12. Final Justice

by Fern Michaels

  She was going to have to put in a long day to make sure things would run smoothly if she had to go to the mountain. Charles had called it a party. A party was usually a festive affair, not something to dread. Charles had said everyone was going to be there. She wondered who "everyone" was. Would Bert be there? Highly unlikely, if he was under such intense scrutiny. Lizzie wouldn't be there, so everyone wouldn't be there.

  Five minutes later Maggie stepped out of the elevator. She removed her shoes and carried them down the hall, across the newsroom, and into her office, where she dumped them in a corner. She slid her feet into a pair of scuffed loafers and settled down to put her office to rights in preparation for her trip. She looked up once, an hour later, to see Ted staring at her from across the newsroom. He blew her a kiss. She smiled and waved.

  She felt so giddy she didn't know what to do, so she blew a kiss in return, which brought a smile to Ted's face.

  "He's not setting me up. He's not. He wouldn't do that to me again. I trust him. I really do. Well, mostly I trust him," she muttered under her breath.

  The big question was, should she stay at Ted's apartment or take the cats to her house? If she stayed at Ted's, she could spy on him, check out his computer and whatever else he had lying around. Like she would really do that. She'd end up doing his laundry, cleaning the apartment, feeding the cats, and changing the sheets. It would be okay to leave the cats for an overnight trip as long as she fixed the litter boxes and put down plenty of water and food.

  She blinked when she heard the strange buzz from the cell phone Charles had given her. She dug it out of her backpack and opened it. Her heart picked up an extra beat when she realized that the caller was Jack Emery.

  Chapter 3

  Dawn was just moments away when Jack Emery slammed his way into Harry Wong's dojo. He was shivering and sweating at the same time as he jumped around from one foot to the other. "It's cold out there," he said to a startled Harry.

  "What the hell are you doing here at this hour of the morning, Jack? I thought we said we'd meet at ten. It's not even six yet."

  "I wanted to make sure you didn't weasel out on me, Harry. You were pretty pissed when you left last night. We can't screw this up. Everything hangs on our pulling it off and making it legit. You got any hot tea?"

  "What's with that we shit, Jack? Tea isn't ready yet. The reason it isn't ready is because I just got here myself. And the reason I just got here was I was at your place till two this morning. Then I had to go across town on my cycle and almost froze my balls off. It took me two hours to thaw out, and that means I only got an hour's sleep."

  "You're missing an hour. I thought you could count."

  "I tossed and turned after I thawed out. I hate you, Jack."

  Jack waved his arms in the air. "Enough of this male bonding. You need to stop saying that or you're going to start believing it. I'm your best friend. Actually, I'm your only friend aside from Yoko. I still don't know what she sees in you."

  "Shut up, Jack. It's way too early to be having this stupid conversation. Class starts in forty minutes. I still think you should tell Bert and not blindside him."

  "If we do that, he won't react the way we want him to. It has to look real. Look, Harry, we beat this to death last night, we're not changing course now. It's too late."

  "I'd feel a hell of a lot better if Charles knew about this cockamamie plan of yours. I was really looking forward to going to the mountain today. Think about this scenario, Jack. We step out of that cable car, and there's Charles and Kathryn waiting for us. I'd sooner face a firing squad. You can't mess with her, man. Then you know damn well the rest of those women are going to side with Kathryn, and before either one of us can blink, we'll both be rolling down the mountain, and I didn't even get to what Charles is going to do." Harry took great pleasure at the look of terror on his friend's face.

  "It will be okay when we explain," Jack mumbled.

  "You really are a dumb shit, Jack. I can't believe I hang out with you. Didn't you hear what I said? Kathryn is going to kill us. Then you better think about what Nikki is going to do. Those women are glued to one another. You and me, Jack, we're just window dressing. Those women have it going on, and they scare the living shit out of me. If they don't scare you, then you have a few screws loose up there," Harry said, clipping Jack on the side of the head.

  Jack snorted, but he had the grace to look uneasy. "Isn't that damn tea ready yet?"

  "Fix it yourself," Harry sniped.

  "'Fix it yourself,'" Jack said, mimicking his friend. "You are the crankiest son of a bitch I've ever met." Before Jack could take a second breath, he was on the mat, flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. He'd never seen the lightning swing of Harry's foot.

  Jack rolled over on the mat, his hands clutching his stomach. "You feel better now that you vented?" he managed to gasp.

  Harry sniffed. "You make my brain ache, and my hair hurts when I'm around you. No, I don't feel one bit better." He reached down to grasp Jack's hand and pull him to his feet. It was Harry's way of apologizing. Jack accepted the apology.

  Still clutching his stomach, Jack's voice was tortured at best when he said, "Look, if you have a better way, let's hear it. Last night you drew a blank. I'm not saying this is a perfect caper, but I can't think of anything else. If you think for one minute this isn't killing me, you're wrong. I love Bert like a brother, the same way I love you, Harry."

  This was Jack's apology and, just as Jack had done, Harry accepted it.

  Wincing, Jack slapped his buddy on his back before he headed for the door. "So, I can go off knowing you're going to take care of matters?"

  "Yeah, Jack, I got it covered. Don't be late for our trip up to the mountain. You want the tea to go?"

  Jack sucked in a deep breath. "No, but thanks for the offer. I'll be on time. See ya, Superman."

  Outside, Jack looked to the left, then to the right. After debating a whole minute about whether he should jog to the courthouse or hail a taxi, he limped to the curb and hailed a cab. The moment he buckled up, his cell phone rang. He hissed a greeting. Maggie Spritzer. He listened.

  "I just left Harry. He's got it under control. How are things on your end?" He listened again.

  "Yeah, okay, we're good to go. I'll see you this afternoon for our ride to the mountain. Charles said he didn't want a paper trail, and there will be one if you fly. Jesus, Maggie, if this doesn't work, Bert is screwed." He listened again. He rolled his eyes. Maggie counseling him. What was wrong with this picture?

  Jack leaned back and closed his eyes. He hated what he was being forced to do and at best it probably wasn't going to work, but he had to do something. Only three days to ensure that the Senate backed Bert.

  The cab pulled to the curb. "Ten bucks, buddy."

  Jack pulled some bills out of his pocket and sprinted across the pavilion to the massive front doors that would take him to his office. Everything had to be routine. Now he had to head for the coffee shop to get a bagel and coffee that he would carry outside to the back of the building, where he could smoke as he drank his coffee. He always ate the bagel on the elevator. The same people he rode up with every day would say he was right on schedule. If anyone had even asked, that is. The smokers would be gathered outside, alongside a tub filled with sand. Ordinary. Nothing different. Business as usual.

  Jack's thoughts were all over the map as he stood in line for his bagel and coffee, kibitzing and making small talk with colleagues. I'm pulling this off, I really am. An MRI of his stomach would have said otherwise.

  Outside, he fired up one of the few cigarettes of the day. He shivered in the brisk October air. His gaze followed a puff of smoke as it sailed upward to meet the gray clouds of the day. It was going to rain before long, making for a messy trip to North Carolina. But gray clouds and rain were the least of his worries.

  Jack jerked his attention to the left when he heard someone call his name. Brad Devane, a colleague from his softball team. A guy he ha
d a beer with occasionally. "What's up, Brad?"

  "Same old, same old, overworked and underpaid. I heard you're going to let that guy Josephson plead out. True or false?"

  Josephson? Jack drew a momentary blank before it came to him who Josephson was. He forced a grin he didn't feel. "Decided to save the taxpayers some money. He'll be back in ten months, then we can throw away the key."

  "Call me next week, and we'll have a beer," Devane said as he crushed out his cigarette in the sand.

  "You got it. Next week is wide open." He wondered if that was true. He followed suit and stuck his cigarette in the sand, then followed Devane, who was holding the door for him.

  As the two attorneys walked to the elevator, Devane asked, "You think your buddy Navarro is going to be confirmed on Friday? Pays to have friends in high places."

  Jack stiffened. He'd heard the envy in Devane's voice. "Navarro is no friend of mine. You need to update your information, Brad. I personally don't give a good rat's ass if he's confirmed or not."

  Devane pressed the elevator button, stepped back, and said, "Whoa! Hey, I thought you guys were friends. The scuttlebutt. . ."

  "Look, Devane, I don't care about scuttlebutt, and I don't like discussing my private life in public. Just drop it, okay?"

  "Sure, sure. No problem. Sorry I brought it up."

  The two men were silent as they entered the half-filled elevator and rode upward without further comment. When the elevator stopped at the fifteenth floor, Devane got out, waved airily, and turned right. Jack waved his index finger and turned left.

  "For whatever that was worth," Jack muttered as he entered his office and hung his jacket on the hook hanging over the door. He sat down and turned on his computer. Checking his e-mail was the first order of the day. He grinned from ear to ear when he clicked and clicked again to bring up his home e-mail to read the note from Nikki.

  The message was short and simple. "Love you, am counting the hours till I see you." As always she signed the e-mail with a question mark.

  Still grinning, he clicked back to the government e-mail and read those that had come in during the night. He decided there was nothing that required his immediate attention, so he unwrapped his bagel, refilled his Styrofoam cup of coffee from the urn out in the kitchen, and settled down with the morning paper. He knew if someone quizzed him in an hour he wouldn't be able to tell them what he'd read.

  Every two minutes, Jack looked up at the huge white clock on the wall. The hands were moving like snails.

  While Jack was eating his bagel and watching the clock, Maggie Spritzer was chewing on her bottom lip, wondering if anyone involved in the day's activities would take the time to figure out where the tips were coming from in regard to Bert Navarro.

  It wasn't exactly news when Elias Cummings, the current director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, visited the White House. Maybe a mention on page eight in a two-line paragraph. Even when Cummings journeyed to the White House with his right-hand man, assistant director Bert Navarro, it was still a page-eight, two-line item. All the news was about the upcoming election in November, just weeks away. Boring political news. Hard to believe there was no scandal going on in Alphabet City, and the populace had to do with page after page of hashed and re-hashed political garbage.

  Well, that will change in a few hours. Childishly, Maggie crossed her fingers. A shadow crossed her doorway and she motioned for Joe Espinosa to come into her office.

  "Talk to me, Joe."

  Espinosa licked at his dry lips as he looked at Maggie. Once she'd been one of them, his partner's lover. They'd had some good times and some bad times as well, but she'd been one of them, not the establishment. He suddenly felt inferior, and he didn't much like the feeling.

  It was the first time he'd been in this office since Maggie took over. He wasn't sure how he was supposed to address his new boss.

  Maggie changed all that when she asked, "Joe, you waiting for a bus? What? This is me, Maggie. Talk to me."

  Espinosa heaved a sigh of relief. "I thought this was Ted's gig. I just got my orders an hour ago, but I hustled. I called some friends at the Daily News and the Sentinel. Just another day covering the White House, with one slight difference. I was just getting ready to leave and wondered if you had any last-minute instructions."

  "Get me good pictures. I'm going to run with it above the fold. Do it right, and you can count the bylines on both hands. The television stations will be covering it all day and night."

  "Why the hell is this guy so important all of a sudden?"

  "Where have you been, Espinosa? Nobody has the right to tell another person who his friends should be and hold a promotion over his head for a relationship that goes back years. Jack Emery has an impeccable reputation, so it doesn't make sense. Washington politics suck. I want an in-depth interview with both Cummings and Navarro. Both will run under the fold. You following me, Joe?"

  "Got it. If that's it, I'm on my way. But before I go on my way, do you want to step outside this office so we can talk?"

  Maggie laughed. She let him off the hook when she said, "Yeah, I guess this office is intimidating." She could have said she was intimidating, but that would have frazzled Espinosa's delicate psyche.

  Outside the "intimidating" office, Maggie was once again one of the guys.

  "You want to tell me what the hell is going on? Is there any way any of this can backfire on me, you, the paper? I'd just feel better if Ted were here. He's got instincts I'll never have. I do better when I know what's going on."

  "All you have to do is show up, cover the scene, and get me some good pictures. The interviews have all been arranged for four o'clock this afternoon. Just show up at Cummings's office. Get me the interviews on time. He's expecting you. You're right about Ted, but today is one day he doesn't need to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for reasons I won't go into right now."

  Espinosa offered up a sloppy salute of sorts and loped off toward the elevator.

  Maggie returned to her office and clicked on her television. She sat glued to her chair, her eyes fixed on the screen.

  An hour later, a Channel 5 news commentator suddenly appeared on the screen, the reporter rattling off a prearranged opening. A running banner under the full screen said, BREAKING NEWS. "We don't know why this emergency meeting is being held here at the White House, since it wasn't on the president's schedule today. We assume it has something to do with the upcoming Senate vote this Friday on Bert Navarro's nomination to succeed Director Cummings."

  The reporter's cameraman let his pictures do the work as he panned the parked car that belonged to Director Cummings. The reporter started speaking again, saying, "These meetings never last more than twenty minutes. We're told that Cummings and Navarro have been in with the president for over forty minutes, which is an indicator to those of us in the media who know about these things that something serious is going down or will shortly. Back to you, Stu," the reporter said.

  The morning anchor on Channel 5 resumed his report on a firebomb going off in Pakistan. Maggie rubbed her eyes when suddenly all hell broke loose on the screen in front of her. The anchor turned the screen over to the reporter at the White House, who was shouting about ninja forces invading the grounds of the White House.

  Maggie's eyes popped wide when she saw black-clad masked figures leaping and pirouetting as smoke clouds sprang up everywhere. Bedlam ensued as Secret Service agents appeared out of nowhere, guns drawn. The ninjas covered from head to toe in black garb, continued their high-flying antics as more smoke enveloped the area. Maggie heard curses and shouts the network wasn't able to drown out. More agents appeared as more smoke clouds erupted.

  Maggie flinched when she saw Bert and the director flat on the ground, gray smoke circling overhead. She knew she wasn't imagining things as she saw the look of stunned surprise on Navarro's face when one of the black-clad ninjas leaned down to say something to him. When a giant cloud of smoke sailed upward, guards, agents, and pedestrians, as we
ll as all traffic, came to a screeching halt. Car horns blasted the morning as shrieks and shouts permeated the air.

  When the smoke cleared, the ninjas were gone, and the Secret Service agents were obviously chasing their tails all over the place. Even to Maggie's eyes they looked foolish. Her nerves twanging, she continued to stare at the screen until she saw Joe Espinosa talking to one of the agents.

  Sightseers hoping to see themselves on the noon news could be heard shouting about which way the ninjas had traveled. They seemed to be saying, "Straight up in the air, then they disintegrated into a fine mist." She almost fell off her chair when she heard one of the agents ask Espinosa if that was all true and did he see it the same way.

  With a straight face, Espinosa said, "That's how it looked to me. They went up in a cloud of smoke and disintegrated."

  Nine blocks away, Jack Emery stared at the screen and muttered, "You can't make up this shit. No way, no how."

  Chapter 4

  By the noon hour Maggie had her headline for the Post, complete with pictures. She giggled as she approved the bold black letters. NINJAS ATTACK FBI! The pictures made her laugh out loud. Espinosa came through.

  She looked up at the reporter, who was standing in the doorway, and paid him the supreme compliment: "I couldn't have done it better myself, Joe. If you hurry, you can catch Emery. He should be leaving the courthouse in"—she looked up at the wall clock—"precisely ten minutes."

  Espinosa was gone before she could blink.

  The entire front page of the Post was dedicated to the ninja attack. Damn, I'm good. She hoped Charles, Annie, and the others were proud of her. She took a few seconds to wonder what Ted would think when he watched the news or went online to check out the latest happenings in the District. Not that it mattered what Ted thought. That's a lie, and it does matter, she told herself. She shrugged because there was nothing she could do about Ted. At least for now.