The Echo of the Whip (11 page)

“This conversation never happened, Galia,” McGill told the chief of staff.

“Of course not. Only the president is authorized to use this phone.”

“Right. I need to know everything you can tell me about my new client, Mira Kersten.

“I already gave you a full briefing, from her college days to the present.”

“You didn’t tell me she works on television.”

“That’s post-politics. She blathers to earn a living. It’s nothing of substance.”

“So you’re saying, what? She doesn’t put her heart into her work?”

Galia hedged. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“How about being ambitious? You think she’s left that behind her?”

“No, I’d never say that about Mira.”

“So, as pleasant as being a TV celebrity in Los Angeles might be, the big action in televised political punditry is in —”

“Washington and New York,” Galia said.

“Uh-huh, and even the LAPD detectives working the case know that Mira has already outclassed the local competition.”

“What are you getting at, Mr. McGill?”

“An unspoken if not successfully hidden agenda on Ms. Kersten’s part.”

“What could that possibly be?” Galia was starting to get nervous.

“It might be as simple as personal ambition. Say a network TV contract in New York. Maybe a weekly column in
The Times.
Who knows? Maybe a book deal with movie possibilities attached. You know, something along the lines of ‘All the President’s Men.’”

“All that?” Galia asked, incredulous.

But her mind whirled as she considered McGill’s speculation.

“Come on, Galia. You know where I’m going here.”

Called on the question, Galia had to admit that she did. Not that the idea had occurred to her before that very moment. Not that she necessarily agreed with McGill’s conclusion either. But she had to consider it was possible.

Galia said, “You think there’s a chance Mira is setting up both you and me. She either does possess Edmond Whelan’s latest grand plan for the right wing’s domination of the government or she knows who does. She’s going to feed you enough crumbs to lead you to a patsy or, I hope, some muckety-muck on the right.”

“Could be one person playing both roles,” McGill said, “or it could be something else entirely. She denied knowing who stole Whelan’s book of schemes, but I’m not sure I believe her.”

“What do you think she could be doing?” Galia asked.

“Let’s say Mira has reached the conclusion Whelan’s side is going to win the White House next year and keep both Houses of Congress, and that will be only the start of a very long hold on power. Maybe she just wants to be on the winning side.”

“You think Mira is going to sell out?” Galia asked in disbelief.

“Why not? Dick Morris went from Bill Clinton’s White House to Fox News.”

“But if that’s the case, why bother to involve you in … what? A bogus theft? And would she really risk the viability of her embryos? I can’t imagine that.”

“Maybe I’m just getting paranoid,” McGill said, “but if the Senate trial goes against the president, and Jean Morrissey gives Patti a blanket pardon, what’s left for the other side to do?”

“Trash the president’s legacy. Make her look as bad as possible in retrospect.”

“Right. Maybe through me. Say, catch me doing something shady while I’m investigating an important Republican staffer. That might be worth a book deal in itself.”

Galia wanted to tell McGill that he was letting his imagination get the better of him.

Only she couldn’t argue with the political logic. If McGill was caught doing something underhanded, who would be accused of putting him up to it? The president, who else?

There was still one thing, however, that kept Galia from buying into McGill’s scenario.

She said, “I know for a fact that whatever Mira’s other ambitions are she is determined to get pregnant and soon. I just can’t see her risking those embryos for any other consideration.”

McGill told Galia, “When Ms. Kersten and I first met, she gave me a very warm smile. My ego said it was a product of meeting the president’s husband. But I should have recognized the way she looked sooner than I did.”

“What do you mean?”

“She reminded me of Carolyn on three very special occasions.”

“You mean —”

“Yeah, she had the same glow my ex-wife did each time she told me we were going to have a baby.”

“You think Mira is
already
pregnant?”

“I’d bet on it,” McGill said. “She’s playing some kind of game.”

John Tall Wolf found his way to a locked door on Melrose Avenue between Fairfax and Crescent Heights. It was situated between a hair-styling salon on one side and an art gallery on the other. Just inside the door, a stairway led up to a second-floor suite of offices. Before pressing the doorbell, Tall Wolf gave the pane of tinted material in the door a light rap: polycarbonate resin not glass. The door’s frame was heavy-gauge brushed steel.

Stylish and very secure. Made Tall Wolf wonder if the area had a
serious
burglary problem. He pushed the button to announce his presence.

“Yeah?” The voice came from a speaker above Tall Wolf’s head.

He instinctively looked up. Saw the camera lens that just got a good look at him. Tall Wolf gave it a cheery smile and a wave.

He said, “Keely Powell sent me. John Tall Wolf to see Jeremy Macklin.”

“Hold on.”

Tall Wolf looked at his watch to time the wait.

Seventy-five seconds. Long enough to make a phone call confirming his referral.

Even so, the voice said, “Show your ID to the camera.”

“No.”

“
No?
Then get lost.”

Tall Wolf stayed right where he was, took out his phone and made his own call. “Keely? It’s John. This guy Macklin you sent me to is being a dick. You might want to let all your police contacts in L.A. know. What? Okay. I’ll give it a minute.”

John looked back at his watch. This time the response took twenty-nine seconds.

The door buzzed open and Tall Wolf stepped inside. He walked up twenty-five steps. As he arrived at another door, a twin of the one at street level, he heard a buzz and a click. He pushed the door open. Confronting him was an open laptop computer sitting on an otherwise bare desktop. The image of a man’s face twitched nervously on the screen.

There was no question the guy was scared.

“Jeremy Macklin?” Tall Wolf asked.

The head bobbed. “Why wouldn’t you show me your ID?”

The BIA Co-director sighed and took out his badge and photo identification.

“People can fake these things, you know,” he said. “A referral from someone you already know and trust is far more credible.”

Ignoring Tall Wolf’s point, the man asked him, “What’s your tribe?”

“Homo sapiens.”

“Come on, damnit. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. Northern Apache and Navajo.”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“St. John’s, Santa Fe. That’s the last question I’m answering. Now, here’s a question for you, one I hadn’t even planned to ask: What the hell’s scaring you? You want me to call LAPD?”

“No.”

Another buzz and click admitted Tall Wolf to an inner office. The face of the man who’d been on the computer looked even more frightened in person. He sat behind another desk, this one supporting multiple uneven stacks of paper as well as a desktop computer. Macklin, if that’s who he was, had his right hand in a desk drawer.

“If you’re holding a gun,” Tall Wolf said, “you’d do far better to shoot yourself than a federal officer. The pain would be over much faster. And, hey …” He held up an open right palm and put a solemn expression on his face. “I come in peace, pale face.”

Despite whatever trouble he was facing, Macklin let a nervous laugh escape him.

He closed the desk drawer and showed Tall Wolf an empty hand.

“Was it you or your favorite dog whose life was threatened?” Tall Wolf asked.

“I don’t have any pets,” Macklin said.

“So you then. Was it something you did or something you’re not supposed to do?”

“I just got a phone call telling me I’m not supposed to stay in business.”

“Huh. Keely told me your little website is called
The Scandal Sheet,
and you deal in what you call ‘the unedited truth.’ You finally touch a nerve you shouldn’t have?”

Macklin didn’t reach for the drawer where he might have had a gun, but he did look in that direction, until Tall Wolf shook his head.

“I really am no threat to you. I’d say honest injun, only that’d be politically incorrect.”

Macklin laughed again, and this time he couldn’t stop. Until he started to sob. That went on until a sense of embarrassment overtook the man. He blew his nose in a Kleenex and said, “I’m sorry. You know, I’ve been threatened by a lot of people: politicians, actors, producers, cops, crooks and creeps. None of them ever scared me.”

“What was different this time?” Tall Wolf asked.

“This SOB not only threatened to make me disappear, he said he had the law behind him to make it happen.”

Tall Wolf’s guts tightened as the words
covert rendition
came to mind.

“So you’re worried about the federal government disappearing you, and I’m a fed.”

Macklin’s head bobbed uneasily.

“Don’t worry,” Tall Wolf told him. “I may be moving to Canada soon.”

Watching from a car parked at the port in Buenos Aires, Tyler Busby saw his most recent super yacht,
Wastrel,
get under way to Perth, Australia. The distance between the capital of Argentina and the city Down Under was 6,803 nautical miles. The vessel could cruise 6,000 miles at 17 knots without refueling. Throw in time to refuel and re-provision and the trip could be made in two-and-a-half weeks.

In fair seas. Without any medical emergencies. Or time to island hop and relax.

The party to whom Busby had leased
Wastrel,
though, was unlikely to be in any such hurry. Señor Juan Lopez — Spanish for Mr. John Smith — had leased the vessel for a year. It had been whispered to Busby by his leasing agent that Lopez was being set up to take the fall for the recent murder of a special prosecutor who’d been looking into charges of corruption against Argentina’s president, a woman with a reputation for spite and shifting blame.

So Lopez had done the smart thing. He stole as much money as he could going out the door and fled on a vessel that could hide him in comfort for quite a while. Long enough, he hoped, for some other sucker to pay for the sins of his superiors.

If Lopez eventually did appear in remote Perth, there was the vast Western Desert of Australia to hide in, should he still be the object of pursuit. A better choice, though, would be to get on another pleasure craft and head out onto the even greater expanse of the Indian Ocean.

Alternating landlocked and floating hideaways had worked well enough for Busby — until recently. Until the completely unexpected happened and Busby fell in love. Not with Ah-lam, but with the son she’d given him.

Jonathan Kwan Busby.

The fugitive billionaire had never become a father before. Not to his knowledge anyway. When he’d learned that Ah-lam had become pregnant, despite taking every reasonable precaution she’d said, he’d thought of it as a mere annoyance. He’d even checked with the physician aboard and was assured the man knew how to perform an abortion.

That would have been that, if Ah-lam had not insisted on having the baby.

Busby told her, “If you think that will earn you a dollar more than we’ve already agreed upon, you couldn’t be more wrong.”

Ah-lam slapped his face, something no one had done since his nanny had delivered a blow for pinching her bottom. Busby hadn’t known whether to laugh or have Ah-lam thrown overboard. Instead of doing either, he listened to what she had to say.

“Think, you old fool. This child has already beaten formidable odds just by forcing its own conception. With the cunning and ruthlessness he will inherit from us, what will be the limits on his achievements? He might well rule the world.”

Busby doubted that. There were too many other ambitious parents and kids. Too many cross-cultural barriers to surmount. Still, discarding the hormonal bias of a pregnant woman, he could see a little critter with his genes and hers growing up to leave a hell of a mark on the world, if not rule it.

If his sperm hadn’t succumbed to the defects of age, that was. He was in his seventies. Hell, his best jizz must have been produced and expended decades ago. That thought led uneasily to other foreboding ideas. What if the kid was handicapped or something? Forget about dreams of glory. How about if the whelp couldn’t tie his own shoe laces?

Ah-lam read the misgivings on Busby’s face like it was a billboard.

“Our son will be perfect,” she told him with all the arrogance of vigorous youth.

Wanting to believe not argue, Busby’s only other question was, “How do you know the baby will be a boy?”

“Wait and see. You will learn that I am right about everything.”

Then she took him to bed one last time. After that came a period of abstinence longer than any other since he’d laid the nanny who’d once smacked him. The period of self-denial might have gone on indefinitely if Ah-lam hadn’t said she would procure for him again. In due time.

“You need the pleasures of a woman to remain strong,” she told him. “You need to be strong to set a good example for your son.”

Busby had smiled inwardly upon hearing that.

Talk about a liberated woman.

Or one who didn’t want to be bothered anymore.

Ah-lam was endearing, maddening and more than occasionally frightening. For all that, he thought he was coming to truly value if not love her. He was sure that she would outlive him, eventually possess all of his money and …

Damn if a shipboard sonogram didn’t prove her right.

They were going to have a boy. You could see his little nub of a wienie clear as day.

In that moment, Busby felt a sense of fulfillment that all his money, power and carousing had never brought him. He’d have to do his best to keep up with Ah-lam. Not let her be the only one to influence their son’s development. Busby knew better than to think he should be imperious with the child; that would only bring rebellion. He’d charm the little bugger. Let Ah-lam be the bad cop.

The mere thought of cops brought Busby up short, made him think as rich and slick as he was, the United States government and all its well-armed minions were looking for him. Eventually, they were going to find him. Lock his ass up for the handful of years he still had left, maybe even execute him outright.

Put him on the Tim McVeigh fast-track express to a date with a lethal injection.

So the question now was: What the hell could he do to jump off that train?

The answer, in some measure, was to do what Juan Lopez had in mind. Stay out of sight until another tethered goat could be slaughtered. Only Busby would do more than hope for another victim; he would provide the fall guy.

U.S. Representative Philip Brock.

Nothing satisfied the public ire like punishing a politician.

First, though, he needed to go to the hospital and pick up little Jonathan and Ah-lam. Then they would be off to the ferry for the short trip to Uruguay. If the president of Argentina learned he’d been mucking about in her country’s internal affairs, helping Lopez make his getaway, there might be a price to pay. Better to go to stable, peaceful Uruguay.

He’d already purchased a modest 14-room house in Punta del Este.

It was perfect.

Who’d ever think to look for Tyler Busby in a housing development of McMansions?