The Echo of the Whip (26 page)

Before they could talk about anything else, Deke reappeared.

He had Sweetie with him.

One look told McGill something big had happened.

John Tall Wolf did what would be unimaginable for most Angelenos: He took public transit from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica. He made the trip on the Rapid 10 Express Big Blue Bus. A light rail line linking the two points was due to open next year, but just then the bus was the way to go if you didn’t want to drive. Not driving was an aberrant idea for most Southern Californians. With the ever growing crush of traffic and the expansion of public transit, though, attitudes were beginning to shift.

For two dollars, Tall Wolf thought it was a bargain to let someone else fight traffic.

The view from the bus window also gave him a better vantage point to survey his surroundings. He’d been to Los Angeles before on business, but he’d never really gotten a feel for the place. Riding the bus, looking things over, he came to a new understanding.

Los Angeles, he decided, was the victim of its own natural beauty. The landscape was gorgeous: mountains, hills, and a desert turned verdant by imported water. The air was warm, soft and dry. The smog could be problematic, but on that particular day a steady breeze was pushing exhaust emissions elsewhere.

The main drawback was too many people wanted to take advantage of what looked like, at first, easy living. Overcrowding brought its own hardships. Competition for homes and apartments pushed housing costs to surreal levels. Providing public services to the largest state population in the country demanded high taxes. At the most fundamental level, the city, like the rest of California, was running short of water.

There were work-arounds for a lot of problems.

Insufficient water, though, was one that seemed insurmountable.

Tall Wolf got off the bus at 2nd Street and stopped for an ice cream cone at a shop on Ocean Avenue. He took his treat across the street to Palisades Park and sat on a bench looking out at the Pacific. Maybe, he thought, desalination was the answer to the water shortage. He didn’t know enough about the technological challenges of that to say for sure.

If purifying sea water did prove to be the solution, he could see the state becoming even more crowded and expensive. Ultimately, the advantages of living in a desirable place would cross lines with the frustrations brought on by congestion and the population would recede. That or the long overdue arrival of The Big One, the monster earthquake that had been predicted for decades, would kill thousands, send even more packing and scare off an unguessable number of people from ever coming.

In the meantime, Tall Wolf had to concede, the place did have its appeal.

He took out his phone and called Jeremy Macklin, the online publisher of
The Scandal Sheet,
who was currently hiding out on the Northern Apache reservation in New Mexico.

“Let me call you right back,” Macklin said. He did so in a matter of seconds. “I’m using a burner phone now.” One that couldn’t be traced to him. He gave Tall Wolf its number.

“Everything okay?” Tall Wolf asked.

“Yeah, no storm troopers kicking down my door, and the cabin I’m using is surprisingly comfortable. Looking at the bigger picture, I’m impressed by the resources available to the community at large out here. L.A. should do so well.”

Tall Wolf told him, “The rez has some signed contracts in place with Big Energy to tap their natural gas resources. Some friends and I made sure that they got a good deal and the environmental impact will be kept to a minimum.”

“What’re you saying,” Macklin asked, “the bad guys didn’t come out on top? I’m out of business if that shit keeps up.”

Tall Wolf laughed. “Maybe you can find a teaching job out there.”

“You joke, but let me tell you, I’ve already found two kids working on the school paper who are natural writers, a boy and a girl. I’m having a hell of time trying to encourage their talents, though, when I know there are fewer people reading newspapers every day.”

“Just go easy on the cynicism and let them fight their own battles.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But being the skeptic I am, my guess is you didn’t call just to say hello. So what do you want?”

“You still keeping in touch with your sources here in L.A.?”

“Yeah, your cousin Arnoldo has been investing in communications. There’s good cell service here, satellite TV and computer connectivity, too. Let me guess, you’re looking for anything that might have Mira Kersten’s name attached.”

“You must’ve been a pretty good reporter,” Tall Wolf said.

“Still am. Okay, I suppose I owe you something for finding me a place to hide. Here’s something I just learned. Might not seem like much to most people, but in L.A. terms it is. Ms. Kersten has left her old talent agency, a respectable but middle-tier place, for one the biggest, hottest shops in the country.”

Macklin provided a company name that even Tall Wolf recognized.

The BIA Co-director drew the proper inference. “Something big is in the wind for the lady?”

“You got it. Thing is, there’s no apparent reason for why Mira Kersten was taken on as a client. That means it’s a case of know-who. Somebody with a lot of juice is behind her good fortune. I believe we discussed that possibility back in Santa Monica.”

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.”

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.