Mounting Fears (29 page)

“I’m afraid I’ll have to call you back, and what with my schedule, it might be a couple of days before I can do that,” he replied.

“Don’t bother, you son of a bitch,” she said. “Don’t bother
ever
to call me again. I’ve torn my life apart for you, Marty Stanton. I’ve moved across the country, bought a house, found a new job—all just to be near you—and this is how you treat me?”

“I’ll have to say good-bye for now,” Stanton said, then hung up.

Barbara threw the cell phone at the opposite wall as hard as she could, shattering it.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Gene stopped at the Georgetown house, collected the tape from the recorder, inserted a new one, then drove to the offices of the
National Inquisitor
. He put the tape in the envelope, wrote Nelson Pickett’s name on it and left it at the reception desk.

The envelope was sent to the
Inquisitor
’s mail room, and shortly before the office closed, it was left on Pickett’s desk. He returned from the men’s room to find the envelope there. The cassette had no name on it, just the date and time of collection.

Pickett took a small tape player from his desk drawer, inserted the cassette, and pressed the play button. Then he listened, with increasing interest, as he heard the conversation between Barbara Ortega and the vice president of the United States. Before he had finished he was on his way to the office of William Gaynes.

He burst into Gaynes’s office to find him on the phone. Gaynes pointed at his sofa and put a finger to his lips. Pickett waited impatiently while Gaynes continued his conversation. Finally, he hung up the phone. “What?” he said to Pickett.

“Running that story in yesterday’s edition did the trick,” he said. “Listen.” He played the tape.

Gaynes waited until it was finished before he said a word. “Brilliant!” he said, finally. “She actually used his name!”

“And he didn’t deny it,” Pickett said. “Do you realize what effect this could have on the national election?”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what effect it has on the election,” Gaynes said, “I’m Australian. All I care about is circulation.”

“Well, before you make a decision to run this story, let me explain something to you about this woman. She is the head of the Criminal Division of the United States Justice Department. Do you understand what that means?”

“All right, tell me,” Gaynes said.

“It means that all the United States attorneys report to her on criminal matters.”

“So?”

“Making this recording is a criminal matter—it’s against the law. Do you see where I’m heading here?”

“I think I get the picture,” Gaynes said. “If we run it, we get busted by the feds.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“So we can’t run it.”

“Not as such. We can’t even allude to this conversation, because if we do, Ortega will immediately know that we could only have gotten it by taping her phone conversations. Not only would we be charged with illegal wiretapping, but she would have her house swept for bugs in a flash, and no more telephone tapes.”

“So how are we going to handle this?” Gaynes asked.

“The story that ran yesterday, which was just supposition, set her off and made her get indiscreet on the phone. We need more stuff about Stanton and Wharton, stuff we can back up. If we can get that, then Ortega might get even madder, and who knows where that could lead. We’ve got a couple of weeks before the election, so let me put more people on Stanton and Wharton, and more people on Stanton and Ortega when they were in Sacramento, and we’ll see what we come up with. If we can get something more concrete we can name Ortega and blow the lid off the whole thing.”

“Well, get your ass on it!” Gaynes said. “Spend whatever you have to!”

55

TODD BACON LANDED HIS AIRPLANE AT PEACHTREE DEKALB AIRPORT, AN ATLANTA general aviation field, then rented a car and drove to the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, only ten minutes away. He ordered some dinner from room service, set up his laptop, and got online.

He had no evidence of where Teddy Fay was or what his plans were, but the Reverend Henry King Johnson was easier to find, since he published his travel schedule, like any candidate, on his website. Johnson was traveling, mostly in the Southeast, and Todd tried to put himself in Teddy’s shoes. If I were Teddy, he asked himself, where would I kill Johnson? He’d worry about how later.

Todd looked for locations that were outside large population areas like Atlanta and Charlotte; Teddy would find smaller venues easier to deal with and, most important, easier to run from. His airplane was likely to be his escape vehicle, so Todd went through Johnson’s schedule, looking for smaller cities with airports nearby. There was only one stop on the reverend’s campaign trail that fit the bill.

Amelia Island was an expensive resort community near Fernandina Beach, just east of Jacksonville, Florida. Todd, being a southerner and the son of a flying southerner, had visited there with his father as a teenager. They had landed at Fernandina Airport and spent a weekend playing golf.

Then he noticed something even more attractive on the schedule. The reverend was to perform a marriage ceremony on Cumberland Island, the next up from Fernandina Beach. Todd had visited there once, too, with his parents. They had stayed at Greyfield Inn and had taken a nature tour with a guide in an old truck. The place was mostly national seashore now, so the number of visitors was restricted to the inn and a campground that had a capacity of a couple of dozen. The marriage was to take place in the old slave village, now mostly deserted but maintained. Todd remembered that John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his wife had been married there, in the tiny village church, which Todd had visited with his parents.

He found a map of the island on the Internet and, right in the middle of it, the grass landing strip where his father had landed the family Bonanza. He remembered that they had had to buzz the strip before landing, to clear away the wild horses and feral pigs that foraged there. The inn was south of the airstrip, and the slave village was north of it. Teddy could get in there in his airplane, do what he planned to do, and get out in a hurry, and, flying low, he would be virtually untrackable.

Todd went through Johnson’s schedule once more, which ran right up to election day, and Cumberland Island seemed Teddy’s best choice. Amelia Island would do for a backup, but the place was fully built up, and there would be other people at the Fernandina Airport.

The wedding was three days away, and Todd started looking on the Internet for an airplane to rent at Peachtree DeKalb Airport. He jotted down a couple of numbers and would phone them in the morning.

Todd watched a movie on TV and got to bed early, tired from his long flight. He fell asleep and dreamed of stopping one murder and committing another.

MARTIN STANTON WAS RATTLED, first by the appearance of the
National Inquisitor
article and then by the phone call from Barbara. And as if that were not enough, he had a phone call from his lawyer.

“This is not good, Marty,” Jake said. “I was supposed to get the signed settlement from Betty’s attorney today, and it hasn’t arrived.”

“Shit,” Stanton said.

“I have no way of knowing whether either of them has seen the
Inquisitor
piece, but I think we should assume that they have.”

“Jake,” Stanton said, “I give you full authority to deny the
Inquisitor
thing on my behalf. It’s nothing but scurrilous supposition, based on nothing but hunches. I am not having an affair with anybody. I go to bed, exhausted, every single night after half a dozen campaign appearances and speeches. I have neither the time nor the inclination to be screwing anybody.”

“I’ll do what I can, Marty. If I don’t hear from her attorney, I’ll call first thing tomorrow morning and have at him.”

“If they don’t deliver by noon, sue. Thanks, Jake, and good night.” Stanton hung up and looked at the naked Liz, propped up on an elbow beside him in bed. “You and I have to deny everything,” he said.

“Well, of course we do, sugar,” she said, dallying with his crotch.

The phone rang.

“I’d better answer this,” Stanton said, picking it up. “Hello?”

“This is the White House operator,” a woman’s voice said. “I have the president for you.”

“Yes, of course.” He covered the receiver with his hand. “It’s the president,” he whispered to Liz.

She lay back and pulled the covers over her head.

“Marty?”

“Yes, Will. How are you?”

“I’ve been better. I suppose you’ve heard about this
Inquisitor
thing.”

“Somebody showed it to me late this afternoon. I’d never even heard of that publication until that moment.”

“I’ve heard of it, and it can be troublesome. It’s not so much that anybody really believes what they write, it’s the fact that the mainstream press, once they’ve seen something there, have a basis to start asking questions.”

“Well, if they start asking, I’m prepared to answer them.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Worse comes to worst, we have on our side that you and Betty are practically divorced, so both you and Liz are single. You are practically divorced, aren’t you?”

“We are. In fact, we were supposed to get the signed settlement today, which is the last step before getting a decree from a court.”

“That’s good. I’m prepared to back you with the press, Marty, but I think it’s in your interest to tell them the truth. We don’t want this to come back and bite us on the ass later.”

“I understand, Will, and I appreciate your confidence.”

Liz was making her way across the bed and was now exploring Stanton’s crotch with her tongue.

Stanton gave a little gasp.

“Sorry, Marty,” the president said. “What was that?”

“Mosquito, Will.”

“I didn’t know they had mosquitoes in Denver in late October.”

“It’s probably been trapped in this hotel since August,” Stanton said, running his fingers through Liz’s hair.

“We’ll talk again,” the president said. “Good-bye for now.”

“Bye, Will.” Stanton hung up and gave his undivided attention to what Liz was doing to him.

56

TODD BACON BEGAN MAKING PHONE CALLS FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, AND HE soon found a late-model Bonanza for rent. He called Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island, where he knew the owners. He managed to book a room for two nights and got permission to land on the grass-and-sand strip near Stafford Beach, in the middle of the island. He also got their help in renting an old pickup truck that a local owned and arranged for them to leave it for him at the strip.

He checked out of the hotel, drove out to the airport, and presented his pilot’s license and medical certificate to the renters of the Bonanza. Then he took half an hour’s checkride, to show them he could handle the airplane.

“You’ll do,” the other pilot said, and Todd performed a respectable landing. He gave the people his credit card number and was given the keys to the airplane.

He turned in his rental car, tossed his bag into the rear of the Bonanza, started the engine, and took off in perfect weather. He didn’t file a flight plan; instead, he flew toward Stone Mountain, the second-largest piece of granite in the world, at two thousand feet above ground level, in order to stay under the Class B airspace of Atlanta, then, when he was clear, climbed to twelve thousand and leaned out the engine. The airplane would do better than 180 knots, and he had a decent tailwind, too.

As he flew south and east the landscape flattened and became more agricultural, and two hours later he was descending, with Cumberland Island in sight. The island was the typical leg-of-lamb shape, with the pointed end at the south, and he was at two thousand feet when he spotted the airstrip. As he anticipated, half a dozen of the island’s wild horses were grazing on the strip, and he flew over at fifty feet to scatter them before he turned and lined up for landing. He had to dodge a couple of potholes left by the rooting feral pigs that were common on the island.

He saw the rented pickup at the end of the field, taxied up to it, and cut the engine. He locked the aircraft and looked around for others. There were none in sight. He got the pickup started and drove slowly around the perimeter of the field, checking to be sure that no airplane was tucked away in the trees.