Electing To Murder (31 page)

Mac snuck a glance at Wire, who was looking right back, the recognition on both of their faces. Was this what this was all about? He looked to Bloom. “Ms. Bloom, did either Mr. Checketts or Mr. Martin express any concerns about this project or anything else that was going on?”

“Mr. Checketts didn’t.”

“What about Martin?”

Bloom hesitated for a moment, as if she was giving deeper thought to the question. “He didn’t say anything about that project to me.” She glanced in Bruzinski’s direction but Mac could see she was becoming guarded and hesitant. “He was involved in evaluating what the problem was with the memory cards but otherwise he didn’t say much about the completion of that project.”

Mac’s eyes shifted over to Wire again. She’d seen it too. Bloom knew more than she was letting on. She wasn’t necessarily lying, he wasn’t getting that vibe, but she was holding something back, perhaps thinking it through. Mac looked down to his notebook and jotted down some notes about the conversation, not wanting to lose track of this thread. Then he went in another direction to give her some time.

“Mr. Bruzinski or Ms. Bloom, does the name Jason Stroudt mean anything to you?”

Bruzinski and Bloom shook their heads.

“How about Adam Montgomery. Does that name ring a bell?”

Bruzinski shook his head and said: “No.”

Bloom’s eyes went wide and then she looked over to Bruzinski quickly and then said: “N… n… no. I do… do… don’t know that name.” Wire looked at Mac, did you catch that? Mac raised an eyebrow.

Montgomery registered with Bloom.

Why?

There was a knock on the door of the conference room door and Bruzinski was asked out into the hallway, “If you’ll excuse me for a moment.”

Wire leaned over and whispered to Mac: “You caught the hesitation?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s see what it’s about.”

“Go.”

Wire leaned away from Mac and looked to Bloom: “The name Adam Montgomery means something to you, doesn’t it?”

Bloom bit her bottom lip and a scared look washed over her face and sadness became nervousness.

“Ginger, something has you spooked here,” Mac asked quietly. “What is it?”

“Gabe gave me something a day before he was killed. I have it at my apartment. He told me that if anything happened to him, I should give it to Adam Montgomery and he gave me a phone number to call. I’ve tried to call Montgomery but he hasn’t answered his phone.”

“Ginger,” Mac answered, “Adam Montgomery is dead. He was killed last night in St. Paul.”

Bloom’s right hand went to her mouth in shock. Wire lightly grabbed Ginger’s left hand. “He was meeting with a friend of mine when he was killed,” Wire added. “My friend was shot and killed as well.”

Very quietly, Mac said: “Ginger, I’m going to make sure you’re safe. But you’re going to need to show us what Mr. Martin gave you, but not here.” He took out a business card and wrote instructions on the back.

* * *

The vice president was in the middle of his speech, just getting warmed up about the need for fiscal sanity in the government. He was in Cincinnati, speaking to a massive rally at the Riverfront Coliseum. If northern and eastern Ohio were fertile territory for Governor Thomson, southern Ohio was lush territory for Vice President Wellesley. Connolly had looked at polling data and the metering dials from the last presidential debate. When government spending was framed as being out of control or that the government was spending insanely, the vice president experienced an uptick in the state. So, it became part of the stump speech, the democrats equaled insane government spending. Never mind the fact that under the Barnes Administration the debt had increased by another $5 trillion. Politics was perception, not reality.

Connolly stood with Wellesley Jr., just off the dais, taking in the speech, feeling the roars of the crowd of nearly 18,000, an exceptional turnout. The campaign manager felt the buzzing of the phone in his left front pocket, the burner phone for the Bishop. “Our friend is texting.”

“The Bishop?” Wellesley Jr. asked quietly, looking straight ahead.

Connolly nodded and the two of them slipped away from the dais and down a tunnel that led back to the bowels of the arena and to a locker room that was an anteroom for the campaign. The burner phone revealed a text with a message: “Check e-mail. Look at pictures. Do you know woman?”

“Woman?” Wellesley Jr. asked.

“I think he’s asking about the woman working with the St. Paul Detective McRyan. It’s a new development. Let me get out my personal tablet.” Connolly took his tablet out of his computer bag, opened up the e-mail from the anonymous account and opened the first picture.

“Dara frickin’ Wire,” Wellesley Jr. said bitterly.

“You know her?”

“FBI. Or she was. She’s …”

Connolly saw the look of anger over take Wellesley Jr.’s face. “She’s the one who … you know … like … rearranged your face.”

“That’s her,” Wellesley Jr. growled. “You tell our friend that if he can take that bitch out I’ll get him any vote he’ll ever need.”

“I’ll call the Bishop.”

T
he man sipped his coffee and admired the view for another minute, considering the chaos he’d set in motion in locations not as serene as the one he now overlooked. The isolated cabin was idyllic, of course, he would have nothing less. It contained just the right touch of rustic furnishings along with all the modern conveniences the Bishop was accustomed to and needed for his business. The view as he sat at a pine table on the porch looking high out over the broad valley down to the York River was spectacular to say the least. The pallet of orange, yellow, brown and red of the autumn leaves stretched for miles, accented by the clear blue sky.

The Bishop sat at the table looking at his laptop screen, playing chess against the computer. For a man who carried the nickname “the Bishop,” he had played little chess in his life until very recently. In his life there was little time for games or hobbies. When he was a child he enjoyed playing with dominos. Not playing the game against an opponent, but rather setting them up in complex and long formations and then once complete, just ticking one domino down and making the rest fall. It served as a metaphor for his life, setting up and making the dominos fall. Running his business was his hobby, his obsession, his time playing in the sandbox. However, now that he’d started playing chess he was obsessed with it and how it mirrored his life, the moves he made and the pieces he moved around to make events occur as he wished. He’d come to the conclusion whether he was buying stock through numerous shell companies for a hostile takeover of a corporation, uncovering compromising information on an energy minister in Russia in return for drilling rights or using his proxies in Syria to continue to feed the violence and civil strife, the Bishop realized that all of life was a chess game, one move begetting another. He had the innate ability to see two or three moves ahead and he could set the trap. Often times he enjoyed the journey every bit as much as the ultimate destination.

This time, however, he was not enjoying the journey to the ultimate destination. The election had to be won, but there were loose ends imperiling the end game. The former was set to be won if the latter was handled.

The Bishop rarely involved himself so thoroughly in politics. There were candidates that he favored to which he donated vast sums of money, far beyond what was allowed by previous state and federal campaign financing laws, but always in his preferred method, indirectly, through various organizations, in manners that were untraceable. But this time around, for the presidency, the election was paramount to achieving his ultimate goal and to protecting his interests.

Governor James Thomson was a man who believed in everything the Bishop didn’t. Whether it was the environment, for which Thomson wanted to take action on global warming and move away from fossil fuels, to his promises to break up the big banks, everything Thomson proposed and wished to enact would hit at everything the Bishop had spent years building and profiting from. It was his goal to be the richest man in the world. A Thomson presidency would make his goals much more difficult if not impossible to attain.

Therefore, the election
had
to be won.

Nobody beyond a few people knew that he was involved and the loose ends were being tied up one by one and how it was being done didn’t bother him. The Bishop was a ruthless man and believed you could only succeed to the level he aspired by being so. You did not attain the wealth and power he had by being nice, by playing by the rules. You got to where the Bishop was by doing whatever it took to get and stay there. So Martin, Checketts, Stroudt, Montgomery and McCormick were done and gone and the Bishop wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. He didn’t have anything personal against them. It was just business.

And now the radio playing quietly to his right gave him an extremely relieving piece of news—Foche was dead.

The Bishop exhaled. Foche served him well for the past ten years and he would be missed, not only by the Bishop but by Kristoff as well. But Foche was also one less loose end to worry about. One less awkward situation to deal with, because it would have had to have been dealt with.

The question now circulating through his mind was whether such steps would be needed with regard to the St. Paul detective and his lady friend. He’d read the background on McRyan. He was a very able cop and his file screamed relentless. The man would not stop investigating as long as there was something to go on.

McRyan was a threat and he now had a partner who was equally troubling.

Dara Wire.

Courtesy of Wellesley Jr., he now had the identity of the woman who likely shot Foche and was involved in the fireworks outside of McRyan’s Pub.

Dara Wire was thirty-four years old and retired from the FBI, an early retirement not of her choice. Up until four years ago, she’d been a rising star in the bureau, working organized crime, having first worked undercover and by the time she was thirty, beginning to recruit and serve as the main contact for undercover operatives. She was becoming a top-notch investigator with an extremely bright future in the bureau.

The Bishop spent a moment looking at her picture.

Wire wasn’t necessarily pretty but she was a strikingly attractive woman, a brunette with soft green eyes and an alluring smile. Yet, he could see how she would have been effective undercover working the mob. This was especially true when he evaluated the photo of her in an extremely low-cut body hugging black dress cut at mid-thigh and wearing stiletto heels. She could do the gangster’s moll look, big hair, large breasts and copious makeup for just the right amount of trashiness. The goombas probably fell all over themselves for her.

Four years ago, Wire was working an informant in the Giordano crime family, which was operating in northern New Jersey and was proving particularly troublesome on several real estate projects on the Hudson Riverfront looking towards Manhattan. Wire’s informant was in deep with the family and the RICO case was building to take a big chunk of the infrastructure of the Giordano’s down. The investigation, and its advanced stages, apparently got back to Donald Wellesley Jr. who let it slip at a DC cocktail party, a party that included a delegation of politicians from New Jersey, that the bureau had an informant feeding information on the Giordano’s. Word from the party leaked back to the Giordano’s and after conducting their own form of internal family investigation, Wire’s informant was found floating in the Hudson, so badly beaten he could only be identified by his fingerprints.

With what they had on the Giordano’s, the FBI moved in and in the process of interrogating family members, Wire discovered how the family learned of her informant. The bureau’s higher ups, at the time a particularly spineless lot, were not about to touch the son of the vice president. Incensed, Wire took matters into her own hands and found Wellesley Jr. at a Washington DC bar and proceeded to, Giordano style, savagely beat him to a pulp around the face until the Secret Service, hanging idly outside the bar, was able to get inside and take Wire into custody.

At a minimum, Dara Wire was out of the bureau and was looking at far worse trouble. However, she had one ace in the hole and the Bishop smiled. He loved and admired power plays and Wire had the ultimate power player come to her defense—Judge Dixon.

She’d come to his attention while he was still the attorney general due to her impressive undercover work. The Judge intervened on her behalf and threatened to expose the vice president’s son and few knew how to do that like Dixon. The Judge was able to leverage a soft departure from the bureau for Wire. Donald Wellesley Jr., meanwhile, disappeared from view for a number of months to recuperate from his injuries.

With McRyan and Wire on the hunt, the Bishop had reason to worry.

Of course, he’d have much preferred to operate without there ever being even the possibility of any loose ends requiring Kristoff to ply his services in so many places and to such brutal effect. The Bishop often thought of his operations as a layer cake, with layer after layer between himself and what he was trying to accomplish. His involvement was never known or discovered.

However, there were times when you had to move quickly and didn’t have the luxury of setting up the layer cake. When Heath Connolly came to him about his friend Peter Checketts and the trouble he was having in Las Vegas, the Bishop saw the opening and the chance to grab the election out of the jaws of defeat, but they had to move quickly.

“There was no time for the layer cake,” he muttered, sipping his coffee.

There was no layer cake, and then Kentucky went bad.

It seemed like a simple and safe enough meeting, especially with Kristoff solving the Martin problem in Milwaukee at the same time. The meeting was like so many he’d arranged over the years that had gone off without a hitch. And the Kentucky meeting was necessary. Given the money and stakes at risk, he and Connolly needed to be certain their plan would work and needed to see how it would work. But then the meeting was discovered and he’d been tying off loose ends ever since—Stroudt, Montgomery, McCormick and Checketts.