The Echo of the Whip

by Joseph Flynn

  Jean left the room without taking any questions.

  The Oval Office

  Patricia Grant and Galia Mindel looked up from the iPads on which they had just finished watching the vice president speak. The chief of staff asked the president, “Did you hear what I heard? Did the vice president just declare war on Congress?”

  A contemporary take on Mona Lisa’s smile etched itself on the president’s face. “That and tell them her housecleaning, so to speak, is what she’ll use to run for the presidency next year.”

  The president laughed and clapped her hands in approval.

  “You didn’t know this was coming, did you?” Galia asked.

  The president shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you approve of what she said, what she’s planning?”

  The president laughed again. “Approve? Galia, I’d pay to see what Jean is going to do next. I’m almost tempted to … No, I can’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “For just a moment, I thought how pleasant it would be to leave all this.” Patricia Grant spread her arms to encompass the White House in particular and Washington in general. “Leave it to Jean and let her carry on the fight.”

  “You mean resign?” the chief of staff asked.

  “Come on now, Galia, be honest. Wouldn’t you like to get away, too? Do nothing but rest and read good books in a sunny place for a year or so. Recharge and then find something useful to do that doesn’t require endless political battles and swarms of Secret Service agents to keep all the violent loons in the world from killing you.”

  “You put it that way …” The scenario the president had painted began to take root in Galia’s imagination. She had to shake herself to bring her focus back to the present moment. “You said you couldn’t do it, resign. Why not?”

  “Jim thinks it would put me in the company of Richard Nixon.”

  Galia nodded. “He’s right.”

  “I might even make Tricky Dick look good after the other side gets done smearing my reputation.”

  “They’d never stop doing that,” Galia said. “You’d become the political gift that keeps on giving. Whether it was your politics or your gender, you’d become the right’s perpetual piñata. Look how long they bashed Jimmy Carter.”

  “Quite a while, as I remember. Until Bill Clinton came along to be the whipping boy.”

  “Yeah, despite the booming economy and the first budget surplus in 50 years,” Galia said. “So we stay but we don’t do anything to inhibit Jean Morrissey?”

  The president laughed one more time. “Hell, no. Maybe we’ll have the guys in the kitchen make some popcorn for us. We’ll put our feet up and enjoy the show.”

  Sure beat dwelling on the idea the Senate might convict her.

  Austin, Texas

  For just a moment, Gene Beck, uncredentialed government assassin, thought he was imagining things. He’d been running along a stretch of Bee Cave Road when he saw the first of a series of billboards that seemed to be addressed specifically to him. He blinked hard to clear his vision, make sure neither his eyes nor his mind were playing tricks on him.

  The first sign said: Clean Gene …

  Followed by: You’re not invisible …

  Time to get to work …

  Before your world turns miserable.

  Beck didn’t think for a minute that someone was trying revive Burma Shave jingles. The SOB who wanted him to kill James J. McGill was telling him that not only had he been found — right down to knowing the routes he liked to run on a given day — he was also threatening Beck with dire consequences if he didn’t play ball.

  To his credit, Beck didn’t break stride or otherwise call attention to himself, and by the time he’d passed the final billboard an indignant rage burned with him. Did this asshole know who he was fucking with? He’d rip the guy’s throat out with a claw-hand grab right there in public if he had the chance.

  Of course, the bastard knew enough not to come within arm’s reach.

  Still, he might be watching. Observing whether Beck was smart enough to understand his message or had even noticed the signs. If Beck ignored the threat, the guy might feel he had to get closer to make his point. Come within hands-on range. Maybe not, though. He might just make good on the warning. Drop a ton of shit on Beck from 30,000 feet, move on and get some other sap to do his dirty work.

  Beck turned around well short of his intended destination. He zigged and zagged on the way back to his rental house, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone following him. Thinking about things as he ran, Beck decided that his recruiter and handler, Nicholas Wicklow, wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to blackmail him.

  Wicklow had accepted Beck’s vetoes of legitimate jobs he hadn’t wanted to do. He’d had to. If Beck ever went public with what he was doing for the government, Wicklow would go to prison, too. Well, that would be Wicklow’s fate if someone higher on the DIA’s organizational table didn’t kill Beck’s handler first to give the military spook shop plausible deniability.

  Hey, the big-timer could say, I didn’t know Wicklow had gone renegade.

  Still, Wicklow must have told his superiors about the jobs Beck had accepted, the ones that had worked out just fine. From the Pentagon’s point of view anyway. The bastards Beck had killed wouldn’t have agreed.

  Maybe Wicklow wasn’t feeling so good about things these days either. What if some DIA muckety-muck had Wicklow killed preemptively, before Beck had been tasked with knocking off the president’s husband? That would eliminate any link between Beck and the DIA, and if Wicklow was already dead from some innocuous cause, say a fall off a ladder, it would look a lot less suspicious than if he died after Beck had made an accusation against the DIA.

  With Wicklow the victim of an accident, any charge Beck might make against the military’s spy shop would be dismissed as a paranoid delusion, publicly accepted as such, and after a suitable length of time Beck might suffer his own mishap. No, that would look suspicious. It’d be better if he just disappeared.

  Of course, Beck knew, he wouldn’t be safe even if he somehow managed to kill James J. McGill. If you agreed to play the part of Lee Harvey Oswald, you could be sure Jack Ruby was waiting in the wings. At that moment, Beck couldn’t see any good way out for himself.

  The best he could do was buy time.

  He at least had to look like he was going to kill McGill.

  Los Angeles

  McGill took Mindy Crozier, the security guard from the fertility clinic, to breakfast at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. He’d once taken his younger daughter, Caitie, there when he’d gone to visit her during a movie shoot she was doing at Paramount, not far away on Melrose. Both of the young women had chosen the deli because it offered breakfast 24 hours a day.

  It was closer to lunch time but Mindy ordered the banana pancakes. She’d had to keep a dental appointment before meeting with McGill. He went with a BLT and kettle chips. Deke Ky, sitting alone at a table opposite McGill’s booth and keeping an eye out for any menace greater than a plate of high cholesterol, asked for a cup of coffee which he didn’t touch.

  Nobody working at the deli kvetched about such a stingy order taking up a table. They remembered McGill and the tip he’d left from his last visit. More than one staffer asked where his cute daughter was, and mentioned that they were still behind the president. McGill’s heart warmed on both counts.

  Once they were left alone with their meals, Mindy said, “It must really be something, being married to the president, huh?”

  McGill noticed Deke tilt his head ever so slightly, the better to hear the response.

  He said, “Being married to my wife is the highlight of my life; her being the president is another matter entirely.”

  “Yeah, but the two of you never would have met if she hadn’t gotten into politics, right?”

  McGill gave the young woman a look. Her eyes looked tired from being up all night, but otherwise she was the picture of youth and health. Clear
complexion, freshly polished teeth, trim figure but not a workout fiend. A Girl Scout just coming into full bloom.

  In some ways, she reminded him of his older daughter, Abbie.

  She responded to McGill’s silent examination by saying, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get personal. I just thought I should read up on you a little, after you said you’d like to talk with me. Hope that’s all right.”

  McGill smiled. “It’s more than all right. It’s what any good cop would do, check out the other guy before you put yourself into an uncertain situation.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not so sure about becoming a cop anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Unh-uh. I’m not so sure I’m even going to keep working security much longer.”

  “Because of what happened at the clinic,” McGill said.

  “Yes. The paramedics who came to take me to the hospital? The older one said getting hit by a taser is the closest thing to knowing what it’s like to be struck by lightning.”

  “You check that out, too?” McGill asked.

  She nodded. “I did the research, if that’s what you mean. A taser packs 50,000 volts. Lightning, they think, could go as high as a billion.”

  “Amazing anyone survives that.”

  “Sure is. Even a 50K jolt like the taser can mess with a person’s memory or keep her from thinking straight. But I’m clear-minded enough to know I don’t ever want to get tased again. Or shot either.”

  “Perfectly sensible,” McGill said.

  “Kind of chicken-hearted, too.” Mindy made a couple of clucking sounds. Her eyes brightened when McGill laughed. “I read that you and the special agent over there have both been shot, and you both stayed on your jobs.”

  “Sure, but everyone knows women are smarter than men.”

  “I don’t know about that. We make mistakes, too. We just usually keep ours more private.” She grimaced and shook her head. “Only a few of us cartoon characters get their heinies zapped when they’re supposed to be holding down the fort.”

  McGill grinned. He liked Mindy’s spirit “Don’t be too hard on yourself. You were set up.”

  That assertion changed her mood in a hurry. “What do you mean?”

  “Dr. Hansen told me you need to correctly hit a seven-key sequence to open the door the thief used to enter the clinic.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’d mean there are 5,040 different possible combinations just using the numbers on the keypad. But there are two more keys, an asterisk and a pound sign. So now we’re talking hundreds of thousands of combinations.”

  Mindy saw where McGill was going. “But whoever zapped me got it right on the first try.”

  “Someone tell you that?” McGill asked.

  She shook her head. “I checked the digital log.”

  “Good for you. Does the log keep a record of when people hit the wrong keys and have to start over?”

  “Yes, it does. You get only two tries to get it right or someone inside has to let you in. Usually, that happens only when there’s been an office party and somebody had a little too much to drink at lunch.”

  “So what does it say that the thief got it right the first time, other than he hadn’t been drinking?” McGill asked.

  “He knew the code and practiced,” Mindy said. “It wasn’t his first time; he’s a pro.”

  “Right. Now, the code for the keypad, how often is it changed? Regularly, I hope.”

  “Yes, first of every month.”

  “Does the new code come from someone in the clinic or someone at the security company that installed the system?”

  Mindy blinked twice. “I don’t know.”

  “You think you could find out, discreetly?”

  She thought about that. “Yes, I think I could.”

  “The LAPD is going to look into the source of the code, too. They’ll investigate to see how many people had access to it.”

  “Then why do I need to look? Just to help you?”

  “Pretty much. But I think the thief is most likely not an Angeleno. If he lives outside the city, that’ll mean the LAPD will have to get another police entity involved. Who knows how much importance they’ll place on the theft? The whole thing might go into a figurative deep freeze, and the guy who zapped you can rest easy.”

  Mindy frowned. She didn’t like that idea.

  McGill had another unhappy thought for her.

  “You should be prepared to have Detectives Zapata and MacDuff consider you as a suspect, a person who knew the code and might have provided it to the thief.”

  “Me? But I got —”

  “Your heinie zapped? Yeah. What could be better cover for an accomplice? You’re young and healthy. Chances were you wouldn’t be permanently hurt.”

  “How do you know how healthy I am?” she asked.

  McGill let her work it out.

  “You checked up on me, just like I did with you.”

  He nodded. “I even looked at your extracurriculars in high school and college. No drama club or acting classes. Some people can lie effectively without any training, but I don’t think you’re one of them. I don’t think you were in on the theft either. I can’t say how the local cops will feel about that, though.”

  Deke caught McGill’s eye. “Here comes the LAPD now.”

  Zapata and MacDuff had just entered the deli. They spotted McGill and headed his way.

  Deke got to his feet, screening McGill and Mindy from the cops.

  “You don’t have to help me if you feel uneasy about it,” McGill told Mindy, slipping her one of his business cards. “But if you’d like to lend a hand, I’d appreciate it. You don’t have to say anything to the cops about that, but otherwise play it straight with them. Okay?”

  She nodded and slipped his card into a pocket.

  “Will you stick around if they start asking me questions?” Mindy asked.

  “Sure,” McGill said, “if that’s what you want.”

  “I do.”

  Santa Monica Municipal Airport

  John Tall Wolf told Jeremy Macklin they could wait in the SMPD substation at the airport, but the tabloid reporter opted for the observation deck instead. The day was clear and the Santa Monica mountains stood out in sharp relief. Palm fronds rustled in a light breeze. The beach and the ocean were a short drive to the west.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing, believe me,” Macklin said, “but, damn, I’m going to miss this place.”

  “Picture postcard day,” Tall Wolf agreed. “Feel free to change your mind.”

  Macklin laughed. “Like I have a choice. Besides, I already paid for the charter flight and the landing fee here at the airport.”

  “Yeah, you might as well go.”

  Back at Macklin’s office, Tall Wolf had explained to the reporter that he needn’t fear being locked up in some grim foreign prison for years.

  “Why not?” Macklin asked.

  “Because it would be so much simpler just to kill you.”

  The reporter’s mouth fell open, but he remained speechless. Couldn’t find a word to rebut Tall Wolf’s point. Eventually, though, he managed to ask the obvious question: “What do I do now?”

  Tall Wolf said he had an idea, and that led the two of them to the airport.

  They were awaiting the arrival of an executive jet.

  Seemed an unnecessary risk to Tall Wolf to expose themselves to public view and conceivably a sniper shot, but he didn’t see any vantage point where a shooter might set up. Besides, nobody knew they were going to the airport, and he hadn’t seen anyone following them from Macklin’s office. In the real world, bad guys needed time to work out their plans like anyone else. They didn’t just step out of a shadow for the convenience of the script.

  The only person Tall Wolf had ever met who didn’t appear to be bound by the shackles of mundane reality was Marlene Flower Moon. She seemed able to come and go with the ease of a breeze. She also often knew things without having a perceptible so
urce of information.

  Then again, Tall Wolf thought his co-director at the BIA might be the human manifestation of a supernatural being known to Native Americans as Coyote.

  He wondered if he should ask Marlene for help sorting out this new situation.

  Not yet, he decided. He didn’t want to owe Coyote a favor.

  He told Macklin, “I never got around to asking you about Mira Kersten.”

  “The political talking head? What about her?”

  Tall Wolf decided how best to order his questions. He took out his phone, set it to audio record and asked, “Do you know of any paparazzi who’ve taken an interest in her? If so, who are they and what’s the attraction? Is there any special man in Ms. Kersten’s life? If so, who is he? Is there any dissonance between Ms. Kersten’s public persona and her private behavior?”

  That last inquiry drew a laugh from Macklin. “You mean is she two-faced? Hell, in this town or any other, what public figure isn’t?”

  “So you do know a thing or two about her?” Tall Wolf asked.

  Macklin nodded. “Look, paparazzi suck the blood of celebrities who sell tabloids in supermarkets. Ms. Kersten, from the photos I’ve seen of her, isn’t bad looking but she’s no movie star, model or even TV newsbabe. She gets people elected to offices most other people don’t think about twice a year, if that. Or she used to. Now she talks about getting people elected to those same boring jobs.”

  “So why would any paparazzo bother with her?” Tall Wolf asked.

  “Well, here’s the thing, if one half of a couple is a cipher to the general public maybe the other half isn’t. If that’s the case, you might have a Cinderella story going.”

  “Okay, who’s playing Prince Charming here?”

  “That’s the reason a handful of the more enterprising ambush jockeys have been sniffing around her. They want to know, too. So far, no one has found out, but the rumor persists. Of course, Kersten might just be screwing with their heads for her own laughs.”

  “Okay, but what’s the speculation about who the man might be?”