The Echo of the Whip

by Joseph Flynn

  Tall Wolf chose not to rub it in by telling Macklin he was looking at the ocean right now.

  “We did. You also mentioned Ms. Kersten was about to lose her local TV job. So it would seem she’s enjoying quite a remarkable turn of fortune.”

  Macklin laughed. “Yeah, ain’t life grand? She must have a pure heart. That or her secret admirer is your basic show-biz titan.”

  “Could be a merit-based decision.”

  “You believe that, I’ve got an Indian reservation to sell you.”

  “Some of them are quite valuable,” Tall Wolf said, “the ones with natural resources.”

  “Good point. There’s one other thing I found out.”

  “Yes?”

  “I looked into Mira Kersten’s past to see if someone there might be the source of her good fortune.”

  “I was thinking of doing the same,” Tall Wolf said.

  “You probably should. Every leap year or so, I miss a relevant tidbit. But what I found out was she was married to some guy named Edmond Whelan. Never heard of him and for a good reason. He keeps a real low profile, but I know some people who work the Capitol Hill beat and they told me he’s a real power behind the throne in the House of Representatives hierarchy.”

  Tall Wolf kept his own knowledge of Whelan to himself.

  “And how does that relate to Ms. Kersten?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I found it very interesting that Whelan recently got his own heavyweight agent.”

  “He did?”

  Macklin said, “Yeah, the literary kind. Edmond Whelan is going to publish a book.”

  Los Angeles, California

  Leo Levy was driving McGill, Sweetie, Elspeth and Deke to the Santa Monica airport. McGill had been tempted to ask for a police escort, but he’d been told the executive jet that would take everyone back to Washington wouldn’t be ready to fly for an hour. Upon hearing how much time he had to work with, Leo told McGill , “No problem, Boss. I’ll make it with time to spare.”

  The call McGill had run upstairs to take at the star’s mansion had come directly from the president herself. Sweetie, Elspeth and Deke had given him the room to speak privately. Before McGill had been handed Deke’s phone, the special agent had the presence of mind to tell him, “It’s not any of your kids, but it does sound important.”

  McGill’s heart continued to race from more than physical exertion despite the reassurance.

  He took his wife’s call by asking, “What’s wrong?”

  Hearing the tension in his voice, Patti said, “Calm down, Jim, please. I’m calling you so you don’t hear this news from anyone else.”

  Catching his breath and doing his best to sound calm, McGill repeated himself, “What’s wrong?”

  “I was just informed by a call from the Senate majority leader’s office that my trial will be moved forward to this coming Monday. The official reason of that august body is that it has too many important responsibilities to address to let the little matter of booting me from office linger.”

  McGill responded with a humorless laugh.

  Having a tooth drilled was a fleeting experience compared to watching the Senate work.

  In normal times anyway. So McGill asked, “What’s the rush?”

  Across the breadth of the continent, he heard the woman he loved sigh. “The political forecast from people who should know …” Galia and her spies, McGill understood. “… is that my trial should have been a relatively brief affair, given how certain everyone was as to how the vote would go.” Meaning Galia had intimidated any weak-kneed Democrat who might otherwise have voted to convict the president. “However, there’s been a new development. Joan Renshaw has regained full consciousness and is talking to a staffer working for the House committee that will act as the prosecution.”

  “And she’s saying what, exactly?” McGill asked.

  “We don’t know for sure, but the assumption has to be that I put her into a cell with Erna Godfrey for the express purpose of killing Erna. Also that I’d pardon her for her crime.”

  McGill didn’t bother wasting the time to say that was bullshit.

  What he did say was, “It wouldn’t surprise me if the woman remained awake and coherent just long enough to testify. After that, oh my, there could be a fatal relapse.”

  His conjecture was greeted with a long moment of silence.

  “You don’t really think —” the president began.

  “I do,” McGill said.

  He knew that news of Joan Renshaw’s awakening must have come from Galia’s spies at Walter Reed. It also wasn’t hard to imagine that a lie from Erna Godfrey’s killer saying that she’d committed her crime at the president’s behest might give any wavering Democrats the cover and the nerve they’d need to vote to convict. Hell, if Renshaw’s testimony came across as plausible, it might be grounds for a landslide vote against the president.

  “Where I’d start,” McGill said, “I’d put the word in Ms. Renshaw’s ear what her fate might be. Let her know there are people out there who won’t want to give her any chance to recant her lie. See if she still feels like telling it.”

  “Hold on a second, Jim.”

  He overheard a muffled conversation, the tone not the words. Still, he got the impression his advice would be acted upon. Someone in Galia’s shadow army would pass the word to Joan Renshaw. Let her start to sweat, know her future would be far the worse for any further misdeed.

  Serve her right if her brain short-circuited again.

  When Patti came back on the phone, she said, “I was going to ask you if you wanted to come back to Washington and sit beside me in the Senate. Now, I think I’d like you to be there. Please be with me, Jim.”

  “You couldn’t keep me away,” he said.

  McGill sat in the back of the armored SUV with Sweetie on the way to the airport. The privacy screen was up and both Elspeth and Deke had squeezed in up front with Leo. McGill listened to his old friend tell him of her confrontation with the intruder at Mira Kersten’s house.

  Sweetie concluded, “You were hired to get the embryos back. Looks like that’s been accomplished now, even if it wasn’t the way we expected.”

  “You think this guy was telling Mira the truth?”

  “I got that impression, yeah.”

  McGill trusted Sweetie’s judgment. With her years of experience as a cop, she knew when people were lying and when they weren’t. Polygraph machines weren’t as accurate.

  “And the dog you brought in was sitting on the guy’s lap?”

  “That was probably the thing that scared me the most. Where do you get training like that? Just the scent of a stranger on the other side of the door should have set Dudley off. But somehow the guy kept him quiet while beating the security system and opening the lock on the door.”

  McGill shook his head. “Something like that, he’d have to be trained by an intelligence agency of some sort, civilian or military.”

  “Yeah, unless he just flew in from the planet Krypton with a box of Milk Bones.”

  McGill grinned. “Maybe we could reason with that guy.”

  “Oh, this guy was perfectly reasonable. Slick as the road to hell, too. He committed a crime, got what he wanted and walked away with the victim’s consent.”

  McGill said, “That is pretty impressive. What’s he look like?”

  Sweetie took out her iPad and lit it up. She said, “Putnam got me this thing. He knows I’m technology averse, but he showed me some of the benefits. One of them is an app that makes the old IdentiKit package look silly.” Sweetie brought up an image of the man she faced off with at Mira’s house. “That’s not quite photographic quality, but it’s very close to the way his face looks.”

  McGill said, “If his eyes are that green, he had to be wearing colored contact lenses. Was his skin that shade of brown? Are the wrinkles around his eyes real or cosmetic.”

  “All good points,” Sweetie said. The program actually suggests a variety of skin tones based
on the shape, size and placement of the facial features. Does the same thing with eye colors. I dialed back the eye wrinkles myself by 50% and this is what we have.”

  The new face McGill saw belonged to a white man in his mid-to-late thirties.

  He looked at it until the likeness was well established in his memory.

  “How big is he?” McGill asked.

  “Just a tad smaller than you. Maybe six-one, one-eighty or a few pounds under.”

  “Anything else worth knowing?”

  Sweetie said, “He tapped his right foot the whole time he was sitting with the dog on his lap and talking with Mira and me. Didn’t seem like a nervous tic. More like he was listening to music only he could hear. And when he got up to go he almost glided. The guy has seriously good muscle tone and balance. He’s probably real quick when he needs to be.”

  “Good to know. Do you have any idea what kind of imaginary music he was hearing?”

  “His foot was beating like this,” Sweetie said.

  She tapped the seat with her hand.

  “Four-four time,” McGill said.

  “You know more about music than me.”

  McGill fell silent for a couple minutes. Sweetie waited for him.

  He said, “The threat against my life was probably made by someone who also threatened a man with covert rendition. That sounds like someone who might have an intelligence agency connection, too. You think the guy you saw might be the same one who’s coming after me?”

  “Why would that guy, the one threatening you, want Edmond Whelan’s name? Wouldn’t he already know it if there’s a connection?”

  McGill threw his hands up. “Don’t know. Spy stuff is beyond a simple cop like me.”

  Sweetie laughed. “Yeah, right. Name me another simple cop who wound up married to the president.”

  McGill couldn’t. He and the others just got on the plane and took off for Washington. Right after takeoff, he called their L.A. hotel and left a message for John Tall Wolf, letting the BIA man know about their abrupt departure.

  Pacific Palisades, California

  Mira Kersten hated to admit it, but she felt anxious returning home after making a trip down to Anaheim to verify the intruder’s claim that her embryos were, in fact, being stored there. They were. That was a big relief, but she didn’t want to leave them anywhere a thief had put them. The SOB might have a way to take them back. She also didn’t want to send them back to the facility from which they’d been stolen in the first place.

  After a quick online search, she settled on a fertility clinic in Brentwood. The director there assured Mira their security was the best. It wasn’t far from her home either. They sent a special vehicle with cold-storage capacity to fetch the embryos. Mira trailed it all the way to make sure nothing went wrong. She wrote a check to the new clinic for the next twelve months.

  With all that out of the way, she went out to dinner, eating alone.

  It wouldn’t be long now before she moved to New York and her new job. She had mixed feelings about that. She’d grown up in Connecticut, had made frequent visits to Manhattan and Boston as a child and teenager. By the time she went to college at Brown University, those places were old hat for her.

  Still, New York was where the big TV news jobs were, and WorldWide News had promised her a plum slot. Way better money than she’d ever made before. Only it wouldn’t come close, she felt sure, to the money that would flow her way after bearing two children for Hollywood’s hottest male actor. Sitting back, hiring a really good nanny, and enjoying the more relaxed California lifestyle would be more to her liking.

  She paused to wonder if that was her flood of pregnancy hormones talking.

  Did she really want to give up being a go-getter for a life of indolent affluence?

  Right then, yeah, she pretty much did. At least for the moment. If things changed later, she’d do a turn-around. It was only after leaving the restaurant, on the drive to the Palisades, that she remembered her home had been violated. Even with an armed bodyguard and a dog on hand.

  Now, she had neither of those safeguards, and for all she knew the guy had returned because he’d thought of something else he wanted to know. Or steal. Or maybe just kill her to make sure she could never testify against him.

  Within minutes, Mira was scaring herself silly.

  Problem was, things might get complicated if she called the police to check out her house before she entered it. She’d have to explain why she was fearful and needed protection. The police wouldn’t like it that she’d let a home invader go without even reporting it to them. Or tell them she’d recovered her embryos.

  The uniformed cops might even check her out and wind up bringing those two prick detectives in to question her. She didn’t need that shit. Gritting her teeth, she pulled into her driveway, popped the trunk and took out the lug wrench. Just gripping the thing made her think its only value was symbolic. If she tried to bash the guy who’d broken in that morning, had he returned, he’d probably take it away and turn her into tapioca with it.

  Still, she couldn’t leave the wrench in the car.

  As a tool for self-delusion, if nothing else, it had value.

  She crept up the curved, landscaped path to her front door. It was only when she came to within a few feet of the threshold that she saw a note taped to the front door. That was enough to paralyze her. She wanted to turn and run, hope she could make it back to her car before anyone grabbed her. Petrified as she was, though, she took the opportunity to read the message.

  Honey, I’m home. Your first love, Ed.

  The heart that was already hammering in Mira’s chest took it up another notch, now stoked by anger. Her sonofabitch ex-husband, Edmond Whelan, had broken into her home, too? After he’d had her embryos stolen? The nerve of the bastard.

  Mira’s grip on the lug wrench tightened.

  She was sure now that she’d be the one to use it; she’d turn Ed’s skull into pulp.

  The front door was unlocked. She threw it open and stormed inside. Stopping dead in her tracks when she saw a man who appeared to be a total stranger. Some geek with a shaved skull and a struggling attempt at a goatee.

  Then he said, “Surprise, I’ve come to give you your embryos back.”

  That was Ed’s voice, all right, and when she looked closer she recognized his eyes, too.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked. “Where’s your hair?”

  Whelan frowned and looked as if his umbrage might be expressed physically.

  Until Mira slapped the lug wrench on an open palm and shook her head.

  “Unh-uh, pal,” she said. “Anyone kicks ass around here, it’s gonna be me.”

  She took a step forward and it thrilled her to see her ex-husband retreat two steps.

  “Hey, come on, Mira,” Whelan said. “I’ve come to make peace between us. Really. I’m going to tell you where the embryos are … and sign a release, too, so you can use any of them any time you want.”

  “Except for the one you destroyed and photographed trying to intimidate me, right?”

  Mira started forward again. Whelan backed right into an armchair and plopped down onto it. Before he could regain his balance, Mira gave him a nice little rap on a shin bone.

  “Ow, shit! That hurt, Mira!”

  “Damn right it did, just what you deserved, ruining that embryo. Ending a potential life.”

  She saw he was about to make a wisecrack. Something along the lines of conservatives being the ones who were pro-life. When they weren’t advocating for capital punishments. Or shilling for the right to own assault rifles. Only he’d thought better of saying any of that.

  She honestly had him scared.

  “I ought to ring this wrench right off your head,” she said, “only it looks like you’ve already done enough damage there. Christ, did you lose all your hair at once or what?”

  In a sullen voice, Whelan said, “I shaved my head … I only had a bald spot.”

  “And w
hat, you never thought of a transplant or a weave? You’ve always been pretty much of an asshole, Ed, but at least you were good looking.”

  Mira sighed. Her anger was dissipating fast. All she felt was regret that she’d spent so much time with Edmond Whelan because, honestly, he had been something to look at. Made her damn schoolgirl heart race. She felt like tossing the damn lug wrench aside, but didn’t.

  Doing that might turn out to be a mistake.

  “I could still do that, you know,” Whelan said.

  “What?”

  “Let my hair grow back in, do something to cover the spot.”

  “I don’t care, Ed. With any luck, I’ll never see you again.”

  “I didn’t destroy the embryo, Mira. That was a stock photo. I did a cut and paste.”

  She looked at him closely and saw the lie immediately.

  “Okay, I did dispose of it, but I am sorry,” he said. Whelan drew himself up, sat in an erect posture. “What the hell did you expect me to do after you stole my work?”

  Mira only shook her head. “You mean your brilliant scheme for wing-nuts uber alles? You know, there was a time when that actually worried me. I did think I’d have to do something about it. Only I started to see how often your predictions were wrong and your plans backfired. The only purpose for revealing your masterwork now, Ed? That would be to work up a comedy act.”

  Anger flared in Whelan’s eyes, and Mira saw it.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Try something. We stepped away from each other far too peacefully. There should have been some bloodshed, but —” A thought struck Mira, taking her in a completely different direction. “I take it back. Beating on you physically would be a poor substitute for the idea I just had.”

  Knowing better than to overlook his ex-wife’s intelligence, Whelan said, “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to tell you who really stole your precious unpublished doctoral dissertation.”

  “Who?”

  She gave him the name, and the truth of her revelation made him wince more deeply than the rap on his leg with the lug wrench. Whelan got to his feet without any hint of intending to harm Mira. It was simply the prelude to his exit.