Born to Run

by John M. Green

  That Nixon was a crook and Isabel a saint didn’t seem to gel with him in the state he was in.

  He clamped his eyes, shutting out the TV and the room, but he couldn’t shut out everything. His wife had kicked him out. CBS was publicly supporting him but privately wiping its hands of him, wishing he’d never existed. For security reasons, he’d shaved his beard and wore dark glasses and a cap when he ventured out.

  What should have been the story of the decade had become a debacle.

  Was no one interested in the truth any more if it had… fucking consequences? That was the truth’s job, for chrissakes!

  At that moment, his hotel room TV broadcast a newsflash about the blast in Los Angeles. His eyes blinked open but he could hardly watch. He recognised the building. It was meant for him.

  Who were these fucking people?

  He swiped his hand across the bed sheet in front of him sending the newspaper onto the floor and he jabbed at the “off” button on the remote.

  His hand shook as he stretched across for the vial that was perched on the edge of his bedside table. It had been lingering there since ten o’clock last night when he had slipped it out of his toiletry bag.

  Damn these childproof caps. Mike sat up straight and wiped his hands dry on the bed sheets and tried again. Third time, he succeeded. As he drank it, he remembered something his dad used to tell him as a kid when he was feeling down: if at first you don’t succeed, forget the skydiving.

  But this time it wasn’t funny.

  Hot sweat dripped down his back and the clear liquid streamed cold down his throat.

  Truth.

  Consequences.

  IN London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Registered Nurse Jeni Crompton was completing her morning rounds and came to Room 603. An insensitive creep had taped a hand-written sign below the room number: “Burns Unit”. Jeni ripped it down. To her, the allusion to Jax Mason’s shocking encounter with the famous Scots poet was not at all amusing. Inside Room 603 it was quiet… only the beep, beep, beep of Jax’s heart monitor sounded. Here, no one answered back to her, unlike the man two rooms up.

  She always spoke to Jax, babbled really, but had never got a single response in the month he’d been under her charge. Probably a good thing, given what she’d told him, otherwise he’d know everything about her sex life (lack of, really), her parents’ divorce, the bank loan she was hoping for, and the fact she was sick of nursing and wanted to try out working in her sister’s café (where she might meet someone “nice”).

  Jax’s doctor had told her—probably the only time the old fart had deigned to speak to someone like her for more than three seconds—that he’d be surprised if Jax would ever come out of the coma; that the paramedics should have let the “poor young bugger” die.

  Jeni rolled Jax over onto his stomach, untied his gown at the neck and laid it out on either side of him. She had brought in a basin of warm soapy water with her and bathed him top to toe, hesitating over the tattoo at the base of his spine, a disk with a “Y” stamped out of it. It was in fact a representation of an old New York subway token, but she guessed it was a peace symbol, though the words “Good for one fare” didn’t really match with that. She dried him and rolled him over onto his back.

  “You’re a bit of a hunk,” she said aloud for the umpteenth time as she sponged him down. He was her age, she’d noted from his chart the first time.

  Just as she was about to shave him, her pager vibrated against her leg. Damn. Room 605. That bastard again. Why doesn’t he just lie there like everyone else? Jeni towelled Jax down, dressed him in a fresh gown, tucked him in and left his room. She could shave him later. Or tomorrow. He wouldn’t know.

  As the door closed behind her, she didn’t see the flicker in Jax’s left eyelid nor hear the stutter in the heart monitor beeps.

  29

  ISABEL FIRST HEARD about Mike Mandrake’s suicide from Gregory. A friend of his had been breakfasting at the Watergate. Habits are hard to break, and Isabel’s former staffer called her even before he phoned Hank.

  Hank’s campaign was flailing. “I’m quitting,” Gregory said, the real reason for phoning. They’d argued about this many times recently, but this was it. After the nightclub fire, he felt he couldn’t keep working with Hank and retain any vestige of dignity. “I love a political joke as much as the next guy, but I can’t work for one.”

  He was right about Hank, she knew it, but with backup Hank was still a better option than the alternative.

  “Unless we pull a rabbit out of a hat, the campaign is D-E-A-D. It’s…”

  “You’ve got to hang in there, Gregory. He needs you… I need you.” Her appeal to loyalty was a low blow, but she knew Gregory was nothing if not devoted to her.

  “MANDRAKE?” Foster remarked. “What d’you expect from a beard guy? No beards in my administration… Note that down, Don.” He glanced over to his deceptively bookish but hardnosed campaign strategist, Don Thomas, to check if he had.

  What Don noted, though not in writing, was that his candidate was getting way too cocky. A bad sign. He knew voters easily detected smugness, and punished it.

  SNAP!

  “Damn that woman,” Don swore behind the glass partition out of Niki Abbott’s earshot. Why had he ever agreed to this intrusive photographic record? Each time he picked his nose Niki snapped him with her camera. Hell! He didn’t want shots of Foster out there crowing like a rooster.

  Spencer Prentice, visiting for an hour’s meeting, also prickled at Foster’s arrogance and shaded his eyes from the flash to cover his own crabby expression, the whole thing reminding him he’d rather be somewhere else; anywhere else.

  “Diaz is out, and now Clemens is washed up…,” Foster bragged, swinging his socked feet up onto the desk and puffing hard on his cigar. “So, what’s next on my agenda? Solving world poverty? Get Bono on the phone,” he laughed.

  SNAP!

  Don Thomas cringed.

  Spencer’s normally hard-to-read face recoiled at Foster’s brazen conceit. Too late, he saw that Don Thomas, stooped on the airconditioning ledge over by the window, had observed him. “Robert,” Spencer refused to call the presidential candidate Bobby, “that’s how it looks today, but you know better than I do that three weeks are…”

  “Yeah… a long time in politics. You came here for a reason, Prentice?”

  Spencer was smouldering and cleared his throat to control himself. “Everything points to a win,” he said slowly, “but that’s not the point…”

  “It’s not about winning?” Foster said, unable to keep the smirk off his face.

  Spencer bit on his scorn. “How you win is important, surely.” How could it be otherwise? He glanced at Don for support but got the same sneer he’d seen on Foster. What was it with these two? “Robert, you’re getting the numbers but unless things change you’ll be seen as the usurper stealing someone else’s throne.”

  “Hank Clemens?” said Foster, extracting his cigar and spitting some leaf to the floor.

  SNAP!

  “Oh, fuck her,” Foster said, faking a smile through the glass to Niki’s camera. “Hmm, maybe I will… fuck her. What do you think of Niki Abbott, Prentice?”

  “Wha…?” Spencer couldn’t believe this. Through the glass partition he saw Niki posed behind her camera in a body-hugging red silk suit and her ever-present baseball cap, its peak twisted to the right, just like her politics. “It’s a signed Ted Williams cap, you know. Anyone who desecrates a Red Sox heirloom like that doesn’t deserve attention. How do you work with her hovering around?”

  “We manage,” Foster said. “Prentice, what did you mean I’d be Clemens’ usurper?”

  “No, Isabel Diaz’s,” Spencer corrected. Was Foster really so thick?

  “Her. You’ve always been, er, close to her, haven’t you?” Foster winked, like a father discovering his son’s stash of porn on his computer.

  Spencer resented the implications—sexual innuendo, party disloyalty, ugh!�
��especially from this pretender, but he kept his face blank.

  Don Thomas was now leaning so far forward on the window ledge Spencer worried he might fall into a duck dive to the floor. Unknown to Spencer, Don had given Foster a similar message two days earlier after he’d found a parody website called ImposterFoster.com. “Prentice,” said Don, “Seems you and me are sharing the same nuthouse. Come slobber over here with me.”

  “Buddy boy,” Foster said to Spencer, the bounce in his voice barely masking a concern, “even if I agree with you, what can I do about it, exactly?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Spencer could see Don smiling. Then it dawned on him… this was why Don had invited him here. “You’ve got to show strong, uniting leadership… That you’re for all Americans, not just those who vote for you.” He braced himself, “In your victory speech, you should announce you’re inviting Isabel Diaz into your Cabinet.”

  “Fuck! Fuck, no! Clemens has already promised he’ll do that,” said Foster, dismissively waving his cigar and casting a gruff eye to Don. “Newsflash! I’m way out in front,” he continued. “I don’t need to be Mr Me-Too.”

  “Clemens’ offer was a desperate ploy in a struggling campaign. I’m talking about your victory speech, Robert. That way she can’t refuse you, either. Bipartisanship... the right thing… bring the country together. All that.”

  Foster swung his feet to the floor and leant across the desk. “And if I don’t want that bee-yatch in my Cabinet?”

  Spencer was aghast, “Then you should offer her something else with stature… Speaker of the House?”

  “Where have you been, Prentice? She can’t even be a member of the House. You know… the Con-stit-u-tion? You Bostonians learn about that old piece of parchment?”

  Disgust welled up inside Spencer but he controlled it. He’d heard worse and from “better” people. He eyed Don for support but the strategist had flipped his spiral-bound notepad open and was bent over it jotting, avoiding his eye.

  Spencer shuddered just being with this pair, let alone with the notion that they would be in charge of his country for the next four years.

  30

  ELIA CACOZ WAS celebrating. She still had Simon and she’d cashed her first new paycheque. She clinked her beer glass against Simon’s. “To my first story on FOX.”

  “Better than your last one at CBS, I hope” he said before taking a long draft. He belched and after wiping his mouth with the back of his hand said, “What’s the scoop?”

  Elia felt the drill of his eyes, chasing more. Spurred on by Simon, she had emailed her resignation into Close-up the night Mandrake’s story went to air. When the credits scrolled past her name as assistant researcher, she couldn’t help but squirm and found it hard to look him in the face. While she couldn’t unmake that snippet of history, she wasn’t proud of it and wouldn’t remain part of it.

  “It’s a deeper trawl into Isabel’s past… about what made her. But it’ll only be ready to go to air after the election. So if Clemens wins, it’ll be ‘the woman thankfully behind the turkey’ story.”

  “If Foster wins?”

  She shrugged. “Why the slimy shit shouldn’t have.”

  31

  AFTER THREE WEEKS, Karim Ahmed was still holed up in the Philadelphia hideaway with his same four friends. The dilapidated row house was smack in the middle of Strawberry Mansion, near the east bank of the Schuylkill River. This place didn’t look like the birthplace of the nation, not today. There were no mansions either, but plenty of decay. Row after rundown row, many houses had been abandoned and boarded up, and others with broken shutters were flapping to signal that someone was home, but wishing home was somewhere else.

  Karim was making cheese sandwiches for lunch. “I’m tired of hiding,” he said peeling the plastic wrap off the sunlight yellow slices he’d bought at the mini market down the block.

  By the sink, Abdul was twisting the creaking faucet with a wrench to run some water for a cup of tea. “Soon, my friend,” he said. “It is good there is enough money.”

  Mohammed walked in, carefully, over the cracked, lifting floor tiles. He snaffled a portion of cheese from the packet.

  Their street was in a district with a Muslim flavour, though largely black Muslim. Around here, welfare was the biggest employer.

  “We go tomorrow,” Karim said.

  32

  “YEAH, IT’S A promo for some stoopid new TV show.” The thick Bronx accent sashayed from a short, skin-headed man. “Some clever-dick guy upstairs dreamt it up so, by definition, it’s brilliant. They gives me tree hours, yeah, tree. What, like I’m a magician? I ain’t got that many people on call, which is how come I need you guys. So how many messengers you got you can send me?” he asked, drumming his fingers on top of the latest issue of The Economist.

  He made a few notes on a pad and continued, “So to repeat, you’ll send sixty—that’s six-zero—guys here in plenty time to make all my drops, all over Manhattan at 17:25 on the button… Yeah, I said 17:25… You think I don’t know that’s rush hour? Listen, bro, I’m not the fat cat genius who thunk this up… Cool it, man. Don’t shoot the messenger… Okay, you’re the messenger—it’s an expression. Now listen… If any of your guys ain’t at the drops by 17:25, they don’t get no money… Yeah, the packages are ready… The pick-up? Don’t you listen? It’s, like, where I told you… Yeah, that’s it… Where? Christ, dude, where do you think...? Okay, it’s just east over the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City. Yeah, off 21st Street, a warehouse with a Big SatTV sign out front… your guys can’t miss it… What…? No, our people’ll be there to collect orright. The TV broadcasts go live at 17:35 so if our guys ain’t at the drops at 17:25 to get the packs from your people, they’ll be dead meat, so don’t you worry… See ya.” He terminated the call with a sinister grin.

  “Dead meat. Great joke, Dwayne,” his companion Gary laughed.

  They were an odd couple. If Dwayne had any hair on his head, he would’ve resembled a furry bowling ball cover. He didn’t look like a Dwayne but he kept the moniker his parents gave him because he enjoyed the cocked eyebrow that usually followed after he was introduced. Then he’d perform his party trick: he’d flex his pecs and then in theatrical waves, he’d send a series of tight ripples from his diaphragm at the base of his stumpy thick torso up to his shoulders—rounded by years of steroid-assisted weights; they’d turn and travel down the short but powerfully dangerous-looking limbs that sandwiched him, themselves covered with a protective shield of dark wiry hair, past his knuckles—graced with tattoos of “L” and “R”—to his fingers.

  Gary, when he worked with Diana, had been Lucky, but since their London episode, Isis had shifted him over as Dwayne’s sidekick for this part of the operation. Gary never needed to work out, yet he had a rapport with Dwayne. Maybe it was a height thing. Gary only went to gyms to ogle the women or steal their underwear. His nickname in high school had been heartless but on the mark: Ferret. He was short and spindly, like the snub-nosed screwdriver he used to keep in his back pocket for raiding the girls’ gym lockers before he discovered the power of his bare fingers. It was his fingers he worked on; they had become Gary’s ticket. With one hand, he could just about squeeze a piece of steel into a strand of wire that he could then wind around your neck to choke you.

  “And your accent!” squawked Gary. “You shoulda been an actor.”

  “No time for flattery, Gary.” Dwayne’s now mellow timbre revealed his cultured roots, easily mocked in his profession, though never in his presence. “The messengers are on their way—our 230 unsuspecting shock troops from fifteen very ignorant delivery firms. They’ll all be lining up here soon, and we can allocate the drop-offs. First in get the longest trips—that will make the fools happy. We’ll send them on their merry ways and we’ll tap-dance out of here by five.”

  “MAXINE” said the badge pinned to her uniform. With pink hair spikes gelled flat, she bounded up to the desk. It was just inside the doors of a warehouse hu
ddled in an area she’d rather not be biking around. “Pickup for Crisis Couriers?” she said.

  “Don’t say,” spat the walking neck. “An’ I thought you was goin’ to a costume party!”

  “Okay, wise-ass,” she chuckled, remembering the company logo stitched on her breast pocket. “You got my delivery?”

  “42nd Street subway station, on the…,” he looked at a control sheet, “A-train platform…”

  “No one said anything about a platform.” She’d assumed she’d be delivering to a store there.

  Dwayne winced as though she’d dragged herself out of a dumpster. “Yeah, a platform… you know, what people stand around on waiting for trains. Here’s a Metrocard,” he said, handing her one of the pile of turnstile entry cards that would gain all the messengers entry to the subway platforms he was assigning them to. “Our TV broadcast team’ll be waiting for the A-train heading north. You’ll see ’em there with the cameras, can’t miss ’em. Ask for…,” he looked at his crib sheet, “… Vanessa. Like I told your boss, if you’re there by 17:25, we pays. If you’re not, we don’t. Here,” he said and pushed a small screen pad forward. “Sign for it.”

  “What’re they filming?” she asked as she scratched her signature on the pad.

  “Big promo,” said the artiste-usually-known-as-Dwayne, his eyes lifted to the ceiling in mock derision. “It’s called ‘The First One’. Goes like this...” He lifted his beefy hands in front of his eyes into a camera view-square shape—his fat thumb tips were pressed together and his stubby fingers pointed up, his palms facing away from him so she could see his hardened weight-lifting calluses. “The train pulls into the station. The doors wheeze open. If you’re first off the first carriage of the first train after 17:35, you gets a prize. This is the prize.” He held up a black-taped white box that Gary had passed to him from one of the fast-reducing stacks.