is storming through a town… he reaches down to pick up this beautiful woman. She’s deaf too. He has the deaf woman in the palm of one hand and says to her…”
Suddenly, Davey smashed his free hand down onto the palm that was holding the imaginary woman and started to jig on the spot. Ed cracked up himself and, until father and son composed themselves, all Isabel and George could do was look to each other, trying to guess at what was so funny.
“I’m sorry,” said Ed, wiping a rare tear. “King Kong says to her in ASL,” but he broke into laughter again. “Okay, this deaf King Kong says, ‘Will you marry me?’ But see, the ASL sign for ‘marry’ is to slap one hand down onto the other so King Kong, instead of asking her to marry him, crushes her to death.”
Isabel leant over to give Davey a big hug as George laughed his way to the kitchen. Ed excused himself, too. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Davey,” he said, and after stroking his son’s head he walked off.
Isabel was so flushed with laughing that her scar stuck out against her neck.
“Why have you got that?” Davey signed when the two were alone. He reached for it and touched it gently, though to Isabel, his finger seemed to burn. Davey had asked before but she’d fended him off with her stock answer, “Someone hurt me once.” Previously it had been enough for the boy, but he was getting older and more insistent.
“Who hurt you?” He pressed it this time.
The ASL sign for a man, Isabel knew, mimicked grasping the front brim of your hat, but gallantry was out of place. Her colour drained and she let Davey lip-read instead, “A man,” she whispered. “A bad man.”
“A boy hurt me at school yesterday,” he signed almost immediately; Davey was, after all, only eight. “He whacked me over the head with his lunch box.”
Isabel forced a smile. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
“No,” he continued signing. “He was angry because I hid his water bottle. How did the bad man hurt you?”
There was no way Isabel would reveal the shockingly sensitive details to an eight-year-old. She’d never publicly admitted it was a rape, just an assault gone very bad. Fortunately for her, the records from back then were patchy. “Davey,” she said, “he cut me… with a piece of glass and…” Her voice broke off.
Ed walked back in. “Hey, big feller,” he said, making sure Davey’s eyes had followed Isabel’s toward him, “Are you telling the next president how she should run this country, or are you still jabbering about gorillas?”
“A man hurt Isabel, daddy. With a piece of glass,” the boy signed earnestly, then touched her scar.
Ed saw the silent wail on Isabel’s face and the scatter of smile lines around his eyes fell away. “Isabel doesn’t want to talk about that, Davey,” he said. “Okay?”
Davey shook his head so his hair flew out at the sides, “Not okay.”
Isabel rested her hand on Ed’s arm, and breathed in, “It’s fine,” and turned back to Davey. “Davey, the man did bad things to me, so… so I can’t have any children.”
Davey absorbed the information for a moment, chewing his tongue and tapping Pip his stuffed toy penguin on its head. One of Isabel’s campaign badges was pinned to Pip’s chest—the button with the red, white and blue rose. “But I’m your child. You said so!” he signed, a tear drizzling from his blue eyes. “Why can’t you have me anymore?”
She shot a look of alarm at Ed. “Of course I can have you, Davey. I meant that I can’t have a baby.”
The boy nodded weakly, sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Did the man hurt you a lot?”
She nodded.
“Did he kill your mother too?”
Isabel’s breath caught in her throat, hoping she’d misunderstood the signing but she saw Ed’s jaw tighten and knew she hadn’t. Ed had been right in trying to avoid this path. Often his relationship with Davey was excellent, like this morning, but it was sometimes marred, and not merely by a boy’s typical disappointments over a busy father who wasn’t always around. Wrongly, Davey blamed Ed for his mother’s death and there would be days when he just wouldn’t communicate with his father at all, freezing him out.
What was going on inside Davey’s head became clear just after the wedding two years earlier. His doctors had suggested some new tests and it turned out that Davey wasn’t mute at all. He was deaf, certainly, but there was no physiological impediment to him speaking.
Isabel had been witness to Ed’s understandable tangle of emotions: delight his son had speech, but distress at why he refused to use it.
Off her own bat, Ed’s assistant Debbie tracked down a psychologist who specialised in deaf kids. After three sessions with Davey, Professor Howard called Ed in. Isabel went with him and they sat silent, watching a video of the doctor interviewing the boy in ASL.
Isabel spent as much time watching Ed as the video. She could see Ed tearing himself apart at the boy’s perverse theory. After his mother’s car accident, Davey had read the lips of some adults gossiping that she had been “running off” with the man in the car. The little boy’s twisted logic was that Ed must’ve done something bad to her to make her run away.
Isabel saw Ed shaking as Davey continued signing: “She went to heaven to run away from my daddy and I sent my voice up there to bring her back.”
THE revelation turned Ed’s already strong political partisanship into zealotry. Once he learned Davey was blaming him for his wife’s death, his hostility to the Democrats and especially Isabel’s opponent, Bobby Foster, became very personal.
Ed had explained the whole story to Isabel, starting with Jane’s affair with former Democratic congressman Peter Jackson from New York. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Foster had been the lawyer who helped the bastard escape any serious penalty for the charges, getting him just a paltry fine. A pittance for a life… lives.
“My wife dies, Davey loses his mom and that creep Jackson gets off scot-free, thanks to that slimy, s
weet-talking Bobby Foster. Yet my son,” Ed choked, “my beautiful boy… he blames me… and won’t talk to me because he sent…”
Ever since, Ed had despised Robert Foster and everything about him: his role in Jackson’s defence; his past career as a money-grubbing trial lawyer; even his glossy magazine good looks.
When Foster got the Democratic Party’s nomination, Ed’s investigations dredged up some of Foster’s own passions; mostly of the tiresome variety that would plunge him into hot water with his wife if she ever found out, something Ed had toyed with facilitating many times.
But what haunted Foster’s campaign—his own Karim Ahmed affair—was not his defence of Jackson, or even his infidelity… it was Joe Cook.
All these years after, few could stomach what Foster had done for his notorious rapist-murderer client. Harvard Law School taught that Foster’s strategy at Cook’s trial was a model… of what not to do. He’d idealised Cook to the jury as an articulate and energetic white worker for black rights, a hapless victim of police who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t even his gun! Mistaken identity. Foster tried it all, and enough of it worked. But within two months of the not-guilty verdict being handed down, cops from the next precinct shot Cook dead as he clambered over the tenement rooftop of a young black mother and her two daughters, aged twelve and ten. Foster’s former star client had saved the mother… for last.
“The wealthy defence attorney with political aspirations,” as the media liked to call him back then, took the opportunity to appear on TV that same night and, holding back tears, told the world he was ditching the law for a life of public service in politics. It worked, with most of the country applauding him for ditching money for public duty as penance for his mistake.
But Ed was not among them, vowing that one day Foster would pay. For all his mistakes.
16
SNAP! BOBBY FOSTER and his inner-circle were ensconced in the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters in Atlanta, behind floor-to-ceiling glass, partitioned from the bustle and clatter of the scores of volunteers working the phones. SNAP! Though neither Foster nor his running mate Mitchell Taylor hailed from Georgia, their strategists had picked Atlanta to boost their support in the South. Maine was Foster’s home base and Mitch Taylor was an Iowa boy.
SNAP! The venetian privacy blind was yanked right up so—SNAP!—the “mamarazzi”, celebrity photographer Niki Abbott, could take whatever candid shots she wanted yet still be out of earshot of campaign strategy. As always, her blue, signed Ted Williams Red Sox baseball cap was pressed down over her flaming red hair.
“Yes!” Mitch Taylor fisted the air with a spirited air-punch and shot a glance out of the corner of his eye to check if Niki had captured the moment for posterity. His victory cry would have made more sense if the Foster-Taylor team’s polling had clicked over 50 percent rather than just 28 but, from the doldrums their campaign had previously been lolling in, any rise needed celebrating.
“Thank yo-ou, Judge Thomas,” Taylor chuckled. The vice-presidential running mate winked at Don Thomas, the wily political strategy brain who headed up Foster’s campaign machine. Don was a seasoned operator. He was also the judge’s brother.
But Don, a lantern-jawed Kentucky boy, winced at the hint of complicity. Not in his family. No way. His brother had tossed out the Karim Ahmed case because that’s how he cut the evidence. It had nothing to do with his political sympathies or even Don’s job. Not with his brother’s fierce love for the law above all else. It was why no one, not even Ahmed’s defence team, had asked Judge Thomas to recuse himself from the case.
Yet Don was too excited to let the family slur intrude on the moment. He placed his hand on Mitch Taylor’s shoulder, but—SNAP!—a flash from Niki’s camera temporarily blinded him. “Mitch,” he said to Taylor, blinking away the starburst, “at 28 we ain’t even half of Diaz’s 62, but one thing’s for sure: our number’s going up, and hers is coming down.” Don Thomas’s swaggering bravado seemed out of place for someone with such a pale face, bookish shoulders and a spine almost as bent as the question marks he always had on his mind.
“There’s so much blue sky in here, we need sunglasses,” Taylor smiled, posing for Niki Abbott’s lens. Or was it for Niki herself? Don Thomas wondered, sucking in a deep breath of frustration.
17
AFTER ONLY SIX days of Don Thomas’ revised election strategy playing out, Isabel was being pushed more and more onto the back foot. Karim Ahmed had suddenly vanished a second time. The entire nation’s media mounted a massive search for him but was coming up empty-handed. The timing was perfet and Don Thomas had Bobby Foster asking all the right questions on every nightly news bulletin: “He won on a technicality, but does an innocent man run? Does he hide? This man, Isabel Diaz’s star protégé, was claimed to have financed terrorists. Where is he now? Why won’t he come forward and explain himself?”
That Ahmed was not a public figure was beside the point. That the judge had let him go, likewise. Isabel’s support was nose-diving. That was the point. Down from its 70 percent to 55… already.
With seven weeks to Election Day, Isabel’s chances of victory looked like they’d be pole-axed unless she could arrest the slide. Publicly, she remained calm and restrained. Stoic.
But deep in private, behind tightly closed doors, things were different. This was a crisis of the highest order for her campaign, for the Party… for the nation.
And it was time for a group of well-placed individuals to act. To take their next steps. Planning, precision, surprise and deniability were crucial. As usual.
They’d been readying for something like this even before Jax Mason’s fall from the 14th floor of a London office building. It was time to use what they’d taken from him. The Diaz campaign was starting to reek with the stench of a slaughterhouse and they vowed, as such people do, to hose it clean. Isabel had to win; no matter what.
“It’s not just that we’d miss out on the White House,” Isis said, “though there is that. What stinks is that this pathetic duo, Foster and Taylor, might get to cup the future of this great nation in their mauling paws. If it wasn’t for Ahmed, damn him, we’d still be wiping the floor with them… It’s time to roll out Phase Two.”
Diana was in Georgia and had dialled into the meeting on a secure line. She liked her code-name. Goddess of the hunt carried a certain class, she decided, and that Diana was an emblem of chastity added a pinch of somewhat ironic spice.
18
FOSTER AND TAYLOR had been dithering over whether to accept the Secret Service protective detail they’d been offered for the campaign, a privilege all major candidates were entitled to since Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. After struggling with its privacy drawbacks, the pair had only just said yes, resigned that in twenty-four hours they’d no longer have some of the freedoms they liked to enjoy on the campaign trail.
Isabel had not a second’s compunction about accepting the protection, though she hadn’t expected her detail chief’s bluntness. “Ma’am,” he’d said when he first briefed her, “I don’t want to create any false expectations. If someone’s committed to killing you, well… they’ll probably do it. My job is simply to make it as hard as possible.”
FROM under her blue baseball cap, and with her camera tote bag over her shoulder, Niki Abbott phoned up to Mitch Taylor’s room from the hotel lobby. “Ready for our breakfast shoot, Mr Vice-President?” she said provocatively. It was still weeks ahead of Election Tuesday, but she was confident he’d find it an alluring hook.
“Uhmmh?” He rolled over to squint at the clock. “It’s only… ah… six. Weren’t we scheduled at 7:30?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said, with a lilt calculated to intensify his memory of yesterday’s seductive wink. She’d arranged to photograph him breakfasting alone in an elegant private dining room with the morning’s papers spread out before him. It would pitch him, she said, as the contemplative man in the background, ready to step f
orward and serve as number one if needed. Though a Republican, Niki was fine with the scam. The shots would be huge for her, too; her agent had negotiated a five-figure pre-sale with Reuters for nationwide syndication. She loved elections.
Bobby Foster had already flown back to DC. He’d be breakfasting with congressional leaders and then had three back-to-back radio talkback interviews, all of which he’d planned for turning up the heat on Isabel over Ahmed’s ominous disappearance.
“I guess,” said Niki, her pout almost protruding out the other end of the phone, “I’ll just have to wait by my lonesome down here in the lobby till 7:30…”
Taylor’s bio described him as happily married with three children. His wasn’t as long a marriage as Bobby Foster’s but it was almost as tempestuous and, like Foster, that was mostly his own fault. Yet, Julia Taylor was always the good wife, putting up with his antics just as Foster’s wife had so far tolerated his.
“Er, Niki, why don’t we, er, do a pre-breakfast breakfast? You know, up here. Get to know each other a bit better. Then later, we can focus on the, er, shots and not the, er, small talk?”
She smiled as his voice struggled, trying not to crack like a teenager buying his first condom.
“I’ll leave the door unlatched,” he said, “while I’m, er, taking a shower. You can call up room service. I’ll leave my order on the table and you can put it through with yours. Suite 2302.”
A highly polished black brogue was holding the door to the suite open and, as she pushed inside, she heard the pelting of water in the shower—music to her ears. She picked up the shoe, looked back to check in the corridor and quietly double-locked the door.
She thought of snapping him in the nude—someone, though not Reuters, would really pay for that—but what she had planned would be better. Niki carefully put her treasured baseball cap on the hallstand and huffed her camera gear to the floor, lifted a pocket flap and pulled out two small objects and slipped them into place.
Born to Run Page 7