by Jan Coffey
He nodded. Alanna and David gave each other a high five.
The light at the crosswalk turned green. David shook his head as Leah forgot the bag of gifts and started crossing arm-in-arm with Alanna. He juggled the third bag and followed them.
He’d been in touch with Alanna during the months that they’d been in Germany. She had as much to do with making Leah’s kidney a reality as he did. When he was looking for a job, it seemed natural to look at the West Coast, somewhere close to the friend he and Leah had made on the island. She’d been instrumental in helping him find a place to live and a school for Leah and make their move go smoothly.
David watched them walking ahead of him.
“Are we going to live in the same building as you?” Leah was asking hopefully.
“In the same complex,” Alanna told her.
“Can I come and visit anytime I want?” she asked.
“Anytime you want.” Alanna put an arm around Leah’s waist. “You know, you’ve gotten taller.”
Leah started walking on tiptoes. “Pretty soon, I’ll be taller than you.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can always beat you in chess.”
A couple minutes of trash-talking followed about who was the better player. Alanna told David which level she’d parked her car, and they headed for the elevators.
“So is there any other person in the picture?” the nine-year-old asked.
“My grandmother comes and visits a couple of times a week.”
“I don’t have a grandmother. Do you think she’d mind if I called her grandma?” Leah asked.
“Actually, I call her Abuela.”
“Can I call her Abuela?” Leah asked.
“She’d be delighted. I’ve talked so much about you that she can’t wait to actually meet you.”
Leah looked over her shoulder and cast a beaming smile at her father.
“So…Alanna. You didn’t answer my other question.”
“What question?”
“Is there a boyfriend in your picture?” Leah asked.
“What are you, nine going on twenty-nine?”
“Answer the question,” Leah ordered.
“No boyfriend,” she finally admitted.
Leah turned around and gave him the thumbs up sign. She turned to Alanna again.
“Can my dad come and visit anytime, too?”
CHAPTER 73
Erie, Pennsylvania
It didn’t matter that Paul Hersey claimed he didn’t know where the funds came from. The money was in his account, and it hadn’t come in one lump sum, either. After that first horrible day, the money had continued to pour in over time from what the newspapers were claiming to be ‘terrorist organizations.’
The whole thing was totally a lie. But they kept saying that computers don’t lie.
There were allegations of campaign fraud, commercial bribery, and embezzlement. The trips he’d taken to the Middle East in his official capacity as a member of the Intelligence Oversight committee were being scrutinized. The gifts, the dinners, everything he’d done, everywhere he’d gone. They’d tried to stick him with a hundred and one other charges, too. Most of them were thrown out of court. One that Paul Hersey was still struggling with however, was explaining campaign contributions that were not under the name of an actual contributor. There were a number of them, it seemed.
It was all a set up. He knew it. But it didn’t matter. It was too late. If you’re explaining, then you’ve already lost.
In March, he’d announced that he was ending the run for the presidency. His goal was no longer to get into the White House, but to avoid going to jail. Last month, he’d officially resigned his seat in the Senate. He’d used health issues as an excuse, but no one was fooled.
During this mess, Amber had stayed away. It wasn’t until last month, when he’d started chemo for prostate cancer, that she’d come to visit him in Erie. Even during that visit, it was obvious she was fulfilling an obligation. Her heart wasn’t in the visit.
Matt had come up from Washington this past weekend to see him, too. He was Paul’s only defender, his only friend left in a city of cutthroats. He came up to see him at least once a month. Paul appreciated that.
Paul had been born and raised in Erie, but there weren’t too many people willing to associate with a disgraced politician, even an unindicted one.
He’d moved back into the same house that his parents built back in the fifties. To him, it was home. The city was a place where he would get healthy again. Where he would begin to rebuild his life.
He heard Matt’s car pull into the driveway. A housekeeper came three days a week and took care of things, but on weekends especially, Paul was left on his own. Matt had gone to the drugstore to pick up some of his prescriptions for him. Chemo was not easy. He’d lost most of his hair. He looked as if he was in his eighties and not in his fifties these days. He didn’t go out unless he absolutely had to.
He closed his book and lowered the foot of the easy chair. Matt had a set of keys. He walked in, a couple of minutes later, through the back door.
“Have you been listening to the news?” Matt asked.
The television was on in the background all the time just to keep him company. But Paul didn’t pay much attention to it. He looked over at the screen. They were showing weather.
“America is obsessed with weather,” he told Matt, turning up the volume slightly.
“It’s Al Gore’s doing,” Matt commented. “Global warming.”
Paul laughed. It was fun to blame everything on the Democrats. “So what did you hear on the news?”
“Steven Galvin.”
The simple name was enough to push his blood pressure to stroke level. They hadn’t seen each other since the crises started. They hadn’t spoken. But Paul knew there was only one person who was capable of working this kind of revenge. Another tragic thing was that Amber had become very close to Galvin. Paul had the idea that she visited him quite often.
“So what,” he growled.
“He’s missing,” Matt continued.
“How?”
“He left on his sailboat six days ago from Grand Bahama Island for Florida,” Matt Explained. “There’s been no sign of him. No contact at all. He just disappeared.”
“Was anyone else with him?” Paul asked.
“They don’t think so.” Matt dropped the prescriptions on the coffee table. “What I heard around Washington was that he’s been acting pretty strange. He stayed on the island even through the summer. Nobody has seen him in public in quite some time.”
“Amber still goes to the island to see him, doesn’t she?”
“She does. She’s one of very few people he’s in touch with,” Matt told him. “The word is that Kei’s death finally caught up to him. You knew him pretty well. Do you think this would be his way of finishing it all?”
Paul stared at his friend. “What do you mean?”
“I mean ending it. Taking his life like his wife did—except doing it his own way.”
Paul looked at the screen, into the face of the man who had once been his friend. Before it all went bad.
“I don’t know. I thought I knew him. But I was wrong, Matt.” Paul shrugged again and looked away. “I was dead wrong.”
AUTHORS’ NOTE
Once again, thank you for allowing us to entertain you with this story.
Many people write to us and ask where we get our ideas for our stories. To answer a difficult question simply, our novels are all about characters. And the characters in our stories come to us from real life. A headline from the news, a whisper from some forgotten history, a face in an airport or train station, a name from a gravestone. We weave and twist together qualities and flaws and hopes and fears until a new character is formed. And then another. We put them on the page, and they begin to breathe. And a story is born. That’s all there is.
The idea for The Puppet Master came to us from characters who exist in a moment of desperation. Most of us
have been there at one time or another. A sickness in the family. A financial hardship. A love lost. A mistake in life that could ruin an entire future. And then, of course, the desperation of one of those characters evolves into a desire for revenge.
How many of us are capable of going through with a scheme calculated to exact so terrible a vengeance? And if we are, how many of us would find any sense of satisfaction in the end?
This question is for you to answer. It might be the birth of your story.
In writing this book, there were many organizations and people who helped along the way. There are two people, though, to whom credit is particularly due. To our son Cyrus McGoldrick…thank you for the detailed account of your travels. We hope we did justice to some of those places in our descriptions. Also, to our son Sam McGoldrick…thank you for your creative input; thank you for your imagination and talent. We love you both. And may your dreams always come true.
As authors, we love feedback. We write our stories for you. We’d love to hear what you liked, what you loved, even what you didn’t like. We are constantly learning, so please help us write better stories. You can write to us at [email protected] and visit us on our website at www.JanCoffey.com.
Finally, we need to ask a favor. If you’re so inclined, we’d love a review of The Puppet Master. If you loved it or if you hated it, we’d just love the feedback.
As you may have already know, reviews can be difficult to come by these days. You, the reader, have the power now to make or break a book. If you have the time, here is a link to our author page on Amazon. You can find all of our books here. Amazon Author Page.
As always, we love hearing from our readers:
Jan Coffey
[email protected]
www.JanCoffey.com
Table of Contents
Road Kill
The Puppet Master
Cross Wired
Cross Wired
by
Jan Coffey
Originally Published as The Project by Jan Coffey (copy right holders Jim & Nikoo McGoldrick) by Mira Books 2007. All rights reverted back to author May 2013
Copyright © 2007 by Nikoo K. and James A. McGoldrick
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher: May McGoldrick Books, PO Box 665, Watertown, CT 06795.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to the families of Newtown, Connecticut
Foreword
Everyone who sends their child or their spouse off to school feels, at one time or another, the fear of what might await their loved one there. An incident of violence, so often involving teenagers, can cause heartbreak. It can destroy families and communities alike.
Generations of psychologists and educators have tried to search out the reasons why violence in a school occurs. Clearly, there are no easy answers.
In our simpler, fictional world, we’re happy to pin it on a technological advance gone awry. We’re delighted to lay the charge against a few scientists who have lost their way, and against a few greedy businessmen. We write fiction, after all. We only wish real life could be so simple.
Prologue
Thursday January 3, 6:57 p.m.
New York
Freezing rain, razor-sharp on the skin, continued to fall. Across the five boroughs of the city and into the suburbs, traffic moved at a crawling pace on every expressway. The Cross County was the usual parking lot, and the Henry Hudson was down to one lane, but the worst was the Cross Bronx, completely shut down because of a horrendous accident.
The driver of the limo leaned over and switched off the radio, apparently abandoning all hope of finding a reasonably clear route out of the city. Now they would simply inch along, one car in a line of the thousands of other commuter vehicles going north on the FDR Drive.
In the back seat, the passenger pushed aside the work he’d brought and glanced at his watch. He was going to be late for dinner. His daughter and her husband and three children were in from the West Coast until Sunday. Christmas week had been spent with his daughter’s in-laws in New Hampshire, and this week the gang had been with them in Connecticut. He’d have liked to have it the other way around. He’d been home most of last week. This week, though, with the exception of New Year’s Day, his schedule was booked.
His wife phoned him at the office to tell him their daughter was now considering staying for another couple of weeks with the kids in Connecticut. He looked again at his schedule and shook his head as he paged through it. There wouldn’t be any relief now until the end of the month. Not until the company’s big deadline. He wouldn’t be able to spend any time with them.
He started to call his wife. He had an eight-thirty breakfast meeting in the city tomorrow morning, and he contemplated telling the driver to turn around and take him to his apartment in Midtown instead. He could do without this commute tonight.
The cell phone rang before he could make the call home. He looked at the display and felt his spine stiffen. A bitter taste edged into his mouth, and he considered not answering the call. He wished that were an option, but it wasn’t. He knew he’d be answering.
He even knew what the call was about. His old partner had phoned him daily this past month. Old skeletons were peeking out of the closet. This wasn’t the first time; over the years, the episodes had come in waves. But this one was worse than anything they’d faced before. There was no getting around it. Still, they just had to put up with situations like this until the test samples were all gone. The last time he’d counted, there were only seven left.
Seven.
He pressed the button on the console and waited until the window between him and the driver slid shut before answering the call.
“Hello, Mitch,” he said, looking out at the blackness enshrouding the East River.
“Have you been watching the news this afternoon?” his partner asked without a greeting. The agitation in his voice was clear.
“No.” He reached for the TV remote and turned it on.
“There’s been another shooting, this time in San Francisco.”
He switched the channel to CNN and muted the sound. In a moment, the closed captions began to scroll across the bottom of the screen. “Was he one of ours?”
“Yes,” Mitch said, his voice rising.
“Did he live?”
“No.”
Six left, the passenger thought grimly.
“Then we don’t worry about it.” He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait,” his partner snapped before he could end the call. “This is different from anything we’ve seen before. The violence is worse.”
“That’s not because of us,” he said calmly. “All the test cases have been the same. The ones that remain are the earliest specimens. They’re older now than the others were. Adolescent hormonal shifts are complicating the equation. That can result in more damage.”
“Curtis, they’re flipping every couple of days,” his partner said, obviously trying to keep his voice down. “How could you be so relaxed about it?”
Unlike his old friend, who’d turned his back on industry and was quickly becoming fossilized teaching biology to imbeciles in the California state university system, he was having a late-career resurgence. Over the course of this past year, all the doors were again opening. Money was pouring in. His name was the talk of the business. For a change, everything was going right.
It was hard to imagine that the two of them had, at one time, worked so closel
y. They had always been like night and day in terms of composure, in their goals, in their hunger for results, in their willingness to take risks to succeed.
“Listen to me, Mitch. I’m not relaxed about any of this.” This was exactly what the other man needed to hear. “But there’s nothing we can do about it, just as there was nothing we could do about it three years ago when we lost a large sample size, or fourteen years ago when we found out everything was going wrong and we had to shut the project down.”
“You’re not hearing me,” the other man said, his voice now bordering on hysteria. “There are others who are getting dragged into this. Innocent people.” He spat out each word slowly. “And there is something we can do about this. We can identify them, pull them out of…”
“Do you really want to tell the world what we did? It’s not only your neck and mine that we’re talking about. How about our investors? Do you want to expose them? And do you really think they would put up with it? Do you really believe that coming out into the open would solve all the problems?”
The pause on the other end of the line gave him some reassurance. His partner was still as timid as he’d always been. He needed to keep Mitch from panicking, but fear was good.
“I want you to stop watching the news.”
“I…I can’t.”
“You can,” he said forcefully. “There are only six left, Mitch, and they’re taking care of themselves. Time is on our side. All we have to do is sit tight, and everything will go away.”
There was another pause at the other end. He couldn’t understand why his old partner couldn’t quite fathom the probable consequences of this “coming out.” So many careers would be ruined. More than a few corporations and major hospitals would be rattled to the foundations, possibly irreparably. Some would go down. Politicians would lose their seats. Some of them would end up in jail. The Merck fiasco with Vioxx wouldn’t hold a candle to what they’d be facing. There’d be criminal charges in this case. He didn’t want to go there.