The 14th... And Forever

by Merline Lovelace

  “You want to tell me what this is all about, son?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “Angela said only that we had to talk, privately. Without any of my staff present.”

  “It might be easier to show you instead of tell you.”

  Jack opened the dog-eared copy of Senate Bill 693 on the conference table to the next-to-the-last page, where a single small paragraph was circled in red. Placing the bound bill on the conference table, he laid a sheet of paper with neat columns of figures next to it. With an economy of words, he explained his calculations.

  As the senator took in the differing bottom lines, a tide of red climbed up the back of his neck and heated his face, until his carroty mustache lost its startling contrast to his skin.

  “Are you sure about these numbers?”

  “No. They’re just an estimate. A very conservative estimate. In my opinion, the actual numbers are probably higher.”

  Obviously shaken, the senator swiped a palm across his shiny crown. Angela’s heart ached at the tremor in his hand.

  “I should’ve caught that clause,” he muttered to himself. “Damn, I should’ve caught it. Maybe I’m gettin’ a mite too old and too tired for this business.”

  Jowls flapping, he gave himself a little shake. His glance flicked to Ramirez, then centered on Jack.

  “Do you boys still think that I’m in HealthMark’s pocket? That I inserted that language deliberately?”

  “No,” Jack replied. “But we have an idea who did.”

  As he laid out the bare facts they’d gathered about Marc Green, the ruddy color in the senator’s face deepened. When Manny added that the HealthMark PR executive who’d spent two weeks on a cruise ship with Marc had just been picked up for questioning, the legislator’s mustache twitched like a startled squirrel’s tail.

  “Well,” he said after a long, weighty pause, “I do believe it’s time we treed us a coon.”

  Striding to his desk, he pressed the intercom button.

  “Yes, sir?” Marc Green’s voice sounded reedy and thin over the intercom.

  “Bring in the history file on the medical reform bill, would you? I want to review it.”

  “Now? But the—”

  “Now.”

  Her heart pumping, Angela moved to one side of the room with Jack and the two investigators. The senator settled in his chair and linked his hands over his stomach.

  Behind him, tall windows framed a spectacular view of the long, rectangular Mall, lined on either side by the eclectic group of buildings that formed the Smithsonian Institution. At the far end of the Mall, the Washington Monument stood silhouetted against the gray February sky like a solitary sentry. The majestic vista formed a fitting backdrop, Angela thought, for the drama that was about to unfold.

  It seemed like an eternity to her, but no doubt was only a few moments, until the door to the outer office opened and Marc Green strode in. She strained to detect some sign of nervousness in the aide’s voice or appearance but couldn’t find one. Every strand of his thinning sandy hair was neatly combed. His woven brown leather suspenders held up sharp, creased navy trousers. His white shirt showed nothing that even faintly resembled a perspiration stain.

  He was halfway across the plush red carpet before he noticed her and Jack and the others. He stopped abruptly, his nostrils flaring. The thick file in his hand shook noticeably for an instant.

  Then, incredibly, he smiled.

  It was a tight, thin smile. Just enough to fan the fury Angela had banked during the past hours into a hot, searing flame.

  “You’re here early, Angela, you and Dr. Merritt. I should’ve known you’d cut considerable time off your ETA in Tony’s Corvette.”

  Shaking with the force of her anger, Angela stepped forward. “I didn’t drive Tony’s Vette in, Marc.”

  His gaze flickered for an instant, then settled on Manny Ramirez and Ed Winters. “No, I don’t suppose you could fit everyone in the Vette. Are you gentlemen all here to listen to Dr. Merritt’s testimony?”

  A small, feral light gleamed in Jack’s eyes as he sauntered forward. “No, as a matter of fact, they’re not. This is Special Agent Ramirez from the Miami office of the Food and Drug Administration, and Detective Winters from the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police. They’re here to talk to you, Green.”

  The blood drained from the staffer’s face, but he managed to put on a good front. Sandy brows lifting, he turned to his boss.

  “What’s this all about, Senator?”

  Coon Dog Claiborne steepled his fingers over his stomach. From beneath his hooded lids, the sharp, cutting lasers of his pale blue eyes lanced into his aide.

  “Well, sir, I think you’d better tell us. In the process, maybe you’d better tell me about this little two-week cruise you took last year, compliments of HealthMark, Incorporated.”

  For one wild instant, Angela thought Marc might bolt. His face paper white, he jerked a look over his shoulder at the door.

  “Try it, Green,” Jack murmured with lethal softness. “Do me a favor and try it.”

  To Angela’s intense disappointment, Marc didn’t try anything. Dammit! She wanted to see him pounded into the carpet! She wanted to help with the pounding!

  Her disappointment vaulted into total disgust when the staffer placed the thick file on the senator’s desk, drew himself up to blade-stiffness and stonily faced his boss.

  “I want to speak to an attorney.”

  “You can call one from downtown,” Manny Ramirez informed him.

  Scooping up the thick file, he gave the staffer a smile that held all the warmth of a shark closing in on its next meal.

  “I’m obligated to advise you of your rights according to the Miranda ruling, Mr. Green. You’re familiar with Miranda, aren’t you?”

  As she listened to the special agent reading a rigid, unspeaking Marc his rights, Angela told herself that she might pity him when they discovered what had driven him to such desperate acts. She might even forgive him. Someday. But when Manny and Ed Winters handcuffed Marc and hustled him past an openmouthed staff, she felt only a fierce satisfaction that his exit from the corridors of power was so public and so humiliating.

  Her exultation took an abrupt downward spiral when she turned and caught sight of her boss. Shoulders slumped, mustache drooping, he watched his senior aide being led away.

  “I should have seen it,” he muttered again.

  Not forty minutes later, the senator’s exclamation bounced off the paneled office walls.

  “Those bastards!”

  His color erupted from bright red into purple. Clasping his hands behind his back, he pounded a track in front of his desk.

  “They promised Marc Green my seat?” Disbelief reverberated through every booming word. “Those bastards at HealthMark promised Marc Green my Senate seat?”

  From across the expanse of red carpet, Jack caught Angela’s eyes. The glint in their brown depths told him that she, too, had noted her boss’s transformation. The man whose hand had trembled and whose shoulders had slumped such a short time ago might never have existed. One phone call from Ramirez had relit the fires in his heart.

  “According to Manny’s contact in the FBI,” Jack informed the thoroughly agitated legislator, “Ms. Palmer is as anxious to cop a plea as the hit man Uncle Guido delivered to the police last night. She, too, is spilling her guts. Literally. She threw up all over the police interview room.”

  “Good!” Angela interjected. She sincerely hoped the unknown Ms. Palmer stayed sick for a long, long time.

  “She admitted that she dangled the tantalizing offer of HealthMark’s support if Green decided to run in the next election as your replacement. Evidently he jumped at the offer.”

  “My replacement!” the senator thundered. “As if he could replace me!”

  “Evidently HealthMark wanted someone in this office who’d be more sympathetic to their interests.”

  Angela’s “Ahem” matched the legislator’s harrumph in both volume
and tone. Smiling, Jack shared the rest of the details an ecstatic Manny had just relayed.

  “By the time you heard about my audits and invited me to Washington, Green was in so deep with HealthMark, he couldn’t have dug himself out with a bulldozer. We don’t know yet if someone at HealthMark was behind his actions or if he decided on his own to eliminate the source of the audits before the results were released to the public. But we will.”

  That set the senator off again. Mustache twitching in outrage, he blustered for several minutes about vipers and polecats and several more unpleasant life-forms indigenous to Washington, D.C. When his face turned bright purple again, Angela crossed to the water carafe on the console behind his desk.

  “Here.” She pushed a glass of water into his hand. “You’d better calm down before you blow a gasket.”

  While he took a long, gulping swallow, she flicked a quick glance at the clock above the door.

  “The hearing’s scheduled to begin in ten minutes. Do you want to delay it a while longer, just to give yourself time to get over the shock?”

  The senator thumped the glass down on his desk. “It will be a cold day in hell, missy, a very cold day in hell, before I let the likes of Marc Green disrupt the process of this august body.”

  Anchoring both hands on the lapels of his white suit, he lifted his chin and pulled his dignity around him like a cloak.

  “Well, sir, are you ready for your first appearance before a duly constituted committee of the United States Congress?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be, Senator.”

  Abandoning his lofty pose, the legislator gave his witness a piece of well-meant advice. “Some folks feel that testifying before the Congress is a daunting experience. Just answer the questions to the best of your ability, son, and leave the rest to me.”

  Jack’s glinting gaze settled on Angela. “I just rode in from Maryland with your driver and a police escort, Senator. Testifying before a congressional subcommittee can’t begin to compare with that experience.”

  Unsure whether she’d just been flattered or insulted, Angela preceded the two men out the door. Her boss used the brief underground monorail ride to the Russell Office Building, where the Senate conducted most of its day-to-day business, to fill Jack in on the other committee members. With a final slap on the back, he left his star witness at the entrance to the committee room and headed for the caucus room behind it.

  Flashing her ID at the usher, Angela escorted Jack into the drab, functional chamber. A gathering crowd of spectators filed into rows of seats separated from the witness table by an oak rail. Bristling with microphones, the witness table faced the banked platforms where the Senators would seat themselves. A single printed placard sat on the table, indicating Jack’s seat.

  He’d be alone at that table, facing an entire battery of senators. Suddenly, unaccountably nervous on his behalf, Angela stopped at the rail.

  “You’re the only one scheduled to testify this afternoon. I hope it doesn’t get too lonely at that table.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Right behind you.”

  His smile warmed her to the tips of her toes. “I won’t be lonely.”

  A flurry of aides scuttled out of the caucus room, telling Angela that the hearings were about to commence. She bit her lip, her fluttery tension mounting by the second.

  Most of the hearings she’d attended in this room she could only have described as stultifying. She’d listened to incredibly verbose witnesses read dry prepared statements that had half the room nodding off and the other half doodling on every available scrap of paper.

  On a few memorable occasions, however, she’d witnessed some real bloodbaths. Once, a four-star general had left the room with the tips of his ears burning and his jaw locked so tight Angela was sure it would crack. Several industrialists had walked out of this chamber to face a barrage of media questions and demands for their resignations. Recently, a well-known rock star testifying about pornography in the arts had lost every shred of professional poise and broken down in tears.

  Angela didn’t want Jack reduced to tears, or even to burning ear tips. She hesitated, then offered the only encouragement she could.

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  He didn’t look the least bit nervous, she thought enviously. She was quivering inside on his behalf, and he hadn’t even worked up a damp palm.

  She took her seat, remembering how she’d derided Jack after the bridge incident for the fact that he appeared so calm and in control. How she’d accused him of lacking basic human emotions, like a number of his bean-counter peers she and her family had had to deal with.

  Now, Angela only wished she possessed a tenth of his poise and control. Shoving her hands into her pockets again to keep from chewing on her nails, she waited for the proceedings to commence.

  Fifteen minutes into the hearing, Angela stopped worrying and started enjoying herself as much as the senator and Jack obviously were.

  They made worthy opponents, she thought wryly. Her boss’s style tended toward the flamboyant, and his circuitous, often meandering questions carried all kinds of traps for the unwary. By contrast, Jack responded with short, straightforward answers and handled himself with the utter confidence of a vice president and chief financial officer.

  Seated directly behind him, Angela felt the different layers of lust and love that this man generated in her take on a deeper texture. Respect added a richness to the slowly forming tapestry of her emotions: Admiration wove its way through each separate strand of feeling.

  He sat easily in the oak witness chair, his broad shoulders square and his every movement assured. Most of the questions he answered from memory. About the system of audits he’d instituted at Children’s. About the various tasks he’d measured. About the deviations from the statistical norm he’d noticed and corrected.

  As Angela had known he would, the senator eventually zeroed in on the audit Jack had conducted on prescriptions written for the growth hormone Gromorphin.

  In response to his questions, Jack laid the bare facts on the table. Yes, he’d conducted an audit of prescriptions written for that particular drug. Yes, he’d discovered that certain physicians had written a percentage of prescriptions that deviated significantly from any expected norm, given their caseloads and previous histories.

  Murmurs and exclamations arose from the crowd of spectators as Jack calmly related the suspicions that had led to a four-month investigation of Gromorphin’s distributor, HealthMark, Incorporated.

  “The same company,” the senator announced to the thunderstruck listeners, “that I have reason to believe corrupted a member of my own staff. A member of my own staff!”

  With the consummate showmanship of a career politician, Henry Claiborne played to his crowd. His voice quivering with indignation, he detailed his grave, yes, grave reservations about the unbridled power of companies such as HealthMark. Companies with so many fingers in the health care pie that only the most carefully crafted government oversight could curb them. Companies that contributed to the escalating costs that drove health care out of reach for too many, far too many, of this nation’s citizens. Pounding his fist on his desk, he ended with a resounding call for medical reform that won a burst of applause from all listeners.

  Except Jack.

  And Angela.

  For the first time, she wasn’t swayed by her boss’s fervent call to arms or by her family’s bitter experiences. This time, she listened to Jack’s voice. Calm. Steady. Rational.

  He didn’t argue. He didn’t dispute the issues involved. As he had the night before with Angela, he simply fed the issues back to the committee from a different perspective.

  Smoothly, persuasively, succinctly, he made a convincing case for less government control, instead of more. For a simple set of norms that would allow the medical community the flexibility they needed to operate, while still providing a yardstick to measure acceptable performance.

/>   When he finished, the audience didn’t burst into applause, but a swell of comments and murmurs of approval filled the hearing room. Senator Claiborne slouched in his high-backed chair, twirling one tip of his mustache between his fingers. For long moments, his gaze held Jack’s.

  “Well, sir, you raise some interestin’ points. Most interestin’. Perhaps we should take another look at one or two provisions in this bill.”

  “More than one or two, Senator.”

  The legislator smiled and placed a hand over the microphone directly in front of him. In a mumbled aside, he consulted with his colleagues. When he faced Jack again, he wore the fox-in-the-henhouse expression Angela knew all too well.

  “The members of this committee would value your input on any revisions, Dr. Merritt.”

  Jack’s voice held only a hint of a drawl. “It would be my pleasure to provide it, Senator.”

  “Would you consider acting as an ad hoc advisor to this committee? As such, we’d require you to meet with us at least once or twice a month for the near future.”

  Angela slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her involuntary laughter. The old reprobate! He’d led his sacrificial goat to the altar and gotten a swift butt in the hindquarters for his efforts. Now, he was trying to entice the former victim into joining his ranks.

  Leaping excitement swiftly overtook Angela’s mirth. Her crafty boss was also offering both her and Jack the chance to take their short, tumultuous relationship to the next plane.

  In the brief time they’d known each other, she and Jack hadn’t allowed themselves to think beyond the immediate danger. Certainly not beyond this hearing. They hadn’t had time to sort through their feelings. To talk about a future. The idea that Jack might return to Washington on a regular basis for the foreseeable future sent a wave of joy flooding through her.

  They could explore this shimmering, sensual, heady sensation that verged on the edge of something wonderful.

  They could discover what each liked to eat, in addition to fresh baked cannoli and fettuccine con salsa di noci.